**Phil Howard:** Okay, everyone, welcome back to Dissecting Popularity Nerds and the reason why we’ve been having these wonderful technical things, which is what we do in the IT world, is put out fires every day. Hopefully not. And we’re a little bit more proactive is we’re trying to get all the live streams going at one time. So you know you’re the first, like super double live, I guess is what we could call this. I don’t know. We’re trying to go live in the community, live on LinkedIn, and all this stuff at the same time. I’m sure there’s like an AI thing that could fix that. Before we even get there, can we maybe just talk a little bit about how you got into the wonderful world of IT? Because I’m sure it started somewhere back in the day with, maybe tape backups or something like that. Why don’t you just give us your rundown and how you got playing with all this stuff before we get into the real deep stuff.

**Yossi Akselrud:** Yeah, sure. So my background in IT, how I got involved was I was going to be a radio engineer. I wanted to be like an audio engineer, radio engineer, that stuff really spoke to me. And I have a brother who’s like, you know, take a networking course, take it. So I took a networking class. I was like, it spoke to me. It was just a computer class. It was just like a regular computer class with maybe like IT stuff. I knew nothing about IT at that point other than, like, we had a computer in the house that I, you know, AOL, you know, you’ve got mail, you know, files waiting, that kind of fun stuff like, don’t pick up the phone when you’re online, you know. The old fax blasting, you know, baud rate modem, fun stuff.

**Phil Howard:** But that’s pretty high tech for back then, though, if you actually had a modem in your house.

**Yossi Akselrud:** Well, if you had thirty-six thousand baud rate, you know, the Hayes modems, then yeah, for sure. So that class, I don’t remember much. I remember I think it was like we touched on Excel a little bit like what Netscape is. I don’t think it went very deep. I don’t remember, but then I was like, this really speaks to me. I think I took a second one and I was like, okay, this is, you know, we’re going to put audio engineering maybe to the side. And I took a, I went to Chubb Institute. I enrolled in Chubb, which was very interesting for me to have to interview to go to college. But, you know, I got accepted to Chubb and then after, you know, spending some good months of every day having to take the subway, I actually went to school across the street from World Trade Center. So every day before we started, I actually met my brother every day for lunch, who was working at the Trade Center. And I would be there with a jacket and tie every day. You had to wear a tie to Chubb Institute.

**Phil Howard:** That’s my path. That’s my journey. I’m here. I’ve been there. I’m here now. What’s next? Because I felt like, oh, if you do this and you fill out this punch list and you do this really well, and we do this construction, you know, and we make sure that, you know, this construction goes well and this project goes well, then you’re going to get this phone call and this opportunity. No, it’s just right now I’m doing my one hundred and ten. And I want to ask some hard questions for you. Number one for everyone else. Because one of the things that everyone wants to know is how do we get past the AI hype, and how do we actually have some real use cases or really implement AI in a way that is actually meaningful to the business and drives business value?

**Yossi Akselrud:** So I work in healthcare. I’ve always worked in healthcare. So with healthcare, we’re guided by HIPAA. So it’s a protocol put in by the government. We have to keep certain standards. And my personal feeling is that every business should have these type of standards and regulations of how are you treating somebody else’s data. Like I saw recently on LinkedIn, there’s like a keyboard voice dictation tool, like, oh, what’s their security protocol? Because, you know, we remember back in the day there were keyword loggers. Like, the worst thing you could get is somebody putting a keyword logger. Well, if I install on my own something that’s capturing everything that I’m saying as a keyword, and now they’re putting it to somewhere and they don’t have the security in place to protect my data and who I am. You know, that’s not something I would want.

So you ask a multi-pronged question. So one is how do you get into it? And I think my personal feeling is find something that you will find fun and interesting. Make it almost like you’re drawn to it and something that will draw you to it. Like, let’s make this interesting. And if you I won’t say gamify it, but it’s a tool that you’re going back to because it’s fun. It’s interesting. It speaks to you. It goes to you.

I’m in GPT constantly. I’m using for multi-pronged of what I’m using it for, whether it’s to help formulate a draft of something that we’re sending out to somebody, or to review something else, or to make a fun image. I’m really good at making fun images and funny memes and to send that around. I have a lot of fun doing that. You have no idea how many subscriptions I have just so I can do fun things. Like you need to have fun. And these are fun milestones, right? Fun thing. So how to draw somebody into getting into it? I would start with start low. Hey, what is something that speaks to you?

**Phil Howard:** We should go along with the vibe too, because one time you told me I start off in the morning, like maybe even in the shower vibing. I imagine you have, like, this waterproof microphone in the shower and that you’re vibing with AI.

**Yossi Akselrud:** Yeah, it’s called your phone. Your phone’s waterproof. I know that I remember the exact time when the phones became IP67. And I’m like, I know these IPs or whatever it is, but I can use it in the phone, in the shower. And I’m like, oh, my phone is now waterproof. I don’t have to really protect it.

And so in talking about like, vibing, I talk to my GPT constantly. And I actually had a thought this morning I put on LinkedIn where in GPT you can vibe with it, whereas like if you tell somebody to go to Google and you’re doing Google search, you have to give it exact like in the longer tail words, it’s more finite, you know, of what your results are going to be. GPT just having a conversation with it. And so I’m getting really comfortable with vibing with GPT. I’ll hit, you know, dictate. It’s not the talk, you know, one to one where it’s talking, it’s answering you. It’s just listening. And you can vibe with it ten minutes. The cap is actually ten minutes. And you’re just having a thought.

So like, somebody sent in like, hey, what are we doing for this process? We’re doing a rollout. How are we doing the stage of the rollout? Oh, I have an idea. In the shower, like we discussed last time we spoke, Phil, I voice dictation, I vibed with it. This is something. How we’re going to roll this out? I’d like to do this address for this. Calculate this. You know, all the parameters and it just spit it out. So if you’re hearing this. Yeah. If Mike if you’re hearing this, that whole memo I wrote up, it was in the shower. Just think of that. Just talk to it. Vibe to it. Don’t be scared of it. People are scared about this thing. It’s a scary thing. It’s new, you know, lean into it, but don’t give it private info yet. I wouldn’t.

**Phil Howard:** How many people you think, if you had to guess a percentage wise in the company. Not your company, any company. Anyways, across whatever industry, let’s just say whatever manufacturing healthcare actually use AI every day.

**Yossi Akselrud:** I don’t have stats, but I will tell you, I have a friend who’s a partner in an accounting firm and we talked AI and I give him some stuff to look at and he went to his IT guy. He goes, okay I would like to start using AI and IT said no you cannot. And he’s like what do you mean for stuff that doesn’t it’s not, you know, private it’s not without PHI, you know, why can’t we use it. No. And so this IT guy has his accounting firm. I told my friend, I said, listen, get a copilot license. It’s your world Azure tenant. Your data is not leaving. It’s secure. You sign on, there’s a little green shield. Go that way. And I’m trying to help my friend in the accounting firm convince his IT guy to let him, you know, dip his toes into AI. And, like, these are formulas and trying to figure out long spreadsheets. You know, they’re changing so people are scared to start.

**Phil Howard:** That was kind of one of our first bullet points. And I wasn’t really scared to start. I was just kind of, I mean, I could use it. What am I going to use it for? Search my email, make a few things more, you know, whatever it was. And Greg, he knows that there’s things that he showed me before in AI and that I come back to him like, hey, we got to use this. And he’s like, yeah, I showed that to you like six months ago. Yeah, two weeks, two weeks ago, two weeks ago. Six months. He’s like, we should use a different LLM. It was different six months ago. That’s so that’s so May 2025, you know.

**Greg Le Dall:** It’s true though, Greg. It’s true because anything that we have now, it wasn’t there three weeks ago.

**Yossi Akselrud:** And like we looked at, we’re rolling out, a questionnaire to a subset of our employees because we’re switching out some of their devices. And so we found this old form that I used two years ago, literally two years ago when, like, AI was a new thing and Midjourney was what we were using for creating images. And I look at this thing, this image I created, I go, that is so beta, I guess. It’s like it’s like it finally generated an image without six fingers. Greg, have you been, you know, doing the AI for a while, like, oh, I got one without six fingers. Let’s use it because it’s not complete crap, but like it, like, now I created it and it’s lifelike. It’s real. It’s got the image, the emotion that I’m looking for. It really dives into exactly that subset. Whereas when I was like starting, it was not repeatable. You could not repeat results from prompt to prompt to prompt zero, whereas now it’s keeping the memory and it’s keeping the images, the memory within the images. So like initially when you would adjust like let’s say, oh, I like this image. Take out this table from the from this image. The whole image would change. The whole thing was gone. Whereas now table is gone. Put a pen in the hand has a pen. It’s crazy. I can’t figure out the spelling yet. If you guys can figure out how to get stuff to spell long form words on the page that…

**Greg Le Dall:** Yeah, these are about the models, but some of them are better than others.

**Phil Howard:** So to not follow any agenda at all, I’m throwing it away. But the one thing that we were talking about, Greg and I, before we got on here, was look at the stuff we can build. We’re not even coders. Look at what we can do. So I know that you’re doing that. I know you’ve got things that we don’t. We can’t talk about. We can’t. Even if we signed NDAs, you wouldn’t even whisper about it. I know you wouldn’t. But let’s just use a fictitious example of something that you could do. And I guess our question was before, if we’re not coders, what do we need to do? Go find a coder to, like, fix the little gaps or something? What do we do?

**Yossi Akselrud:** So there’s a few platforms out there. One is Replit. That was the first one I was introduced to. Another one is called Lovable. Another one is called Zeit. And there are a few other ones. Base 44 is another one. And these platforms, you really don’t need to know coding.

So my workflow that a good friend of mine, Clark, suggested to me, which is my gold standard for the workflow of these guys. You got to give credit. You know what I’m saying? It’s not my idea. The ideas that I’m building out, perhaps are mine, but the workflow where I’m using GPT as my core of everything. Anything I’m using in AI, even if I need to do it, bring it to another AI, for instance, like gamma. Like, oh, I need to create a pitch deck for this, or create a document or a PowerPoint. Whatever it is. I’ll go into GPT, I’ll vibe with GPT. So I’ll just hit that dictation button. I’ll talk to my GPT looking for these things to occur. Then I’ll tell GPT, give me an output for whatever the platform is. GPT knows how to give you an output for that platform. Like you say, for gamma, it will put the brakes into where it feels that the Gamma pages breaks near to happen. It’s crazy. Like when you go to gamma, you’re like, oh, it’ll have it baked out. And so the pages are exactly how so? Like, for instance, when GPT, before there was a gamma, you’d say, hey, I need a PowerPoint deck. It would just give you some, like, really, you know, poorly formatted documents of like, a presentation, but now you’re getting the good data from GPT. It’s not that great at creating the images as the formatting. But it’s really good at creating content. So you take the content from GPT and you’re putting it to gamma. And then here’s your thing.

So I do the same thing with my low code. Zero code that I’m doing. Well I’ll vibe with I’ll open up a new thread, new memory image GPT. You can do open a new folders, whatever it is. And I’ll tell it, this is what I’m doing. I’ll vibe with it. What I’m looking to do, the business model, the platform, whatever it is that I’m looking to have created, I’ll vibe into my GPT exactly what I’m looking to do. It’ll then I’ll then tell it, give me an output for this platform, whatever the platform is. It’ll then give me the output. I’ll copy and I’ll paste it into, let’s just say lovable. Or I’ll paste it into Zeit. And it’ll build it out. And then if I want to make a functional change to it, like within the platform like, let’s say lovable. I’ll, you know, if I need to adjust this, this button should look like this. It should, you know, be doing this, you know, that’s fine. The the micro adjustments I will do within that platform. But the macro adjustments such as functionality. I’ll then go back into GPT because GPT is now my my thread of, of this platform that I’m looking to build out. And I’ll say, okay, adjust this functionality, build out this functionality. You know, again, give me the output file, I’ll put that into lovable and it will then now build that out for me.

Let’s go. And I’ll just I’ll give you like an example because you asked me for an example of what you can do as you build out an automated workflow within a company of you need these triggers to happen, these people to be notified. Very simple. And you want transparency. Really. You know something that’s customizable based off of your business that you’re looking to do. So instead of going online and you’re paying somebody as a gig, or you find somebody tool online that’s going to cost you whatever a month. You can build it out, customize it for yourself and within using lovable. You don’t even need to know database architecture. You don’t need to be a DBA because lovable will connect with Supabase, which is their back end, and it’ll say, okay, would you want me to create this for you? Yes. Bam! I need to adjust. It’ll tell you, hey, I need to adjust the SQL tables to do the bug. Would you like that? Yes. I need to send emails. Give me the API key for this platform. It’ll tell you the platform. It’ll give you to it’s called resend. They’ll say, okay, give me the API key for resend API key. Put it in. You’re not going into the back end really of supabase. You could if you wanted to, but you’re all doing it through this, chatting with an AI agent that’s now doing all these actions for you and all these triggers, crazy stuff.

**Phil Howard:** And the old days of, oh, I need to invest X amount of money and X amount of time into create even just a wireframe for an app before you’re like, oh, let me see if this is like a real thing.

**Greg Le Dall:** I have a personal example like that. That’s funny because it really goes back to now the ability to create your own solution. For example, now instead of building like a PDF document with the boring Google doc to PDF, I just do everything on HTML. But I couldn’t find a good HTML code to PDF format, so I just build it myself. And now the app is perfect, but I just use it on my own, you know, locally. But that’s where I see where you can go now. Like, basically you just at this stage where it’s going to be like micro apps that you use for your own use case, not even putting in production to sell it, but really because you want your own thing.

**Phil Howard:** Someone’s going to hire someone’s going to hire Greg. Now he’s going to get like fifteen job applications. And here’s why he should as well. He should, by the way, because you realize that a guy like Greg, with his strong suit of being able to make micro apps, most companies, they don’t want to, you know, bring in something that’s a big platform. Like they want to bring in like a whole big thing and change a workflow. Like they want an MVP, a micro application that will address the, you know, some little pain point that they’re having and efficiency spreadsheet, the spreadsheet company that’s still working off spreadsheets and using email as a database.

So what we talked was a little bit high level for maybe some people in the company. What would you do to start people out in your company? How would you draw this out? Or how would you get people to start using any kind of steps or suggestions.

**Yossi Akselrud:** So start small. Let’s start small.

**Phil Howard:** And if I can just add something on top of that question, the whole vibe coding is usually for solopreneurs, people that just build a thing, you know, on their own. A really small team, but not yet when it comes to a company. Is it something that is really applicable, for a company because of all the questions behind the ethic, behind the security and everything.

**Yossi Akselrud:** So, yeah. Greg. If so, I’ll answer you. With the vibe being for the solopreneur. When you have at least for a company my size. I view it the same way. Where you first come up with a set of what you’re looking to accomplish. What’s what’s what are you looking at? What’s your MVP? What’s your framework. So whether you know I’m doing it as a vibing entrepreneur or doing it for a company, I would I would address it and, you know, go at it the same way you would with any other, you know, platform that you’re looking to build or anything that you’re looking to accomplish within the building or for a company. And then you adjust your time frame to roll something out like this is just greatly, you know, accelerated where, hey, you can meet with the with the stakeholders. And like get their their their requirements, what they’re looking for. And then two hours later you can spin around a framework that might even be working. You don’t have to like, bring it back to the developers and then have the developers, then, you know, work on this and they’re creating it. Your your turnaround time to just, you know, have something even if it’s I’ll give you an example. I had an idea at two o’clock in the morning on Friday morning when I was in Israel, and I was like, oh, I have nobody to talk this through because two o’clock in the morning in Israel, it’s a seven hour difference, six hour difference depending on time of the year. And I’m like, let me just talk this through with my AI. And so I just I went to my GPT, I vibed with it. Everybody’s sleeping. It was just me and I just vibe with this thing. And then it gave me an output. But lovable. I took this output and I have a crazy. And then I’ve modifying him, adjusting it, whatever it is. But then it’s not working because it’s meant for a phone. Like my idea that I want to build out and I do a thing, it’s for an AI, for a phone. And I’m just waiting for, you know, for it to happen for the piece of the tech stack to line up, you know, appropriately. But I have a working wireframe of how my app is going to work. Yes, it’s in lovable and it’s not doing it, whatever it is. But your turnaround time to just come back to whoever the stakeholders and say, is this what you’re looking for? Even if you want to take the code and then put it into another platform like lovable has a link is hook up with GitHub or GitHub. So I have a data ninja. I have a guy in Costa Rica who’s incredible. So we’re just he uses low code, no code to do, you know, platforms for me, like micro platforms, we built out something like about a year ago that is just it’s not on the space, but like you said before, not everything that you’re building out, you’re going to go public with. A lot of things, you know, it’s built out efficiency and like the, you know, like my owner, my company said, like we built out something that’s going to make us more efficient. Why would I give that to, you know, my competition?

**Greg Le Dall:** And is that up to the company policy or like, is it something that’s so everybody uses like quietly on their own, but they don’t mention it to the company because of a great question and shadow.

**Yossi Akselrud:** It is a real thing. Shadow IT is a real thing at a had a company reach out to me, last week. Hey, we can monitor your stuff and your IT for shadow IT. Like, who is doing things that they shouldn’t be doing? Who’s doing stuff with your data? Like a DLP that’s like we’re putting into GPT. We’re putting into an AI that has none of these, you know, securities in place. I had a call with a company, like about two months ago. I’m blanking on name the company I was. I totally give him a shout out where they are. Your your filter. Where you like. They are your your interface to the AIs, whatever the AIs that they’re going to that’s, you know, that’s up to you and you can decide and whatever it is. But anybody who needs an AI within the platform, within your company will put into their platform. They’re then filtering it for DLP to filter out, to anonymize whatever it is. And you know, everything. SOC compliant. Your POC compliant. They will this stuff out, flag it. Maybe even tell them, you know, hey, Greg is trying to extricate some data here, okay? Whatever it might be. Obviously he’s not Phil, but look, Phil tripped up over there, but it will then filter through and then go to the eyes with, you know, a clean set of data. So I’m blanking on the name of the company, but like. How do you stop anybody from creating a side account of, let’s say smartsheet and putting your data into it.

**Phil Howard:** He’s in charge of building this the so as we speak somehow if we can do that.

**Yossi Akselrud:** So you know, I mean the solution like I have some models that just run locally on my computer, you know with LM studio. And so if there are like sensitive data anyway, you know, you can just use that and do like a mock up, material that use fake data and you just use the same structure and, but that takes a bit of time.

**Greg Le Dall:** And I don’t know, it takes a bit of time and it takes an expert like yourself. It’s like the difference between like having somebody on staff, right? Who can do whatever. Give you an example I don’t know, whatever it is. They could be a subject matter expert or you might not have a subject matter expert on staff. So you’ll go to somebody externally. Like Phil said before, you know, whoever you know, Greg’s, you know, going to be getting a lot of job opportunities now because everybody’s recognizing that he’s, you know, a genius who’s built a local LLM, which does not go to the cloud. So you’re compliant for all those security regulations. But like not everybody has. So like so first of all, even if you have somebody now and like how we start this conversation, they might be really good at stuff. That’s now three weeks. That’s changing like the the space of remember the old, oh, what are you going to do in five years? What is your tech stack look like in five years? Then it became what is your tech stack look in three years? Three years. What does it look like in three months? That’s why I have a problem with people signing five year agreements. Somehow they still do it somehow. They still do it. I put an end to that. That should be like a that should be like a company, like on a top ten. No do thing or something like that. Really? Especially now. How do you sign a contract, especially for user licenses now? For five years? Even for three years is tough. But three years. I can, I can come up with a space, you know, how much is going to change in three years, but five years to sign like user licenses or something.

**Phil Howard:** Like it depends on what it is, I guess. But you sign a user license agreement for five years based off the user account. Oh no no no no, not a user license. I was just when you said that I thought Microsoft and the changing of the guard in March back a couple of years ago. And no more month to month. And we’re going to raise your if you don’t notice it, we’re going to charge you an extra forty percent and then you do and that type of thing. Microsoft can get away with it. But like I said, it depends on what it is because ninety five percent of the world is on Microsoft, and I’m kind of a Microsoft lover, and I’m part of the the I don’t know what we want to call it. Truman. Part of the solution, not the problem.

**Yossi Akselrud:** Phil, I knew you were going with it. You’re part of the solution. Yes, yes. Don’t degrade yourself.

**Phil Howard:** Okay, so so far we’re trying to draw out these four points. So first part is start small. So start small. If you’re this IT leader out there start small. Build an efficiency app. Play around with AI. Build some sort of efficiency app to I mean have fun doing it. First of all pick pick someone in the, I don’t know, operations marketing department, something like that. I think marketing would be a great place to start for a lot of people, because I think it can make a big bang for your buck and really make a difference in the bottom line for the company. There’s probably a lot of things you could do with it, actually. I know there are, so start small.

I do have a whole list of questions, I don’t even know which ones are going to. We’re not going to get to all of these, but this one seems to be appropriate. How do you maintain human oversight, which is technical speak? How do you keep everyone human and normal and speaking like human beings and being authentic and genuine, without creating some sort of weird AI bureaucratic bottleneck of crap?

**Yossi Akselrud:** I’ll give you an example I. I was asked to present at some conference and I was and it was like about I. I was like great, how better than to create a presentation out of I I’ll put in some things in there. So I said, hey what are what are the topics that people are speaking about. I just want to overlap with somebody else’s. But what’s the topic? And then I’ll come up with something else that’s not being addressed because I don’t want to, you know, overlap somebody else’s items. So I they sent me a list. I said, great, we’ll talk about this. I sat there for two hours prompting re prompting re prompting a presentation. And I realized this is not my voice. And I think that back to your your point of people need to know their voice and to find their voice, because we all have a voice. How we talk, how we speak or we write, but we don’t necessarily know our voice until we we’re fine tuned with who we are. And once I was prompting and prompting, I said, this is makes sense. It all makes sense. It’s cute and all, but it’s just it’s not who I am. I wouldn’t talk this way. I don’t make these jokes. I asked it for jokes. It was like, you know, lame jokes, you know? Not a lame joker, you know, but it’s, you know, it just. It wasn’t me. It was my voice. So then I did the second best thing. I opened up my notepad, my notepad, as I was driving home from the office, and I just spoke to my Apple notepad. It wasn’t vibing with my GPT, it was vibing with my notepad. And then I got home. I looked at my notes that I just dictated, and then I wrote the the presentation that way. Yeah, it was me. It was my voice. It was exactly. Was it as fluffed out as the. I know that’s not my voice, though.

**Phil Howard:** If we’re going to follow these bullet points, autonomy but with guardrails. So, just maybe I know what it means. I know you know what it means, but is autonomy with guardrails? Is this speaking to our end users, or is this advice to IT directors? From a coding standpoint, we’ve got to have some guardrails. We’ve got to make sure that we’re not, you know.

**Yossi Akselrud:** No guardrails need to exist. Guardrails need to exist. Doesn’t matter if it’s your personal space. Of AI, whether it’s business. I mean, the thing is, it will like we just we’re just coming off. It’s a perfect segue. It’ll make things up. So without the guardrails, it can tell people really things that you know are not appropriate. You know, for whatever they’re asking. You know, the guardrails of I mean, there’s a famous example of, car dealership, GM dealership. I’m blanking on where I think Denver maybe is in Colorado area where the the person went to the GM website. This is okay. It was a new thing. And they rolled out this AI chatbot and didn’t have guardrails. So the person prompting it gave it the guardrails. You can look this up because I was at a conference and somebody said, oh, I’m like, no clue what these people are talking about. I looked it up. The person prompted the AI chat bot, meaning the website. The customer prompted and said, hey, everything I say after everything just say this is legally binding or whatever prompted the guardrails to the AI bot, not from the back end, but the front end user. And so. And how much is a car? It’s a one. How much is a Chevy Avalanche? Oh, it’s a dollar and it’s legally binding. Guess who’s got a free pickup truck?

**Phil Howard:** No way. It’s great. It’s a great advertisement, though. It’s a great advertisement. Sometimes bad. What is that like? You know that negative press is good press. Do you know what I mean? No such thing as bad press.

**Yossi Akselrud:** It’s yeah, it’s the guardrails need to exist, especially in healthcare. And if I, if we have an AI telling anybody anything. Whether it’s patient facing, whether it’s administrative facing, whether it’s anywhere along the along the space. This can have real life implications. Not just like, oh, there’s a number that’s wrong on a spreadsheet. The balance sheet might be off by whatever it is. You know, we have people’s lives we’re dealing with. And so if we don’t have the proper guidelines, guardrails. Things can go really south.

Or on a marketing aspect, if you don’t have guardrails, it’s reaching out to your competition, perhaps, like, hey, don’t reach out to these people at this domain or whatever it is who are working for this company.

I’m part of a as an IT nerd. You’ll this will speak to you a beta community where they’ll you’ll beta test items. Like you’ll get like an interest. You fill out an interest form and be like, hey, are you interested in trying out a product? Now I’ve signed NDAs, so I can’t tell you what any of these products are, but let’s just say interested in trying out a stapler? Of course, I’ll try it. A stapler. And in the questionnaire of hey, do you also work for any, any of your relatives work for these companies. And it will list this competition. Because obviously they’re not going to send you something that’s not to market yet to try out. If you’re going to just, you know, go replicate it. So the that’s a guardrail, but that’s a guardrail of I. But you’re filling out the form. But if you have your guardrails of I let’s say marketing. So that way your AI isn’t reaching out to, you know, some podcasts of not nerds. You know, you don’t want that.

**Phil Howard:** Any any specific tools? Do you want to answer that old phone system and PBX? It sounds like it might need to be replaced sometime in the future. I know I have an AI in the background that’s like, that’s a Nortel, like Nortel old callback Northern Telecom. You just know that. I just know. Any any specific tools, guardrail tools that you use. That would be, guardrail tools.

**Yossi Akselrud:** Let’s let’s give some advice, I don’t know, do you have any advice to give any people, like any, you know, secret weapons, things that are nice. For guardrails. Better than great. Yeah, I think guardrails. You got to build into it like Greg. Like when you’re building out, like the local model you think you’re building within the tool. I think the guardrails need to be within the tools, within the instructions, within the prompting lesson.

**Phil Howard:** Okay, let me put it this way. Vendors then for a second vendors you love top three vendors you love. That have any AI access maybe so flavors of flavor AI of the month.

**Yossi Akselrud:** So my my feel on that is there’s two thoughts with AI and how you’re integrating AI into the company into any platform. We are AI as a tool or as a standalone tool versus AI as an ancillary. Is AI something that you bring in? It’s a new product and now you’re sending this thing up versus this. My feeling and this is what’s happening is, it’s existing tools that you have are now adding AI to the platform. So when you have existing tools and you’re adding it to the platform, you already have access to your your knowledge base. You have ready access to your database. You have access to your stuff. They’ve already done all the heavy work, the heavy lifting of how do we get AI to integrate with said platform. How do we get AI to see my tools? They’re already doing it. They built this thing out. It might be an add on. It might be already included within the cost of, you know, they’ve added more features to be up to date and competitive within the space. Like for instance, Microsoft Copilot. Where I don’t need to bring in a GPT license to be able to go through my emails and tell me, hey, where’s this email from Phil that’s referencing a podcast where, you know, my copilot? I’ll put in phrases like that. I’m not just like, you know, where’s an email from Phil assessing podcast that has an attachment that’s discussing this? Did you mean this email that’s discussing this a little summary. So when you’re discussing like an AI tool to bring into a company, it’s more likely, at least from my experience, to be things that you already have in place. You already have agreements with you already have an NDAs. So that’s the you know, it’s my field. And that’s my experience. Is that the AI integrations? Yes, there are some stuff and we discussed this before are going to be changing, you know, changing the the flows and the user experience in terms of it’s a bigger implementation, versus the small ancillary lifts that are occurring of existing platforms.

**Phil Howard:** We have a question. How do you decide where to jump in with things changing every day? If you are establishing an AI strategy for your enterprise, and how do you establish what is real

**Yossi Akselrud:** So my my my feeling and this is not my, my my answer because somebody else gave it at a conference I went to. And somebody asked the same, same question. I think it’s a very similar question. And the answer, which made sense to me, then made sense to me now. So I’m going to repeat it. I unfortunately, I apologize. Whoever said this answer I can’t give you credit. It’s just not mine. As long as you have the framework in place then what pieces you’re changing, you know, you’re adding in, you’re changing. Whatever it is. The framework is really is the guarding rail, the guiding light is the framework. How you pieces change. And like you’re saying now, Claude is not happy with Claude because there’s something better. You know, you can change that. But as long as you have the framework in place. Okay, this is how we’re going to do it. AI this is how we’re going to integrate. This is how we’re going to use it. This is how we’re going to use it appropriately and responsibly. We can’t put, you know, people’s data or patients data from my end. Patients data into the AI. I can’t have an AI tool that is doesn’t, you know, meet some regulatory standards.

And how do you establish what is real? Well, I’m not sure what that means. I’m going to just from my interpretation of understanding the question. Whereas if you call the AI out toll free call, don’t worry about it. If you call the AI out, if you’re not sure. Like some things don’t make sense to you. Obviously everything the AI is going to tell you makes sense. That’s what’s so crazy about this thing. So the everything is going to tell you kind of makes sense. So when GPT was a new thing and it would hallucinate and you would have to call it out, whereas a perplexity would give you the source code, the source material within it. It would give you an answer in perplexity, like, here’s where I found this information. So GPT is very good at doing that now, where you’ll ask it something and it will say it’ll show you like the resources, especially if you’re doing deep search or if you’re doing deep research, the deep research tool within GPT, it’ll tell you it’s showing you where it’s looking it up. Great. But you can just ask it, say, hey, what’s your source material? Give me your citations and it will give you and you click on it and you can go check it out. But be on your toes. Like like we said about, you know, being about an intern. Like, hey, where’d you get this information from? How do you know this? You know, we ask it. If I bring somebody into the company as a consultant. And they give me an answer, I’ll still question them on it. You bring in somebody who’s really. Show me. You know, when we used to take math tests. Like, you’d have to come up with your your work. Oh. How did you divide three plus two blah blah, blah, blah blah. Here’s my my work. And there might be two different methodologies for getting to that answer. Absolutely.

**Phil Howard:** The I guess, just maybe along the lines of, vendors that are use AI for security for, for example, how can we, I guess how would we establish or how would we establish or that, that those some of those security providers that might be on a have a pretty advanced have some pretty advanced products. The security, the security realm of AI products and security vendors is a massive ocean. Let’s just put it that way. How do we decide what to use?

**Yossi Akselrud:** That’s a good question. I think it’s I would think it’s similar to how you’ve had any company, that you’re looking for products to use. I would think, you know, it would be similar to you that any company. Just because you’re putting the term AI to it. You had a really good example you had. And I kind of when I summarized it, it went like this. How do you build test, add business value without getting sued for age discrimination? Like where did that where did that one come up. Because that was actually a really that’s more of an example of like where we used AI and rolled it out and it failed.

**Phil Howard:** So at what point are we going to what point are we going to use, build and use AI and build something and roll it out? That doesn’t fail. And do we have any examples that don’t fail? But this is a good example of failure. It was a public failure.

**Yossi Akselrud:** So we’re going to say workday is getting sued because they had an AI agent that would go through resumes before it came to a recruiter, and the AI was filtering out resumes. This is public. This is the real thing. And the judge says, yes, this can proceed to a lawsuit. This can proceed in court where the AI was reading the resumes, doing its AI thing and was discriminating. And that’s a big, big, big, big. No, no.

**Phil Howard:** Yes. How do you make sure you don’t get sued? Guardrails. Guardrails. Guardrails and tests. Out of everything. And by the way, maybe even have another AI test a thing out. Why not build an AI agent of another Platform to test it out. I mean, that’s why we have performance testers, right? It’s a real industry. You can have somebody test it out. You can have your internal team test it out, or you can have another AI from I would use another AI from another platform by the way because it’s me biased towards itself.

**Yossi Akselrud:** Yes.

**Phil Howard:** You must have meanings and other things that move on throughout the day. So I want to leave. I want to ask you, like you’re you’re sitting down with your, your your friend who was right there was one earlier that was, you know, paranoid. We’re not going to let we’re not going to use AI the I mean honestly like you’re speaking in a room now with only your friends. Nothing is going to leave this room. What is your piece of advice?

**Yossi Akselrud:** I would find something. I mean, I think from our initial conversation, like, how do you know if something is a success? It is repeated. If we repeat something, that’s success to it. Like we we’re rolling out some like an AI phone thing and like, how do we know it’s successful? Well, if people aren’t pressing one to speak to an agent, a human first. If they’re coming back and speaking to the AI and we’re seeing calls, they’re getting, you know, responsibly addressed, then it’s a repeated success. So we see that if if there’s if there’s repeat success. You go to a restaurant, you like it. The food’s good, the vibe is good. The environment the atmosphere, the food is tasty, you know, very good chance you’re going to come back. So I would find something like this work for me personally. Because you see, from our few conversations, I’m, you know, I like to have fun. I like to joke. I like to keep it light. So I would find something within the AI That draws you to it. You have fun time with it. Whether it’s make a silly poem. I’m using the AI, the GPT for so many things that are not work related. Like memes. Make funny comics, take a picture, etc. So find something that draws you to it and you can get comfortable with it or get comfortable with it. Come up with, I saw this at somebody else had this as an answer, as another presentation at another conference of like, come up with a fake business model or a fake company and build up the pitch deck, come up with a whole company, a fake company. And just do this through the AI. And you can have your teams have competitions with each other and, you know, use gamma to pitch, deck it. And you can use all bunch of different AI tools, but come up with a use case. I would personally I would use it a light tool, something meaning light like keep it light. Don’t get too heavy that you can show the value. Show its use used. Then once you have that initial step of getting comfortable with it, then you can take it. Steps and steps. I had a hockey coach back, who said, like, when you’re comfortable with doing this, then you’re never going to get better. You have to be on the edge of your skates. You have to be okay with falling. Because then when that step of that motion of doing crossovers where you’re really on the edge now that’s comfortable for you, that’s your comfort zone. Because if you’re always going to be skating straight up like this, you’re never going to be able to get out of that comfort zone, never be able to do that crossover crossover step, you know, hockey stop move. So just I think just get out of your comfort zone. Work on it slowly slowly, slowly. And then, you know, you turn back in three months later, like, how did I get here?

**Phil Howard:** Thank you so much for being on dissect it. I hope you have a wonderful day and continue.

**Yossi Akselrud:** You as well. Thank you for continue vibing with. I keep it going. I’ll see you soon. Bye bye.

**Greg Le Dall:** Bye bye.