In our Future Co livestream, we invite leaders who have pioneered AI in their businesses to share their wisdom. These are the trailblazers who've seen it all - the challenges, the breakthroughs, and the transformative power of AI.

In this episode we welcome Jeames Hanley, who brings a wealth of experience in implementing AI within the architectural industry. He's grappled with the ethical, creative, and leadership challenges that such transformative technology presents - and has recently released his book "Remaining Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence".

Jeames' top 3 Tips for C-Suite leaders when evaluating and initiating AI project teams:

1. Be Productively Curious and Assess Risks: Leaders should be productively curious about AI. This involves understanding that the AI landscape is fast-moving, and a platform committed to today could easily be superseded tomorrow. Leaders should think about the risks associated with public AI versus private AI, and carefully consider which platforms they explore.
2. Consider Private AI for Efficiency and Profit: While public AI is great for initial exploration and understanding, private AI is where businesses can truly gain efficiency and profitability. Leaders should explore private AI uses and understand how these can be implemented effectively within their organizations.
3. Develop an AI Policy and Framework: It's crucial for businesses to have an AI policy and a framework, particularly around the use of public AI platforms. This policy should address how AI will be used within the company, considering data privacy and ethical implications. It should also include guidelines on how employees should engage with AI tools, ensuring that any data input into public AI platforms is used responsibly and without compromising privacy.

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Transcript

Welcome to Future Co.
‍We welcome you to our live stream where we share AI knowledge, leadership, and innovation with business leaders. Leaders who want to navigate the future of work with confidence in this slightly uncertain world of AI, changing technology. So just a quick introduction, my name is Stuart Riddle. I run Knkt Digital, a software agency that builds business apps, largely AI-powered.

Knkt Digital's Mission Our aim with those business apps is to give you superpowers to help you work faster, do more with less, and we use AI and automation to do so. We are a team of curious innovators, which I think is the best way to describe us. We want to share our learnings today with you all. And we also want to learn from the experience of others, other practitioners and professionals who have gone before us and really help business leaders as they grapple with AI at scale in their organizations. So on the back of that, we launched what we call Future Co. Which is an initiative of Knkt and our mission is to help leaders combine those human elements of creativity with the precision of AI to do some amazing work. And we want them to do that so their teams can focus on doing higher value work and getting more out of their day.

An interesting statistic in some recent Future Co sessions, we ran some polls and those polls told us that the majority, we're talking 70% plus of organizations, are still in the really early stage of AI adoption and operationalizing AI. So we want to try and shift that conversation from tools and from prompts into processes and guardrails and help CXOs lead their organizations through that change and help them give them tools to do so.

Introduction So my guest today is Jeames Hanley. He joins us from Sydney. Welcome James. He's practice manager at Gray Puksand. I hope I got that pronunciation right. Great. Like said, sorry. They're a national architecture and design firm. I'm just going to read you James' bio... As a CTO, technologist, and strategist, James combines strategic vision with technical expertise to propel organizations toward true digital transformation. James's work is underpinned by pairing technical know-how and soft skills. I love this bit, to support people in an era shaped by exceptional technological advancements. So great description. James, welcome and thank you.

Jeames on His New Book First up, congratulations on the new book, which you've. I see you recently got some hard copies in your hand. Yeah, I did. Yeah, I just returned from holidays and had a nice little package waiting for me with some hard copies. So it's great to see that sort of come to fruition after a good 12 to 18 months of note-taking, writing, rewriting, editing, and then on to sort of marketing. Nice. And the title is "Remaining Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" and we want to spend a bit of time on that in a little bit. Sure. But like as a polymath, I really kind of struggle, even with the concept of focusing enough for long enough to write a book. So is the blood, sweat, and tears worth it?  ook, absolutely looking back at it now, I think it's obviously the first book I've ever published and I sort of have an idea for a second one, and my wife is desperately trying to push me to take a bit of a break. But it's quite funny. I think, you know, I've caught up a call up sort of once or twice and having done somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 60 panel talks and webinars and podcasts and stuff this year alone on AI. I sort of have been surrounded by a lot of people that know even much more than myself and I sort of was just furiously taking notes and reading web articles and stuff, and I sort of sat back a while ago and I sort of thought there's definitely a book here somewhere.I think I spoke to an HR manager of a large firm here in Sydney a few months ago and we sort of have this discussion around your IT managers and your technology sort of people in business got you through COVID. They got everyone set up and running and it sort of led us to have this discussion around who's going to get us through the next wave of technological advancement like who's going to be there when AI really starts to embed in businesses and we both sort of said well, yeah the tech guys will be there but the HR people are going to be critical because it's all about how do you maintain those human qualities and those human relationships when things around us technologically speaking or advancing so quickly. Some of those human traits are going to become so much more important than they are even now and they are quite important now when you're talking to people and hiring people. So yeah, I sort of was like yeah, I think I'm on the right track here with the book I need to dig into those soft skills and how emotional intelligence interfaces with artificial intelligence and where humans will sort of sit in that narrative.

AI Study There was a youth study that came out earlier this year that you may have seen and that survey thousands of Australians and one of the, I guess, not startling, not unsurprising but important aspects to that or trends that was highlighted in that survey was the growing number of younger Australians who are already using generative AI or tools like ChatGPT as part of their work data. So I think they are part of their life and I think the HR angle and helping business leaders prepare for that shift is a really important conversation to have. Absolutely. The growing number of Aussies who are using generative AI are sort of over 50% who have used it for work. So, yeah, HR teams, business leaders, executives need to upskill their teams. I think they need to have some AI fluency in their teams to be able to conduct interviews with AI as part of that interview process and then align their back-end processes and hiring process to deal with it. It's going to be a conversation that you hear more of.

AI in Architecture and Design Education Absolutely. Yeah, we actually I have done some teaching on sort of emerging technologies in the architecture space at the University of Sydney this year and actually had a young kid come up to me and said, oh, look, I don't mean to offend you, but I actually just fed all of your presentation notes into a PDF summarizer that I built last week because I just didn't even attend to a four-hour lecture. And we've actually subsequently interviewed him and he came to the interview and he said, oh, look, just to let you know like I jumped on to your website. I took a few images of one of your what looks like sort of key projects. I built a little AI engine and here are 20 different variants of that entire school that you guys designed and yeah, some of our partners were just blown away that here is a young graduate coming out of architecture school. Has that design thinking has been taught that design thinking is so natively in a very emerging and vastly emerging technology such as AI. It's such a different conversation to have in an interview process or it's either an interview process. It's a demonstration of fluency and capability. In real time almost so very different process needed to deal with that. "Yeah, I think it's fascinating. It's the average person goes through three somewhere between three and seven career changes. And I just wonder what that looks like, the next step looks like for the younger generations that are coming through. Yeah, yeah, absolutely five to nine career changes. I think it'll be driven by tools like generative AI where people explore and create and find a new pathway that they want to explore. Yeah, so yeah, I think it's a pretty exciting space.

AI in Careers Is that you have you have you gone through a number of career changes to land where you are or tell us." I actually haven't I so look I've been in in the industry in the architecture and construction industry for  years now and that was straight out of out of high school and TAFE. So I studied at college and I originally wanted to start as a as a technician and I didn't want to be an architect but I knew I wanted to work with sort of buildings in the construction space. And I actually really enjoyed basically coordinating buildings working out the architect has designed this and the services need to fit all of these service into the building. How is it going to work? And then I sort of became really good at the software and just just through evolution and and learning on the job by then sort of have worked my way through to where I am now, which is sort of that CTO digital practice manager where I sort of now take care of a team of  the industry. It's funny. I've never there's so much disruption around us and our industry in terms of architecture is just so right for innovation that it's never really crossed my mind to to leave the industry. I just think there's so much to do here to get us up to speed like we've we've we were struggling the industry was struggling with understanding data and managing data long before AI came around and AI is just going to turn that on its head. So I think a lot of designers and architects out there might be thinking well my God, how do I deal with all of this technology that's happening and I'm like, well hands up I'm here to help you. This is where I want to be. So no, I actually haven't gone through any career changes yet. I was just working on things like being an author and stuff on the side. Yeah, yeah, and you've gone deep in one field so yeah, yeah. It's good.

The Spark of AI How had it that kind of evolve over the last few years like what was the first spark of interesting AI and like how did that happen? Look just, but me just thinking about how a lot of these technologies prior to to ChatGPT, which obviously opened up the world's eyes to the fact that AI has existed right. I mean prior to that, I sort of was thinking well this technology is here when I when I drive on a toll road in Sydney, there is a machine learning model that takes a camera takes a photo of my license plate and then direct efforts my bank account for the toll. When I go and do a self check out it at calls or Woolworths, I place my my fresh fruit and vegetable on the scale and there's a camera that understands that hey that looks like a captain therefore it's a captain. So I was like all of these technologies not visible to the general population and then sort of ChatGPT came on board and that really sort of started to spark interest around the world. But I'd always been interested in technology and sort of saying well, how can we apply it to the architectural industry because we have to get better at what we do. We are we are architects have a very ambiguous relationship with technology at the best of times they were terrified to give up drafting boards and pencils and then they were terrified to sort of leave. CAD and AutoCAD behind and move to sort of  modeling software and I think a I was just going to actually super charge the next transition. So it's yeah what spark me interest was just there's all this technology out there that we interface with daily but a lot of us don't really have an understanding of what it is and how powerful it is. Especially when you go about. Yeah, it's attracted for the technology and the tools make it really easy to use.

So it's also some of your stuff that you've generated in runway. Yeah, yeah, you're taking a still rendering of a building and yeah throwing it at the tool that lets you really quickly create a walkthrough. Yeah, I mean that just you know, I guess you in one way you can look at that and go that's removing an animators job. Yeah, but it's also helping you communicate a design vision a lot clearer. I would expect with clients. Absolutely. Yeah, because a lot of the time like I've worked in architectural practices where we have teams of visualizers. And it is it's just meeting after meeting the architects talking to the visualizer. No, I want I want the image to look a little bit more like this or the video to transition like this will that there is a massive democratization of sort of skills and ability to learn these platforms to do your own work for yourself. It's not going to show and I'm sure there will be sort of the job losses that are run talks about, but there's a huge opportunity here for a massive reskilling and upskilling of people in these areas. We still work with visualizers, but it's just the tools they use are changing. I mean, we're not seeing any job losses at the moment. It's just how we do what we do is changing becoming more efficient in my mind. Yeah.

A Day in the Life of an AI Practitioner And what is it, what is a day in the life of James look like are you you kind of embedded in cool tools all day or is it sort of you know boots on the way it depends on it depends on what you classify as a cool tool at the moment. I mean, I mean PowerPoint and Excel just going through budgets, but look a lot of the time it is R&D to say look what is for example that the runway stuff we were doing. I picked that up sort of two weeks ago and was like let's just throw three images at runway and see what animation we can get out. And that's sort of all in sort of an hour or two. We've looked at we've obviously built a lot of AI apps in house. So we're we're in that really far sort of fail forward area. So I spend a bit of time between that the fun R&D stuff, but a lot of time it's actually managing budgets, understanding what projects we have on what do those projects require. An architectural project in Melbourne might have a need for mid journey or some sort of image generation tool or workflow. So another project in Sydney might not need it. So it's actually understanding a day in the life of me is basically delivering the right technology and the right tools to the right staff at the right time. And having a team to help me support do that across about  architects nationally. Yeah nice. The idea of failing forward and just sort of executing and experimenting. I think is a critical one like with with built solutions that are AI powered and literally have gone down a particular rabbit hole or a pathway.

Pivoting in AI Development So thinking that we're on the right track in that in that development phase of approach and where we're building a solution that is going to get AI on the hands of users with guard rails. And have had to back out and rebuild and you know you've got six or eight weeks worth of work that you've had to essentially re tool and rethink and re architect based on if a changing tools or  or better understanding of what we're dealing with and the limitations of the platforms that are behind some of the tools that we're building. So it's an interesting journey, but I think that the message for business leaders and particularly project managers who are looking at doing AI in their organizations and building solutions around them is that you need to have that mindset. You need to have flexibility. Need to adapt as you go and absolutely kind of go through that journey of of being better at AI more mature with your option. There's this experimentation phase, but then as you scale it out, you need to have that mindset as you build the projects. You need to be able to leadership needs to be flexible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've got to be able to pivot really quickly because we've done done the same sort of thing. We sort of opened up look, we started playing around with mid journey almost two years ago when that sort of first came out and we've been really dead. That's actually one of our day to day tools in our practice now to the point where we actually use it on live submissions. Of course, we actually do tell our clients that we're using AI. Obviously, ChatGPT has been around. We've been using sort of BART and perplexity and a few different tools, but we sort of moved really quickly into then we'll that's great. There are public platforms. There's obviously sort of data risks and ethical concerns around those platforms. How do we actually start to build platforms in house and look, we of course we did I did two or three proof concepts built them. And then sort of thought actually, you know what, it's not the right tool or actually the weeks that I spent building it. There'd been some some new release that basically captured exactly what we're doing. So it's got to be you need to be very careful in sort of managing time effort and budget on that front. As a lot of our partners sort of tell me we want to be at the leading edge, not the bleeding edge. But at some point you need to sort of fail a little bit to understand, well, hey, where is we're charting a course. There's going to be off shoots and rabbit holes that we go down from time to time, but we're actually all the better for that because it's going to clarify where we're trying to get to and what we're trying to deliver to our staff and to our business.

AI at Scale Yeah, and then understanding those stepping stones from their into into broader adoption and how to bring those guard rails at scale. I think it's a really important step. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And look, I think adoption is a massive one. When when some of these bigger platforms came out like mid journey, for example, I sort of looked at that and thought, wow, every every design is going to use this tomorrow. And here we are sort of year and a half later. And what we've actually seen is the opposite. We've actually seen a lot of architect saying, look, sorry, too busy. Like I'm on eight projects this week, I got deadlines up to my neck. I actually just need to sit down with one of your tech specialists, give him a prompt and work with him to help generate some imagery. So we're sort of seeing like, yeah, that adoption journey is very is very different to what I actually expected it would be in the fact that some people, a lot of people are aware of the platforms. Some people want to use them and explore other people like, you know what, I just need help doing it. I want to work with someone that knows what they're doing. Which is which equals absolutely fine in our minds as well. Yeah, yeah, good advice. On the just just before we, before we proceed, if you're on LinkedIn and you'd like a question answered by James, please feel free to interact and add those. We'll pick them up and deal with them as they come in. \

AI Ethics and Humanity To the theme of your book, which is available on Amazon for anyone interested in purchasing a copy, you can find it on Amazon.com.au. Re-imagining human, sorry, remaining human in the age of AI is a guy to understanding ourselves and the traits that make us human, as well as understanding AI and how it is impacting our lives today and into the future. In a future so inexorably soaked in technology, characteristics such as creativity, empathy and emotional intelligence will become more important than ever before. So just to explore that a bit, James and think about creativity and ethics and some of the conversations around that and how they can coexist in this world that's going to get increasingly saturated by AI.

You know, we, when we experiment, and this is probably some of the fear within some of the architects that you deal with, like the longer we spend on, the longer we spend thinking about a problem or a design in your case or something that you're writing, whatever creative exercise that you're involved in, a longer you think about it, you know, the better the output, the more you write, the clearer it becomes, the more clarity and that creative process is. is critical, I think to, you know, us growing creatively and as you write a piece, you write a book, as you have done, you know, the more time you spend, the more doors open up, the more possibility, the possibilities and options sort of open up in front of you and that's creativity. But then you jump onto a tool like chat GPT, you ask them you get like this in some ways that may be bad, but in others, it's like that's opened up for me, it's opened up new avenues to explore new creative possibilities that I might small brain could never have on a phone. it's this double edge sword, right? It's like, well, we've got this inbuilt spark of creativity and this this inbuilt purpose unique to humans above all other animals, but. you know, you've also got this tool that can really super charge that and really bring them those skills to the forefront, but in a different way it's a very different experience creative experience and you sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and sitting out, you know, in the park and and drawing something, for example, yes, yeah, what's what's your take on that.

AI and the Creative Process look, my take on that is and again, having been surrounded by our clicks for my life, creativity is not a linear exercise it's messy it's it's full of sort of exploration and offshoots into different areas, whereas if you're working with an AI, it is literally input output. and there's no real at the moment, you're just stuck in that sort of input output cycle and there's no real way to sort of deviate off or off shoot from that and sort of look at different things or different ideas. So I think, whilst I see an immense benefit of AI in that design space and in problem solving and creativity. that that point of that what I was trying to get to in the book is that it's just it's a tool it's not going to replace creativity it's not like AI is going to get AI will definitely progress right let's not make any mistakes about that and it will get much more intelligent but it's never going to stop humans from being creative and we're never going to stop relying on humans for for their creativity. I think absolutely creativity I think is the cornerstone of human innovation and progress so you can't simply just farm out that those decisions in that process to machines % and I think that's where a lot of people have been talking about this in circles that discuss AI like it's that interface between humans and machines right. It's how do you not be replaced by machine or by an AI but how do you work with it to extend your creative boundaries you might sit there and sketch three or four different sketches or you might even just do one sketch in the park and then you could feed that into AI and say give me seven variations of this that there is not replacing your creativity it's actually extending that boundary for you and helping you sort of do a lot more in a lot less time.

It's become sort of that cliche that yeah look it's going to sort of everyone's talking about it's going to take the mundane task and automate it and that sort of stuff and yeah sure that's true but I think on those high level tasks that in the past have been solely the domain of humans I absolutely think AI will add value there but we've been really really I've been saying it to almost blew in the face like it's not about replacing an architect with an image generator it is simply about expanding the world. So I think it's a very important thing to do is to look at the way you're creating horizons to look at something that you might not have known because creativity can also be a limiting exercise in in the case of an architect we could be let's say an architect in our business tomorrow gets a request for a proposal hey we'd like a new a new hospital designed and it's a competition you've got six weeks. How many options can an architect come up with really just with their own two hands and a piece of computer software in that six weeks what if you were actually able to codify or use an AI agent that knew how to design a hospital and knew the best layout you could talk to that AI and say give me a hundred different options and now based on the client requirements tell me the best five based on on the north aspect of the site which ones are going to work so it's a great thing to do is to do a lot more work. It's absolutely about efficiency it's not it's not getting rid of that creativity spark from the human side of it. So they're going to product manager within me response to that and goes how do you then capture a lot of the wisdom that's from those. Yeah, older architect like how can you yeah how can you bottle that and that's where the power of AI really can help you.

AI Capturing Wisdom and Knowledge Yeah, I can do it for example. Yes, younger architects who come into the practice how can they access that wealth of information that's within all those older architects by. Yeah, we're not talking about what link creativity in that sense we're talking about what we use of experience that somehow you can extract from past projects.

Yeah, that experience and that knowledge right. That is something I firmly believe all the a lot of the major architecture firms around Australia if not the world will be absolutely tackling that question as we speak. We have an archive drive with every past project we've done I mean in in Graypuck sense case we've been around for  years. We we have hospital designs in either d models or PDFs sitting somewhere in an archive drive that we did  years ago. There's so much knowledge in those drawings like how do we how do we get to that. A new architect if you if you came and joined our business tomorrow you might not even know that we did a hospital  years ago and we have a whole design sitting on on an archive somewhere gathering dust. So it's about yeah you're absolutely right it's it's not about bottling it but it's like how do we leverage all of the data that that has been created before us by architects that either still work for the company have left the company and moved on how do we how do we get that access to that IP and that data to help us work so much more efficiently in the future.

AI for the C-Suite For CIO's or CTO's I think it's really under c exploring that and and seeing those pockets of information in your organization and then experiment and start to start to use smaller parts of that data set to really chat with understand explore and build tools on top of to give your team access.

So it doesn't have to be an incredibly big project I don't think to start off it can be small chunks small problems in your business or pockets of opportunity and exploring those yeah yeah yeah absolutely. With do's me with human qualities like empathy intuition intuition there there but you know inherently human traits that we that we know and loves and explore and use every day but do you think those kind of qualities are being impacted by AI or how do you see them being impacted by AI. Yeah I think they are being impacted by AI and I think they have been for actually a number of years it it look because you and I are Australia based with obviously had some some issues with major phone carriers the last few months with networks going down I mean even if your internet goes down at home and you try and call call a major phone provider you're going to get some sort of AI or robotized voice and it's incredibly hard to get to work with.

So I think I don't know and it's been happening a lot right sort of being in terms of offshore and customer support and these sorts of things it there's no empathy or intuition in that right you're sort of just talking with a set of rules to try and direct you and it's incredibly frustrating like if I'm at home and maintain goes down I want to know as soon as possible when that's going to be back online so I can continue working like it does in this day and age it absolutely affects our lives our by our. So I think we need to be careful because obviously customer support has been one of those areas where it's been largely touted that AI can just replace everyone and whilst yes that is factually true is that actually the best course of action for a large business of course it's going to save you money or you need as a large language model and a set of rules but for your customers satisfaction is going to go right through the window.

In terms of people aren't going to be satisfied with trying to get a hold of you like there are still people that want that human connection and want to talk to someone and say hey why am I having an issue with your service so I think yeah I think there is a large focus that we need to as a society place on empathy and intuition I mean intuition comes back to sort of that you know just talking about sort of that architect that's been in the business for  years and he just intuitively knows how to design.

Because he's been he's done so many designs empathy on the other hand is well I don't know when you're talking to your Google device at home do you say thank you every time it enhances you like so there is I don't know you've got to I've seen friends and they say thank you to try and teach their kids manners which is quite quite a funny scenario so we need to be careful about that empathy side of things about we need to remember how to relate to other people I do and that again was another sort of idea behind the book was a lot of people.

Growing up in the Age of AI I've got a  month old daughter and I sort of wonder like growing up in a very digital native environment over the next  years like how is she going to be as an adult will she will she be comfortable answering a telephone call will she want to talk to people when there's so much technology around you so I think empathy we have to teach people those soft skills and focus on that equally as much as we do we don't want to hamper the progress of AI and just say no we can't do it we need to do it. We need to just stay human we need to strike that harmony or that balance between human relationships and also getting the best out of AI. Yeah particularly when rolling it out to a business it's pretty easily steam roll something out with the bottom line in at the front of your mind and it's like this is going to improve profitability what's going to increase our our analysis of customer you know customer brevenue. Yeah but what about people how they are reacting to it what's the what's the soft skills needed change management don't underestimate the you know the resistance of of your teams at some point yeah yeah you got a thing about coming into culture right yeah yeah yeah bring them on the journey and yes yeah don't expect a particularly smooth ride like any change you know yeah no no implementation and and yeah digital transformation is just not an easy and it's not easy. It's an ongoing journey right everyone thinks we can come in and digitally transform this company and set everything up perfectly in a few years look at the technology around us that that is it's such a short sight of you sometimes wrote when I speak to a few people that leading those teams saying well we just need to do this project and then we're good like yeah you got to have your eyes on what's next on the path and how you're you're taking that business on the journey because it never stops.

Yeah so the core fundamentals remain it's you know it's not you can have you can have technology changing around you but if you've got a solid culture that's based on understanding appreciating people and and the value they bring to your business then hopefully you can blend those two and and help them flourish.

Diversity in AI Development Yeah absolutely. Any any practices or habits that you recommend teams think about when it comes to adopting AI with those with those concepts in mind of creativity and human traits that we all have. Yeah look it's and having speaking from experience it comes back to what we were just saying about taking people on a journey you've got to include people in in the AI development space okay so you can't a technology team can sit there. And build the best AI but if they haven't gone out and can best it's sort of what you were talking about before in terms of product development right like you can see there and build a product but if you haven't sort of actually spoken to who your end users are going to be and included them on the journey in development it's a well we're building this platform what would you like out of it what do you think it should do. You need that diversity of thought so you absolutely need to bring those people up and say look we're building a tool this is what we believe this is the problem we believe it can solve what do you think what are your opinions like we need to hear from you so I think it's yeah you need to make sure that and I've done this before like I've sort of built tools where I'm like yeah this is great this is going to solve a problem but the way it's used is completely off the mark to how I thought it was going to be used.

So you've got to have that diversity and bring people in and make sure that your development team has a bit of diversity as well I know there's some crazy statistics out there around diversity of people of color and and males and females in those AI development teams and that's why we've seen a lot of these image models or image to text image platforms have crazy biases straight off the bat because I hate to say it but a lot of these AI developers are just a little bit more interesting. They're just like guys they don't know anything outside of what they and it's not their fault like they're a product of their environment they're upbringing their job but without that diversity you're going to run into problems very very quickly. Yeah, yeah, interesting angle will explore that one it's just back to your point about yeah advice for teams like we like to think about it in a startup world where when you're creating a new product and you're a startup you need to find what's called product market fit and the only way you find product market fit is by talking to your customers.

Yeah, fact you should talk to your customers way more than what you talk to you and you're anyone else to understand their problems and agree what you're solving so you can bring that mentality across into your teams in your organization. It's all about helping them be better at their jobs which end of the day really kind of contributes to culture so yeah absolutely.

Yeah, you raised an interesting point about ethics and and biases and I think it's worth touching on because it seems to me there's these different levels of responsibility when it comes to ethical AI development government level you know we've seen recently Australia's sort of signed off on the AI guidelines along with   other countries which is great which I think is a lot of things that I think are going to be a lot more important. It goes some way to addressing that at a government level but there's detailed media from government and then you've got organizational level responsibilities the guard rails you need to put in place and then you've got individual responsibility like as citizens we need to have and think about when a is appropriate if the if the results from our interactions with AI is useful or not and if there's biases in that and and do add due due diligence on things that require it so.

Ethics in AI Yeah any insights or advice for organizations around ethics. yeah look I think it's it's a tricky one I think we and again speaking from personal experience we sort of went really open in terms of AI adoption we sort of said hey no policy no framework like these platforms have been released jump in. And then we had to sort of backtrack pretty quickly and and I'm sure you've seen in the news like they're there are large companies out there that have banned outright banned access to certain platforms so I think if you're developing tools in house you've got to work with with your business team and your leaders to adopt ethical guidelines and frameworks I think implementing those guidelines and frameworks can prioritize our human values and morals in the development of AI as well as its use. I think we've got to think about when we utilizing these sort of technologies we've got to have checks and balances in place okay because people are I mean if you look at how quickly you can go on to ChatGPT and develop your own your own GPT for public use like a lot of that computational sort of setup is done by over now I but you've developed your name is on that so you've got to be really careful about what you're doing I think a lot of companies are doing that. And I think that's probably catching a few businesses out so I would say look definitely be exploring AI and look at how it can affect your business it's going to affect your businesses in multiple ways from your business to your business. So back of house finance teams and marketing teams right through your customer facing staff but you've got to get to grips with your reputational and brand damage if something goes wrong so you absolutely need to think about what guardrails have we got in place you need to do serious testing of that platform before that goes live you need to look at how it might interface with your guidelines or with your frameworks.

So we've got those in place you need to have those in place first in reality what does gen AI mean to our business how do we use it how do we not use it how do we protect our information how do we protect our data how do we protect the information of our customers it's not just our business it's also we've seen it before where there's examples floating around someone sent me a nasty email ChatGPT here it is can you please write a response and we've seen people copy an email into ChatGPT with the persons  name at center their company signature like you're affecting the data in the year you are unknowingly maybe affecting the data anonymity of that person I think we've only just learned about the pitfalls and the absolutely negative impacts of social media that have been around for what   years like we completely miss the boat on how bad Instagram and Facebook and those sorts of platforms are for young kids  whereas AI we are just full steam ahead how do we make money and we're not thinking about the larger impacts so I think yeah get your policy and your frameworks in place understand what it means to your business and what the risks are and just be really careful in the development don't rush it just test it and make sure that it's fit for purpose before it goes any further and have your development team on hand if something does go wrong if it's if a customer comes back with bad feedback  

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have a question from Jimmy thanks James for that question that's of that answer that's really good answer that question how can Jimmy says how can current university students use AI effectively without downplaying the role of education good one for James  

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Exploring AI in Education Yeah, look, I think a lot of the university students I've lectured and had the pleasure of going in and talking to are exploring AI. They're using AI, but I think it's also for the education department to get to grips with as well. It's not so much about downplaying the role of education. I think just last week, I posted on LinkedIn that the Department of Education has released their AI framework that aligns with the Australian governmental policy. This is a huge step forward, saying, 'Hey, we realize AI is here and it is absolutely already impacting education.' How do we set our students up and how do we set our teachers up for success?

AI's Impact Across University Disciplines But look, whatever you might be studying at university, AI is absolutely going to have an impact in that area. My advice would be like, don't shy away from it. Everyone I talk to, I'm trying to tell them just be productively curious. Don't forget about the job and the role you've got to do right now today, but absolutely understand how AI is going to impact it. Because if you're not learning AI now, you're going to be forced to learn it and work with it in the future.

AI as a Tool for Enhancing Creativity It's just another tool and another platform to understand and learn whether you are studying at university or whether you're out in the workforce. And I think further to that is, if you are using AI anywhere, right, workforce or education, in our policy and house, there is absolutely a clause that says yes, you can use it, but you've got to make it your own. Please, I've got to stress, please don't be lazy enough just to copy and paste stuff out of ChatGPT or some sort of platform. That text those platforms return is entirely robotic in nature. You've got to put your own prose on there, your own sort of infuse it with a bit of humanity."

Utilizing AI for Initial Ideas and Creativity Yeah, use it as a tool, but don't use it as the absolute end of the road. I call it vanilla content; it's the base minimum, the baseline. Take that and build on it. Or if you're starting with a blank page and you need inspiration or an idea to get going, use it for that. That's how I use it to write a business case. I might just generate a few words here or there, and that sparks my creativity. It puts me on a roll to then end up rewriting most of it anyway, which is great. Give me five dot points to start me off. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And that can be in the kind of the visual as well as the written word, right? It can be exactly an idea spark.

AI in Creative Processes That's actually a really good point. We've seen image creation AI used as the very first tool in the workflow. For someone like me, not a creative person at all, I've got an idea, put a few words in, there's an image. On the flip side, we've actually seen it used much further down the track where we've already got a design or an image. 'Hey, actually, what if it looked like this, or can you give me a variant?' So yeah, you can actually use it at various points in the process to get a bit more creativity or a bit more idea about what you're designing or trying to deliver.

AI Leadership I really like what you say about leading with confidence  and also that you the benefits far outweigh the risks I don't think you can afford to stand still  on this but then having said that I don't mean that you need to move at breakneck speed and throw  everything else out the window to implement it yeah yeah okay very good good advice um with  

Top 3 tips for AI for C-Suite Covered a bit of territory today James um I think I think there's a lot we could explore for  this and maybe another session in future if you're up for it yeah always be really good  do a dead dive into a couple of areas would be would be useful I think for people but uh well  if anyone's got any feedback on any of those topics that they like us to delve into a bit deeper  love to hear it so um just to close off James kind of top pieces of practical advice like what are  your top three to give C-suite lead you know business leaders when they're thinking about next steps  with AI like if they're just starting out on their journey they're kind of in this emerging phase  where they understand the potential or see the potential yep don't really know how to kick it off  what's your top three pieces of advice? Jeez top three limit I think I've got a limited to three um yeah  look I suppose my creativity look .

my first one and I always sort of say is be if you're  really kicking it off like be productively curious be be very careful or understand that it's a very  fast moving environment a platform that you might commit to today can easily be superseded tomorrow  by a new development um think about the risks of basically public AI versus private AI so think  about what platforms you're actually exploring um if you I think all businesses and all C-suite  leaders will definitely and and if they're not they should be looking at how they develop in-house  apps um public AI is absolutely great to get you on board and get your understanding but  private AI is where you will get the efficiency and make the make the money or make the profit  and make your business more efficient so absolutely explore your private AI uses definitely do  some reading around even at government level the AI policies because they will aren't they're  a starting point they will start to filter down and they will start to um inform regulations in  your industry um it's only a matter of time so absolutely do some reading on what policies are  out there at the moment if you haven't already my sort of

third piece would be absolutely get  an AI policy and a framework at just a use policy implemented into your business um we we have  seen it time and time again and I'm talking about internally but externally as well about some  pretty cautionary tales of using using public AI um those public AI platforms whatever you're putting  in there don't be um yeah don't don't have the the will over your eyes they will absolutely use  that data to train their models so just have a use case in a policy and a framework in-house on  how to use AI um whether it's private or public I think they would be my yeah top two or three  top top two or three there's more um which we can probably we're doing probably unpack at some point  

Very useful thanks James um I'm sure our listeners have got lots of value from that and  hopefully it's given them some confidence to take that next step and um and build those those three  into their into their business going forward so that's a wrap we're going to leave it there thanks  very much for joining us James appreciate your wisdom or experience that you've that you've taken  us through today um thank you and we love you to subscribe at future.knkt.com.au if you'd like  more AI knowledge innovation and experience we we write regularly on the subject and uh are  planning to produce more of these so love to have you join us and we'll see you next time thank you.

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