The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 365 - Value Add AI

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hey, Pete.

Pete: I feel like it's been maybe ten or fifteen episodes since we talked about AI. And in 2025, I feel like that's worth a pat on the back. Because it feels like everyone, everywhere is either talking about it or you're talking to an AI. So, I had what I felt like was a counterintuitive aha moment about using AI. I want to share it with you. And it comes from, who else, but Seth Godin.

Jen: Oh, well, I'm already in. Let's go. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Alright, AI and Seth. I should have known that he would have this interesting counterculture but very insightful take on the whole thing, which he does. And I heard it a few weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I haven't quite nailed what it means for me, but it's worth stewing on. And so, Seth created this short punchy workshop. I think it's on Udemy. I'll find it and put in the Box O' Goodies, for anyone that's interested. And in one of the opening workshop session's videos, he almost says this thing off the cuff, which is a very Seth thing to do, and I'm like, "Wait a minute. It feels like the opposite of how everyone else is thinking about this." I'll paraphrase it. But essentially, what he said was: Most people start and almost stop with thinking about, at the moment, "How do I use AI to make my life easier? How do I use AI to get through more of my to-do lists? Can I create some efficiencies with how I'm doing my work?" And what he said is, "That's the wrong question. The right question to be pondering is, 'How can I use AI to serve my clients? How can I use AI to delight the people that are my customers or my audience members or my colleagues? How do I use it to add value to others,' as opposed to, 'How am I using it to make my life easier?'" And I paused the video, banged the table, and I was like, "Goddammit Seth, that is so true." Because here we all are, myself included, going, "Well, maybe if I had transcripts of coaching calls, I could use AI to make my note-taking process easier." And it's like, "Yeah, that serves me and my note-taking process. But how does it, how might it, how could it also delight your clients?" So that's what I'm coming at you today with. I don't know where we take it, but I feel like it's worth chewing on or noodling on.

Jen: Oh, that is so rich and so Seth.

Pete: Exactly. Exactly.

Jen: Right?

Pete: Exactly.

Jen: I just love this idea that we use technology as an act of service and with a posture of generosity, as opposed to to serve ourselves and with a posture of selfishness.

Pete: Right. And in reality, it's probably both. And that, I don't think he's saying don't use it to find efficiencies in your work. But also, use it (if not, start by using it) to help the people that you want to help, to use it as a generous tool, to use your words. Yeah.

Jen: Right. Interesting. So I feel like we should maybe use ourselves as guinea pigs here and examine the ways we are using AI with our clients, to see if we're living up to Seth's standards.

Pete: I know.

Jen: I never want to disappoint Seth Godin, oh my gosh.

Pete: I know. And this is where my caveat in the intro was, I don't know if I fully like chewed this or nailed this or fixed this myself. So maybe we should, yeah, use ourselves as guinea pigs. I mean, I feel like you and I both use these tools for many different things. What are most the common use cases, at the moment, you're experimenting with?

Jen: Well, I use Zoom to have strategy sessions with clients where we discuss their goals, talk about their strategy for reaching their goals, and identify next steps the actions that they need to take.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Zoom has this amazing AI tool that, after a meeting ends, will send you not only a summary of the meeting...which is fascinating, especially if the meeting was emotional. It is incredible to see a robot take all the emotion out of it, and you can really look at something very objectively about what was said and what was landed on.

Pete: Interesting.

Jen: And then, it also sends a list of to-dos and names who's responsible for each thing. So within one minute of the meeting ending, I send that to the client. And that feels like a great use of AI. Because while it's fresh, they're able to look at a summary, see the to-dos, add it to the calendar, and all that good stuff. So, that's one way I'm using it right now.

Pete: And that feels like it's serving the client, for sure.

Jen: Oh, 100% for the client.

Pete: Yeah, I think you've done a good version of that. I would say that the version of that, that's more self-serving or less beneficial to clients or people in a meeting, is to use the transcription service that you described in Zoom or in Google Meets or whatever one you choose to use. And then, to sort of just send it around as minutes after the fact, that no one actually opens or views and uses. Like almost as a passing the buck, of, "I'm the leader saying here's what we're responsible for now." It's easy for someone to go, "Well, there's a transcript. And there were things, so like just go and poke around in there." And like, there's less accountability in a big group kind of setting. I've seen this a lot.

Jen: That's interesting.

Pete: So, someone almost uses it to take themselves off the hook. And then, no one's on the hook.

Jen: That's really fascinating. So instead of holding myself (this hypothetical person) accountable to following through with my responsibility to all of you, and summarizing the notes and making sure everyone is clear on next steps, it's like, "Well, here's the transcript. I hit the button."

Pete: Totally. "So, you just read it and figure out what you're accountable for."

Jen: Right.

Pete: Yeah. So, that can pop up. So you're not doing that, which is great. And this is perhaps the use case I've used recently, that I could be straddling both of these, of like, "Are you using it to create value for your clients?" I think so. But also, "Is there a risk that you're using this to take yourself off the hook of writing down the most important things from a conversation?" Maybe. So with certain clients, with their permission likewise, I've been experimenting with using the capture transcript / summarize transcript feature in Zoom and Google Meets. And I also still scribble notes during these sessions, because that's how my brain works. I like to scribble things down. And there was one team I was working with, in particular, who were interested in what the like general sentiment of the team is. And so, I was playing around with, "What do I notice the themes as being, having been the person that had this conversation with people?" But then also, to your point about the emotion of it all, "What does the AI think of the themes of these four or five transcripts from different people in the same thing?" And I really had to check myself, with, "Have I come up with my own kind of discernment or opinion or overlay of what I think the themes are? Or am I just purely relying on what it thinks the themes are?" What they're ultimately paying for is my interpretation of what the themes are, not necessarily outsourcing that to a robot.

Jen: Right.

Pete: So I've been like, "Am I cheating? Am I making sure that this is Pete's idea, based on all his experience and knowledge and skills and tools?" And I think that's adding value to the client. But I'm like, I feel like there's a small question mark there. That I'm like, this is why the Seth thing really hit me, I think. It was like, "Huh, maybe it can be both. Maybe it can make your life a little bit easier, but also add value to the client."

Jen: Mmm-hmm. Well, one of the things that I'm doing with AI is helping my clients understand how to use it better in the work that they're doing. So like, you know, most of my clients, they're people doing Broadway musicals. That's what they do. And ChatGPT doesn't know that much about Broadway musicals. It really doesn't. So like, outsourcing some of the questions they have about the intricacies of music to AI, when it comes to Broadway scores, not a great idea. No. It's going to tell you a lot of things that are just plain not true. And you may look a fool, if you believe it. But it is very knowledgeable about pop music. It is very, very knowledgeable about pop music, and has great ideas about song choices and interpretations and things like that, when it comes to using it. So I have been able to help my clients understand when to use it and when not to use it in their own careers and their own work, which does feel like I'm really helping them avoid some pitfalls and also having to avoid a steep learning curve that may not be worth it in the end, for certain subjects.

Pete: Yeah, I love that example. That's a good one. Likewise, I mean, I gave a talk on this topic a few weeks ago at a conference, about leadership and AI. And I basically was like, "We could talk about...you know, everyone wants to talk about anything that relates to this. But I want to give you just three super practical things you could use this for, like use cases." And the one that I think got the most attention was using it as a leadership coach. And what I said to them, was like...I mean, I've coached thousands of leaders from around the world. And what I know about executive coaching and leadership coaching is, in an organization, it's usually reserved for a select few senior leaders who have budget and a desire to get coaching. And they're the kind of people that I work with. And I think that has a place, and I think that's really important, and I think it's really effective. And in most organizations, you have 98% of the people who don't have access to a leadership coach or to have a development conversation. And maybe they have a really good manager that helps them with that, or maybe they have a great friend that helps them with that. But in most cases, people don't have access to having a developmental coaching type conversation. So I've said to hundreds (probably thousands) of people at this point, "You should be encouraging people to use this as a leadership coach, when it makes sense, like, 'I have this meeting next week that I'm facilitating. And I'm feeling a bit nervous. What's a technique I could use to help me ground this in an effective presentation strategy," or, "I'm feeling uncomfortable about having a difficult conversation tomorrow. How can I make sure it goes well?" Like, these are questions that people have but don't ask anyone, because they don't have anyone to ask right now. And so, I feel like as someone who understands that sphere of leadership development relatively well, I'm trying to help people see that they can use these tools for that.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Okay, so we've got some cool use cases. And this leads me to this article I read the other day, which is a HBR article. Which I'll try and dig up, and put in the Box O' Goodies. It was like, I read it on an airplane in someone's HBR that they left in the chair. So I don't even know if I'll be able to find it, but I will do my best. And it was a really great interesting article on AI and trust and different use cases. And I will paraphrase my memory of it. Essentially, what happened is they had this organization who took the CEO's emails, previous Q&A transcripts, ideas, and turned it into a chatbot, an AI-driven chatbot that employees were then able to use to ask, in theory, the CEO a question. And the "CEO" would then respond, i.e. the chatbot would respond, without actually needing to bother the CEO. And so, it was perceived originally as this cool way to democratize access to the CEO and also to protect his time. But what they discovered, I found particularly interesting. Which was, they did a bunch of studies that basically said, "Some of these are responses from a chatbot AI and some of these are responses from the actual CEO himself." And what happened was, if you thought it was from the CEO, you trusted and valued the response more, even though sometimes it was actually from AI, but you thought it was from the the human the CEO. And conversely, if you thought it was from AI, even if it was actually from the CEO, you trusted it less and found it less valuable. And I can't stop thinking about this article, because it feels like an important overlay of this whole conversation we're having. That, yes, it might be adding value in theory. And there also might be trade-offs of that. So if I think something is AI, am I trusting it a little less? And I kind of think that's true, too. If I read something as a response that I thought was from, you know, a CEO, I would be much more likely to believe it, in certain contexts, than if I got a response from a chatbot. So I'm like chewing on that as an overlay to all of this, of like we need to be careful just how much we're trying to use these tools to add value to others, because there's all these unintended consequences. Like, trust? Pretty important.

Jen: Yeah. Well, it's just, it's making me wonder about trying to pass something off as something that it is not. Like, you know, I have clients all the time sending me drafts of emails that have to go out. And lately, I have decided I'm just going to call it out when I know

Pete: Yeah. It's pretty obvious.

Jen: And I say, "This sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, and it needs more of your voice. I've never heard you say any of these words before. The sentiment is right, but the sound is wrong." And most times, people will be like, "Yeah, you're right. This is the first draft that ChatGPT helped me write."

Pete: There's this like viral acknowledgement that ChatGPT (I think it still does it, but it definitely used to do it) uses the em dash.

Jen: It does. It loves the em dash.

Pete: It loves the em dash. And like, no other human uses the em dash the same way that ChatGPT does, so it's a dead giveaway. And it's like, there's all these viral examples of, you know, an email from a CEO that went to customers, and it's just like em dash, em dash, em dash. It's like, "Well, ChatGPT wrote that, so I don't trust it or believe it anymore."

Jen: Right. It makes you realize...I mean, maybe it's so obvious but maybe we just take it for granted, there is so much value in trust.

Pete: Right.

Jen: And to your point earlier about Seth and, "Are you using this to bring value to your clients," I'm like hearing some shadow question there, of like, "Will your trust with your clients be strengthened or weakened by the use of this tool?" And maybe it's also like, "...by your transparency around the use of the tool?"

Pete: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, that's good. I like that, yeah. "How could you use these tools to help build more trust," feels like a counterintuitive but important question. Because, yeah, I feel like you're right. In that, if I'm transparent about the fact that, I don't know, like I've got a coaching AI that I've trained on my blog and some of our podcast transcripts. I haven't shown it to anyone yet, except for maybe you.

Jen: Yep.

Pete: And the theory is, at some point...I don't know if I will but at some point, I could give access to certain clients and say, "This is an AI trained on me, on my content. It is not me. You can still email me a question if you have it. However, if you also want to leverage this or use this, and recognizing it is an AI, have at it. It's got access to everything that I've written and spoken about on the podcast." And if you're transparent about that, maybe that does actually add value. And perhaps (maybe it's a stretch) builds a little more trust with people, because they go, "Oh, I trust that I can still go to Pete if and when that's appropriate. And I also trust that this is trained in a way that is going to give me a response that might sound something like what Pete would say."

Jen: You know, it's making me realize, in our line of work (and I know this doesn't apply to all of our listeners, but like for anyone who is in a direct-facing relationship with clients), part of the value a client gets from working with you, Pete, and I know, for sure, that part of the value a client gets from working with me is feeling and knowing that they have been seen, heard, understood, and fully expressed and received. And I don't know that a chatbot will do that. Which is making me think that maybe implementing a chatbot isn't lessening the value of access to Pete, but actually increasing the value of access to real Pete, increasing the value of access to real Jen, because real Jen will look you in the eye and tell you the truth.

Pete: Yeah. I have a friend who's probably one of the most sought-after brand minds in Australia, like unbelievable brand marketing agency kind of brain. And I had this conversation with him, around, "Is it potentially damaging to one's brand, in my line of work, for example," we'll use that as the example, "to say, anyone can access my thoughts as a coach all the time. Here it is." And he said exactly what you just said, which, he goes, "No, the opposite will happen." Which, his perspective is, if it's done well, if the experience of that AI is pretty good, what it will then do is, because people start to value that as, "Oh, that's been useful. Imagine what it must be like to work with the real artifact, the real thing, the real human." And all of a sudden, it actually increases your brand value. I thought that is wild, because that was counterintuitive when I first heard it.

Jen: Wow, fascinating. Well, Pete, I am interested to know from any listeners who want to write in and share how you are leveraging AI tools to serve your clients with a very generous posture and to generate more trust. I would love to hear your thoughts about that.

Pete: Send us your ideas, yes. We love hearing these. And I feel like there's so...I mean, I asked a question in this talk I gave about other use cases. And some of the things that came out, I was like, "Oh my god, I never would have thought that." There's just such a litany of cool ideas out there, so please reach out: hello@thelongandtheshortpodcast.com.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.