Pantrium, Truth of Business Leadership: Mike Todasco: What It Means to Be an AI-First Company

Mike Todasco 0:00

We all need to be AI first companies. AI is just going to be is ubiquitous if not more as just being on the internet. And to do that, you got to start with these steps. Number one, I would say is focus on the customer, the experience of the customer. Don't get so tied up on the product. Two, you want to build a culture of innovation if you want to thrive as a company. And three, you need to encourage innovation and experimentation. Give your employees the tools, give them the ability to try this, give them the permission to fail sometimes, show them that you do it yourself as part of that.

Christie H. Kristensen 0:38

This is Pantrium. We bring you the truth of tech leadership and the unfiltered stories of what really happens when no one's watching. From billion dollar screw ups to behind the scene battles, we lift the curtain on modern leadership and we reveal what it actually takes to build, grow, and lead in this crazy fast moving world. Hosted by myself, Christie Christenson, it is time to get real and have deeper conversations. Mike, thank you so much for joining the Pantrium podcast. I've been looking forward to our conversation today.

Mike Todasco 1:12

Christie, I am happy to be here and looking forward to it as well.

Christie H. Kristensen 1:15

It's going to be really good fun. And actually, you know, I start each show with the question about introducing yourself with a fun fact. So without further ado, Mike, what's yours? And what are you also focusing on these days?

Mike Todasco 1:30

I always struggle with fun facts. I'm like, oh god, what's interesting or whatever it might be. But what I'll go with, possibly the proudest thing of my adult life, like semi professionally related, would be I did about 20 years ago a sketch comedy TV show that some friends and I did like late nights while we were working in our first early jobs and we got to produce and this is before YouTube sadly enough. It was hard to distribute stuff when you're making things independently. But we made three 22 minute episodes and it was one of the most exciting things I ever did. It was very fulfilling. Even though nothing ultimately came of it as part of that, but it was super fun to do.

Christie H. Kristensen 2:22

But just like creative juice and creating something fun.

Mike Todasco 2:27

Totally. I mean, it was really fun to just be riffing ideas back and forth, to be failing, to see what works, what doesn't work, learning a whole bunch of skills, editing, you know, bringing in actors to do certain things. I remember we had things like actor just doesn't show up and we have a place where we're shooting. Like what do we do instead? Having to think of things on the fly. It was a super fun experience to do that. Oh, that's good

Christie H. Kristensen 2:53

Fun. And we're going to talk way more about lessons learned, the journeys and experiences and so on. But before we do that, Mike, what are you focusing on or what takes up your time these days?

Mike Todasco 3:06

Well, literally I will start with today. I know that's not your question, but today literally I am making AI videos. That's what I'm doing today. Like Google recently put out a new AI video generation tool which, as I was calling it, kind of the ChatGPT moment of AI videos. It is just mind blowing. It is just completely captivated my imagination. And I have spent literally the morning today making Broadway style musicals of '80s action movies. So like Scarface and Terminator and all these kind of things and just what would that look like as a Broadway musical? Working within the prompts, working within the IP considerations to see what it'll actually let me do or not.

It's super fun to just play and explore with these things. And so that's literally what I'm doing. More broadly, that's kind of what I do. I am at the James Silberrad Center for AI at San Diego State University and as part of that I teach, I work with students, I do research, I write, I mentor, I do kind of whatever in the world of AI and it's kind of a fun job to just go down these various rabbit holes.

Christie H. Kristensen 4:24

That is really good fun. And we're double clicking on that much more today. And as we kind go in and we talk about innovation and you know, especially in the era of AI and GenAI, I wanted to take a step back and just hear a little bit from your own experience. And I know like you come also from former financial as well as a fintech startup scene as well. And I wanted to hear a bit about your hardest lessons you've learned throughout your first career or through your

Mike Todasco 4:58

Career. The hardest lesson I learned in finance and accounting, that's a good question. Honestly, the hardest lesson was that it was just doing that initial pivot, just finding out like literally like this isn't the right thing for me. It doesn't give me energy, it doesn't give me excitement. It's one of the reasons why I did that thing that I started off talking about, the sketch comedy TV show, was like I needed some more of a creative outlet and I wasn't getting that from it. And I think there was a lot of hard and interesting skills you could learn as part of the process and I did get that.

But when you don't have something that is really just the right fit for you in your career and your personality type, it makes things just so much more difficult. You know, I think there's that Venn diagram of what we're good at and what we like and you kind want to find the intersection of those two things. And it's really hard to be good at something that you don't like.

Christie H. Kristensen 6:05

And when you talk about, you know, again, being creative and coming up with videos and having that creativity flourish, looking back, where did you see that you did thrive and where you did actually, you know, bring the best out in you? And can you tell me a little bit more about those experiences?

Mike Todasco 6:27

My first jobs were like straight up accounting finance and it wasn't a good fit. And I quickly, I was at GE and I quickly moved on from GE to another company because they wanted me to do like reporting type stuff. And I know initially that would be like, oh reporting, is that anymore interesting? But like the types of things, and this was 2001 keep in mind, so technology wasn't where it is today, they needed somebody to build like a financial plan, like an instrument panel that management leadership could read from and so forth. And just share data and kind be the one source of truth where we could get our information and all that.

And yeah, they did have like SAP integration and stuff like that, but the CEO wasn't hopping into there to find stuff out. So that was actually a unique opportunity for me to just kind bend more to a little bit something that I felt was a little bit more creative. I remember I created this panel, I think I even still have screenshots, it was all done in Excel. And it was super fun for me because I actually kind of got to push Excel to the limits. You know, I was doing a fair amount of Visual Basic programming which I was learning as part of the process in there.

And it was just exciting to use Excel in a way that really wasn't being used up until that time. Like it was one data sheet, how do you make this useful? How do you make it so somebody really doesn't even realize they're in Excel? And that's almost the constraints that I put upon myself to make it more interesting and more exciting. And so finding those kind of opportunities made it more interesting and frankly got me further away from finance and more into the things I would do later in my career, which I did find to be more enjoyable.

Christie H. Kristensen 8:18

How did you go about that? How did you feel about that?

Mike Todasco 8:21

It's always hard. I mean, it's always hard to do that. Like you're always like, oh am I? Because especially there, I left GE which was the most valuable company in the world at that time to go to a paper company that nobody had heard of. So went from like big, exciting, sexy industry to paper. Like what the? And that was a lot of the reactions I got from people, like why would you go there? And honestly, I think those are the kind of things you just have to look past, move past, be prepared to deal with and so forth. Like when you do do these things, a lot of that to other people might feel like step back, might feel like, well why would you do this?

Even when I left PayPal to do nothing frankly, I think I did get a lot of like, why are you doing this? What is the point? You have something, you say you even love it, why would you do that to something else? But at certain points in your life, you do just have to kind make these moves. And a lot of it will depend on your financial state. Ideally, again, I don't want to make this into a personal finance podcast by any means, but hopefully if most of us are able to live below our means, that gives you more flexibility to do these things about pursuing a career that is fulfilling and so forth versus if you spend every dollar or every dollar and more that's coming out of your pocket, it makes it a little bit tougher to do these things.

But within there, you're always going to have doubters, you're always going to have self doubt, and ultimately you just sometimes have to just take a chance. And maybe it isn't going to work out. You just deal with the best information that you have at any given time and just know you could always go back to finance, you could always go back to accounting, you could always go back to where you were before and ultimately it's going to be okay. We catastrophize these things when we're making these decisions. Most of these things that we catastrophize, it's like when you're a teenager and you're dating somebody and you have your first breakup or whatever it might be, it seems like the worst thing in the world.

And as adults, we think, oh that's so cute, that's so silly, whatever we do that. We do these same kind of things when we're adults with our jobs and all these other things too. It's no different. Now

Christie H. Kristensen 10:45

You mentioned PayPal as well. Can you tell me a little bit more about the journey there?

Mike Todasco 10:48

Yeah, I mean when I started PayPal, it was completely I needed to find a job because I was running a startup that was losing money and so I was negative money coming out of my wallet on a monthly basis. And after two years it was kind of clear and even as much as it hurt, like hey this isn't going where I wanted to be going, I need to find something. Had an opportunity with PayPal, joined there. I was dangerously unqualified for every single job that I had at the company, but there were all new challenges, one challenge after another. And after doing this, I got to be put on some really exciting and innovative projects and I always embraced those.

I was very excited to work on this. And that led to when PayPal was separating from eBay, an opportunity to take on kind of a new role for head of innovation for the company and sort of define what that's going to look like. What is that going to mean for us as a standalone company and taking on some of the new and emerging technologies that weren't part of the business or anything. So it was just a gradual evolution from project to project, but always kind embracing the new, embracing the tech and doing all of those kind of things as much as I could. And really being a champion of the culture too, because that was a big part of my job of innovation, was just creating a culture of innovation in the company.

And it was always nice to do that on smaller scales with teams I had, even when it wasn't necessarily a responsibility of the team to be innovative. It was something I was always pushing. And that's why when the opportunity arose to do that, it was something I definitely raised my hand to do.

Christie H. Kristensen 12:39

And then when you were saying that you were dangerously unqualified for the roles, looking back, what was your biggest aha moment?

Mike Todasco 12:50

Here's the thing, for applying for getting in, so here's my hack for getting into a company. I would never ever go on LinkedIn, go on Indeed or Monster or whatever people are doing and just apply for jobs. It's honestly going to be a waste of your time to do something like that. It feels good to say I applied for 20 jobs today, but in reality it doesn't do anything because for most companies, at least in the technology world and probably many other worlds, nobody looks at all these resumes. You'll get hundreds, potentially thousands of these resumes and nobody's scouring through them. A computer might be, but no person is.

What you need to do is you basically need to be scrappy and find a person who knows a person who knows a person who knows a person who knows the manager and find that connection and just get your resume in there. You got to be scrappy. That's the way to do these. Sorry, Christie, go ahead. You will have to hustle your way in, I suppose. You have to hustle, exactly. And if you're doing that, that's going to open a lot of doors, that really will. And look, if you're straight out of college, you probably shouldn't be applying for the CEO job at a big company, but as long as it's somewhat within reason, like yeah, the years of experience, I'm kind within the ballpark, I've kind done some things like that.

Like my first job at PayPal was in data analytics. Well, I did finance, I did all this other stuff that was kind tangential, so it was close to it. I didn't know how to do anything like traditional data analytics folks did, but I got in there and just kind told my story and just kind said, hey, I'm willing to work hard, I'm willing to learn stuff, and I will make you look good. Because ultimately whenever you're trying to get a job, your job as an employee is to make your boss's life easier and to make them look good. If you can do those two things, you will be rewarded as part of that.

So if you can convince them of that in the interview process, that's going to put you in a much better place to potentially be able to get hired.

Christie H. Kristensen 15:01

I totally agree. And I think a shout out for all the women listening, we need to be better at this. I think sometimes we are too modest and want to tick all the boxes 100% before reaching out or applying or doing anything instead of just going for that job. I think that's

Mike Todasco 15:19

Exactly right. And you know, I think it is a natural tendency. Look, I have imposter syndrome more than anybody, I feel. Like constantly I am doubting myself. But at some point in my life, I realized, and this is probably within like the last maybe five years or so, everybody's just making it up. And that's like if people take nothing else away from this conversation other than just know everybody is faking it. I'm faking it now as I'm trying to give advice to people. We're all faking it in life. We're just making it up as we go along. And the sooner folks, women, men realize that, the more comfortable at least I became in many ways of like, oh okay, just everyone's making it up, it's okay.

I'm just going to do my best and make it up too and try and do a good job and that's all that anybody is ultimately trying to do. Yeah,

Christie H. Kristensen 16:18

Definitely. And I wanted to hear what was your biggest learning from that period of PayPal?

Mike Todasco 16:24

My biggest learning was to find great managers to work for. That was probably my biggest learning. When in doubt, just always go work for a great manager. They will find opportunities for you, they will promote you, they will support you as you progress through the company. I had good managers and maybe not as good managers in my time there and there was always a mark difference in that. And my best experiences, my best memories were with a great manager. It wasn't like, oh when I was even doing this function or this certain job or working, it was always just kind having that level of support and that's what matters the most.

Christie H. Kristensen 17:03

And you touched upon culture and I wanted to hear a little bit more about that. Like how do you create culture?

Mike Todasco 17:12

When I had one of my first teams that I was managing, it was about 10 people on that team and it was a job where it was a little bit of a hybrid between product manager and program manager. And just to kind explain for people who might not know the terms, product manager in the technology world generally, it's almost kind like the general manager, the visionary of a product and so forth. Like okay, what do we need to do with it? And program manager is a little bit more like checking the boxes and making sure that it's on time. And I'm over exaggerating for both of those things, but that's kind how it works.

So this team was called product launch and it was like right between the middle of those two things. And so I had people who had both of those skills and they might have seen themselves as siloed in one area. But I think it became pretty clear to me as part of that job that we as a team needed to do whatever it took to get a good product into customer's hands. And that meant we had to be creative in many ways to do that. And so I learned that pretty early on. And just to give an example of what that might mean, we're trying to release something to the customers.

This did happen one time. Lawyers were being unresponsive to doing something. Like we needed some terms, we needed some whatever. And one of the people on my team basically says like, okay, I'm going to write them myself. And nothing will get a lawyer to act faster than to say for a non lawyer to say, okay, if you're not going to do it, I'm going to do this myself. He literally did that. This is before ChatGPT. Now you could actually get ChatGPT to probably do a pretty adequate job of doing that. But he just wrote it himself and he basically said, hey lawyers, this is what I have, I need a response, is this good?

This is a straw man. And immediately seeing that got the lawyers to do the work and that helped to get the product out the door. And that was just like one of many examples of how can you be creative in this big company to use influence with others to get whatever you want done. And so one of the things I really tried to push on a team was like, hey, we all need to be innovative. And so when we would have our weekly Monday meetings, one of the things that I would ask of the team is like, every Monday I am going to at the beginning of our one hour meeting or whatever it was, I'm going to cold call on one person and I want you to share something that within the last seven days you did was creative or innovative.

It could have been in the job, it could have been at home. And I think the first week I used myself as the guinea pig and I gave an example for that. And at first the reaction of the team was like, oh my gosh, are you really making us do this? It's nerve wracking, especially for the people who don't think of themselves as creative or innovative. But as part of doing this, you know, and I kind cherry picked the first few weeks of who I was calling, I wasn't necessarily calling on them first, but we were learning from each other. We would hear stories like that one I just told there and other versions of that.

And people did things in their personal life and other things in the job or whatever it might be that was creative and was like, hey, I have a difficult problem, what's a unique way for me to solve this thing? Because that's what we were doing. And by sharing that, we started to create that culture. And by knowing that people could be put on the spot for that, people were not only they were looking for it in their own lives too. And that's the thing. So they were always kind thinking about that. And just when you're priming yourself like, okay, is there an innovative solution? Is there something I can share with Mike and the team or whatever it might be, that just by itself will lead to more innovative solutions.

Like we are all innovative and creative people. Like that's what we do as a species, that's what we've always done. Usually it's just the environment that we're in that really breeds that creativity and breeds that innovation or not. If I were to tell anybody that was on that team, hey, you have a child and you're not we're not going to give your child food anymore. You have to you don't have money, you don't have anything, you got to figure out how to get your kids fed, you're going to figure out how to do that. And again, I'm not saying I would ever do that obviously, but like as a species, those are the kind of problems that we have dealt with our whole life.

I mean, who the hell was it that figured out like lobster, yeah, we can eat that thing. Like all of these things when you kind look at what humans do, that came from innovation, that came from working through necessity and it came through constraints that we ultimately had to say, ah, okay, this is how we do it. So it's just kind creating that environment that's going to breed innovation.

Christie H. Kristensen 22:21

I really like that. And I think also to your point, if you become aware of when you are thinking creatively and you think in a different path than what you usually do or just see blockers everywhere, you suddenly also become more kind of pushed to actually continuously thinking outside the box and think differently and trying to solve problems because, to your point, like that's what we're here to do, that's what we naturally do.

Mike Todasco 22:49

We're all innovative whether we believe it or not. That is just part of it. Even if you're watching this and listening right now and you don't believe that you're innovative, you're actually wrong. You just haven't found that in yourself yet.

Christie H. Kristensen 23:03

I want to hear where did it not go as planned and what would you do differently if you were to sit in the similar situation or if others are sit in such a similar situation?

Mike Todasco 23:15

There's the one that jumps out to me is like especially earlier on we weren't always focused on what the customer needs were. I worked on a product called PayPal Beacon, which was amazingly cool technology and was very much at the forefront, but like it was something that customers weren't ready for. This was 2013. Long story short, it would allow for things like hands-free payments, walking into a store, you can even drive up to a coffee shop, the beacon could be like detecting your phone out in the parking lot and start and they could, you know, get the signal, start making your coffee right away. And this is like, oh my god, this is amazing technology.

We're going to do all this stuff. It was cool tech. We, you know, we got patents, we did all this other kind of stuff. Like our engineer was driving to Apple's headquarters to tell them how to integrate this into their phones because they didn't even fully figure out the capabilities of this yet. So we were very much at the forefront of that. But people didn't care. And that was like a huge miss. When we actually got this into stores and had a bunch of test stores in where Stanford University is, not too far from our offices, you had all these very tech-savvy college kids in 2013 who were like, well, why would I need to I'm at a store, why do I need to use my phone to pay?

That doesn't even make sense to me. You know, this was a different time, 12 years ago. It was a different time. And like and they meant it. They're like, well, I have a credit card. That's fine. We missed it. And like, oh yeah, I guess it is cool, but it's hard to change a habit. You know, really in the United States, people didn't really start paying with their phone until COVID happened. Like COVID was the one thing that finally turned that on, so to speak, because in the US, like we've been habituated for 60 years now to use credit cards as a form of payment.

And so it's just it's hard to break those cultural norms. So that's something that's I, you know, and that was just one example. There were others too. You know, we miss these things. I mean, ultimately, yeah, it's cool to work on great technology, but you have to build something that is a burning need for your customer.

Christie H. Kristensen 25:34

It's I love that you're saying this because, you know, if you even look at the electric cars, that's not new either. It's been around for like decades.

Mike Todasco 25:45

Oh I mean, even technically, I think like 100 years we had electric cars before. They weren't they didn't go very far, but yeah, that's right.

Christie H. Kristensen 25:51

Exactly. And I think it's so interesting that, you know, we can all and that's also why I started Pantrium, right? Because we all talk out in the like in the world, we talk about technology and we talk about what the enabler and we talk about how great all this stuff is, but it's like, well, at the end of the day, it doesn't actually matter. If the customers don't care and they don't adopt it, then it doesn't matter. And it's like to a point, like human behavior and changing habits is probably one of the toughest things out there. So, you know, understanding what challenge what problem is it that they are trying to solve or just about to realize that they could do something better because introducing something new and I get a flashback of the wonderful kind of Google and Meta glasses that they keep pounding at us trying to hope for like is this the year that everyone understands the purpose of these glasses, right?

Mike Todasco 26:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, especially like Meta, those that don't have their own operating system, they really want to own their own operating system where they can control the entire thing, whether it's glasses, whether it's virtual reality, or whatever it is, they're pushing for that. I think that that is something where it's really easy to lose focus of that. And the best place where I kind of learned this lesson and even talked this lesson while I was at PayPal, Adobe has open sourced something called Kickbox and anybody can go to kickbox.org, you could download all the materials, use them in your own organizations. We would I would teach it personally in PayPal to people and it's kind of like this innovation course.

And one of the things that it emphasizes in Kickbox is you need to fall in love with your customer's problem, not your solution. And so like so you have a customer, they have a problem, basically your focus needs to be on solving that problem that they have. The second you fall in love with, well, here's my solution, it's really awesome and let me tell you why, that's when you start to run into problems because all of a sudden that then you're going to be so focused on that, you come become detached with actually solving a problem for someone.

Christie H. Kristensen 28:05

I was actually in a customer meeting earlier this week and they were talking about their problems and I was just like, oh, they're talking about workflows. Sometimes our solutions can be quite cumbersome and technically difficult to understand, but at the at the essence of that problem, it was just a system, a workflow.

Mike Todasco 28:24

I think that's it. Like and we should be spending so much time, you know, listening, talking to customers, focus on that, focus on understanding what the problem is, you know, observing what that is, and that's where we need to spend our time like solving. And you're not going to get it right the first time. You're going to have to iterate again and again and again. And if you keep doing that, eventually you're going to see like, ah, this was a real problem and I have found the way to solve it.

Christie H. Kristensen 28:51

I wanted to move on move us on to kind of what you're focusing on today as well. And, you know, you were mentioning in the introduction, you're also doing a lot of teaching and supporting and helping others, especially around AI. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Mike Todasco 29:09

Yeah, look, I think AI is going to change our world more than any technology that we've experienced in our lifetimes. It is really clear that I think we're probably all underestimating the impact that it is going to have in the short term. I mean, as much hype as there truly is, like it is going to be just completely revolutionary to everything that we do. And I feel my hypothesis is the more that people know, understand, use these tools today, the better prepared they're going to be for that future and also the better prepared we collectively are going to be for that future. So students are at the front line of this.

I don't envy students in a lot of ways. I'm I'm actually I think by 2026, next year, the whole concept of college internship for technical students and so forth, I think there is going to be a seismic change in that. And that's not going to be due to economic factors, it's going to be all due to technological factors. Right now you can have, you know, if you're a software engineer, AI can build a pretty darn initial website that you could just iterate and quote-unquote just vibe code your way to building out this amazing piece of software. And it's going to change like what entry-level jobs look like.

And that and once entry-level jobs change, it's going to change all of these other things up the spectrum. And so that's a lot of what I write about research. I write about things like, you know, job loss related to this. I'm working on research and people's perceptions of things that are made from by humans versus AI and what the differences are going to be. You know, we saw, I mentioned earlier, VO3, which is a Google tool, and it makes you put in a text prompt and it'll make an 8-second video for you. Some of like the man on the street kind of the stand-up comic type footage that comes out of there, it's indecipherable from reality.

It's just about impossible to tell that this is not a real thing. And that is only going to improve. And when that happens, what is that going to mean for entertainment? What is that going to mean for how we communicate? Like this is going to be big changes to how all of us work. And the thing I just harp on again and again with votes is like use these tools, understand them because it's going to help better prepare you for whatever this future is going to look like.

Christie H. Kristensen 31:51

And speaking of what's them what's the one thing that you feel like people are missing? Because talking about job losses and talking about like being a I think most of us are very happy not being a student these days and just not knowing what the future looks like, right? Whatever you're studying right now might not even be a job in two years or even a year, right? What's the one thing that people are missing in this conversation?

Mike Todasco 32:21

Hmm well, look, I'd say it's not that jobs won't exist in the future. I think they will. You know, there's certain things that are obvious. Sports, for example. Like, you know, I use the example all the time. I live in California and in San Francisco and we have Steph Curry, he's an amazing basketball player and people pay, myself included, pay tons of money to see him play. Any robot can work better than him. Any car we drive is faster than Usain Bolt. We don't care about those things. They're they're not humans, they're not interesting to us. Just because we can build a machine that does better, it's not interesting.

You know, there's also certain areas like a friend of mine, he wants to go back to school to become a lawyer because he actually believes that litigation, you know, there will there will not be an AI in front of a judge in the future. You're going to have a human being do that. And he's probably right about that. Now, there might be hundreds or thousands of AIs working behind him to get all that, but the actual act of being in front of a judge, that's going to exist. Like there will be jobs. There will be tons of jobs in this future. It just might not be nearly as many that we have today.

And I don't think any of us truly know what those are going to look like. You know, we can't all be athletes and lawyers, specifically litigation lawyers. Like, you know, there needs to be more than that and there will be more than that. But like that's that's the thing I think we're all like kind of struggling with here of what exactly that is going to look like. That is still a little ways away. We still have time before we hit that, but it might be a pretty bumpy ride until we get there in some areas. And that's why I also I think the more that you use these tools in your job, the more you will have superpowers, the longer you're going to be able to last and outperform and just do great in the work that you do.

Christie H. Kristensen 34:30

And speaking of like what's some of the tools that you think people, you know, in the workforce should double down on today that they might not have heard about or have not discovered yet because of course we all aware of ChatGPT, but there is endless of other tools out there. Which tools would you recommend people to double down on and experience and explore?

Mike Todasco 34:55

So so what I would say to people is find out where like the repetitive tasks are in your job. Like where do you spend do a time audit one day. Like literally take a piece of paper, write 15-minute increments, put it next to your computer, carry it around with you, whatever, and just write what you're doing all day. Are you doing email most of the day? If you're doing email, things like Superhuman are probably a great tool for you to integrate and spend 30 bucks a month to just have AI do a bunch of that and take a lot of the grunt work out of organizing and responding and doing all those things within your own email.

If you know, if you're taking a bunch of meeting notes, use Otter, use Fireflies, use whatever it might be to transcribe those meetings, to capture action items, to do all of that. Maybe you're spending a lot of time reading about things in your industry. Take those PDF files and throw them into NotebookLM, which is a Google tool, and, you know, maybe you still want to read them or at least read the abstract, but you could also query it and the technology behind NotebookLM doesn't really hallucinate nearly as much as any of the other tools would. So you can ask it questions about the data that's in there and get pretty darn accurate responses to that.

So I think it all starts with the audit. And if those three things that I just described, if none of them hit for you, then I would actually just go into ChatGPT and say, hey, here's what my day take a picture of it, say, hey, here's what my day looks like. Can you help me find AI tools or give me suggestions of ways to use AI to help me be more efficient and productive in my day? And it's going to do an amazing job at giving you some suggestions from that. That is an underused skill, Christie, I think just in general with these tools of people asking the tools what it should be asking or what it should be thinking about or how do I prompt.

Like a couple of years ago, prompt engineering was a big thing. It's not anymore. Like one of the things I do now is I will sometimes use one model to prompt another model. I'm saying like, hey Claude, this is what I want to do. Now can you tell ChatGPT to do that? Or I might even do that within ChatGPT. I'll just kind of do that and do that over. So like just be open with these models and they will be extremely helpful. It's your assistant. It's there to help you. You know, ChatGPT as we mentioned before, Claude or any of those are a good primary, but there's a lot more detailed ones where depending on what you need to do, you're going to find a lot of solutions for that.

Christie H. Kristensen 37:33

Yeah, it's it's actually interesting you say it because I started also testing it with because I don't have the language of design because I'm not a designer, right? But I wanted to get ChatGPT to tell me what would the prompt be to create something that looks like and then I uploaded the videos of what I thought looked really cool or what I wanted, right? And to get them get it to tell me what is the visual prompt like the design prompt, the words I should use to get it to look like that. And that was really useful. I still haven't gotten exactly what I wanted, but it's way closer than me trying to figure out how to get it to do design without knowing the language, right?

Mike Todasco 38:18

100%. And this is getting back to the discussion we had before about within your organizations, how do you kind of use this? Like if you want to be an AI first organization and have your team like step one is always make sure they have permission to use these tools. Sign up for an enterprise account for Claude or ChatGPT or Google, it doesn't matter. Just sign up for one. They're all great. And give your team permission to use these tools. That's like really clear, really important to do that because frankly, if you don't, they're going to use them anyway and that might be leaking data, that might be doing all these other things that you don't want within your organization.

And then two, set up a channel in Teams or Zoom or Slack or whatever and just have people share these prompts with each other because that's the way we all learn. Whenever I publish an article and I have AI imagery in there or even video imagery that I use in the latest article I had, I always include my prompts so people can always take that prompt, they can remix it and build whatever they want to with their own. Oh, that's

Christie H. Kristensen 39:21

Really cool. I like that. I'm curious because I am still looking for you know, a really good tool to, you know, everyone talks about AI agents, right? To automate and create flows and basically create my own assistant. What tools are you using on that that you find super useful?

Mike Todasco 39:45

Truthfully, I'm really not using much for that, but I do have some suggestions though. OpenAI released Operator earlier this year. I think you have to pay like 250 a month to use it and that's kind of their AI agents. I tried it back in January and honestly it was bad. I think they've updated it very recently and I haven't tried the new version, so that's one way to go. Another way which is much less expensive and may even be better is to use Zapier or to use Make.com. And for folks who don't know what these are is they're just kind of simple drag and drop interfaces where you can do something like, hey, if I get an, you know, you give it access to your Gmail account, you give it access to, you know, ChatGPT or something, and you give it access to wherever, and you can make rules and connections between these things.

So it could be something like, hey, anything that looks like a newsletter in my Gmail, I want you to take the content from all of those, copy that, paste that into ChatGPT, summarize that in ChatGPT and give me a, you know, a 5-minute read that you could then put into a Google Doc on a daily basis. And it would connect all those things and it would automate it. So okay, all your newsletters are going to be wherever you want it to be. And, you know, the possibilities are infinite for that and they're usually free. And again, Make.com and Zapier are kind of two tools that really enable that to happen.

Christie H. Kristensen 41:21

Oh, that's it. Check them out because I feel like, you know, AI agents is almost like I was working in CRM systems and integrating them and setting them up and so on. I feel like it's like workflows on steroids, right? Do something when I, you know, when something happens or do don't do this because do this instead or whatever it might be, right? So it's like one of those yes or no almost rules. Yeah,

Mike Todasco 41:43

It's it's like an if this then that. And you could do it for CRM in fact. Like you say, hey, anytime I get an email from somebody, if it has this type of content in it, I want ChatGPT to scan that, make a decision and then puts things in a table and then see if it's in my CRM already. And if it's in my CRM, great, like don't do anything or say we have a new contact. If it's not, add that as a line or whatever it might be. Like so you can do a lot of different things with that.

Christie H. Kristensen 42:12

And I wanted to kind of as we're coming to the end, what do you think is going to be a fundamental change that the industry have to adopt to? So like what rule should the industry break in order to adapt fast enough for what's happening right now?

Mike Todasco 42:32

I think you just have to think like a startup. I do not envy big companies right now. They're at such a disadvantage for this. Like you need to think like a startup. You need to think about different ways to do these things. Within hours of VO3 coming out, I knew people who were making commercials for their startups using these tools and putting them out there. And like so, you know, for, you know, the cost of just signing up for this product, they're making these things that are really polished and actually use this as marketing materials on their own website. Within a big company, are you going to be allowed to do that?

I'm sure not. You know, so what are the ways within a large organization that you can enable at least some level of creativity, some level of experimentation, frankly, some level of play to just try things out? I think if big companies are not being innovative and being nimble, they're going to be left behind because, you know, if you're building software, you're going to find out, hey, you can use these tools to build custom software. I mean, I'm already doing this. I'm not a software engineer. I will use these tools to build just little software things that are just making my life easier in certain ways.

Like whatever it might be, like all of this is changing fast. So that's the one thing I would say is like be act like a startup, act on entrepreneurial as best as you can within your organizations to enable like this experimentation to happen.

Christie H. Kristensen 44:04

Yeah, agility and staying resilient in these crazy times is going to be extremely important to say the least. So true. So I wanted to hear if you were to give one challenge to our listeners, what would that be?

Mike Todasco 44:18

I don't want to sound like a shill for Google here, but like honestly, I would like go into I would sign up. It is not cheap, I will say. So I think it's it's going to be 250 a month for this. They're reducing it to like 125 bucks. They throw in some other stuff like you get YouTube Premium or whatever, but like sign up for this for a month, share it with your friends, share it with your team and just start creating stuff with this because it is going to open up completely new possibilities you did not even know of. It's going to change maybe how you do presentations.

It's going to do whatever it is. Like literally you will be blown away by the kind of things that you can create with this. I think it's worth a 125 investment to just spend a few hours in this and see what you're going to be able to do with it because it's not always going to be this expensive. It's going to get cheaper and cheaper over time. But the better you understand this today, you're then taking like what you can do with a video medium, what would take crews and all this other stuff and you're just doing it at your keyboard and creating these amazing creative experiences that will help you and your teams with your communication, with your kids' birthday parties, I don't even know.

I mean, like just try it. And frankly, if you have those videos, feel free to share them with me. I'm always curious to see what other people are creating with it too. I love

Christie H. Kristensen 45:42

It. That's a good shout out. I have really enjoyed this conversation, Mike. Thank you so much for joining the show today.

Mike Todasco 45:49

Christie, thanks for having me. Great being here.

Christie H. Kristensen 45:53

Thank you so much for spending your time with us. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you have feedback, topic ideas or guest recommendations, we are all ears. Pantrium is growing thanks to our community of listeners. So if something resonated with you, we would love for you to share your favorite takeaways. And just a quick note, the views shared by our guests are entirely their own and don't necessarily reflect the companies they work for. That's it for now. Thanks again for tuning in. Until next time.