Episode 403: Embrace AI or Risk Falling Behind in Your Career

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:00:50:12 – (Bob Woods): Steve Cunningham joins me in the social sales link, Virtual Studios, for this episode of Making Sales Social. Brought to you by Ask Us Out that I. Steve is the founder of the Simple Income Institute, which helps people and organizations increase their productivity, performance, and profit with a I, which all sounds absolutely terrific to a revenue-generating professional like myself. Hopefully you’ll think so too. Steve has a very interesting background. He has been an attorney for exactly one week now. He is and I. And that’s a story that we’re definitely going to be digging into with that. Welcome to making Sales Social, Steve.

00:01:34:14 – (Steve Cunningham): Thanks for having me. Excited to have a conversation. 

00:01:38:12 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a let’s get this underway. So, lawyer for a week. Sounds like a sitcom in the making. I’m sure there’s a Hollywood executive out there somewhere saying this project is greenlit already. So tell me, what the heck happened?

00:01:54:13 – (Steve Cunningham): Well, it’s far less interesting than it sounds. Essentially, I was working for a law firm, and I decided I didn’t want to be midway between the second and third year of law school. You got a job. And over the summer, typically with a law firm, you get to go carry the bag of the senior lawyer at the law firm, get them coffee and learn all the ropes of what your life is going to be like when you finally graduate to the big leagues. I basically didn’t like what I saw.

00:02:24:19 – (Steve Cunningham): In terms of like, what, what I was going to do for the next 20 years to get to the level of the person that I was carrying the bag for and decided that I, did not want to join the law firm.

00:02:36:28 – (Steve Cunningham): I’m from Canada originally. There’s, like, an apprenticeship year for lawyers. At the time, my father was running a very small signage company. And he, I made a deal with him as, like he said, if you finish law school and get called to the bar and you still want to come join the family business, we can talk. And so I finished up law school, did my year of what’s called articles in Canada, the apprenticeship year. And at the end of my apprenticeship year, they asked me to join the firm, and I said, No, I don’t want to.

00:03:09:12 – (Steve Cunningham): It’s not for me. But they asked me to stick around for a week to work on a file that I had been working on. So I thought this would be a good story I could tell for the rest of my life. I’ll tell everybody I was a lawyer for exactly one week, so sure, I’ll stick around for a week. And, as I like to joke, I think it’s a world record. Nobody has fact-checked me on the title of the world’s shortest-serving lawyer, but here I am. 

00:03:35:12 – (Bob Woods): Willfully. Probably. We should answer to that too, because there, there, there may be 1 or 2 people out there who were kind of taken out, not because they didn’t want to be taken out, but you know, that that, that type of thing. So from there, you go from lawyer to lawyer for a week. Starting next Thursday on CBS, and then to your father’s signage company. Take me from that to a I because, because I’m still not getting the AI connection there, and, yeah, yeah. Please, just go and do that.

00:04:06:28 – (Steve Cunningham): Yeah. So, I started in that company very quickly, and decided I didn’t want to do science for a living for the rest of my life. We created a marketing agency, then created an e-learning company called Read It for me, which summarized bestselling business and personal development books that ran for about 15 years. And then that’s a quick 20 years of history in the 30s.

00:04:31:14 – (Steve Cunningham): But then fast forward to November of 2022, and ChatGPT comes out, and we realized very quickly that the business that we are in, which is basically a content production business, was going to get steamrolled by AI. And so if I could put in a prompt that says, give me a book summary of X, Y, and Z books, and even back then, when the tools were not that great.

00:04:57:10 – (Steve Cunningham): We could see the writing on the wall. So we decided to pivot into AI. And so we have spent the last two years, you know, both using it for our business. So step one was, hey, let’s, you know, let’s not read the book for eight hours and summarize it. Let’s take 10s and get the summary done. That way. That seemed like the first step to teaching people how we were utilizing it in our business, to ultimately today, what we do is two-fold, which is, number one.

00:05:26:27 – (Steve Cunningham): We work with organizations to install what we call our AI performance system, which essentially deconstructs every role into its component parts and gives them tools to help them do their work faster and easier with AI.

00:05:42:25 – (Steve Cunningham): So that’s how we work with organizations, and we show them how to immediately become more productive. We have a tracking mechanism that shows ROI within the first week and so on. So, we’ve been able to help organizations quickly deploy AI across their organization and not in silos. And then, we also work with consultants who will go into those organizations and help them,

00:06:08:26 – (Steve Cunningham): you know, get their people trained up, make sure that they’re deploying AI in, you know, the right and safe ways, and ultimately helping the organization find their path in this new AI powered economy that we’re all going to have to be living in here very soon. 

00:06:29:12 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, definitely. So tell me, it seems to me just when I’m out there talking with people, not only people who are at the tops of organizations, who are seeing AI, and they’re thinking, oh, yeah, we need this, we need this. And then we see the people who are underneath them who may be seeing AI as, okay, I’m going to use this for a while, and that is going to take, you know, it’s going to take my job, because that’s what everyone out there thinks.

00:06:57:20 – (Bob Woods): How do you deal with the person who is thinking, you know, who doesn’t have the vision that you have? And quite frankly, I have to, because just from when we were talking before, I, I could definitely tell that we’re that we’re along the same lines, but there’s there’s still this big segment of people out there who are thinking AI is going to railroad me out of my business, and I’m going to need to do God knows what.

00:07:23:06 – (Bob Woods): And if I get there, then there will be an AI there, and then I’ll have to do something else and yada. Yeah, yeah. You know, down the line, what do you tell these people? 

00:07:33:26 – (Steve Cunningham): So we’ve coached thousands of business leaders through this process. So we’ve seen the patterns. So we’ve created the five stages of AI psychology transformation. It’s kind of like the five stages of grief. 

00:07:50:06 – (Bob Woods): And yeah, that’s what I thought when you first said it. Yeah. 

00:07:52:26 – (Steve Cunningham): So inspired by that. So but we’ve seen them go through these different stages. Sometimes it happens over time. Sometimes it happens in like a one-hour session. So it really depends on the person. But they start off with indifference or active resistance, which was what you’re, you were just describing somebody who either thinks there’s no possible way that I could do X, Y, or Z, or they’re actively resisting it because they know I can do it, and they don’t want anybody to know that.

00:08:20:27 – (Steve Cunningham): So that’s the first stage. The second stage is actually, fear, which somebody shows them AI doing their work. And so at that point, they have a decision to make. Do I act like the way you just described, which is to try to make sure that nobody finds out that I can do my job?

00:08:43:14 – (Steve Cunningham): Or do you lean into it, and do you become what we would call an AI performance engineer? And so what we tell people is like, look, there, you really don’t have a choice in this. This is happening. And you know, there are boatloads of stories of entire departments being laid off.

00:09:04:25 – (Steve Cunningham): The only way to lose at this game is to not play. Because if somebody comes in and shows your boss, one person can do the job of ten. And you’re not the one person you’re going to be out of a job, and then you’re basically what you just described is they’re going to be launched out into a workforce that’s going to demand that they have these AI skills, and ultimately, you’re only going to get hired if you’re able to perform at ten times the capacity of somebody without AI.

00:09:29:25 – (Steve Cunningham): And so it is a, you know, it’s the cliche from back when I was first launching, AI is not going to replace you. Somebody using AI will like that’s been repeated ad nauseum, but that’s the truth. Right. So ultimately, and we’ve seen like, you know, job ads now where people are basically demanding, like you have to party, have built a whole bunch of tools to do X, Y, and Z in this role.

00:09:56:17 – (Steve Cunningham): And so you’re there basically, the world is going to demand that people become these and these AI, performance engineers, which is different from the role because it is really about how do you utilize AI in the role to produce the result. And we don’t care whether you have, you know, ten years of experience or 20 years of experience or one year of experience, as long as you can perform the role, that’s all that matters.

00:10:20:15 – (Steve Cunningham): And so I make that possible to, you know, these are people who like using round numbers, but some somewhere in the order of magnitude of ten times more productive than somebody who’s not using AI. And it’s true of every role. It’s true. And unless you’re like an HVAC repairman, you know, the physical jobs are probably the safest jobs.

00:10:42:28 – (Steve Cunningham): They’re not safe forever, but they’re safer. And knowledge work, and the line that we like to repeat is that the future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet. So, we already know how it’s going to play out. If you want to stick your head in the sand and wait, you will very soon find yourself out of a job, and it’s just a matter of when.

00:11:04:01 – (Steve Cunningham): And then you’ve got to go in and get that job back with AI. So there’s no way to win that game unless you’re one out of ten. That’s right. Yeah. And that and or start your own thing, or you know, there are many ways that you can win at this game, but pretending that it’s not going to happen in your job is not the way to win.

00:11:26:18 – (Steve Cunningham): We have a book that I read, and one of my favorite books is by, the book is called The Black Swan, and it’s about the financial crisis in 2008. And the whole there’s a story in that book called The Turkey Problem. And then the story goes like, for the vast majority of us, Turkey thinks it has an amazing existence.

00:11:48:18 – (Steve Cunningham): It gets fed every day. He gets to play with his friends in the yard. And it’s just an amazing life. So one day he wakes up on Thanksgiving and then, you know, some of those turkeys are plucked from the group, whatever a group of turkeys is called. And it goes out. And so the whole thing that we leave people with is, don’t be a turkey.

00:12:10:20 – (Steve Cunningham): That is the only way to lose at this game. And there are many ways forward, but being a turkey is not one of them. 

00:012:19:06 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, being a turkey is never one of them. The phrase I am a performance engineer, I kind of did like a dog tail kind of kind of. Oh, that sounds interesting because I think that’s probably a really good way for people to look at what they need to evolve to. So in other words, not necessarily a prompt engineer, because prompt engineering takes a lot of, you know, really specific skills. And my view, at least in terms of not only being able to use the English language in an exact way to get the prompts that you want to get out of AI, but to almost think like

00:12:59:14 – (Bob Woods):  programmer at times, to take AI through things logically so that you do get what you need to get out of it. I am a performance engineer, which almost sounds a little more holistic than that, and maybe even an easier way for people to think of themselves when they interact with AI. Do you think that I’m on the, I’m on the right course here, basically? 

00:13:23:20 – (Steve Cunningham): Yeah, I think so. I think the one thing we might quibble about is the insight that we’ve had over the last year or so is that AI has progressed the one of the things, you know, there’s always like AI as blanketing and inserting. You know, it does you know, it’s your coach, it’s or whatever. Right. So, one of the things that it is now is your prompt engineer. So the idea that you need to become a prompt engineer is now just not true. It was true a year ago. It was true a year and a half ago. Maybe, maybe.

00:13:55:20 – (Bob Woods): I agree with that. 

00:13:23:20 – (Steve Cunningham): So now it’s like it already knows. If you need to generate prompts, the best person to generate the prompt is the AI. It can do a better job than you, and I can do it way faster. So yeah. So we’re kind of abstracting up the chain, which is that you would need to produce these prompts to do the work faster.

00:14:15:02 – (Steve Cunningham): Now you don’t need to do that anymore. You have the AI produce the prompts. It does the work faster. So your job is basically to which was always the job is to figure out how to, you know, generate better results in a role that you need. Typically, a role will have a KPI associated with it. 

00:14:31:20 – (Bob Woods): Right. 

00:14:32:02 – (Steve Cunningham): Your job is to make that KPI and go in the right direction. And so there’s a whole methodology that we have around that. But that’s the basic gist, is that, you know, we’ve moved from, you know, not AI at all to everybody thinking they need to become a prompt engineer, which is just not true anymore to performance engineering. And as the AI continues to progress, there’s probably already an argument for the role of a profit engineer, which is you can imagine a future where you’re managing, you know, you get ten screens in front of you and you’ve got ten agents going off and running your business.

00:15:07:05 – (Steve Cunningham): And so you’re really, you’re a profit engineer if that’s the purpose of your business, which it should be. So ultimately, that’s the, you know, the future that we’re living into. And so that’s kind of what we’re trying to give people some language to understand what that means. And it is thinking more like a, like an engineer and probably software engineer is the right type of engineer to be thinking about and performance, which of course, like software development is going to go away like this year probably as well.

00:15:39:07- (Steve Cunningham): So yeah. So, there needs to be a new way to think about these things. And that’s our attempt at giving people a word for it.

00:15:47:09 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s, you know, a lot of times it’s just about paradigms, basically, and, and, and how you think of yourself. And I think that you really, really touched on that really well, which gets me to my next question.

00:16:04:00 – (Bob Woods): And it’s a phrase that, that, that you’ve used before, and I really like AI powered fractional executives. Why don’t you go into that a little bit more and give me an example too, because it sounds like a lot of people are going to be finding themselves besides being a performance engineer, like in this type of role, too.

00:16:22:28 – (Bob Woods): Or maybe they’re very similar. I’m not sure. You tell me. Excuse me. 

00:16:28:07- (Steve Cunningham): Yeah. So one of the things that we believe is true is that for the most part, any consulting engagement that’s going to be valuable, even today or in the very near future, is to train organizations on how to use AI to do that thing. So being a sales consultant, if you are, you know, if you’re relying on what’s in your head to be valuable in your business, serving a business client, that game is over. So, what an AI fractional executive would be. And this is actually a layover from language we would have used, you know, six months or a year ago.

00:17:07:14 – (Steve Cunningham): But the idea would be that you are now equipped to solve problems across the spectrum of an organization that previously you would not have the ability to do. And it was just our realization that as we’re working with so we have, about 120 consultants that, we work with, and they’re a mix of, you know, CFOs and CMO and, you know, chief legal officer is like the the gamut of what a business would need in terms of consulting expertise.

00:17:39:09 – (Steve Cunningham): And when you use the AI as the prompt engineer and you show the legal person, here’s the output, and the legal person would say, that’s great. You show the operations person an option in operation, saying, and I’ll say, that’s great. So once you see that enough times, the only conclusion you can make is while the AI knows what it’s doing and for the most part, it can operate, if you know how to operate the AI, you can give good advice and strategy and execution across all those elements, even if you you yourself don’t have, expertise in the vertical.

00:18:12:28 – (Steve Cunningham): So it’s really about becoming a fractional executive for the organization to help all of the functional areas of the business do things faster and easier with AI. And to the extent that they don’t want to do all the work themselves in an organization, it’s an opportunity for somebody to come in and do that work. 

00:18:34:28 – (Bob Woods): So it’s almost like, and, and tell me if I’m wrong here, kind of an AI powered SEO type of person. You know, someone who’s really kind of knowledgeable about everything and just making them. I mean, does that type of job necessarily need to be a C-level type of position or, or do you think about that?

00:18:55:10 – (Steve Cunningham): So I’d say two things in that comment. I think the SEO one would typically not have functional area expertise in the non AI world. So it’s not like it’s yellow because their skill is to just, you know, listen to a bunch of smart people and make decisions. Right. So there’s lots of stuff that they do operationally that are very specific skills.

00:19:19:02 – (Steve Cunningham): So that is sort of not the same. And then to your point, the question of like, can anybody do it? I think the answer is yes, technically, but there’s still a part of the role that you need to look at the output and say, that is right. There’s a quality control aspect of it that the more actual business expertise you have in this, the better. So I would like to use an extreme example. I wouldn’t try to farm this out to a VA in the Philippines.

00:19:46:00 – (Steve Cunningham): I would want somebody with experience to check the work and to make sure that what the AI is producing is on the mark. So I think it’s somewhere in the middle where I think, somebody who has a decent level of business experience and understands what a business is trying to accomplish and like the value chain is starting with strategy, and you got to build a product and you got to market it and you got to sell it, then you gotta deliver, and then you gotta make sure you got the right people and the finances.

00:20:18:15 – (Steve Cunningham): Like there are, there are things that are useful to know when running a business. So I think as long as they have that holistic business expertise and I think, you know, that’s not really age dependent and you could give it to somebody, to do so. I don’t know if that’s a clear answer to your question, but that’s, 

00:20:36:28 – (Bob Woods): you know, it’s pretty, you know, as clear. I like that answer. It just brings up a question, though, do you think that there’s always going to need to be that human involved or at some point is I going to get so good that they no longer need to be that kind of check and balance type of thing?

00:20:56:23 – (Steve Cunningham): I think that if you play the game out all the way to the end, it’s like, where are the humans? Like, we don’t , in theory, we don’t know where they fit. But there’s always going to be new things for us to do. And so one of the bottlenecks right now is, you know, the agent AI, where the AI can start to take over your computer just doesn’t work very well. So, there are a lot of things where a human still needs to be involved there and to to actually do the work,

00:21:25:16 – (Steve Cunningham): but I’ll say that the reasoning AI has gotten good enough that you can, if you like, squint your eyes, you can see. And you imagine that the agent tech tools are going to be faster and way better, and the entire internet is going to be built on allowing these agents to interact with websites and all that good stuff. Like you can see how that would play out and the idea that the, the, the benefits of this revolution are not going to be evenly distributed, I think is just true.

00:21:56:01 – (Steve Cunningham): Because, people who don’t take advantage of it, like I’m at least 100 times more productive today than I was, a year ago. And as I continue to, you know, me. Plus AI is going to be way more productive than anybody else. And without AI. And that’ll just become more and more and more true. So I think there will ultimately always be humans in the mix.

00:22:19:22 – (Steve Cunningham): But the levels of which they’re needed continue to get abstracted up. And ultimately the vision of like you, plus a bunch of monitors running, you know, like an entire holding company by yourself is probably to some extent true. 

00:22:37:28 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, I can imagine people in the audience are listening to this and, and they’re feeling overwhelmed by probably everything that we’ve just talked about. So with that in mind, do you have some simple, practical ways and, and let’s just bring this down more to like sales teams of revenue driven, professional type of people, since that’s our primary minds here. What are some simple, practical ways sales teams, sales professionals, managers can start using AI today without feeling like they need to be that tech expert?

00:23:11:06 – (Steve Cunningham): Yeah, I think, so one thing I’ll say is we’ve created a formula for helping people think about this. So it’s, work faster times, solve smarter times, track and communicate equals performance and profit. So the good news is sales, salespeople, anybody that generates revenue is, like, usually the most important person in the business. So that that will always remain true.

00:23:36:17- (Steve Cunningham): And so the idea is you figure out a way to free up some of your time by offloading a lot of the drudge work to AI. And that’s where work faster comes in. And so we and most people are like, well, how do I do that? So we, we create, we help folks deconstruct their role into its component parts.

00:23:56:19 – (Steve Cunningham): By asking them, what is your job title? What industry are you in and how big is your company? And that’s usually enough of a slice to get the AI to, to say, here are all the things that we think that you do in your job, and we do it by deliverables. So, deconstructing the role into component parts and then using AI in chipping away at those deliverables with AI is a place to start.

00:24:23:04 – (Steve Cunningham): And then so let’s just say you’re working through that and you’re freeing up 20% of your time, which is a conservative estimate. But that gives you some free time to go use the AI to solve problems. So now you’re working on KPI level stuff. So your boss says you need to, you know, increase your close rate from X to Y.

00:24:41:28 – (Steve Cunningham): Use AI to help design experiments based on what the world knows has worked in the past to do. And so you start using AI to generate experiments about what you can try in order to get those results to go in the right direction. And then the last thing, and this is probably the most important thing that we found, is that by tracking what you’re doing with AI and and communicating it with either a coach or, your, your boss will create this, you know, this open cycle, and closed loop cycle, I should say, 

00:25:18:28 – (Bob Woods): right.

00:25:19:03 – (Steve Cunningham): Keeping this game alive because it’s very easy to feel like you’re a rudderless ship out in the middle of nowhere when you’re doing the stuff. Am I doing it right? You know, am I getting the output I should be getting? What are other things that I’m not thinking about? So a lot of it has to do with psychology, like the tools.

00:25:35:17 – (Steve Cunningham): And the good news to your point is the tools are insanely easy to use. They’re not complicated, and they’re getting easier and easier by the day. And if you know how to send a text message to a friend, and you know how to copy and paste, those two skills are enough for you to be productive with AI.

00:25:54:00 – (Steve Cunningham):  And the rest of it is, you know, how much do you know about what ultimately adds value? Because that’s where the engineering part comes in, it is like, you need to reverse engineer how to add value to your job or to your organization. So it’s less about technical expertise like prompt engineering. Unless you’re building insanely complicated AI products, you do not need to be a prompt engineer.

00:26:22:17 – (Steve Cunningham): And I would suggest even if you’re building a product, you should be using the AI to produce the prompts that go in your product. It’s all the same kind of stuff. 

00:26:35:28 – (Bob Woods): So, yeah, definitely improve or most definitely improve the initial prompt, which is something that we do here all the time. I mean, it just seems, you know, almost, almost brainless to like, not have AI check what I can do with itself based on what you’re inputting into it. You know what I’m saying. 

00:26:53:17 – (Steve Cunningham): Yeah, absolutely. It’s still a dance. You get to like it’s a back and forth with AI and that’s ultimately how you get to the right, the right answer or the thing it’s, it’s an experiment on results. I mean that’s really what we’re saying with AI performance engineers.

00:27:06:28 – (Steve Cunningham): Free up your time so that you can go run a whole bunch of experiments to figure out what works, and then continue to do that over and over and over again. And that the game is really not complicated. And once you the cool thing is that once people get over that fear and they start using it, it actually feels more meaningful.

00:27:26:03 – (Steve Cunningham): The job feels, it has more purpose, has more meaning. And yeah, well, ultimately the people really get excited and they get to become evangelists almost for AI. And that’s the coolest part that we get to see all the time as people go from huge skeptics who are worried about their future to feeling like they’ve had more hope than they’ve ever had before. So it’s very cool.

00:27:51:08 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. That’s Yeah, yeah. So I mean, in terms of that, you know, just using AI, just us here, not only in developing SSL, but even before, you know, even with our own internal processes and things like that, we just sometimes sit back and just marvel at it. And it’s like it really did all of this.

00:28:11:21 – (Bob Woods): This is great. Let’s do more. And, yeah, you know, then go in and go all in and we were already in on it in the first place. So, you know, being able to take someone from that, from that skeptic part to, to a true believer and even evangelist, I think is really important, which actually gets into my next question.

00:28:32:01 – (Bob Woods): What do you think a mis, what’s a common misconception about AI in business that just 100% needs to go never, never be spoken about again? 

00:28:43:03 – (Steve Cunningham): Well, I think there it’s probably three, three of them. The first one is that I can’t blank. So, I can do almost all knowledge work. No, maybe that was not true a year ago, two years ago. But it is for the most part, true now. And if you take the approach of it’s not how it can, it’s not if it can do the work is how it can do the work. Right. And you explore so I think that’s one I think the second one is that, you need to be a prompt engineer.

00:29:15:11 – (Steve Cunningham): I think that, if you’re a and this is we would not have said that if you go spin up a podcast of me from a year ago, I would not be saying the same thing. But the tools get better, and you do not need to be a prompt engineer. So like it’s to your point, it’s like you don’t need technical expertise in order to use these tools productively.

00:29:36:21 – (Steve Cunningham): In fact, over time it becomes less and less true that you need technical expertise to, to use these tools, even if you’re building like once you peel back the hood on even any AI product that’s built on top of open AI, it’s like way less complicated than you think it is. Like, you think this is magical stuff going on.

00:29:54:29 – (Steve Cunningham): It’s just a prompt on top of a system, prompts that get delivered and then sent back. And the only thing you should be thinking about is, does this tool make me more productive or not? And if it does, use it. If not, don’t use it. But there’s no real magic going aside from the lemons themselves, which are truly magic.

00:30:12:15 – (Steve Cunningham): And like even the companies like OpenAI, I don’t truly know how they work. Everything else is just, yeah, use your words and tell it what you want it to do, and it’ll do a good job. 

00:30:29:21 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. So, yeah. So speaking of limbs and using words because, because that’s a lot of what we do and how we help people. But the way we do things is, we leverage AI to not only improve productivity, but to also bring in authentic city and human centered interactions at the same time. And I think a lot of people don’t get that. So, I will try to explain it. I think I do a pretty good job of it, but I want to hear it in, in, in your words, how can I be leveraged to bring forward authenticity and bring forward someone humanity in, you know, in, in copy, in, in emails, in messaging, in LinkedIn posts and things like that.

00:31:15:18 – (Steve Cunningham): I’ll answer this question, which might be like an oblique way of getting at your question, but if you give me a little bit of rope, I think this would be an interesting point. Answer. So I’m in the middle of writing a book, and as always, I’ve always had cognitive dissonance about it. One of the biggest benefits of AI is that it can tailor communications to the end user.

00:31:39:26 – (Steve Cunningham): And so it enables you so on my end writing a, writing a book and like stamping these words out and like every person that reads this book reads these exact words in this exact order, doesn’t make sense to me. So I would prefer if somebody were able to almost translate those ideas in a way that made them resonate with them, but not, not only on tone or like, you know, do you like, do you like reading humorous stuff?

00:32:06:28 – (Steve Cunningham): Do you like reading very serious stuff, but also in explaining, contextualizing the ideas in your exact set of circumstances. So I think for me, the future of books is you write books with prompts as an AI experience that will guide somebody through the ideas you want to bring into the world so that it resonates with them and that’s all.

00:32:28:28 – (Steve Cunningham): Like, I don’t care if you know what you receive are my exact words. What I care about is that you get the ideas and that it makes sense to you as you’re consuming them. So I think like in terms of like marketing stuff,

00:32:41:24 – (Steve Cunningham): the more you can interact with people, by putting an AI in the middle that helps the communication, almost like a Google Translate. It’s like, imagine everybody has their own language that they want to be talked to you in. The AI becomes this, like this Google Translate in between you and the person. So I think that’s not going to help with static content, like, like LinkedIn posts and those types of things. But I think it does definitely help with,

00:33:07:00 – (Steve Cunningham): you know, a website that’s going to help sell on your behalf. So I think there’s a lot of ways that sales and marketing will transform over the next few years. And I think having AI in the middle as a translator for the person to facilitate that conversation is where that will go, because it’s just one of the obvious benefits of using AI. 

00:33:28:21 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, no, that’s great. And actually I’m going to use that, to, to tie in as, as we start to wrap things up because we always like to, to leave the, the people who are listening and watching with one implementable take, one takeaway.

00:33:44:05 – (Bob Woods): So Steve Cunningham, when it comes to what we’re just discussing, what’s the one thing that our audience members can do right now to use AI to help them in their businesses? And, you know, like immediate, hopefully immediately implementable?

00:33:59:08 – (Steve Cunningham): Well, I think the the thing that we always start with, with folks is to use the AI to help deconstruct your role into as component parts so that you can see, visually, all of the ways in which I can be helpful for you. So, really simply, if you just go to any lab and you type in, give me an eight by eight matrix with my job responsibilities on the horizontal axis and the deliverables and tasks that I need to do on the vertical. So filling up in a matrix will give you a really clear picture of how I can be useful in your role.

00:34:41:19 – (Steve Cunningham): And then just start exploring. Asking the AI that’s always the big thing is like whatever question you’re going to ask me about AI, then I can answer that question for you. So once you know, once you can see all of the ways in which the AI can be useful, start asking questions and asking how I can help. 

00:34:59:07 – (Bob Woods): So, yeah, 

00:35:01:19 – (Steve Cunningham): that would be my one quick takeaway for folks.

00:35:02:07 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. And that’s the key to me, because we always teach two kinds of overarching things here. Number one, you’re having a chat with AI. This is and like, you know what used to be called one shot prompting and, and you put in one thing and you get a result and you pray that it’s fine. The other thing is to prompt AI to ask you questions about whatever it is that you’re doing, because the AI is going to come up with really good questions, believe me.

00:35:29:24 – (Bob Woods): And especially in, in what Steve just said, it will be able to build you an x y axis, eight by eight thing that that would be that will blow your mind just because of the conversation that you’re having with it, asking you questions. It’s almost like, I don’t want to say it’s a podcast necessarily, because, you know, we’ve been rambling a little bit and hopefully y’all have enjoyed that.

00:35:54:05 – (Bob Woods): But at the same time, you know, it’s definitely a targeted and focused thing, but the results that you will get from it, just from having the I ask you questions I think will blow your mind.

00:36:07:04 – (Bob Woods): So yeah. Good, good. That’s always good. I’m glad to hear that. So, Steve, how can people get in touch with you? 

00:36:15:19 – (Steve Cunningham): They can, head on over to simple consultants, dot AI, and, we’ve got lots of goodies there for them if they want to come in and take a deeper dive into some of the concepts that we’ve been talking about. If you’d like, we can get you a special link that we can throw in the chat or in the, in the transcripts, to get them access to some more stuff. As well. 

00:36:39:04 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You can go ahead and send me that. And that will be in the show notes for this, I guarantee it. So, so, with that, you can also find Steve on Linked In as well. So with that attorney turned AI expert with a couple other things along the way. Steve Cunningham, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. 

00:37:05:19 – (Steve Cunningham): Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. 

00:37:06:04 – (Bob Woods): Oh sure. And thank you for streaming for streaming not screaming streaming. This episode of Making Sales Social. So remember, when you’re out and about this week and every week, be sure to make your sales social.

Outro:

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