Your Team is Using AI Right Now And It's Not Helping You | Chris Daigle

Unlocked Professional: AI and Future of Work: Most companies are doing AI completely wrong. The crazy part is that they have no idea. They see a LinkedIn post, they sign up for a tool, they let everyone on the team just start using it however they want. Six months later, nothing changed and nobody can prove that it actually worked.

The CFO is asking hard questions and the team is burned out from chasing the next shiny thing. Chris Daigle has a name for the people giving all that bad advice. He calls them TikTok trainers. People who sound smart on video, but have never actually run a company through a real AI change.

Chris spent over 20 years going inside eight and nine figure companies and fixing the broken stuff. He called that work growth architecture, finding the hidden leaks in a company and plugging them before they sink the ship. Then AI showed up. He realized this was not just another tool.

It was the whole new way of working. So he built chiefaiofficer.com, created a 90 day step-by-step plan to make AI actually work inside a real company and has already certified nearly 400 liters to run AI the right way. He also hosts the popular Using AI at Work podcast, which I now subscribe to.

But here's what Chris told me that hit different. There is a gap between what AI can do right now and what companies are actually using it for. And the only thing standing in between them is human friction, not the tech, the people. Today, we get into the plan, the guardrails, and what it really takes to win before the window closes.

Chris Daigle, we're excited to learn more about your journey. Welcome to the show. Awesome, Jeff. That was a fantastic introduction.

Thank you. Happy to be here. I read that as a kid, you were already doing some growth architecture, selling candy out of your school locker, buying low, marking up and filling a gap in the market. What did those hallways teach you about spotting opportunities that still show up today in your work?

And honestly, what were the top sellers? I guess I didn't even know that arbitrage was an entrepreneurial thing. just saw, it's like, man, kids want candy. I can go to, I think at the time the store was called TG and Y.

I don't even know if they have those anymore. It's like, I can go get it for X here and charge X plus. That's cool. It just seemed to me very logical and easy, right?

There's a gap in the marketplace. I can exploit that gap. And that's always led me to people talk about, my kids at an MBA, they're getting a specialty in entrepreneurship. I just don't know how you can.

teach that in that gut that innate like ability to so anyway, just born that way top sellers candy are still to this day. Except the candy that I sell today isn't the chocolate bar. It's the candy like what we call the AI magic, right? Everybody loves seeing the AI trick or ⁓ my gosh, it made the song it put my name and all the we call that the candy as well.

So I guess I'm still selling candy to some Candy still around, got it. Yeah, candy still around. I ate my fair share of candy and you were targeting the right market, I can say, when I was for kids. So you balance high intensity martial arts with quiet morning bike rides to watch the sunrise.

So how do those two habits, discipline and stillness, keep you sharp when work is getting heavy? These are great questions. I have been, this is like the first endeavor in my life, business endeavor, where the endeavor alone is enough of a satisfaction. It wasn't like, just the pursuit of the outcome.

That's what got it started, obviously, but the process of building this startup over the past three years has been a reward on a daily basis. Now, what I do is I go and then I'll get up from the desk and I'll go and burn up a lot of the energy that was built up from sitting for hours and hours. So that's where the martial arts, the running, the whatever comes from. And the, don't have a lot of anxiety around the business.

like I have in other endeavors for a couple of reasons. certainty that we're on the right track. again, that entrepreneur's gut. Like, we are in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.

The big win is imminent today, tomorrow, the next phone call, which is a fantastic way to live, like, with that level of anticipation of knowing that the good stuff, not waiting for the shoe to drop, waiting for the Ed McMahon to show up with the check at the front door kind of thing. But I don't operate like other people, I know that. And a lot of that ability to not be high, low anxiety kind of thing simply came from in the startup environment, just fatiguing that muscle. There was just so many ups and downs that eventually it was just like, ⁓ this is how you play the game.

We call it riding the bull. But sometimes in the startup, you're riding the bull and the bull's a lot meaner than at other times. But I think that now it's just, second nature because I exhausted my ability to play that game of, what's going to happen? What if there's been enough what ifs that we've survived that I just don't worry about it anymore.

I don't know if that's helpful, but that's the reality. Good. Sounds like you built up a tolerance. Big time.

Yeah. Yeah. So your, I don't know how to phrase it, credit is MAP or map framework is a 90 day plan model access perform. Most companies try to skip straight to the tech.

What actually happens in that first 30 days and why do so many get it wrong right from the start? I've got an opinion on that. we, especially in the past year and a half, we've been in front of a lot of audiences of our ideal customer profile, executives, decision makers, and lower middle market companies, primarily in the US, right? So I've had a chance to have a lot of conversations and entrepreneurs, right?

I think we have a skill to be able to identify opportunity. It's a blessing and a curse, but we see opportunities everywhere. So for me, the opportunities are, what information am I getting from these patterns and the conversations that I'm having? And the three things I think that are the top impediments from companies moving forward that I've noticed really surfacing in the past 90 days or so.

The first one is the decision makers don't understand the risk really. So it's not prudent to take a course of action if you're not clear on what the risk is. So that's one of them. The second one is they'd love to get started, but they don't.

They don't know where. They haven't been able to make that connection of identifying use cases or pilot projects and stuff. And then the third one is they'd love to get started, but they don't have anybody in their organization that's like the AI guy or the AI girl that they can go to. So they need help.

So those would be the three things that I think are keeping them from getting started. Now, the ones that say, ⁓ we had some automations built. We're good to go. You're not ready for the future.

The ones that said, ⁓ we had a one day training. Somebody came in and taught our team how to use AI. you're not ready for the future. This is not an activity that occurs like in a vacuum and ⁓ we checked that box.

Your people, it's got, and I don't think it has anything to do with the actual tool, the paradigm of artificial intelligence, sure, but it doesn't matter if you use Claude or you use chat GBT or you're using, it doesn't matter what the tool is. If your people haven't made the transition, they are not going to be able to adapt. as the technology continues to improve and now there's a better tool that we need to be using. So we've made a big decision.

We're going to switch off this tool to that tool. To them, there'll always be a learning curve. ⁓ my gosh, like a new tool as compared to if they're doing what we call internally, what we call when they're thinking in AI. they've gotten so it's a natural reflex for them to go to the models to get an answer or to not necessarily say, ⁓ we got to schedule a meeting.

Hold on a second. Hey, Chad GPT, if you were an expert at blank, how would we do that? They're just closing these loops a lot faster. If they can do that, it doesn't matter what the tool is.

I put the tool in front of them and they're thinking the right way. Can this tool help me do this? ⁓ let me ask it. Hey tool, can you help me do this?

You're thinking that way. So I think that's where companies, and that doesn't happen from a one day training. That happens from a one day training that leads into a regular tempo of communication about it, reinforcement of behaviors. congratulations.

Chris did a cool thing in AI, let's celebrate that inside the company. That's really what it's gonna take for your company to be prepared for the future. And when's the future? Like tomorrow, today, like it's happening now.

And if you think that you get the AI person to come in and build the automation or the agent, you're good to go. That agent will be obsolete in three to six months. The training that you gave them, the team will revert back to the old way of doing things because... ⁓ it's just easier doing that.

I don't remember what they taught me in the class. So it's not just about the tool of technology folks. It's starting with the people and then any tech you throw in front of them, they're going to be able to maximize it. I guess that's my answer.

Yeah. So giving the team the fundamentals and creating systems and then ensuring that they're continuing to optimize. How can we continue to leverage these tools and systems? How can we improve things instead of just once and done, when and done, implement, follow the same processes of let's say like a SaaS software over and over again with just filling out forms and yeah, I agree.

think having a systematic dynamic approach is key. Even me as a personal user of the tool, things. go awry, I do like to think of agents as employees that still need to be managed and trained as well. So yeah, the thought that you could just be hands off with them completely, unfortunately, is not a possibility at this stage.

Yeah, not yet. Research shows AI can handle up to 14 % of tasks and hundreds of jobs, yet it's not happening. And you blame human friction, not the tech. How does a leader fix that within their own team?

Yep, so the study that you're referencing was one that I found pretty telling. was some research released by, I think, MIT. And they had worked with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And they had identified all the activities that need to occur.

And I think it was about 900 jobs that are common here in the US. And then they took all those tasks that were required as part of that job role. And they looked at the capabilities of generative AI as it is today. And they realize that it could address about 12 to 14 % of tasks across all those jobs.

That's very exciting. However, I don't know that any of you that are listening would say, 12 to 14 % of the tasks in my teams are being handled by AI. Now, just because it can do it doesn't necessarily mean that the employee is aware that it can do it, that the employee knows how to use the tool, has permission to use the tool, that the leadership is getting them trained on introducing that 12 to 14 % augmentation into their role. And I think that's going to be the biggest thing that's going to be, if every single knowledge worker knew how to do what I know how to do, different world.

But they don't. And why? Because they've got a soccer game they've got to get to at home. And because they've only got eight more years before they retire.

Whatever the story is, they're not There's no incentive for them to do what it takes to really master this. And to me, that's immersion. And you can immerse and get it done in 90 days. You can immerse and do it slower over a course of a year or whatever.

But to not be studying this as if it was like final exam is coming soon and you really need to know this information. And it's not even about knowing the information. It's really more about changing the way that you think. And you referenced it like there's To us, there's three stages of this concept of learning or thinking in AI.

The first one is you start using the tools enough and you have that moment where you're like, ⁓ wait a minute. If it can do this, then I bet it could do that. ⁓ if it could do that, it could do this. that, like the matrix unfolds and you're like, ⁓ my gosh, like this, now I get it.

I get the amplification that this tool can have for me. I'm seeing like, ⁓ I could do this. I could do that. That's fantastic.

That's the first step. But the next step is as you're having that, you're like, ⁓ I wonder if it can. ⁓ we should probably schedule a meeting and see if we can. That's the old way of doing things.

The new way of doing things is I wonder if it can. Then you create that reflex. Hey, chat, GBT, can you? How can I?

Who does like, how is this being done? And other like you realize that there is no, there's no external knowledge source that you need to wait on. You need to schedule a meeting with, you need to get on their calendar. That doesn't, that's not the first step anymore.

The first step is have that reflex of go to the models, go to, how can I, I wonder if I can go to the models. Like all of these questions that are going to start happening for you about using AI, safely and using it. it capable of doing these things? You just go to the models.

Hey, Chad, GPT, hey, Jim and I can you. That's the number, the second part of thinking in AI. And the third part is just really now that you're that person walk around the office and say, ⁓ you know what? Let me show you something real quick.

⁓ if you did it this way using chat, did you know chat GBD can do this or whatever your model is, right? And it's that evangelization. It's not necessarily training as much as it is demonstrating in the organization that, Chris knows AI. You can go talk to Chris about it.

Hey, Chris, how do we do that sort of thing? And I can tell you, regardless of where you are in the organization, nothing bad will happen to your career. If you're known as the AI guy or the AI girl, right? ⁓ they know AI.

That person is There will be layoffs, ladies and gentlemen. The future is unknown, but I can tell you that with the, what we are able to do with generative AI, that it will, I just don't need as many people and the people that we do have are doing the work of several more people and working less hours. That's coming for you. In any organization, they're not going to say, ⁓ Chris, he knows AI really well.

They're not going to say, ⁓ let's get rid of them. You have. like you're ensuring your economic viability by learning this stuff. Even if you're the CEO, you are ensuring your economic viability by learning this stuff.

Your front line, just graduated from college, you better learn this stuff or else there is no easy future for you in knowledge work if you don't know how to use AI. Yeah, I agree. These are the table stakes now and everybody really should be thinking about how they can adopt. not only the usage of these tools, but how they could do their jobs better and perform better.

And I think companies respect that type of input when you can come to them and say, hey, I was able to do XYZ that much faster. I've given some examples in the past I've talked about where people oftentimes they hide their little internal tools or hacks or things that they've been able to do in order to make their workday shorter. But I think that those tips are what is gonna make you potentially that SME that the employer is gonna wanna keep around in the future. And so you should definitely not play with the tools and see what you can do.

Keep company data out of personal tools, absolutely. But other than that, try to figure out how to do it faster and better. So you brought up a good point about this. If you're a leader of a company, there are people right now in your company using AI, whether you know it or not.

What are they using it for? You may not know. But here's what they're doing. getting more work done unless you have led by design an example and you've made it known that the culture is changing.

There are people using their phone to get the work done and they're not spending it on doing more work. They're spending it on scrolling Instagram. So you're not getting additional bandwidth from these individuals. If you don't have a well thought out way of training them, making sure that they understand safe usage, that we've got those policies in place, that they're trained on them.

and that we're measuring output and that we're measuring adoption, you are going to be like, just ad hoc benefits will pop up here and there, but you're not necessarily going to know if it was done safely, if it was done right. If that person ended up their output increased because it's A players, right? That's a different story. But your organization isn't comprised of a hundred percent of A players.

It's those B's and C's that if they're not, if they're doing what's called shadow usage, You're not getting any extra time out of them. If, but if done right, your B and C players can now perform at the A player level. That's been proven in multiple studies. Boston Consulting Group at Harvard is the one that I'm thinking of in particular in September of 2023.

The B and C players, once they know how to use these tools and they're thinking in AI, you're getting output from them like they're A players. Like you gotta get, you gotta get control over who's using it, what they're using it for, when they're using it, what they're using, all that stuff. for sure. So would you say, I don't know if step one is the right term, but in the beginning when you're either through your training courses or when you're consulting these businesses about their AI strategy is generally the first step or one of the initial things that you look to do is identify an integrated LL tool that they're going to use in the company.

And then you start building on that as far as workflows or solving for specific problems and then in two parts. And is there a go-to? If that's the case, do you have a specific recommendation or do you keep it pretty dynamic based upon the company? So most companies that are coming to us, they've got something in place.

And for a lot of them, the easy introduction of AI was copilot for Microsoft. Most of the businesses were on Microsoft. But routinely, daily, When I talk to people who know anything about AI and they're using Copilot, their opinion of Copilot is very low. Big miss on Microsoft's part, they got the distribution, they're in 400 million knowledge workers around the world use their products, whatever that number is, it's an immense number.

And for them to come out with a tool that it just is not very good is a big miss. They're going to fix it. So what ends up happening is a lot of the companies who say, we're on Copilot, And within a few, within a 15 minute demonstration, we can show them why Copilot is not the answer for them. So what we typically recommend and have since I guess, 2023 is chat GPT.

Most people know they've heard of it and how I see it. It's the, it's the utility player of LLMs. So I would suggest that's where you go. Now, another suggestion is don't jump around.

Once you get into something until you've truly mastered it. There's no need for you to jump around, pick one tool. It's going to have all the, and again, until you are an expert level user, like you're not gonna, you're not going to miss out because this one's got a bell and this one's got a whistle over here. And trust me, all of these tools, if this model releases something within days, weeks or months, this other one will have it too.

There's really the edge that these tools have doesn't last for very long before the other model say, Ooh, that's a good idea. Let's include that. So that would be my advice on the tool side of things. But where we start isn't on tool selection, where we want to start.

And I would suggest if you're listening to this, that you follow the same logic here. We start with a one day training for the executive team, the entire executive team, because companies are asking, hey, what are we going to do about AI? And their shareholders and their employees and their boards and their vendors, what are you going to do about AI? If I've got my executive team assembled and one or two of them know a little bit, I've got a power user over here, a couple of them are like, hell no, I'm not using AI, I don't trust it, whatever.

When it gets time for us to answer that question, and this is an existential question, like this is not just what color are we gonna paint the break room? This is how do we make sure that we are still competitive a year from now? But if you go to have that conversation and... Not everybody in the room who's representing all the domains of the business is at least at the same baseline understanding when it comes to what the tools are, what's possible, what they cost, what are the risks, all those sorts of things.

It's an ineffective conversation and that company's AI strategy is going to be truncated to just the people who understand it enough to be able to contribute. So the first step for us is make sure everybody at the executive level is up to speed and we do a one day immersion. And we can't make you an expert at AI in a day, but we can make you an expert level user for strategic use in a day. No question.

From there, the next step that we do, why do we do it this way? Because we've screwed up a lot, right? We've learned a lot of lessons. We had a lot of scope creep.

We lost money on contracts because we didn't, like we've made all those mistakes earlier on. So the next step would be, The executives aren't going to be the one that are pushing it or driving it. It's going to be the employees, the staff level that pushes it and drives it internally. Because you as the executive can bring the big stick and you got to do this.

Great. But you're not sitting next to them on Tuesday at 415. And that's really where that the cultural shift will happen. When I see my peers across from me using it and getting big was going, man, that was easier than I thought.

Oh, that was fun. Oh, look what I did. That's what it's going to take to really get the adoption. It becomes.

Of course we use email. Of course we drive a car to the office. We don't walk. It just becomes an assumption from everybody that's operating in your organization.

But we're going to train at that level. And then what I would suggest is that you have representatives, just like we did at the executive level. We had representatives of all the domains of the company. Next level down, that department head or whatever.

Those individuals across the company need to be collectively communicating and collaborating on at least a weekly basis. Yes, a weekly basis. can be a lunch and learn. It can be a morning thing.

It can be whatever, but they need to be sharing the wins that they're having in their department so that the other departments can go, ⁓ I didn't know it could do that. That's great. Get this collective wisdom distributed. But not only is that what we want to have happening with that, we call it an AI council, but they need to be holding each other accountable on pilot projects or initiatives that are in place.

Because if you don't, you're going to come back in 30 days, hey guys, how's it going? ⁓ it was just easier to do it the old way. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that when companies didn't have the follow up in place. It's not a, I heard a guy, Liam Otley, he's a younger AI thought leader.

And he said, he looks at it as layers and not leaps, right? It's not. ⁓ we did a thing. Now we're an AI company, right?

It is, we did a little thing here and a little thing here and a little thing here and another little thing here and another. It's those small wins that come from these initially not terribly ambitious pilots that prove concept that get people used to talking about AI, get you people used to, ⁓ like that facilitates and accelerates that, moment of thinking in AI where the matrix gets revealed to them. So that's where I'd start way before any getting caught up. There's If I went to, there's an AI for that dot com.

If I went to that website right now, it would show me that there were 47,000 AI tools that they've documented. Don't play that game. Don't even worry about it. That's TikTok material.

That's not real world application for business. When you approach these companies from your experience, obviously you said, I think you started in 23. that when? so from 23 to now.

Probably in 23, most of the companies I'm guessing at that point didn't really have much exposure, if any, to the LLMs. And you're saying now you go in and they have some type of co-pilot instance or something. So I'm just curious, along that journey of where, until where we're at now, how prepared and experienced do you think the staff is today when you go in and start talking LLM innovation? What does that look like?

In March of 2023, when we launched this business, I already thought we were behind. Right? I thought, ⁓ man, everybody must know about this and can see the impact that's going to have on the business. Wasn't the case, obviously.

But we used to do trainings every week and we would get a mixed bag of people to come to these trainings. But sometimes we'd have a couple hundred on there every single week. And for the company or you just you have one for your for all the chief AI officers or their organizations or large. What?

So you hold like a webinar or something like that that's open to anyone who wants to join. OK. Yep. Every week we would do that for anybody who wanted to join.

We did advertising. It was part of one of our channels and that sort of thing. And we used to always start the presentation so that we could make sure that we weren't like dumbing it down too much or talking over everybody's head. We would just say in the chat real quick on a scale of one to five if you'd let us know where you are on the journey ones being like hey I'm brand new I've never really messed with it to five is I should be teaching the class and 2024 is a lot of ones, twos, threes, no fours and fives.

2025, it was that, but at some point we started seeing more people like fours and fives. And my interpretation of that was, this is awesome. People are finally like having the breakthrough. And I would always ask, hey, that's great.

Not to put you on the spot, Joe, but I see you're a four there. How are you using ChatGPT? Oh, we use it all the time. Great.

What are you using it for? I use it to write emails, I use it to summarize documents. And to the individual, the frequency of use to them was like that qualified them as a power user. But anybody who's listening to this and is using the tools knows that it can do a little bit more than write an email.

So there was still this disconnect of, I'm a power user. Yeah, but you're not really using the tool that much. You're using it for a very... very discreet scope, right?

So I think that a lot of people are misled about their AI savvy. think that because they've taken it and they've been to the grocery store and they've taken a picture of the aisle and they've done the diet, the meal planning or whatever, and they've used some multimodality stuff in very clever ways, I think they think that's like, I'm an expert level user. To me, you mentioned it, expert level usage is table stakes. A company that is really ready for AI has now gone way past just access to chat GPT for everybody.

They're process mining and mapping for pain points in departments where automations or agents or human augmentation is now the solution, right? That's the next level. If your team is still trying to figure out your security settings and chat GPT, you're better off than a lot, but you are not ready for the future. What would you say now when you go into a business, how long is that trajectory?

Six months, three months until where you get into a position where you feel like everybody has a decent level of understanding how to navigate the tools and is starting to project to that next level where they're adding more value to the company. So what we're seeing, there are a lot more like enthusiasts popping up where I'm like, hey, they actually have their head around it, right? So there's a lot more of those people, but they're random. There might be somebody in this department and somebody in this department and they're probably not collaborating, but I know what AI prowess looks like and I can see that person knows what they're doing at the scope that they're operating.

They don't know what like enterprise wide. So I'm seeing those people, but the timeline when we first got started, We didn't, again, we didn't have the processes that we have now. Now, within 90 days, if you as an executive will support our velocity, right, the pace at which we want to introduce this, within 90 days, your teams that are participating in what we do will be on fire. They will be excited about it.

They won't be scared of it. They will be eager to exchange knowledge with other departments. There's not going to be any of this siloing the information. They'll understand that this makes all of us limitless.

And that, when we apply it to, we do some exercises where we take some of the crap work off of their plate really quickly and early so that they go, hey, say, I stuff pretty good. I hated doing that. And now I don't have to work on the weekends because this gets done in 15 minutes instead of this took my Saturday morning before, right? Like very quickly, 90 days on the far side.

Like you will have a team that is like ready for the AI Olympics. Like they really will be that good. What kind of feedback are you getting in terms of performance? Is there any you're seeing in general X amount of productivity in that 90 days?

So this came up, we have a weekly call with all of our certified chief AI officers and we talk about what's going on in the landscape. And this came up today, there's a new chief AI officer and she was saying, How do I forecast what they're going to get? And it's hard because it's not just the technologies we talked about with the 12 to 14 % impact on jobs, but yes, somebody's got to actually use AI for those jobs. They're not doing it, right?

So outside of those things, what we tell them is that to let executives and decision makers know that we feel very comfortable forecasting a 10 to 40 % positive impact on any KPI that gets AI-ified. Right? Like I could work one day out of those 90 and we could get you there. Right?

Like those very low hanging fruit, but we don't want to let them know. We don't want to come out of the gate telling them what we've actually seen because it'll sound like BS until they see it until they see it in their own business. And like, my gosh, this used to take a perfect example. Like one that we talk about a lot is commercial construction company.

They have to manage a lot and real estate and all that. They have to manage the certificates of insurance. from all of their vendors. These aren't, this isn't the tech space we're talking about.

This is professional trades. Like they'd rather do the thing than do the paperwork. So it's a pain in the neck. And for this company, and they're not huge, but for this company, it was taking three people roughly about 20 hours a week to follow up and make sure that the forms were filled out correctly and that they were even sent in the first place.

And it was just, it was prone to human error and mistakes, but it's insurance. If something screws up, and they were underinsured, big consequences. So was very important. We came in and within 24 hours, we saw what the process was and we had MVP.

Within 24 hours, we had minimum viable product of a solution that took it from 20 hours a week down to two hours a week. So in that case, it saved that company. They went from 1,000 hours a year across these three people to now, what, 200 hours a year? If, no, not even 100 hours a year.

So it was a significant reduction in the amount of time that was required for them to do. Now, that's one activity in a big company. Every company has those big spreadsheets that they're maintaining or like, that's just, they didn't have a solution. So they had to home grow a solution.

Those things are taking up so much time and the executive doesn't even realize it. And the people that are doing it aren't thinking, boy, this sucks. I wish we had a smarter way to do it. It's just the process that they do so they don't really think about it.

Like we come in and we attack those things and people are just like, they love it. They fall in love with AI. It's great. When you do that assessment, is it person, remote, a combination of both?

How long does that process take to do? is it, is there multiple phases of that? And then just one other side note, which I think is funny. When I think of that assessment phase, I actually think of the Bobs from Office Space, where they're coming in and really just, what is it that you do?

is that, yeah, can you tell us more about what that experience is like in general and how long does it take? So if we're going to be on site doing like a full day immersion, that's one of the things we'll do. But if we're not, we can do it in an hour. And what I'd want to do is I would want to get your, AI council.

And again, the council is made up of representatives from the departments of your business, right? It's not the executives. It's more at the staff level who will be actually executing and having the conversations with each other about it. So what we'll do is we'll pick somebody out of the audience and we're going to ask them, do you have any, do you have some pilots in mind?

And they're going to be like, Nope, no worries. Bing. We share a link with them to a custom GPT that we've built that's specifically designed to get information and context about their role and give them between five and 10 suggestions on pilots based on the information that they gave them. process takes about 10 minutes, right?

And it's a very easy process, even if somebody's never really used ChatGPT or a custom GPT before. By the end of that, we've got 10-ish pilots for each person that did that. So we'll do a demonstration. We'll share the link with everybody.

Then we'll say, OK, everybody take 10 minutes. Go through it, now that you've seen me work with somebody else on the team. At the end of those 10 minutes, are they any good? I don't know.

Let's evaluate them. So we have a pilot project evaluation algorithm. that's baked into the software that we've built to manage projects. And we show them how to use that.

Okay, great. Now, Terry, you ran through the example with me earlier. Let's go in and evaluate these now. So we'll get them into our tools.

And it's very easy. They go in there and I'll say, okay, now copy that, paste it in there. Copy that, paste it in there. So that's usually going to be the title of the pilot and the description.

Okay, Terry, now let's answer on one to five. Let's go through this multi, this, they just enter a button, a score on something. And it asks them about a dozen questions that address Is the company ready? Is the data ready?

Is this a high risk? Does it align with strategy? Do we have the people that we need to be able to do this? So we have them answer those questions really quickly, and it will score that pilot project on viability.

Now, at that point, they went from, don't know where to start, to having a bunch of ideas, picking the ones that they think would make the most sense, getting them evaluated through an algorithm that's been trained on, at this point, thousands of potential pilot projects. and then giving them extreme degree of clarity. Here's the three you should start with. Here's the highest impact one you should do based on these conditions.

We do that. It makes it very easy for companies to go, hey, this looks good. And I'm excited about the potential output of doing this. And now we've got something to actually start helping the companies build.

We can build, but our preference is to teach them how to self-serve, maybe not build an app agent or an automation. but at least know how to build a custom GPT or a Gemini or whatever to be able to support that role, support that process, that workflow in the business so that now they can say, hey, this used to take me two hours every Friday. Now I get it done in 10 minutes because I built the tool that's helping me. And those, we document all of those wins.

We gamify the documentation of it with the teams, whichever individual and whichever team is documenting the most wins gets acknowledgement and all that kind of thing. So we've made it fun. But we also, as a business, if you have your teams doing that and all you're measuring is pilots, you're missing out on the bulk of the productivity. Because it's coming from, now that I'm thinking in AI, ⁓ you know what?

Instead of, there was a situation with OSHA yesterday with a compliance client, 196 pages of pretty dry content. But it's their job. They need to know this stuff. Now they load those into GPTs, and now it's search and retrieval.

It's not, OK. This is going to take a full day of me reading this at the Starbucks. Now I don't even have to read it. I can load this as a knowledge base in the custom GPT.

I can ask it questions. It's been told to give me citations so I can now, as the human, confirm that the information that I'm reading is correct. But I didn't have to go source it. I didn't have to find it.

I didn't have to figure out this is actually… Now there's this other section where it talks about the… I didn't have to do any of that. I had a query. I had a knowledge base. I use natural language.

got my information. I confirm the source. I'm good to go. That used to take them so much time and now they're doing it in two five minutes instead of 20 to 30 minutes.

And if I can get the teams to document those wins, you'll be blown away. You'll be blown away how much time they're saving from saving 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, 30 minutes there, 30 minutes there. It adds up on an individual level. Like they might start saving eight hours a week, not in one big batch.

but a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit there, it adds up very quickly. So document those little wins as well as the big ones. The other cool side to it that I see is that you also start, new ideas start coming to you. The LLM is bringing ideas and or concepts to you that you've maybe been doing the same job for five, 10, 15 years, and it starts talking about new ideas, new thought processes.

Sometimes that can be overwhelming itself, but that lends to this whole new area of innovation. So it is productivity in terms of making their day-to-day quicker with improving and optimizing the steps that they do. But again, lends to a lot of new innovation, which is extremely valuable. Yeah, for sure.

And then with that, I'm just curious, do you with... the service that you provide, is it generally, does it end there after that immersion phase or do you have some kind of ongoing cadence or you can, what does that look like after that? So I don't know how smart this business model is, but our preference would be to train your team so that they don't need us. Can that happen in an afternoon?

No. Can it happen in 90 days? Probably not. But at some point, I don't want you to be beholden to an external resource.

to be your AI expert. That's why one of the things that we do is we have a certification for the chief AI officer. And to us, it's not a technical role. It's somebody that understands business.

Ideally, they understand your business, and they understand AI. It's become their job to be the AI person in their company, right? So our preference would be to get you up and running. Ideally, you've got somebody going through the certification from your side simultaneously so that they're not just getting the certification, but they're almost doing an internship with a chief AI officer so that at some point, and the company may decide, Hey, we still want to keep you guys around to help us build stuff.

The company may decide, Hey, we still want to keep you around, even though we've got our own internal person, but you'll be there like mentor coach. What we do is that the training for sure, the pilot identification, we introduced the safe usage and show you how to develop the use policy. We'll build that for you. build it with you so that your risk environment is addressed.

But there's layers to this thing. You may be a four or five. And then once you get there, honestly, in AI, you realize, ⁓ there's this, there's open claw or whatever, right? So I don't know that there's ever going to be a time where you're going to be like, yep, we've exhausted the capabilities of AI, we're good to go.

I think there will always be a need for Whether it's us as the chief AI officer or one of your internal resources, there will always be the need to have that person who's like, yeah, but we could also do this. Or now that we've done that, we can really focus over here. And the more of that you do, you just, like a little bit faster, a little bit faster, you are exponentially faster and smarter and less error and higher quality across all the departments of your company where you took this stuff seriously.

So do you guys also take on that responsibility of chief AI officer from a fractional perspective? you'll either find some identify somebody that they want to put into this program or sometimes you guys will just say, hey, we have that capability if you want to just leverage somebody off the shelf from us, like on a fractional or a consult. OK, got it. And on the certification training, how long does that take to get somebody certified generally?

Is there a timeline or amount of hours? It's great question, and I want to address it because there's a lot of training material out there. And people say MIT's got a chief AI officer program. Yeah, they do, but I want you to think about this.

The person that's teaching that or developing that curriculum, just as higher education works, they're not going to say, ⁓ you're going to teach something? Great, go teach it. They're going to say, we need to evaluate this. We need to make sure that it meets our standards and all that stuff.

So all my content, all my training needs to be presented to an approval process well in advance of the class start. Okay, great. That class starts, they're not big fans of you dynamically changing the curriculum in the middle of the course, right? It's not how higher ed works.

So what that means is by the time you sign up for that program, it's already, believe it or not, it's already outdated, some portion of it, maybe all of it. And especially by the time you get to the last class of that semester, last week, ChatGPT version 5.3 and version 5.4 didn't exist.

Right. Next week, it'll be the same thing. Something that didn't exist this week, it will be released. So you have to be very careful where you're getting your training from.

If it's a static course, you'll learn some stuff for sure. But I've talked to the executives that have gone through there they've been like, ⁓ it's okay. I did it for the MIT or the Harvard designation, but it didn't help me lead my company in AI. So our program Some portion of it is self-paced.

It's content that's not going to change as much. And that's really our framework for rolling it out, which we call the MAP process. So you learn that as a chief AI officer, a proven model of going from start to finish successfully piloting AI and then deploying it. But that's also supplemented in our certification by these live trainings that we do throughout the week.

And I think on any given week, we might have 10 or 15 live trainings occurring on different topics. CAIOs teaching leadership concepts or AI for HR or specific tools. So if your learning environment doesn't have some element of, this is what happened this week, you're going to know more about AI than the cashier or at the grocery store. But you're not necessarily giving advice on the most current capabilities of the tools.

And if I tell you, this Model T is a great car, yeah, I guess it's faster than a horse and can go farther than a horse. But we also have jets now, right? yeah, you know something, but what you're teaching people to use is an old version of the technology. And that's, I guess it's better than nothing.

But again, that's not going to make your company ready for certainly whatever's going to happen, transpire between now and the end of the decade. Companies that are trying to operate on just like old tech, old ways of thinking, old ways of production, they're going to be they're going be relegated to a subcategory of their industry. They're just, they're going to be like boutique. They're not going to be competitors in the market.

They're just, how can they be? They're still licking envelopes and sending letters and I'm sending emails. I can just do more, do it faster than you can. And that's just what's going to happen.

Yeah. And I agree. It's important to stay as dynamic like that because things are rapidly evolving and changing. I think the challenge that even we as individuals have is as it's evolving so fast, where is the best place to put your investment of time because that tool might change.

But absolutely, it is changing so fast that I can see what you guys do. You have to be dynamic with it. Yeah. And just if you want to be using the tools.

I got a daughter that plays tennis on the high school team. They made tennis rackets in the 50s and 60s. But if she showed up with a tennis racket from the fifties and sixties, she would not have, she would not be as competitive as somebody who's got the latest racket or whatever. Right.

And that's how it is with your tools. I don't suggest you jump around from tool to tool until you're like, you've developed a palette for what is good AI, what is not good AI. Most of you just need to get started. And one tool is all you need really.

It's chat, GPT, your Claude or Gemini or whatever to start moving forward. Once you can distinguish, ⁓ this is good, but it's not as good as I need it. I need something that could do X, Y, Z, then go find the tool. But bouncing around from tool to tool is gonna keep you anxious, it's gonna keep you surface level, and you're gonna be, that's candy, that's what we call candy.

It's fun, but not very fulfilling. If someone's feeling stuck today, what's the one small thing that they can do right now to start building their own advantage with AI? Yeah, I would actually go to the models. go to chat GBT and say, I feel stuck.

Can you help me? that question you just asked me, I would take that right into chat GBT. Yeah, it seems getting experience. Yeah.

Right. And that's that that's that new reflex I was talking about, right? ⁓ man, how do I do something? ⁓ hey, chat GBT, how do I do this?

One of the things that we used to do in our trainings, we have comments running and people would be asking questions and our moderators were trained to copy that question, paste it into Perplexity, copy a link to the output from Perplexity back in there, not to necessarily let me Google that for you, but to show people like, you have the answers if you can remember, ⁓ yeah, hey, how do I do this? Hey, I'm stuck, here's my role, what can you, that's, you do that, you'll always have clarity on how to use the models at that time for that task in that role.

Glad that you guys are solving this problem, getting the workforce out there and companies more integrated with the tools. I think we're in complete agreement that that's necessary and necessary step in doing that assessment phase and getting the organization aligned is of tremendous value. Where can people go to follow you and to find out more about your work? I do a lot on LinkedIn.

I think I post regularly, like daily on stuff that we're discovering in the field. It's not a bunch of just thoughts. It's, we saw this is what's happened. So LinkedIn, Dr.

Daigle is my, spell it out, D-O-C-T-O-R-D-A-I-G-L-E is my LinkedIn profile. We do a ton of free trainings in our Chief AI Officer community. So you can go to chiefaiofficer.com forward slash community.

Like literally a ton of free trainings, great stuff. And if you're just interested in like how we can help your company or what the certifications look like, if you just go to chiefaiofficer.com, it's an easy site to navigate. like we pay attention to what's happening in the marketplace.

I'm not the guy that usually says this, but we're very good at what we do. can see what other people are doing. And we just got, we got thousands of people in our community that are feeding us information all the time about what's working, what's not. And that is priceless, right?

Just, we've got a big footprint out there when it comes to collecting intelligence of what's working and what's not. Come get some. And the podcast. And the podcast, Using AI at Work.

Sounds good. All right, yeah, everything we talked about is gonna be in the show notes as well as we'll add in all those details for the audience. And thanks again for helping us stay on lock, Chris. Don't be a stranger.

It was my pleasure. Thanks everybody, go use AI.