The Generalist’s Revenge: How AI is Leveling the Professional Playing Field | Tim Cakir

Unlocked Professional: AI and Future of Work: Every decision you make in life is out of love or out of fear. And you're going to decide in which one you do. And if you make it out of fear, you're not going to go very far. This technology helps us work on better things, on bigger problems and better challenges.

have brains that needs to work on higher cognitive work and not low cognitive work. People who work on low cognitive work, they get drained, they get stressed, they get anxious, they have meltdown. But people who work on higher cognitive work, most of the time are having a better time in life. I've seen people reduce five hours of due diligence into 30 minutes.

I've seen teams that brought down 15 hours of sales reporting down to one hour a month. And when you have 50 salespeople, that compounds very quickly. You have ⁓ an agent on your phone where you put your AirPods and then you're reporting automatically after that visit. The quality of the reports are even better and the quality of the insights that you can get later are better.

Right now, almost every company is racing to use AI, but 95 % of those projects fail to make money. or move the needle. Most people are scared that machines are coming for their jobs. Our guest today says that fear is pointing you in the wrong direction.

His superpower is he fixes the broken relationships between humans and machines. He is the architect of the adopt method, a five-step plan to turn regular teams into AI operators who work with technology, not against it. He's not a theorist. He has helped businesses create over $21 million in real value.

And he believes that when you stop treating AI like a cold tool and start treating it like a true partner, you build a special advantage that makes your career safer and your life better. Looking forward to meeting this guest today and talking a little bit more. Tim, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

It's an absolute pleasure to be here. We'll just get right into it then. Before you were leading tech transformations, you worked in door-to-door sales and as a translator. Two jobs where you had to read people fast and talk to anyone.

Tell us more about those jobs. Wow. Yeah. First of all, thanks for that great intro.

I definitely have to steal that intro. It was amazing. Those two jobs, wow, that was really beginning, beginning, beginning of even... before the career because the translation job was actually, was a kid and I just spoke, back then I spoke three languages, now I speak four.

But because I was speaking three languages, I just got the job basically. And I remember it was incredible because I was about what 12, 13 and I was doing it for actually American schools trying to recruit students in Turkey. And I was helping the translation in the conference and this education conference. And I did it a few years actually.

And it was great. Yeah. Because I think that's where I, I became an extrovert. I became a person who loved to chat to anybody in whatever language.

And I really learned to love people. Now that you asked me this question, I think about it. I'm like, wow, I think that's really where it started that I could just come and get one anybody. And then the door to door sales was in Los Angeles.

I was about 18 in LA and actually we were getting in a truck and then we were doing some U S trips and we were knocking on doors. We were booking some call, like we were buying these phone numbers from Turkish tourist shops, right? Where you leave your details because you're doing some tax return. And then we would, we were in LA, we would buy these receipts.

Back then it was like early days of Skype, which is crazy, right? And we would buy these things and then we would call the people and would say, Hey, this is whatever name. was never our name. When I think about it, it's not, it wasn't really ethic, but we did.

But back then I think that hustling was okay. And now I think you got to be careful with ethics. And we used to book these meetings, call people and say, Hey, we've got some carpets. Can we come?

And we go to their doors, knock doors, and some didn't have meetings. just had their addresses and we're trying to sell these carpets. And since I'm Turkish, I would joke about flying Turkish carpet and I throw it in the air and stuff like that. And I think that's where I guess I got really good at sales.

And now today as a founder, when I look at it, where my sales skills comes and I'm good at closing deals. And I guess it was from those roles in my life. Yeah, that's quite the experience. Door-to-door sales is a different level of sales.

And I think it's a good place to cut your teeth. I had a paper route when I was a kid. That's not really door-to-door sales, but I had to go door-to-door collect our fees on a monthly basis. And I get direct feedback right there in your face, which is just a lot different than picking up the phone and calling somebody.

So I definitely have a lot of appreciation for those guys and gals that come around. Except for the ones that do solar. Those, they're a little excessive. For some reason, those guys don't give up.

But I love the hustle. You're an avid sailor based in Bodrum, Turkey, and you run house music events called Electronic, I'm probably going to get this wrong, Serp May. Do you use AI to help you out with some of those ventures? Yeah, hundred percent the sailing not really actually.

Oh, yeah the sailing the other day I built a quick kind of routes planner for a friend of mine who has a boat So I sail I don't have a boat but a friend of mine was like, oh, I don't like these applications I want something that's gonna do this and I was like, let's just vibe code it and we did that on a weekend That was really fun. But for the electronic events electronic set me. Yeah, I started that because of Having AI powers because if not, I couldn't be on top of those as well.

So I do all the design, Instagram flyers, now videos, thanks to ReMotion and Cloud Code, all the bookings. I build landing pages, sites for people to sign up for the events and so on. And yeah, I'm glad that I have AI, because if not, I wouldn't do those events. Because if not, it would take me hours and hours a week.

And now it takes me less than an hour each week to plan the next event. Yeah. And you mentioned earlier too, that you do your sound engineering as well. which aligns to that, which I've learned quite a bit about and surprisingly, took me a lot of time to figure out how to work these microphones correctly.

You've got the right mic though. You have an S &M D, I think. Yeah, that's a really good mic because I think we have the same mic. You walked away from being a growth consultant to become an AI plus human evangelist.

Why did you decide that the old way of just buying more software was not working for most companies anymore? Yeah, I, that, I think it was more that when chat GPT came along November 31st, 2022, and I saw this awful tool because it was, it wasn't good. GPT 3.5 wasn't good at all.

It was really crap. But I have a machine learning background. I was a head of marketing for a machine learning company about 11 years ago when AI wasn't sexy whatsoever. when people didn't want to talk about AI and back then I learned machine learning.

And then life changed and I wasn't in machine learning or so I was head of marketing different businesses. And then I was a CEO of 110 people company, sales outsourcing company. And ChachiBT came along, that was 31st of November, 2022. And I was like, oh shit, this is awful.

But if I understand from machine learning from the past, this is going to get very good very quickly. And I'm glad that I remembered that moment because I went full in. in AI, ChachiBt especially, back then I trained people in my company and I was like, okay, this is going to get good. And it got good very fast.

And now when you're asking me the question about many tools, as a growth consultant, yes, it was a lot about tools. They even called me tool time Tim. Actually I had a newsletter called tool time Tim and I had a website called tool time Tim and my nickname was tool time Tim. And it was funny because CEOs would call me like, which tool is best for this?

It was fun times. But what I realized, especially lately, think the last few months is like, I've been reducing my tools because I don't need 15 tools to run my business anymore. need four or five and close the code potentially. And I can run most of my business.

And I have a client who have about 450 people. They're a huge company and what they do, they're quite, they're quite big in revenue and so on. And it's like, they have four or five different task management platforms because teams, different teams prefer different platforms. And then you ask him about source of truth and how do you understand things that I open this login, that login.

And I was like, in the AI era, this is like the biggest mistake you can do at the moment because you need to have all your data in one place so that you could do some context engineering at the end of the day so that you can tap into that context very quickly. I think that tools, and I used to say this, tools aren't for fools. That was something that I used to say. And I think that now, It's even crazier because you can build whatever tool you want in minutes time almost, okay, in hours, if you want to build something very serious.

And I'm saying that in hours you can build tools, which is crazy to think about. So it's not about now the tools, but it's more about which outcomes do you want? Because you don't need to build tools because the conversational, which is cloud, ChachiPT, all these generative AI platforms where we ask questions, we get answers. You potentially can get 70 % of all your tools job done in that conversational style now.

So it's a very interesting time, I think, to be thinking about products and tools. So that's how I didn't really answer your question because I didn't have in my mind to go to AI because I didn't think business issues and have as many tools. But now lately, very recently, I'm like, ⁓ okay, we've got to help companies reduce tools and really have a source or through the database. and then have an intelligence layer on top of it and just get their questions answered and be able to do dynamic charts and interactive charts in minutes time instead of having dashboards and logging in and filtering things out and so on.

And for some context too for the audience, can you tell us a little bit more about what your work is that you're referring to that you do? I know you have a lot of different things, but what you're referring to right now, the type of work that you're consulting work or building work. Yeah, the main thing that we do at AIR Prater, so AIR Prater, we do behavior change programs. So we were a training company in the beginning, that's what we called ourselves.

And we realized, cause a bunch of clients said, you're not training, you're behavior changing us. And so we're changing the behavior of humans on how to interact with machines, to how to interact with technology and how to interact with intelligence layers and how to get these questions answered and so on without having all this crazy... manual processes and logging in into things and creating PowerPoints for their managers when the manager can actually ask a question to a platform like Cloud that has a connector and that can answer all those questions.

And you can actually work on what you do best, which is if it's sales, if it's marketing, should be creative. should be designing campaigns and not reporting. Right. So as AR creator, do, mainly we do a 12 week accelerator program.

So we come in and we behavior change training on features, also on how to redesign how you work, how to be able to work 10x more efficient and reduce and sometimes even remove repetitive and boring work. So that's one of my biggest goals is like, how can I reduce or remove boring work? Because we all do a lot of boring work. And I think that it's sad because it sucks the human intelligence and the cognitive powers and you feel drained.

So that's what we focus on a 12 week accelerator program. And we have transformation packages for bigger businesses of a of thousand people size. where we also build agents with them. With them is very important to underline because I want humans, want businesses to have these skills.

I don't want to be the company that they always rely on to build things because I think that's not fair in this day and age. You mentioned about your IT background, right? And then back then you had to call an IT for everything. And I think that nowadays when people ask me, I'm like, have you asked clothes?

Have you asked clothes code if you have a bit of terminal skills? It can fix and do most of the things that I think could do back in the day. So that's what we do as a business. And I think the biggest mission of AI operator, it's how to operationalize AI in your business.

Yeah. And I think we can all appreciate and understand that pain of having to do manual tasks that we've all had to do for a long period of time. I know in my current workflow and day to day, I get extremely frustrated when I have to get bogged down with starting up, let's say a new application. that I'm signing up for.

And we talked about some of the experiences you're having with other software companies out there as well. It's like a whole process of just, ⁓ I've got all these things that I really want to do and that I can make an impact with and move the needle forward in my business. But no, I'm going to spend three or four hours signing up for this new application today and working through all the bugs that that company never figured out or created and trying to figure out a bunch of questions or answers to questions that things are pretty much irrelevant to me once they're answered.

like, it's just, but the cool part is that at least you can get some kind of AI assistance to help you, aid you through that, but you have to build that system first. And you potentially are going 20 % of the features. That's the problem as well. You have all these, you pay for these subscriptions, you have this huge tool and, but your use case is just 20 % of the capabilities.

So Tim, back to the AI operator conversation. and what you guys do. Maybe you can you give us a practical example? Obviously, I know there's probably some information you don't want to share, but maybe a practical example of one of these transformations that you've made high level, providing us just some details of what that company was and or did, you know, again, and what what you were able to accomplish in that 12 week period.

Yeah, I think that the 12 week period, if we start talking about what we can accomplish in the 12 week period, it would be a huge conversation. Because the 12 week period is great because it's about empowering your team. So we don't come in and we're not the consultants that is going to tell you that we know better than you at what you do, because you do what you do and you do it every day. And there is a lot of edge cases and there's a lot of things about your business and the day to day that you do.

So we inspire people. so I've seen that we have an innovation competition throughout the 12 week as well. So teams compete. And at the end of the day, when awards, rewards, according to first place, second place, third place, and everybody votes and his relevance to work, innovation and quality of output and teams built agents and back then it was custom GPTs, workflows, automations, vibe coded internal applications, everything you can imagine that you can do with AI today.

And the examples are we achieve some great things because we have teams where the president of the company and the CEO of the company will be in teams as well and not in leadership teams and mixed teams with team members. And they'll build great solutions to the real problems in their company. And I've seen people reduce five hours of due diligence into 30 minutes. I've seen teams that brought down 15 hours of sales reporting down to one hour a month.

And when you have 50 sales people, that compounds very quickly. I've seen team members build internal tools that would do things that they've never imagined they could do. So it's really about the people that we spend that 12 weeks with. it's incredible because they amaze us in great ways.

one of the other examples is instead of sitting, like if you have field salespeople, instead of sitting in front of a desk on a Friday to come and report about what you've done all week, you have ⁓ an agent on your phone where you put your AirPods and then you're reporting automatically after that visit. Right. And it's wow. places where you didn't think AI would help a ton.

And it does. And the conversational style of having a 15 minute call with this AI that is going to ask you a bunch of questions about that visit and there's going to report it, that is going to input it into Salesforce automatically. The quality of the reports are even better and the quality of the insights that you can get later are better. These are examples.

There's so many of these examples. And this is why I love what I do, because I see how creative humans are. you allow them and if you give them the tools to be creative and to innovate and to redesign how they work. Is there a specific niche that you feel like your AI operators really has key strengths in?

I know you mentioned sales a few times. curious if that's... Yeah, it's because of my background, right? Sales is because of my background.

Marketing is because of my... So I did sales for a couple of years and then I went into marketing, then I did marketing for 10 plus years. Then I was in operations. Then I was in growth consultancy and growth hacking when growth hacking was cool.

Then I was a chief growth officer, then I was a CEO and I changed from cannabis industry to B2B SaaS many times, deep tech, agency work. I changed a lot. have ADHD and I have to stimulate my mind. So I have to change a lot and really please that urge of curiosity.

And AI is doing that really well for me because it's changing every day, every week. Right. So I'm so I was reading something and it's like, this is the neurodivergent era. Right.

And it's true. I think that finally it's, it's the era of ADHD. people thought we were lost, but we just, we just wanted a little bit of everything and now we can have that. coming back to your question, I think that we've done, we've done work with agencies, B2B SaaS, but right now what I've seen is private equity.

We're really doing really well in private equity firms because we can help the PE team members and then help their portculls. It's just because it amplifies the mission, right? So it's much easier because we get into one company to the PE firm, then we get into their 65 companies, help them and so on. So the mission is amplified and it's faster.

But coming back to which kind of teams we help the most, I think all operational business operational teams for sure. think they're the ones who gets the fastest wow and aha moments. And I was saying this and then the other day I had a CTL with lots of years of experience of being a CTL and he wasn't into code code and he's like, I don't like code code that much. It's okay.

I use cursor and I have VSC Visual Studio code and we're doing really well there and so on. And I was like, Oh, okay. to you. he's like, can you, I remember he asked, said, can you convince me on the code?

I said, I don't need to convince you, but if you want a 30 minute extra outside the training, I'd be happy to show you what I'm doing with the codes on my terminal. local files and markdown files and stuff. And I showed him and it was like, and then a week later he was, he said he was three to four X more efficient. And it was, he's got technical background that I don't have.

So he went faster than I do in everything because he knows what to look for and how these machines work and stuff like that, where I'm just an explorer that has been hacking a coding agent into being a business operation agent, which is going really well. So I think that it's just about anyone that we can help. But I think anyone that is touching on business operational processes that are a little bit more older, old school, a bit manual, hasn't been innovated in a few years, we can really blow their minds and very quickly get incredible efficiency.

So I think, yeah, sales marketing is a great one and any kind of operations admin, HR, because it's a lot of manual processes. It's very old school. When I look at how we can work now and I look at how people work still in a lot of the companies, I'm like... There's a huge gap.

And I think it was said, if the AI innovation stopped today, it would take us 10 years to understand how to really redesign how we work. It would take us 10 years and it's not stopping. Let's be honest. I think the last week has been like one of the calmest weeks.

Claude still has a lot of features coming. We haven't had a crazy model lately. And I was saying this today and they're like, ⁓ yeah, but Tim, you realize the latest, the last model was a month ago. And I'm like, it feels like was ages ago now.

So I bet in a few weeks we'll get a new model again and the race will be back on. It's super exciting. What connects with me is what you mentioned about the CTO and how he was able to level up some of what you showed him because he has this specific domain knowledge. And it just made me think about how in the past we were very siloed or even still we still are.

Current business is still very siloed into all these different business units and organizations. And really, you, if you're a technology guy or gal, you're in your you're in your swim lane and sometimes you get to visit the other ones. Sometimes you go to finance comes to you and says, here's ⁓ a use case, here's something that we need to solve for and you get to explore that a little bit. super, but now we're moving into a position where you can actually take that finance person who really has strong domain knowledge of what it is that they do and then they can leverage that tech piece in a way that nobody's ever been capable of before.

because they just, again, didn't know that tech piece. So I see this cross-pollination opportunity advancing what businesses can do because now you're getting different fields of view, different perspectives that you just network. And it's not just between like technology and finance. This could be across the whole organization.

I've found personally, just even as somebody that do my own, I'm doing a whole wide range of things. And I think you've mentioned this before, but... The other part is when you start layering in agents and leveraging them and learning new things from the LLM or the different tools, and it just seems endless, right? Like endless sea of opportunity that's out there right now.

And that's just something that I want to promote to the audience is that I think it's a good experience. Like you mentioned, even with clogged code, get your feet wet, right? Dip into it, try things out. Doesn't have to be perfect.

Solve for a personal problem. How can you make your emails be, I don't know, drafted for you automatically in the morning so you can review them before you send them, right? Or how can you better keep track of your bills? Whatever those are, there's some basic tools out there that most people really, if they just give it a shot, can figure it out.

Yeah, I want to add something because you said something that makes our programs, our behavior change programs, We have everybody in together. We don't say, let's just do marketing or sales and we want everybody because the cross-skilled learning. I think the cross-skilled learning is incredible in AI because how I work with AI and how you work with AI and how John works with AI are completely different. Right.

And we learn so much from each other. And I think that's very important in businesses. One of the things that we do is it's create the time for people to come and learn and show each other. And I think that's what's very important because a lot of businesses when we're too busy, if you're too busy and you can't give time right now to learn these things, you're going to stay busy forever.

And that's going to be always your excuse that you're busy. So I think it's very important for different jobs, different teams to get together and learn from each other. And that said, think that we are going, I think we're already there and I think it's incredible because it's the generalist era, right? So I think if 20 % of each area in a business, you'll do really well because the 80 % the AI will help you for that.

And if you understand from what quality looks like and you have a bit of taste. So I think that we're all going to become tastemakers, like understanding taste and understanding quality and understanding what good looks like. If you understand that, let's say that's 20 % of the job, the AI will do the 80 % and you'll be able to do those tasks. Right.

And if this talk, this chat that we're having was a year ago, I would say, oh, okay, it's still a bit difficult for AI to get really good at specialist. tasks. But now with Cloud Skills and really building these skills and the sub-agents and so on, and these agent teams now in Cloud Code, you can really be the orchestrator, be the AI operator and let these AIs and agents pull in skills that are perfect at financial analysis. And you don't have to be a financial analyst.

You don't have to be a data scientist. I'm sorry, data scientists and financial, I'm not saying that your job is obsolete, but I'm saying that in a lot of... smallish or medium-sized company, you don't need a data scientist because Cloud Code is going to write the Python code that a data analyst would write to query that database anyways. from my background in hiring within technology over the last 20 years, it's weird that we're in such a different position because I would say, we talked about it before, right?

20 years ago when you were just looking for IT people with no specific design skill set. And then we moved in and it's okay, I'm looking for a full-stack engineer, I'm looking for a network engineer. And so the people whose profiles and resumes or backgrounds were more generalist were typically the ones that had, I think, a bigger challenge of getting hired for specific jobs because they're looking for an SME in something. again, we're at a critical juncture here where things are changing rapidly.

And I would say the advantage actually goes... to the generalist now because, especially somebody who's a systems thinker and consider the various moving parts and how organizations work. I'm biased, right? And I know we not to beat on the sales part too much, but the cool thing about sales, at least the type of sales that I was in is you're really trying to understand all those pieces of the puzzle and how they work together and connect those dots all the times because your deal might close.

You might be working with an IT person, but the finance folks aren't aligned or the legal folks aren't aligned. So you have to be looking at and or considering the bigger picture of how those pieces work together. And so this is a plug for all those salespeople out there. You all have probably a pretty significant opportunity to innovate within the space.

Sign up for cloud code or whatever your whatever your the tool is out there that you feel you can get warmed up with and just give it a shot. It couldn't hurt. absolutely. I think what you're saying is I think very important because it's the business The roles that involve human to human connection, sales is really human to human connection.

You're selling to a person, you're not selling to a business, A person is going to buy and it could be, all right, it be four or five people that are going to decide together and they're going to buy together. But there is a very human element and most of the times I close deals because people like me and it's not that we got compared the other day to McKinsey. They're like, oh, should we work with McKinsey or you? I was like, who do you prefer?

You're really cool. Work with me then and we'll close the deal. No joke. It's so funny.

And I was like, yeah, if you want to pay $4 million for a suited college kids, and I'm sorry if I offend anybody, I hope not. And that just got out of school and they're just going to create a deck, an executive summary deck, and they're going to do a presentation and that's going to cost you $4 million. I said, yeah, I think those times are coming to an end. If you want somebody who's obsessed about the day to day of AI and how to operationalize in your business, you work with us.

And if you're having fun in this conversation. You already know the decision and we close that deal. So I think the human to human connection is becoming more and more important. I think we saw that with COVID as well, right?

And now with AI, it's like even more and more important. Right? So this is why, if I can give your audience some tips, I think it's build a community, build, build an audience, build interactions of real humans, build a network, because that's what's going to help you survive, make money and have work to do. I think that if you don't have those things.

jobs are going to change. And while they're changing, I think that it's going to hurt a lot of industries and it's going to hurt a lot of millions of people. And let's be honest, I always look at the positive side of AI and, it's lately the last two weeks and a few podcasts and yours now that I'm telling this to people. I'm like, yes, it's going to get bad before it gets really good.

And if you want to be on the positive side, it's for sure getting out there, talking to people, building relationships, because that's what's going to get you, that's what's going to get you work now. I talk about this too, the human relationship component, being a good person, likability. And I often talk about how that relates to the job interview, which I think is something that maybe sometimes is overlooked by many, especially people that are recent college graduates or even somebody who's been in work for 15 or 20 years and has now been displaced.

They maybe don't consider the game of that job interview and what... what making a personal connection, what kind of difference that makes. And what I always say is probably the real reason that you didn't get hired is because they just didn't like you. And that could be a controversial statement, but I'll back it up a little bit to say, no, I don't just mean they didn't necessarily love your personality.

They didn't connect with you. You didn't come in there and give them a convincing reason why that you're the best person suited for this particular job. And that... Again, that could be less of you have the technical capabilities and could just be more of were you somebody who was prepared when you went into that job interview?

Did you know a little bit about the company? Were you able to connect with that person that you talked to? So I think those soft skills still reign true as a very important aspect of things and will be our differentiators as we move forward with this is not this trajectory is not stopping with AI. How do you differentiate yourself?

And it's that human piece right now. because humans are still hiring humans. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And I think this is what we're going to see with humanoids in the planet and in the workspace and shops and outside. And we're going to long for that human to human interaction. And I think that, again, I repeat, I think the businesses that are going to do the best are the ones who need a human to human interaction. And this is why we see development and programming as one of the first jobs that are changing the most, because it's about the human and the machine, and it's not the human to human.

It's just you sit down and you write code for eight to 10 hours or in the US, sometimes 12, 14 hours a day. And then even the best programmers in the world are saying by the end of this year, no programmer should be writing any line of code. And I said, oh, wow, it was the toughest degree to get. And now suddenly that one is the first one to be disrupted.

And that's because human to machine. I think that human to human stuff is going to get more and more important. And I think... going back in the beginning, you asked about my events, my music events.

I'm a sound engineer and I have a music background and I'm a DJ. I definitely am going to invest money and time into my events, into my house music event. And I started an acoustic music event for my wife, because she's a singer songwriter. Because I believe in three to five years, these businesses are the businesses that going to make money.

When potentially even with AI operator, I might become obsolete. So I think that I will be working with AI to make the human experience better. Actually, that's one of my goals with these events stuff is like, want the human experience to be incredible human to human and the rest to be handled by AI. How do you feel about AI music?

I'm loving it. If you ask my wife, she'd go crazy right now. She'd be very angry about this in a nice way now and I'm not a bit better. But the other day, I think it was when Suno, is it Suno 4 or 4.

5 or the latest cool Suno came out a couple of months ago. I set and I made a whole album in a couple hours. I made a really nice album as well and the lyrics was things that I really wanted to say and it was like dub techno, groovy dub techno and my wife has been writing a song for the last, or she was just trying to record and stuff. She doesn't have the time because we got two kids.

She's like, it took me six months to finish this song and what you wrote the whole album in a couple hours? And then she swear at me. She was really angry. And I was like, Look, I don't like AI music neither.

when we're in cafe or something like that, you hear it, you're like, oh yeah, that's cheesy. But being able to do things that you imagine that you couldn't do before, I think it's awesome. But this is what's happening with AI music as well. It's first, we're doing the whole song.

And like was image generation and mid journey. it's like, you do the whole thing and everybody's like, wow, we can do music, we can do images, we can do all of this and stuff like that. And then you're like, yeah, that's shit because that's killing. the actual creativity or it's killing what we created.

And now you go back and now I'm like, okay, I'd love an AI in Ableton, which is a digital audio workstation, where you're making music, is I've written a piece and I'm like, ⁓ I want some chords to go with this. ⁓ here are some variations. And then you could say, ⁓ I like that, but can it sound a bit more like this? Great.

So now suddenly AI is becoming a tool again, it's becoming something that you work with and not just say, AI do this and then get the output. And I think even with chat GPT and generative AI in text, this was the biggest mistake. Humans were like, ⁓ and LinkedIn posts, right? This is the best example.

People say write a LinkedIn post about, about whatever, about AI being cool. Right. And then they're like, ⁓ LinkedIn post written and they post it and it's like AI slop. Right.

But if you ask, I want to write an AI, I want to write a LinkedIn post about why AI is cool. Ask me 10 questions and then you're answering these questions and so on. And the context gets your context. And then the post is really good.

Right? Same thing. It's like, let's make a song and the song shouldn't just be like, ⁓ make it sound housey in this and one prompt and the song is done. No, I don't think so.

I think it should be, all right, let's write the baseline. I want it to be like that and make it go boom or say these things and start working with it. And maybe instead of five months, six months of writing a song, yes, maybe you'll finish it in a week. But again, who's going to win is the one who understands from taste and who that has taste and the one who understands from quality of output.

You're the curator. of that output. it's not just here's the output, dump it like you mentioned with the LinkedIn slop type of stuff. You still have to be the curator of that.

The cool part is that it takes you maybe less time to get to that end goal that you get to. But I think there's still that key piece of you being human and the human in the loop and ensuring that the quality is there. Absolutely. I love it.

It was a great conversation. I'm having fun. So you make the point that it actually takes 66 days to build a real habit, not 21 like most people think. Why does this matter?

Was it, I have the James Clear, James Clear habits somewhere here. Actually, was it 21 days in James Clear? was, yeah, 30 days something. And I realized why we did 66 is because when we're talking about AI habits, it's not every day that you will have aha and wow moments.

And in 21 days, You might be working with AI five days, six days, and you get a little aha moment. ⁓ that was cool. And then three or four days and you get another one. Right.

So in 21 days, you're not going to get 21 aha moments, but when you're doing pushups in 21 days and you're doing it every day, you see the results so quickly because you're doing it every day for 21 days that it becomes a habit. But in AI, I believe in the beginning, especially, it takes time for you to warm up, for you to get those moments. to get lots of aha, some wow moments. And they have to be a bit personal sometimes, as you said earlier, and sometimes professional.

So we do professional programs, but I have a small percentage of team members that are in our programs, they don't get their wow moment at work. And they're like, I'm not sure about this AI thing. And then they'll have a weekend or they'll be renovating their house or they'll be having a baby or their mother's sick. And they'll come to me at a Christmas party with one of my clients.

She hugged me and she cried and I was like, wow, what happened? And she said, my mom's very sick and Chachi PT helped me so much because she has this special dietary requirements. She didn't know what to do. The doctors explained she didn't know what to do with it, but she spent a bunch of time with Chachi PT and she built a whole meal plan and so on.

And her mom was better and she could take care of her mother. And then she was like, wow, AI is so good. So that takes time. And I don't think it's 21 days.

66 is not. because it's a scientific number, it's because we've been doing it. We have a tracker of 66 days and it's magic. It's absolutely working magic.

And yet if you... So we have a 66 day tracker that every day at the end you take five minutes and you just write down or dictate by the way, you say how you work with AI that day. Even if it's shit, even if you didn't have a great moment, right? You say, oh yeah, I did some emails, it was okay.

Oh, I did an agreement, it's okay. And then, ⁓ wow, I did a data analysis that I could never do before. Here we go. We got one great moment from that.

So if we can get about five, six, seven, or 10 moments in that 66 days, you are going to fall in love with AI and you're going to be addicted to AI. And I will bring this up on the screen because we said about fear in the beginning, but we have this concept, love, not fear. Every decision you make in life is out of love or out of fear. And you're to decide in which one you do.

And if you make it out of fear, you're not going to go very far. But if you make it out of love, you definitely are going to come out on the positive side or on the great side. So I think that this is why we're not pushing because it's not about that is we're helping people build these habits and fall in love with this technology because I do believe this technology helps us work on better things, bigger problems and better challenges. And as a human, we have brains that needs to work on higher cognitive work and not low cognitive work.

People who work on low cognitive work, they get drained. They get stressed, they get anxious, they have meltdowns. But people who work on higher cognitive work most of the time are having a better time in life. And I think that this technology can help us do more of that.

I find that with myself is that I'm learning so many new different things and which sometimes I can feel it in my brain. Like I feel like I can actually, it's like my engine is running too fast. In the past maybe, or in different experiences in life, that pain was more... ⁓ no, I got this pain, I don't like it.

And it created that frustration or maybe like that burnout towards burnout. But this pain is different. It's there. I know the engine is running on red lines sometimes, but it's exciting because you are seeing something cool.

You're not just sitting in front of your computer, refreshing the browser and hoping that it loads this time or it's just something that it's stuck on so basic. You're moving the needle, right? And that type of innovation for me. is extremely exciting.

May I add something to that? Because I really love this conversation and I just wrote down here, no pain, no gain, right? And when you used to say no pain, no gain, and it was like, ⁓ okay, maybe I understand. But what if you were just doing data scraping all day and you were copying and pasting into a spreadsheet things that all day and that was your job for two, three years and no pain, no gain.

You were not gaining much. You were getting your salary, which is quite low salary as well in those types of jobs. But now that pain that you mentioned in site. building something and you're learning something and you're like, wow, I broke it, but I learned why I broke it.

And like the next day you're redoing something similar and you're like, ⁓ I know that I'm not going to break this one this time. And I think we're learning so much. think the learning speed has increased so massively. It's incredible because I don't know how humans are we going to cope with this.

And I think that education can't cope with this. Schools, I think, are in trouble. I think the kids, I'm sorry for anyone who's just finishing school or is in a university for four years. It's like, when you come out, it's going to be irrelevant.

And it was already irrelevant. I went to a French private school because I live in Turkey and my mom's French, my dad's Turkish. So even the public French school here is private automatically because it's overseas. And it was learned by heart.

And you had to learn Louis XIV. ⁓ blah, blah, blah, and history and poems and stuff like that and math and stuff. And I was the last of my class and I was the worst of almost the school. And everybody said, ⁓ this kid's stupid.

I was there like, yeah, this kid's not good. He's not going to be able to achieve anything in life. And then I look back now, I'm like, ⁓ shit. It's incredible because it was it is practical.

My brain works practically. And if you give me new things that I'm learning every day, and if I'm excited about it, I'll do incredibly well. So I think it's very important. to realize that education has changed and how we learn has changed.

And it's going to be difficult. I think it's going to be very difficult for the education system. In about four five years, hopefully, I'll have a great exit at AI Operator. That's the goal.

And I'm going to go build schools. That's my next venture that I want to do. So today is AI for better work. And soon I want to do AI for better learning.

That's definitely on my radar. That is my next journey, hopefully. Glad that you have a master plan in place. And I hope that...

education system that you build or schools that you build are teaching less boring stuff. So guys like you aren't dragging behind. believe me, a similar situation, think, and many people probably in the audience as well can connect with this, is I remember spending, I really did not like school. I made it a point to finish in college and get my degree, but I was not a fan, didn't want to be there, wanted to do anything but sit in that class.

I think of kids and family members out there and it's painful sitting in a place eight hours a day learning about things maybe that you're not interested in. I actually through the school systems here and some of the work that they're doing, they are starting to integrate LLMs into their workflows and they're starting to give their students access to such things as like notebook LM or different tools where they can integrate. And so they can have their own interactive type of learning instead of just learning about the Spanish Revolution through a teacher discussing it, now they can have a much more interactive experience.

And then they could probe that notebook LM and ask questions. It's just cool to see that there are a lot of new innovations that are coming out there that will hopefully, no, I'm not gonna say hopefully, that will improve that experience. Yeah, glad that you're gonna be part of that, Tim. So, looking forward to seeing how you build it.

Thank you. I started for AI for Better Work because... My last job, I was really good pay. I was a CEO.

I had a partnership and it was incredible. But when I look back now and people tell me that you've changed massively from that job to what I do now, because then it was a job to earn money. Now I'm really doing it out of passion. And there it was just draining.

As you said, I would show up every day. I had to manage so many people and we were doing some old processes and it was just so draining. And it was like, I would wake up not wanting to go to work. And now I wake up and I'm like, Oh, who am I going to help today?

Which how many people am I going to help today? How many people are going to have aha and wah moments and they're going to work with this technology and see that this technology is incredible because I saw it myself and I want others to see it. So I think that this is why I'm doing it for work first, because I had that first experience myself lately. And then of course learning is because I look back, but I look at my kids, my daughter is only five.

And when she's 10, 11, 12, what's going to... What is she going to study? I wonder what she's going to study. So I'm going to have to, I'm going to be, have to be involved somehow.

So I've never done this in a podcast, but I do. It's a call to action for anyone that want to get involved in, in, in whatever. have AIforbetterlives.com.

It's not fully finished, but it's just a little bit of what I want to build. And AI Appredo is just one of the companies in the portfolio. And then hopefully with other people getting behind the missions of AI for better work, AI for better learning, AI for better health. And then AI for better design.

what I mean design is life design, world design, like when the humanoids are everywhere and so on. How is AI going to help us live better? How are we going to design better lives? So that's, yeah, that's the next 20 years mission, something like that I'd say.

And hopefully at some point, yeah, we'll retire and sail the world. Hopefully you're going to make some peptides and maybe some supplements or something in there and then 10X your life anyway. So you can live to 300 and Hopefully not keep the ocean, keep the seas clean first because you could live 120 years and have horrific sea, no more fish, no more sailing. Live why?

I don't want to live in Mars. I'm sorry, I don't want to live in Mars. That should be a message to grow. I don't want to live in bars.

Thank you, Ellen. You go. I stay here. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm earth first as well. Appreciate that, Tim. Winding down here.

One last question that... we talk a lot on this show about being an architect and not just a worker. Looking at the world you are helping build, what do you think the future of work will look like in the next three, five, and even 10 years down the road? I think 30 to 5 years, it's going to be scary in about 5 years because jobs are to be lost and so on.

I think so. But in 10 years I think it's going to be incredibly positive because we definitely are not going to do any of the things that we don't want to do. And we as humans are going to just focus on what we want to do. And work is going to look much different.

I don't think we're going to be in keyboards, on computers in a closed space. I believe that we're going to be walking more, spending more time outside and... what I see and how I want it to be. And I don't think of it as the 10 years, but it's in a few years.

I just want to have some really good glasses next to me at a Greek Island. My kids are swimming. They're a little bit older now and as, I have a quick call with some people around the world about a project. I just put my glasses on and we have a quick meeting.

Okay, great. I'll tell the agents to do that for you. And then my agents already know and they're building this thing for this business and so on. And as I, just get pinged certain times for really important things and agents and AI are making everything happen for me and for my clients and the people that I'm working with.

And I believe that should happen in a few years for me, because I think I'm a little bit at the forefront, but I believe that a lot of people are going to catch up with this and it's going to be the new norm. And we're going to spend hopefully more quality time with our loved ones and with friends and family and so on. And agents are going to do the work that we should have not been doing at the first place. So if you had to, if you had to put your finger on that you talked about the job loss component, which is on everybody's mind too.

My goal of the show and just in general where my head's out is not, I'm not looking to promote fear. I think there will be a shift in terms of responsibilities. So with that and those job losses that would be there for the audience, do you have any specific suggestions on things that you've seen within the organizations that you support? or within innovations you've seen with cloud or different tools that are out there.

What types of skills, I know we talked about the human stuff, is there anything in particular skills wise that you could recommend to the audience that you think they should lean in on? I think use the strategic thinking, first principles, systems thinking, all of this is super important. Of course, the human stuff and all those soft communication skills and so on. But also I think having taste in things, being able to look at 10 different campaigns or 10 different emails and understanding what is good and what is bad.

And I think that we as humans, we can start training ourselves in this today by really looking at the examples of the best. And we can look back even in history, if you want to study a little bit of the best writers, the best authors, the best marketers, the best campaigns, the best things. And what you'll see in most of this, I realize it was always less is more. It was always the simple thing.

was more. So I think this is why Adam Maskell, so I'm not a big fan, but I think he does really well because he brings everything back to first principles and being able to peel it or peel the whole thing, come into the first principles. I think it's going to be a huge, a huge skill for humans to be able to like, okay, it's a dashboard, but why do I need the dashboard? Okay.

This, what, why that answer? Why? Because of this. How, what if I didn't need that answer because of that?

And then really getting into it to say, ⁓ you didn't have to build that whatsoever. You just had to. have this whatever question answered for you at a given time. And if you can really go roll like that and you can really filter it down and get to that, I think a lot of people are to pay a ton of money to you.

Be curious and try to understand the why instead of just being a task taker and following those directions that are laid out in front of you, right? Trying to understand why am I actually doing this? What's the impact? And again, I agree with that.

I think that's a dramatic shift for a lot of and even the audience that's out there. And it seems so subtle, but it is, it starts with that. Try to understand the why. Probably don't badger your current boss on the why a million times a day.

That's not gonna do very well, but maybe start with your LLM, start asking questions, understanding it, and bringing in some of that understanding into conversations and or meetings at work or into the job interview. They try to explain what you know about that company, maybe some of the challenges that are happening. and start thinking about from an innovative perspective how you as a person that is looking to be hired could solve some of those problems. So understanding that why, super critical.

Yeah, problem solving. think you said it. I think we all as humans, we're supposed to be problem solvers anyways. And with AI, we could solve bigger problems.

So find great problems and do your best to solve them. And I think that's going to make you future proof anyways. Agree. Where can people go to follow you and find out more about your work, Yeah, so Tim Kakir, Tim C-A-K-I-R, anywhere on LinkedIn, YouTube.

I'm very active on LinkedIn and YouTube a bit. I have a free news that's It's every Wednesday. It's completely free. So please do sign up.

You'll find it on LinkedIn. But my business right now is AIoperator.com. Everything we talked about is in the show notes as well.

And thanks for helping the audience stay on lock. Don't be a stranger, Tim. Thank you very much.