Speaker 0 | 00:06.439
Everyone out there listening, you’re listening to Dissected Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’re talking with Prashant Natarajan. I hope I did this correct. Okay. Perfect.
Speaker 1 | 00:16.026
Perfect.
Speaker 0 | 00:16.867
We’re just going over the six languages that you speak, of which I can’t even pronounce some of the languages I should. Canada, which is not Canada like we could probably have. No. I’m sorry. Canadian jokes pop in here. We should have Canadian jokes ready to go, but we don’t. Tamil?
Speaker 1 | 00:35.459
Tamil. Tamil is a language of the state of Tamil Nadu in South India, large coastal state, probably spoken by about, off the top of my head, I would say, conservatively 30, 40 million people.
Speaker 0 | 00:51.690
And then Telugu.
Speaker 1 | 00:53.011
Telugu is another. It’s the language spoken in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. If.
Speaker 0 | 00:59.292
memory sources. Now, let me ask you this, though. If you can speak Hindi, will you understand these or no?
Speaker 1 | 01:04.213
No, you won’t. So the funny thing about India, I think India takes the adage diversity very seriously for a very long time. And what I mean by that is we are a nation of, or India is a nation of… multiple cultures multiple languages it’s funny awful because you could go like from Tennessee where I live now into Georgia where our local Costco is and you will have two completely different languages where people don’t understand each other not only I’m not talking about dialects I’m talking about languages and not only not only will that happen the scripts will be completely different too so you can’t understand the other person’s script either just going from Tennessee to Georgia, Tennessee to Kentucky. And so the diversity of languages, India has always been a melting pot, if you look at it anthropologically. And if you look at the genetic distribution, it’s no surprise that India has been a traditional melting pot of genes, of languages, of trade routes, for I would say, conservatively, maybe 2,500-3,000 years. And so as a result, you will find a huge multiplicity of languages. And the other thing I learned studying linguistics during my master’s was that there is a correlation between languages and dialects and population density and distance. So apparently, language being a way of expression first, a way of identity, and also a way of creativity. becomes an identity marker. So that is the reason why there is a mathematical connection to population density and distance. Because once a certain distance happens, there’s less need for people to connect with each other. And then they use a new dialect to generate a new identity. So with a billion point four people or so at last count, roughly speaking at 55 languages, many of them with their own unique scripts and approximately about 700 dialects belonging to these 55 languages. And I would say this is the thing that I think surprises a lot of people and arguably the largest English speaking population in the world, more than the United States. That’s India for you.
Speaker 0 | 03:44.865
Blowing my mind at the moment. This is great. This has nothing to do with IT at all. This is amazing. I’m a typical, yeah. probably self-centered American person that knows nothing about geography or other cultures. You know, this is, we have to, we have to, uh, um, how do we say, um, stereotype Americans?
Speaker 1 | 04:05.684
I am American for the last 23 years. And, and to be honest, American at heart, American in spirit, American in style, even, uh, in many ways, uh, by openness. I guess you could call me a New Yorker. In my love for the beach, I’m Californian. And then when it comes to, you know, just having a good time, loving community, I’m as southern as it gets. And extremely, extremely rocky mountain mountaineer when it comes to independence.
Speaker 0 | 04:49.583
I love it. I love it. The, I, I was speaking with someone the other day and I was, I was, I told you, I’d just gotten back from Morocco because I was working with my, my AI team over there. And I was speaking with a UK brother from the UK and we were having lunch and then someone else came up and, uh, whatever, he introduced me to him and I just started talking to him. And then we started chatting. I was like, Oh yeah. And you’re from here. And what about this and your kids and blah, blah, blah. And when we were done, the, the, the, the brother from the UK was like, um, um, wow, you Americans are really, uh, really open. I was like, uh, what do you mean by that? Like, like what do you mean? Like you get like, The people from the UK are very like more refined and kind of, I don’t know, I don’t want to say standoffish or protective or on defense or something like this. I don’t know what the, I can’t think of the word off the top of my head. You being the lover of English should probably know the word I’m searching for. I have a deep fascination, deep fascination for people that can speak multiple languages because I would love to be able to do it myself. I’m waiting for someone that can psychologically turn the key for me, turn the key and help me. What is it? Do I, a lot of my, a lot of people I know is like, no, Phil, you just got to go to wherever it is and then throw yourself in the culture and throw away the English key and just stop speaking English. Yeah. But how would you even know? Like I got to have some kind of like, you know, survival skill basis or whatever. You being a person that’s learned multiple languages, what’s the key?
Speaker 1 | 06:17.191
I think the key, again, in my case, Phil, since we are talking about it, I learned as many Indian languages because part of my schooling I studied in different states in India, which are almost different countries, like I said, each with their own script, each of their own language. And I developed a few things. One, and my dad always says this, and he says this even today, wherever he goes, and he’s also widely traveled like I am. And he says, people always like to hear you speak in their language. This is very important. And… You see, I’ve been a foreigner in foreign lands for most of my adult life, all of my adult life, for most of my life at this point. So it’s really about how do you make a connection with other people. And people don’t care about your grammatical mistakes. They don’t care about your linguistic mistakes. They don’t care if you switch words here and there. What they care about is you’re actually making an effort to learn their language and converse with them. them. It builds that human to human connect. So that was one thing that was drummed into my head. My dad speaks about 14 languages, including Russian and German, English, of course, and things like that, right? Definitely fluent French. And coming from that kind of background, my sister is native level fluent in Japanese, which she became in one proficient in. less than a year, which is apparently not a done thing. So part of it is, I think, just an interest. Part of it is when you are moving all the time, we have been, I would say, the original digital nomads before that term became popular. We have been selling our knowledge to various bidders for the last 60, 70 years as a family, right? We are intellectual mercenaries for hire, right? So with brains for hire, so to speak. and in my case, bad comedy too. So when you have that, I think the first thing is connect with, I also believe strongly that in Epicurus, I do have an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, a master’s degree in technical communications and linguistics, some PhD coursework in cognitive psychology, Greek philosophy, and rhetoric. So you could say I’m completely confused. or I’ve got a very good generalist in specific education.
Speaker 0 | 08:57.047
We’ll go with the first one.
Speaker 1 | 08:58.888
We’ll go with the first one. I think eating a meal of stale cheese and stale bread, but with friends is much more a guarantor of happiness in life than the fanciest food, right? So I believe that when you are in any culture, when you are in any ecosystem, whether it is organizational, cultural, national, international, right, community. You’ve got to learn the language told people speak. You’ve got to be one of them. You’ve got to make an effort. Nobody owes you anything when you are the nomad. You are the curiosity. You are the outside. You’re the one who’s trying to fit in. So language plays a very, very important role, not just in making yourself understood, but even half-broken language. builds 100% full human to human connections.
Speaker 0 | 09:56.594
So true. It is true. You remind me of this Egyptian conversation where I was sitting when I was in Egypt, and I tried to go back to Egypt a couple times, but they threw me in jail both times because, I don’t know, they just threw me in jail for no real reason. Call it, I don’t know, racial profiling. I don’t know. They don’t like white guys with long beards. But when I was there, and I was staying in this really remote village with… a friend of mine who’s really they don’t have any money i mean like when we say no money in the united states it’s like okay you know it’s not they don’t really understand a level of poverty that like other countries have and i’m sure you being in india you’ve seen a level of poverty that’s a real like a real level of poverty right and but i was sitting with them on the floor we were eating dinner the whole family was there i mean like you know the one family lives upstairs the other family lives you know in the apartment next door the other one lives you know walked across the street whatever it was probably like 20 30 people crammed into one little room sitting on the floor eating and uh the brother of my friend and i’m you know practicing broken arabic and like you said everything that you just said rings very true and uh he asked me like of all the things that i had seen what was you know like, you know, you saw the pyramids, you saw like, you know, you saw whatever Salah Hadeen’s castle, you saw this, you saw that. What was, uh, what’s your, what, what, what’s your most favorite? Like, uh, what, what was your most favorite? And I was like, this, this right here, sitting right here on the ground, eating with your entire family, seeing everyone interact, you know, just because we don’t really have that. At least I didn’t have that. I don’t have that. My, uh. I come from a family of doctors and my dad was, you know, you know, worked very hard. It’s just, you didn’t have that. Like, you know, everyone’s sitting down every day, you know, just like very tight, like community, like closeness. I was like, just didn’t have that. I was like, this right here is, this is the best experience. This just understanding your, this whole village and this whole aspect of how all this works and family and everything. This is the most fun. I don’t care about going around being a tourist somewhere. You know what I mean? If that makes any sense.
Speaker 1 | 12:21.736
Even. a modest meal with poor friends is better than eating caviar and lobster.
Speaker 0 | 12:29.642
How many people do we know that are driving Range Rovers and, you know, have tons of money, but they’re on like 15 different pills and ready to kill themselves at dissecting popular IT nerds. We expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one’s patience even on the best of days. So, whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, Our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power. in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts. so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we’re still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at… at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. So let’s segue with that to let’s not kill ourselves over AI, because you wrote the book demystifying AI for the enterprise, because why do you go to AI? Because I don’t know. The CEO says, we need to do AI. We need to do this thing. What is it? What’s going on? How do you demystify? What’s it all about? Because we hear AI, hear AI. It’s like talking about the cloud. It’s like saying blockchain and Bitcoin. Bitcoin and all these different things, how are we going to demystify AI? Because it’s a very broad thing. It’s a thing.
Speaker 1 | 15:35.458
Yeah, absolutely. Right. I’d say maybe let’s probably start with the demystifying part and then I’ll touch upon why I think it is almost indispensable on one hand and inseparable on the other from human existence. A little more of a philosophical and historical point.
Speaker 0 | 15:54.456
It’s too late, right? We can’t like, there’s no backing off like this whole like government, like we got to slow down AI. We’re going to slow this down. Like that’s all a farce, right?
Speaker 1 | 16:03.162
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I, I have, again, the fact that I don’t think so doesn’t necessarily mean I’m right. It just means I don’t think so. I think our understanding of AI, when I say our understanding of AI, I’m not talking about you and I, I’m talking about regular Joe and Jane. up there, right? John Doe and Jane Doe.
Speaker 0 | 16:27.938
You can say Phil Howard, that’s okay. You can say Phil Howard.
Speaker 1 | 16:32.802
The last 15 months or so, large language models are not new. Large language models have been around for quite some time. Transferable architectures have been around for quite some time, right? And what happened was 15 months ago, somebody at OpenAI decided to put it in a chatbot and release it out there. And all of a sudden, … you know, any new technology when it comes out first. Obviously, we know the numbers now, but let’s step back for a minute. What is AI? AI really is the ability of, for us to predict, it’s artificial intelligence with compact and more, but a formal definition that Peter Norvig gives, which I like a lot, is it’s the ability to act like, think like a human, act like a human, think logically or act logically. These are the four classic definitions. If you cut it down to, okay, how do we really do it? It’s really pattern recognition and using pattern recognition of historical data. The data could be numerical data. It can be text data. It can be image data. What you’re seeing now with a lot of generative AI is text and image data. Come to that. In order to create a vision of what’s possible and predict what’s happening. So that’s all it is, right? And I’ll come back to my second point. But really, it’s the ability for us, today’s AI, notwithstanding the previous ones, is really the ability for us to throw compute at large amounts of data to detect patterns that are otherwise not visible to the human eye and to be able to create more accurate predictions. Now, what could these predictions be? The predictions could be one popular example is predicting a stock. price, for example. That’s the AI that all of us want, don’t we? Or it could be predicting a more accurate weather forecast. That’s an AI that all of us want. It could be predicting soil conditions and crop harvest vis-a-vis the dew and the frost. It is something that all of us want. It could also be predicting the next letter or the next word in the sequence of sentences, which is like what. chat GPT does or generative AI does. It could be predicting based on a text prompt what an image could look like, right? So that’s AI really. In the enterprise setting, what does it mean? I think we can forget why and what’s of these definitions and focus on, I like to say, replace the A in AI, replace the artificial with augmented intelligence, amplifying intelligence. and assistive intelligence. And I describe each of these. Given my examples, humans by nature have always been predicting machines or have been trying to use predicting machines. The earliest technological revolution was actually agriculture, genetic engineering, and trying to predict what… genetic variant of a crop would give a better yield, make you less sick when you had to plant it, when you had to harvest it. That’s, I mean, by the very nature of our human existence, you could posit that the history of civilization is the history of prediction. So when people say, you know, is AI going to do this? Is AI going to do that? I just look at it as remove the hype, remove the fears. We have been, you can’t separate the history of civilization from what we call AI today, from the almanacs, from the prediction of weather.
Speaker 0 | 20:13.077
What about the outliers? So you kind of can’t predict what’s new, right? You can’t, or can you? Can you predict new inventions? Can you predict? What about the outliers that hit home runs? Can we somehow, we could predict maybe where some of the outliers would come from or some of the people that might be able to generate the new new.
Speaker 1 | 20:43.052
Outliers, again, let’s talk about outliers because outliers, anything that is not in the normal distribution is an outlier, right? So outliers. don’t necessarily, they just don’t follow the pattern in this case. They don’t follow the pattern can fall in two or three categories, right? So I posit that we should be looking at AI also from the lens of usefulness as much as we are looking at other lenses today. And what does it mean? Outlier could be a good outlier. We may end up with a new drug discovered as a result of applying AI, generative AI and hallucinations. in high dimensional spaces like protein folding or early stage drug discovery, for example, molecular combinations that the human brain or even the most talented humans put together are incapable of doing, right? That can be a positive outlier, a cure for a deadly pediatric disease. Who doesn’t want that, right? A lasting cure for cancer. Can we get to that? Yeah, sure. I mean, those are positive outliers. The negative outlier could be… One, the proliferation of content and other things that can lead to potentially negative experiences, right? Whether it is a more polarized society because AI-generated content is indistinguishable in many ways, is designed to trigger, so to speak, or in the wrong molecules being created, right? Instead of drug discovery, if your goal… is to do something bad with a bioweapon or biowarframe. That is also an outlier. Now, why I believe, yes, while AI, Gen AI has hit the world completely in a way that is truly mainstream now, I do think, Phil, that not just governments, governments are representatives in a democratic society of voters. And I just don’t think, despite extremes on any end, AI is not going away anywhere. At the same time, AI is not going to create this dystopian future either, where it’s going to take all jobs away. And our most pressing problem is going to be whether we are going to be drinking an old-fashioned or a pina colada because we have no work to do. No. I’ve talked about this frequently in some of my keynotes and things like that, which is, if you look at the history of technology, societies only allow that much technology as they want it. Just because we have nuclear power for the last 80 years doesn’t mean you and I are driving around with mini nuclear reactors in the back of our cars, is it?
Speaker 0 | 23:45.172
Why has that not happened yet? We should be doing that.
Speaker 1 | 23:48.533
Well, I guess we… should be. But the problem will be if you take a look at some of America’s home videos, I think some people have challenges filling gas with a gas pump that we don’t want them to be touching radioactive material by any chance. So I think that’s a good enough reason in that case.
Speaker 0 | 24:10.319
We need things to break because they need to keep selling cars. And if you’re going to make some sort of nuclear powered car, most likely it’s going to go forever. So, uh, That’s not going to work. It’s not going to make a profit.
Speaker 1 | 24:22.323
I actually think with AI, in one of my conversations and talks that I do often to boards and private forums where I’m invited to come and kind of speak about what the future holds for the enterprise.
Speaker 0 | 24:38.955
Top secret. No one’s allowed in. Top secret.
Speaker 1 | 24:41.137
AI perspective. Or they’ve bought enough books of mine.
Speaker 0 | 24:44.639
How many books do we need?
Speaker 1 | 24:48.746
It’s a few, right? Five at last count. And all business and industry focused. But I think one of the things I keep saying is we are seeing a sea change in how business is done. The traditional models have been technology enabled models, right? Have been B2B and B2C. And to me, and I predicted this well before Generative AI happened, I said the new model is going to be almost a B2C2B, where consumers and groups of consumers and customers are also going to create their own products and solutions that they are going to sell to themselves or sell to other businesses. And the company that ignores that community of users and creators as a source of new innovations and new products. The company that does that better is going to be ahead. And with Gen AI, oh my God, it’s so much true.
Speaker 0 | 25:44.463
We’re dying for that, though. I think any entrepreneur wants customer data, wants real customer data. That’s the old, what do you want?
Speaker 1 | 25:52.445
Customer data, though. It’s not just customer data. It’s an ecosystem where you can accept customers’ innovations, help them scale it to benefit the organization, and also benefit the customer and the community. I’ll give you an example. continuous glucose monitors. They’ve been around for quite some time. They’ve become extremely mainstream now. A lot of pre-diabetics and diabetics and others are using them to manage their blood glucose, manage their lives. There are insulin pumps. For a long time, the connectivity between the continuous glucose monitor and an insulin pump was not there until it took a bunch of preteens and teens who came up with their own stuff that then forced the industry to then accelerate the integration of these devices. That’s an example of a bunch of motivated users and motivated customers creating solutions when either organizational inertia, market conditions, or something else prevents you from doing what’s a no-brainer that your customer base already agrees on. So this is the kind of opportunity that I think no business can afford to miss.
Speaker 0 | 27:02.517
What should a… Regular, I don’t know, mid-market manufacturing company in America, logistics company, construction, healthcare. And when I say healthcare, I mean provider-based healthcare. So multi-location, dock-in-the-box type of healthcare, not big hospitals type of things. People that have IT, and I’m saying that because the majority of the IT leaders that we interview on the show or that have been on the show or the listening base are those people in that. in that space and mid-market heart of America, managing AT. What should they be doing? Is there anything they should be doing? What can they leverage to do their job better, right? Is there a place they can start or how can they, how can they leverage this AI technology as a, you know, layer of digital transformation to bring their business into the future and not just be a… an IT drone keeping the blinky lights on and being a clog in the cost center of IT.
Speaker 1 | 28:13.454
Yeah, see, I want to go, it’s a topic I’ve been talking a lot and I’ll answer that, but before I do that, I’ll probably just provide my view of why generative AI is particularly important to IT managers and leaders in small to mid-sized firms. This is important. Of course, it is important to large firms too, but I think more so for the small, mid-sized, mid-America, because I think what we are seeing fundamentally here, Phil, is a dramatic change in something that for a long time we have taken for granted. And what we have taken for granted is that there is a need for IT. And why do I say that? If you take a look at, I’m old enough, to know that there was an assembly world once upon a time, which then moved to COBOL, which then moved to C and C++, which then moved to Visual Basic and VC++ and then Ruby and Python. And now all of a sudden, what you see is the simplification of programming languages from assembly to lower order programming languages to higher order ones to the ultimate program languages that people want, which is plain English. All of a sudden, generative AI makes the language of IT and the language of computing for the first time in history, not a computing programming language, but a language that each of us use in our work, in our life, when we pray, when we play. So now, what does that mean? It means that the average IT leader and IT manager must figure out how to use generative AI. Don’t be frightened by it. Right. It’s not it’s it’s not going to. steal your job anytime soon. It’s going to change your job. but it’s not going to steal your job. Because while it is going to change jobs, it’s also going to create new opportunities, plenty of new opportunities. A database administrator or a cloud engineer who wanted to do something outside his or her realm of comfort would have to take time off their work, off their life to sit and learn something new. Today, generative AI gives people a way to get 60% of it, 70% of it right. So it’s going to liberate and create new opportunities too. So I think that’s the first thing, which is don’t resist, not because it’s inevitable, but don’t resist because it can benefit you. It will benefit you. So be the leader in figuring. The second thing, how do you go about it? Don’t try to churn the whole thing. Don’t try to create your own LLM. Don’t try to create your own platform, right? That’s the worst way to do it because all of us have certain things we need to do. from a productivity standpoint, efficiency standpoint, or a happiness standpoint. So narrow AI, narrow Gen AI is still going to work. If you can get a Gen AI agent to summarize all your emails, create replies for them, and have them sent out after a quick two-minute review, that’s something that can save you 20-25 minutes a day. So a tool like that. Being able to, for example, create technical documentation, including regulatory documentation. If you’re an insurance agent sitting in middle Appalachia, where I sit, and you have to submit various things as an agent or a broker to state insurance companies, getting generative AI to support you on those documentation requests. whether you’re a developer or whether you’re an agent, right? Again, narrow use cases. If you’re a mid-sized company, 10,000 people or less, right? That’s the definition goes. Then leveraging generative AI to manage your RFIs and RFPs, right? People always talk about, oh my God, these are going to take our jobs away. No, they are not. Generative AI and AI are not going to replace humans. with robots, more likely they are going to remove the robot out of us so that we can actually act, think, and feel more human.
Speaker 0 | 32:40.174
You have to be creative. You have to actually think and use your mind.
Speaker 1 | 32:45.018
Not only that, just think about this. Does anybody in their life really want to read an RFI or an RFP? Nobody likes to do it, but we all have to do it. So why not? Play the role of higher order human thinking, which we all want to do. And move the lower order stuff to these machines.
Speaker 0 | 33:08.528
Don’t do $10 an hour tasks.
Speaker 1 | 33:10.889
Don’t, or, yeah, well, if it is up to $20 an hour, let the machine do it.
Speaker 0 | 33:19.012
Don’t do $20 an hour or less tasks. Yes. Don’t,
Speaker 1 | 33:21.773
don’t, don’t, right? But then also figure out how you monitor. that in a way that it actually pays you back, right? So I’m never in favor of somebody who just comes and says, we have to think about economic empowerment. This new AI will only be acceptable to society, despite what everybody says today, if it creates more wealth. That is true of the history of any technology. A technology that doesn’t create more wealth in the previous technology will not be accepted by society, period. So the democratization of AI, in my humble opinion, is going to lead to the democratization of economic opportunity, of wealth, of commerce.
Speaker 0 | 34:11.499
It’s kind of why Google Glass never worked out, I think. It didn’t create enough wealth for people.
Speaker 1 | 34:17.601
It’s true, right? I mean, for something to be truly disruptive, you should either hit… people’s wallets or you should hit their hearts, right? What the social media has done is it hits on people’s hearts positively by allowing you to connect with family members and friends, for example. Negatively, by allowing you to participate in an echo chamber at times.
Speaker 0 | 34:43.369
It’s called desires. We’ll call it money or desires.
Speaker 1 | 34:46.870
Money or desires, right? So it’s always the trigger. So if AI doesn’t trigger it. either or both of these, you know, in the end, society will not let it succeed. Right? And I just don’t see, I don’t see… Kind of like some of, I think, fear cells. Hype cells, but fear cells better. So this whole idea that if you don’t, if you don’t do this AI today, dear small and mid business, you will be extinct tomorrow. Is not the case, not the case. No,
Speaker 0 | 35:28.560
but you may have an edge. If you do do it today, you may have an edge.
Speaker 1 | 35:33.296
No, you will have an edge. You will have an edge.
Speaker 0 | 35:36.077
Oh, now I like it. Now you will. So I’m still mystified though. I’m still mystified. I want to know what to do.
Speaker 1 | 35:44.061
First, easiest thing, first buy my books because it’s a 450 page book written in plain English, demystifying these various technologies, transformers, et cetera, for people who are in HR, for people in supply chain, for people in finance. for people in small business marketing, right? It’s for people who exactly you’re talking about. The folks who want to know how does it affect me.
Speaker 0 | 36:11.942
How do you want people to buy this book? Amazon, your website?
Speaker 1 | 36:16.325
Amazon is pretty good. They run sales usually. The Routledge Press also is running a sale right now, I believe. But Amazon is popular. They’ve got a few versions available. So I would strongly…
Speaker 0 | 36:30.996
still recommend Amazon. Do you have any examples of where you’ve implemented some AI solution that has saved or generated money? Other than the email one.
Speaker 1 | 36:42.986
Plenty. Plenty. Plenty.
Speaker 0 | 36:45.888
What’s like the most, let’s hit on a couple common ones that are just… I’m so glad I listened to this episode.
Speaker 1 | 36:53.274
I’ll give you one which I think will touch upon a couple of things. I can’t name names, obviously. for the customer, but I’ll give you a real example. So this was actually an insurance company. And this happened actually about four years ago, working with them. And I don’t think it would be very surprising if people go to my LinkedIn profile to find out who it was. But what we had built at the right height of COVID, COVID hits America, and all of a sudden, small businesses in America are sinking. closing their doors. They are going out of business as COVID hits. It was that horrible time when the pandemic just landed on our shores. And what the insurance company was trying to figure out was, how do you provide the best possible pricing for small businesses to continue their insurance in a way that was more affordable, more empathetic to them? Not always profit turning, but just enough to get you into the door so that… It’ll help you survive as a business. So we did something called best price first, which was take a look at the best, most appropriate pricing, which agents and brokers could use. So here’s an example of, I would say, a mid to large company taking recognition of COVID, taking recognition of the fact that half their small business market was in doldrums or worse. And looking at the lifeblood of America, which are insurance agents and brokers in every town in this country, and bringing all of them together at the height of a pandemic to find the lowest, best price, which was feasible for this company to actually continue to provide insurance to small businesses so that they could continue to remain to fight another day. It was done by good old fashioned AI. using a combination of machine learning, using a combination of natural language processing. But these are the technologies that were used then to provide exactly that human touch, that touches then communities, right? Because it’s not just about keeping a small business in business. It’s also making sure that the family that that small business supports, the vendors they support. It’s almost saving America through AI. at a time when we needed technology to do more than just be hype or fear.
Speaker 0 | 39:27.874
Sounds like a conspiracy to me. Sounds like a conspiracy, like this, we needed COVID to make AI happen.
Speaker 1 | 39:35.017
It’s hilarious you say that, because I would say that COVID was actually one of the biggest drivers of health AI transformation in several of the health systems that I work with.
Speaker 0 | 39:49.883
Digital transformation. period across the board. That was the old meme. Like what drove your digital transformation? Because hospitals are struggling to manage their ICU beds,
Speaker 1 | 40:02.818
but they’re struggling to manage supplies, and they’re struggling to manage nurse staffing and physician burnout. AI actually had solutions.
Speaker 0 | 40:11.515
We could have AI use, AI could probably knock out a lot of those initial questions that the doctors ask you.
Speaker 1 | 40:17.019
If we are seeing the tuntity with a lot of the ambient AI, I think it’s also an overheated space right now. I just stumbled on my way about to go drink a glass of water and I fell on three ambient AI companies by the time I got up.
Speaker 0 | 40:39.314
How can I start up an AI company?
Speaker 1 | 40:42.977
What do you mean, how can you start up an AI company? I’m surprised you aren’t one yet. Everybody else is.
Speaker 0 | 40:49.161
I think I am. I think I already am. I could sell this.
Speaker 1 | 40:56.306
What I mean by that is there are few legit AI companies today, right? Getting a chat GPT subscription. And again, I’m speaking just for myself here, not for anyone else strictly. But just getting a chat GPT subscription, connecting it to a chat GPT service, or running mid-journey to generate logos doesn’t make you an AI company. It makes you an AI user, right? And there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong in being an AI user. But I think the part of the part, I like the analogy of the late. 19th century, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s. There were almost a few hundred car companies in America. By 1950, that was down to four or five. By 1980, that was down to three. So I think we are kind of in the same land grab thing right now. Everybody is AI, including people who are not. But I think we’ll see a cleanup and value. Whether you generate value or not for your customer is going to be a bigger driver of what AI you have rather than anything else. And that reckoning is coming, in my opinion, Phil, in about 12 to 18 months from today.
Speaker 0 | 42:23.929
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Speaker 1 | 45:02.194
with perplexity a bit. I like the fact that their answers have references and are contextual. It’s… It focuses on getting you an answer, right? It’s not page ranking by no means, unlike traditional search. I’ve been kind of intrigued by public city a bit.
Speaker 0 | 45:22.538
Give us some more. Come on, we need some more bytes here. We need some more things we can use here. Okay, what else? Where else do we go? What are the great tools?
Speaker 1 | 45:30.463
I’d say there’s a few things right now. I still use chat GPT, even though I have certain… issues and challenges with sort of things there. I still like it because from a chat interface standpoint, I think they’ve done a pretty good job from a B2C perspective. And the integration of the image and text and voice is all pretty nice. Pretty good, actually. And so still, but I don’t pay for it anymore. I don’t pay a subscription for it anymore. Because I don’t find it to be that useful given the multiplicity of open source and other options out there to justify paying $20 a month. I have been using the Perplexity AI free service. I haven’t paid that $20 yet. I like it if I want to get specific answers to specific questions, and I want to do it in a relatively confident way in which I’m confident about the answers. I like Perplexity. So it’s not as… generic as chat gpt yet very specific needs and i i kind of like it quite a bit and then going on on the tech side i’ve been uh playing around uh obviously i’m talking mostly b2c space now uh claude claude is not bad right i absolutely love it i i like it too i i mean the challenge with all of this still is hallucinations are still there. So trust and credibility, which I believe is essential. We were talking about so many things earlier. We were talking about language, we were talking about science, we were talking about culture. I think underpinning all of this is trust and credibility. So I think AI is useful today. It will be even more useful, even more pervasive if it… It’s trusted more and provides answers that are more credible.
Speaker 0 | 47:41.179
The whole industry is kind of garbage in garbage in garbage out. Right. Like if you’re using it to, it’s been very helpful for us and some of the, you know, just task oriented stuff, just getting rid of a lot of production of these shows takes a long time. You have to, you know, transcribe all the episodes you have to record. You have to use mid journey. You mentioned mid journey. That was funny to make, make cover photos and stuff like this. And you’ve got, We’ve got prompts and bots and we’ve got, one thing that’s been useful is using the show to pull out real authentic pain points from IT leaders.
Speaker 1 | 48:20.331
Summarization is a good one, right? Organizing topics into themes is a good one. For example, you could use.
Speaker 0 | 48:29.839
And then going deeper on those themes. See, if the theme is real, if the theme is real. it can research that theme and pull out other real stuff. I guess there could be some garbage in there, but if you’ve been doing this longer…
Speaker 1 | 48:45.550
There is garbage because there are… See, again, there is the LLM memorization, which is less of an issue, but it still exists. The training data just being spit out. That’s one source of garbage. The other source of garbage is what many people still don’t understand, Phil, is hallucinations are not a bug of generative AI. They are a feature of generative AI. The reason generative AI works as well is because it hallucinates like crazy. The difference is certain hallucinations, you like Phil. If I say Phil is the most handsome bearded man on the planet, that’s a hallucination you’re going to like. It may be true. It may not be true, right? If I say that you’re only the second most handsome man, then
Speaker 0 | 49:30.096
It may still be hallucinating.
Speaker 1 | 49:32.057
It’s still hallucinating, but you don’t like the result as much. Now, you’re really going to dislike the result by saying, Phil, it doesn’t matter however long your beard is. Prashant is the most handsome bearded man on the planet. Then you’re going to get really upset, right? So I think the point is, and I’ve been talking a lot about this of late, is it’s time for us to accept that. All hallucinations are bad. Some hallucinations are useful. Some hallucinations we absolutely love and some we absolutely hate.
Speaker 0 | 50:08.325
I think that’s just life. So maybe it’s perfectly normal.
Speaker 1 | 50:13.066
So the point is, again, I think the key thing for us is if we want to move society, self, community, and enterprise to an upper plane, to a higher plane of progress, of knowledge creation, of happiness, of economic prosperity, which are all things that make up the human existence, we need to accept the good with the bad and understand. that in democratic societies, change is sometimes slow, but the way we can get AI to work the service is first to understand what it is, second is to start using it, and third is to start demanding more. When I say more of it, more from it.
Speaker 0 | 51:00.965
Okay, what’s the worst that could happen? We’re going to end with this. What is the worst that could happen, Terminator 2?
Speaker 1 | 51:10.529
The worst that… could happen is one of two extremes one is some kind of uh an event or the fear of an event even i’m more nervous about the latter uh is going to cause us to drift as communities as societies to one or the other extreme either an extreme driven by a desire to be so safe and so aligned not that i agree with the stops that we will not We will not allow AI to even help us where the risk is low and the reward is high. That’s one extreme. The other extreme is we allow AI to trample over the rights of creators, trample over the rights of intellectual property owners, copyright owners, trademark owners. And we really do a fundamental shift where instead of economic prosperity. there is economic deprivation as a result of it. To me, either of these extremes will benefit, obviously, somebody. But for society to benefit as a whole, moderation, again, in this case, is not a bad thing, but it’s almost a necessary thing. So bad could be any one of the extremes, irrespective of where you stand on those extremes.
Speaker 0 | 52:34.218
So there’s no third option, like the computers take over?
Speaker 1 | 52:40.382
No, no, because I don’t think humans will ever let them because we may find out that they actually are smarter than us and probably more productive and more efficient. And no, we don’t like to be shown up by dumb machines.
Speaker 0 | 53:02.280
No. Now, what if they start popping out better looking than us? No,
Speaker 1 | 53:07.924
no. I look again.
Speaker 0 | 53:09.446
We’re all hoping for that.
Speaker 1 | 53:11.746
The earliest human epics have talked about humans creating machines to help us, right? So I think what we are is after 5,000 years of epics and myths and books, we are at a point where we can actually get semi-intelligent machines. Jan Lekun said recently that some of the smartest AI that people are talking about is less intelligent than a house cat. So let’s put that in perspective.
Speaker 0 | 53:38.490
Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 | 53:41.512
I don’t think I would agree with that because anybody who has interacted with a cat and who has watched cat videos will tell you that cats are more intelligent than most humans.
Speaker 0 | 53:54.904
Oh, this is what, you know, herding cats is one of the is one of the terms. Herding cats is one of the terms in the. IT directors urban dictionary that we’re getting ready to put out for the show. That’s an actually an AI project. So we, we used AI to pull all of the definitions that IT directors use that are uncommon definitions and build a dictionary that we want to give away as like, just like a fun, like it, it was hilarious. And all the terms that came out of the show, one of them was herding cats. And it was like a term that IT directors use to refer to end users when training. It was like something like that. And I was like, something hilarious. And that was something that AI used. I’m trying to, I should pull up the, I wish I had it at my fingertips right now.
Speaker 1 | 54:42.884
The other thing that you should also then do is kind of give them a first aid kit because when you herd cats, you end up with a lot of scratches. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 54:55.935
Oh man. Did you give your parents a hard time growing up?
Speaker 1 | 55:01.100
My mom says no. my dad disagrees we’re gonna end
Speaker 0 | 55:12.176
Since you’re Indian, we must end with what’s your favorite food?
Speaker 1 | 55:16.438
That’s tough. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 55:19.040
I must know. Can I get it?
Speaker 1 | 55:20.640
One answer. You can guess.
Speaker 0 | 55:23.522
No, I don’t know. No, I said, can I go get it? I want to go get it.
Speaker 1 | 55:26.264
Oh, Ethiopian.
Speaker 0 | 55:27.824
Ethiopian food. Like the raw meat and the like squishy bread or what?
Speaker 1 | 55:32.807
Both of those. They also have, believe it or not, some amazing steaks. They’ve got some great. vegetarian options, vegetable options. Their spices are very similar to Indian food and they have a lot of meat in them, which again, I’m a big time meat eater, carnivore, so it fits very well. Beyond the bread and the vegetables, Ethiopian food is very, very rich in meat as well. So it’s probably one of the best carnivorous cuisines in the world.
Speaker 0 | 56:10.016
believe it or not all right we’re going ethiopian i’m carnivore right now as we speak um i have a pinched nerve c5 c6 we call it nerd neck i’ve been sitting in my chair too long you probably see me uh my neck is just messed up right now um but yeah every time i go carnivore and eat only meat which all the the vegans and vegetarians they just attack me like crazy if i post a meat recipe they’re like good night you’re gonna get scurvy um anyways And I’ve gone full Mediterranean and gone kind of vegetarian before, too. And that’s been great when I’ve been in the Mediterranean. It worked great. It doesn’t work good in Connecticut, Hartford, Connecticut. There’s just not. I don’t feel like there’s enough good access to organic. I don’t know. I don’t trust it. Anywho, we’re going Ethiopian then.
Speaker 1 | 56:55.909
All right. Ethiopian. Yeah. Ethiopia is awesome. Yeah. In fact, if you’re next time you’re in Washington, D.C., do check it out. because that place has got four Michelin star Ethiopian restaurants.
Speaker 0 | 57:09.055
DC has a lot of great restaurants. I love DC. I went to, I had, I had the best. Oh man. I had this Gambian dish down in DC. That was amazing. It was this like spicy chicken and this spicy mustard sauce chicken. All my Gambian friends are going to get mad at me now. Cause they’re going to be like, yeah, you don’t remember the name. But anywho, yeah, you know, so Prashant, it has been a pleasure having you on Dissecting Pepper, IT Nerds. One more time, you can get the book on Amazon and we, you know, if that’s the best way to get it, if there’s a website of yours. That’s the best way. Find Prashant on LinkedIn as well. Demystifying AI. for the enterprise thank you much uh thank you so much sir thank you thank you great to be
