Transcript: Building Trust with AI: David Espindola on the Path Forward
0:00 Brad AI is reliable when you give it enough context.
0:22 Scott Welcome to this week's episode of the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast.
0:26 Scott My name is Scott Porad and my trusty co-host,
0:29 Scott Brad,
0:30 Scott is on vacation this week, so it's just me.
0:33 Scott And we have a really interesting guest here today,
0:36 Scott David Espindola.
0:38 Scott I think I pronounced that correctly,
0:39 Scott who is a technologist who's been in this field for decades and who has been thinking a lot and writing a lot.
0:47 Scott a lot about AI and I'm really looking forward to talking to him today to see if he has figured out the answer to the questions that all of us are struggling with.
0:57 Scott So David,
0:58 Scott welcome to the show.
0:58 Brad Thank you, Scott.
0:59 Brad It's a pleasure being here with you.
1:01 Brad I'm looking forward to our conversation and I have not figured out any of those questions yet.
1:07 Scott Okay,
1:08 Scott let's just get stuff started off with the basics. We were just talking about this a minute ago, but I'm sure people who are listening want to know.
1:14 Scott Tell us about your background a little bit. What's your story?
1:16 Scott You were born at some point in the world and you're sitting on this podcast now. What happened in between?
1:21 Brad My whole career has been in technology. So I started out as an engineer.
1:25 Brad I worked at two very fast growing computer technology companies in Silicon Valley,
1:30 Brad one of which did an IPO.
1:32 Brad So to me, that was just a rude awakening of, you know, how.
1:37 Brad powerful technology can be and you know the power of entrepreneurship and you put those two things together and you have just an incredible combination and half of that experience I decided that I wanted to get a big name software company on my resume and I decided to go work for Oracle so I work at Oracle for 10 years I was in their consulting business implementing
2:01 Brad software at very large clients,
2:04 Brad you know, Fortune 500 companies doing ERP, CRM, all kinds of software implementations, process improvement.
2:11 Brad And in that role,
2:13 Brad I got to work with a lot of CIOs and I decided that I wanted to become a CIO myself.
2:19 Brad So I had a boss that I worked for at Oracle.
2:22 Brad He left, he became a CIO.
2:25 Brad And he was very kind in inviting me to go work with him.
2:29 Brad He showed me the ropes and I learned what I needed to learn to become a CIO. And when the right opportunity came along,
2:36 Brad I became the CIO of a software company.
2:39 Brad And for the last 10 years, I then left corporate America and decided to do my own thing.
2:46 Brad I did a startup and I'm currently focused on AI with my own company,
2:52 Brad Brainius.
2:53 Brad So that's sort of a high level overview.
2:57 Scott Okay, I want to ask a brainy question in your company on that, but I actually want to ask about something that you mentioned earlier in there.
3:03 Scott You said, I learned all the things I needed to be a CIO.
3:05 Brad Yeah
3:06 Scott And that's actually, I mean, I get that question sometimes from people earlier in their career. Oh, Scott,
3:12 Scott what do I need to learn to be the CTO?
3:14 Scott And I'm curious to know that statement you made,
3:17 Scott oh, I learned all the things I needed to be the CIO.
3:21 Scott What are all the things you needed to learn?
3:23 Brad Yeah, so,
3:24 Brad you know, there's a lot that goes into becoming a CIO.
3:27 Brad I think a lot of it is around leadership.
3:31 Brad It's having some understanding of the technology, but you're not going to be the expert in all different technologies that you're going to touch.
3:40 Brad So you need to be able to have enough understanding to have.
3:45 Brad intelligent conversations with the people that have the expertise across all of these technologies and you know you need to be obviously knowledgeable about the business aspects of the role understand your industry understand the business processes and be good with strategy so you have to have a strategic mind
4:10 Brad and be able to collaborate with the other executives around strategy.
4:15 Brad Now, in my case, you know, I came from the world of software applications. So that's what I was good at. I understood very well what it took to run an ERP implementation project,
4:28 Brad for instance.
4:28 Brad I've done several of those.
4:30 Brad I had that experience. I have that capability.
4:32 Brad What I didn't have was the infrastructure knowledge.
4:35 Brad I had never got infrastructure before.
4:38 Brad So when I was working for my boss at that time, you know, he gave me responsibility for infrastructure and I learned it from, you know, from experience, just basically working with other people that.
4:54 Brad knew that area well and you know learning how to deal with vendors learning how to build security into everything that we did redundancy dealing with you know telecom vendors storage vendors
5:08 Scott Mm
5:08 Brad computer
5:08 Scott -hmm.
5:09 Brad vendors so all of that experience built up and over time you know I had that combination of the infrastructure side and the business application side and then obviously
5:21 Brad Obviously all the other leadership communication strategic thinking kinds of skills that I needed as well
5:27 Scott It's so interesting that you mentioned that infrastructure piece coming from the software side because I had a similar experience and I got the infrastructure piece through luck,
5:37 Scott effectively.
5:39 Scott Kind of, I guess what you would call a battlefield promotion.
5:42 Scott I was working at a company,
5:44 Scott I'd been there probably for about six years and I'd been a software engineering manager and director and I actually was working as a product manager for a while.
5:52 Scott Wow.
5:52 Scott And I remember very vividly, the CEO came to my office.
5:58 Scott This is back when we worked in offices, of course. And she said,
6:02 Scott hey,
6:02 Scott so and so who led our sort of infrastructure and IT division,
6:08 Scott we are going to have to let him go tomorrow.
6:12 Scott um because he was caught stealing from the company and i was like oh that sounds really bad she's like yeah i was wondering if you would his position and i said um well you know i was a software engineer i don't really know how any of that stuff works i mean you just know that wouldn't really i kind of she's like well i really think you could do it you know so and so forth and i was like
6:37 Scott I was like, I don't really know.
6:39 Scott That's not really, it doesn't seem like it's my thing.
6:41 Scott And finally, I'll never forget that she said, look,
6:43 Scott I need you to go to the 12th floor on Monday.
6:47 Scott She said, really,
6:48 Scott I'm not giving you a choice here. I need you to go fill in for this guy.
6:51 Scott And so I was thrown into it. I had no idea what I was doing. I was in so deep over my head.
6:57 Scott So you just start swimming as hard as you can and figure it out.
7:00 Brad Right. And,
7:01 Brad you know, when you are put in a position like that,
7:04 Brad I think most of us that come from a technical background,
7:06 Brad you know, we usually learn things fairly quickly.
7:09 Brad And I think we have this natural ability to just be able to capture the essential fundamentals that we need to know.
7:18 Brad in depth and then the other details you know it's working with the team right and you're going to be surrounded by a team of experts and your role as a leader is to work with those people you don't necessarily need to know every technical detail behind every technology right and so that's that's how it works
7:37 Scott That's exactly right.
7:38 Scott You have to learn how to sort of learn an area quickly,
7:41 Scott not every detail in a way to, like you said, have an intelligent conversation with folks about it.
7:45 Brad Yeah,
7:46 Brad yeah,
7:46 Scott So okay,
7:47 Scott so that's a key lesson. All right, well, let's switch gears.
7:48 Scott I want to hear about brainius.
7:50 Brad yes
7:52 Scott What is brainius?
7:53 Brad So the idea behind brainness is to deal with the fast changes that we are all experiencing due to AI.
8:04 Brad So I started the company to leverage...
8:10 Brad Some of the thoughts that I had developed as I was writing and publishing my second book,
8:15 Brad which
8:15 Scott Mm-hmm.
8:16 Brad is Soulful, You in the Future of Artificial Intelligence. So in that book, I try to capture in an easy to understand language.
8:25 Brad All the deep changes that are about to happen that's already happening actually due to AI and how transformative this technology is going to be,
8:36 Brad how it's going to impact every aspect of our lives, the future of work,
8:40 Brad society,
8:41 Brad business,
8:41 Brad everything.
8:42 Brad And so with brain use,
8:44 Brad what I wanted to do is, you know, how can I help people thrive in the age of AI?
8:51 Brad What are some of the things that...
8:52 Brad we can do as people to be ready for this change.
8:56 Brad And that's sort of the gist behind the company.
8:59 Brad So I think of the company as there's three aspects to it. One is what I call media and education.
9:07 Brad And what I do there is I have several products and services that I provide.
9:14 Brad I do a podcast myself that I co-host with an AI.
9:19 Brad I have a newsletter,
9:20 Brad you know, I've written the book,
9:22 Brad I have done courses and partnerships with local universities.
9:27 Brad So anything that will help people understand what AI is all about and prepare for these changes that are about to happen.
9:35 Brad The second aspect of it is advisory services. So I have done a number of projects being an advisor to US government entities, to universities.
9:46 Brad expertise to private businesses and then the third component is the technology side of it and that's sort of my my playground right my lab
9:55 Scott Mm
9:55 Brad where
9:55 Scott -hmm.
9:55 Brad I play with ideas I try to develop new things so one of the things that I developed is my podcast co-host I call her Xena so Xena is my AI assistant you know I've taught her everything that you know that I have in terms of
10:12 Brad written documents about the work that I've done in the past so she knows about my books she knows about the podcast obviously she co-hosted the newsletter all the content that I've produced she has been trained all those things so she knows what my values are she knows what I'm interested in she knows the language that I use she knows what kinds of things I talk about and she helps me develop content content
10:37 Brad She helps me co-host the podcast.
10:39 Brad She helps me thinking about things that I want to do and challenges me.
10:44 Brad So it's sort of having an AI partner that can work with you and that you can trust. And so the trust component is really important to me because if you don't have that trust, you know, if you lose the trust piece,
10:57 Brad then it all falls apart. So I
10:59 Scott Mm-hmm.
10:59 Brad want to continue developing.
11:02 Brad AI agents that you can absolutely trust.
11:05 Scott And I have so many questions,
11:07 Scott but I'll just start with where you left off.
11:08 Scott How have you built the trust into it?
11:11 Brad Yeah, so the trust, I think a lot of it is basically providing the context. So AI is reliable when you give it enough context.
11:25 Brad So, you know, if you go to a generic...
11:29 Brad chat GPT for instance and you ask questions it may hallucinate it may you know provide answers that it just made up and a lot of times is because it's trying to please you and it's trying to give you answers and be helpful and sometimes it seems like it
11:45 Brad you know, reasons that if it just gives you an answer, even if that answer is wrong,
11:49 Brad it's
11:50 Scott Mm-hmm,
11:50 Brad helping you and it's not.
11:52 Brad So the key thing is to train it in a way that is useful to the system to behave.
11:59 Brad So you tell the machine, ask questions, you know, don't take everything that I say for granted,
12:04 Brad challenge me,
12:06 Brad tell me when my reasoning doesn't make sense, what am I missing,
12:11 Brad right? So
12:11 Scott mm
12:11 Brad you...
12:12 Scott -hmm.
12:12 Brad Provide that in the instruction that you give to the AI,
12:15 Brad to the training that you give to the AI,
12:18 Brad along with all the other contacts that you want that AI to know.
12:23 Brad And it becomes really,
12:24 Brad really good and reliable as you provide that context.
12:28 Scott Are you relying on one of the sort of, you know, large language models that's out there or have you built your own model?
12:35 Brad Yeah, no,
12:36 Brad I have not built my own model.
12:38 Brad I leverage the models that are out there and,
12:43 Brad you know, and this is something that's changing so fast,
12:47 Brad right? So
12:48 Brad Models are coming out every month or two and I don't want to be tied to any single model.
12:54 Scott All
12:54 Brad I want
12:55 Scott right.
12:55 Brad to use the best model that's out there.
12:56 Brad You know, the question that comes up and something that I think a lot about is the issue of privacy.
13:03 Brad I
13:03 Scott Mm-hmm.
13:03 Brad know to what extent are we comfortable having these AI systems that know a lot about you in a public domain where that data can possibly be used to train the AI and maybe accessible by other people.
13:20 Brad So there is this thinking behind.
13:24 Brad Perhaps having a local large language model right on your laptop where it's concealed,
13:31 Brad it's not available to the general public.
13:35 Brad But then you have to deal with the technical difficulties of doing that.
13:39 Brad You have to deal with the challenges of training that system.
13:42 Brad You have to deal with, you know, the constant upgrades,
13:47 Brad the changes that are coming,
13:49 Brad right?
13:49 Brad So it becomes a lot,
13:51 Brad a much bigger project than I'm willing to spend time doing right now.
13:55 Brad But I think a lot about the privacy issue and maybe something that I may...
14:00 Brad invest in the future and doing something like that but I'm not doing that right now right
14:05 Scott Well, I think a lot, you know, with the enterprise level, it's a lot of these providers, you know, with anthropic or opening, they claim that they're not going to use your data.
14:15 Scott Right.
14:15 Brad yeah
14:16 Scott But they have it. They still have it. It's out there.
14:18 Brad yeah yeah yeah
14:20 Scott So there's a lot of trust that goes in there.
14:22 Brad there's there's definitely a concern there
14:24 Scott The reason I asked about your own model, I've heard a few cases lately of people.
14:27 Scott of people saying mostly for cost reasons they're trying to build their own smaller models for very specialized purposes
14:34 Brad Yeah, yeah.
14:36 Brad And I have also had conversations with several people. In fact, you know, there's an idea behind using a small language model because the idea is that, you know, these large language models,
14:48 Brad they've been trained on every subject that's out there.
14:53 Brad They may not have.
14:54 Brad have the depth of knowledge that you need for a particular application so if you are trying to get that AI to be very knowledgeable about your products for instance you know the generic AI is not going to know a lot about your products
15:09 Brad But you don't necessarily need that AI to know about, you know, geography or history or
15:15 Scott Right,
15:15 Brad physics or
15:15 Scott right.
15:16 Brad whatever.
15:16 Brad You just wanted to know about your product, right? So a small language model,
15:20 Brad if you train it very specifically about your products,
15:23 Brad it can do a very good job, even though it doesn't have all this other knowledge.
15:27 Brad So that's another possibility as well.
15:30 Scott Okay,
15:31 Scott so you mentioned that you host the podcast with the AI.
15:35 Scott Remind me her name again.
15:37 Brad Zina.
15:38 Scott Xenia, you host the podcast with Xenia.
15:40 Brad Yeah.
15:40 Scott And then shortly thereafter,
15:42 Scott you mentioned that she helps you with all sorts of things with coming up for content or with all sorts of different things.
15:47 Scott And so my next question is,
15:49 Scott when you obviously on the podcast, you're talking with her.
15:55 Brad Yep.
15:55 Scott When you're doing these other things,
15:57 Scott are you also talking with her or in those cases are you typing?
16:00 Brad Yeah, good question.
16:01 Brad I tend to type, but I talk also.
16:04 Brad So obviously on the podcast,
16:05 Brad it's all verbal and to let you know how that came about.
16:09 Brad So I started playing around with this idea, you know, I'd love to have an AI that knows about my work and that can be a partner working with me because, you know, it's been trained on everything that I've been thinking about and I've been working on.
16:22 Brad And so I developed this AI and then I started having conversations with the AI and initially.
16:27 Brad And initially the conversations were just, you know, typing whatever and then getting a response back.
16:35 Brad And then I was so impressed with what it was coming up with that I said, you know, why don't I start recording this conversation? I mean, this is so interesting,
16:46 Brad right?
16:46 Brad And it's reflecting back to me all these things that I've been thinking about and talking about and working on and researching,
16:52 Brad and it's helping me with this conversation. The conversation became very interesting. I said, you know, I think it would make sense for me to just record this and then share with the public.
17:01 Brad public and then you know that's how the podcast idea came about and I started initially it was just me and the AI talking to each other
17:11 Brad and talking about ideas, talking about the main theme of the podcast is human AI collaboration.
17:17 Brad So I was talking about several aspects of human AI collaboration.
17:21 Brad And then the next step of evolution was to bring in guests,
17:24 Brad right?
17:24 Brad So I bring in guests now and it makes it much more interesting because it's not just me talking and it's me and the guest and the AI.
17:32 Brad So it's a three-way conversation.
17:34 Brad Now the trick here is AI is not very good.
17:37 Brad at three-way conversations yet so that social aspect of AI is not quite where it needs to be at so I have to do some manual things behind the scenes to make that work to be very transparent here but that's how it came about
17:53 Scott It's interesting you say that about the three-way conversation, because we do these podcasts,
17:57 Scott you know, we record them over Zoom or other video things.
18:00 Scott And even with humans,
18:01 Scott the three-way conversation.
18:02 Scott over you know over the video call can kind of be tricky there's
18:06 Brad Oh, yeah, absolutely.
18:07 Scott there's a bunch of social cues you get when you're in person that you just don't get online
18:12 Brad Yeah, and AI gets really confused because they don't know when to interject,
18:17 Brad they don't know when to be quiet,
18:19 Brad and it gets very confusing. And I tried to do one with two AIs, me and two AIs. That was horrible. It did not work at all.
18:28 Scott I have done a small experiment where I did get two, I was just using ChatGPT, I got two versions of ChatGPT, not two versions, two instances talking to each other.
18:39 Scott And I told them, okay,
18:40 Scott this is the scene.
18:42 Scott I said,
18:43 Scott look,
18:44 Scott you're walking along the street and you run into an old friend that you haven't seen in a long time.
18:49 Scott And the first thing you say is, oh my goodness, it's so nice to see you.
18:52 Scott And I just let that conversation unfold.
18:55 Scott And it did okay for about 90 seconds.
18:57 Scott And then it kind of went off the rails.
18:59 Scott But that was a very amateur experiment.
19:01 Scott I want to come back to Velina though.
19:03 Scott This is kind of really,
19:05 Scott I don't know what to say other than blowing my mind. Like the voice part of it to me is pretty neat. I can imagine walking into my office having.
19:14 Scott my computer or an Alexa speaker-like device recognize that I've entered the room and say,
19:20 Scott hello,
19:20 Scott Scott,
19:21 Scott right?
19:21 Scott And I could say,
19:23 Scott what's my next meeting or whatever?
19:24 Scott The notion of an audio AI,
19:26 Scott which is not revolutionary, but like a personal audio AI is kind of, I don't know, just something you said about how you have her as your co-host on the show and you also work with her in real life in the audio part of it.
19:39 Scott It makes me see, I'm sure I'm not the first person, I know I'm not the first person to think of it, I'm personally internalizing, wow,
19:46 Scott that is a real possibility for what within five years we could all have on our desks wherever we are.
19:52 Brad Yeah, and it's just incredible how much better the voice component has become.
20:00 Brad In the last three years,
20:02 Brad it's just, you know, it doesn't sound robotic anymore.
20:06 Brad It
20:06 Scott Yeah.
20:07 Brad is very human-like. It's to the point where it's almost unrecognizable that it's an AI.
20:13 Brad And it's only going to get better,
20:15 Brad right?
20:15 Brad So it has advanced considerably and it's just mind-blowing, the quality of the audio these days.
20:22 Scott Have you even just used Amazon's new?
20:26 Scott new alexa plus so
20:28 Brad I have not.
20:30 Scott they launched their alexa plus i guess in the fall with a new i guess you know i don't know exactly the details of what's behind it but it's basically
20:39 Scott or associates AI powered or whatever but the sophistication for how its voice interactions are now are much better I think maybe before Alexa was very keyword focused and now it's just more natural language using an AI model but they're doing it very generically I wonder if they're maybe they're headed down that path okay I had another question for you when you talked about brainius and the problems you're trying to solve and how you help people solve them but you said you wrote this book
21:04 Scott about like how you thought AI was going to influence all these different aspects of life.
21:09 Brad Mm hmm.
21:10 Scott I mean, to me, that's the,
21:12 Scott you got to know before you can understand brainiacs, you got to know about what you thought in the book. I'm curious to know, and it's a whole book, so you can't ask you to read the whole thing to me now,
21:19 Scott but maybe you could just tell us what are the key things you think are going to change that maybe aren't obvious to the rest of us or maybe are obvious to the rest of us.
21:26 Brad I think some of it is starting to become obvious.
21:29 Brad We're starting to see so in the book.
21:31 Brad The book,
21:31 Brad I try to give it a very
21:34 Brad optimistic long-term view of AI because I am optimistic about AI in the long term but in the book I talk about this chasm this period of time that we're going to go through before we get to the other side that I think will be very prosperous and bright but there's going to be a lot of disruption in between and change so I spent my entire career
21:59 Brad dealing with technology change and
22:02 Scott Mm
22:02 Brad change
22:02 Scott -hmm.
22:02 Brad is never easy change is difficult and this is a naphic change management problem that we are facing right now because of the impact that AI is going to have on jobs it starts with jobs right and the way we go about doing the work that we've been doing you know we're used to this
22:26 Brad industrial revolution pattern of doing work and our education system was built for the industrial revolution and post-industrial revolution and now everything is changing because of the capabilities of AI so we're going to have to relearn how to work we're going to have to relearn how to deal with these intelligent machines and interact with the machines and work with agents
22:50 Brad You know, as a leader,
22:53 Brad you're no longer just working with human beings,
22:57 Brad you're an orchestrator that has to learn how to work with agents and with humans and how to make the two work together.
23:07 Brad And so there is going to be some very profound impact economically,
23:15 Brad right? Because if
23:17 Brad Technology starts to replace
23:20 Brad jobs and we can you know talk about how much of that is going to happen and how much may not happen I think we're starting to see entry-level jobs that are being displaced by AI I think anything that is algorithmic in nature and by that I mean anything that you can perform by just following a set of instructions particularly if it's digital if it's something that you do in front of a computer
23:47 Brad a computer,
23:47 Brad that job or that task is going to be exposed to automation and it's going to happen very quickly.
23:55 Brad So, you know, we're all going to have to reinvent ourselves.
23:58 Brad We think about the kind of work that we do.
24:01 Brad How can we leverage the human capabilities that can't necessarily be replicated by
24:10 Brad automation by AI and bring that to the table to work collaborative with AI.
24:17 Brad So I think the mindset needs to change. And there's still a lot of people that are afraid of AI that are not embracing AI.
24:25 Brad And the message that I want to send to the world is,
24:31 Brad you know,
24:33 Brad We're not going back. This is here to stay.
24:35 Brad You need to lean in. You need to learn about AI.
24:37 Brad You need to learn how to collaborate with AI.
24:40 Brad And we'll have some disruptions along the way, but I think the end result will be very good because we'll be able to increase productivity.
24:49 Brad We are going to find cures for diseases that, you know, we don't have today.
24:55 Brad I think we're going to be able to solve world problems like the environmental problems we're dealing with and other problems,
25:03 Brad energy.
25:05 Brad many many many other problems that AI is going to help us solve so in the long term I think we'll have a bright future but there will be disruptions along the way and we're going to have to manage that change process very carefully yeah
25:18 Scott Yeah. You know, you mentioned the entry-level jobs.
25:21 Scott I think about that a lot for a few different reasons. One is just as I think about my industry,
25:28 Scott but like, you know, as a society, if people don't get entry-level jobs, how do they work?
25:31 Scott work their way up to the not entry-level jobs but
25:34 Brad Yeah.
25:34 Scott i also have i also have two kids in their 20s uh i have kids who are 24 and 20 and i think about their future and you know i have nieces and nephews and all their futures right what's the world what's the how are they going to get their careers started in a world where there's no
25:54 Scott entry point right sort of entry-level jobs what's your what's your take on that both from my like from two points of view one is like as a society like how do you think we deal with that and then like if you were just talking to an individual young person what would you tell them to deal with
26:07 Brad Yeah, so I think it's a difficult problem.
26:10 Brad I don't know that there is an easy answer just because of the way we are.
26:15 Brad structured as a society. So obviously companies are going to look at this from an economic view,
26:24 Scott Mm-hmm.
26:25 Brad right?
26:27 Brad But I think we need to, as we go through this change management process, this transition,
26:34 Brad I think there will be a role for humans.
26:37 Brad organizations to bring in the capabilities that we have as humans that can't be replaced by AI.
26:44 Brad So companies,
26:46 Brad organizations are going to have to take a chance on entry-level workers and give them
26:55 Brad exposure through a process that may not look like the process that we have today because today you know you get that entry-level job maybe you get to work on some of the tasks that more senior people don't want to work but that's how you get your hands dirty that's how you learn and maybe it will change in the future where your your entry-level job is going to be more of a learning experience than anything else you know you're just going to shuttle
27:22 Brad shadow somebody or maybe you know we'll have processes where you may not be contributing right away but you are extending your learning and you're learning how the organization works you're learning the business processes you're learning you know the different aspects of the business so that you can then be productive
27:41 Brad So I think we need to be very intentional about hiring those entry-level workers because,
27:47 Brad like you said,
27:48 Brad if they don't start somewhere,
27:50 Brad how are they going to do the more senior jobs? They have to get that basic learning somewhere,
27:57 Brad and I think companies will realize that.
27:59 Brad You can't just cut out all the entry-level jobs,
28:02 Brad but maybe we're going to look at entry-level jobs differently than we do today.
28:06 Brad Okay.
28:07 Scott Yeah, we're going to have to think of something differently and change our attitude about it.
28:11 Brad Yeah.
28:11 Scott Because even just in one company, right,
28:13 Scott where you maybe have a few hundred,
28:15 Scott maybe a few hundred to a few thousand employees,
28:17 Scott you need that pipeline because you always have people,
28:21 Scott you always have attrition for one reason or the other.
28:23 Brad Yeah.
28:23 Scott And so you need that pipeline.
28:25 Scott And if you don't have it, I don't, I don't.
28:28 Scott you know it's going to work and then if i if i bring it down to a narrower level just like software engineering right you get the experience to do the more complex things because you did smaller things first and made mistakes and learned and all those kinds of things so it's it's gonna be a challenge that i don't think we've figured out yet
28:45 Brad Yeah,
28:45 Brad and I think that is the key message that I think I'm trying to.
28:52 Brad socialize this idea you know that we're not prepared right we're not prepared for the changes that are about to come that are starting to come right now that's my biggest concern it's just the lack of preparation for the changes that we're about to experience yeah
29:07 Scott You also mentioned you thought there in the future there's a bright future of things AI helps us with.
29:13 Scott And one thing, I mean, you mentioned healthcare,
29:16 Scott which I think is really interesting.
29:18 Scott I've seen some stuff.
29:18 Scott Stuff where the thing that stood out to me most is I read an article about how some scientists in Australia were able to use AI to detect cancer.
29:27 Scott substantially or like five years earlier than they could normally and so i think there's cool opportunities there i'm curious to know if you what you've seen in the environment space if you've seen anything happening there if you if you're or if in your imagination you can see how it's going to help in that space because that's a you know we're making the environment worse with all this ai stuff right so like we have to figure out how to make it better too
29:50 Brad Yeah, yeah.
29:51 Brad So I think we will be able to come up with new materials.
29:58 Brad AI is going to help us come up with new materials.
30:01 Brad I think we'll be able to create things from scratch.
30:07 Brad So, you know, just the ability to leverage molecular level materials and
30:15 Scott Mm
30:15 Brad recombine
30:15 Scott -hmm.
30:15 Brad them in ways that are energy efficient,
30:19 Brad that are effective.
30:22 Brad Even just discovering new sources of energy or helping us develop new energy capabilities that will diminish our need for more traditional ways of generating energy.
30:36 Brad I think AI is going to have a huge contribution from that standpoint.
30:41 Brad In agriculture,
30:42 Brad agriculture today has a huge impact on the environment.
30:47 Brad And I think with AI and with new ways of thinking about food,
30:55 Brad we'll be able to do that much more in a much more.
31:01 Brad environmentally friendly manner than
31:03 Scott Mm
31:03 Brad we
31:03 Scott -hmm.
31:04 Brad do today so these are just some of the examples that I can think off the top of my head and I think you know there will be many others but it's hard to predict exactly what those things will be but I'm sure you know over time we're going to be able to address
31:22 Brad Most of the pressing issues that we have today.
31:25 Scott Yeah.
31:25 Scott Well,
31:26 Scott and you touched on really the two biggest,
31:28 Scott right?
31:29 Scott Climate change and food.
31:31 Scott You know, are we going to stay cool enough and are we going to have food for people to eat?
31:35 Brad Right.
31:36 Brad Right.
31:36 Scott Water to drink.
31:37 Brad Yeah.
31:38 Scott That's pretty interesting.
31:39 Scott Okay,
31:39 Scott so I have one last question for you about Xena,
31:42 Scott the robot,
31:43 Scott the robot AI voice.
31:45 Scott I'm curious to know about the blooper role.
31:48 Scott with xena on the podcast because sometimes ai goes a little off the rails and if you had that experience where where you've realized maybe in a visceral way like oh i'm not talking to a person right now because they've started they've started going down a path and i can't seem to reel them back in when you're typing you just say oh this chat thread's all messed up new window new
32:10 Brad Yeah
32:11 Scott chat new chat i better start over because i
32:14 Scott I gave this thing some context or asked the question in a wrong way and it's gone down the wrong path because sometimes you can't get it off what it's thinking, but in voice you don't get that option.
32:23 Scott You Yeah. can't say, Zina,
32:24 Scott I need you to start over or maybe you can.
32:26 Brad Yeah.
32:27 Brad So I've never had an experience.
32:30 Brad recording a podcast where it completely went off the rails and
32:34 Scott Mm hmm.
32:35 Brad I think maybe that's just because of the way I structure it I make it very well structured and when I
32:40 Scott Oh,
32:40 Brad ask people questions I
32:42 Brad Preface the question with, you know, given X,
32:45 Brad Y, and Z,
32:46 Brad what's your opinion about,
32:48 Brad you
32:48 Scott I
32:48 Brad know, A
32:49 Scott see.
32:49 Brad or B or C?
32:50 Brad And it stays very contained within that particular conversation.
32:56 Brad Now,
32:57 Brad where I've had problems is sometimes it speaks when it's not supposed to speak.
33:02 Scott Yeah.
33:02 Brad You know, I may be,
33:04 Brad you know, at the end I usually think.
33:07 Brad thank the gas and I thank Zina for being a co-host and she may speak on top of the gas and those kinds of things happen all the time but you know I can manage that fairly easily but I've never seen it actually go you know in different directions where I don't want it to go.
33:27 Brad But again,
33:27 Brad I think the reason for that is just because of the structure that I have put into it and the training that I provide.
33:34 Brad You know, even before the gas comes on the podcast,
33:37 Brad I talk to Xena and I tell her this is the gas we're going to have.
33:41 Scott Mm-hmm.
33:42 Brad Here's what this gas is all about. Here's what I know about the gas.
33:45 Brad You know, these are the questions that I think we should be asking the gas.
33:47 Brad So I prep her for the event and she's, you know, very well.
33:52 Brad prepared and ready for the conversation.
33:54 Scott Yeah.
33:55 Scott And it was interesting you said you framed the conversation to her. You sort of adapted,
33:59 Scott you as a human have adapted to her interface.
34:03 Brad Right.
34:03 Scott Like just like we adapt to a computer interface we type right or use a mouse or whatever This is a different kind of computer with a voice interface and we have to they still have to some degree a structure of their interface that we have to connect with
34:17 Brad Yeah.
34:17 Brad Yeah.
34:17 Scott Although it's looser and looser I suppose
34:19 Brad Yeah. And I, you know, I think over time this will continue to evolve.
34:24 Brad It's going to improve.
34:27 Scott Mm
34:27 Brad But
34:28 Scott -hmm.
34:28 Brad today there are some limitations,
34:29 Brad so we need to learn how to work with those limitations today.
34:34 Brad In the future...
34:35 Brad You know, I think this is an explanation of technology.
34:40 Brad It's just very difficult for us to project.
34:42 Brad You know, we tend to think linearly and it's very difficult for us to project how good this technology is going to get in the future.
34:50 Brad But I believe that's where we're going.
34:52 Scott Well,
34:53 Scott so I'll finish with this question because I was just asked this question to a candidate we were interviewing at our company and he was earlier in his career and he said to me, hey, you've been doing.
35:02 Scott You've been doing this for a little while.
35:03 Scott Have you seen in your career anything equally or more disruptive than AI is being right now?
35:13 Scott And I'm curious to know your experience in your career.
35:18 Scott Is this the most disruptive thing you've seen or has something else come along that was more disruptive?
35:22 Brad Yeah, so,
35:23 Brad you know, I've been through many platform transformations,
35:29 Brad you know, I can remember back to mainframe computers, and then we had client server,
35:38 Brad you know, architect.
35:39 Brad structures and then we had web applications and then we had mobile and it goes on and on and on I think what's different about this one is that the disruption is coming at a speed that I've never seen before I've
35:54 Scott Yeah.
35:54 Brad never seen this velocity with you know the exponential improvements that we're seeing today so
36:04 Brad Definitely a velocity that has never been experienced before in history.
36:12 Brad And I think because of our difficulty as humans to adapt to change.
36:19 Brad And when that change comes super fast,
36:21 Brad it's even harder to adapt.
36:23 Brad And I think that's where we're going to feel that disruption.
36:26 Scott Yeah,
36:26 Scott that's exactly right.
36:28 Scott This one might be some of those other things you mentioned might have been more disruptive to our industry,
36:32 Scott but none of them happened so fast as this is happening.
36:36 Scott And it's not just the pace of innovation within the model technology,
36:42 Scott the AI technology.
36:44 Scott It's
36:44 Brad Yep.
36:44 Scott actually the adoption of it as well.
36:48 Scott is happening so rapidly,
36:49 Scott which is pretty fascinating.
36:51 Brad yeah it is fascinating thank
36:52 Scott Well,
36:53 Scott David,
36:53 Scott thank you very much for coming on today.
36:56 Brad you Scott
36:56 Scott I really appreciate it. I'm now motivated to go get myself an AI podcast co-host, see if I can crack that because it seems pretty fun.
37:05 Brad yeah let me know how it goes I mean I you know this is something that I've been having a lot of fun doing and it's been it's been great I really enjoy doing it
37:13 Brad You know, I keep thinking about what's the next level,
37:17 Brad right?
37:18 Brad So I think about video.
37:20 Brad I think video, it's a lot harder to work with video than it is with audio.
37:24 Brad But I'm sure that's going to be the next thing, right?
37:27 Brad Where you're going to be able to actually sit in a room like this one here and have AI sitting there with you talking face-to-face and having interactions with other AIs, with humans.
37:38 Brad It's going to be wild, so.
37:40 Brad So I'm looking forward
37:40 Scott Yeah.
37:41 Brad to that.
37:41 Scott Imagine if the I think the next iteration actually might be just a camera. So when you sat down at your computer.
37:48 Scott the AI can see you and say,
37:50 Scott oh,
37:51 Scott I see you're looking a little tired today or you're looking a little sad or you seem happy today.
37:55 Scott What happened?
37:56 Scott It doesn't have the visual sense yet,
37:58 Scott right?
37:59 Brad Yeah, yeah.
38:00 Brad And I talk about that in the book. It's interesting that you brought that up because that's one of the things that I talk about in the book. You know,
38:06 Brad AI is going to be able to really detect your emotions and detect your physiology.
38:13 Brad and be able to help you especially from a learning standpoint right we all learn differently and AI is going to be able to know how you learn best what kind of learning mode are you more
38:29 Brad adaptable
38:29 Scott Mm-hmm.
38:30 Brad to at what time of the day are you more alert and ready to receive certain kinds of information it's going to you know it's going to know you really really well and that can be a bit scary and goes back to the privacy issue to what extent are we going to be comfortable sharing you know who we are with an entity and if we don't have that trust you know it all breaks down again so
38:56 Brad So these
38:56 Scott Mm
38:57 Brad are
38:57 Scott -hmm.
38:57 Brad going to be interesting times.
38:59 Scott Very interesting.
38:59 Scott All right. Well, thank you for coming on just for our audience.
39:02 Scott If they want to find you out there in the world,
39:04 Scott how can they find you?
39:04 Brad Yeah, so the best way to find me is probably through LinkedIn.
39:09 Brad I'm fairly active on LinkedIn.
39:11 Brad Just look me up David Espindola,
39:14 Brad E-S-P-I-N-D-O-L-A.
39:16 Brad I also have my own website,
39:18 Brad DavidEspindola.com and Brainius.com as well.
39:23 Scott And you got to tell us the name of the podcast.
39:25 Brad Well, the podcast is called Conversations with Zina,
39:28 Brad my AI colleague.
39:29 Scott Oh, I love it. Well, thank you very much for coming on today. I appreciate it.
39:32 Brad Thank you, Scott.
39:33 Brad It was a pleasure.
39:34 Scott Thanks, dude.
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