The Executive's Guide to AI with Greg Shove

0:28Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? $250 million in exits. He's also the founder at Machine and Partners and AI Consultancy, helping companies identify and prototype AI products and personal math, a newsletter for professionals in their 30s and beyond. In today's Foundation, we will talk about AI as a strategic partner, a digital board of directors, AI adoption in organizations, how AI is reshaping high-end knowledge roles right now, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Greg and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:06AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Shopify is not only the home of the number one checkout on the planet. They also offer ShopPay, which boosts conversions up to 50%. Upgrade your business today. Sign up for your$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash onfire. Greg, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:48John, I think that at least in Silicon Valley, the advice to entrepreneurs is sort of fail fast, right? Get to an answer quickly. So, you know, get out to market quickly, find your product market fit. And if you don't have it, sort of, you know, kill it off and go on to the next one, right? Either the next idea, the next venture. And VCs, venture capitalists, tend to like that approach. They don't want entrepreneurs wasting their time. They want entrepreneurs to fail fast. And all of my success has come from the opposite. Sort of hanging in there, sometimes just by the fingernails, but kind of hanging in there, hanging around the hoop.

2:22you know, just refusing to quit, over-investing time, over-investing months, years even, to get to a place where the market's ready for you, or you figured out the market, or your product finally works, whatever it might be. So counterintuitively, I think time and seat, time and saddle matters, and it can work in your favor. Hanging around the hoop, I mean, Fire Nation, Dennis Rodman made a living in the NBA. just hanging around the hoop. And today we're talking about the Executive's Guide to AI. So I want to talk specifically, Greg, about AI as a strategic partner, because you have personal experience using AI in this manner.

3:06So tell us more. First of all, John, I'm 63 years old. So my fluid cognitive abilities, my processing speeds are declining. They start to decline when we're 50 and accelerate after the age of 60. so for me the light bulb moment was uh february the 1st 2013 last year chat gpt plus when i played around with that i'm like okay this is going to be my cognitive edge and i need one because i intend to keep working for 10 more years and i live and work in silicon valley the most ageiest place in terms of work in the world so you know if you're not 26 in a hoodie you're an idiot so i just realized okay i need i need gpt uh to help me out here so that was the first moment the second was preparing for a board meeting July of last year.

3:47It's going to be a tough board meeting. I'd come off of a year and a half of slow growth, basically post-pandemic. Our growth had created, our company cratered in terms of revenue, had dropped 50%. I'd laid off over 100 people in three layoffs in 12 months. It had been a really tough sort of 18 months. We were stabilized but not growing. And I wanted to pivot the business to really focus on AI, to shift from business education to AI education. And that wasn't clear. That was such a great idea now almost a year and a half ago, right? So spring, summer of last year. And so I knew this board meeting was going to be a little rough for me.

4:30And I've got a great board, world-class board members. I've actually got the best board I've ever had as an entrepreneur. You know, I've got VCs who've had billion-dollar exits. I've got someone who's on the board of Moderna and VMware. So like fortune 500 companies, I've got Scott Galloway, who's not short of opinions and a very successful entrepreneur and so on. So I've got a great board and tough and experienced. And so I prepared for the board meeting using AI. I thought, okay, listen, here's how I can use AI and kind of get ready for this meeting, I can run this board deck. So the board deck that I send my board members, and I usually send the board deck about, you know, two days before the board meeting, sometimes and not till the day before, but I sent the same board deck to GPT and Claude as I gave the human board and then asked the AI to play the role of different kinds of board members, you know, aggressive, looking for faster growth, higher returns, more conservative looking to conserve cash, you know, more skeptical of our technology roadmap and so on.

5:36And basically got ready for that board meeting using AI as a thought partner. And AI nailed it. And in fact, what we did, John, we during the meeting just took great notes. We don't use an AI recorder for board meetings, and that's for board governance and legal reasons. But we just recorded in terms of manually everything the board said, the human board. And then we compared it after the board meeting, typical 90-minute board meeting. We compared what the human said to what AI had told us before the board meeting. And the AI scored about 90%, specifically Claude. GPT has got better since then, you know, a year ago.

6:16So I use now, you know, Claude and GPT every board meeting. And, you know, it's close to what the humans tell us. so that means as a ceo you know i could just go into these kinds of meetings high stakes meetings we can all go in better prepared and kind of raise our game and quite frankly i've you know obviously i told the board members this is what i'm doing i share the comparison between the ai and the human board i share with the board members and i put it in the board deck and i'm like guys we can all use ai here you know our advisors our investors our board members you know they should be using ai so when they come to the meeting they're better prepared and obviously as the entrepreneur, you know, as the operator, you should be using AI as well.

6:57And hopefully that just, you know, raises everybody's game around these kinds of decisions, right? What I call high stakes decisions or high stakes conversations. We should have better ones, right? And we should be better prepared for them. So what are some practical applications of AI when it comes to marketing, when it comes to sales, when it comes to finance? Can you walk through those? Yeah, sure. Listen, I think the first one is if you're being asked to think about something, develop a plan or a project plan or a product idea. And, you know, you're not sure or you just want a second opinion.

7:31Use AI for that. So if you've got a go-to-market plan, you've got a marketing ad plan, you've got a, you know, a positioning kind of point of view around how you want to position your product, anything like that, just drop it into GPT and talk to GPT about it and ask GPT to adopt a persona. It's really important to use our AI in a specific way to get the most value. And that is asking AI to adopt a persona and give you specific feedback on something that you've shared with AI. Most people and a lot of entrepreneurs use AI as basically kind of a better search engine. And that's just a total fail and a waste of AI's capabilities.

8:10Like we've been given a gift here, which is this thought partner that can cross over marketing and sales and finance, right? can cross over any industry, any domain, any country and culture even, right? So as an entrepreneur, just think about it as I've got a decision to make. I've got a plan to review. I have an idea I need to come up with or an idea I need to review. I just want to load it into AI and have a conversation with AI about it. Do that asking AI to adopt a persona. So like, you know, be the CMO of an early stage company and tell me what to do here. or, you know, be my CFO and be skeptical.

8:47And I want to make this$10 ,000 investment or$100 ,000 investment, whatever it is, be my CFO in this moment and kind of really challenge me. Is this a good way to spend the money? AI does very well when you give it these kind of parameters and tell it kind of what role to play. It does really well when you upload your data. So it's your plan, right? Your financial plan, your marketing plan, you know, whatever it might be. So I think that the strength and weakness of AI, John, is it can do a lot of things. It's the two sides of the same coin. It's so capable across so many domains and problems and kind of questions, which is sort of its Achilles heel and that we don't know how to use it.

9:27And I find a lot of people get stuck because they're like, you know, give me specifics. You just asked the same question, right? Give me specifics. Give me practical examples. And the practical examples are yours, right? meaning as a user, what are the questions you have today on your mind or this week or this month that, you know, you want to get right? You want to get better answers to. And so, yeah, for marketing, that's obviously things like where to spend your money. You know, what's a good go-to-market plan? How, you know, you can use AI as a possible, as a stand-in for a prospect. Role play with your AI, you know, in terms of getting ready for a pitch.

10:04or ask AI to adopt the persona of a potential buyer and show them the pitch or show them the product that you think you want to sell them and have AI react pretending to be your prospect. That's a great way to refine your marketing plans is having AI basically act as a, you know, kind of a customer panel or prospect panel for you and, you know, give you feedback on whatever it is you want to do. I want to double click on that because I think a lot of individuals are always like, how do I get better at X? How do I get better at Y? How do I get better at Z? I don't want to get better when I'm actually speaking to a client and trying to make a pitch because a lot of times people have to burn through 100 clients.

10:45And if they were good, they might have closed 40, 50, 80 of those clients. But since they're bad, they closed zero and then they quit. But hey, what if you practice on AI with a thousand in a few days, in a weekend, over time, over hours and hours and hours and you got great. And then boom, now you're off to the races and you're actually good at doing that thing because why? You've put in the reps. And this is a great way to put in those reps. And we have a lot more to talk about around this topic when we get back from thinking our sponsors. Ever feel like your job description just keeps getting bigger, but we all know there's only 24 hours in a day causing marketers everywhere to feel spread thin between creating content, launching campaigns, generating leads, and more.

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14:07Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Mattel uses, sign up for your$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash onfire, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash onfire to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash onfire. Greg, we're back and I love talking about the future. So I want to talk about how AI is reshaping high-end knowledge roles going forward. Yeah, sure. And here's a way to think about it. Take a team of 100 high-end knowledge workers or knowledge roles. I think the bottom 20%, they're always at risk. I think they're at a lot more risk going forward. So if you're sort of in that bottom 20 % of a team, and you probably know if you are, and if you don't know, you should find out.

14:57So I would say in the age of AI, the number one thing we all have to do is understand where we are in terms of performance from the perspective of our boss. So once you know that, it's the place to start. But if you know you're in the bottom 20%, I think you're at much more risk than you ever were, and it's going to come fast, right? So you need to kind of get out of the bottom of the pack and get into the middle. I think everybody in the middle gets a significant assist if you use AI. So if you're an average to good performer, okay, good, but use AI quickly and get better. Because that's the expectation.

15:37That's my expectation as a CEO. And I run a small 30-person company. I don't want anybody, of course, in the bottom 20%. I want everybody else to be using AI every day and to kind of raise their game, which means they're likely going to be more productive and make better decisions, at least more productive. Hopefully, that will also improve the quality of their decisions. And then I think for the top 20 % of a team, maybe top 10%, they're going to be superstars. They're already the best performing. But I think the advantage here of using AI if you're good is really an accelerant for the best. And I think, frankly, that allows you to go back and ask for more money.

16:13I would expect the best people in my teams who are AI-assisted will be that much more valuable to me. I'm not going to want to lose them. So, you know, avoid the bottom, you know, 20%. Raise your game if you're in the middle so you're in the upper part of the middle. And then if you know you're good, get better. Don't rest on your laurels. What's interesting about AI, it can take an average performer and make them good. It can take a good performer and make them great. So if you're one of the stars on a team, do not rest on your laurels and don't dismiss AI. I find a lot of strong performers and executives and leaders tend to dismiss AI and say things like, well, it's good for call centers or it's good for people doing the drudge work or the repetitive work.

16:53I don't believe that. I think it's good for high-end knowledge workers for sure. I think it's good for people who make high-stakes decisions who today make a lot of money. I think they're going to make more money if they use AI properly. And listen, Fire Nation, everybody always resists change. Now, not everybody, but a solid 98 plus percent of people resist change. They just get comfortable. They don't want to change or scared. They're nervous. It's just a human trait. So don't be that person. Embrace change. Embrace what's coming. Be ahead of the curve. That's what the opportunities will be.

17:22And Greg, your mission is to bring 100 ,000 people or more into the quote unquote AI class by 2025, which is right around the corner. So share your vision on how you will accomplish this. We did 15 ,000 this year, thereabouts. So we got to, you know, it's like five or six X, I guess, six, six, more than six X next year. So it's a big jump. We've got to do it a couple of different ways. We've got to keep building out this curriculum and make it accessible and affordable to people. So a lot of people can kind of get in this AI class just by lowering their anxiety. To your point, John, I think anxiety levels around work right now are all times, all time highs and AI is not helping.

17:59AI is making us more anxious, and that's, I think, understandable. A lot of us are getting our AI information from the media, which is the worst place to get it, because it's either overhyped or kind of over doom and gloom, right? The robots are coming for our jobs. In some cases, they are, but in high-end knowledge work, I don't think that's going to happen. I think in high-end knowledge work, we get an assist from AI. So, you know, we've got to get from being skeptical and resistant to proficient and confident, and we can help in training. Also, though, I think we've got to build a tool set, John.

18:30So I'm trying to shift our solution to something that's more product-based or software-based, where you essentially have an AI tutor to teach you AI. You know, a lot of people don't want to take courses. I get it. You know, whether it's a one-hour, two-hour workshop or a one-week boot camp, you know, it's hard to find time. It's hard to stay engaged in learning experiences. And so I need to make a product and release it soon, John, and it allows people to, and really engages them and allows them to do this on their own time and get that level of proficiency as fast as possible. Kind of a couple hours.

19:03I think, you know, two to three hours, you should be up that learning curve enough where you're getting value from AI. Most people bounce off AI. A combination of they're scared to change and or they try it and AI hallucinates and AI makes up some answer. Which, you know, hallucinated Silicon Valley speak for, you know, AI makes it up, right? And it does, right? And so you've got to kind of push past that, not treat it like a search engine, not be distracted by every once in a while you get a crazy answer. And by the way, in some cases, when you're brainstorming with your AI, a crazy answer is a feature, not a bug.

19:40You want your AI to think about stuff you don't think about. If you're asking for something that's pretty factual as an answer, yeah, hallucination is not very productive. It can waste your time. But don't bounce off, it is my point. There are shortcomings to these technologies. They don't work reliably the same way every day. They just don't work that way. And so if you come to it with a mindset that this is software and it's going to behave the same way every day, that's not the right mindset. AI is not software. It's a co-intelligence that can be unreliable in its behavior, but highly effective.

20:14And so that's the way to think about it. So don't bounce off it. Push through that first couple hours, three hours of playing around with it, using it. You'll find two or three use cases. Well, Greg, speaking of that use case, that's what I want to talk about next, because I love real world examples of companies using AI tools. So what's the first thing that comes to mind, your favorite thing, or the first thing that comes to mind when you give a real world example to people about companies successfully using AI? What's that one thing? As a thought partner. So your boss comes to you and says, can you build me a marketing plan for this product?

20:51Or can you build me a product roadmap for the next three months in terms of we've got one engineer available and here's the product, and what features would you prioritize to add to this product over the next 90 days with one engineer? You can literally give that task to AI, meaning you can describe your current product, you can tell AI you have one engineer available, and you can say, help me build out a roadmap, and then have a conversation with your AI around prioritizing the features that AI will recommend. Right? So it's basically decisions that there are options, and you want to narrow your options to the best.

21:31And I'm not saying AI is going to magically give you the best option every time. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is we all have blind spots. We all have, you know, our Achilles heel in terms of how we make decisions. We all have probably, we're usually too optimistic. So you can ask AI to play, you know, the role of someone who's more, you know, thoughtful or more conservative or more skeptical, you know, just kind of compensate for your strongest muscles with AI because you've also got weak muscles. And so, John, the reason I'm pushing back a bit on Give Me The One Use Case is I don't know, you know, what's your weak muscle?

22:08And, you know, all of us on this podcast know our weak muscles. So let's use AI to compensate for those in our business decision making. Greg, you've given a lot of value today around AI and how it can be used, how it could be used, how it should be used in different areas of life. And And to me, it's really exciting. It sparks a lot of ideas. And I hope you, Fire Nation, are kind of getting ready to hit the stop button here and go implement some of these things that Greg's talking about. Because man, this is a wild, wild, amazing world out there. So if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, Greg, if they want to learn more from you, what is your call to action for our listeners today?

22:45Reach out and we'll give every Fire Nation listener a free pass to one of our AI classes. Love that. What's the call to action? Email me, greg at sectionschool.com. Greg at sectionschool.com. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with GS and JLD today, so keep up the heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Greg in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up with, again, links to everything. And one more time, Greg, give Fire Nation that call to action. Greg at sectionschool.com. Email me.

23:23We'll get you set up with an AI class. I recommend our AI crash course as an intro course. Well, let's get you in the AI class as fast as we can. Fire Nation, I'm actually going there right now. So I'm ahead of you to sign up for that. And Greg, I want to say thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. And for that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, JLD. Boom. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Greg for sponsoring today's episode. and Fire Nation successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days.

23:59And we're talking step-by-step. So visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or on the flippity flip side. The next wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented, The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. If you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling, on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between, and Shopify can help.

24:43Sign up for your$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash on fire.