Start HERE with AI: Georgie Barrat (AI Expert)

0:00This is an incredibly powerful tool that you can apply to your life and your work to do amazing things. Georgie, many people are talking about AI, but I don't think they're asking the right questions. I am on a mission to at least show people the possibilities of how they could be engaging with these tools to individually benefit their own lives. Wow, so you're optimistic. There will be many things that you do, AI right now could be doing for you. That gives you one of the greatest currencies of our time, which is time. What's the first starting point to get comfortable with artificial intelligence?

0:33You should be talking to AI. Yap it, don't tap it. People are so worried about the perfect prompt. Big tip here is meta-prompting. Okay. Get AI to write your prompt for you. Jobs are disappearing. It's all doom and gloom, right? Ultimately, this isn't going anywhere. You are going to be doing this day in, day out for the rest of your career. You need to bring your expertise. If you're not inserting all that brilliant stuff that you have accumulated, It's going to be beige. It's going to be AI slop. I don't want you spending time doing boring stuff. I want to be tapping into your human potential, the stuff that AI can't touch.

1:07So why not find out how you can make it work for you? Hello, I'm Georgie Barrett and I am reworking with Tim Campbell.

1:24Hi, Tim Campbell here and welcome to Reworking. AI is not coming for the workplace. It's already here. But here's what's fascinating. I'm not sure our bosses are the ones leading the revolution. So while companies are writing AI strategies and debating policies, their employees are already experimenting. And that creates a pretty uncomfortable question. If your colleagues are learning how to work with AI and you aren't, are you being left behind? My guest today is Georgie Barrett. You might know Georgie from The Gadget Show, where she spent seven years travelling the world testing technology and explaining what it meant for the rest of us.

2:02Today, she's the founder of Collab AI, where she helps non-technical teams work out how to actually use AI rather than simply talk about it. But what makes Georgie's story particularly interesting is that she also got caught out by how quickly this technology moved. After having two children and spending several years dipping in and out of work, she returned to find that the technology she built a career explaining had changed dramatically. And over the past year, we've watched Georgie's own opinions about AI change too, which I love. Because perhaps the biggest myth about AI is that everyone else understands it.

2:37They don't. Today we're going to be talking about whether someone using AI could really take your job, whether businesses are actually ready for what their employees are already doing, and what those of us who don't have hours to learn about the latest AI platform can realistically do to keep up. Most importantly, I want to know what remains valuable about you when technology can seemingly do more and more. Let's get into it.

3:09Many people are talking about AI, but I don't think they're asking the right set of questions. So when people do start talking about AI, the first thing they default to is jobs are disappearing. It's all doom and gloom, right? What's your view? What's your biggest thing that you think about? What people are thinking wrong is the conversation with AI? Well, firstly, they have every right to think that because, my goodness, have you seen the headlines? Every single day, there is something about AI taking away jobs or destroying our planet or where are we going to be in 10 years time? So like everyone feels that it's a highly emotive subject and we are constantly being fed that.

3:45So I acknowledge you wherever you stand that that is of course where you're coming from because that's what you're experiencing. And the truth is we don't know exactly how this technology is going to play out. Yes, there are a lot of unknowns, but what I do know and how I use it in my own life and how I teach people to use it is that this is an incredibly, incredibly powerful tool that you can apply to your life and your work to do amazing things. Wow, so you're optimistic. I'm incredibly optimistic. Now, obviously some caveats around that, but the impact it's had on my own work and the way it allows me to be more ambitious, to get rid of the boring jobs, to do things that I've never been able to do before, to be a solopreneur, entrepreneur, to achieve amazing things.

4:35I am on a mission to at least show people the possibilities of how they could be engaging with these tools to really individually benefit their own lives. So let's go there then, right? Let's go there. So someone's watching us, they can see you fizzing with excitement about the opportunities that it's afforded you. What should they be considering for themselves if they're sitting in a position of thinking, I want to use AI, but I don't know where to start? Okay, there is a part of your week that you do not enjoy. There is a part of your week that is repetitive. There is a part of your week that doesn't, it's not a good, that you should be spending time doing those things.

5:11Whether that is filling out, you know, a new report, whether that is copying and pasting something across, whether that is you trying to work out what information is useful, scrolling back through stuff, there will be many things that you do that AI right now could be doing for you. and what does that allow you to do? That gives you one of the greatest currencies of our time which is time. It allows you to go and do the things that you enjoy, that you excel at, that's in your zone of genius. So it's about finding the things you don't like doing or finding the things that you need help with and then giving that to AI.

5:49So a lot of people are hearing and they're saying, yes, I should but there's a bit of trepidation with saying, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. There's all these different models, there's different languages, different bodies. And what should I do? Where should I start? What would you advise those people? It's hard. And this technology, by the way, has just sort of been launched upon us. It's just here. It's just here. And the amazing thing about it, it's really intuitive to use. So everybody can go on to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, whatever which one you use, and you just chat to it.

6:19You chat to it like you would use, you know, you chat to anybody else. but the problem with that is that you think that you're getting the most out of these tools because it doesn't need any there's no learning process to it um but there is and there's sort of like one level where it's almost like you're using these large language models as a fancy google so it's what you type into google you type it i question and it gives you a really lovely personalized response yep but what's the next level to that the next level for me is starting to use it in more agentic forms, which sounds complicated.

6:54I know, I know. And all these talk of AI agents and it is like a new language we're starting to get to grips with. But what I mean by that is AI going off and doing things for you. So it's not you typing something in, getting a response back, then you copying and pasting that response somewhere else. Yes, you can use it in that way, but you're not getting the most out of AI in that way. What you need to be doing is you need to be linked up to your emails, to your Slack, to your any kind of messaging-based services, to your calendar, to your to-do list, to every sort of tool that you are in day in, day out.

7:32AI needs to be able to have access to that stuff in a safe way, which I would argue if you're paying for it, that is pretty secure. And we can maybe go into these details later, but making sure that you're not using your data to train the model, which is a setting that you can change and it can then be almost like this one place that you access all this information and not only can you access this information and ask it questions about you know an email that you've just had a phone call you've been on but it can go off and start doing things for you it can go and create that spreadsheet create that research document that you need it can have like an it can update documents that you're keeping on top of all the time and suddenly you find that all that busy work that used to take up so much time is suddenly being handed over to ai but it's not only that it's things like oh you know i get ai i get my so i use claude i'm a good claude user um and you were asking what tool to use they are all really good okay so i would say like chat gpt claude they're like i would say the top two a lot of people have access to co-pilot through their work still really brilliant and actually within co-pilot you can use like the sort of functionality of chat gbt or the functionality of claude so um you do get access to that kind of stuff but i would say they're the top two gemini you know close third they're all really really good though and i would say almost like i like to to take away from the hype a bit because it's hard to keep on top of all this stuff so much happening there's so much happening i can't you know i specialize in this subject i you know i can't check out all the latest models the whole time so i'd say choose choose a large language model that maybe you've already started on um as i said my favorite's claude what do you use i'm a claude addict but what i tend to do is use the models to argue with each other oh nice so i actually use one model to talk to the other have a reference point talk to another and then come back and see if it agrees and see if it takes the advantages of all those different viewpoints.

9:39Okay, and so you say that. So how are you getting those two to talk to each other? Is it because they're creating documents? So it will depend on how I've built up my agentic process. But say, for example, if I've got a report that somebody's given me and I have to assess whether it's a viable opportunity for me to invest in, I'll have a set of parameters that I will build into Claude that make my assessment criteria really clear. I'll then get feedback on that. I'll take that end report that's come from Claude, feed it to another one of the LLMs, get the feedback on that and take that feedback back to Claude to see what he thinks is good or bad or indifferent and if it would change anything on the perception.

10:19So I like to build different reference points around any one thing. So there's not one source of truth. There's multiple pieces of the puzzle that I then make a decision on. That's amazing. And so what I love about that is often people sort of brush over that, oh, I just tell ChatGPT what Claude said. And that's almost like the missing piece for many people, which is what you've got there is you've got your AI creating a document. And that document sits in your Google Drive or sits on your computer. And that's just like a document, like a spreadsheet, a Word document. There's nothing fancy to it.

10:57AI has just created that document. But that then allows, like you can then link that folder to another AI, whether it's a different agent or a completely different model. And in the instructions, you say, read everything in this folder, tell me your insights from it. And then that's how that keeps sort of getting added to. So it's not this kind of mystery of like these little, you know, AI agents running off your AI employees going to do this stuff. They're just literally creating documents in this one centralized place, which is just a normal document on your computer or hard drive that you use.

11:31And then the AI can work with that and update that. So anytime I'm like working within Claude and there's an update to everything, you know, like let's say I'm creating a new marketing campaign and then I make a new decision, I will just say to Claude, okay, like I'm not ever leaving that chat. I'll just say like, can you just update the document? So everything's now got that one source of truth. And then Claude will go through and will literally go into that Word document, go into that spreadsheet and just check that it's always updated. And that is how you really start getting productive with this stuff.

12:06I love it. So, because we might have, we could talk about this forever because we're in it, we're doing the stuff, right? For somebody who's just hearing this conversation for the first time and everyone around them is talking about, I use AI or large language models, what's the first starting point for somebody to get comfortable with artificial intelligence? So I really think it's helpful to think of these as your AI employees. So how would, you know, if someone came and said, okay, I'm your new assistant, what would you like me to do today? What information would you have to give to that assistant in order for them to do a good job?

12:43You'd have to say, okay, this is about me. These are my businesses. This is how I like to operate. If you're doing an email on my behalf, I like it written like this. if you're going to insert something into my calendar, it needs to follow this very strict code and you can't ever deviate from that. This is how I speak to my audience. These are the customers that I serve. And you're really giving this. You wouldn't just say, oh, here's access to my emails, off you go. Off you go, do whatever you want. You'd be really onboarding that person. And that's exactly the same with AI. And this is all about giving AI that context about who you are, what business you work for or business that you run.

13:23and giving it such large amounts of data that is relevant data to you. And then AI is going to, it's very good at processing that information. And every time you then go to it with a question or ask a task for it to do, then it will know how to go off and do that. So I have within Claude my assistant. I like to call them like my sort of different names. Again, I just find that easier to like imagine. You say please or thank you. I do say please or thank you. I'm the same. I do. I feel like, you know, exactly the overlords ever come back. They're like, yeah, you were good. You were a polite little guy.

14:01But, you know, so I have my assistant called Evita. And she has like a whole brain behind her. Now, again, let me demystify what I mean by that. Literally Google documents that are on my Google Drive that she is linked to. So she's linked to that folder. And on there, she's got details about how I write emails to different people. because obviously you have different registers for different people and how I like my calendar saved what kind of holidays I go on with my family who my family are what size shoe my children have what schools they go to all this details that when I then ask her to go and reorder some school uniform for me and by the way she won't take it she'll just put it in my basket and I'll do the checkout she just gets it right there's no other explanation there So straightforward.

14:53So it's almost like you're saying this is a intern who could be developed into a fully fledged employee that will do stuff on your behalf. Precisely. So there's the sort of the brain, the context, the knowledge base that you're giving AI. And then there's you being very specific at how you like a task being done. So they have that, you sort of build them up, you're on board them, you know, you've had the first two weeks alongside you, you've explained everything about it. but then you say okay so on a friday i do this report or i have to do this kind of presentation each week this is the presentation this is how i like it to look uh these are the fonts i use this is the in here i've got to do some research about this and you're telling it exactly the order that you do it in and that you then and again these are called different things depending on what um what ai model you're using but within claude that's called a skill and i'd like you to think of that like an instruction manual so you're like okay so claude when i go and ask you to go and create this for me go and read that instruction manual because that is the way i like it done and do not deviate away from it so then off it goes and then you have these things that sound like you that are genuinely helpful for you that mean that it does feel like it's an employee someone has actually gone off and done the work for you and then you are still the human in the loop it's still your responsibility to check everything but you're all there going yeah cool that looks pretty good tweak that a little bit make that sound better and i'm good to go and then the next stage would be an agent yes so that is basically an agent and i guess the the sort of an agent is the is the doing aspect it's being able to search through the internet for you it's being able to deliver that report to something automated exactly and then you set that up to you schedule that task so you could schedule a task whereby i have a morning brief so every morning it will go through you know how you you have so many different channels of communication now maybe you've got like whatsapp you've got your emails you have varying messaging slack yes great one and if you get your ai to link up you know with all those bits it can then give you this really lovely fine-tuned update on everything that you need and if you're like oh but what what was actually said back then or whatever it may be you just ask it questions like you would a really well-informed employee um but you could schedule that up so so for example my morning brief arrives to me at 6 30 a.m so i can just see what have i got in my diary that day what's the industry news i need to look at um who haven't i got back to what's on my to-do list um and it's just there and it's still the information that i would eventually get to if i was going to all those different sources but you just read it and it's good i love the dashboard effect that it can give you in terms of an overview of the thing but for somebody who's in their job now thinking i must do this i've got to move forward because they're so passionate about it it's doing all this dashboard stuff and automate but but they're not sure how that's going to impact their job and make their job better what's your words to them well this is a funny time we're living through like never have we had a technology that has fundamentally changed so much of what we do so quickly yeah so my first my first thing is like ultimately this isn't going anywhere whether you get on board with this today and almost take advantage of everything that it can give you and like your productivity levels you will eventually get there because we know the sort of the train the train has left the station.

18:28We are on this ride, whether we like it or not. So why not learn it? Why not find out how you can make it work for you? The other thing is, is that if there's something that you enjoy doing, if you're really good at writing, don't let AI write stuff for you. If you're really good at like having, I don't know, coming up with creative concepts, then don't get AI to do that bit. Find the bits. Find the job. My expenses. I hate doing my expenses. Who doesn't? Give them your expenses to do. Like, find the bits of your job that either you find really tricky or you find really boring. Because that is where you're going to be invested.

19:07That's where you're like, oh yeah, it is so worth learning this AI thing. Because my goodness, if I didn't have to do, insert boring task, that would make my life way better. I love that idea of outsourcing the bits that don't fill you with joy. that don't really add any value to what you're doing, but they have to be done. They're permanent. And I love the fact that most of those things are logical process-based stuff, which applies itself really well to utilising artificial intelligence. But if somebody's in a creative field, say, for example, do you not see it as a positive of using AI for enhancing what comes to them naturally?

19:41Yeah, absolutely. I mean, AI has so made me more creative, has sort of pushed my ideas to different levels. And the big thing, and this is almost like the one thing that I'd love people to take away from today is that you should be talking to AI. And what I mean by that is yap, don't tap. You should be hitting that microphone button and using your voice. Why? Because multiple reasons. Firstly, it is four times quicker than typing. So you will be able to add more nuance, more context, more of you into what you're proposing to AI. Oh, I've just had this idea. I'm thinking maybe this, but this didn't work last time.

20:24I need to somehow change that up there. Would I be bothered to type out that? No, I'd just be saying, can you come up with a new campaign idea? And you don't sort of get to that level of detail that you get if you are typing something out. Because people are so worried about the perfect prompt or putting in the perfect information that they stagnate the potential of learning rather than just talking to the actual platform and then getting on with stuff. Yeah, and it's so great that you're mentioning prompts there because if you give AI that context, you know what I'm saying, linking up those folders.

21:01If you're linking up to all this information, all these documents, anything else, like if you use an AI note taker, transcripts from meetings that you have, all that stuff, it's going to be able to digest that information and know everything that you need from it. Now, yes, there is an art to creating a great prompt. And again, my big tip here is do something called meta-prompting, which sounds scary and very complicated, but it's the best thing in the world because you get AI to write your prompt for you. So, for example, you'd open up your AI tool, you'd hit the record button. I need to create a spreadsheet that's going to be able to track all the different sales that are coming through over the next few months.

21:47I need it to make sure it does X, Y, Z, fill in all the details through your voice. Can you create a prompt for me? Go. AI comes up with this beautifully worded prompt that you then copy and paste into a new chat. And then away you go. You can then have a really good sort of, like you get, exactly, you get off on a good foot with AI. And it really understands, you know really it's it's given to ai in a way that allows ai to perform the best but the thing with prompting this is what's really changed over the past year is that it was all about the perfect prompt to begin with is now it's all about giving it that rich data letting it know who you are because often when you're using these tools they sound like they know you they're like really that oh georgie you're back again you know oh yes i remember this but actually it's really patchy the memory that it has between different conversations and many people have what i call like the sacred chat so they have this one chat that they have that they're like this is the chat i go to anytime i need to ask everything yes a business question about xyz and you know they find it and it's really really really long and i say when chats go long yeah claude or ai goes wrong because what happens is is that every time you then type in something else in that chat ai has to go to the very top of the chat and it has to read through everything that you've written even if you just said oh can you make that sound a bit better it's got to read through all that chat so not only is that using up tokens which is sort of like the credit system inside ai which um if you're on claude they're quite you've got to look after your tokens um but it also that things get lost things get deteriorates it does things get overemphasized there's just no sort of order to it ai just goes okay i'm going to skim read all this and here's your here's your answer now so really you should be thinking about after about 30 to and froze with ai you should be moving on from that chat but then people are like how do i but but it's so good they i finally got it to the point that i want to you know that it knows what i'm doing but that's all about making sure you then turn that into those instruction manuals that i'm speaking about so it knows this is who i am this is how i like this done and then it just goes and reads that instruction manual so it's a fresh chat but it goes and reads the instruction manual so it goes ah i know how you like this i like the idea also in these potential large language models of creating projects which keep all similar types of conversations in the same space.

24:30So that allows you to only, not only track all the myriad of different conversations you had, but also gives the database the information that you need to answer more proficiently about what you're asking. Absolutely. And like projects are specific to Claude. And like how I work my projects is that they are different AI employees. So I'll have one project who's like my head of marketing. I'll have another project that's like my head of content. And these are different, like another one who's like my finance manager. And within that, they have access to that knowledge base, all those folders that explain me and who I am.

25:05And they also then start to learn what kind of tasks I want to be doing when I go to that particular AI employee. So with projects, with prompts, you're saying, don't get too focused on the perfect prompt. Just be clear on what you want in terms of the output. Is there a particular framework that you have around that which will be useful for people to keep in front of mind? Yeah, absolutely. Well, firstly, meta-prompting, i.e. get your AI to write the prompt for you. It's the easiest thing to do. It's the easiest thing to do. And it means that you can ramble, you can go off on tangents and add all that context to what you're trying to do.

25:42So yes, they say it's helpful to give AI a role when you're prompting. You are an experienced social media strategist, help me plan my content calendar so you you give it a role you explain the reason and again think about talking this out loud so you're just you're getting ai to write the prompt it doesn't matter but you're explaining the reason why so i'm wanting to do this because i really want to increase my follower count or whatever it may be um explain the result what do you want back from it i would love for this to be a report that lands in my inbox every morning i want this um research paper to be updated every month so that's the result you want back and then you need to be specific about like any rules or anything that you definitely don't want it to do um and then it's just what i call resources so what can i add in to give it that rich context but hopefully it already has all that context up its sleeve already because you've just linked up those folders yeah i think we use a very similar framework.

26:49The only one we add is restrictions. So we want it to be no more than 50 words or make sure it's listed in this. Don't make up anything because we know that there's, you can say, make sure everything you had is a verified source behind it. So there's easy ways to put restrictions in, which mean that you get much richer information back afterwards. And that's so important. Like, you know, AI is not perfect. There is a huge amount of AI slop out there because it's very good at creating stuff. so people get their hands on these tools for the first time. They're like, whoa, look, I've got 50 documents for everyone to read.

27:23Everyone's like, okay, no one's going to have the time. I'm just going to get my AI to read those documents that your AI has created. And it ends up in this very bizarre world. And it can also, again, happening less so, but it can definitely hallucinate as well. This is when it just makes up facts, and it makes them up very confidently. So, yeah, a great tip is to always ask it for its sources. and literally what I mean by that is it will include a hyperlink to where it's got that information from you click on the hyperlink and the big thing with that is you're looking to see whether it's out of date because often AI is pulling stuff you'd say, if you're not telling it specifically only look for the past news that's broken in the past week or the past six months then you've got something from 2024 and you think that's not really relevant anymore it's moved on so I think one of the things that really was interesting about your particular journey is how you've used AI yourself.

28:16And this is going to be really helpful to our viewers. You've used AI as almost like a career coach in some situations. Can you tell us about that and how you gave it the instructions to do that and what have been some of the benefits as a result? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, a little bit of background on me. I am a tech journalist. That's how I originally came into the world. I then did the gadget show for seven years and I still do little bits of TV. um but in the past four years i've had two babies which means that i've been thank you i've um i've been sort of in and out basically this whole time that ai's been breaking around us gbt launching in 2023 i've been like off on my leave coming back again and every time i dip my toe back in again i'm like whoa this has changed so much um and i officially like came back to work literally this time last year and I was like wow things have really yeah like skyrocketed and even though I live and breathe this stuff I felt so behind with it I really was like I've taken my finger off the pulse for one year to have a baby and how do I get back into this now and I started really upskilling myself on AI I thought come on this is firstly it's going to be helpful for me and secondly i need to be able to talk about this stuff um so i invested a lot of time of just like learning it finding out what's the best practices are um what was that through courses through youtube for a lot of courses a lot of courses i've probably done about eight different ai courses in the past year um and youtube and instagram the problem with tips on instagram and youtube is that they're just like they're quite bite-sized and you sort of when When you're trying to learn anything, it's like learning to drive, isn't it?

30:04It's like it's so clunky that you have to think through all these different processes. It's very hard to like see how it comes together. And you almost just need someone holding your hand for that first bit so that you start to have those folders linked up. You know how to create a skill. You've got just those fundamentals under your belt. And then when you see the tips, they don't feel like they're coming at you. And you're like, how on earth have you got to that point? Instead, you're like, oh, that's quite a next logical step of what I can do. um so yeah i did i did a lot of courses um but i used ai you know i really learned to talk to ai my kids are like who's mommy speaking to ai it's claude my husband's like who's this person that you're still chatting to at 11 p.m at night i'm like claude leave me alone oh exactly just me and claude working working it out um but it was amazing i would go for walks i would voice dump but all my insecurities, my thoughts about like, whether I should start a company around this stuff.

30:59And it was so beneficial. It really, I think if you are a self-motivated person with an entrepreneurial mind, and you start tapping into this intelligence that we have all got access to now, and you're giving it all that rich context, the way it can give you advice to advance what you're doing, to, you know, you already have the ambition there. It can supercharge it and really link up those dots for you and really make you feel like you can do it. And listen, there's still loads of learning along the way. It still doesn't work out. Sometimes what it recommends isn't great. But if you take action, as you know, you need to start to just move forward.

31:40Do something. Do something. Because it's data then, isn't it? Exactly. And I think the bit that's most encouraging from that is that you're saying, don't be afraid to make mistakes with it. You don't have to get perfect at the beginning, but you have to get better at it and the only way you're going to get better at it, like the babies, they fall over but you pick them back up and you let them go again, right? Exactly. It's like with learning anything new. It just, you know, like it requires that sort of sticky, clunky beginning bit where you think, why is it not doing what I want it to do? But what waits for you on the other side is firstly feeling empowered about this stuff because you are going to be doing this day in, day out for the rest of your careers.

32:16The AI you use today is the worst AI you're ever going to use. every single day is going to get better. And so, you know, like, let's find out processes of making it help you do what you want to do. And like, don't, yeah, don't be scared about it. The perfectionism of many people what makes them pause. And that's my concern. You need to get more people at least trying it to see what best fits for them. So from the career coaching perspective, if somebody's viewing this now and they want to have their own career coach using Claude, because that's our go-to choice. There are other ones available.

32:52What would you tell them to do to set this up? Okay. Do they have to do a paid version? Should they go just off the bat? Should they be getting it to set out the ideal position? What did you do and what would you advise them to do? I would say it's probably worth for£18 a month investing in one of these platforms. It doesn't have to be Claude, whichever one sort of appeals to you. And it allows you to just properly experiment with the tools because often you reach limits quite quickly. And in context, that's a packet of cigarettes, one less. It's one less bottle of wine. So it's not massive things we're talking about investing.

33:26I also really hope that you'd be learning to use it enough that you would think it's a no-brainer. Where you're like, no, this does so much for me. Of course I'm going to be using it in this way. And so then it's about giving it that context. So maybe you don't have it all nicely sitting there in one Word document about your life history up until that point. But what you do have is a microphone button. And you could really, really create a really long voice note about where you're at. Think of it like if maybe, or the other thing is you could get it to interview you. So you could say, ask me questions so you really understand where I'm at, where I want to go, what are the kind of things that drive me?

34:10And it can go through this process. And again, when you're talking out loud, it free flows a lot more and then it can start to like get a better picture of where you are and work out what those next steps are and then what you could do is you could have all that big long chat and say could you put this in a document for me so then you have this document that has a nice overview of where you're at you could then say in that same chat could you create a prompt for me that would help me put together a really cohesive plan step-by-step action orientated that i could do over the next six months you then open up a new chat you literally put in that document that ai has created and you copy in the prompt and see what it comes up with and then you're you're good to go then you're good to go and you can then you gotta go do it but that's the point but you can keep coming back to it and feeding updates and more information from there because I think that's really useful for an individual is that if you set this up today, it can continue to grow with you over time.

35:13It doesn't take a snapshot and stay there. You can constantly move it forward. Absolutely. And I think that's where the concept of thinking them like AI employees makes sense to more people. So let's say that's just one chat and you can get your head around that it's had that context and you've given it that prompt and it's created that one document. So this is your career coach sorted on the side. Yes. So let's say it's your career coach and let's give her a name, career coach clara every time you've got a question you about your career you go to that one place now instead of it being that one long chat because obviously it's going to deteriorate you instead create a little space in your chosen ai platform and in that space it has those documents it retains them all it retains them all it knows exactly the context that you're coming at and it knows all the other chats that have happened before and in claude that's called a project So every time you've got a question about your career, you go to that one place and then you open up a new chat, but it will know all the history that's happened before.

36:10I think that's an actionable thing somebody can do immediately, which is incredibly important. So from looking at the marketplace now, lots of people are rightfully concerned that this conversation around AI is going to take their jobs. That's the doom and gloom that most of our listeners are concerned with. I'm of the opinion that AI is not going to take their jobs. Somebody who knows how to use AI is going to take their jobs. So what are the focus skills around AI that you think people should be leaning into more that's going to put them in a better position to retain the positions of work or whatever that looks like in the future rather than getting scared?

36:49So it's all about thinking about, okay, if I'm going to be my own boss of a whole 17 AI employees and they're all going to be creating these reports for me coming up with ideas, being able to link together all the information that I've had access to, your role, I would argue, becomes really enjoyable. You are in charge of what they're producing and you're the one who then can take action on it because ultimately AI isn't real. It's a technology and it's giving you access to information. You've got intelligence on tap there. It's about what you then go and do with that intelligence. So you can choose to act upon what they're suggesting or the findings they've come up or you can choose not to.

37:30So you're really playing into that entrepreneurial mindset. Okay, what's going to work here? What should I say no to? That needs to be tweaked a little bit more. That's not good enough yet. Go back and work harder on that. And you're really sort of using these to fine tune your skills and making decisions in knowing what good looks like, which is a big point because how are you going to know what good looks like if especially the next generation of talent coming up through, if AI is doing everything for you? so how do you stay sharp in your field really interesting subject i would argue use ai to help you stay sharp in the field but you know you have to think about how do you um fine-tune those skills but also what are you doing with that extra time you know how can you strategically think about progressing your career or your business because you're not having to copy and paste a whole load of things across because you're not doing really boring mundane stuff you can be using that stuff to network, to do the in-person stuff, to do the things that really move the needle big picture.

38:29And that you find enjoyable. That's a really big one, that you find enjoyable. Because all too often, the bits that I outsource now are the things that either were really too hard for me to do individually, so I can get other people to do those, other people, other agents to do those, or it's stuff that allows me to be more efficient where I need to be. Exactly. So you can spend time creating a podcast, you know doing things that you're just like okay my businesses still need to run but i've got all these other ideas that i want to do alongside it um and and listen i i think it's not going to be smooth sailing over the next five ten years i think there is going to be a lot of job disruption and i don't want to shy away from that okay um i think when like someone put it really nicely to me when i was like interviewing them they said um if you had like 10 human sales people and then you gave them access to AI and it made them 10 times more productive, would you be saying, let's hire less salespeople?

39:30No, you'd be saying, let's get 10 more. I'm 10xing my productivity. And I really hope, and obviously there will be more sort of gray areas within this, but I really hope that as everybody is pulling on these tools more, business is going to be booming because people are going to find more efficient ways of doing stuff. And so there's going to be more of the pie to go around for people who can't get access to some of the tools they haven't got the 20 pound to spend what are they going to do good question i mean so firstly you do get free access to all this stuff so i'd say use it to the limits and um often what happens is you get capped about how much usage you can do of it now you could have three or four different accounts with all the four major ai platforms that's good and you could be you know like you say do one idea here do another idea there, max your credits out, tokens out, and then say, okay, cool.

40:23You can still get quite far with that. Of course. And it can still help you strategize and sort of think about how you could use AI. Or, you know, you're like on a Monday, I know that this job needs to be doing, so I'll use up my free tokens on doing that. So that's like a great way of thinking about it. And yeah, I guess going forward, if your employer doesn't have these tools, if they're not training you up on them, then I would be saying this is something that you should be going to them. To manage up. Exactly. Let's say we need, this is a fundamental skill that we all need to start using more.

40:57And we need to find ways of outsourcing the pits that aren't working and let's then use that time to do something else. It's a great point. We were having a conversation here amongst the team and one of the guys said that they would be really incentivized to show how their boss could take advantage of it because that puts them in a better position to be showing how they're adding value. So you've got to take the lead sometimes, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I would say that we should all, as a workforce, we should be saying, you know, every time we have a review, how have you outsourced your job to AI this year?

41:29And how have you outsourced AI? And then what are you doing with that time? Because that is what I'm going to be judging you on. I don't want you spending time doing boring stuff. I want to be tapping into your human potential, the stuff that AI can't touch. so show me how you are firstly upskilling the ai on your knowledge base on your sort of skills that you've learned over time because that's the other thing is that you know if you just said to ai oh go off and make some investments for me it's not going to do a very good job you need to bring your expertise and whether that expertise is just in your head the way that you're interacting with it or whether that expertise is in a folder you've compiled you know that you've got ai to analyze over a long period of time, combined with your intuition of being in business for however long, that's the combo that means that you can really take action.

42:21Because if you're not inserting all that brilliant stuff that you have accumulated, then AI is going to be the middle of the whole entire internet and every book that's ever written. So it's going to be beige. It's going to be AI slot. We don't want any of that, right? Somebody who's been very successful in their career, they've worked 20 years doing whatever they want, and they're really worried now that all of their experience that they've built up over time is now going to be useless because someone can just tap it into artificial intelligence platforms. What's your message to them? My message to them is that no, they really can't take that.

42:55Now, yes, they can take the fundamentals, but as you know, business is nuanced. That involves face-to-face stuff. There's gut instinct. There are so many variables in our messy human world that AI won't ever be able to really take a grasp on it. Or it can make a good guess, but sometimes it gets it wrong and sometimes it doesn't. And that's part of the joy of figuring all this stuff out. It is your, they are your employees, but you're the boss of them. And you decide what resonates and what doesn't and what action you should take and what doesn't. And that experience that you've accumulated, that's like amazing.

43:30Like that's the thing that actually, people are going to be hungry for that talent because they're going to be like, okay AI can tell everyone to do everything how are you going to interpret that information what are you going to add on top of that that makes it relevant to your particular you know audience or a lot of people are rightly concerned about a term they call cognitive debt where people are losing the ability to think for themselves or critically think because they're outsourcing everything immediately as we talked about the very beginning using chat as a google platform almost so every single decision they're outsourcing it to an artificial intelligence platform does that concern you yes i think it does so yeah they you can use ai and you can go into cognitive debt which is where you're almost like outsourcing your thinking to it so much that you are losing that ability to do that kind of process yourself or there's like cognitive advantage where you're using it to bounce ideas off to test run things to actually be able to do things that you wouldn't normally be able to do especially if you're just sat working from home on your own or working for your own business um and the sort of the big the big difference between those two things is making sure that you are sort of aware and part of that process as the ai is doing stuff for you now like let's let's also think about this in technologies that have happened before something like google maps or maps you know is it important now to be able to navigate from a to b less so and is it does it bother you that taxi drivers maybe don't have that skill anymore i don't know maybe for some people but i would say you're still ultimately the end goal is to get to that destination so how you're getting there doesn't really matter now ai is never going to take you all the way there.

45:23It's never going to make all those investments for you. Turn up to all the pitch meetings, decide what you're going to go with, like do all the ins and outs of what it takes to operate in this world. But certainly it can help you fast track certain things and do certain things. And I guess also going back to this point of like, are you losing skill sets along the way? I think the way that our society operates in a capitalist society is that let's say you lost the ability to write you lost the ability to create really persuasive emails it's like when you go away on holiday you come back and you forget how to spell the word yeah exactly but you're gonna be you're gonna fall behind other people who aren't using ai like that who have got originality in their writing because they are using ai for other aspects of their life and i think we will grow savvy as a sort of you know as a species of like what feels authentic here am I just chatting to your AI because actually I can't be bothered with that like I'd rather have a real conversation with you and almost through that process and I think we're going to be going through that process or we are going through that process as we speak of like working out okay where are we placing value here and if you're not delivering that value for me then I'm going to vote with my feet you know if I feel like I've got something turning up in my inbox that is hasn't been written by you maybe you haven't even read it I'm not going to give my time and attention but we're at this sort of like pinch point of everyone just getting access to these tools and i was working out how to use them exactly how to apply them so i just think that that we're gonna shed the bits that don't work for us um and then someone's gonna come along and they're like i've created this book and i haven't ever used ai for it and be like this is amazing human creativity is amazing and then you know that's going to give people the edge

47:14Which areas of our society worry you about artificial intelligence taking over? Because we've had lots of conversations about the hospitality sector, the creative industries. We've had actors in who are really worried about their voice and their images being used. Which areas worry you and which areas fill you with optimism? No one knows. No one knows exactly how the cars are going to fall. And there is a huge amount of uncertainty. and it's so fundamental to what it's doing, to the fabric of work and the fabric of what we do day to day. I completely get people's anxieties. And I feel them too.

47:48Like, don't worry. I have late night conversations. Exactly. I have late night conversations with my husband. Like, what on earth are we meant to be teaching our children? But what I do know is that you look back between like the whole of history, we are incredibly good at adapting. Technology can come along. I mean, this goes back to the printing press. You know, back in the 1400s, every single book was meticulously written by hand by monks. A technology came along that literally within a year, they were never being handwriting again. Bridges, horses, carts. Exactly. You know, even to a more recent example, like, you know, it wasn't that long ago that if you ever wanted your voice to be published, you'd have to go through publishers.

48:33You'd have to be featured in a newspaper. but that was your basically i will get featured on tv there were three avenues that you could do technology has come along and completely disrupted that it's lowered the barrier to entry everybody whether you like it or not can broadcast their voice have an opinion to say but human edge has found a way to to to get like work out how to get the competitive advantage over that because there's a lot of noise online so how do you still stand out well you find a niche you work out how to do hooks you create content you get led by the data like we are good at adapting and thinking about okay so this is the new normal now everybody in the world can can speak online how am i going to find a following how am i going to speak to people and we we are just very good at adapting i just like so i guess optimistically i just think we'll be able to adapt i just it is going to be a white knuckle ride as we go through the adaptation i i agree i think we've survived every single thing so forth and the the end conclusion is that we won't be here if it doesn't work right so we don't have to worry about on the optimistic note um for the first time ever we've got a minister of ai yes what would your advice and request be of that minister for me it's it's the education piece so many people and you know i train people and i go into businesses and train them on this but so many people think they're power users of ai and then you scratch below the surface and you're like and you know and i don't mean this and you've got it wrong i mean it's like nobody's ever shown you that actually no okay that's like you're just doing this much of it exactly like let me show you all the ways this can really really help you so that bit's missing it's prolific it's everywhere everybody talks about ai but has anybody actually just shown you the very very fundamentals about how you could get the most out of these tools and from my experience of the rooms I'm in, it's like, no.

50:29Very few people have sort of got to that level. We're getting towards the stage now where I'm going to pull out of your head your top tips on how you've been successful, right? We call it the payoff. This is where we ask you for your tips and tricks on certain different things. The first one is still this habit. What's the one habit that for you has been a game changer? Yap it, don't tap it. Okay. Talk to your devices. Talk to AI. Talk when you're writing a document. You shouldn't be typing anymore. Why don't I feel silly doing that? No, walking down the street, talking to my phone. I mean, enough people do that already, don't they?

51:02Very good point. Enough people do that already. But really getting into that habit will just liberate you from the cognitive difficulty of trying to type things out the whole time. And I love that you said, get the artificial intelligence platform to ask you questions to refine the answer that you get. You don't have to be an expert straight away, do you? No, you don't. And then from that, get it to create the document. Listen, outsource it, outsource it, outsource it. Don't do any work yourself. But do the work that only you can do. Exactly. That's the important thing, right? Next one, productivity hack.

51:36What's the hack that you use to get stuff done? Okay, so I have my AI create a morning brief for me every single morning. So that will be everything that I haven't responded back to in my inbox that's urgent. So it's prioritizing stuff for me. It'll be pulling information from Trello, which is where I have all my to-do lists and tasks that I need to do. it gives me the top three like news stories that are broken overnight that's relevant to my specific audience um and it will give me it like pulls stats because you know i like do content or pull like stats for my instagram but that could be anything that you know you're trying to track just have that waiting for me and not only that i can then draft responses really quickly i then prioritize my day but how i prioritize my day is i'll then hit the microphone button i'll have the morning brief in front of me and I'll say okay I need to respond back to these emails saying this these are the tasks that I'm currently thinking I actually have quite low motivation this morning I'm knackered from last night I should be doing this task but I actually can't be bothered what are your thoughts AI will then come back and it will say look Georgie I know you can't be bothered doing this but that is actually really important you should start by doing that and it'll give me time blocks for my day that then i find it a lot easier to follow i find that really useful if i have a day where actually i don't have many meetings like when you're up against it you're just sort of doing it exactly it's when you have a full free day where you're working from home and you're like oh well i could just procrastinate a little bit um but that really helps me stick on track love it love it keeping to the simple important things having a dashboard what's on your not to do list then so for me it's still having that inkling to go off and like create that spreadsheet create that document as really everyone should be getting ai to do that stuff for you so you say i want a tracker for my sales i want a content calendar i want to be able to have a place where i record all the christmas presents i'm going to buy this year you know and instead of going in and like opening up a word document or an excel sheet you just tell ai and you say exactly and you explain oh i need to be able to track that and like i want to make sure that i'm not overspending here just explain to it what you want the thing to do and then it will go and create something that makes more sense that is way more beautiful that takes literally less than a minute to do um and what's brilliant about it is that often when you get ai to do that it it writes little notes to itself.

54:07So then when you interact with that spreadsheet again, AI opens up that document and at the front it's like, oh, dear future Claude, if you're here, this is how everything works. So when I'm then just asking it to do something, it then just updates it. I love it. I was always told when you're interacting with the large language models, be an entitled individual. Expect everything to be done for you. Seriously, it's the click finger. the thing that we find very anti-being British almost you should actually be that when you're talking to like demand everything and sometimes it comes back and is like oh Georgie you can do that through that I'm like I am not doing that thank you very much you should have that reaction I'm like what me?

54:49I'm like you have got your connector set up you can very well go and plan that yourself I like your finger started coming out the pointed finger started coming out it's natural for you now I love it right alright so that's good to be entitled tell the thing to do what you want and if it pushes back push back even harder. Yeah, exactly. Just say, go find a way or like get me to a point that's easy then for me to do it. That's right. Be demanding. Your greatest failure and what did you learn from it? So I think it took me so long to find my place on social media and to embrace social media. And like this whole building a personal brand and it's literally taken me about 12 years to feel at one with being on the internet, which sounds bizarre because I've been in TV for the past 12 years you sort of think it's a different medium yeah you'd sort of think it's a natural fit being on camera or chatting but i've just always had the ick factor with it and obviously when you work in media it's all about like come on georgie you should be posting more you should be doing this more and it's been an uphill struggle to get to that point but it has switched for me recently and the switch has come because i've suddenly i really thought about obviously with the help of ai like what is it about the social media thing that i find so difficult and it's that like slight self-promotion or like feeling like people care about what i'm up to and it's just never really been there like i've just always as i said had the ick with it and then transforming that to a bit more like okay why why what's the reason for me showing up on someone's feed um and really being like how can i actually like be like have a purpose with what i'm doing yeah um which obviously has been now centered around ai and sort of upskilling people on that um so i guess my sort of biggest lesson from 12 years of absolutely uphill struggle oh god i've still got to do that social media post why is this not fitting for me so now really enjoying creating content yeah the takeaway is if it feels like a struggle if it's a real push to do that thing you're gonna have to find a different way of approaching it because you know i never got through that i like was doing it for a decade and i never got to the other side of it until i really like came at it from a completely different angle so you had a different agenda do you think it has helped with imposter syndrome then yeah definitely what ai does is it like speeds up that like that bit where you know when you're younger and you're trying to like make something from blue peter and it never looked that good why does mine look awful and you're trying to recreate it ai helps you recreate stuff but it gets it to a point where it looks way better than what you do on your own so you sort of get past that like really sort of tricky beginning stage where you look like a real imposter that you feel like you're not doing a good job of it instead it can look i'm not saying it's going to be the best thing ever it's going to produce but it's going to help you get to the point where you're not so like toe curling cringe i can't believe i'm gonna have to send this email or report when i feel like i've got no experience in doing that.

57:51That's really powerful because lots of our viewers say they feel stuck. But actually, this technology has the power and ability to help you get unstuck but also accelerate to the next point. Yeah, just like make that first step. Do that bit that makes you feel really uncomfortable because what you've done is you've run it through AI and then it improves it. And you're like, okay, actually, that's okay. I'm not saying it's great but that's better than what I would do if it was on my own. I love that because I don't like being vulnerable. Yeah. So actually, this is a safe space to be vulnerable when no one knows anything.

58:18Oh my gosh, Oh my gosh, like the stupid questions I ask AI. There's no such thing as a stupid question. And I'm still there, you know, obviously I'm still on these tools and I'm meant to be the expert on it. And sometimes I'm like, why on earth has it just done that? I don't, and I'm like, right, Claude, can you just explain what has gone on here? What's that acronym mean again? But it's true, it gives you that power because once you've been vulnerable with it, you get the information back, it creates a positive feedback. You're willing to test it again. Okay, final one is, what's one piece of advice that you wish you had earlier?

58:42One piece of advice that I wish I had is that like my value is not completely linked to how hard i'm working and i like whether you outsource that to somebody else i like a real life human you know you get help and i talk about this in like my my um professional capacity but also at home like getting helping with the kids getting helping asking my husband to do stuff like i don't have to prove that i can do it all in order to like really feel like i'm achieving um and that 100 applies to ai as well like don't feel like i'm cheating if i'm getting ai to do some of this stuff for me because ultimately i'm still adding a huge amount of value to this i am still doing it and i'm still putting myself out there so it's sort of getting past that like you feel like you have to work hard and prove that you've done it in order to get the end results as you i still work hard but it's like i don't have to do that like that real grind that I used to feel like I had to do listen it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for coming wishing all the best with your future building the business and doing everything here we go thank you thank you for having me cheers really good thank you very much

1:00:02huge thanks to Georgie for joining me on reworking so many great takeaways from this one why AI needs your expertise to avoid becoming AI slop, why it's time to yap and not tap and speak to AI instead of typing and why the future of AI at work might not be something we need to fear after all. As always, I would love to hear from you. I do this because I want to help demystify work. I want to help people be more successful and feel more in control. So do drop me a line on socials or at email reworking at bowermedia.co.uk. We've also launched a reworking newsletter to help grow this community even more.

1:00:40So do keep an eye out for that and make sure you're signed up because I'll be sending out regular updates on what I've taken from these conversations and what I think will be really useful to you. You can find that at reworkingpodcast.substack.com. See you soon.