Demystifying AI: Use Cases, Privacy & Recommendations With Varun Grover

Can you tell the audience who you are, where you're from, what you up to

There's just so much more participation at the ground level compared to other tech transformations that I've seen in the past. I think AI is one which is really tapped into the imaginations of so many people. It's just been super exciting to be in this space. And I recently even started a LinkedIn newsletter on it where I package up all of my content and engage in different types of conversations I'm on my 11th edition right now. So still, Early but it's been really fun building that out.

One thing that I see that you advocate is a venture mindset. Can you tell me more about that mindset as a business owner? Cause every time that I look at a new tool or a new solution, you can either look at it, Oh, let me just see the latest and greatest. And then you go down that rabbit hole and every single, there's that, there's like a repository or a website that shows you all the AI tools. There's thousands. On that website. It's insane.

And you don't even know the privacy policy on half of those. So you gotta be safe on that. But on the other flip side, the other mindset is to look at something and here's a use case I'm trying to solve for what tool solves for that. I think that might be more empowering, but walk us through the venture mindset and how you take, this approach when you're exploring new tech.

Alongside my full time job, I'm actually pursuing a master's in computer science, and I had an exam coming up. And so I had to summarize a bunch of different chapters from a few different textbooks. So I took this NotebookLM tool and had it create. an AI podcast for me using just a bunch of the material and it was a lot easier than having to read through three chapters of deep learning or reinforcement learning. It just created an actual podcast that was exciting to listen to.

And I was blown away, man, it sounded really realistic. And so that's just one example. I think. GPT is what is being used the most nowadays by a lot of people to make their lives easier at work and personally, but I think with agents, it's going to get a lot more autonomous where you're not just asking, For questions you're honestly having a coworker work alongside you. I recently tried out this new tool, Cove, which is phenomenal.

And that's like a visual workspace that you can collaborate with. I had it plan out my next trip. And so there's a lot of different tools that you can just start to experiment with and then you start to dial into, okay. This tool is useful for X use case. And so this is where I'm going to try to experiment even more. And so you're not spending a ton of time just thinking about what to use.

You're actually playing with these different tools because the reality is none of these tools are perfect but they're only going to get better over time.

Like just to give a preface for the audience, when we talk about go to market tools there's Signal based tools to figure out what are people searching for? If they're in the buying cycle then inbound based tools. How do you actually get contact information and outreach based tools or filtering tools to figure out okay, is this the right person, the right ICP, the right contact or all the analysis and then outreach so that is a whole stack.

And I can, one Saturday I just spent 500 bucks just testing things and just, you know how it is. So I, I love to know more about what are you seeing professionally? So you mentioned about. You're pursuing your higher advanced data. You use a notebook element. I've heard fantastic things in notebook. I've toyed around with it. But when you're working at work, I know some companies, like a friend of mine, she, it's still in person, so they're not fully remote.

So it's I know that's a, not a judgment call there, but it's a, it's still in person shop.

And they're all talking about, Hey, we actually will not be using AI because of the privacy concerns, et cetera, et cetera. How are you seeing that? Discerning that through the work that you're doing, other people that you're working through, maybe even clients that you're seeing like data, privacy use cases, and then also solving real professional problems. Because I think if you're not leveraging the technology, you're significantly being left behind right now.

So we've started actually leverage a lot of these tools internally for a number of different things Summarizing conversations for example, scaling content creation. There, there's a number of different things that we built out internally as well, we have AI powered customer success organization. Has built out their own. Generative AI assistant, for example.

And there's just a number of use cases internally that we've been able to create while prioritizing data security and then externally as well, we continue to help our customers take advantage of AI but do it in a secure manner.

So people were having all these conversations and without you realizing it, All of your conversations were being used to train the base model. And so if in that conversation, your credit card number ended up in there it's in the, it's in the underlying LLM now. I think more and more vendors are having to be extremely clear about their compliance and privacy around AI. And how are they actually handling the data from the conversations? How are they handling access controls?

How are they handling sensitive data? All of that is just extremely important, and I think that is something that we look at very closely when we are working with different vendors and we make sure to read them thoroughly before using any tools for that.

OpenAI Sora thing was being explored when they were asking if it was trained on YouTube content or not.

Peace, but like, why am I mailing a check? Like, why are we not using Stripe? Like that? That's life happening right now. So that's the reality that we live in right now. And the conversations right now are what tool stacks are we leveraging? How are you developing something faster? Instead of taking three months, you're taking three hours and that's not an exact duration. With your YouTube channel, with the feedback in the comments that you're getting with the subscribers.

And I know now on LinkedIn, where are you seeing that people are? It's there's some sort of. Magic trick, but then once you really see that's not a smoke and mirrors. How do you help people demystify to really take action and implement this in the real world? Because I think the workflows that we can execute through AI are really beneficial. But how have you had conversations either with users or subscribers to demystify it, to make it more tangible for them to execute on?

And I think we often run into the core technology messaging problem where a lot of times these tools end up being hammers looking for nail. And that's not how users think like a lot of times. What I've seen work in terms of demystifying some of these new tools or just generative AI in general is meeting people where they're at in terms of the problems that need to be solved and thinking about, okay, what use case do you have?

And then working backwards into Hey, here's how AI can help you versus hey, here's this awesome new tool that can summarize text there you go. Like it like that is not enough for anyone to stop what they're doing or change behaviors and start doing something new, but if I Went up to a college student and said, Hey, you're really struggling with these five different dense textbooks that you need to study in the next week to, to prepare for this exam. You know what?

There's a school tool that can help you summarize that and create an AI powered podcast. So that, that's a flip in terms of you have a problem that drives a solution versus an existing tool where you're looking for a problem to solve. And I think the smart.

AI companies are realizing that and they're trying really hard to differentiate themselves in terms of the value that they bring to the customers and to the users versus Hey, I am AI powered, insert whatever you're doing before AI here, right? A lot of companies that perhaps had nothing to do with AI in the past, just say they are AI powered.

It wasn't as sophisticated and definitely, yeah, that, yeah, basically Perplexity was doing a much better job of that. So I feel like now they're getting to parity with perplexity, but I think that the advantage that ChatGPT has is. Once you start using one generative AI tool, it develops a sort of stickiness and that user behavior is hard to change, right? So if chat GPT is what you started using first. You're going to probably go back to it multiple times. I tried to use perplexity.

Notebook LM is one that I definitely valued, but I use the free versions for both of those. I don't use the paid version. I think if there's one thing that I feel good paying for is it Chat GPT right now.

love that I was able to get really good insights in the first answer, but the more conversations that you had in that thread, the more water down the conversation got like it remembered less, even though the token usage wasn't that high. Like I wasn't using 2000 tokens per conversation. It was like a simple conversation, but I feel like the reply rate, I had a less mental power being used. And that with GPT 4 all the time with a 4. 0 in, in, in mini.

But with 01, it's probably the most The most advanced that I've experienced so far?

unique capability that I haven't seen the other Gen AI tools start to invest in. There's better search, like search GPT or perplexity, like they're investing a lot in making that better. But Anthropic, I think is going down a different path with this desktop control capability. And they're really, I think once they figured out the artifacts, like they've figured out, like that's the path that they want to go down further on. And it's just fascinating to see the two different trajectories.

And if there's a difference in like the value you're getting, why not pay for two tools?

all out. I know you shared with me that your mother has been a huge influence in your life. And part of this podcast is to honor experiences and those who've influenced us and what we're doing. And I know that's a significant part of why you're doing. Can you share a little bit more about that story? Because I think it's absolutely amazing.

When the internet came out, she helped me take advantage of those same things online and start to use the internet and she would do courses herself to help me just take advantage of this new technology. And then, throughout my education, throughout my career, she was my biggest support, my biggest rock. And I always felt. I wanted to get her a better life and make her proud, which is by I continue to pursue my goals of moving abroad. So I grew up in India and moved to the States for my MBA.

And then I was able to help her live through a lot of experiences that were just dreams for us. For example, she used to talk about us renting a Chalet as a family growing up. And we were able to do that in Tahoe. And that was one of her happiest memories. And when I lost her in 2023, I felt like anytime, You go through a very difficult experience. Like losing a loved one. There's really two paths, right?

It's either you go down a spiral of grief and that is hard to come back from, or you, try to live up to the memory of the person that you have lost. And so she was the brightest light. And so I always felt like people used to tell me that my smile was her smile. So I was like, If I can broaden my influence in the world and my impact in the world in a way like More people will know her story.

Or more people will be able to connect with her even if it's indirectly so that was the big motivation behind scaling my youtube channel it's a private video, but one of the youtube videos that I had first posted on that channel was my mother's prayer ceremony or her memorial service I made that video private, but then I was like, I'm going to take this channel and make this into something that helps me reach the world broader. And I was really interested in generative AI at the time.

I was learning a lot about it. I was like, Hey, I'm learning might as well make some good content. And hopefully people like it. And it took off and yeah, I'm really proud that I was able to do that for her and so yeah now I feel like. It's been over a year since I lost her, but I still feel like she's a huge influence in my life. I was able to channel something that was a very dark time in my life and do something hopefully that's positive and helpful to the world.

But the fact that how are we figuring out how to better ourselves, our community and others, and our clients, and to use your words, like, How do you leverage this for positivity to provide hope and to do this courageously in a way where, sometimes in the marketplace or sometimes in the world, it may not be as positive. It might be a little dark. So I really do appreciate that in our conversation here.

But for everyone listening here, where's the best place for everyone to one, thank you for being on it to learn more about you and the YouTubes.