85: Using AI at Work to Reduce Tool Overload and Drive Real Productivity with Tim Cakir

Don't compete with AI, you'll lose. Collaborate with it. Become best friends, become partners, and then you'll have a great time. AI expert isn't their role. What would you tell them to make sure that they're getting the most leverage out of their efforts to chase the tools, let's say? Well, first of all, I'd say don't.

try just do it or don't do it don't try right you will feel very left out or delayed delayed into the into the game you know because a lot of things happen all the time you look at you know my channel and i do some crazy stuff and you're like oh my god i'm not there at all am i missing out yeah don't feel like that

because this is what we do day in, day out. When you're doing these trainings, what happens in 12 weeks? Like, how do you get started? We focus on behavioral change, redesigning how we work, redesigning how we show up, redesigning how we talk, because we're speaking to the machines now.

We're talking to the machines. Interesting. Tim Shakir went from DJing and sound engineering to helping global companies unlock AI's full potential. As founder of AI Operator, he's on a mission to make everyone more creative, curious, and future ready. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week, we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started.

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Everybody, welcome to the next episode of Using AI at Work. My name is Chris Daigle. I'm the host of the show. And today I'm very excited about our guest, Tim Shakur, who is the founder of AI Operator with a very profound mission that we'll discuss today with his efforts in AI. I first discovered him way before we ever got on this podcast because of the content that he was producing on YouTube as an executive who's focused on the AI space and what that means for business growth.

Tim's content was one of those resources that helped me really stay up to date at trying to chase the tools and the developments that are occurring in the marketplace. Isn't an easy thing to do, even for somebody who focuses on this 100 percent of their time and much less for somebody.

who tries to squeeze in a podcast here and there to stay up to date. So today I want to make sure that you guys walk away with understanding how Tim is doing this because he's doing a fantastic job at it. So, Tim, thank you for being here and welcome to the show. Well, thank you very much for having me and thank you for the kind words. And, you know, I'm glad that my content gives value to some, especially if it's to you. I'm even more excited now. Thank you.

You've had, as we just talked before we started on the mic here, you have had a pretty global and broad. career. If you don't mind, maybe just kind of run us through what that looked like and kind of what the what you're historically you've been doing for companies and with companies and how you ended up as an AI thought leader who is.

you know, basically in the laboratory all day long, pushing the buttons, figuring out what's working, what's not. Yeah. I think, you know, the funny thing is that finally I found what I love to do. And then it excites me every day and every evening, even if I.

sleep less than usual. It's just like, it's so exciting, you know? So I'm so happy that finally, you know, it took a few years to get here. I'm actually a sound engineer and a music producer. So I'm a sound engineer by study, by trade. I love electronic.

music you know techno so i was always into some type of technological thing but i didn't know what it was i remember my parents got me a guitar they said no you have to have a music like an instrument and i didn't like the lessons but i had to do it because they never understood that producing music or things like that was.

It could be a job. So one of my first jobs was selling carpets in California, actually, in Los Angeles. I was selling carpets door to door throughout the whole US and stuff. So I discovered marketing. I was like, oh, okay, you could show.

things to people all around the globe. You know, this was early days of Facebook, you know, when it just came out of invite only and things like that. I was like, oh, okay, you can find people around the globe that could want your products. I was like, oh, this is marketing. That was super exciting.

So I really got into marketing and that's when I was, then I moved to London, London, UK. And that's where I was able to actually kind of get my marketing into my sound engineering and music. I opened the studio. had a label, had radio shows. We had a radio station, like an underground radio station and so on. That was really fun days. And I realized that I'm a sound engineer, music producer, but mostly what I do is marketing, marketing the studio, marketing the shows and so on.

So I got into a media publishing company that was publishing magazines, like old school, you know, like paper magazines. And I helped them digitalize their offering. And I was like, oh, okay, I really like this.

And from there on, I suddenly was marketing for tech stuff. So not just media and sound and magazines anymore, but really got into the tech world. And I had the opportunity to move to Barcelona for some deep tech companies. And I was in computer vision for real estate, so image recognition. know how many years ago when nobody even knew what AI was. Nobody cared what AI was. I was doing head of marketing. And I remember back then my CEO.

And I was curious. And he said, would you like me to kind of explain to you what are neural networks and so on and machine learning? I was like, oh, yeah, please do give me like a masterclass. So I learned a lot about it, but I still continued my path throughout business. So I got into then growth hacking. Growth hacking was cool, right? Growth hacking was a trend, if you remember. I was like, oh, I'll jump on that boat. So I jumped on that train, on that boat, whatever. And I did ride that way.

I surfed that wave of of growth hacking and you know I went it was growth tribe in Amsterdam they had a great course I became a certified growth hacker and then we're doing these growth hacks and scraping data bases and all that kind of stuff. Then I realized that that was not very sustainable. And then I really fell in love with operations.

I was like, oh, okay. You know, it brings sales. It brings marketing. It brings, you know, growth. It brings all this stuff because growth is not just in marketing and sales. But then I realized growth is in the processes. Growth is in systems. I was always a tool addict. I had a neighbor. In COVID, he called me Tool Time Tim, if you remember the show Home Improvement. He was my neighbor, really. We had a separation in our garden, and he'd come to me and say, hey, Tool Time Tim.

tim you know you know what's the coolest crm right now you know and we talk about that and he started calling me tooltime tim it was hilarious um so at some point i had the newsletter tooltime tim and everything was branded tooltime tim i was obsessed about tools people called me me about tools.

And then, yeah, I become a COO. So then I really got into those operational things. It was a B2B SaaS company. And also throughout COVID, I had the opportunity to teach at two universities in Barcelona because I did a couple of master's. classes after work before covid and then covid happened they said can you continue to teach

I was teaching, and I was good with technology. I had Zoom. I had my lights. I had this thing. I had a stream deck with some shortcuts and stuff, and people are like, oh, he's a good teacher. It was interactive, and other teachers couldn't do that.

The school's going to ask me, can you do more classes? I was like, okay, sure. I'd love to help you. So I did a lot of teaching and I didn't realize that I loved teaching. It's just maybe the topics that I wasn't sure. Were you teaching technology or what were you teaching?

Yeah, I was teaching digital marketing strategies and technologies. I was teaching technology and business organizations, business intelligence, e-commerce, because I was in different industries. So I created all these curriculums, making sure they were interactive. online and so it was really fun

And then I had this opportunity that I was the growth consultant for a sales outsourcing company of 110 people. Then I became the CGO and the CEO of that company. And I accepted the CEO role because of the title. you know, money. And I was like, oh, you know, I've done it. You know, I'm getting quite far quite quickly. Just accept it. Go with it. Even if you have no clue what to do with it, you know, just hustle.

throughout that first year and a half with that business or towards the second year, ChatGPT came alive, right? That was about three years ago, November 2022. And I was like, oh, this is exciting. And... I kept playing with it every night. I always say this, my wife thought maybe I had a mistress. She's come and check who am I talking to. I was like, don't worry, is this technology, is this large language model thing that we can use now? It's terrible.

It's terrible at humor, terrible at poems, terrible at jokes. It was awful. But you could see that there was something like that. was going to happen like i don't know but i saw i was like oh okay so i kind of pushed the limits i tried new things with it i was like oh okay it's not really good the output but if the output gets better

we will have a very interesting technology in our hands, you know. And everybody was like, you know, it's just a predictor of words and kind of stuff. And I was like... Maybe, but there's so much more to it. And I really put my full time into that while I was the CEO there. And then my business partners were like... You look bold from this. You don't want to do this anymore. I was like, well, how did you get it? You know, they're like.

you're so into this chat GPT thing, aren't you? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. I'm very into it. I trained the whole team and, you know, I was like, I talking, hey, chat GPT, chat GPT every day. And, you know, it was still GPT 3.5, maybe, you know, something like that. So it wasn't good at all. And luckily, my business partner was, again, my business partner in this business, by the way. He kind of said, he said, all right, what do you want to do? I said,

I think I want to train humans. I want to train people on AI, on this thing. And it's like, well, let's start a business. And luckily we had this... client in the other business that I helped train their team on AI. And they were like, oh, okay. So I suddenly had a product. It's just because somebody asked. I had a product I service, which was a training program.

I did it once, and I was like, oh, this is really cool, right? So created the company, AR operator, and suddenly we were training Google on Gemini. So the Google team in Munich came to us to train them on Gemini. I was like... Is this a career joke or something like that? And apparently not. And then I realized that I was quite good at training because I had that teaching experience. I hated school when I was a kid. So I could completely teach in very different ways.

Like if you ask me something back then, I said, did you Google it first? And if they said no, I said, then I don't answer it. You know, go Google it and then we can talk. And then now it's like, did you chat GPT it? You know, a similar thing. So I always took that approach. And then suddenly I find myself here, you know, we've trained about 25 plus companies.

thousand plus employees team members across these companies um and the demand is huge um and you know and um and i really did find what i love and because of that you know as we were discussing you know i love every night you know yeah

Because I'm in Turkey, what happens is that I get the new features at 10, 11 p.m., just as I'm about to go to bed, which sucks. Because then I'm like, oh, shit, I'm not sleeping again tonight. 3 a.m., I'm like, no, you're going to sleep because you're going to show up. A lot of people are going to take it to school. But when you're in the U.S., at least you get it in the morning or in the afternoon, so you've got time. But yeah, that's how we got here. And I think that luckily...

People enjoy the content that I'm putting out there. I love putting the content out there because it makes me practice and I like to show the transparency of me testing things and telling you if it's good or not and why it's good, why it's not. And this is why I guess I'm... in this great podcast of yours, Chris. Yeah, well, thank you so much. Now, that's fantastic. It's that quote. I think it's attributed to Steve Jobs, but it's easy to look backwards and see how all the dots connect, right?

The COVID experience with, oh, I'll teach. Oh, this is actually kind of fun to where you are now to where you're teaching tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands globally with your channel. Let's say, you know, companies, executives, they're not necessarily their introduction into AI isn't at a strategic level about how this is going to transform my company. It's they've seen some AI magic somewhere.

right they push the button and the video got made or the the image oh look at me i'm on mars whatever um and it it's even at that level where they shouldn't be distracted by the shiny object there is this uh impetus to chase the tools right with all of the the advancements and you and i we've we've had a couple messages back and forth like as things have happened with new releases and that sort of thing how do you stay on top of it and how would you recommend and again this is what you do

How would you recommend somebody who is trying to stay abreast of things that this isn't their role? AI expert isn't their role. What would you tell them to make sure that they're staying on top of things, but they're not necessarily. that they're getting the most leverage out of their efforts to chase the tools, let's say. Yeah, well, first of all, I'd say don't try.

Don't try. Just do it or don't do it. Don't try, right? I think it's my business partner. And he also, my business partner, had told me once, he said, saying, trying.

is that you're accepting the failure, right? That there's a big chance that you're not going to be able to achieve it. It's like if your wife's at the airport and she say, oh, I'm coming at 11 p.m., you don't say, I'm going to try to come and get you. I'm coming to get you, you know? If you say try, you've put already a big percentage.

I might not come, right? So that made a lot of sense to me. And I'm trying to get that word out of my dictionary of trying things. And sometimes my wife says, I'll try that. I'm like, no, I just could get it done. So I took that approach of just getting it done.

But to people out there, you will feel very... very left out or or or delayed late into the into the game you know because a lot of things happen all the time you look at you know my channel and i do some crazy stuff and you're like oh my god i'm not there at all am i missing out yeah You know, don't feel like that because, you know, as you said, Chris, this is what we do day in, day out, you know. So I got to, you know, one of my responsibilities is to be up to date so that.

You know, people around me, clients, partners, even people in my family, you know, when they hear something or something else, they ask me, you know, they don't go and they don't dig. They say, Tim, you know, how's that image model? Is that ready for, you know?

production and i'm like no just wait you know this is you know last year okay it was image year the year before was text year this year was voice year next year is video year you know i kind of also try to predict some stuff you know most of the predictions been good apart the the

prediction of like i thought google gemini would have been awesome uh by the middle of this uh this year uh which is uh you know 2025 because i'm guessing we're gonna have this in 2026 so all predictions are correct uh but if you look

out in news and you try to follow the news you are going to feel like you're behind of all this you know and you're going to feel frustrated and you're going to feel sad and you're going to feel like you're losing right and if you feel like that you're not going to achieve great things

So I would suggest maybe choose one or two thought leaders, content creators, and be careful with content creators, I would say. Yeah, but be careful with content creators. I know a lot of content creators on LinkedIn with hundreds of thousands of followers, and then they

put something and then it's wrong and i'm like that's wrong you know that's not how you do that and they're like yeah on the comments and then i've seen a lot of this and i kind of i don't do it to make them look bad but i want people to realize that

It's false information. So I get involved in these things. So if somebody, their primary goal is to create content about AI and to make money from creating content, they'll just do anything. But if they have a business and they're selling... automation, they're selling training, they're selling something, or they have a community that they're selling some community membership or so on.

they are going to make more real content, like genuine content that actually helps because their job is not to create these hooks just to get people read something that is not true and grow in numbers and then get advertisement, you know. Lots of these posts on LinkedIn, you know, and LinkedIn, it doesn't say ads, right?

sponsored, you know, like in Instagram, a lot of people will say sponsored or things like that, you know, or on YouTube, but on LinkedIn, no. So a lot of the posts that you see is companies spending thousands of dollars per post just to put their, their application out there.

so I'd say you know choose one or two great thought leaders like yourself like hopefully hopefully me you know follow us you know do we have newsletters do we have a community um you know and and get involved but put yourself as well a limit you know hey every day 30 minutes an hour i'm gonna

I'm going to check this out and maybe put yourself also an hour of testing things though, right? Because you watching me do things on YouTube, it's great. but you taking that and trying it yourself is going to take you to the 10x right away, right? You're going to be like, oh, he did it. Let me try that. Oh, okay.

And then you get an idea on how you can run this for your process, for your day-to-day, for whatever you're doing. So I really recommend taking some time, not to just consume, but to create. And I think that this is why we're doing good because we create a lot. and then I consume a little bit so I can create more. But I think this is what's going to happen in the AI era as well while we're at it.

consumers are not going to achieve great things, but creators will, because we can vibe code now, we can do things. So you can keep creating incredible stuff. So we're going to have the consumers and the creators. Right. So which side do you want to be on? Right. And when I say creator, it doesn't mean you have to create a whole new company. You can create a process for your reporting that you have on Fridays. Yep. Yep. You're still a creator. You know, that's a great distinction.

You learn by doing, right? Not necessarily exclusively by watching. And for anybody listening to this, if you're not sure how do I test, go watch some of Tim's videos. Watch how he's testing. Mimic what he's doing. Mimic the thought processes that he's. You know, exhibiting as he's pushing this button, trying this process. So, Tim, you mentioned kind of some eras text. Then there was image.

Text, image, voice, and there's going to be video. Most of our audience is business application. Let's talk about the text. We got it. Image. Certainly on the marketing side and creating ad creative and things, yes. Especially with Neto Banana Pro now. Beautiful, right? But voice is an area that I've been very interested in.

Because of its application and sales. If I could have outbound bots that did not sound synthetic, that were able to, even if it was just a handoff to a live person, right, that would be fantastic. Do you think that tech is here? I absolutely think the tech is here. I don't think the humans are ready for an outbound call done by an AI. But I think that we are ready for a kind of when I say an inbound call doesn't make sense. But if I fill up a form on your website and then the second.

if I receive a call that is going to help me book something or be quick at it because AI is calling me. I think we're starting to be a bit more comfortable with that. But if from the, you know, out of the blue, if something calls me and is an AI and I understand that, it's like, oh, yeah, this is cringy, right? Because we don't even...

I'm sorry, but I don't even check if I don't know a number. There's a 99% chance that I'm not going to check. And I'm going to say, message me. Who are you? And that's happening more and more for everybody. So I think that the outbound route, humanly, we're not ready for it yet. And I don't know what's going to happen there. And at some point, there's going to be bots calling bots, I reckon, right? But the bot is going to answer.

So that's coming. So I think that the voice technology, we are there. The latency is there. I think that the quality of the sound is there. I think that that's all there now. But there are some great use cases like... the one that you fill up a form, boom, you get a call. You get a qualification call. You request a call. You do something. And we're just closing a client right now. They have a really great thing. And then apparently from...

when they fill up the form and lead fills up the form, it takes about 48 hours on average to get back to the lead. As a human. as a human the human gets back in 48 hours and they call back and then sometimes the people don't remember you know what they filled up as a form you know and they're like yeah not anymore i already booked i already did so you've lost that 48 hours but what if an ai could call you

right away and say, hey, thank you so much for filling up. I have some clarification questions. Okay, great. Yeah, I'll get this clarification. Okay, great. And then because of those questions, you could potentially even send a proposal or you can send them to the next step and not wait 48 hours for a human. Speed the lead. Yeah, speed to lead. So whatever we can do to speed to lead from an inbound perspective, I think voice is incredible at that right now. Any favorites? Well, any favorites?

At the end of the Eleven Labs sounds awesome because I have my voice there, you know, but you can with the API, you can put it in anything. But I hear everybody using VAPI VAPI for all the voice stuff. You know, so I think that technology-wise... that's there. So a combination of knowing how to create a great voice on 11 Labs and the API and something like VAPI, I think that you have more than enough. And if you learn a little bit of NA10...

as well somehow to connect everything and have some kind of integrations into your different platforms and so on. I think you're good to go to build voice. And I hear a lot. The last especially few months, everybody's like, oh, you know, I'm building something.

something around voice, you know, what do you think about voice? So I think that, yes, it was the voice year, but I think that towards the end of the voice year, realizing that there's a lot of great use cases. But if I may add something. I think for voice, the thing I'm excited about, it's not even inbound or outbound calls. It's my assistant on my AirPods.

It's somebody that I can speak to, my chief of staff, which is an AI, and that I can speak to, and I'm walking in this beautiful beach town that I live in, and I go for a 30-minute walk, and I'm like, hey, whatever. I don't want to call it Siri because Siri is awful. So, you know, whatever, chat GPT, right? You know, what are the emails that you can't answer to?

And it says, oh yeah, well, I've answered eight out of 10. You know, I was sure about those. These two, I'm not sure. What are you not sure about? You know, I'm not sure about this and that. I'm like, okay, yeah, well, price them a bit different. All right, did you send that? Yeah, great. Can you learn that the next time so that, you know, you can tackle all 10?

of course i put that in the memory great well how's my calendar today it's great yeah blah blah blah it's like uh well did they put an agenda for that meeting no they didn't can you send them a message and ask them for an agenda before that because if not it would be a waste of our time yeah done that, message sent. What else? We have to send an agreement.

Well, can you send it? Oh, yeah, but I'm unsure about this. Do you want this pricing and these terms? Yeah, done. All right. In 30 minutes, I've achieved so much work that potentially that took me half of my day in my desk. And in your desk, actually, as humans, we are not meant to be working on a desk like this the whole day, right? And how did I understand this? In between calls...

I started because I have this Plouds necklace. I don't know if you know Plouds, Plouds. It's a note. I used the one on the back of my phone. Yes, I have that one. And then I got the necklace because it was really cool. Yeah, exactly. That's a perfect tool. So I got the necklace and what I did is like, I'd get very inspired from the call or I have an idea and I would just go for a walk.

Yes. And I, and I just click on my necklace and I'd be the crazy guy in the streets. You know, it's a beach. Not many people, luckily, but I'm talking to myself, you know, he's crazy. He's completely lost there. So I'm talking to myself. Boom. I come back to my desk. it's it's on my computer i put on touch pd on a project of strategies or whatever like that boom it kind of uh creates a step-by-step thing for me you know and then i even know

Because of the project's custom instructions or whatever, it knows who I'm going to delegate this to. I put it on Slack or I even say, you know, create tasks now on Notion for this because I have the MCP. It creates all that. Yeah. Wow. And before that, I would have been like, oh, I have this idea. Let me open up a thing. There just wasn't enough hours in the day. There wasn't enough hours. And also, I think that...

And this, I mean, even if I have beautiful windows seeing the beach, you know, it's not the same as me going actually for a walk on that beach. And for a walk on that beach, I was very like, I think my best times lately has been. when I'm outside my office. Yeah. And so I think voice is there for that. Yeah. You know, for any listener, if you've got a commute into or back home to and from the office.

Maybe you don't have the the beautiful scenery that Tim's blessed with. However, that that 30 minutes, maybe you listen to podcasts, maybe you listen to the news, maybe you just listen in silence and get some chill time. But if you were able to go, hey, I got this idea.

And AI was able to say, okay, let's go for it. Tell me, what do you got? Right? And before you even get into the office, what does my day look like? Exactly what Tim's saying. Well, you got this, this, and this. Okay, for that, do this. Hey, for this, tell them to show up instead of me. The amount of time because as a business owner, it's not the doing that's so important. Really, the highest leverage activity is the thinking part of it, not necessarily the doing because now we've got.

We've got a team or whatever that can do the delegation. But if you're spending that time doing or preparing to do. Huge missed opportunity. So I'm glad to hear that. Let's talk about 2026. And you're saying video. Obviously, the creative elements of it, easy to understand.

Let's say let's say that video gets to the point to where audio is now like AI enabled audio. What are some business applications for people listening to maybe go, oh, I didn't think about that. That would be, you know, that'd be huge.

Yeah, there are many. uh and if i may answer this but before that i'm gonna i'm gonna give another quick tip because i realized on on the on the voice stuff that i was going to drop my daughter uh to school 20 minute rides and on the way back i was on my own in the car listening to music i have a great spot playlists and stuff but i was like i wanted to be productive so what what we did is we did an automation

That would catch me up on 15 different newsletters, but with a custom podcast, right? With a custom podcast just for us. At 9 a.m., it delivers to my Slack. And on the way back, I just clicked that. I was on my CarPlay and I listened to this 10-minute podcast.

podcast that takes about 15 newsletters that I love, and I don't spend two hours reading newsletters anymore. Every morning, I get this 10-minute podcast, and then I'm on top of the news, like you were asking in the beginning, right? So I think that there's so many other use cases. for this type of voice stuff. Before we go into video, I want to get geeky and talk about what that stack looks like. So if you're a listener and you're like, well...

I'm interested in AI, but I don't need to read 15 newsletters. No, but your industry information, your professional information can certainly just plug in a different widget here. So what does that stack look like to be able to achieve this? Yeah, it's very simple. We actually use one of our Gmail addresses to subscribe to all these newsletters. We have a label in Gmail automatically labeling these newsletters. And then we have make.com, which is an automation platform, an integration platform.

NA10 or Zapier, there are many others that you can do the same thing. On make.com, we check for that label. And then we take all that information. We clean up all the content of promotional content and, you know, of things inside these newsletters where you concatenate all of it make sure that all the information is the information that we want to know because

15 newsletters there's going to be a lot of duplicates as well about the same news about the same thing and a lot of things that we don't care about that's going to happen like if it's negative news about you know ai stuff i usually don't check i'm on the positive side i really want to focus on that So we have a very nice couple of prompts that will filter out all these things. And then it creates a script.

And then the script goes to Eleven Labs and then Eleven Labs creates the voice, the podcast itself. Then it brings it back to make.com and then we deliver it to Slack. In the meantime, we store it in our Google Drive. We give it a podcast. number, just so that we can have all this information for ourselves. But then at 9 a.m. on Slack, it's like, hey, ARPredit team, today's news is this, this, this, this, this. And my whole team, we're a very small team, we all listen to this.

And we're aware of the latest news. Interesting. So, you know, you mentioned your ops background and that you got like, I'm much more operator than I am the visionary, right? So I see the elephant. A bite at a time, right? It's very easy. And that's what you just described. For those of you listening, if that sounds hard, talk to whoever handles operations or whoever's more process minded in your business and say.

How could we do this? If that's not you, don't worry about it. It doesn't mean that you can't play this game. It just means get somebody who's thinking that way. Ask AI. I mean, right now, like I always say in my training, automating the automation. We are in the phase that we're almost automating the automation. Yes. go to make make has a copilot you tell it or zapy has a copilot you say what you want to build it builds it for you and

80 to 90% of it works. And then the 10 to 20% doesn't work, but this is across everything. To our trading program, they're like, oh, I got to 80, 90%. I'm like, don't worry, the 10, 20, it's not going to work, right? But it's fine. You know, it's okay that you pushed it to that. Right. So, so I think that you can ask AI and, you know, people ask me.

Like, what should I do? Or I'm like, did you ask AI? Like, you know, just tell me what you do. Yeah. Yeah. Ask me, ask me, take a question about my job, about what I'm going to do today and then help me automate it. And you'll be very surprised. So I think that's very important. And anybody can build anything almost now. If you go to Google AI Studio and you tell the app idea you have, you have a full working app.

AI features ready for you. It's like, what? You know, why are we living? So, hey, for those of you listening, like, you're going to want to, we're going to have a list of all the tools that we mentioned. Go through all of these. The ones that Tim's are mentioning, two things. One, You can learn how to use them pretty quickly, at least, you know, baseline level usage. There's not a huge learning curve. And two, natural language is all you need. You don't need to be, you know, as an educator.

like you on AI stuff, that's my number one tip to people. Well, what about go to the models? Well, how do I go to the models? That's like my mantra as well. When we get questions in our certifications and things like that, can I answer the question? Sure. However, by me getting you to essentially, you know, the equivalent of did you Google that? Right. I'm helping that individual develop that new reflex of, oh, I'm stuck. Oh, wait a minute. No, I'm not. Hey, chat, GPT. Hey, Gemini. Hey, clock.

Go to the models if you get stuck. Make that your new reflex. Does it get you 100% of the way? Maybe. Does it get you further than you were when you had the question? Absolutely. So that's great advice. 100% it'll get you, you know, more than 0%, right? If you don't do anything about it and you wait for an expert, you wait for somebody and you want to book something, you know, you're already late. But come to an expert, come to us.

done your research, tested things, and you failed. Because if you do that, then, oh, you failed at this. That's fine, right? So you kind of... done at 80% again, right? And why are you going to pay less? And you're going to learn a ton, right? And I think it was yesterday in a new training program, there was a question and the question was like, what's going to happen with AI taking the cognitive

the cognitive behavior of humans and so on. And I was like, well, if you don't read the reasoning, if you don't read what it's doing, like how it's thinking.

right? Then yes. If you just look at the output and you roll with it, you're in trouble, right? But if you read the reasoning, it's... it made me much more intelligent right because i see like how it thinks things and some frameworks i never heard and then you go into a rabbit hole you understand those frameworks then you put a notebook lm and then you suddenly create a notebook for yourself and you learn that whole area you know like if you're curious

This is the best time to be alive. And I'm very curious. So this is why I think I'm very excited about this. So what I also want to say is that... You know, you said it yourself, you know, Chachapiti, Gemini, Claude, there's so much, there's so much free stuff. You know, you can go today to, you can go to Chachapiti today and say, hey, give me a four week plan on understanding what are large language models.

I'll give you a four-week plan, right? You can even go to Gemini and say, find me for this four-week plan all the YouTube videos I should watch. It's going to find all those, right? So it's unlimited. It's unlimited, you know? The only blocker is ourselves.

We are the limitation. Let's talk about that because we kind of became aware of this process that occurs. We call it thinking in AI. It's a moment where maybe you're showing somebody they're doing something and something clicks and they go, oh, wait a minute. That means I could. Take it to chat GPT and ask it to create the four week. Oh, and then I could and then I could and then I could. How do you facilitate that?

I mean, I'm sure you've witnessed a similar aha moment where it clicks, the matrix unfolds. How do you help facilitate that for people? Yeah, I think the aha and the wow moments are the moments that I... This is why we have our business, you know, in our training programs. And I see everybody that's, you know, 75 people on the screen in little squares. And then I see in their eyes, I show something.

They go, what? And then I see, I'm like, oh, you know, Chris got the aha moment. Oh yeah, I was thinking. And then I'm like, you know, unmute yourself, tell us, you know, and then says it across everybody. And then everybody's going to go try that, right? Things like that. So, so how we facilitate it really is.

We learn how we do our training program is that we survey everybody. So we know every process. We know everything that everybody does. Not everything, but most of the important processes and systems and tools they use in their jobs. And our program is fully custom to the company. custom to the team, custom to what they do. So then I do that task, right? And I do it.

I'm not an expert in that industry or that task, but I'm an expert in AI, right? So I open up an AI and a feature, could be a deep research, could be whatever it is. And I do that and I see people go, and they're like, what? You know, it's like, that took me five hours the other day. He did it in 15 minutes, right? So if I get that reaction from people, then after that, they message me. You know, they're like, Tim, you know, how did you do that? Well, I showed you, you know, test it next week.

Come and tell me how did that go? So we're always focused on their job and what they do, right? And really kind of showing them how could they do that. that task, that job, that system, how can they do it today with the technologies that we have in our hands, you know? And the second I show that, I really get a very big adoption very quickly in our training programs.

Makes sense. When that happens, that's it. Then it's a beautiful journey because you get that in week four. We do 12 week programs. So in about week two, three, we've got most of the people. The skeptics, week four, five, latest week six, everybody's on board, right? If there is one or two people not on board, they have a fixed mindset. They're not even the right people for your business.

That's a good point. I want to talk about that a little bit because you're doing a couple of distinctions. One, as you were saying that, as you're looking for that training, right, what you just mentioned was you have context on who's going to be on the other side of the Zoom window.

Because you've done some surveys and you understand. And I think that for those of you that are wanting your teams to get trained up and that sort of thing, very important distinction. Rather than going into broad conversation about the subject matter. Apply it contextually. And I think that that will accelerate that aha moment. If I see that.

Somebody made a music video with AI. Oh, that's cool. That's amazing. But if they're doing something specific to my role, it's very easy for me. So that's a really good takeaway for me. Second thing, what percentage or what category of individuals are you seeing that?

that aren't getting it necessarily or are hesitant because change management is a concern. If you're rolling this out in your company or you're wanting to be the champion internally and lead the conversation, how do you address those people that? See it as either they don't get it. They see it as a threat, the fixed mindset. I mean, the point of they're not a fit. Maybe they were a fit before AI entered your business. But as your business is transforming into.

What is necessary for economic viability in the future? You need to reconsider those people. Like, are you seeing any patterns that maybe we should look for as far as individuals who might be friction in that enablement or literacy effort? Yeah, this is a bit more the sadder part, isn't it? They were a great fit because they did nine to five and they just did these processes. They didn't have to think, you know, and they just...

step by step and they just did their job and at five o'clock they they clocked out and they're like oh i've done my job for the day you know you were they were great and sadly these are the people who are going to lose their jobs you know in this hundred million people losing jobs by 2030 if that's happening

These are the type of people that are going to lose their jobs, right? And I think in that is from that category is the ones who have a growth mindset and they like to learn even if it's not a work, right? So maybe...

Maybe they're doing that nine to five and, you know, and they've been their job because they earn money and they have kids, but, you know, they go home, they have a record collection, you know, on Sundays they buy records, they go to parties, you know, they play piano, you know, they play. tennis or whatever, they have hobbies, they have things they want to do, but work never was a place to be proactive because there was money and that was it. Right. Yeah.

So those people still have a very big chance in AI, right? In this new economy, because they can learn and they can experiment. And again... They'll realize that aha, wow moment, maybe when they're planning their, you know, their next art exhibition and they use ChatGPT to help them plan where they're going to put certain art.

oh, I never thought about that, right? So they got that aha moment and now the only thing that is missing is how do they connect it to work, right? And potentially they're going to get a new job or whatever. So those people are okay, but I think that-

The people that are not going to do really well is really the fixed mindset people, right? They're very fixed mindset. They don't want to learn anything new. They complain about a lot of things in life. They watch a lot of news, right? And they're like, oh, everything's...

dark and gloomy all the time, right? And if they stay like that, then AI is dark and gloomy. So Tim, you've mentioned the training that you're doing and I find it... It makes a lot of sense to survey in advance, understand the context and not just have a one size fits all when you're doing these trainings. What does what happens in 12 weeks? Like, what are you covering? How do you get started? Where do you end up with 12 weeks?

Yeah, so Art Well Week is really, we focus on behavioral change, as you were saying, right? It's not, these are not hard skills. These are soft skills. These are behavioral change. This is a habit changing. It's really redesigning how we work, redesigning how we show up, redesigning how we talk, because we're speaking to the machines now. We're talking to the machines, right? So that's the program, and we break it down into three phases.

So first of all, we do a survey. We do a survey throughout everybody. Everybody fills up a survey, right? And that survey gets read by me very quickly in certain places. What are you looking for in the survey? Are you looking for like already, are you already using the tools or are you asking more?

tactical like what is your job and that sort of thing so it's a combination is the first is what is your job what do you do daily and then it starts going to you know what is painful in your job you know what sucks actually what sucks

It sucks that I have to do reports on Fridays and I have to create these presentations for the board or whatever. That sucks, right? That does suck, right? If you had the magic ones, what would AI do for you? Things like that. So we go from very what you're doing to very inspirational. of what AI could do? Why are you worried of AI or do you love it? Can you tell us a little bit more? They're all open text. It's about 10 questions. They're all open text.

long text formats, and we tell them, spend 10 minutes. You can dictate to it. You can send a voice note if you want. You can write if you want. I don't care. Just... put what's in your mind into these questions, right? To answer these questions. We take all of this. We have multiple agents now that do the job, of course, and they analyze everybody, right? What they analyze is... comfort level pain points um you know uh wish list you know uh and if they've tried anything and if

if they have any question about security, privacy, things like that. So anything that we need to flag and so on. So we do that across 100 people in our company. And then from there on, I get a... a kind of survey analysis where I have the top pain points in the company. But first of all, I understand what does the company do, right? And what does each do and how it kind of contributes to each other and it contributes to the big picture. And then I get these pain points, the top five pain points.

right? These are great because that's, if we start training with that and we would use those pain points, you already love us. That's the context. Yeah. And you're like, I love these guys. And you tell your CEO you love us. The CEO says, yes, chick, you know, like return investment is already starting, right? Because What happens a lot is that...

As we all know, there's a lot of fear out there, right? That AI is going to replace us. But when a company hires us and spends money on us and we're not cheap, right? And I say it in a nice way because I know the return on investment is huge and the value. is there. I'm saying that because a lot of people will come and they'll be like, oh, that's expensive. Yes, it's expensive, but when I show you 750% return on investment in the next 12 weeks, it's fine, right?

And also... you know one thing is your team's happiness your teams are all fearing yeah and they're like oh you know i'm gonna get removed i'm gonna yeah if somebody books a meeting like a manager books a meeting with one of your team members and that's okay that's it that's my yeah they're letting me go you know ai has replaced me right so so there is there is this fear going on uh and then suddenly you get everybody and you say

There's this company, our operator. They're going to do an introduction session for us next week at this time, right? And then you see me and you're like, oh, it's fun, right? And I tell you, look.

AI is not smarter than you. You have the context. AI just has a lot of data, but it doesn't know what to do with it. You're the one who knows what to do with it, right? So if you as the context machine and the context engineer now has all this... technology behind it with features but with also all this data around the globe right and if you get together you are unstoppable

Yeah. The human versus the AI bench. There's so many benchmarks and all benchmarks are human versus AI. There's no benchmark, which is human plus AI, right? Human plus AI. Yeah. No, there's none because it would crush all benchmarks, right? Yeah. So nobody wants to do that benchmark, right? Yeah.

And also negative news and cells, right? So it's negative news amplifies, positive news. You know, when do you open a news channel and it's like happy news? It's very rare, right? It's always very dark and sad news because that's how we get brainwashed.

right so that's how how you can brainwash humans right uh and then and then get them to consume and fear and so on right uh so i always you know i i have to do it here as well i have this love not fear uh yeah we have this love not fear approach to everything You know, every decision you make in life is out of love or out of fear, right? So I'm pushing, not pushing, but in a way from our first session, we're showing people that, you know, if they love this technology, they're going to have

a great time. If they fear it, they're going to alienate themselves, and then it's going to be the human versus AI. But if they love it, it's going to be me and AI together, right? And I'm even trying to learn myself now to remove the word use AI, because I keep saying use AI. No, AI is not something to use. AI is something that we work with, right? Because there is the thing, if you use AI, you're like, hey, go do that job. It does okay. But if you say, hey...

We're going to do this job. Let's do that job. Yeah. Can you ask me 10 questions about it? Yeah. And it's like, wow, the results are already like 10x, right? So that's really how, you know, what we do and we get people get excited and then... You know, I show some magic tricks right away. You know, I'll show some kind of Notebook LM podcast about the company or about something like that. So they go, yeah.

Whoa, what is that? And then it's like, okay, great. They ask you right away. Okay, this is this. Go play with it till our next session. And then you've got people on board in the next session. They're like, I'm ready. Yes.

Team happiness has gone up. So performance is going up. They don't look at the news and fear that their job is going to go. And so they're like, oh, I'm going to work with this technology. I'm going to love this technology because... you know what i never like to do reporting i never like to to fill up spreadsheets can this do it

Oh, wow, I love you, AI. You're helping me do the things that I don't want to do, right? And I can do more of the things that I really want to do, and potentially I can do better the things that I want to do because I have you on my side. So that mindset shift is what I think I obsess with the first few weeks, right? The second I get that switch, it's done, right? Then we have a great training program. Yeah.

So this is interesting because I'm not the music guy. I'm not the creative person. I'm the, I don't know, the soldier, I guess, right? Like, get it done. The grinder, the hustler. And when I work with a company, I'm looking to like very data driven, like, oh, this this happened. These people push these buttons this much faster, whatever the thing might be. Your approach, though, they get that result. The company gets that result, but not because of necessarily specific.

tactical training, but because of behavioral change and positioning about how do I look at AI. Oh, this is fun. This isn't. necessarily a work tool that I use, this is a fun thing that I get to work with. I love it. I think that that's a fantastic, because the individuals themselves will self-select.

The ones who are already good at their job and love the company and love their peers and that sort of thing, they will take this and they will be even more of an A player. And even the B players will, because of this approach. I mean, I like what I do. I'm just not like I don't have the tactical or technical skills. Oh, but with this thing, if I work with AI.

My job's even better. I think that's fantastic. I love that approach. If I could add something to that, Chris. So I get leads sometimes come to me and they're like, well, we'll pay whatever, even more, but we want the program in a day or a day. delivered in two days. And I'm like, no, sorry. I go somewhere else. And they're like, well, I'm going to pay you.

And it's the same program. I'm like, yeah, well, I'm not going to get the same results when I put it out to 12 weeks because I am changing behavior here. I'm not just teaching them how to use this feature. Right? So that takes time. So I am not going to do the program in nine hours intense in an office altogether. And then it was like, oh my God, another trading done. Yeah.

some features and then that. When I do the training, when we do at ARP the training, it's in a way that like a client that just finished three months ago, the training. I see one of their team members on LinkedIn. He became an AI expert. He's posting about it, he's testing things and so on. And I'm like,

Wow. Like when I trained him, he had no clue about it. And now he's an expert in his company. He's a champion. He's an AI champion inside. And he's learning more now because I gave him that curiosity on AI and kind of showed him that.

You don't have to fear this. You have to love it. You have to experiment. You have to try. And if it doesn't work out, that's fine because it might work out in a month. The technology is not there, but you know now where the limits are and the strengths and the weaknesses. You know how to be human in the loop and what to look out for. So when you know that...

and I remove myself from the company, they're continuing to learn. Because it's a permanent change world. But they keep learning. And then next year, if something comes out, you have the right team members now. right even if you don't have us which is a bit weird because you know you do want to be stickier but no i want our clients that when we finish the program that they don't need us they have their team members and their team members are incredible because they know the job

day in, day out. No consultant that comes from outside that gives you 50-page guides would know the job better than the people that are in the trenches, the warriors, the ones that are doing, the soldiers. Yeah, absolutely. This is... This has been a big breakthrough for me because, and for listeners, this applies to you as well. If you're looking at AI as strictly a, well, how do we measure the ROI? And, you know, we need to be able to track X, Y, Z.

Great stuff. And yes, you do. The board's going to ask or, you know, you need to be to know that, OK, this was a good investment because it is supporting our bottom line or whatever. We're producing more widgets. But your approach. of changing the behavior is much more sustainable, not just sustainable, cultural shift that occurs in the business. If I teach you a fact about AI, you can use it. Oh, but you have to remember to use it. But if I can change your behavior to where your default is.

AI first, then you'll figure it out because, again, the tools aren't that hard. You already know your job. And if you've got this accelerant or this multiplier, this copilot that can work with you, then. The right employees will figure out the application of it. So I think that that's a fantastic approach and that more companies.

Should be asking questions as you're vetting vendors. Maybe you work with AI operator to do this with your company. But as you're vetting vendors, don't just look at what are we going to like? What tactical things are we going to learn? You know, use are we going to learn? But how are you going to shift the behaviors? Because without that cultural shift and that behavioral shift, your company will stay static at.

The tactical things that they learned 90 days ago. But if you shift that behavior, your company will like your teams. will adapt and they don't have to necessarily be on this tool chase and this whole sort of thing. They'll see it and they'll instantly go, oh, I can use that here. That's fantastic, Tim. That's great. So tell me more about...

For the listeners that are interested in that approach or working with AI operator, do you have bandwidth? How far out are you pushing this? What should they expect as far as? Because, A, there's no question you've established through the YouTube and this conversation today, you get it, right? And with your business experience that you shared early on, like you're not just a guy who learned the tools.

You're looking at it through the lens of somebody who's been a CEO, who's been a marketer, who's been an operations person, who ran a sales floor, like all of those things. So what is working with AI operator look like? Yeah, I think working with us, I can give it from a quick story. Our first ever client, that client that I said that I did the training program when I first started, they're still with us.

Wow. They're still with us. They did the training program and they were like, what's next? I was like, well, what do you need next? What do you need next? Because I was just creating the services thanks to them. And I'm sure they'll be listening because they're really great friends as well now, the founders.

And thanks to them, I kind of keep innovating services. And then we kind of finished, not finished, but we have these three services that work really well, thanks to them as well, as we train companies. Every team member now knows how to speak AI and how to speak together with humans about AI and about their jobs and very, very tactical as well. Right. But also they're super excited. They're happy about this technology. They're happy about the future. You know, they don't.

think if somebody says, oh, you know, AI is going to kill us. And they're like, well, no, there's such a more positive aspect that we have to, you know, go for, you know, and if we start thinking like that, yes, that can happen. But so they also are amplifying their communities and their health.

that positive message so after the training what happens is that your teams are all like oh i did a custom gpt and it does that i've shared it across the whole sales floor you know everybody's having a great time and so on and they'll be like oh okay but

Now, this custom GPT, we want to connect it to our automation so that it sends that out automatically, those agreements. It's like we tried a little bit of Zapier, we got stuck because one of the APIs is not as solid or whatever, right? And at least you're like... what you are not a technical person listen to what they're saying right yeah so then they say they say this is what we need and they can map it out and then they can go all right well we need an expert

And that was AR operator on top of it again, right? And then with this client, the example, and then we sit with them at leadership. They bring us their problems and sometimes they even have an idea for a solution. We talk about it. Sometimes they say, oh yeah, we can get this done. I'm like, great.

do it, you know? And sometimes they're like, okay, well, we can get this down 80% and then we need that 20%. So then we'll take on that build, right? So we build automations and so on. So what we do is train, advise, and then build. And we have now an AI transformation partner package, which is a whole year package for next year, is to make sure that you get everything. You get the training, you get the leadership advice.

consulting, being there for your teams, office hours, pain points, things like that. And then you also get some build hours, right? So you get some build projects that are delivered for you. And especially on the most painful processes of, you know.

I love this one. It's recognizing invoices and putting in the system because everybody sends different emails with invoices. And it sounds simple and there is a lot of tools that does it, but it never does it to exactly the way that you would do it manually. It's a very quick, actually, automation that can be done now that saves a ton of time and then suddenly people in accounting and finance are happier. So these are the examples. So working with AI operators that suddenly...

You have this partner at the moment that is me and my team, very small team, but I do the kind of service delivery side of things at the moment. I don't know how long I'll be able to, and I'm starting to be the bottleneck as you were asking if we have bandwidth.

a bit more bandwidth at the moment. But with the deals that I have in the pipeline, I think I'm not going to have bandwidth. But we're going to have to start train the trainer program. We're going to have to start training some consultants and things like that.

I somehow do want to be very involved because... i love what i do and i think that i can bring a lot to the table so being with us is that you know it's it's 14 months with this first client that we had it's been 14 months we're still together i'm invited to all their retreats their company retreats even if it's for fun

invite me because they want me to be with the team because they see us as their AI department, right? So we act as their AI department, basically. So if you come with us, it's behavioral change to advisory and then to building, right? And that's a whole year and plus. Yeah. Dude, I think there's, you know, another episode that we could do right now. I've really enjoyed the conversation, Tim.

Again, we're going to put every tool that was mentioned in here. We're going to put that in the show notes because I would encourage everything that Tim's mentioned. I'm like, yep, great choice. Great choice. But again, a couple of takeaways for me. That last one about you're not teaching them, OK, then push this button and then you save it here. You're teaching them how to what we call thinking AI. And once that transition happens, like.

That's much more important for the future of your company than, oh, they know how to use tools. Huge takeaway. So anybody listening, if you got on this or you're trying to just learn the tools, certainly, definitely do that. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is getting that cultural shift to.

Anchor in. And if you approach it the way that Tim's talking about here, I think that like the hard part is going to get done by the teams, not by the consultant, not by you, because you're creating this as my my. Buddy at InBrain says AI fluency rather than just literacy.

Right? Yeah, it's fluency. Absolutely. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I just had one more thing because you said that, you know, it's fluency for sure, but also, you know, we're creating a new job, right? You know, chief AI officer is a new job and we're... operating AR operator.

I want people to become AI operators. They have 10, 15, 20, maybe more agents and tools, but they're the orchestrator. They're the operator. They're in the middle and they're like, go get that done. They check. They're the tastemaker. And that's where we're going. So that's what we're aiming for. We want to make everybody AI operators. So it's interesting with that concept of AI operator. I got one more point.

When I would go and get a job, OK, I was expected to know how to use maybe Excel and I would know how to expect to be used. Do you check your email? Do you know how to write any like I had business tools that I used and that were just that everybody used. Sheila in accounting did it. Bill on the factory floor did it. You just kind of referenced this to where like the business tools that I'll be using are going to be.

the custom gpts or the agents and things like that absolutely but it's not necessarily going to come from microsoft it might be something that the person sitting next to me in my department built yep very interesting shift here Yeah, we've got more conversations to have, Tim. Anything imposing? Any bit of advice, maybe, like final nugget? I mean, there's been plenty in this episode. Yeah, absolutely. I think that just to repeat maybe or make it clear, don't compete with AI, you'll lose.

You know, don't compete with it, you know, collaborate with it, you know, become best friends, become partners, you know, and then you'll have a great time in work and also outside work and life as well. It helps a ton, you know, see it as a blessing.

I know that, yes, there are bad things that can happen out of it, but same with any technology and anything that happens in the world. But if we look from the positive side, from the fuller side of the glass, we have incredible things to do as humans. And we have this incredible new technology that is our assistant. So, you know, don't compete, you know, collaborate. It's a great way to look at it. Hey, thank you so much for being on this, everybody.

We'll be out with the next episode next week. Definitely check the show notes. There were a lot of cool tools and things that we talked about on here that I highly endorse and would suggest you start playing with. And great advice, Tim. Thank you so much for being on the show and we'll see everybody next week. Thank you so much, Chris. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work.

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