Nova Chat - AI in the C-Suite

Jeremy · 0:00

Hey, friends, welcome to episode 304 of The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's your host, Jeremy Burrows, and I'm excited to have the opportunity to share another Nova Chat conversation. And I'm going to keep my intro short because there's a lot of great insight in this conversation. And it's all about artificial intelligence in the C-suite. And Maggie Olson talks with Lawrence Coburn, Jessica McBride and Fiona Young. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. Again, another Nova Chat with my friend Maggie Olson. You can check out the show notes at leaderassistant.com/304 to find out about all of those featured in this chat.

Speaker 3 · 0:43

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 1:00

Hey, Leader Assistants, have you heard the Nova Chief of Staff Certification course is about to see a price increase? But don't worry, you can enroll now, lock in the current rate, and start whenever you're ready with lifetime access. Nova's mission is to give you the ultimate student experience. They've packed the course with dozens of templates, self-paced learning, hands-on practice, multiple instructor touchpoints, peer engagement, and even guest-authored assignments. With over 500 students across 22 countries, Nova is the top spot for Chief of Staff Learning and Development. Don't wait. Enroll today and join the community at leaderassistant.com/nova.

Maggie · 1:45

Thank you guys all for being here. We're all shocked. We had 600 plus people register for this event, and the list continues to grow. I think we've got almost 150 people joined at this point, and we will absolutely send this recording out to everybody who's registered. So don't worry about that. You will get the recording in the next day or two. And my name is Maggie. I am the founder of Nova Chief of Staff. You can learn more about us at novachiefofstaff.com. But today is really all about this very relevant discussion around AI use in the C-suite. Specifically, we're going to talk about Chiefs of Staff, Executive Assistants, CEOs, the AI landscape over the next five years, the actual practical tools and things that you could all be doing right now if you're not already. In regards to AI, we're going to start very generally around like what are the basics? What is AI? What's generative AI? And then we'll leave you all, we'll send out in our email with recording some tools from Fiona, Lawrence and Jessica to show you some quick and easy things that AI is already doing and that you can be doing with AI. So introductions, Lawrence Coburn is the CEO and co-founder of Ambient AI. And Ambient is an AI assistant purpose-built for the chief of staff. It's very exciting. Previously, he co-founded Twine, a leader in network software and Double Dutch, the market leader for mobile events. Lawrence lives in the Mission District of San Francisco. If you missed that earlier, we were doing a little bit of where you located on our panel here. And he lives with his entrepreneur wife and their 13-year-old daughter who's a tennis champion. When he's not working, you can find him riding a bicycle or playing tennis with his daughter. So moving on to Ms. Jessica McBride. Jessica is the brains behind Tech Savvy Assistant, a go-to hub for modernizing admin work through tech with over 10 years in the admin field. She knows the ins and outs of the job and how tech can make it better. Jessica is all about teaching. So she's on a mission to help admin pros get tech savvy and make their lives easier and up their game. She does this through various channels, but speaking events are her thing. So notably, she was a speaker at the 2023 Admin Professional Conference in Las Vegas, and her knack for breaking down complex tech topics and her engaging style make her a popular speaker. So we're very happy to have both Jessica and Lawrence. And finally, Fiona. So Fiona is the founder of CARVE, a series of live digital courses for executive assistants to learn AI, create capacity and develop into strategic assistants, carving out their career growth in the process. So before launching CARVE, Fiona spent five years leading learning programs at Hive Learning, the B2B peer learning app. She previously ran L&D for Blenheim Chalkut, one of the world's most successful venture builders overseeing group learning strategy and programs for 3,000 people across 25 ventures. Fiona started her career as an executive assistant in entrepreneurial businesses. So again, I'm Maggie. I am not an AI expert, but I am going to be moderating this panel with these wonderful AI experts here. So thanks again, everybody, for joining us. And we are going to dive right in. So Lawrence, we are going to start with you. Can you, like, let's just break it down back to basics. A lot of us probably weren't even talking about AI until a few months ago or maybe until a few weeks ago when we saw this panel come up. What is AI and what is generative AI? What's the difference?

Lawrence · 5:23

Yeah. So I think AI has been around in some format for 50, 60 years. So the work has been happening in this domain for a long time. Generative AI is a class of AI technologies. And so just to sort of set some context, like some of the things that you might have heard of before, computer vision, the ability for computers to sort of recognize, like this is a picture of a cat. Machine learning, the ability for computers to make predictions about what's going to happen based on a dataset. But the big jump that's happening with generative AI is the ability for computers to create new content. And content could be an article, it could be an image, it could be a song. And so the ability to sort of conjure up out of nothing, a song that never existed before, a piece of art that never existed before, or a blog post that never existed before. This is the new thing. And this is the thing that's starting to approach sort of human levels of creativity. And that's, I think, why the world is getting really excited right now.

Maggie · 6:28

Okay, so can you kind of maybe go back a little bit and just help us understand the difference between AI and then what's generative AI? I hear both of those terms a lot.

Lawrence · 6:38

Yeah, so I mean, the easiest way my co-founder likes to describe it, which I think is smart, is like previous flavors of AI have been about analysis. Like think about an analyst. Generative AI is about creator, like creating new stuff. And that's human-grade content.

Maggie · 6:54

Got it. Okay, okay. Fiona, do you have anything to add there in terms of just the basic definition around AI and generative AI to help our audience?

Fiona · 7:04

Yeah, I think that differentiation between analyst and creation is a good one. I would just say on AI specifically, you would imagine that these are typically systems that were making decisions. So they're taking data inputs and they are able to autonomously make decisions using that data. For example, think about some of the technology that's been around for decades, like credit card fraud detection, right? I mean, I can remember being abroad when I was a kid and having our credit card stopped because, you know, suspicious activity. So, you know, that stuff has been around ages. But what's new is this ability for the machine to be able to create totally new content and really everything from text, images, voice, code, you know, and that is really game-changing because for the first time ever, it's really threatened what you might call white collar jobs, you know, death-based knowledge workers. Although obviously automation is old news for folks in front-line positions, I think this is the first time for those of us working in death-based jobs that we're thinking, oh, shit, this could actually take my job.

Maggie · 8:15

Interesting. Jessica, since we're just starting out here, I do want to hear from all of you from like a definition perspective. Anything to add or anything that you help teach your students around? How do we understand just AI from a basic level nature?

Jessica · 8:30

Yeah, so the way that I think about it is like we've interacted with AI. Like Lawrence said, it's been around for 50, 60 years. There's been several different versions of it that have slowly integrated more and more into our day-to-day life. Like all of us have interacted with like Google or Siri or Alexa, and that's a very basic version of AI. You're giving it a command, it's processing that data, and then it's just giving you a response. And never before have you been able to give it an idea and then bring that idea to life, for example. It's been the difference of just a yes, no, and a yes, and. And I think that when you're learning to use it, it's saying like, what am I wanting to create here? What am I wanting to explore? And using it really as a thought partner is always how I've described, like using ChatGBT or like large language models is it's digging into it and creating something with yourself and using it to boost that. So it's just it's expanding and empowering us in a way that we haven't been able to utilize before.

Maggie · 9:34

Okay, yeah, I really like that. You're giving an idea and then it's bringing it to life. And that is the generative part of AI. Does that sound right? Yeah. So Fiona, why is it important that we start learning about AI now? And this is just a general question, not role specific. So all of us, everybody, why is it important that we start learning about it?

Fiona · 9:57

You know, this space is moving so quickly. I don't know about all of you, but I'm subscribed to many, many dozens of daily newsletters. And I personally find it overwhelming to keep up and it's my job to keep up. So I think what I would just advise everyone here today is, given the pace of development in this space, you need to start now because every day that you wait, it just gets harder and harder. And, you know, I get it. For those of you out there who are EA'd, I have literally been in your role. And I know it's really tough to prioritize your own learning. So like I'm not sitting here saying, you know, gosh, you have so much time sitting around twiddling your thumbs. Like, why don't you go out and do this? Like, I really do get it. But ironically, I think if you take on these AI tools, you'll actually create capacity for yourself. You know, so it's like an investment. You know, you need to invest a bit of time to wrap your mind around this, understand how it's going to work for you in order to pay out dividends over the long run, which you'll see in the time savings that you make on a daily and weekly basis when you're using these tools. And, you know, I think it's also worth mentioning, too, that, you know, if you have extra capacity from using these fabulous tools, like it's great to be able to use that to take on the more strategic work and the more human work, but it's also great to use that spare capacity to just give yourself some work-life balance. Most of the folks I'm working with, C-suite assistants out there, are working 60-hour-plus-week, every week, week-on-week, and that's obviously not sustainable. So, you know, another way to look at these tools is like, what a great opportunity for me to get a bit more balance in my life.

Maggie · 11:36

Yeah, I think that's super helpful. So diving in a little bit to what you said, you said it's going to get harder and harder the longer we wait. So what exactly is going to get harder about learning AI if we keep waiting to learn it? Have you heard? The Nova Chief of Staff Certification Course price is going up in January of 2025. Enroll now and with lifetime access, start whenever you please. Here at Nova, it's our mission to provide the very best student experience possible. Our course is chocked full of features and resources designed just for you. Dozens of templates, self-paced online learning, hands-on practice, multiple instructor touch points, peer engagement opportunities, guest-authored assignments, the list goes on. With 500 students across 22 countries, Nova is the premier destination for Chief of Staff Learning and Development. Enroll today and join us.

Fiona · 12:37

Yeah, just given how many tools are coming out literally every day, and the pace of development of the tools that are already out there, I think the longer you wait to learn the fundamental skills around them, for instance, when we think about LLMs, large language models, so tools like ChatGPT, you may call them AI Chatbots, the basic skills of that tool are really around prompting. Funny enough, that is the same skill that you need to use any AI component in any tool that is using GenAI within it right now. For instance, if you're using Notion as a way to gather and organize all of your documents in your life, well, you still need to know how to prompt the engine that sits within Notion. It is really the same thing we did. Those fundamental skills of how to use these tools, how to actually get value out of them will carry across the whole school's landscape and will benefit you moving forward. The sooner you can really get on that path to learn them, better.

Lawrence · 13:48

I think just to chime in on that, I think a little more optimistic flavor of what Fiona is saying. I agree with what she said is that you are still early enough. The foremost experts in generative AI applications like the actual tools build on top, they have about a year of experience. The fact that you are here on this webinar means that you have a chance to be the expert at your company in this emerging domain. Let's not make any mistake here. This is the big one. I'm here in Silicon Valley. There have been two big waves in the last 20 years. One is the Internet itself, the second is mobile. This one is going to be bigger than all of them. I think that you're here, there's an opportunity to learn a skill set that's going to stamp your ticket for the next 20 years of your career because I believe that the chiefs of staff that are fluent in AI are going to outcompete the ones that are not. It's just an education process and the tools are out there. I agree with Fiona 100 percent.

Maggie · 14:51

Fiona, you mentioned prompting. I just want to make sure that we're just describing the terms that we're using. Before ChatGPT came out, I thought that there was this art and this science to putting the right thing into Google to find what I was looking for. And that's what prompting is in the ChatGPT space too, right? It's like, what do we put into ChatGPT to get back what we're looking for and what we need? I'm sure you can define it a little bit better, but do you want to just kind of close the loop on that?

Fiona · 15:21

Yeah, precisely. So a prompt is simply the question that you're putting into this tool or the instructions that you're giving it, which then leads to, of course, giving you an output. And so the richer that question, the more detailed, the more context you're able to provide, the better the result that you'll get out the back of it. And so you can think of it as, like, imagine you're talking to a five-year-old, you know, you're going to really need to spell things out. This is a, you know, this is a model that does not have background information on you and your very specific world and what you're looking for. So you really need to define that clearly. And what I find so often with folks I work with is that is, oh, this stuff is so underwhelming. Like I've used ChatPPT, it was rubbish. And, you know, I ask people questions, well, how did you use it? And walk me through, what did you put into it? And yeah, I mean, I think it's very easy to put a very simple question into these models and get a very simple answer that is really not aligned to what you're looking for. So it's all about the nuance that you add into that prompt. And also embracing a kind of a back and forth. It is a chat bot, you're designed to chat with it, and to have a back and forth conversation and not to take that first output as being the final one. And I think that's a really critical learning too in prompting.

Maggie · 16:41

Okay, awesome. Yeah, thanks, I think that's super helpful.

Lawrence · 16:44

Have you all heard the comparison between prompts and like spells, like a book of spells, like a grimoire is a book of spells. And I really like that because when you're talking to these models, you don't really know what's going to come back and you have to use to Fiona's point, exactly the right words and describe exactly what you want in a way that the machine can understand. And so it's almost like you're talking to this like magical being. So like the spell book comparison is really cool.

Maggie · 17:13

I love that. Before we move on, anything else to add on this topic? Okay, so let's dive into some role specifics here. I want to start with you, Jessica. Why do EAs specifically need to jump on generative AI? So let's talk about the EA role. Take your time. Let's dive into all of the things. We're on a 90-minute panel. And just a reminder to the folks, we will get to questions, take them down. We'll run through questions towards the end of the panel, but we'll keep this going here from a flow perspective. So why EAs and generative AI, Jessica?

Jessica · 17:52

Okay, there's a lot. So for one thing, the administrative, we talked about a little bit earlier, why it's important in general, why the people are learning is the administrative profession has been shrinking significantly. The average age of an executive assistant in North America is something like 49. We haven't been able to get a lot of people really interested in this role for a lot of reasons. It's kind of gotten to be a bit boring at times. And I think that by embracing AI, we can really shift the admin field in an entirely new direction. Because we have this massive set of generalist skills, and they're really not being utilized by a lot of organizations to the best of their capabilities. And a lot of times the blocker is something as simple as I don't have anybody to ask. When I was an executive assistant, I was the only executive assistant in the office. And that's what led me to joining a bunch of different admin organizations, groups, Facebook groups even. And I found myself kind of mentoring even more than I was really asking for opinions. But people really needed help and guidance and didn't have anybody to turn to. And I was an executive assistant right on the cusp of Chat GPT. I got laid off in February 2023. So I had started using Chat GPT just to see how it would solve problems for executive assistants in my communities. And I was recognizing very quickly what a great tool it was for things like templates, for standard operating procedures, for just working through a problem that you didn't have anybody else to work through it with. There were a lot of ways that wouldn't be as obvious to start using Chat GPT. But since it's really become my go-to, I don't use Google that much anymore because Google wasn't helpful for me when my CEO came to me and asked me to create an engaging presentation with very little guidance on actually what to put in. I can't go to Google and be like, tell me what I need to put in for a pitch deck. But I can go to Chat GPT and say, this is my company, this is what I do, this is the outcome that I want, help me create a pitch deck outline, and it's going to create this step-by-step outline for me. This is why I talk about using it as a thought partner, is because I'm not going to Chat GPT and asking it to procure that data for me. I'm asking it, put my thoughts in an organized way. How can I take the knowledge that I have and transmute it and use Chat GPT to put it into a much more organized fashion? Thinking about using it that way versus I'm going to Chat GPT to get an answer is really where the magic is at, and where it becomes this incredible tool. I do think that the more and more we invest in learning and understanding AI, the more room there is to grow within your role and your space.

Maggie · 20:50

Okay. Thank you. Fiona, you also train assistants, so I want to give you an opportunity to jump in here. Anything to add?

Fiona · 20:59

I think what Jessica said was brilliant, and I guess zooming out as a person who's spent the last decade in learning and development and worked on a lot of change programs with people teams, HR teams, like I'm sure many of you in the audience would have done as well. I would just say that my view is that AI may not take your job, but it will fundamentally change it. And what I mean by that is it's going to take a whole lot of repeatable admin off your plate. So if you can just imagine, like in a year's time, 50% of the time you're currently spending in a calendar, 50% of the time you're currently sending an e-mail just vanishes, it's going to fundamentally, seismically change the shape of your role. And so one thing that I really like to suggest for folks, you know, in an EA role, thinking about AI is lean into this stuff now so that you are able to rewrite your own job description because we are all going to have to rewrite our job descriptions, myself included. You know, and don't let her do that to you. Be on the front foot thinking now about what could my role look like if literally half of what I do right now vanishes in a year. You know, and I think that's the mindset we all need to be in. And certainly a lot of the reports I'm reading as well, you know, are showing similar things. I think the WEC report that came out last year showed that something like 60% of people are going to need to reskill by 2027. That is not far off, right? That's a few years time. So that's a pretty incredible statistic. So yeah, start thinking now about how you're going to retool and use the strengths you have, like Jessica mentioned. We are amazing generalists. We have such an incredible ability to see the bigger picture as well as work on the nitty-gritty and build relationships and do all the human stuff brilliantly. You know, there's a whole lot of things you can do with that. It's just all about diving in there, understanding the potential we have right now with AI and really thinking critically about what your role might look like and shaping it for yourself.

Maggie · 23:05

Yeah, that, you know, it just makes me think about how everybody in the C-suite, including executive assistants, are leaders. And if all of our leaders aren't adopting first, then we're going to be out of the loop. We're not going to be able to guide the people on our teams and within our company. So from a leadership perspective, it seems to make a lot of sense as well as a tactical and administrative and like reducing the workload and being able to think more strategically. So Lawrence, let's dive into why chiefs of staff specifically need to jump on generative AI.

Lawrence · 23:37

Yeah, I love what you just said. And I think it's related to the unique aspects of the chief of staff role. I think that the chief just by definition is such a low ego role. They have to be thinking about how to push their organization forward, how to unlock their principle. The chief of staff is the queen or the king of the special project. And so what I'm hearing from the field is that there is no role that is better suited to usher in the next chapter of generative AI into a company than the chief of staff. They are made for this moment. So I think there are two lenses here. I think there's a selfish lens, and I don't mean this in a bad way. I think there's a lens for everybody on this call is like, you need to prepare yourself for the next chapter of knowledge work. And that's what we're here for. We want our resumes to be better. We want to unlock more time. As Fiona says, we want to re-imagine, what could our role look like if we had 10 to 15 more hours a week to put into strategic work? Like how could we move the dial for ourselves, for our company? But then I think there's a company-wide lens, which is companies compete with each other. And I think the ones that are quick to embrace the new skills and get hours back, a team of five doing the work of 20 because they're using these tools, like that's an advantage. So I think the chief has to think about both lenses, helping themselves, preparing themselves, but also helping their or get fluent with this new tech.

Maggie · 25:08

Yeah, that's great. I totally agree. And I think that's why everyone's here on this call. So whoever mentioned that you guys are all, I think Lawrence, it was you earlier, like everybody on this call is taking the right first step or wherever they are in their journey to learn more. Figure out ways to adopt and understand the language. So cheers to everybody for signing up for this webinar. All right. So let's dive into tactically a little bit more. How should assistants and chiefs of staff be using AI now? So let's talk about the things that we're doing every day. The ways that AI can help our work, the actual assignments and responsibilities that we're doing in our job. Shall we start with Chiefs of Staff, Lawrence, and go back to you?

Lawrence · 25:53

Yeah, sure. So I think this term rhythm of business is where the opportunity is right now. Chiefs of Staff have a lot on their plate. There's things coming at them from all sides. So I'll start with sort of like a high level metaphor of what AI can be for you. I think it can be a backstop. It can be an assistant that is helping you capture the notes while you run the meeting. It can be an assistant that makes sure that after you get done with 10 calls, that there's a nice tight list of the action items that you have to follow up on so that you're not dropping any balls, that you're making sure that you're keeping the trains running on time. So I think you can go right down the workflow of the Chiefs of Staff around calendar, around meeting notes, around action items, around projects, around creating decks, around writing memos and writing summaries. All of this stuff is right in the wheelhouse of AI today. There are startups working on every part of that flow. So I can share our little market map of the different lanes of a Chiefs of Staff and what are some companies and products to check out. I'll share that after. But yeah, I think the way to think about it is how can I save time? How can I take the stuff at the bottom of my list that's important but repetitive? And how can I automate that with generative AI?

Maggie · 27:20

Yeah. And I think another component to everything that you said is then Chiefs of Staff driving that alignment on the leadership team and with an AI tool that is doing all the things you mentioned for all of the people on the leadership team and then kind of from a macro level summarizing the next steps and the priorities and the follow ups. It just seems to compound and expand on itself the possibilities and the impact. All right, so let's dive in to EA specifically. Fiona, let's start with you. So how should assistants be using AI right now tactically in their job with their current responsibilities?

Fiona · 28:01

Yeah, I mean, I'd love to start actually by just suggesting where to start, which is, in my view, dabble. You know, I like to say the words Roger Scare, you've got to F around to find out. You know, it's not until you actually start trying out these tools and going through the kind of sometimes messy, chaotic process of testing them and working out which ones are good, where they're going to work for you, where you're going to get leverage in your workflow. And by the way, which ones are completely crap or don't work for you and don't meet your needs. And there's a lot of crap tools out there at the moment because, you know, everybody is launching them daily. And, you know, and some of them as well are not taking data privacy, infosec very seriously. And so I think those are all things to be aware of as well. I'd also suggest when you think about starting, like even if your company has restrictions on how you could use AI at work, there's nothing stopping you from starting in your personal life. And actually, I always suggest to folks, probably the best way to start using a tool like ChatPPP is using the phone app. Because it is so intuitive, it has the most incredible voice recognition ever. And when you use it in your personal life, you don't have the fear that, oh gosh, am I going to put something in there? I shouldn't. Am I going to get into hot water with my boss or my organization? And obviously, discretion is really key as an executive assistant. So I would say, as a starter, just try using this in your personal life because I think that's a great way to understand the capabilities and also the limitations. And then thinking more practically about specific ways you can use these tools. So I like to think of it as in any sort of productivity tool that you might use at work. So when you think about the big time sack, email, calendar, there are AI tools for those. And in the email space, you're looking at tools that are auto-composing your email for you. In some cases, they are drafting them and leaving them in your draft. Of course, they are filtering your emails and categorizing them as they come in and nudging you as well and all the good things like you need to reply to this. For calendar, there's great functionality out there that shortcuts bits and pieces of calendar management, but we're absolutely not very set with autonomous calendar management. I'd say the best tools are allowing you to, for instance, set up templates for different types of meetings. So for instance, anytime I have a one-to-one, that's a 30-minute by default, that's classed as a medium priority, that needs zero buffer time. Anytime I'm meeting with a client, that's 60 minutes, that requires a 30-minute buffer time, and that's always high priority, etc. It really help move us towards that autonomous and strategic calendar management. Then when you look at the broader suite of tools, I mean, it really runs from building a TrezDeck to design tools, to all-in-one tools like Notion and Coda, which are really trying to disrupt documents in your workflow. Task and project management, one of my favorites is TapGate. I use it all the time. Then when you start to think about processes, tools like Scribe and Guide are able to capture SOPs by just recording their screen as you do something. If you can imagine how easy and simple it would be to write up an SOP, just clicking it through, say the process that you book a vacation in your new HR tool, for instance. I also think just diving in to TAT CPT specifically, like that tool is incredibly powerful for executive assistant. I have a guide that includes 130 ways that you can use this in your workflow. I'm not going to be able to cover all of that today. I also know afterwards we'll be sharing around an AI tool guide that I've created which has 50 tools I think are most useful for EAs right now, including my unbiased reviews. Not sponsored by anyone. I have no relationships with anyone, just my honest opinion on them and what's good and what's less good. But yeah, very happy to dive in to specific tools if folks want to use the chat to just share what they're most interested in. I'm sure we'll have time in the Q&A as well.

Maggie · 32:15

Yeah, I love that. So a great reminder, Fiona, we will be sending everybody who's registered kind of a few takeaways. Fiona just mentioned a huge guide from her. Jessica has a huge guide as well. Lawrence is going to show the very awesome ambient tool built for Chiefs of Staff that if we can, we'll share a meeting summary with you. I don't know if the webinar allowed our ambient tool in, but we'll share a lot of information with you via email after this as well. Thanks, Fiona, for reminding me about that. I want to share just the way that I started dabbling, which is the first thing you said, just dabble into ChatGPT. For those of you that are like, I just haven't started yet, I don't know what all those things are. Like Fiona said, download ChatGPT, Google it. There's a web browser, also fine. I had a few ingredients for a Thai curry, I think it was, several months ago at the end of last year. And you can make Thai curry a lot of different ways. But I didn't have all the ingredients for like any recipe that would have popped up. So what I said is, how do I make Thai curry with these ingredients? I don't have these. And a recipe popped up for me and I followed it. And it was the first time I'd followed a recipe from ChatGPT. So thanks AI for that, for that use case. But there's so many, right? Like, how do, what do I want to name my next child? I want it to be four letters. Give me 50 options. I want an A in there. I mean, it's fun. So pop around, play with it. If nothing else, like, leave this call and just practice a little with something fun. So Jessica, over to you. Same question. I want to hear, you know, anything that Fiona, you know, you want to add on specifically from an EA perspective. How should assistance be using AI right now?

Jessica · 34:07

Um, OK, so like Fiona talked about, there's just a million and four ways that you can actually use it. Um, I think that I have like 22 different categories, um, in my course of just different areas. Um, for ChatGBT, I like to use it, like I said, as a starting place. Uh, in comedy, they have something called no bad ideas. So it's like to kind of get ideas rolling. They're just like no bad ideas, like say whatever you want. And I feel like that's what it's like to work with ChatGBT, is I don't have to be embarrassed about, like, my silly little idea. I can just kind of talk through it and get all the steps that I need. Uh, and I think that's one of the best ways to use it, is like I said, it's a thought partner. It's how do I start using it in my day-to-day? Well, I don't know how to answer this email, so let me ask for this email and have it respond in a professional and polite tone. Or, you know, how do I write this awkward email on my behalf? And that's like the most basic way to use it. But as I've grown my business over the past year, I really use ChatGBT as like a business coach, a business partner, and that like, if I don't know how to write a proposal for something, it's like, hey, here's my course description, write a proposal for it, and it'll, you know, put it into this like nice business format for me, so that I don't have to worry about masquerading as a grown adult professional. I can just like have ChatGBT take it over from me. And I, a little bit ago, like in the question, somebody had said something about like, how do you deal with the security or like data concerns or things like that, is when I was learning ChatGBT, I was learning from a data analyst, and she used to work at Facebook or something. And she suggested what she called the Reddit rule. And her name is Rachel Woods, if anybody's ever interested in looking her up. And if you wouldn't put it into, this is for ChatGBT 3.5. So like, this is like no guarantees of data privacy. They're training on your data. Is you can say, oh God, I lost my ADHD brain of thought. Shoot, that's embarrassing. What was I saying?

Fiona · 36:07

Oh, you were just talking about Rachel Wood.

Speaker 3 · 36:10

Thank you.

Jessica · 36:10

Sorry, she was.

Maggie · 36:13

The chat is distracting. Even though keep chatting, we love it. But yes, as panelists have to work through that.

Jessica · 36:17

It's that ADHD brain. It just, they dissolve away like cotton candy. Yes. So she was at the Reddit rule. So basically, if you wouldn't put it into an anonymous message board, then don't put it into ChatGBT. You're not going to go to ChatGBT and be like, my box's social security number is X. Can you tell me what year he was born? You are going to ChatGBT and like you said, you're asking for help on how to do something and you don't need to give it, you don't need to give it details about people's personal lives or anything like that. Almost everything that I do in ChatGBT is take it out and put it into my own document form. So really just knowing that you don't log on to ChatGBT and become a bad person. You don't log on to ChatGBT and suddenly forget all the years of data privacy that you're expecting for your boss. You're still the same person. So you just utilize the tool in a responsible way. Sorry about the brain, guys.

Maggie · 37:14

I think it's relatable. People are loving it, so just don't even worry.

Lawrence · 37:18

Can I share some hilarious apps to play with, just in the nature of playing with stuff? So Can of Soup, I don't know if it's available for everyone yet, but it's like Instagram, but you decide what you describe what you want to see. So you will see yourself in like famous like Harry Potter movie scene. I mean, it's hilarious. The second one is a Voiceify, where you can generate songs but sung by other famous voices. So if you want to hear Homer Simpson singing, Don't Stop Believing, you just put in the YouTube link and they'll crank out Homer singing songs. Then there's one called aragon.ai, which is like AI powered headshots. So you'll get like 200 ridiculous professional headshots of yourself in all moods. Like my LinkedIn photo is not actually me, it's generated by a computer, and I have ones for different moods. Yeah, actually my headshot for this panel is also AI, so a couple to play with.

Maggie · 38:15

Very cool. We'll make sure to get those names from Lawrence and include them in our wrap-up summary email, and this chat transcript too, someone was asking about that. So we'll do our best there. We will come back to kind of privacy and barriers. I think we should have a good conversation around that. But while we're on the topic of role-specific, EA, Chiefs of Staff, I want to pause for a minute and talk about CEOs. I don't know if Lawrence, Fiona, Jessica, if either of any of you have a perspective on, is there anything different that a CEO should be doing from EAs and Chiefs of Staff as it relates to the use of AI? Personally and for their company? Lawrence, go for it.

Lawrence · 38:59

I definitely have opinions on this. I think the most important thing that a CEO or a founder or leadership can do, is to give their org the green light to educate themselves and to lean into this wave. I've seen lots of examples of CEOs that have just unlocked their org to get smart. But the CEO doesn't have to be the top expert on AI in their company, but they have to give the green light that it's okay to experiment. I think it's that kind of leadership that's needed. For the folks on the line, I know they have the ear of the CEO. I think that's part of by meta adjacency, that is part of your role to convince them of the importance to lean into this.

Maggie · 39:44

Yeah, I love that. We'll include that in our summary and you guys can forward onto your leaders if you want. Jessica or Fiona, anything to add around CEO use?

Jessica · 39:55

I think that they need to get ahead of it. Why are we having to do this in the shadows? It's the new version of going to the Internet for help. When the Internet became a thing in offices, we had to agree to Internet policies, the same thing in school. If that's a concern for your organization, if you're someone who's a little nervous about it, get ahead of it. Put a policy in place and get everybody on the same page of how we're going to do this.

Maggie · 40:24

Yeah, I think that's great. Fiona, anything from your end there?

Fiona · 40:30

I agree with what was just said, and I completely think that the tone comes from the top. And I think that the risk of not moving on this stuff quickly is much, much greater than the risk of being slow and scrambling, trying to figure out what our policy is, whilst people are, by the way, using this stuff and not actually following good data privacy, policies or practices. And so, yeah, I completely agree. I think it's just best to get ahead and also to think about, Jessica just mentioned some of the blockers right there. I think we'll probably have a separate discussion on all of that. But you really do need to consider this as a whole change management process. And there's a lot of different steps to put in place. This is not as simple as, we're going to switch on Copilot within Microsoft and train people up on how to use the tool. That's actually the easy part. It's a huge mindset shift.

Maggie · 41:23

Yeah. Thank you all for that. I think it's super helpful as we all work so closely with our principals. And we are influential leaders with them and thought partners. So I'm sure a lot of these conversations will transport themselves to the CEO. OK, so we're going to spend a little time talking about educational resources for the C-suite as it relates to AI. We're going to talk about what AI cannot replace. And then we're going to dive into the barriers that we've kind of brought up here. Some privacy, some behavioral changes, the people that just don't want to adopt and adapt. And then we will definitely get to questions. I think we're good on time here for that. So first, let's start with educational resources for the C-suite as it relates to AI. Jessica, let's start with you. Feel free to talk about the amazing products and tools that you each offer yourselves.

Jessica · 42:16

So I think, like Fiona said earlier, the best way to learn is to just get in there and start doing it. But I also know that the first time you log on to ChatGPT, it's a blank, blank, blinking screen, and it's not always intuitive to know what to do. So that's how I had gotten started, was just testing the different executive assistant scenarios. So it's like, what do I need help on? I'm asked to make a standard operating procedure for using the company credit card and just see how it puts that out. We talk about what's important for an executive assistant or a chief of staff to really have to be able to utilize these tools and stand out for the difference from them. It's the emotional intelligence that comes along with it. I'm really good at using ChatGPT because I have read a lot, and I have a lot of media literacy, and I've consumed a lot of information. So the more information that I'm able to give it to work with and organize, the better it's going to be able to be used. So really dig out your thesaurus and think about different words you can use to describe the way that you want to get a result. But it also challenges you in that way of continuous learning because you're always thinking like, okay, how do I best describe this situation? How do I best ask for help? So it really helps you to learn to think through things even better. I think that's the difference between a human and a computer, is that I'm continuously learning. I'm continuously finding different ways that I can utilize tools. And a tool is only a tool, it's just going to sit there until you actually use it. So I don't ever worry about it replacing our skill set for that aspect.

Maggie · 43:51

Yeah. Okay. Any educational resources that we haven't touched on that you want to share?

Jessica · 43:56

Yes, I do have a course, AI for Admins. It's on February 28th from 12 Eastern to 3 Eastern. And we cover kind of like baseline, why is it important to understand AI? Why is it suddenly so important to talk about it? Because it just feels like it just kind of came out of nowhere for us last year, as well as a bunch of different tactical ways that you can use Chat GPT, which I like to teach on Chat GPT because once you understand how to use it, you will understand how all of these other programs like Microsoft Copilot can be utilized. It's a very good foundation for understanding the capabilities of generative AI. So yes, Lindsay, message me and I will give you a discount because you took it previously and it's improved. So I'm really excited to be doing it again. So you can check it out at techsavvysistent.com.

Maggie · 44:48

Cool. And we'll include all the details for that. I think that's going to be super helpful. All right. So Fiona, do you want to dive into educational resources as it relates to AI? I know that Carve is a huge one.

Fiona · 45:03

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say, I guess, before I get into practical tips, just to take a step back, like, I think we should all be seeing these tools as a co-pilot and as a thought partner. I hate to use Microsoft's terms for their product, by the way, but I have to agree it could be one in this case. But also as it is a tool to fill in for our own deficiencies. And so I think the more you know yourself and you know the work that you hate doing, like, what is the stuff that you just let hang out on your to-do list for too long, that you have to really force yourself to get through, that feels like a flog, you know, or where you feel like it just takes you twice as long to do than it should. And start there. You know, I think that is a starting point for where you want to lean in, where you want to learn, where you want to discover tools. For me, personally, it's slide deck, you know, it was a year ago that I went out and said, what is the best AI slide deck creation tool out there that I can use? Because I hate creating slides. Like I didn't have the sort of, you know, two years of working in a strategy, like management consultant role of just building PowerPoint 60 hours a week to teach me how to do it. And I just hate doing them, you know, and it's not something I want to master. So that was the first tool that I went out and said, let me find a solution for this, for me. I think that's a good starting point is really that self-awareness, that self-knowledge is thinking about how could you partner with a tool? What is going to give you the most leverage right now? And then I think in a more general and practical sense, I would say commit to, you know, subscribing to say one daily AI newsletter. I can share my favorites. If you just commit to reading that every day and also commit to, as you're listening to news, as you're reading news, however you consume it, to try to find articles about AI and lean into those. Try to understand the bigger picture issues around regulation, for instance, around copyright and intellectual property. There's a whole lot of issues in this space that are still being worked through. And so I would say, don't shy away from really leaning into those and consuming whatever media works for you. I mean, for me personally, I love the coverage in the New York Times. I love the coverage the BBC and Radio 4 and in their dedicated AI podcast has. I love as well No Pliers, the podcast co-hosted by Elad Gill and Sarah Goh from Conviction. So yeah, happy to share other tips, but practically commit to doing your learning. And one thing that's worked certainly for folks on my course is setting aside the time for it, like 15 minutes a week on a Friday, a time where you feel like, okay, this is non-negotiable and even if I have to shift it and move it, really try to stick to that and just be consistent in committing to your own learning, because you're really committing to yourself. And you're right, I do have a course, a signature course called Carve AI, and this is really for executive assistants who want to go on this journey. It's a seven-week course, a couple of hours per week, where we go through everything from what is AI, how it can help me, what it means for the EA role moving forward, through to really going deep into chat, PPT and other AI chatbots to understand which is right for you, how to use them, how to get value out of them very quickly. And then right the way through the AI tools landscape for assistance and through projects and work with peers, basically building your own AI tools stack, which is pretty powerful. Very small group, program limited to 30 people. I just launched actually a cohort this week. And so the next one will be coming in the spring. And I do also do a whole bunch of corporate workshops, speaking engagements and free events and stuff that you can join up. Please definitely follow me on LinkedIn.

Maggie · 48:56

Awesome. Thank you so much, Fiona. Okay, Lawrence, from an educational resource standpoint, anything to add from your end?

Lawrence · 49:04

Yeah, I like everything that Jessica and Fiona said. I'm a Twitter guy, so it's an incredible resource for following the people that are at the front line. So choose your favorite AI company, open AI, anthropic, hugging face, mid-journey. Follow the executives there, follow the engineers there, and some of them share a lot. One account I really like is Ethan Malik. He's a professor at Wharton, and he just basically plays around with all these tools and analyzes what happens. And so I've discovered a bunch of new tools for him. So yeah, Twitter, if you're a Twitter person, just follow Sarah Guo, Fiona mentioned, follow Clara Shi from Salesforce. There's a whole list of folks you need to be following.

Maggie · 49:49

Awesome. Okay. Well, we will try to get as many tidbits into the summary email as well from all of these guys. So let's dive into what can AI not replace? Some of the things are obvious, and I think it's still relevant to have the conversation because there's a lot that AI cannot replace. Fiona, let's start with you. From an assistant perspective, what can an AI not replace that an executive assistant can master and there's just no replacement for?

Fiona · 50:20

Yeah, I think really the human stuff. So when you think about the human stuff in this role, it's really sensing, it's anticipating, it's nudging, it's giving feedback, and that kind of upward feedback that executives so rarely get, and when you're a strategic partner, you're really able, when you have built up that relationship, of course, of trust, you're really able to give that feedback in a way that no one else can. And I think as well, kind of solving complex problems on the fly, being a proactive problem solver is something that I think will be hard for AI to take on. And then I guess the other big one is really around prioritization. So when you think about super complex prioritization on a daily and weekly basis, how does this person spend their time? And I supported an ultra high net worth individual who had more money than God, but literally did not have time. And so that becomes the most important commodity for these people. And I think what's interesting when you're an EA and also a chief is that you are really the only person in this executive's life who sees the whole picture. You see the company's strategy. You see the big challenges that are cropping up behind closed doors. You also see their personal life. You understand what's really going on. And oftentimes these folks are grappling with some really complex stuff outside of work too. You understand their values really deeply. And you also can see how they're spending their time and be able to thought if that misaligned, if there's a misalignment between those values and what their true priorities are and how they're actually spending their time. So yeah, and I would say all the other human touch stuff as well, like empathy and thoughtfulness, connection, like really simple stuff like, oh, there was a hurricane in Florida, and I know that this employee is from there originally, let me check in on their extended family, or all this client, you know, just had a baby, let's send a bottle of champagne and bouquet of flowers. You know, it's those sorts of thoughtful touches that are actually so important for building long term relationships and trust, and that executive assistants are so good at doing. I guess the final one, like in a face-to-face world, because we are getting back to that, I think, for most of us, is representing your exec. So being that person who makes the first impression with VIPs who come through the door and who is able to represent your exec to employees, whether it's new hires who come in or folks who maybe have never met your executive, you're able to be that kind of face who can welcome them and represent them, really.

Maggie · 53:10

Yeah, those are great. Jessica, since we're on the topic of assistants, do you want to add in here?

Jessica · 53:16

I really feel like Fiona definitely nailed it. The one example that I used, because at one point in time, there were some executives on LinkedIn talking about that this new AI tool was going to basically replace assistants all because it can do something like call and make a reservation for you. I just remember thinking that was such a simplistic idea of what an admin does. Because anybody can pick up a phone and call, it's the fact that I know that you get really annoyed when a restaurant is loud. You want a quiet restaurant. I know that this is a city where you would drive, so I need to make sure that it's going to have a parking lot at that restaurant. I know that the person that you're meeting with is a vegan, so we need to make sure that there are a couple of vegan options. That's the stuff that makes me who I am. It makes me great at my job. Not the fact that I can pick up a phone because honestly, I hate doing that. That's the worst part. But if you know all these details about a person that they don't even know, is that the people that we support aren't always the most intuitive of people and they don't always know themselves that well. So being able to pick up on these details and file them away and come back and use them when needed is the absolute difference of why AI won't ever replace what we do.

Maggie · 54:32

Yeah, I think that's great. We will move along unless, Lawrence, you have anything that you want to add that Fiona and Justin didn't touch on.

Lawrence · 54:39

Yeah, just speaking to the Chief of Staff perspective, I gave a presentation yesterday at the Chief of Staff's Summit here in San Francisco. It was basically about how my previous Chief of Staff, what made him successful. And as I went down the list, I had seven things. I'm not going to go through them all. I'd say four of them are going to be not fully replaced by AI, but partially replaced. So I'll focus on the things that I think are out of reach for AI. And so number one and number two on the list were, he had my trust and what do I mean by that? I knew his family, he knew my family, he knew my history, he knew personal things that I was struggling with. And so there's something about that, that I think is out of reach for AI, at least for the foreseeable future. I know folks are working on sort of the mental health assistant, kind of sit on your shoulder kind of thing, and there may be possibly, but there's a human connection there that is not going to be replaced anytime soon. The second big area was dealing with human conflict at my company. So we were 250 people and my chief of staff, Matt, would come to me and say, you know what? I think this guy is going to leave unless he gets some help. And it would have been catastrophic if that person left. So that the guy in my ear that I knew had the best interest of the company in mind was absorbing all of these dynamics across the whole company, was able to talk to me about very difficult things that nobody else could talk to. So the true consigliari kind of stuff, that's not going to be replaced. And I think critical feedback, too, is I think feedback is a very human thing. And I think that not too many people are in a position to give the founder feedback. And I think chiefs can if they have that trust. So I do think I'm a techno-optimist. I think AI is going to come in and it's going to unlock the people on this call to do bigger, greater, more strategic, more human things. And it's going to take away the more admin stuff. And it's just going to unlock us to be even better. So yeah.

Maggie · 56:49

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I'm so glad you shared all those things because as a chief of staff, they ring very, very true. And there's just absolutely no way that anything could replace that. I also think about the assistant example. People like Jessica was saying how silly some of these things that have been said are, oh, well, now that we have AI, the assistant won't be needed to order the thing. So who's going to do the ordering of the thing? It's going to just be through AI, you know? But the assistant is the one who's going to be in the driver's seat, not the CEO. They're not going to be adapting a new tool and adding that to their workload. The assistant is just changing the way they're going to be working. But I think these are such valuable pieces to consider of what AI absolutely can't do and what we shouldn't try to even approach AI as solving. So let's dive into some common barriers that prevent the use of or adaption of AI for C-suite users. I know that we've got a few things on this list, right? We've got the privacy concern, information security, behavioral changes, people not being bought in, general comfort around tech. But I think we can have a bigger conversation and dive into a few of those specifically. So Lawrence, let's start with you. I know that you are prepared to chat through some of the privacy and information security components. You've built an AI tool that you're having to really weigh all of these things with.

Lawrence · 58:16

Yeah. And so this is a big deal. I think there's multiple levels of obstacles and some of them are real. And so I'll give you a quick example of how Ambient works, just to give you a sense of some of the stress that we're talking about here. So with Ambient, you summon an Ambient bot to your meeting. So right there, that triggers behavioral things like, why are you recording this? What is this? I don't need a bot. I can take my own notes. We've never had a bot in here before. Why are we doing it now? So right off the bat, you're sort of bumping into some behavioral issues. The next way the product works is it records the meeting. After the meeting is over, it generates a transcript. We wrap that transcript in our special Chief of Staff prompting. So from the lens of the Chief of Staff, we send multiple jobs with this transcript wrapped in our prompting to GPT-4. So it's going to another third party, which is OpenAI. You can go directly to Microsoft Azure. I'll talk about that in a second. We get back a series of assets. The agreement we have with OpenAI is they delete that content. They're not allowed to use it to train their own models, but that's a scary thing. How do we know they're doing the right thing? We get back a series of assets and then we deliver you a list of next steps, action items, and a triage framework for managing your work. That's the way it works. So right there, the people that we're bumping into as obstacles, first of all, IT. How do we know our confidential transcript from our very important meeting board level? Imagine your executive leadership standard. How do we know that content is safe and not going to leak out on the internet? So that's the first thing. The second level of obstacle is coming from legal. So what happens if my company gets sued 10 years from now? Could all of this transcript stuff be discovery in a lawsuit against us? You talk to Stripe and I know people at Stripe. They will not store any recording of any meeting more than two weeks. Some industries are tougher than others. Financial services is very locked down. And then the third level is just the behavioral stuff I'm talking about, which is like, I don't know if you all remember Calendly. Two years ago, if you send a Calendly link to someone, there's a 50-50 chance they're going to get really mad. How dare you? I don't work for you. How dare you send me a Calendly link? And then over time, most people realize that actually, this is going to save us time with a Calendly link. So I think there's a little bit of that behavioral thing that needs to change. I also like, I'm old enough to remember when Gmail came out and people like, oh my God, Google's reading all my email, like all that embarrassing personal stuff. I'm old enough to remember AWS, like I'm not going to store all my customer data at Amazon. And now most companies do. So I think some of this stuff is surpassable over time. I think some of it is real. And I think the overall dynamic that I'm seeing is that big, powerful, incumbent companies are being very careful. It's the challenger companies, the startups that are just saying, you can save me 10 hours a week so I can do more. Let's go. I'm going to roll the dice a little bit. And that dynamic, I'm an entrepreneur. So I love that. I love the hungry little companies taking chances to take down the dinosaur, or the giant, not always dinosaur. But yeah, I'll pause there.

Maggie · 1:01:42

I love that. I think it's super helpful to think about it from that perspective. As an AI builder yourself, you have this great insight that none of us do. So there's other barriers. And a big one is that adaption, that person that's like, I'm just not really into it, and that behavioral change that you might just never see. So Fiona, you're seasoned in training and development, lifelong leader in learning. How do you work through behavioral change when it comes to adaption of a new technology specific to AI?

Fiona · 1:02:16

Great question. I would say just to start with, I love Lawrence's comments, and by the way, that stuff is really important. Data privacy, Infosec, I mean, look what happened with social media when governments didn't regulate that fast enough. So I think regulation is going to be critical in this space, by the way. To go into the behavioral side, absolutely. I think right now, so many people are really underestimating the mindset shift that's required for this. And by the way, not the 200 of you who are here right now, you're leaning into this, right? But your colleagues, there will be a lot of your colleagues who are super negative, super cynical about this stuff. And I think we can't underestimate the amount of effort it's going to take to move those people along. And when you think about any sort of change management process, you have to have all your ducks in a row. I'm not going to talk at length about that here. But if you think about tactics like creating change agents, and by the way, maybe that will be you. Maybe you will be a change agent in your organization. That's a pretty powerful thing, right? Creating innovation teams of change agents to spread this stuff within teams. Getting people on this journey. I've been doing a lot of corporate workshops lately. Even for some of the most forward thinking VC tech companies out there, there's always that one or two people in an EA team who are just laggards or who are completely cynical about this. I do understand their concerns. But you have to identify who those people are, and you have to start to move them along a continuum, and see this as a continuum. So some folks, like you out there, you are already ahead of the curve. That's amazing. There's going to be other folks where nudging them along is just getting them open-minded about their colleagues using this stuff, getting them to think, yeah, AI is not going to take your job in the next six months. So don't fear it so much. Oftentimes, it's fear that sits behind us, of course, the cynicism. So digging a little bit deeper, understanding that, acknowledging that, working through that, using logic, as well as using emotion, I think is always a good way to connect with folks or a bit behind the curve. But yeah, I guess my big one would just be that don't underestimate the amount of work that needs to be done to get people going and on this journey and moving along this continuum, because it's not about, oh, let's train them up on this new with the tool that we brought in. That's the easy part. Anyone can use a tool, anyone can learn that stuff. It's really the mindset shift for those 10, 15 percent of the organization who does not want to play ball on this stuff.

Maggie · 1:05:00

Yeah.

Lawrence · 1:05:01

Fiona, just to add, I think we have to be empathetic. I think the people that are building these models say that there's a non-zero chance that this is going to end with the extinction of humanity. That is scary stuff. When we pivoted our company to work on AI, we had employees that were like, are we working on the bomb? How do we ethically get our arms around this? This is serious stuff. I landed in the techno-optimist perspective, like, let's have the good guys working on this stuff. It's a much longer discussion, but the term you'll hear about in Silicon Valley is P-Doom, like the probability of doom coming from this technology. It's scary and people are right to be nervous about this stuff.

Maggie · 1:05:47

How do you talk to the people who are nervous about this, Lawrence?

Lawrence · 1:05:51

Yeah, I mean, we spent and we did an off-site, we pulled together an off-site just on this topic, that it was so intense and personal for our team. And we just made the case for, again, the techno-optimist, which is this is not the first time humans have gone through a big transformational technology wave. And we've always found a way to carve out a space for us higher up in the food chain. It's just the way humans have managed to thrive for thousands of years. So I think that's where we landed in this concept of like, everyone's going to be working on this anyway, we might as well bring an ethic to it. And so that we put our stamp on it of, this is how ethical people build AI tools.

Maggie · 1:06:35

Yeah. And, you know, I appreciate this, this line of conversation. I'm glad you brought it up, Lawrence. So we did have someone just pop into the chat and talk about, but what about like the jobs? Like, how do we not think about those jobs when we're having this conversation? So I want to make sure, you know, maybe Lawrence, you can continue on here. What's your, what's your thought there? How do you talk to someone who is concerned about job loss at a micro or macro level?

Lawrence · 1:07:03

Yeah, the studies that are coming out are pretty scary on this, just the percentage of jobs that are at risk. So that's the pessimistic side. The optimistic side is I would say most of the tech leaders that I'm speaking to are not thinking about how can we eliminate jobs. It's how can we do 3x the work? I mean, at least in the United States, it's a growth mentality, which is grow, grow, grow, grow. And there's good and bad with that, I think. But I think if you take a growth mentality to AI, it becomes like, let's do the work of a team that's 3x the size as opposed to let's do the same work with one third of the people. So it's sort of a simplistic answer, but it's definitely something I think concepts like universal income, like I think we don't even have a business model for this technology yet. Like look at the New York Times suing OpenAI. So it's so early. There's so many things that can still go wrong or go right. So it's just, again, you all are very early to be on this call.

Maggie · 1:08:07

Fascinating for me here as well. So thank you for allowing me to moderate this discussion. Jessica, I want to pass it over to you. What other barriers have you seen that exist that prevent the use of AI in kind of the conversations that you have and the teaching that you have and in your experience?

Jessica · 1:08:25

Yeah. So a lot of fear around the idea of we're going to lose jobs. And I loved that Lawrence brought up the idea of a universal basic income. I would love to discuss this if anybody ever wants to talk with me offline. I think that we need to imagine a world that isn't like ours. Societies change. We're watching a lot of changes right now. We're going to see a giant shift in the way that humanity operates. And we don't look at it. I don't look at it as, you know, oh, we're going to lose jobs. I'm going to say things, other roles are going to open up. There's going to be other opportunities. You know, this isn't the first time the administrative industry has had a shift in technology. It started with like writing things manually, and then it became, you know, typewriters and the computers and, you know, all this additional technology. And we became the beacon of technology in our organizations. How many of us became the de facto tech person when COVID hit, and we had to roll out remote work to everybody? I know that it wasn't my job at the time to be doing it, but I was. So we're going to just see a shift in the way that the world is working. And I always try and come at it from an empathetic point of view, because people are scared. And I get it. Like most of us, a lot of us live in North America. There's not a lot of safety nets available. So the idea of losing your job is terrifying. But the best thing that you can do right now is empower yourself with AI, because burying your head in the sand isn't going to save your job. It isn't going to give you the skills to get a new job. It's only going to cause you problems in your career. And I get it. I have, you know, some older people in my community, and they'll say things like, I don't really want to learn more skills at this point in my career. Like, I'm tired. I'm like, I am always tired. I get it. So like, I just need them to get to a place of saying, like, I'm comfortable learning. And unfortunately, I don't believe that the admin field has been super empowered in the learning aspect. I don't think that we, a lot of us have been given, you know, L&D development budgets so that we can go out and learn. So we've been kept very small in that aspect. And something that I speak to in some of my presentations is how when AI first, when Chat GPT, for example, first came out, a lot of reports were coming out about how it was going to take a bunch of admin jobs and it was going to take a bunch of software engineering jobs because it can write code, right? But what you'll see within software engineering and with tech in general is it's a very collaborative industry and they're not unfamiliar with sharing tools. There's things like GitHub where they've shared code for years. But we don't have that same type of mentality in admin. We don't have this collaborative like, let me share my resources really freely and easily. We're not used to the idea of using a tool to empower our career and leaning on others. We've all been like, we have to do this ourselves. If I'm the only person I can rely on, we have probably like oldest daughter syndrome. It really needs to be focused on how can I use this to boost my career and use this as my partner versus it's going to take my job. It's not you versus AI, it's AI versus corporations.

Maggie · 1:11:37

I absolutely appreciate that last part of what you're just saying, Jessica, very, very much resonates. I'm really excited that we're going to mostly leave it there before Q&A. The last thing that I want to ask each of you is one to two sentences about where AI is going in the next five years. I will start so you can think about it briefly. Where I am going with AI is going to be basically continuing testing, learning, growing, and working through some discomfort of a non-AI expert. Let's move it to Fiona. What's your one to two sentence recap of where we're going over the next five years with AI?

Fiona · 1:12:20

I think as we become more comfortable with AI, with the idea of it and with the tools themselves and using them, we will allow it to take over more and more, an increasing amount over the next five years, because we don't want to have a crystal ball, more and more of our role, and more and more of the stuff that we never liked to do anyway, and free up ourselves and our capacity to do more of the really powerful and strategic and value add work, and the stuff that only humans can do and humans can do best.

Maggie · 1:12:54

Awesome. Lawrence.

Lawrence · 1:12:57

Yeah, this is going to sound a little intense, but we are building for a world. So the context is these models are improving so fast, that what they look like today, which they look pretty good, is going to be nothing like they look like in two years. So we are building for a future where the models will provide God-like accuracy, God-like attention to detail, God-like precision, God-like judgment. So as you use these tools today, don't get irritated by, oh, it didn't quite get that thing right, or it's not as good as I could have done it. Squint your eyes and imagine six months from now, with the rate of progression that things are happening. So I'm going to talk only from a B2B perspective. We can have a separate panel on the implications on society and it sounds like Jessica wants to join that one too. But from a B2B perspective, from a business perspective, I think we are heading towards a world with zero mistakes, zero drop balls, flawless execution. Then it'll come down to things like vision and market, luck, but failed execution, drop balls, I think that will be a thing of the past.

Maggie · 1:14:14

Okay. Thank you, Lawrence. Jessica, we'll end with you.

Jessica · 1:14:18

I think we're going to see a really dynamic shift in the admin field. I think this is going to be the opportunity to branch out from being just support to strategic on a regular basis, and it's really going to empower a lot of people to take their careers places where they didn't think they could go. Maybe they're feeling burned out at the current situation, they're bored. And you can use ChatGPT or you can use AI. Sorry, I always say ChatGPT. AI to be your thought partner and really just expand what you're doing and change your career path.

Maggie · 1:14:48

Fabulous. Okay. Well, anybody, let's see if you have Q&A, it's the easiest way to do this on a webinar is to pop it into the Q&A section of this webinar. I'm not exactly what that looks like on your end, but there's a Q&A area probably down at the bottom. A little easier than going back through the chat. So I'm going to read through some of these questions. And we're going to do it a little bit more. I don't want to say rapid style, but a little bit more question, answer, question, answer. And I will call out the panelists who I would like to answer for each of these questions. Jessica, do you think AI will put a strain on junior EAs or like admin associates to develop a strategic lens in their role a lot quicker than they may have before?

Jessica · 1:15:35

I don't think it's a strain. I think that's a major positive is that, you know, the idea of an entry-level job has really gone the wayside. It's like by the time you're starting an admin role, they kind of expect you to jump in like full speed. I don't think you get a lot of like time to gear up. So using AI, that's just going to make you be able to scale up faster. Is you're not having to, you know, wait, send an IM and wait for somebody to respond about, you know, some question. Is that you'll be able to get an answer a lot faster. It's like, how much time did I spend at my jobs in the past? Just like dawdling, waiting for a response. It's, you know, you can get instant advice or instant recommendations. You don't have to deluge your superior with questions because you can get a general idea and then you can go and work through it elsewhere. So it's going to change the way that like you're working. But I don't see that that's a negative at all.

Maggie · 1:16:32

Yeah, I appreciate that. Lawrence, we were just on the topic around dangers and extinction from AI. What are the obligations of our leaders and our company leaders? Do you see companies taking a stance for or against AI adoption, or is it a little bit more passive than that?

Lawrence · 1:16:48

Yeah, and what's missing there is government, the responsibility of government. And so you're seeing Europe put in a lot more guardrails as they do. And we can debate like what's the right balance between growth and kind of guardrails. Just in terms of the lay of the land from the model perspective, the company Anthropic, which is one of the rivals to OpenAI, they've famously taken a safety first perspective, where they used to work for OpenAI. The founders of Anthropic left OpenAI about a debate of how fast they should allow this tech to move. And so they're trying to build for a future of ethical AI, a little more conservative. That debate between the do-mers and the growth is not over. Like if you followed at all what happened at OpenAI, I was working right across the street with a bunch of startups. And we saw that one day none of the cars came into OpenAI's parking lot. Why? Because there was a coup going on and there was a battle at the board level between the conservatives and not politically conservative, the ones that wanted to go slower and the ones that wanted to go faster. And initially, the ones that want to go slower one and then the people that wanted to go faster one. So it's all playing out right now. So yes, I believe that folks building these tools need to be ethical about the way they're doing that. And I think there's a lot of work to be done to figure out what does that even mean? I think governments have to play a role. And I think we all want growth to some extent. We all want jobs. We all want GDP, I think. So yeah, it's above my pay grade. The question is a big one, but I think everybody needs to kind of take this stuff seriously.

Maggie · 1:18:32

Okay. Thank you, Lawrence. This question is for Fiona and Jessica. And I'm interpreting it a little bit differently for the audience. But what would be your two top tips, two top tips for prompting in specifically ChatGPT? Fiona first.

Fiona · 1:18:50

So yeah, I think I kind of covered this actually earlier. Just to recap, I think the context, giving it as much context and detail as possible, would be my number one top tip. And actually, I have a whole framework for prompting called QOP. And context is the first piece of that. So I can share that with you later if you want to message me on LinkedIn. And the second tip I would say is iterate. So really, you know, embrace this back and forth chat dialogue with the tool. And this is known as chain of thought prompting. So you may have seen it written as such around the Internet. And, you know, just don't settle for that first response it gives you being the final one.

Maggie · 1:19:31

I love that. Jessica, you're welcome to answer that same question. Or maybe your two favorite prompts if you have some fun ones.

Jessica · 1:19:39

No, I mean, because everything is so situational, right? But yeah, I would say, like Fiona said, just making sure that you're being very descriptive. I found early on that because I am neurodivergent and I have a habit of over explaining things as like a baseline, that that's why I would get really good responses from Chat GPT. So making sure, like I said, that you're giving it a lot of detail. And then also telling it, are you doing a good job? Are you doing a bad job? Is really good when you're like iterating on it and saying like, that was good, continue doing that, or I didn't like this, change this. Is you can continue to tweak the way that it will respond to you.

Maggie · 1:20:14

Awesome. So Jessica, this one's back to you. A question I get stuck on when I'm at work is, was that you or was that Chat GPT? How do you answer that in a way that recognizes your skills and creating great results with AI and doesn't diminish the person's ability?

Jessica · 1:20:29

So I think there's another question, too, in there about like, people say that it's cheating to use Chat GPT. And so I'll kind of address these collaboratively because I get these in my presentations a lot, is when you're using Chat GPT as a thought partner, you're taking the knowledge that you have and you're refining it in a way that's presentable to the professional world. That's the way that I'm using Chat GPT. I don't have to worry about being questioned about the way that I use Chat GPT because I can still speak to the knowledge that I have. And I was fine, let me just say this, as a woman, it's never been my first natural instinct to speak with my knowledge. Like it's never my first instinct to give my opinion. By the time that I'm at a place where I'm ready to give my opinion professionally, I'm very confident in the words that I'm saying. So if you have the knowledge, it's just refining it. It's your assistant. It's you're the CEO and you gave something to your assistant and you said, hey, can you refine this for me? It's still your general thoughts and ideas. So there's not really like that concern in the aspect. Like if you're going to chat GBT and you're saying like write an article on something like really benign, yeah, that would be embarrassing. But using your own knowledge is really what the foundation of the difference is. And when I was starting high when I was in high school and early university days, like Wikipedia was just first becoming a thing. And they would tell us you can't use Wikipedia as a source. It's not reliable. And just like in the Internet, I'm sure that they pulled the same thing with the Internet. You can't trust the Internet is we've gone through these variations in history where it's a new tool. So people aren't sure they want to trust it yet. They haven't built up that like, oh, it's Google. Of course I can trust it. So it's going to take some time for people to get comfortable and adopt with the idea of like using ChatGPT. But people have been using copywriters for ages. People have been having people build their presentations for them. So you still speak to the knowledge of the presentation at the end of the day. So it really is like, is this what I know?

Maggie · 1:22:34

Yeah, I think that's great. There's a question here around, there's a few actually, around utilizing AI to help make the move from EA to Chief of Staff. And I would love to hear answers on this. Lawrence, do you want to start with you? I know you've interviewed hundreds of Chiefs of Staff to build ambient.

Lawrence · 1:22:53

Yeah, so I have. I think the line can be murky between a strategic trusted EA and a Chief of Staff. I think there's a lot of gray area there. So I think it's not really about the tools that you're using that makes you a Chief of Staff. I think it's about the trust and the access and the projects that you are working on. And so I think my advice would be for any EA is take the most time-consuming part of your job. If you're taking minutes at meetings right now, see if you can bring that time down by 90% by using ambient, by using an AI note taker. If you are loading Action Items Next Steps into a project management system, man, I have a tool for you. You got to get on ambient tomorrow. And I think I will share a market map in part of the follow-up materials of every single workflow, the calendaring, the drafting decks, that goes right down the list of tools that you can try. So I think the unlock for EAs to get to more strategic work, and you can call the title what you want, is to find ways to automate the manual stuff and free yourself up to work on the more strategic projects. So I'm not even going to go into the title distinction.

Maggie · 1:24:14

I'll stick with it. Yeah. I appreciate that. So let's see how this will work. Yes or no from each of you. If you produce something from Chat GPT, should you tell your executive that it was birthed from AI or keep that to yourself? Fiona, yes or no? Tell your exec that you used AI or not?

Fiona · 1:24:34

I think it depends on the context. I think it also just to add on to what was already said, I think Jessica had a great response to this by the way, is if your starting point with these tools is that they are co-pilot, they're a thought partner, they're filling in for the deficiencies that you have like I said earlier, then of course, why wouldn't you use these tools? It would be silly to leave these, you're leaving money on the table, not using these tools to help you polish and refine and fill in your own blind spots on a piece of work. And so I do think so in certain cases, it might be a good idea to reveal if you have used it. One of my connections who supports the venture capitalists here in London, new to the job, her boss said, could you actually help me rewrite my bio? So she did it with ChatGPT and it had a couple of things in it that were factually incorrect. Luckily, they had a laugh about it and it wasn't a career killer or anything like that for her. But I think the point I'm making is if it's something fact-based like that, you really do need to be very careful about using a tool that is prone to hallucination like ChatGPT. I would definitely disclose it in that case because of the level of risk there.

Maggie · 1:25:46

Any disagreement at all on the panel with what Fiona said? Or you guys need the context before you can answer the question? Yeah.

Lawrence · 1:25:52

Contexting, you need to know your principle. You need to know your CEO. Yeah.

Maggie · 1:25:57

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Jessica, how do you showcase AI proficiency on a resume? What do you say? What do you list? How do you talk about how you can differentiate yourself from others based on your AI use?

Jessica · 1:26:13

I'm going to be honest. I'm the last person you should ask about this. I wasn't really hunting for jobs very long for when Chat GPT was available. I'm sorry. I could not give you an answer on this one.

Maggie · 1:26:28

Fiona or Lawrence, do you have anything to answer here?

Lawrence · 1:26:35

I mean, from founder perspective, LinkedIn, not resume. Sorry. Go ahead, Fiona. I'm sorry.

Fiona · 1:26:41

Yeah. I think we're talking over each other.

Maggie · 1:26:44

I'll let you go first. Lawrence, you go ahead and finish what you're saying for sure.

Fiona · 1:26:48

Yeah.

Lawrence · 1:26:49

I think it's LinkedIn, not resume. I think you are what you do. If there's activity on your LinkedIn that shows your interest or your fluency or your around this domain, I think that's the obvious way to stand out and to associate yourself with this skill set.

Maggie · 1:27:06

That's a great point. Yeah. Fiona.

Fiona · 1:27:10

Yeah. I was just going to say that the more sort of courses and things that you do, obviously you can put those on your CV, on your LinkedIn, always a great way to demonstrate that. I think it's also a great talking point for interviews as well. Bring it up and ask, how are you thinking about AI right now? What is your strategy around AI? Am I going to be able to use these fantastic tools out there in this role? I think that will show that you are someone who's forward thinking in this space.

Maggie · 1:27:39

Yeah. I would probably add that if it is a role where you want to highlight your AI ability, there's nothing wrong with adding a bullet or two around, I am well-versed in a number of different AI tools. I've used X, Y, and Z in the past to create these things. To show your expertise is a good thing, and thinking about how you do that and which words you use to demonstrate your expertise is fine and helpful for sure. Okay. Let's see. One more question here. This is a fun one. We'll go around again from each of you. Fiona, what are the top three AI apps that you would recommend for C-suite users?

Fiona · 1:28:22

Oh, that's a tough question. I would have to say, okay, number one is ThoughtGPT. Number two is Taskade, which I just mentioned. Absolutely adore it. I would say number three is VimPal for calendaring.

Maggie · 1:28:40

Okay. Jessica, you're up.

Jessica · 1:28:42

So, ChatGPT obviously number one. I like EA Buddy for scheduling. If then they have a ChatGPT bot in there and they have some other really neat features. And then for Magic To Do, that's a really great one for breaking down things into steps. I find that I tend to overestimate how much time something will take. So, I can use Magic To Do to break it down. And they also have a time estimator. So, it's a really cool tool that's free as well.

Maggie · 1:29:10

Awesome. Thank you, Jessica. And Lawrence, we'll end with you.

Lawrence · 1:29:14

Yeah. Agree on VimCal for calendaring.

Maggie · 1:29:18

Yeah.

Lawrence · 1:29:19

Let me just go through my list. I like for presentations. I like Tome. I like beautiful AI. I'm going to give a couple more. I think for email, Superhuman is doing interesting stuff with AI. I think for kind of like summarization of various like email and stuff like that, there's a company called The Gist, which is doing some interesting stuff. I think for meeting notes, I think most of the core ones are decent. And I think if you're interested in AI-powered next steps, tasks, routing to different systems, there's really only one and that's ambient.

Maggie · 1:29:58

Awesome. Well, we will end there. This has been an amazing panel. Fiona, Lawrence, Jessica, thank you so much. Thank you for allowing me to moderate this discussion. Thank you for everyone who joined. And we will be getting an email summary to you with a lot of different links and highlights from the conversation and the recording to watch as well. So everyone have a lovely day wherever you are in the world. And thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 3 · 1:30:34

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