How Leaders Can Start with AI Today: A Conversation with Michael Housman // REPOST

Is Friday a good day? Should we choose another day? I think you all been there and you know this is really a problem that takes the fun out of organizing such a thing. In the end, it's about the start. How to start your AI strategy, how you start with your company. We talked to Mike Hausman today and his new book is coming, Future Proof, Transform Your Business with AI or Get Left Behind.

And we talked to Mike today about how to start with AI in your firm or your company and um how to do it the right way. So to get the people on board is the hardest thing. But there's solutions and yeah, people you have to listen to the podcast to get to know those solutions. Welcome to another episode of the Beginner's Guide to AI. It's Dietmar from Ago Berlin at the microphone.

If you want to get all the episodes and some tips and tricks I have for you, go to beginnersguide.nl and get the newsletter.

Um, and and then decided instead of going into academia, one of the best decisions I made, instead of going into a tenure track role, I had a suspicion, hey, data's gonna be really valuable in a world where applications are creating so much data, I knew this was gonna be valuable skill set. And so I went into the tech world.

took my first job working for a startup, using data and algorithms to make better hiring decisions and and the rest was history. And I think, you know, to your question why Uh I I yeah, I talk about it in the book, but not only is it a force multiplier when it comes to productivity, it allows us to leverage our time and get more out of ourselves.

But it helps us make better decisions. You know, we're as humans, we're we're plagued by so many biases. There's a whole field of economics, as you know, called beh you know, behavioral economics. And it says humans are really bad at making decisions. And you when you pair us with algorithms, we can cut through that noise and and make better decisions about hiring and lending and you know, how to how to guard uh kind of cybersecurity, protect fraud.

So yeah, that was that was the reason why fifteen years ago and I just fell in love and and I've stuck with it ever since.

first unpacking, you know, what is it? What is it good at? What are the foundational models? And by the way, no math. It speaks to leaders and not technologists and You know, and then I try to outline, hey, how should you be thinking about leveraging incremental this tool incrementally? How can you be thinking transformatively about uh AI and and disrupting your own space, your own industry before someone else comes in and disrupts it for you? I think that's the there's a lot of fear out there.

And so, you know, it gives a it's a practical playbook for uh using these tools to kind of get ahead uh and and frankly not be left behind.

A lot of venture funding went in, the bubble popped, right? But no twenty, thirty years later, no one doubts the transformative power of the internet, right? There's no companies that have abstained and said, you know what, we're not gonna build a website and we're not gonna lean into social media. We're gonna be just fine.

those end up being the cautionary stories like Blockbuster, like Nokia, like Blackberry, like AOL, like Yahoo, you know, all those companies that are kind of in the dustbin of history because they thought, ah, this is just a fad. We're we're at that stage right now with AI, and companies really do need to be leaning in in various ways.

At the same time, you don't wanna uh throw three hundred fifteen or a hundred and twenty kilos on the bar. Sorry, I gotta do my metric uh translation. You know, you wanna throw like Oh okay, great. That's right. Yeah, sorry. So you know, three hundred and fifteen pounds or a hundred and forty kilos. You don't want to throw that on and and basically stall out and hurt yourself.

So I think of it as small starting with a lot of small incremental wins and using the good news is you don't have to build much. There are so many tools emerging on a daily basis that can help with your day to day workflows and you can start By using those tools, many of which are twenty dollars a month for a license.

Um, and I'll give one example of a company that I talk about in the book. It's a company called Pet Lab. Um, it's a it's a pretty decent sized company. They're B2B B2C, e-commerce company. They sell pet supplements. And early on we saw an opportunity their e-commerce. So their job is to market, to get uh yeah, I mean you're an internet marketer as well, right? So it's to get ads.

put out there, you test them and you refine them. And we realized early on, hey, there's some amazing image tools that can shortcut that time. And the winners e-commerce are the and e-commerce are the ones typically that launch and test ads the quickest. And so we taught their designers that had been Photoshop, you know, buffs. We shot we taught them how to use tools like Mid Journey and various uh DALI, and we showed them how to use these in conjunction with their own job.

And what we found was that they went from launching five hundred campaigns a month to twenty three hundred. So they're, you know, they they basically were machines. They created an engine And all of a sudden they saw you can see it in their revenue month over month, year over year, it shot up. As soon as we figured out these tools, we taught their in developer, their designers how to use them. Their throughput went through the roof.

They leapfrogged the hence of ahead of all their competitors that weren't using AI tools that were stuck in the stone age. And lo and behold, that's a happy story. It was actually about six months ago they got acquired by a large private equity fund. They had a really nice exit.

And so it's a great example. You know, I start the book with that story because I think kind of to your point earlier, like people need to hear these stories. They need to hear examples of successes when it comes to AI. And they're they're a huge one that I'd love to talk about.

And they they did that, no? And they they were really going for this.

how you can get started quickly and how you can really build momentum fast. And now they're much more robust because they their their organization has bought it and they saw the effect and they're like, okay, what else can we do with AI? This is a this is an amazing tool. Uh so it's a great example. I think every company, you know, likely listening to this podcast or every company out there has

so many obvious opportunities and they just need to identify them and find the right tools, fill that gap. And it's it's it's amazing those success stories.

We spent uh months fine-tuning these assessments. The idea is put people through a battery of tests. There was a score that would come out. They'd score green, yellow, red. We still hiring managers and say hire the greens. They'll stay longer than the yellows and the reds. But we found with certain some organizations they saw amazing improvements in turnover performance. Some saw nothing at all.

And when you dug in, you know, I'd go and I was it was perplexing. I didn't understand. So I'd go and I'd sit down with hiring managers and I'd say, Hey, you know, how are you using these scores? And and oftentimes over dinner and a lot of drinks.

They say, listen, you know, Dr. Egghead, like I know you've got a PhD and you're super smart, but no way this AI is better at my job than I am. You know, I've got 20 years of hiring manager experience. I've been doing this forever. I know what a good candidate looks like. And so th I use that as an example of there's a lot of nerves, there's a lot of fear when it comes to AI.

And I tell everyone, the big I can already tell you, every organization I work with, the biggest challenge is adoption. It's executive sponsorship. It's change management. And so it's it's a people problem fundamentally.

But the the the doctors think they are better than the AI because they are people and it's not they they don't accept that there might be something in it and yeah yeah use it as a as a partner.

And the reason is that they they don't trust the algorithm or they take control when they shouldn't. And so that that speaks to there's a lot of training that has to occur. You have to teach you can't just give a radiologist a tool to help with diagnostics and expect it to yield better results. You have to show them, okay, this is how you use it. This is when you use its decision. This is when you overrule the algorithm.

But yeah, it's scary that you know you your your doctor armed with AI might be worse than your doctored by him him or herself, right? That's not that's not the story we want to tell.

Yeah, the the the point is people need to need to train AI, need to learn AI. I mean you do also a lot of teaching in your company, uh so um W t talking about people, no? Where where we have to start? People use ChatGPT basically, no? But where do we have to start? Then level them up.

And the analogy I draw is it it's like having a a Ferrari in the garage and saying, you know what, this is amazing. It can charge my phone and it can light up a room, right? I can use the headlamp. You're you're just scratching the surface of what it's capable of. And so one thing for business leaders that are listening to this podcast, think of it not as a tool, but as a collaborator and a thought partner. And and what I mean by that is

It can be a a board member. It can be a strategic decision maker. It can help you weigh the pros and cons of specific decisions, right? It can help you do research on new markets you want to enter because there are amazing deep research capabilities. So that's I think that's an amazing starting point. You can take that subscription you already have, instead of using it to draft up your next social media post, right, or the next email that you have to write.

Ask it, hey, this is a challenge I'm facing with my business. Can you lay out the pros and cons? Can you, you know, teach me like what what should I what are my blind spots? What am I not thinking about? And and I'll give you one example. Uh, I do work with uh a lot of financial institutions. One's a very large bank in Peru called Credit Corp. And we rigged up a virtual board member, actually two of them. And so we there are tools, we made a virtual avatar.

We gave those avatars literally a man and a woman that were completely fabricated, right? They speak fluent Spanish. They know everything there is to know about Credit Corp, the business, its mission, its customers. They have all that insider knowledge. And they know about frankly everything going on online in the world. And they became, we had a virtual board debrief.

And we treated those board members as if they were members of this board in the room and they were weighing in and they were giving interesting insight about financial inclusion, about sustainability. And so it was it was fi finally, I think it it really had a light bulb moment for the board members. They realized, oh no, no, this isn't just like a writing tool. Like this is someone I can consult as a thought partner and it's a very, very smart

and strategic thinking board members. So that's an obvious avenue for folks listening to this podcast, like use it to weigh out as you're thinking about your business, use it as a thought partner, as a co-CEO.

And I can't tell you how many times I've had CEOs consult with me and they say, listen, my team needs to be using AI. You know, why don't we run a workshop or we'll do a boot camp or whatever it is? And then I'll ask them basic, well, how are you using it? Right? What's your usage look like? And you yeah, I don't want to call anyone out, but you find out very quickly, oh, they they haven't even logged in. They have no experience with it.

And uh that's a recipe for disaster. So there's a lot of research, and that's not just anecdotal. There's research that says that companies that sprint ahead, it's because the CEO and the C suite has made it a priority and they they use it personally. They don't just design projects. and pass it along and say, okay, use this tool, right? And report back.

uh exploring, experimenting. It these tools are also fun. You can create images, you know, I'm constantly experimenting with what can I do. I'm I'm becoming a designer because I'm playing with images and video and audio and doing all sorts of crazy stuff like that.

So, but I do see that there's a bit of a schism when it comes to age. And I think that's actually a c a good thing because I think folks that are in their twenties right now that are trying to figure out, okay, what career path do I want to go down? It's a good thing they tend to be more AI native. Um, and I see this in workshops. I'll do a workshop most often I work with company executives.

Once in a while I'll do something for uh college students or MBAs. So I tend to get a younger audience and they it's unbelievable. Like they get it, they're able to sprint ahead in a way that these 20 year seasoned execs aren't. And so I think that at least gives them a shot because this is going to change the skills that are needed for jobs. And and we're seeing actually a slight decline in hiring for entry level gigs.

amongst companies that are are leaning into AI. And so I worry about the 20 year olds of the world that are saying, well, what how do I make sure how do I get a job? I'm getting more and more inquiries from people that are struggling to find jobs. The answer is I go all in on AI.

And I'd learned how to build agents and agentic tools and solutions. I'd learned the latest and greatest, you know, make yourself an AI expert. And I think that's that's true. Everyone should do that, but younger folks have a bit of an advantage there.

And he learned how to create images of epoxy being poured onto floors and then hardening immediately. And that's something you can only do with AI. And an epoxy company reached out to him. It went viral. Company reached out to him and said, hey, we love this. Can you do this for us?

And so he reached out to me and been working with me for a long time and he said, Hey, I you know, I I just got this job offer for I think it was like two to three X what I was paying him. And I was like, you know, I was sad because I love Chadwick and I was like, damn it, I can't afford you anymore. But

Good for you. Like you leaned into these skills. You did exactly what I've been telling people. You leaned in, you learned a new skill set. All of a sudden you up-leveled your job and your pay. That's what, you know, it exists. That's what everyone should be should be doing right now, especially junior 10.

Um if if you'd say, okay, there are people out there now listening to the podcast and they oh yeah, we we love AI, maybe our C suite is not using AI, how should we start? Like in a practical way? What would be the first step?

Are there lots of tedious workflows that you think could be automated? Are you doing a lot of repetitive work? Is there a lot of copy-paste? Look at, you know, and I and we have exercises where we take break down how you spend your time and you look for those pieces that seem very monotonous and tedious.

And then you ask the question, okay, could AI help with this? And you spend time rebuilding the workflow from scratch in an AI-first way, in an AI native way. And and usually that will create kind of what I call light bulb moments. where you realized, you know, what people need early on are obvious wins. And I know for me personally, one of those can't you know, I'm a coder and a developer. I was I hit a bug.

I knew it was going to take me, you know, I just having done this a long time, I was like, this is going to take me a day to figure out what's going on here. And on a lark, I actually just copy pasted the error into, I think it was clawed because it's really good with code. And it not only found the source of the bug without even having access to the the code, it gave me the fix. It said, Oh, you just gotta copy paste this line into one place. I did it.

Fixed it on my way. Saved me eight hours, right? Just instantaneously. And once you have that moment, you're like, take my money. Like, no, I would I would pay ten times that subscription fee because it got me back a day of my time.

five, ten, fifteen times what whatever it is you're paying. So, you know, when you do that math, it's it's just an obvious win. Uh, but you know, folks are folks are still reluctant to lean in. And so that's a that adoption is key.

I I might use it privately for I know therapy, sports or whatever, but then in a firm I'm like okay, should I what should I put in? No. Yeah, definitely AI literacy. Well Yeah. You have also liter l AI literacy classes and you do stuff there.

Commercial, a deeply researched pitch deck for a new product. We had AI judges weigh in on it. I mean, there's you know, it's really fun. Um, but yeah, I mean, you know, I think. The other story I'll tell is a company I worked with, it was a bunch of developers. Copilot chat is is a game changer. Uh GitHub Copilot is a game changer and cursor's an even better tool. Thought it'd be really easy to get developers to use a tool that would 2x their throughput, and let me tell you it was not.

Like we took a lot of brown bags and innovation awards, a lot of carrots, and we got a third on board. We moved on to the sticks. We we baked into the performance evaluations. We looked over their shoulder at their commits. And and finally I got everyone on board when I said, Hey, listen, you're not going to be replaced by AI today, but you could be replaced by someone who knows how to use these tools.

And that's when we we got the remainder. So the the point is there's no magic bullet, but I tell companies all the time it's gonna be a combination. Every culture's different, but y it's gonna be a combination of carrots and sticks that get folks to to really lean in.

I do work with insurance, I do work with financial services, uh I've done work in real estate. Those are much slower moving industries where it's harder to get people to change habits and behaviors that have existed for 10, 20 years. I also think those industries present the biggest opportunities. And so I'll give you know, an example I talk about in the book is uh Thailand Escrow, which in the US is this very esoteric process. It's wrapped up with buying or selling homes.

It's existed for over a hundred years. The technology for for the longest time, it was still fax machines and insane stuff that people did to verify title, right, on a given house. And with a co-founder, uh, we went in and we said, There's gotta be a better way. And they and they they companies, title and escrow companies swore up and down. They were like, No, no, no, no, no margin for error. You need human eyes and human hands to process these transactions.

And we started building tools that were AI enabled to facilitate the transactions that would do documentation, that would do communication. And when we built and deployed them, uh, we we basically saw a huge opportunity. We were able to shorten the title and the the home buying process from months to weeks.

Uh, and I'm pleased to say that the company ended up getting listed publicly a couple of years ago. So it was a big success story. And the point is, yeah, slower moving industries like real estate, you know, it could be harder to make progress, but if you crack that nut. Everyone else is left on their heels, right? Everyone else is left in your their your dust while you're sprinting ahead. So there are

You know, and at the time I thought Tidelin escrow is the most boring industry in the world. Why would I want to touch this with a 10-foot pole? The answer is those slow-moving industries, man, there's so much opportunity there, more so than the e-commerce, you know, uh companies of the world.

I for the the German uh this is this is a mean thing if you tr translate a book and they have a book deluded in German and so it's is like he he calls it differently, but anyway, so the the slow thinking process is like really you have to get the people to ground like tet let's say the real estate example. Um you still have to make decisions, but with AI.

So there's a bunch of research that says, you know, how do hiring managers react when they see resumes? And the answer is. Average higher engine manager spends seven seconds looking at a resume. When they do it, they look for red flags. They look for long-term unemployment. They look for job hunting, job jumping behavior, uh, they're looking at college degrees, they look at GPAs.

Right. And then when you and and when you look at when they interview, typically uh we spend about a minute forming an opinion about a candidate and we spend twenty nine minutes telling ourselves why we were right.

And we're and we're filled with so many biases. When you're interview with someone statistically like me, bias is an obvious one. You look at them and you say, Oh, you went to the same school. You also played squash. I like you, you're hired. And so What what I love is uh we did research at Evolve and we studied, well, what makes someone a good job seeker, a good, you know, a good fit for a job?

And long-term unemployment doesn't matter. Uh job jumping behavior doesn't matter. We even found evidence, criminal convictions that can actually be very higherable. Um, and so we were able to cut through that noise and we looked at what are the knowledge, the skills, the abilities that make someone a good fit for the job.

And so that was where we're able to correct that unconscious bias with signals that are deeply rooted in data to help those people make better decisions and to avoid using those heuristics that they had used for 20, you know, 30 years.

So I think that's it it's a great example of, you know, just recognize as human we're flawed decision makers, but we can use these tools that are trained on thousands and tens of thousands of job applications and they can help us be better decision makers. So I think it's a It's an example that speaks to what you're saying. That that unconscious bias like machines don't have that bias.

Um, likewise, I love all the deep research tools. You know, there's a concern about hallucinations and misinformation. The deep research tools are getting really, really robust. So perplexity is amazing for kind of real-time answers. Google Gemini's Deep Research Tool. I use it all the time to research really, especially as you're writing a book and you want to do research and you want to see well what's out there about XYZ topics.

Uh it's an and it's so transparent. It's like going to a research analyst. It would normally take them a week. You'd ask them, hey. research me startups in the ride sharing space and it'll they'll come back in a week with something, but you can go to deep research in Gemini and it'll get you the answer within ten minutes. And it's unbeliev and it's ri it's referenced, it's cited, it's fact checked, it's unbelievable. So those are two of my favorites.

Thirty minutes later they come back with great results. So really, really good thing. A notebook LM. Yes, I I uploaded uh a lot of my transcripts to a notebook LM to I can ask my podcasts about things. Uh like things like the terminator and matrix question because I wanted to have some some stuff. Uh what did people answer? But first, Mike, d do you think the Terminators will take over or we will live in a matrix? Maybe we even live in a matrix first right now.

with beings that are smarter than us. And I know it's scary because we've been at the top of the food chain for the longest time. Like we're the ones that are the smartest. W th there will be a class of beings that are smarter than us and frankly can't even explain what they understand to us.

W so what does that mean? What's the relationship we have with them? And I think people automatically go to the negative. They automatically get afraid and they say, Hey, you know, will this be the end of humanity? There's a possibility. There's there I think The survey suggests there's a 10 data scientists think there's a 10% chance that could happen. And it's not, you know, it's not a hundred percent, but it's not zero. It's scary that it's even if it is 10%.

Uh but I'll I'll give you the opposite argument because I tend to be a pro-technologist. Um These tools, these algorithms, you give them an algorithm game like Go, and they play over and over again. They're able to synthesize strategies that humans have never thought of before and come up with answers that we couldn't even conceive of.

I know it sounds nuts, but imagine some of the most challenging problems we've encountered. You know, the i civil unrest and uh and you know, promoting a healthy population and uh food insecurity in the environment. Imagine you give these algorithms though pro those problems. There's a world where they can come up with solutions that we haven't even considered.

So I I tend to think that we're actually about to usher one of the greatest errors of humanity, which is we're gonna solve a lot of problems with technology that we've struggled with for generations. And so that's that's my answer is uh I it's certainly a possibility, but no one considers, hey, what if the great what if this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to us? Right. And I I tend to be on that side. I think it's going to produce something amazing.

It's crazy, but maybe there's a world where we get to just enjoy, right? And the robots can uh take care of us, can make sure we're all fed, make sure we're comfortable. Like no one likes to think of us as the dogs in this scenario, but uh she's she's got a pretty good life. you know

Uh but I'm gonna be s dripping out via my mailing list, chapters, and samples. So uh sign up for the mailing list is your best bet, and I'll uh pass along the order link when it's live.

So really positive outlook there. Get to know AI. I mean young people if you uh listen to the podcast you already use AI. So get better, get systematic with this. And yeah, if you are older like me. uh you might have those young people and tell them they're in school, learn AI. So this is the most important thing. But the other thing is obviously um how to get AI in your firm, how to get AI literacy in your firm.

So people are not afraid to use AI, so people want to use AI and so people can use AI systematically. And yeah, Mike had some great insights there. Thank you for that. And And one last thing, go to beginnersguide.nl and follow the newsletter to get all my episodes in your inbox and some nice tips and tricks I have. Also go to AI for the 99%.

Those ninety-nine percent uh most of the firms because it's a small and medium enterprises, I sent out some tips maybe once or twice a week. So follow there, it's not too much. And you get some insights in how you really can use AI. One shout out to Andrea Andriescu and Lotte Braun who are my editors here and without them the podcast wouldn't really appear. So thank you for doing the artwork.

Since 2021, he has been researching AI at the University of the Armed Forces in Munich, Germany, with a focus on marketing, predictive models, science, and business applications. As the host of The Beginner's Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer is one of the top AI podcasters worldwide, renowned for making complex AI topics accessible to a broad audience.

He has a deep interest in AI ethics and is well known for posing his signature question to podcast guests. Do you believe machines will take over the world like in the Terminator or the Matrix? Beyond podcasting, Dietmar Fisher is an experienced educator and trainer, working across various industries, including tourism, NGOs, and academia.

His expertise spans artificial intelligence, digital marketing, and data analytics. Organizations looking for expert-led AI training in marketing and AI fundamentals should consider hiring Dietmar Fisher through argobalin.com.