Stop Avoiding AI: Here's How it Can Enhance Your Business [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 66]

Chris Duprey
0:00:00
So if you tried AI once, maybe twice, back in 2022, and you're like, Chris, AI doesn't work. I want you to think again. And I want you to think again. I want you to think again. I want you to think again.

Chris Duprey
0:00:12
I want you to think again.

Alex Winter
0:00:26
Live 2024 in Hartford, Connecticut, this October 14th through the 16th. Over three days, business owners, CEOs, and marketing and sales leaders will learn proven strategies to drive business growth. Attend expert-led sessions on marketing, sales, leadership,

Alex Winter
0:00:42
and AI, and get a chance to network with industry pros just like yourself. Discover how companies like yours are dominating their markets. Secure your spot at impactplus.com backslash impact-5. And for all of our endless customers listeners, we have an exclusive discount code that'll save you a hundred bucks. So when you're on the checkout page, just enter the code ECPOD100 in all caps for a hundred

Alex Winter
0:01:06
dollars off. We'll see you there at impact live 2024 up in Hartford, October 14th through the 16th. Welcome back to endless customers the show that teaches you how to earn trust and win more business in the age of AI. I'm your host Alex Winter and today we are joined by Chris Dupre a principal coach here at impact Chris welcome back. What's up man? Not much hanging in I'm excited to talk to you this is gonna be a good good conversation today what's going on with you everything good? Yeah

Chris Duprey
0:01:33
yeah yeah I mean can't complain I you know I've been flying all over the country talking about, right in an age of AI, so happy to share and talk about. That's exactly why we have you on the show,

Alex Winter
0:01:47
because I wanted to pick your brain about AI. I wanted to nerd out and just not get into the weeds on the specifics of tools necessarily, but more talking about how much you've been traveling and educating people on AI and a lot of corporations and companies that maybe had fears, worries, doubts, concerns

Alex Winter
0:02:08
about implementing it, the safety behind it, all the things, so I think a good place to start is like, what have you been seeing on the streets? What's been going on out in the world with AI

Chris Duprey
0:02:18
and just what your experiences have been? I think the funniest thing is is how clearly the marketing world is a vacuum like a silo

Chris Duprey
0:02:33
where but like we've been talking about a i since before it was even launched right and if you go back like paul roach or talked about it in like twenty seventeen at the first impact life right at paul and and the guys are going to come in talking about for a long time

Chris Duprey
0:02:49
but here's the thing

Chris Duprey
0:02:50
even though it's been all over the news every business is talking about it and every business chair america and canada to talk about it the level of understanding that people have is incredibly slim

Chris Duprey
0:03:08
right ok so i start every workshop whether it's with the CEO group or with a company, with on a scale of zero to 10. 10, you use AI every day, it's part of your workflow, it's how you do stuff. Zero, you can't spell AI.

Chris Duprey
0:03:25
Like where do you say it?

Alex Winter
0:03:27
Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:03:27
And the funny thing is, everybody laughs

Chris Duprey
0:03:30
the second that you say it, and the amount of.5 to two that I get and then people say I can spell AI

Chris Duprey
0:03:41
Well out numbers

Chris Duprey
0:03:43
Anybody that's above a 6 Wow, yeah, okay. Do you ever get anybody that's over a 6? I mean I had somebody at a workshop last week say they were at 10. Oh, okay, and Then at the end of the workshop, they're like yeah, we were like a 5. We had no idea right yeah, but like but you have a huge spectrum and

Alex Winter
0:04:04
I

Chris Duprey
0:04:05
think we originally thought and This is like Bob and I as we talked about this. I think we originally thought you were gonna have Really far ends of the spectrum where people were like hey, I should do everything. We don't need humans or No way I I'm keeping it as far out of my business as possible. While those are the two ends of the spectrum, what I've found is more people just don't know anything.

Chris Duprey
0:04:33
So they're not like, no AI, they're like, it's just cheesy, it just helps you write poems and stuff. Yeah, it's for like college kids to cheat on their papers.

Alex Winter
0:04:42
Yeah, or like, or they'll say,

Chris Duprey
0:04:44
well it's just not as good as Googling something. Which led me to this whole big thing of, that's what I started to ask this is, most people, again, this is not like a speculation, this is, I've probably talked to, I don't know, five or six hundred people since December about this topic.

Alex Winter
0:05:09
Wow, yeah, and just for background, Chris has been traveling all over the country talking to organizations like this, and I've actually been at a few of them and watched you give these presentations, which is pretty fascinating to watch what unfolds in these rooms as people start to get a better understanding of what you're talking about.

Chris Duprey
0:05:24
Yeah, but so here's the thing. So this is not speculation. This is like from the data that I've got right now, it's qualitative because it's just my-

Alex Winter
0:05:31
Right, but still real world.

Chris Duprey
0:05:32
Yeah, but here's the thing is that most people, when ChatGPT launched, went to it and asked it to do something and they gave it really bad instructions like they didn't know prompting they didn't know anything and it was GPT 3.5 so it wasn't connected yeah whatever right and it didn't give them what they were looking for and they got frustrated and said AI is dumb I'm

Chris Duprey
0:05:57
going back to Google or whatever and they never touched it again gotcha okay again. The amount of people that I've heard tell me that story is a like it's just this repeats and repeats and repeats. Wow, okay. Right and so I think the biggest thing that I've seen is that in three hours you can take people from it's the dumbest thing ever or I can spell it but that's all I know to holy Holy smokes, this could help us.

Alex Winter
0:06:29
It's been transformational, seeing it. I've seen you do it too. There was one company, they were in the security space, and I think the vibe in the room when you started was fear. It was very much like we're a security company. AI is cheating.

Alex Winter
0:06:44
Yeah, it was very much a fear-based thing, and I don't even think it took 15 minutes before you already had people getting a little bit more excited and the fear was subsiding and the curiosity was starting to spark and it was really cool to see that unfold

Chris Duprey
0:06:55
because I didn't expect that turn to happen so quickly. Yeah, I mean, I remember that.

Chris Duprey
0:06:59
Yeah.

Chris Duprey
0:07:00
I'm really glad that it worked out the way that it did, right?

Alex Winter
0:07:03
It did, it worked out good.

Chris Duprey
0:07:04
But this is the thing is, so again, like, you know, we recorded an episode a bit ago about alignment day for endless customers and the thing that we talked about is you have to educate people so they No longer have the fear so that they don't resist right same thing applies to artificial intelligence and so

Chris Duprey
0:07:21
When we're fearful it's because we don't know what we don't know and So it's just been really fascinating helping companies see some of these things and see the use cases and see how they could apply them and It's not like a bunch of Gen Z folks. I'm talking age ranges from Gen Z to some of the folks in these rooms have been

Chris Duprey
0:07:48
whatever the generation before Baby Boomers was. Right, right.

Chris Duprey
0:07:52
So it's a wide spectrum.

Alex Winter
0:07:53
It's a huge spectrum. Yeah, and I can speak from my own experiences. I was a little afraid at first too, especially coming out of the video world and video profession, I was concerned that this is just going to basically replace me. Right.

Alex Winter
0:08:08
And I think a lot of people feel that way, and what I didn't realize is as great as the technology is, it's not there yet where it's going to be replacing people, and instead, if you start to experiment, I learned all these tools that I can use that help me do my job way faster than I was doing it before.

Chris Duprey
0:08:22
of you would never have an employee in your company that refused to have an email address. Totally. It's kind of like the standard. That's what it's gonna come into, right? And so while it'll affect jobs, the internet affected jobs, we're not going to take the internet away, are we? No. Because it created a whole bunch more. Right. But you have to share this stuff, right?

Alex Winter
0:08:46
And that's why we do the workshops but and I think it's okay to be afraid that was part of like a vulnerability with me is like I was afraid to I think that's what's the most part of the journey of like you start off in fear and concern because it's unknown and then the basis is you have to educate and learn and that's how you start to get over those those hurdles

Chris Duprey
0:09:05
100% yeah 100% and what's what's been fascinating is most use cases that you see right now, right, are in this sales and marketing realm. Create this landing page faster, create this article, create the blah, blah, blah. Talking to all these CEOs, the first thing that comes to their mind is like,

Chris Duprey
0:09:27
I can finally do training now.

Alex Winter
0:09:29
I can make onboarding easier.

Chris Duprey
0:09:30
I can make all these mandatory sessions that I have to have. I can use AI video I can do I can make things Multilingual without having to find somebody to translate like yeah, it just opens this ability To do things that we all know we need to do but they all if we're thinking about priorities We're gonna shoot the video to drive sales before we're gonna shoot the training video

Chris Duprey
0:09:57
without a doubt. Right? Absolutely. But we already have all the material for the training because it's written either in a handbook, right? Right. Hopefully it should be. It should be. So let's assume that it is. Yeah. People see some of these tools like HeyGen or Synthesia Studios where it's literally avatar, insert words, maybe manipulate a little bit but you can create really good training videos without having to have talent to come in and do it. Talent and a film crew and a budget and all the

Chris Duprey
0:10:34
expenses that go with it yeah totally. So seeing that that was that was just fascinating to me that that is when I asked the question so like how are you gonna like what what experiments what are you gonna think about most people

Alex Winter
0:10:46
lean to that. Yeah how many so you you have experimented with GPT and with AI and with all these tools and I feel like you have a ton of experience with a wide net because you want to make sure that you can provide this info when you're giving your talks. Have you had any outcomes or like you're in the middle

Alex Winter
0:11:03
of a presentation and people have like a light bulb and they're like, I can use this for my sales process or I can use this, where like even you weren't thinking about it and you're like, wow, that's really cool that we're unearthing these things like live in the room.

Chris Duprey
0:11:14
Yeah, I think people go in being really afraid of AI with video and then they see it and they go, oh my gosh, I can do this.

Alex Winter
0:11:24
Right.

Chris Duprey
0:11:24
Right, I think the biggest thing that is like there are people just can't believe is I used a tool, HeyGen, and you saw this. I used a tool, HeyGen, it creates an avatar of yourself. And I used it to translate something into French because I was speaking to a group couple groups of CEOs in

Chris Duprey
0:11:45
Quebec City, where French is the main language. And whilst my last name is Dupre and my whole family is from Quebec, I don't speak French. Right. But I was able to, you know, with like two clicks of a button, speak really, really good French and by the way have a Quebecois accent which

Alex Winter
0:12:06
was crazy right? But it still was like your voice and your tone and it sounded like you and you sent me the video and my reaction was like when did you learn how to speak French? It wasn't wait this is AI

Chris Duprey
0:12:18
it was that good. Yeah the funny thing is in the video I say so there's an English version and the French version right I say like this isn't really me It's my AI avatar coming to you from my home office in Middletown, Connecticut, right? I say that Somebody heard it and I was like that's not your avatar. I was like But it nobody really is Like no, no, that's that's you. I was like, I mean, it's

Chris Duprey
0:12:43
Me in AI, but yeah, right and so so like lots of eye-openers with that one Yeah, that's a great example, but then you know, it's like when we go and just show folks the simple uses of Chat GPT right and you can insert Gemini you could probably insert Claude you could probably insert llama, you know, metaphor, like, right.

Chris Duprey
0:13:15
But just the whole idea of how do you interface with a GPT style, large language model and people are just blown away of like, you can have conversations with it. Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:13:27
Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:13:27
That was one of the biggest things you taught me because I started out with GPT, um, a couple of years ago or maybe, maybe it was a year or so ago. I can't remember exactly the timing, but there was a spot there where I was showing you some of the prompts and things that I was doing, and you were like, bro, why don't you just talk to it,

Alex Winter
0:13:46
like you talked to me? And I was like, I basically didn't know, I was like, oh, you can do that? Is that how it's done? And you showed me how you were talking to it, and you even had a nickname for it, and a whole deal,

Alex Winter
0:13:56
and the conversation was exactly like how we are talking right now, but the results you were getting were way better than the results I was getting from the prompts I was putting in. I think that goes back earlier to like, if you don't know how to prompt it, you don't know how to talk to it,

Chris Duprey
0:14:08
it limits the results you're going to get back.

Alex Winter
0:14:10
Right.

Chris Duprey
0:14:11
So there's a whole science to that too. And like the funny thing is, so now if you take chat2BT4O, it doesn't matter how you prompt it. It has memory, you just talk to it, it can do research, it can do all these things. Mm-hmm. But the other models you still have to write. And so you have to train Claude on stuff because it's not going out and learning

Chris Duprey
0:14:32
things. Right. I was going to ask you that too, because I feel like the latest thing right now and it's changing the landscape is like every week it's, it's something different. But right now I feel like it's Claude and GPT, like which one's better, which one is the better LLM and has better responses or better, like sounds more human or whatever you want to call it.

Alex Winter
0:14:49
Yeah.

Chris Duprey
0:14:49
What's your take on that? I mean, I think that there is data that people will run about the performance of a large language model to have very quantitative data on which one's faster, better,

Alex Winter
0:15:04
blah, blah, blah. Sure.

Chris Duprey
0:15:05
That ain't this guy. OK?

Chris Duprey
0:15:07
OK.

Chris Duprey
0:15:09
And out of the box, what I've heard, and I think I've seen too is that Claude writes more like a human. Okay. But notice I said out of the box. Okay. Yeah. So I've been working with ChatGPT for the last year and I have a ChatGPT Teams account so it's secured and and I And I pay for it, so I've got the 4.0 version, which has memory, okay? So it's not like I have to go into each conversation

Chris Duprey
0:15:44
and go back to it, like my thing has memory. So when I call it pal, it says, what's up, Chris?

Alex Winter
0:15:49
Right, it learns.

Chris Duprey
0:15:50
Right, yeah, but it uses my name, and I can say all these other things, right? So yesterday I did a little experiment. I took a topic I wanted to write about, went to Claude, I free wrote in Claude, and it asked me a bunch of questions I told it

Chris Duprey
0:16:05
ask any you know ask me like six questions sure and it came up with an article I then copied and pasted the exact same prompt with the exact same free writing into GPT it asked me different questions and then it wrote me an article and if you were to read them you wouldn't you would say you wrote that one it was a chat GPT was it was a which one was that like this so the Claude one talked about all the things I talked about it did not sound computer-generated sounded human

Chris Duprey
0:16:42
but it didn't sound like Christie pray because I haven't trained Claude gotcha ChatGPT used language like I use.

Chris Duprey
0:16:52
Right?

Chris Duprey
0:16:53
Because I've talked to it so much. Right. And so I think, you know, my original thing, my original experiment was like, which is better at writing? And I think I found a different result, which is, while the technicalities, one might be better than the other,

Chris Duprey
0:17:12
If you invest time in one, it's likely going to do what you'd like it to do.

Alex Winter
0:17:18
Sure.

Chris Duprey
0:17:19
Right? Sure. And so my new hypothesis is find the model that you're comfortable and that you're working with. Like I tried to do that with Gemini, Google's version. I just didn't love how it interacted and I was so used to chat and chat so much fart

Chris Duprey
0:17:36
like chat's got a desktop app. It's got an iPhone app, it's got all this stuff. And so it's searching the internet, I can I can do it, I can use it wherever. And so I've just trained it to do what I want it to do, right? To the point of I'd be like, Hey, what did I say about this thing before, so that we can keep going? And hey, Chris, here's

Chris Duprey
0:17:57
what you said, right? It's super great. Claude, I have not spent any of that time with, and I haven't explored it as much but it so in a heads-up comparison I'm going to chat to you all day but that's me. That's your personal yeah. Now take somebody that did the exact same thing but with Claude they're gonna tell me how wrong I am which is cool because to me it's more about find tools that you can use and leverage to make your work more efficient to give you more time to allow

Chris Duprey
0:18:30
you to do the things that only humans can do yeah and so so that's that's like a big lesson that I've learned from this whether from just that experiment from talking to all these folks it's I don't know that there's a be-all end-all one model to rule them all right like I don't think we're gonna have so runs ring right yeah as this I think we're someday gonna have

Chris Duprey
0:18:57
all these different models with all the things that they're good at and somebody's gonna have one interface and we're gonna put in a question we're gonna put in a problem to put in something is gonna go figure out there's gonna be an agent that figures out which model is the most efficient and best use to get us what we need.

Alex Winter
0:19:17
Totally.

Chris Duprey
0:19:18
Because like, so again, when we think about all this stuff, like the higher level model, the more it costs for the compute, the blah, blah, blah. So at some point somebody will likely come in and so we'll probably have this conglomeration of models.

Chris Duprey
0:19:33
Sure.

Chris Duprey
0:19:33
But it's have you as a knowledge worker figured out how to interact with this new tech the same way that we all had to interact with PowerPoint? There was a huge wave. I remember being an army officer and half my job was making sexy PowerPoint slides. I mean, it was not fun making little 80-second airborne division.

Alex Winter
0:19:59
In Microsoft Office, we-

Chris Duprey
0:20:00
Listen, brother. I legitimately did this take little 82nd Airborne icons and fly them from Fort Bragg to Afghanistan so that when we could click we could show each flight the brigade was taking oh wow yeah that took for yeah I bet right yes but you had to put as part of what you had to do in your plans officer absolutely when I see what we have to do today as knowledge workers sales marketing service

Chris Duprey
0:20:28
CEOs executives leaders managers if you're not trying to go how can I sharpen the saw? How can I get better? How can I be more efficient? I can be more Useful you're gonna struggle and that's the big thing I think that all of these folks are getting even if all they do is go to chat GPT and say here's my job, how can you help me? They're taking that first step, and I think that's the biggest thing that I've seen,

Chris Duprey
0:20:55
is that folks that are afraid, stop being as afraid, and they take the first step to actually leveraging the stuff.

Alex Winter
0:21:01
Totally, totally, and I think the biggest thing I pulled away if you step back from what you were just saying is, you have to experiment. It's like anything else, you know, and if you're not sure if Claude's better,

Alex Winter
0:21:12
or GBT's better, or Gemini's better, maybe it's not about which one's better, it's what's better for you and what works best for your workflow or your style or whatever the case may be. Yes. And the only way you can figure that out

Chris Duprey
0:21:23
is by playing. Yeah. And you got to start somewhere like, you know, if you're a golfer and you love Titleist golf balls, you're probably not sitting there testing Nike balls and other golf balls. Like you're just sticking with what you got. I don't know that that's a bad approach, especially this early on right now. Right, right. So for everyone out there listening and watching, you got to get your hands dirty, you got to roll up your sleeves and try

Chris Duprey
0:21:49
these things out and see what's gonna work best for your particular situation and your workflow. Yeah. I love it. What's the one thing that you would leave people with from this conversation when we're talking about AI? It sounds like maybe don't be judgy and make comparisons. Yeah, I mean I would honestly say I'm gonna steal a line from Ted Lasso like yes be curious not judgmental because here's the thing if you if you've only used chat in November

Chris Duprey
0:22:17
of 2022 you don't know what it can do it's totally different yeah right but instead of judging it just be curious and I'm gonna tell you that AI favors the curious. Right? The more stuff you ask it, the more it's going to tell you. And if you're stuck on something, you go, how can you help me with this?

Chris Duprey
0:22:34
And they go, oh, well, I can do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So be curious, not judgmental. And you and your organizations will thrive with AI. If you're judgmental and not curious, you're just not going to do it and you're not going to die, but you're

Chris Duprey
0:22:54
going to be left behind as you suddenly see more and more people adopt it, more and more people find these efficiencies. They're just going to be more profitable and cash flow is king.

Alex Winter
0:23:07
Yeah, cash flow is king. Yeah, well said. Cool man. Chris, thanks for your insights and for sharing some of your stories. I really appreciate it.

Chris Duprey
0:23:12
You're so welcome, buddy.

Alex Winter
0:23:13
All right, and for everybody that's watching and listening, this is Endless Customers. I'm your host, Alex Winter. I'm your host, Alex Winter.

Chris Duprey
0:23:18
See you on the next episode.