How to Make AI Your Strategic Partner in 38 Minutes | Conor Grennan

17:08I'm like, I think they're all pretty good. But what if you just had a companion through ChatGBT or Gemini or Claude that was just helping you and you could just talk to it? Then it's not about what treadmill is better. It's are you putting on running shoes and getting out there?

17:21Marina Mogilko:Yeah, I love that. And also like with LLMs getting better and better, it's just you keep coming back to them. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Do you have a tip for, for example, like ChatGPT knows a lot about my queries because I also use it as Google. And I feel like the reason is because the output is so well structured, even compared to Gemini. I just love when it gives me bullet points and bold text and emojis. It's just the visual part. I think they nailed it. How do you transfer from, do you say Claude is amazing? Now I want to try it for writing. How do you transfer all the knowledge from ChatGPT to Claude?

18:00I think these tools are so good now that you can actually transfer pretty easily. So now I have kind of like co-CEOs for AI Mindset in Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. And the way I did that was ChatGPT essentially like knew everything about me, right? Because you're talking about the memory. It's so powerful. So what I asked ChatGPT was, listen, create like a 10-page document on like everything you know about me. You're like really distilling it down to the essentials. Like what do I like? How do I think? Like, what do I like? What do I like in outputs? All that kind of stuff. And then I just take that and I toss it into Gemini and Gemini gets it right away.

18:33Claude gets it right away. So you can almost transfer your memory over to each single one. And that is the really powerful thing to me.

18:40Marina Mogilko:I love that. Have you, do you have any queries that people would want to use, especially towards the end of the year? You know, I was just interviewing the founder of Opus Clip and he told me this query that he uses. He asked, Chad, GBT or whatever, I think he was using Gemini. if you could give me advice six months ago based on my queries in the past six months what that advice would be and I asked my chat GPT and my chat GPT was like Marina you're trying to control everything in your life like you're trying to control your kids your dog, your business you need to chill and that was like yeah yeah and like let's let's build a strategy for 2026 based on this do you have anything like this that's super powerful because your LLM has the memory about you?

19:26When you tell your large language model, I say it almost in every prompt just to make sure. I'm like, push back, push back, push back. Because it pushes back. Okay, I'm anthropomorphizing, but it pushes back. Don't you find it kind of pushes back lovingly and empathetically? It's probably, because it's not saying like, Marina, you idiot. It's probably saying like, Marina, you're doing a lot of stuff, right?

19:44Marina Mogilko:It's always, it's the nicest person. Marina, you're so amazing. There's so much. Everybody's like the syncophancy. I'm like, I love that. You're not used to it. You're like, you expect everyone to treat you that way. Oh, my God. They should. We can learn a lot from AI, I think. But it's that empathetic behaving thing. Obviously, it's not intrinsically empathetic, but it is empathetic behaving. And so for me, the things that I put in there are a couple of things. First of all, feel free to push back because I'm not going to get defensive. And I know it's not sort of like a dead thing, but it's going to really help me.

20:15So that other things I use all the time is just like, just make this more readable. How am I thinking? And then the biggest thing I did this in, so I just did masterclass, if you know the brand masterclass. So the thing I was doing in masterclass a lot, this idea of never stop, right? Because why do we stop working, right? We stop working because like, oh, I cannot bear to do another draft or I can't bear to think through this one more time. But you don't have to. You can just say, how would I make this better? What am I missing? What am I missing? Like five times in a row, it's not going to get worse.

20:43Or as soon as it does, you're like, okay, we'll come back to this, come back to this. So I would say the biggest things are, first of all, always create your first draft and have it edit, make it more readable. But the biggest thing I love, I love Opus Clips, by the way, I love that you interviewed him, is kind of toward the end of the year. Remember that your brain instinctively will say, Connor, don't do any more work. You're exhausted. That's instinctive. You have to retrain it to say, just do this again. What's better? What am I missing? What am I missing? That's the real power.

21:08Marina Mogilko:I love that. When it comes to misinformation, right? Because we go to AI for so many questions. And I notice sometimes that if I'm just, especially when I'm in a single thread, like doing all my queries and then ask like a therapy question. And the answer is like, no, I would never do that. How do you deal with that? Because I think Mustafa mentioned that 60 % of copilot AI queries are medical. Yeah. And they connected Harvard database to make sure the answers are correct. But do you ever go to chat GPT for, I don't know, financial advice? How should I restructure my portfolio? Would you trust AI with that?

21:48I think one of the mistakes people make, especially around hallucinations and especially around, well, you know, I'm not going to trust it because it gets it wrong. Like humans hallucinate too, right? Humans get things wrong too. So what we always say, or I always say sort of on our team when we're working with these organizations is it's not a calculator. Like if your calculator gave you a wrong answer, you'd throw it. It'd be like smoking and burning up, right? You'd throw it away. But if a person came on and they were brilliant, they didn't know much about your company, but they were absolutely brilliant.

22:13You could trust is maybe the wrong word, but they were clearly doing amazing work product. You still wouldn't just say like, hey, do this task for me and then, you know, go off and do it like, no, you'd refine it with them. You'd go back and forth with them, et cetera. You'd sort of like teach them a little bit. You'd say like, I like that, but I don't like that. So what is the difference here? The difference is it's really acting like a human. That's number one. So if a human gives you medical advice, if your friend is like, oh, that burn on your arm looks like this, is that person a dermatologist or are they not a dermatologist?

22:40And so if they're not and it's important, I'm going to fact check it. The example sometimes I use is that a lot of things that work, you don't have to have exact precision. A lot of it is just brainstorming. How should I think about this? But if you are going to go and meet like the chief marketing officer at Morgan Stanley and you want some conversation starters and your friend is like, oh, I think I read somewhere that he's really into like balloon animals or something like that. You'd be like, oh, I'll bring on my balloon. You better get that right. Otherwise, you are screwed. So if you need accuracy, double check it.

23:09Marina Mogilko:How do you double check? You just copy the answer from ChatGPT to Claude and ask it to double check? I do, but I don't even put it into another AI. If I really need something that I need to be right, I go to Google search. I go to the source or I ask somebody or something like that. If you need something to be absolutely precise, you're fixing a thing on an airplane, holding the propeller. I don't know why you or I would be doing that. But like, but if it's that, you know that I'm going to go to the actual manual. I'm never going to rely on chat GPT for something critical. Yeah, that makes sense.

23:38Marina Mogilko:Do you think with all of that, like we're going to chat for all our queries, do you think we're losing memorization critical skills? Okay. Here's the thing. You have kids, I think, right? Like I have kids. They're in high school. They're a little further than yours. And we do a lot with education. My son is 16, about to be 17. He and I do a lot of like, you know, teaching together. We've taught at some amazing places and done keynotes together around this. Because I think people keep expecting him to say, hey, everybody needs to use, he's a junior in high school. Everybody needs to use AI. And in a way, he's right.

24:12In a way, I'm right too when I say that. In another way, I mean, it does. Don't you think? Like it kind of, it can really destroy critical thinking. I absolutely believe that. And that's hard. Because how do you be such, how are you such an optimist about something that can destroy critical thinking? I guess what I would say is this technology is here. And a lot of technologies have done away with what we would think are critical thinking skills and things like that. This is a new one. So if people are only using it to just get answers, it's sort of like – remember like Cliff Notes and Spark Notes, stuff like that?

24:40There's two ways to use that, right? There's either, hey, like, you know, I don't have time to read Hamlet. I'm just going to use this. But then that really diminishes your critical thinking, which is going to matter when you get out into the working world and everything else. School matters for a reason. Or you use it as, hey, what's a new way of looking at this? What am I not seeing? I didn't understand that scene three, act four, like in this. And it's an amazing tool then, right? Now your critical thinking is getting even deeper and deeper and deeper. It's a personalized learning assistant.

25:05So it can help. It's really up to the individual. So it gets to the whole question of how do we switch, how do we like change education? But it's not just does it kill critical thinking or does it not? But I think you're right. It can. So how do we prevent that?

25:17Marina Mogilko:So you have two kids. What are you telling them about the future of the world powered by AI? What should they be learning and what skills are becoming obsolete? I mean, you and I live in this world, right? And we're watching it every day. And it is very hard to tell what's going away and what's staying. You can kind of tell in the short term, but we could never have predicted where we are right now either. So it's easy to say to people, oh, we need like adaptability. We need curiosity. But it drives me a little nuts when people say that because what does that mean? Like we were talking before we came on there, right?

25:51About like practical, right? Practical is always more interesting. And I hate when people are just like, oh, you know, just be more curious. I'm like, how do you tell somebody to be more curious? So what I tell, you know, our kids and what I – it's kind of the same thing I tell at scale, tens of thousands of people in one single organization, which is it doesn't matter if you're curious or not. Like you can behave in a curious way. And so what does that look like? Well, let's give you some steps. First, understand sort of, again, like what we do, which is like what is the brain malfunctioning here?

26:18Like what are these three paradigms? What are these steps? all that kind of stuff and take them through what it's not and what it is. And then say, just lean into what you are passionate about. And I don't mean that as a pithy kind of like, oh, do what you love. Because I actually don't believe that. I come from a business school. We don't tend to work in that way. But what I do think is that no matter what you do, AI can enhance it and come up with a new way of doing this. This is what's so interesting about this technology is that the history of technology has been the creators of the technology or the service have always defined like what the role, like if you invented the computer, you know that we need silicone chips and keyboards and delivery mechanisms.

26:53But that's not the case anymore. The leaders of certainly OpenAI, Anthropic, everywhere else, they don't know, right? Leaders of companies, they don't know. The only people that are going to be able to figure it out is from the bottom up, right? People who's in a, somebody who's in a job, really getting fluent on this, really shifting their behavior, not just telling some, you know, somebody telling them use some new tools, shifting their behavior, And then looking at what they do every day, their bottlenecks, and working with AI to really innovate dramatically on what that person, individual, does.

27:24That's why it's so critical to upskill entire organizations. And I kind of say the same thing to the kids. It's like all these jobs are still going to be around. Maybe there's fewer of them. But if you can reinvent a way of doing things with AI, you're gold. Because nobody knows. Because nobody knows.

27:37Marina Mogilko:Yeah, it's what I'm realizing. The more I'm talking to people, nobody knows. Nobody knows. Nobody understands. And it's up to you to come up with ideas. say like, hey, I think this is the right way to do this. And if it's a good idea, people will listen. 100%. Have you seen how hiring is changing with AI? Because a lot of people are struggling to find jobs, especially entry level. Like I think AI eliminated 30%. It's like, it's a big number. Yeah. I mean, the potential is there to eliminate that, right? And that's where all these new sort of statistics around what these models can do is fascinating.

28:08I know Dario Amadei over at Anthropics said exactly this. He's like, look, even if the technology doesn't change from today, it can still wipe out 25 % of entry-level white-collar workforce, call it. So when I'm looking across the whole spectrum, I don't see it happening yet necessarily. What I do see is the potential is there. And that's a pretty big difference, right? So right now, where AI is right now, even if it didn't advance for the next 10 years, which is obviously not going to happen, if people were using it correctly, you can take these teams of 10 people and probably reduce it down to two people.

28:39So it's not that you can get rid of everybody, but just that one person can do way more work. Now, here's the really hard part, right, is that the work that it can do is sort of like entry-level work. But then how do those entry-level people then learn how to do those skills so that they can kind of like go and become managers, et cetera, et cetera? That is unbelievably hard. I'm not sure how to solve that problem. But what we do know is it's not about getting rid of your people and replacing with AI. That can't happen for the very simple reason that AI doesn't know what quality looks like. AI can do a tremendous amount.

29:11And the answers are in there. But if you and I were sort of – if you were a marketer and I wasn't and we both used ChatGPT in 20 minutes to come up with a new shoe brand, mine would look great, right? Because I went from nothing to this shoe. But you as a marketer – I know that's not your background maybe. But this idea is because you know what quality looks like, you'll produce something extraordinary because you know how to steer it. You know what's right and wrong, et cetera. So we still need people with domain expertise everywhere. We probably realistically just need fewer. But I'll also say that companies have been very slow to change their hiring processes.

29:43Marina Mogilko:Any advice for people who are struggling to get hired? Yeah, I do, actually. And being at NYU Stern at the business school, this has been my passion for the last 12 years, which is how do people get hired? It's actually one of the big reasons I went to Stern in the first place is that, like, doesn't that just break your heart when people are struggling to find work, right? And with AI, I think that we're in a zone right now where the opportunity is absolutely colossal for this reason. It requires understanding AI and really using AI well is an incredible tool because you don't have to learn anything.

30:13You don't need to be a coder. You don't need to be anything. Literally all you need to be able to do is talk like a human and everybody can do that. That's number one. But number two, and this is the really important thing. It's not enough to just go into a job interview and say, I know how to use AI. Because everybody can say that. And it's sort of like Excel thing. Everybody uses it, but people are using it to make a grocery list or something like that, not to transform how a hedge fund operates. So what does that actually look like? So we actually have a course, right, this Generative AI for Professionals that helps give people this exact skill, not just reinventing how they work because that's not the holy grail to me.

30:45The holy grail is can you invent the work of everybody around you? So if you go into a job interview, and this is what I tell everybody to do, go into a job interview prepared with what they do. Like they'll have given you a sense of what you should do. So go in there and say like, hey, here's my domain expertise. But let me just show you what I would do with AI and how I would reinvent this process. Because folks, and you know this too, right? Anyone can do this with Claude Gemini ChatGPT. You don't have to come up with it. You just have to monitor and steer it. So say, here's how I would change this role to even potentially put me out of a job, right?

31:21I mean, senior leaders would love that. But here's the really holy grail. This is the kicker on all this. This is the kicker. Such a Chachapiti thing to say, my gosh. I take it back. But here's the really important thing. Say, and here's how the team can use this in a very different way. Here's the exact workflow. Here's what I would change. Here's how I would think about it. Because we want to upskill a team. You don't want to just hire somebody to come in and do AI differently. You want somebody to come in and change the way it's done around that person. That, to me, is the holy grail.

31:47Marina Mogilko:Good sleep is everything. That's why Oli's Science Back Support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-theanine for both kiddos and grownups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. Erasing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Oli Sleep Solutions for the whole family at Oli.com. That's O-L-L-Y dot com. K-pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

32:24Marina Mogilko:It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. And participate in McDonald's while supplies last. I love that. And it's the whole business opportunity. When I look at like all of the brick and mortar business, even like tech businesses, there's so much that could be done. So much. For someone who wants to start a business, where do you see the most opportunity? I almost think starting a business is your best bet right now. Don't you kind of, right? I've heard so many people say in two years, you're either an entrepreneur or you're dead.

33:03Right? I mean, don't you think that though? Because think about it in two ways. First of all, we have no idea where this thing is going to poke its head. In other words, we have no idea if it's just going to wipe out marketing or something. We have no idea if it's going to wipe out writing or coding. We don't know. And it's not because the tool can't do it. It's because we don't know how fast the world around us will adopt to that tool. So given that nobody knows, not even Sam Altman or Dario Amadei or anybody else, or you or me, or you had Mustafa Suleiman on the other day, phenomenal interview you did with him.

33:30He doesn't know either, right? So if these people don't know, then how can anybody know? So here's what I would say. Being an entrepreneur, even if you're an entrepreneur alongside with what you're doing, I kind of call it the parallel resume. Do both, right? If you care about this, Gary Vaynerchuk has a great thing on this where he's like, work the extra hours. I know nobody wants to hear it, but work the extra hours. But here's how you do it. you build something that you think can transform how your team was already doing that work. In other words, once you sort of like create a process for people, that's what people want.

33:59They don't want just like somebody who can do AI because that it's, people don't always recognize it. It's sort of linear in the amount of growth you can provide for an organization. But if you're an entrepreneur, this is how I started. I'm not sure how you started, but certainly in this field for me, I just created a framework like, well, what do I think is missing from how AI is taught? And I just started going out, talking to a million people, testing it out, testing it out, testing it out. And then finally, somebody's like, you know, if you come and give a workshop at our asset management firm, like, you know, how much do you charge?

34:27And I named like some crazy amount. They're like, OK, great. I'm like, really? Like, so. Right, exactly. But here's the thing. It doesn't have to be an AI. Like, if you can use AI to come up with a new kind of marketing or a new kind of operations or a new kind of legal or something like that, people are looking for those narrow use cases that can be expanded to others. that are repeatable, I think it's the best time ever to be an entrepreneur.

34:50Marina Mogilko:It's all about strategy, right? And even like what I see, I have 35 people on my team, and I see all of them as entrepreneurs. Some of them have multiple clients, right? It's not just they're working for me. And you can be an entrepreneur within your workplace because you are reinventing the process. And then a lot of companies are now hiring abroad. And like there are people who are marketers, but they do marketing for multiple companies because they build a process that works for them. It's just such a fascinating time. This is the perfect way to say it. You could be an entrepreneur inside of your organization in a way that you never could before.

35:25And why is that? Because, and they've proven this out a million different ways with Harvard Business School did this with Procter & Gamble. They're showing that one person can essentially create a synthetic team around them. So what's always holding back entrepreneurs? Well, I don't know how to code. I don't know how to market. I don't know how to do operations, legal, whatever it is. Or I'm not a good leader. all of a sudden you have these AIs, that can be a great proxy for that. Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect. But imagine where you were before. And so what that means is that inside of your company, you can reinvent a process.

35:54Now, here's what I recommend people do. Reinventing a process gets noticed way more than you just doing more work, right? Reinventing a process. 100%. Right? And if you say, hey, we have, because now all of a sudden they're tracking ROI. But even more than that, reinvent the process and then show how you can share it with others. Show how you can make it repeatable. I was working with this big private, I do a lot with private equity. And the head of this private equity firm was saying, hey, we have five guys on this team. We're going to invite two more analysts to join that team. But I told these five people, if you can do this work without those two, I'll give you the money.

36:26And which is a great way to sort of like drive innovation in a way. But what I would also say, and what I said to him is, that's not the holy grail. Because they'll just come up with a system that works for them. They have to come up with a system that's kind of agnostic to who would use it. They have to come up with a system, a process that's repeatable for everybody else. You are now in an organization, wherever you are, in a corporation, sitting out there somewhere, working on a process. That's going to be your IP. Figure out how to do that process better with AI. Start repeating it across the organization.

36:55That will get noticed. And then what I would say, and you'd probably say too, right? Go off and start a little side gig.

37:00Marina Mogilko:Talk about becoming a chief AI architect of your company. Isn't that a great title? I love that title. And also, like, as a founder, I want that to happen. I want one of my managers to come up and say like, hey, I don't want to do this manually anymore. I came up with a process. AI is going to do that for me. I'm the test maker. I'm just going to curate whatever AI is creating. That's where I want it. And I love that you said this because you are a manager. You are a leader. And for that coming out of your mouth to say, that's what I want. I'm trying to tell people that all the time. Senior leaders want that from their people.

37:34Marina Mogilko:Absolutely. We don't want... We, senior leaders. No, no, you're right though. You're right. I mean, I don't want people to just spend hours of their days coming up with what AI can do. I want them to become managers. A hundred percent. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay. What do you think is going to happen as someone from NYU? What's going to happen to universities? Do you think in 10 years, do I need to be saving for my kids' college? Or that's obsolete by then? You do. It drives me crazy when people are saying like, oh, there won't be universities. I'm sure that we have said that throughout history.

38:04I mean, Harvard is older than the United States itself. NYU has been around for a long time. universities are not going away because they don't just do one thing, right? Like if universities were simply, you go and you pressed a button and you matrixed something into the back of your skull and all of a sudden you had that knowledge, okay, that's one thing. But that's not what teaching is. I mean, like right now, AI can absolutely, first grade through 12th grade, it knows all that information better than any teacher we have, right? So why do we still have schools? We have schools because school is more than that.

38:32Universities are more than that. Universities are where you meet people, where you exchange ideas, where you actually sort of like bounce things off people who have really lived that experience, where you become, you know, an adult and all this kind of stuff. It's not a transactional thing. Now, if we're just talking about like online school, yeah, I kind of think AI can very easily replace a lot of online school. Absolutely. And I don't mean like, you know, zooming into a class. I mean, just like something where it's like we get this. Yeah, exactly. We're already seeing that. Courses. Because why?

38:59Because all of a sudden you're going from just like a course and think about how teachers have to teach just by nature of how the human brain is structured. You have to go to the lowest common denominator when you're teaching 25 people. You can't take every single kid and understand exactly what each one of them needs. But AI kind of can, to your point about memory earlier, right? So yeah, universities are here to stay. I think that there's going to be definitely a scythe that takes out kind of like the middle structure of universities. We probably don't need so many. But yeah, there's, I mean, hundreds, a thousand universities that will still remain because of everything they offer to the human experience.

39:31Marina Mogilko:Yeah, I love that. My last question is, what type of change influenced by AI do you want to witness in your life so you can say, yes, we did it? Ooh, that's a good one. So for me, so I and my son too and my daughter, we go out to Nepal every year. We have a kind of a history of going out to Nepal and teaching AI in schools and in nonprofits and things like that. And I lived in Nepal for a while and I've seen in a country like that, which is one of the poorer countries in the world, what AI can do for those individuals gives me goosebumps. Literally right now, right? Because if you think about it, they don't have tutors, right?

40:04You and I can afford tutors for our kids probably, right? Like they can't do that. They can't even – like I've seen the schools. They're how the schools work. Now all of a sudden they have something on their phone that can be this incredible tutor. And education, it's not a silver bullet, but holy cow, does it really progress a nation. Same with medical. So I spend a lot of time in very remote areas where there's no roads or anything like that. And this idea in those areas is if you cut yourself or if you have something on your skin or if you have symptoms or something, And all of a sudden now, everyone with a mobile phone, and they do have mobile phones, has access to something resembling a doctor.

40:36Is it as perfect as a doctor? No, absolutely not. And you have to check it. And is there a risk? Yes, of course, all the disclaimers. But going with your kid is sick and your kid is coughing. Like you have kids, right? I have kids. Like what's worse than when your kid is sick? You just want an answer. And so all of a sudden you have these people who live in these very remote areas have answers that they can help their kids. That to me is where I want to go. That's why, to me, it's more than just like, oh, let's sort of see how we can get corporate America to make more money. That's great because I profit from that.

41:03We all profit from that. We're all having a good time with it. But, like, for me, it's like it's humanity. And I really mean that. Like, there's incredible things that we can do with humanity, and I'm dying to see that change.

41:11Marina Mogilko:Oh, my God. I love it. Thank you so much, Connor. It was amazing. Very practical. We love that. Thank you. Thank you for having me. That was a really fun conversation. Thanks a lot.