Navigating AI Adoption: From Misconceptions to Technical Challenges w/ Harrison Painter

By Dan Sanchez · Episode published May 31, 2024

Harrison Painter shares a practical view of AI adoption, from the role of a non-technical chief AI officer to the human creativity and emotional intelligence teams still need.

AI adoption is not only a technical project. It is also a change in how people work, learn, and make decisions. Harrison Painter moved from marketing into broader AI training and described the role as helping people understand the tools well enough to use them with confidence.

Make AI understandable

Harrison described himself as a non-technical chief AI officer, a facilitator and trainer rather than someone who expects every employee to become an engineer. That distinction matters because many people are interested in AI while feeling intimidated by the technical language around it.

The first step is to connect the tool to a real problem. ChatGPT, image systems, and other models become easier to understand when someone can see how they might help with a task already on the calendar. The goal is not to chase every new feature. It is to build enough familiarity to recognize useful opportunities.

Keep creativity and judgment involved

AI can draft, summarize, analyze, and generate options, but a person still supplies the purpose and the point of view. Harrison emphasized creativity and emotional intelligence as valuable strengths. An AI output can be technically polished and still fail to understand the customer, the context, or the feeling a message needs to carry.

That is why adoption should include discussion and experimentation, not just a tool rollout. Let people test use cases, compare results, and explain where the tool helped or missed. Those conversations build practical judgment faster than a long list of features.

Build for a moving target

The technology changes quickly. A workflow that works today may need to be adjusted when a model, interface, or price changes. Teams need a foundation that survives those changes: clear goals, repeatable evaluation, good data habits, and people who know how to learn a new tool.

Small businesses can benefit because they can experiment without waiting for a large organization to approve every step. The best starting point is a focused use case with a visible result. From there, document what worked, train others, and decide whether the workflow deserves to expand.

AI adoption succeeds when technical tools meet human capability. Teach the basics, make room for questions, and keep creativity and emotional intelligence at the center of the work.

Machine-generated transcript. Minor transcription errors may remain.

Welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer.

I'm Dan Sanchez, my friends, Kami Danchez,

and I'm still on this journey to master AI in 2024.

Thanks for listening to this episode

to join me in the journey.

I'm here with Harrison Painter,

who's like, you're the chief AI officer for everybody now.

And I found you through your podcast,

because it was an AI marketing podcast,

and I was looking through all the AI marketing podcasts,

because this is where this one gets found,

and saw that you were ranking up there,

had a conversation with you,

hit it off, I'm so happy to have you on the show.

But I know you just shifted recently

to being like everyone's chief AI officer,

and shifted from, you go broader from marketing

to a broader conversation about AI,

from the training you've been doing.

And I'm excited to jump into all your learnings,

moving from marketing into a broader thing,

with all the conversations you're having.

So Harrison, I'm excited to dive into this.

Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

It's funny that, yeah, as a marketer,

we're supposed to niche,

and then we're supposed to niche within a niche, right?

And I'm going in the opposite direction of that.

But you're right, I'm speaking to so many different people

in so many different industries,

that I just think it's a disservice

if my podcast only focuses on just this one thing.

Now, keep in mind, it'll still be foundationally

about marketing, about sales.

I mean, business is business, right?

And that's what we need.

But at the end of the day, people need more than that.

And I'll share some of the programs I'm working on

as we talk about it.

That's funny.

I mean, I feel the pull myself.

Just posting about marketing stuff

and the GPTs I've been building LinkedIn,

I've started people coming out saying like,

hey, I think I'd really like to build a custom GPT

around X, and it's not even a marketing function,

but I'm like, okay, yeah, that makes tons of sense.

Let's do that.

So I'm already like, I don't know,

different people are reaching out about AI

for different reasons.

And the lessons you learn about how to run it

for marketing apply generally across the board

in a lot of different ways.

Though this show will remain about marketing

because I'm like, someone's got to stay niche down

because even the AI Marketing Institute,

their show has broadened out too, I've noticed.

So I think this is a general trend

because there's so much,

I think there's so much demand for AI

that's waking up across the board

and marketers were kind of the first ones to the game.

Everyone's talking about it,

but marketers have been talking about it

for a little longer and experimenting

a little bit more heavily

because it's had so many more applications

for marketing first, I think.

So I think that's what's going on, but we'll see.

And the other challenge you have too

is everything is moving so quickly.

So once you kind of have this marketing thing

figured out within a tool,

either the tool is no longer valid

or it changes so much that you got to do another episode

because the tool is completely different

from when you started using it.

Just look at the evolution of chat GPT,

where it's come just in the last 12 plus months.

So I want to jump into what you're learning

from being on the ground,

talking with people who are signing up for trainings

and are eager to learn about their misconceptions,

hurdles they're running into

and how you're helping them overcome that.

But before we do,

I'd love to learn a little bit more

about your background.

I mean, I know because we had a previous conversation

about it, but I found it to be a fascinating journey,

but how did you get to AI Marketing today?

Where did your journey start

and give us like the highlights along the way.

I know you've had like a lot of little things

that have happened from the beginning.

Yeah, I'm an entrepreneur at heart.

So I'm a military guy, I got out of the military,

I did the job thing for 12 years

and I just didn't fit into that world.

Became an entrepreneur, I got into real estate sales

and then I got into investing

and then that's where I learned all my marketing chops

was during that era of my life.

Lost everything in 08,

any of you out there old enough

to remember the market crash of 08.

But it was a blessing for me

because I quickly pivoted into marketing

because that's what I was passionate about.

From there, I was able to build a marketing company

that got acquired.

It was acquired by a company in Los Angeles,

a public company.

We were working with different celebrities,

iconic athletes, all those kinds of things.

Kind of 360 branding,

this was the very early days of social media.

So that was a blast.

I had some health issues that brought me back to Indiana.

It was kind of deflating on one hand,

but on the other, it's been a blessing ever since.

I kind of went through,

as most marketers listening to this will relate to,

it's a thankless job.

We don't get a lot of praise for the work we do

and we're pretty expendable.

If a CMO changes, we're typically all fired and moved out.

So it's just one of those rollercoaster type jobs

and I really feel for marketers

and the emotions that we go through with that.

But as I was trying to figure out

what I wanted to do with the next phase of my life,

I started doing live events and all these things

and then COVID hit and that kind of

another big speed bump there.

Then coming out of COVID,

again, started the events again.

We had a lot of momentum,

but unfortunately I had some personal issues

that really threw me for a loop.

My wife got breast cancer,

my daughter was in a skydiving accident.

So they needed my time now, right?

As a husband, as a father, I had to figure out

how do I keep my business running

and everything is dependent pretty much on me, right?

As the leader, as the person doing this,

but yet my family needs me.

And any of you out there

that have been part of a startup knows

that's not a nine to five Monday through Friday gig, right?

So what do I do?

Well, this was exactly the time

that chat GPT was released to the public.

So I started playing around with different AI tools,

experimenting with them.

And all of a sudden I realized,

holy moly, I can do four times the work

in half the time.

I can keep up with what I'm trying to accomplish

and I can still have time now with my wife and kids.

So that was amazing.

And then I dedicated now my life to educating people

and getting these tools in front of folks,

a non-technical, when you say chief AI officer,

I'm a non-technical chief AI officer,

really a facilitator, a trainer,

and really helping people embrace these tools

because it is the future.

I find that a lot of AI work doesn't even need

that kind of technicality to it.

It's amazing how much you can accomplish with AI,

but it requires almost this whole different skillset, right?

Like a lot of the progress I've made with AI

has less to do with my coding backgrounds.

I know how to code in HTML, CSS,

and I dabble with programming languages

because I've learned how to manipulate

the heck out of WordPress.

Oh, is that something I adopted early on in my career?

But the thing that helps me the most with AI

is actually running an internship.

Like I learned how to break complex processes

down into small little tiny tasks

and delegate it as standard operating procedures

that interns could follow and execute relatively well

after a good training and understanding

of what they're trying to do and why and when and how.

That's helped me tremendously with AI,

but that doesn't have anything to do

with the technicalities,

just learning how to like, I don't know,

thinking in terms of processes and breaking down.

So at least, I don't like,

it makes a lot of sense that you can be

a chief AI officer without having the code

and development background.

Well, and I think that's the future of companies, right?

There's gonna be, I don't know,

what would you call today a CTO, CIO,

that's really gonna have that chief AI officer

technical role.

And then the modern day CMO is really gonna be

more of a chief AI officer that's non-technical

and they're gonna deal with the synthetic media

and keeping things ethical,

staying up with the technology,

managing the teams, working on communication

within the company through AI.

And there's just so many different things

that need to happen.

And typically those technical guys,

nothing against them,

but they're not typically the best communicators,

human to human, right?

They're more the coder and they're more comfortable

in front of that computer,

or speaking with their peers that are at their level.

And those guys can make us feel stupid,

for lack of a better term, right?

And they get frustrated with this

because we don't have the foundational understanding

that we have.

And we feel that there is a huge role here in the future

for guys like us that can reach out to normal folks,

employees, just common people,

and share the message with them

and get them the right training that they need.

Often found in prost jobs,

I was kind of like the bridge between IT

and the rest of the company.

Yeah, no stakeholder wants them to feel stupid.

To them and they'd speak technical to me

and I'd try to reinterpret it back

to everybody else sometimes,

why we needed this or why we didn't need that

or whatever.

Since you're working with people all the time,

I'd love to know like,

what are the most common misconceptions

you're running into about AI

from those who are interested in learning

and showing up to trainings,

but haven't spent 20 hours listening

to Sam Altman interviews?

Well, let me share the four kinds of people

that I run into when I'm out there

and then I'll kind of break down from there.

So the first type of person that I run into

truly is the rainbow and unicorn set.

They think AI is going to solve

all of their problems, right?

It's gonna cure cancer,

that's gonna make our lives completely incredible

and almost on autopilot.

Then you have the terminator set.

These are the people that are absolutely gloom and doom.

You know, the overlords are gonna overtake humanity

and we're all gonna be slaves to AI.

Then you have the two that are a little bit more normal

and the first one is,

people just have their head down, right?

They're working hard.

We're in, you know, at the time of this recording,

we're in a very high inflationary period.

People's money isn't going as far as it used to.

They're having to work harder for less

and their heads are down.

Plus they wanna spend time with their wife,

with their kids, their spouse, whatever that is

and they still wanna have a life outside of work.

So, you know, their heads are just down.

Then you have the fourth set that is just exhausted.

I call them the tech exhausted, right?

We went through the internet boom.

Then we went through the smartphone boom

and then the social media boom

and then within social media, right?

We go from Twitter and Facebook to Snapchat and TikTok

and, you know, vertical video

and then, you know, blockchain and cryptocurrency

and all that happened there

and now all of a sudden we're asking people

to adopt another technology

and this technology is moving faster

than all of those combined.

And even though humans say they like progress and change,

we're typically more creatures of habit.

So now you have that balance of,

yeah, I wanna change,

but do I wanna change this much, this quickly?

So you kind of have all that going on.

Now, when I'm talking to most of these people,

the ones that are interested, you know,

they might've jumped on the chat GPT

and I find that they use it almost like Google, right?

They'll just jump on there, ask a quick question,

get an answer and move on.

They don't know, I mean, we call it prompt engineering.

I don't love that word,

but they don't really know how to ask the right questions

and the output that you get is very, very dependent

on the input that you give it.

And once you start explaining some of that to people,

you can see their eyes light up

on how this is so much different from a Google.

And then of course you can blow their mind

with looking at how all of this stuff

can be used in the future.

But my goal is just to get them to,

one, improve their self-awareness.

Because number one,

we're gonna have to really discern what's real

and what's not, and it's gonna get harder and harder.

And at the time of this recording,

we're coming into an election season.

So we're really gonna see how people

can manipulate with these tools, right?

So we gotta discern that way.

And then the second point is,

we really have to focus on critical thinking skills

because it's that critical thinking

that helps us give better inputs into AI

to get those key outcomes

that we wanna accomplish with it.

So really those soft skills

are probably more important than they've ever been.

And I don't think AI is going to take away

the human element,

and I don't think AI can drive intent.

That's gonna be a human that has to drive that intent.

You mentioned that one of the common misconceptions

is AI is like search.

What's another misconception you've run into?

That, hmm, that's a good question.

Another misconception.

You know what, that you can just jump into AI right now

as a, let's talk to marketers,

and it just put everything on autopilot.

Like that's not the case.

I mean, I'm watching too many marketers,

and please, if you're one of these guys out there

or ladies, stop.

We call it lazy AI.

You're jumping into chat GPT,

you're having it write a blog post

or a LinkedIn post or whatever for you,

or some automated system.

It's being copy and pasted and just thrown out there.

Most of these articles are not good.

Most of these LinkedIn posts are not good.

They're formatted in a certain way

where over time people are gonna know

that you did not write that.

They put 58 emojis in there

in a certain way they're formatting,

and there's certain words.

Can we please strike these words from the record, please?

Harness, unleash, unlock, dive, delve, all those things.

You need to use things like chat GPT

as an add-on to your creativity

to make what you do better,

not depend on it to do it for you.

And right there, there's the misconception

that AI is gonna do it all for you.

It's not, it's not.

It's you need to drive what it's gonna do.

And I really do think that marketers

that hold on to that humanity,

that emotion that kind of buck

some of these automated trends,

they're the ones that are really gonna succeed

over the long term.

And their jobs are gonna be much more secure

than somebody that's just putting it on autopilot.

That's one of the reasons

why I really like my internship running experience

because nobody assumes an intern can accomplish anything.

Right?

But I'm like, well, if given the proper parameters,

you can.

AI is just like, I call it the genius intern.

It's Einstein smart.

I know so much yet can't, it doesn't have common sense.

At least not yet, someday maybe.

That's where they're hoping to go.

Well, we need to talk on that too

because even though it's an Einstein,

if you're doing lazy AI and copy and pasting,

there's still a lot of hallucinations.

There's still a lot of outdated information.

And if you put things out there,

whether it's on behalf of you or especially your client,

and you make a mistake,

now you're not only hurting your credibility,

but you're hurting the credibility

of the people that are paying you to do your job.

So it's more important than ever

to really have that second set of eyes

to do a little bit more research.

And look, you have time to do the research now.

The way I use it, I'll write something out

or a script or a blog post or an article, whatever that is,

I'll write it out in my voice.

And then I'll plug it in and say,

look, make this better, make it more valuable.

Fact check this.

And then I'll get the response

and then I'll go back in and do the research

to make sure everything is correct.

Now we have updates.

You saw Google Gemini is coming up to 2 million tokens.

And for anybody that doesn't know what that means,

it's memory.

So as you continue down these long chats,

it's going to remember what you said two days ago or whatever,

so you're not gonna have to keep reprogramming it.

But that doesn't fully prevent yet hallucinations and false.

Look, it's scraping the internet for the information.

And we know, as Abraham Lincoln said,

not everything on the internet is true, right?

That's right.

It's funny because the hallucinations

are often drawn out as bad,

but I'm like it's the hallucinations

that actually give it its power.

It's the same power that makes AI as wonderful as it is,

it also leads to some of its weak points.

Because without the ability to come up with and dream

and create things out of nothing,

because if you're asking for a LinkedIn post about sales,

it's gotta actually make up stuff.

Because you've given it no direction to write said post,

so it will find it itself.

The problem is, is it will find it incorrectly sometimes,

because you didn't delegate it well enough yet.

I mean, to some point, you're like,

well, do I delegate, they'll write it for it?

You're like, yeah, but it gets better and better

as time goes on, it's proven to have less hallucinations

as it's refined.

But hallucinations is a funny thing,

because everybody talks about it like it's bad.

I'm like, no, that's how it works.

Well, you know how they're trying to fix that.

You just have to be aware of its current limitations,

but that's where spending more time with it

starts to build, you start to become more competent,

is learning where it can and can't perform.

Right, and you know what they're trying to do

to prevent that, like I saw an MIT article

where they actually are making like, say,

10 different chat bots that are gonna debate

on the facts around whatever is getting spit out.

And then, I think it was last week or week before,

if you're familiar with, there's an app called Bumble,

I've never been on it, but it's like a dating app.

The CEO came out and said that the future

is that I would have an AI chat bot,

the say woman would have an AI chat bot,

those two chat bots would actually date

to see if we're compatible before

it would create the connection.

So, the future is gonna be a little bit weird, for sure.

But they are working on that

to create a better overall system.

I'm so looking forward to that.

Not the Bumble dating part,

because I'm married and don't care about that part,

but I'm like, to have your chat bot call my chat bot,

I'm like, yeah, that's just gonna be useful,

because how often do you're like,

oh, let's get together,

oh, let's pull up our calendars,

and you're just having to go through it,

and it becomes a whole thing.

I know I run into people in the community,

and it's usually like, hey, have your wife call my wife,

because they understand all the soccer schedules

and all that kind of stuff going on.

It'll be easier if a chat bot

could just go and take care of it.

That way, the right people are landing on your calendar

at the right time in the right way, right?

But look at it like this,

because dating is not much different than business,

so you and I could have chat bots that talk to each other

to see if we're compatible either for this podcast

or to do business together or whatever that is.

So look, typically, adult entertainment and dating

kind of does push the limits with technology,

and then that spills over into kind of the business world

and normal stuff, and we have to look at it.

They did until the juggernauts of Facebook,

social media really changed the game.

I remember walking through some conferences and studies.

I more like read the cliff notes

because I probably wouldn't even show up

to a session about that,

but I remember hearing back about how

they had all the industries and pushed the industries,

but that was true in the 2000s,

probably less true over the last 10 years,

as Facebook and Reddit and Netflix

and all those guys have really, in Uber,

a lot of the more really, really big tech companies

have pushed tech along probably further,

but it's still there, and they're still pushing it along.

With some of these misconceptions about AI,

treating it like search, expecting it to automate everything,

and some of the buckets you've been able

to classify people in,

how is that impacting their business adoption of AI?

How is that coming into play

when actually implementing it practically?

Well, there's a couple of different buckets here too, right?

So for small businesses, it's amazing,

because now you can create synthetic content.

Okay, just for me, for instance,

when I do my YouTube videos,

Oudio is amazing.

I can draft a jingle and chat GPT.

I can put it in Oudio,

and now I can create custom music for my videos,

for my intros, for my outros,

to make something custom for maybe a segment

that I'm doing.

I just did a video on a graduation

of an AI training program that we did,

and I custom-wrote a song that kinda praised

the organization that put it on,

and of course the students who graduated.

So that's pretty amazing,

and that democratizes the playing field a bit on marketing,

because what would that have cost me before

to get a custom jingle written?

One, I'd have to have somebody write lyrics,

have somebody write music, have somebody record it,

get the copyright, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now you just go on Oudio and do it in 10 minutes.

That's mind-blowing.

So democratizing. Was it good?

Was it like actually like?

It is really good.

I mean, I can tell you,

I think the maximum I've ever gone

is 10 iterations of the song,

but typically I can get it done in two to four,

and something comes out that's usable.

I'm not trying to write Bohemian Rhapsody here or anything.

Yeah, it's not gonna be something people listen to

on Spotify, but as a marketing gimmick,

it's absolutely working right now.

And then of course it'll get better

so that actually people might wanna listen to it.

Some of the songs I've heard,

some of the cherry pick songs they put on Oudio

are stuff that I would just normally add

to a playlist and listen to,

because it's that good.

It's that good.

Now, if you're a bigger business,

you've got a whole nother can of worms,

and this opportunity has come at me lately

where I'm starting to find attorneys to work with

to help craft policies for businesses,

because as these tools keep coming out,

a bigger business can't keep up

with everything that's going on,

and your employees are coming into work

and using these tools.

Now, that opens up a whole lot of cybersecurity issues,

IP issues, and these employees,

they don't realize they're doing anything wrong,

but they're using tools that aren't authorized.

They're not under the firewall of said company.

And if they're putting in things like spreadsheets

or financials or client lists or any of those things,

they might not be using a custom GPT

or their own server.

They might just be using the one

that's on their phone downloaded from the Apple store.

So you've got to create a policy now,

just like we did with social media,

and make sure that the company is fully in line

with everything that's moving forward.

They're training their employees,

and that they understand the risks and rewards

that are here for using the technology.

Do you have a boilerplate policy in place

for people to check out or download,

or is that still something that's working?

That's what I'm working on.

Yeah, this just came up out of the blue

and it hit me like a brick.

So I started reaching out to a few attorneys saying,

look, we need to hurry up and put this together

because this is happening so quick.

And I think it's a big opportunity

for anybody that wants to jump on this.

I'd be down.

Because look, these companies will pay good money, right?

This isn't a cheap fee to put it together.

And it's something not only can you help

get the attorney in there with the policy,

but now you could go in and physically train

that company and generate revenue for yourself that way.

What are some of the technical barriers

companies are running into faced with

trying to get AI more into their organization?

Well, look, small companies, it's not really cost, right?

Because most of these tools are 20 bucks

or that a month, and so many of them

when they launch are free.

So you've got that issue.

But if you're a larger company, it is the cost.

Because one, you need private servers.

You need now a whole new set

of cybersecurity type functionality going on.

You need to create these policies for your employee.

None of that stuff is really per se cheap now

because you have all these added protections,

layers, training, everything going on, right?

Where a small company has maybe one to 30 people

to deal with, but if you've got thousands of employees,

that's not cheap, right?

It's just not a cheap, fast, or easy process

for them to implement.

How do you break down the segments

of rolling out AI organization-wide?

I imagine there is a technical stack.

What technology are we bringing in

or enabling within our existing technology?

There's a policy legal standpoint.

There's probably an HR angle

with training and enablement on it.

How do you organize all the facets

that need to happen when you're rolling out AI

in a company?

That is the $64,000 question, right?

I think that's what we're all trying to figure out right now.

What's the best way to do it?

What's the easiest way to do it?

What's the most cost-effective way to do it?

For me, of course, it's working with marketing teams

or sales teams.

I'm not the technical side,

but we do have people on the team

that are the technical side,

so they can go in and work with the CIO, CTO,

whatever that is, and figure out

what tools will benefit the organization

to save them time and or money.

So look, I think we still have a long way to go

to figure out the best way to roll

all of this out with anybody.

I do think that-

What about with smaller teams?

Let's say you have marketing teams of less than 10.

So there's a VP of marketing,

maybe a marketing director,

and a handful of people who execute,

like a couple of writers, designer,

probably a paid media specialist.

You know, it's a small team,

but it's still big enough to be its own little department.

How would you layer that in?

The basic foundational tools, right?

Chat, GPT, or Perplexity, or Gemini,

or whatever your preferred is,

or a mix of all of them.

I don't know if you've seen Po yet,

but that's pretty cool.

It kind of blends.

Po is amazing for anybody listening to this.

I wanna say it's po.com, P-O-E.

And I don't know if it's .com or .ai or whatever,

but basically-

Yeah, it's poe.com.

This platform brings in like 30 different chat agents,

and you can ask each one of it a question,

and then go through each one,

and see the responses based on all of them,

and it maintains the memory throughout the entire thread.

So you could ask GPT 4-0 or whatever a question,

run it into Gemini,

run it into all the other ones that are in there,

and it's a big time saver,

because typically I got, what, six, seven tabs open,

doing it anyway.

So that's always a foundational tool.

For synthetic media, of course,

you wanna use Mid-Journey to create images.

Now, for graphics people out there and marketers,

Mid-Journey does not replace your graphic designer.

Right, it just doesn't.

Number one, you can't copyright any of that material

if you're a company that needs to copyright things,

but two, all it really does for me

is streamline the process,

because look, I can barely draw a stick man,

that's my artistic talent from that,

but I can go into Mid-Journey and say,

hey, I wanna create something that looks like this,

then I can get that to my graphics designer,

and I just saved a week or two in back and forth

of me trying to explain what I want.

So that's a great tool for you.

I don't find Mid-Journey or Dolly

to even be graphic design tools.

They're more like illustration tools,

and I can't, it does replace illustrators,

like unless you're coming up with

really custom detailed illustrations,

like digital illustration is dying.

It has to be taking a hit right now

because of Mid-Journey and those guys.

So, because I was a graphic designer

and I use Mid-Journey all the time,

but it totally gives me access to illustrations

and photography and all kinds of things,

assets I didn't have available to design around.

It is good for mockups, too.

That's where it can do design work

because it can mock up a webpage.

Is it good?

No, never, ever.

But it can get you pretty close.

Yeah, time saving.

Yeah, so I've used it to even do mockups of logos

live with clients when we kinda get it down

to the general idea,

and we just go through like 50 iterations,

find five he likes, and then narrow it down to ones,

and then I usually have to rebuild it in Illustrator.

But just getting to the point where we can look

at mockups together instantly,

so nice.

Well, and for your pitches, I love doing face swap.

So, if I'm doing a deck for somebody

or some kind of pitch,

I can create an image with, say,

the person I'm talking to or their CEO or whatever,

put their face on an image of Superman

or something like that,

and really customize now my proposal.

And typically, that blows them away.

Most people don't know how face swap works

or what it is, and it's super easy in Mid-Journey.

And you're right.

Illustrations, as this face swapping continues

to get better and as you can continue down the path

of the same character,

now you're talking about comic books

and illustration books and things that could be done

without that artist or illustrator.

So, that's pretty amazing.

But, and I'm not an attorney,

I'm not giving legal advice,

but as of now, my understanding is

none of this can be copyrighted,

so you have to be aware of that.

Yeah.

Well, I'd all, anything I would be doing,

I'd be doing for marketing purposes anyway,

instead of, rather than creating my own IP

and my own Mickey Mouse around the issue.

But it'd be fun to come up,

like I've done kids books for marketing purposes,

and I'd love to be able to do kids books faster.

And to continue down the path to things like Headliner,

if you're doing a video podcast like this,

now you can take this video

and what used to take a long time.

So right now we're in 16 by nine mode, right?

But we wanna get it on TikTok or whatever.

Now there's programs like Headliner

where I can just take this long form video,

put it in there, it'll chop up 10 videos,

it'll do it in vertical format.

And that used to take me hours and days to put together.

Even when you start putting the transcript

over the top of it and all that,

now it's like 10 minutes, 10 minutes.

Like, think of Gary Vaynerchuk

would have had this 10 years ago,

because he put out, I think, more content than anybody.

He's gotta have some Guinness World Record right there.

He didn't have AI at that time.

Now you can put out twice as much content as he did

using all of these tools.

It's true.

He had a team of like 30 people

just working on nothing but his content.

I don't remember after that he was fluctuated,

but last I checked it was 30 people,

it might be bigger now.

Yeah, you can use things like the GPT agents,

how can I better SEO this page?

What keywords am I missing?

How can I improve what I'm doing?

So all of these tools for a small team are invaluable,

because now you can take those creative meetings

that used to be three, four hours.

We can get them done in an hour,

because we have all that creative stuff to work from

and everybody gets to bring it to the table.

So that's invaluable.

How do the people that you're working with

address their data and integration issues

with their systems?

So that's one thing I've run into personally,

is like you wanna use AI,

but it seems like it's still kinda isolated

from people's tech stacks.

Yeah, well, the bigger company's a whole different animal.

Small companies aren't really worried yet about that,

right, it's too new.

That's not a focus.

It's just not happening yet.

I think we're gonna see some major issues,

I'm sure, pop up in the next year

that's gonna really get people's attention around that.

But I think right now people are just having fun

using the tools.

They're not really thinking of any repercussions.

It's not on the radar.

Yeah, I think we're too early, really,

unless you're a larger company

and just in that full protection mode.

My wife works at a major hospital

and they're under ransomware right now.

If you've seen the story about Ascension,

they were completely hacked last week.

All across the country,

so I'm sure it's some form of a terrorist attack or whatever,

but they have these hospitals completely under ransom.

None of their computer systems are working,

the nurses are in chaos.

I'm sure the records have been,

we're just gonna see a lot of negative things happen.

And that's the challenge right now

because the world is in this weird state of change

and World War III is going on right now.

People don't realize it, but it's a digital war.

And the FBI even came out a few,

I don't know, a month or two ago

and they even said,

look, the cyber attacks are gonna be increasing.

You need to be aware of this.

And it comes at a time, unfortunately,

or maybe fortunately, but unfortunately,

when AI is really growing

and people aren't really thinking about

the cybersecurity risks involved with that.

Reading The Coming Wave,

which was published last September, I believe,

after reading that, one of the big insights

I took away from that book was OMG,

like cybersecurity is going to be a huge problem

because of AI.

If I'm looking at investing in companies right now,

I'm like, who's got the best hold on cybersecurity

against AI right now?

I'd be putting money into that company right now

because that industry is gonna blow up

because it's gonna become such a problem.

Because there's so many of these attacks.

AI creates so many problems there.

Yeah, there's so many attacks that we don't hear about.

I mean, Ascension, you heard about in the news

only because they're such a large company,

but these cyber attacks are happening every day.

And I would assume they're happening at a top secret level

with some things that we never hear about, right?

It's a war.

It truly is the cyber war that's going on.

And it's, again, I think AI will be able to use

it's gonna be no different than Bumble.

We're gonna have our bots fight in their bots

to try to figure out who can win to get into your system.

That's what's gonna be happening.

Yeah.

What do you think the fundamentals

that business leaders need to understand about AIR

in order to implement AI well across the team?

The soft skills, it's not the technology, right?

It goes back to that self-awareness.

So people need to be focused on emotional intelligence.

I absolutely recommend giving your team

an EQ assessment, seeing where they are

in their emotional intelligence.

Because what most people don't realize,

unlike all of the personality assessments

that are out there, your personality is locked in stone.

You can't change your personality.

Your emotional intelligence can be changed.

You can work on it.

You can improve it.

So get rid of the, I'm not saying get rid of them

because they do have their value.

But the value of disc and all that is minimal

compared to an emotional intelligence assessment.

So that's number one.

Number two is helping people learn

how to ask better questions, right?

So critical thinking skills,

understanding how to format a question

to get the key outcomes that you want.

To me, that's more important for a normal person

than the physical technology itself.

And I can tell you, most companies

aren't even thinking about that, right?

Oh, let's just look at this shiny new toy

and how we can use it to improve the process or make money.

They're not thinking about the emotional.

And look, a lot of employees right now are scared

and you need to address and make these employees

comfortable because there is a large set of America

that feels AI is going to completely replace them.

How do you deal with that and morale in your company?

And it goes back to the old school team building

and all those types of things that need to be done.

So all of these things need to work in concert together

to build that right culture that's going to succeed.

That's good.

What do you think the strategies they should use

to increase AI literacy in the team?

So you talked about building emotional intelligence.

You talked about having them go through,

a team go through the fundamentals

of learning how to ask good questions.

What would you do after that?

Getting a whole team, maybe a small team of five to 10

more aware of what AI can do for them.

Well, you need, there's some big marketing company.

I don't know, I did a podcast on it a few weeks ago

but they created like a new position, if you will.

It's like some kind of synthetic media marketing manager,

if you will.

I think that this is almost like a chief AI officer,

if you will, but for smaller teams.

That person is A, going to have to keep up

with technology for the team.

Because again, it's moving so quickly.

You can't expect all your employees to be sitting

in front of the computer like you and I are

watching YouTube videos, watching three hour

Google conferences, right, doing all those things.

That's our role.

That would be the synthetic media manager's role.

That same role also has to make sure that everything

is in compliance with company policies.

Make sure that everything is being done ethical

and almost like an old school editor at a newspaper.

They're gonna have to make sure that everything

that goes out the door is accurate.

Right, that there's no hallucinations,

that the information in there is correct

or that it meets the proper brand messaging

that you've set out.

So I think that's gonna be, there's gonna have to be

that pinnacle person that's in charge of that.

It just can't be a team as a free for all using the tools.

Yeah.

Gosh, it does take a lot of work to keep up

with what's going on.

I spend a lot of time doing it.

It's interesting because some things get announced

and you're like, whatever, that's a joke.

Or it's not a joke.

It's just a funny little tiny use case.

People are like, oh, look at this new thing.

It's not helpful at all.

But then there's things that like day one

when they come out, instantly useful,

people would start leveraging it,

would give you a competitive advantage

if you figured out how to bake it

into what you're doing within the next two weeks.

But it's hard to discern sometimes which ones are which.

Custom GPTs, as soon as I saw it, I was like,

oh, that's gonna, that's something worth investing

in right now.

But like trying to think of like things

that are like kind of gimmicky.

I'm having a hard time coming up with them,

but there's tons of them.

I'd say Oudio is probably something that's interesting

if you can learn how to leverage it.

Probably not the most important thing

to figure out right now, even though it's fun and exciting.

Have fun with it, right?

It's something to have fun with.

Don't take it too seriously right now.

Something new is gonna come out.

Or Oudio is gonna improve.

Video, text to video.

I mean, we've all seen by this point

what some of these platforms, you know,

most of them haven't been released to the public yet.

But if they're even half as advertised,

just think you and I could get together

and create a cinematic movie, just texting.

That's mind blowing.

But here's the one thing that I think people forget.

I don't think AI is going to be able to truly craft

anything out of an optimized story.

Like it's gonna take the creative people to come in

and guide it into creating better narratives.

It only takes looking at Hollywood today

to see what happened, right?

The last decade has been fully optimized movies.

Basically 936 Avenger or Marvel movies, right?

But people now are tired of the formula.

They're craving something different.

They're craving something new.

And optimization isn't always great.

Modern music today, it's so perfect

that honestly it all kind of sounds the same now.

Like we've lost that 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s,

even 90s vibe in music because it's so perfect.

It's all to a click track.

It's all, there's nothing in the quiet areas

or however they, I'm not a musician,

but you know, they always talk about the space

like jazz works within.

AI in this modern music takes that out

and it can't really create that.

That's a human element.

Well, can't create it yet, eventually.

Yeah, I mean, the future is gonna be weird.

And then it will.

The future is gonna be very weird.

Kind of like, that's what happened with the images

with Mid-Journey, right?

At first they were garbage

and then they got better with some errors

and then they got so good

that you're like, oh, it's obviously, it's perfect.

Like you can't make it any better.

Now for it to get better, it actually has to get worse.

Right.

It has to become more realistic

like it was shot in an iPhone,

which it can accomplish now.

But you have to actually like,

you have to engineer your prompts

to get it to look like it was shot in an iPhone

and an everyday photo that's good,

but not too good, you know?

To actually be stock photo worthy

to fit in a university website

as a student interacting with the teacher

kind of a photo, you know?

But it's almost like it has to become perfect

and then it has to come back.

Has to come back to be more realistic.

But that's where photos are at right now.

So it'll happen with video.

It'll happen with music.

It'll come back.

And I want to touch on this point too,

because this is something that I found

that's fairly fascinating.

So I work with the Indiana Wesleyan University Accelerator

and we have a few programs.

And right now we're revamping the programs.

We're trying to make a world-class AI training platform

is what we're doing.

We have curriculum that's going

into a certification program.

We have curriculum that's going into a master's program

at Indiana Wesleyan.

We are doing in-person and corporate workshops.

We're doing virtual workshops.

We've even created a AI fusion workshop conference

that we're launching on June 28th in Indianapolis.

So that's gonna be amazing.

It has three tracks.

It's gonna have one track for educators, for teachers.

It's gonna have one for nonprofits

and it's gonna have one for the business set.

So we're covering all that gamut there.

And then last week,

and this is the one that really warms my heart,

we just graduated what we call

our community AI training program.

We did it at a local inner city church

and it was an eight week program and we just graduated.

So I went and actually shot some testimonial video

and everybody there was smiling ear to ear.

They said, I had no idea we could do this.

One guy had been trying to write a book for 15 years

and he got it done because of what he learned

in that class by editing and doing everything he needs

to do in the GPTs and whatnot.

But here's what I found that's very interesting.

The less technical the person,

the more their eyes light up around AI.

And when I work in the tech world,

the first thing I get is, oh, I already know everything.

And I mean, maybe that's some bravado.

Maybe that's just, look, we work in tech

and we don't want people to know

we don't really know what's going on

or we don't have time to keep up with what's going on.

But then the tech folks, once you sit down with them

and really start breaking down everything,

typically they'll go, oh my gosh,

I had no idea that you could use the tool at this level

because again, their focus is typically the coding

and all that stuff.

They're not really using these tools

to create a recipe for their spouse

or the little things that you can use it for

to make your life easier.

So I just found that kind of interesting.

Yeah, it's like they went, they had the misconception,

they used it as Google,

found something factually wrong and wrote it off

as like, well, this tool is inaccurate,

so why would I use it?

You're like, no, you used it wrong

because of that misperception because I don't know,

one of the first things I did

when I was testing chat GPT,

when it first came out in December, 2022,

I was like, okay, let's give it a creative curve ball.

Let me ask it something that I'm pretty confident is not,

it just doesn't exist on the internet.

There's no way to know this.

I'm like, create me a recipe

to make Mediterranean flavored ice cream.

I Googled it to make sure it didn't exist,

it didn't exist and it came up with a freaking recipe

that I'm like, that would actually work.

Look, there's your new product.

I could create that and make,

I would be able to build that

and I could tell those flavor profiles are gonna work

and I'm like, there it is.

It has the creative ability to go places

that normal algorithms can never go.

Dan Chas Mediterranean ice cream company.

Mediterranean ice cream.

I love it.

Yeah, so Harrison, thank you so much

for spending some time with me today on the show.

Where can people go to learn more from you

and about what you're doing?

Go to harrisonpainter.com.

I keep things simple.

I'm Harrison Painter on all the socials.

We do have another website, efand.org

and that's where a lot of the events

and different things we're doing on the local front

if you're in Indiana, but if you're not,

harrisonpainter.com.

Fantastic, again, thanks for joining me.

Thank you.