The AI Lessons That Will Change How You Operate

Allie K. Miller has been working in AI for nearly 20 years, and she says most of us aren't even close to using these tools to their full potential. Today, she's going to teach us exactly how to change the way we work, think, and operate with AI. Allie built teams at IBM and Amazon, advises companies like Google, OpenAI, and Salesforce, and TIME named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI. Nearly two million people follow her because she's one of the clearest voices translating AI for people who aren't engineers, which is why she's the right person to have this conversation with. In this episode, Emma and Allie get into the practical, actionable side of AI that most people never hear about—from the systems Allie has built to run her life and business, to the mistakes that keep most people stuck at the surface level. You'll learn: Why treating AI like a search engine is the biggest mistake people make and how to start treating it like an employee who works for you around the clock The prompting shift from "senior analyst" to "CEO" that changes the quality of everything you get back How to build a context document about your life, business, and beyond that makes every AI interaction more useful The automated briefing system Allie uses to manage her calendar, goals, and priorities every morning The study that shows how using AI the right way can make you more creative What's driving the 25% gender gap in AI adoption and what women can do about it right now If you've been holding back from using AI because this all feels overwhelming, or no one's ever taught you how to use it well, start here. What's the first thing you're going to try with AI after this conversation? Drop it in the comments and come back and tell us how it went. For more conversations like this on business, leadership, and leveling up how you work, subscribe to Aspire with Emma Grede so you never miss what's next.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Emma Grede?

  So for the latest in our Career Girls Guide series, I'm bringing you the episode you need, and it's all about AI. Right now, we are living through one of those moments in history where something fundamental shifts, and most people don't fully realise it until it's already happened. Today, artificial intelligence is moving faster than almost any technology we've ever seen. It's changing how companies operate, how decisions get made, how creativity happens, and even how people build careers and businesses. But here's the interesting thing. The real divide isn't going to be between people who are technical and people who aren't. It's going to be between people who learn how to use these tools and people who simply watch the change happen around them.

• 0:52Emma Grede?

  And if you talk to the people closest to this space, they'll tell you something surprising. AI isn't just about automation or productivity. It's actually about amplification. It amplifies how quickly you can learn, how effectively you can communicate, and how powerfully you can execute ideas. Then comes the real question. How do you make sure this technology works for you instead of feeling like something is happening to you? Today's guest has spent years at the centre of that conversation. She's advised companies, governments, and leaders around the world on how to understand and apply AI in practical ways. And more importantly, she's one of the clearest voices explaining what this technology actually means for the rest of us.

• 1:35Emma Grede?

  So today, we're talking about what AI really is, where it's headed, and how anyone listening can start using it to become better at what they do.

• 1:52Emma Grede?

  The Start With Yourself Tour kicks off on April 15 in New York City. Tickets are on sale now at emagree.com.

• 2:03Emma Grede?

  Ali, I am so happy to have you here today. I feel like this conversation's been a really long time coming. And as someone who is completely obsessed with their productivity, I'm really excited about talking to you about what you know the best in the world. And I really want this episode to be almost like a masterclass for people that really want to use AI to amplify their life, their work, their business. And I know that there is just so much that you can give them. So if my listeners give us the next hour, can you just tee us up for what you think would be the most valuable thing that they can get out of this conversation?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and thank you for having me. I think productivity is absolutely going to be part of it. So much of what I'm seeing right now is AI to do things faster so we can get more time back. And I want people to reallocate that time toward amplification and toward figuring out how to grow their business and not just send emails faster. So I'm actually going to be hitting it from both sides.

• 3:00Emma Grede?

  You've been doing this for 20 years. And I feel like the large majority of us have probably caught on in the last two or three.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Botox is a wonderful drug. ChatGPT coming out was kind of the grand opening for a lot of people. There are still people that haven't yet used these AI tools. And there are some people who are building AI agents to help run their business. So it's been out for about three and a half years, like the really accessible AI tools. But you've got millions of people who are at completely different zones of operation.

• 3:29Emma Grede?

  If you were one of the people that decides not to adopt AI, like what's going to happen in the next two years for that person's career?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  So I started in AI almost 20 years ago. I've been in it every single day for the last decade. And I think if you didn't adopt it back then, I would say, okay, you're losing, you know, maybe 10% gains. It's okay, you're not going to fall horribly behind. We are now, sort of in the last year, at a stage where not adopting AI is actually putting you in a really detrimental position for not only your business, if you are an entrepreneur, but for your own individual career. And I really would not have said that five years ago, but the last year and a half has changed.

• 4:08Emma Grede?

  And what has changed exactly?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  So these systems, when they were first kind of coming out, a lot of them were just finishing your sentences. It was the ability to respond back to you, right? That was the big ChatGPT moment. Is that anyone, not just engineers, could access these tools? Ask a question, get an answer. And it was amazing. Like, I don't want to undercut that moment. It was Jaw dropping. I moved to New York because I was on a road trip. ChatGPT comes out and I was like, the whole world has changed. I need to move right now. And just, I found an apartment in five days. That's how crazy that was.

• 4:37Emma Grede?

  And you knew in that moment, like that was like the, the, the kind of like changing moment for you.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  I was one of the first users of ChatGPT. Within forty eight hours, I spun down the company that I was working on. My co-founder and I said, see ya, I'll check in with you later. We split and we went a hundred miles an hour toward this stuff.

• 4:57Emma Grede?

  So what could you see then that perhaps like so many of us didn't see?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  One of the big things was that these systems could just hold on to more information. So when I was really working on early conversational AI, i.e. AI that you can talk to and it responds back to you. It used to be that when you were asking like your third question, it had complete amnesia. Couldn't remember a single thing that you said it in that first go. All of a sudden, it could hold on to a conversation topic.

• 5:24Emma Grede?

  It started learning.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  And so the combination of just being able to go back and forth and hold that information. The fact that it was not some ugly, you know, terminal sort of looking thing. Like it really wasn't for engineers. It was just a normal website. And the fact that it was like very performant and fast, all of that combined. You just tested and you're like, this is the moment that I've been counting down for.

• 5:45Emma Grede?

  I want to kind of go back a little bit before we really delve into what is going to be like these big unlocks for everybody listening. But just for somebody who is sitting at home right now. Can you just explain exactly what AI is like in a simple framework? Like, how should we be thinking about what AI is?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  The way that I define it and how it was initially launched in, you know, nineteen fifty six, it's been around for a while. Is that it's AI attempting to mimic what a human can do. And that might mean typing tweets. That might mean like your Roomba going around and cleaning your home. That might mean a self-driving car, because again, it's mimicking the fact that a human can drive a car. So it's just some sort of computer system mimicking a thing that a human can do. And that thing might be really simple or really complex.

• 6:32Emma Grede?

  So what do you think is the biggest misconception that's actually stopping people from benefiting from AI right now? Because I feel like so many people feel either like beyond excited by it or completely intimidated and overwhelmed.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of weird, right? That we like lost this middle ground of people.

• 6:49Emma Grede?

  A hundred percent.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Like first two years, everyone was kind of floating along. Now it's you're either at 10 or you're at one. I think what a lot of people are still tripping up on is that they believe it is only for the most technical among us. There's something like a million data scientists and machine learning engineers in the world. There's something like 30 million developers. And even the most advanced tools that I am using, that I am helping other non-technical business professionals use, only a couple million people are using those tools. So I think that there's still a lot of education to be done, or at least self-experimentation to say, wait a second, even though these things sound really technical, it's actually a myth.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  You can use these tools if you're a non-technical, non-coding business professional. And I know it because I see it every single day. I'm working with Fortune 500 CEOs who are, you know, secretly kind of telling me, hey, I don't actually know what is happening in these systems. Can you show me? I work with business professionals. I've taught courses. I've taught millions of people. They realize in that moment, those first five minutes, they go, it's this easy? Why did no one tell me it's this easy? But it takes opening the computer and having that moment of humility and going, I'm okay feeling dumb in this moment. I'm okay, you know, having a little bit of fun and experimentation because I know in the next five minutes, I'm going to learn something that I didn't know before.

• 8:09Emma Grede?

  But I think that piece is absolutely critical. And for me, the single biggest unlock that I've had is this ability to experiment because it's so like you are so habitually trained to use whatever device you're using in the way you currently use it. And the minute you go, okay, I'm not going to open that. I'm going to do this instead. I'm actually going to give myself some time to play and experiment. And I don't know who has time, but I have literally scheduled.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Nobody.

• 8:36Emma Grede?

  I mean, nobody. I definitely don't have the time. But for me, because I had like those moments where I was like, oh my God, this Is a game changer.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:44Emma Grede?

  I decided that it made sense to me every four to six weeks I would do a day. And the way that my brain works, I can't take an hour. It just doesn't work for me.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:53Emma Grede?

  I have to escape. I have to put myself in like a hotel room somewhere and go, okay, this is what I'm doing today. And I'm going to play and I'm going to learn. Not everybody can do that, obviously, but I do think it's really, really important, as you just say, to like, play and experiment and be okay to be overwhelmed by it. Because what comes out of that time is something really amazing on the other end, right?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  So we were just talking about how no one has time. It it's an important thing to just acknowledge. Like, you can come up with these excuses. You can say, I'm too busy. Everyone's too busy. You can say, I'm not an engineer. You have to kind of come to terms with the fact that millions of people have figured out the most advanced tools. So they figured it out. Even if that means falling, you know, behind, again, in air quotes, for two weeks just to be able to kind of get to this next paradigm.

• 9:38Emma Grede?

  It's that level of curiosity, that ability to be in learning mode. And you just giving it the time. And I think if I could say anything, it's like, those things are an imperative. What I really want to do today is move what I think are most people's like habits, which is using AI like a bit of a, you know, search engine. And kind of like shifting all of their behaviour forward into like what is possible. And so if somebody is using AI like a glorified search engine, what comes next for them?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Two things that I would want that person to do. The first is to kind of hold on to this idea that habits will open up new use cases for you. And so one of the most important things that you can do is just make it a habit. Make it something that you're going to, even outside of, oh, I need to find the answer to like, where is Aspire Film or whatever, outside of an actual search engine question. You got to start going to it with the weird stuff. So, hey, walk me through the entire process of setting up my first Google AdWords campaign. Or taking a photo while you're on your walk and saying, what is this tree? Can I plant it in my house? And by the way, give me five ways to become a better botanist in my life. Like, that is not as much of a glorified search engine that's taking action on your life.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Having that be a habit, having that be something that you go to, I literally have a post-it on my computer. I had this for the first like three years that just said AI? Question mark, right? And just reminding myself like, just try the thing. The second, which is way weirder to say and happy to go into it with examples, is that AI is not a tool. So if I, Aina?

• 11:17Emma Grede?

  It's not.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Aina? Because if you think about it as a tool, you'll think of maybe something beyond glorified search engine and you'll go up one level. And I guarantee you, you will find amazing things that will make you 20 to 30% more productive. You will brag to all your friends that you cracked the case. You will feel really, really good about where you have figured out AI in your business or your life or your family or your friends. However, if you treat it as this weird beast, alien infrastructure, the operating system for your life, and you treat it as this weird thing, you start to realize that we can reinvent the way we do things. So it's not just using AI as a replacement for what our human task would have been. It's being able to take a step back and say, okay, the way I used to prep for podcast interviews

• 12:03Speaker 01

  was these 15 steps. What I'm suggesting is don't even start with today's process. Take a step back and say, my goals are to have a great interview where the person's laughing and having fun. My goals are to make sure that my guest feels comfortable. My goals are to be educated on what that person's background is. You have to take one big step back, go goals first, and then twist to be able to figure out how to use AI as this weird beast as part of that process.

• 12:32Emma Grede?

  I so hope everybody is taking notes because that is just a fundamental shift in the way of thinking with this.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:40Emma Grede?

  Because people are literally searching for those 15 things. Like, how do you help me through these 15 things? We are not taking a bird's eye view and going, help me get to the end result.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Literally tell the AI system, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever. Tell this system what that goal is. Describe your life a bit. And then, instead of saying, and now build me this three-step method to move to Nashville. I want you to instead say, hey, AI, ask me questions and interview me, right, Emma Grede style, to figure out what you most need from me to get to that weird answer.

• 13:15Emma Grede?

  So this is a really important part that you're talking about here because I feel like for so many of us, we've been trained in Google to like limit the

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:24Emma Grede?

  the length of our search, right?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Because it's like sixty characters.

• 13:26Emma Grede?

  It's like, it's right there.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:28Emma Grede?

  What you're talking about is probably not even, it's like changing the way you search. Like, I talk everything in. Does that even make a difference? Because I feel like what happens is then I'm expressing myself, I'm having a much broader conversation. It's more like a brainstorm as opposed to a question. Like, is that input making any difference? Because I want to kind of talk to you about prompts.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:49Emma Grede?

  Even like the waiter prompt, does that make a difference?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  So you're dictating into ChatGPT or Claude or something right now?

• 13:54Emma Grede?

  Oh, yeah, or Gemini or

• 13:56Speaker 01

  And how many, how many times a day do you find yourself yap into AI?

• 14:01Emma Grede?

  A lot.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Like what?

• 14:02Emma Grede?

  It depends on the day and what I'm doing, but at least ten, fifteen times, like I'm, I'm just

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 14:08Emma Grede?

  a lot. I'm a big chatter. I don't type very much because I feel like it takes up too much time. So I dictate all my emails in.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  You don't want to type in them.

• 14:15Emma Grede?

  Well, do you know what I mean? It just like, it comes from that behavior of not wanting to type. It's like, I don't text, I don't type. So it's like, I talk everything into my phone.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:23Emma Grede?

  Um, so that's just like my habit. But I find that what happens is I give more background, I give more context to my prompts when I'm doing that. But again, I would never do it if I was typing it.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Totally. And also, every single thing that you just said is golden. That is one of the biggest tips that I give to people. Dictation is four times faster than typing. I very rarely am typing these days. So I use dictation tools like Otter AI or Whisper Flow. I use it on my phone, I use it on my desktop. Depending on the length of thing that I'm dictating in, if it's a quick, you know, quick shot, maybe two minutes. There are times when I want to prep or walk through a big newsletter or a big web redesign, where that recording is forty-five minutes long.

• 15:05Emma Grede?

  Wow.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Like, if I'm running a brand new keynote and I'm giving a talk to thirty thousand people, and I want to re- Shape my messaging. You better bet I'm going on a walk in New York. I'm talking to myself like an insane person. And I'm walking up and down the street, talking for forty five straight minutes. And you're totally right. It's more natural than typing. It's easier to get more content out. And it's easier to share your context. So a lot of the systems right now. Goal. Context. And maybe some, some details on like what resources you have or whatever. But that context sharing, that is literally the core of these crazy agentic systems that are working for you while you sleep. But they need to know who you are.

• 15:47Emma Grede?

  All right, so talk to me about supercharging our prompts. Because one of the things that I was reading about was this idea of meta prompts. Right? And this layering and follow up questions. But what you're talking about is much broader. If you're having like a forty five minute conversation. So tell, tell me what are the like, the best ways that we can learn to get and make our prompts like really work for us.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  So if you and I had been having this podcast a couple of years ago, then I would have said you have to come to it almost like you're a senior analyst where like you are laying out the steps. You are specifying the structure of every single thing you needed to do. So if you wanted it to, I don't know, find you the best basketball tickets to a game or something. You would say, I need you to find me two seats in the thirtieth row of the back section. And this, you would give it really strict order of operations. And so you're kind of functioning as like very spreadsheety senior analyst. What we saw in the last, again, year ish is this movement into more of that COO, CEO type prompting, where you're really giving it an overall goal that you want to get done.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And the context of what's going on. You might want to give it criteria. So like success criteria. How do I know that I have found the right basketball tickets for you? How will I know that I have solved your, you know, business question that you have? You might give it resources. You might say, I have three people, each with twenty percent bandwidth. I have an extra $2,000 that I can allocate to this. It has to get done in the next three months. So you might kind of give it a little bit of a box to work in. And then you You might at the end say, and here's some blockers that I have or some open questions. But you're way more prompting, and I'm using that in very loose air quotes. You're prompting it like it's a teammate. Like, right now, this year, it's AI as a teammate.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  And that means you're really talking to it and saying, if I were talking to a coworker with amnesia and they just woke up today, what do they need to know about me? Because thankfully, if you're asking a business question, the answer for Emma Grede should and is different from if I'm asking the exact same question. If people don't give context, I almost want to lean over and be like, do you not think you're special? Like, do you not think you're unique and weird and funky? Do you not think you have different problems than everyone else? You want to bring all those nuances into that context. So when I'm dictating for 45 minutes, maybe I'll have the task upfront and I'm going to say, hey, I want you to think through the keynote that I'm about to give. It has to be 45 minutes or less.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Here are five examples of previous keynotes that I've given, right? That's more context. And I'm going to ramble for the next 30 minutes about things that I want to talk about. The prompt was actually only that first, like, minute.

• 18:34Emma Grede?

  Totally.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  The context. Yes. Attachments, images, audio. I am like a context hunter. Like, even just looking around your podcast setup.

• 18:44Emma Grede?

  You're like, I'm like, yeah. You're taking in all of the inputs. And it's got to go in to get whatever it is that you need out.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  And everything around us is context, right? The transcript of this podcast, that is context. The design, maybe I take a lot of photos and say, this is the aura of Aspire, and this is what she kind of talks about. I take photos of the microphone. I say, how can I deliver the best speech into these types of microphones? I might take a photo of the chair and say, what are the best size heels? Like, the height to be able to sit, I don't know. I kind of just.

• 19:13Emma Grede?

  Did you do any of this, by the way? Now I'm super curious.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  I don't think that's the color background.

• 19:17Emma Grede?

  All the prompts that you've put in.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  So as you're going through your business, just think to yourself, like, meeting transcripts, that's context. Every freaking Google Doc you've ever written, context. Every email you've ever read, sent, social post, all of that is building up context. Yes, but kind of like your second brain. And so a lot of these top AI users, they're building up, and I'm going to simplify it, but it's a file system of your brain.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Do you ever wish you could ask nosey questions about people's money?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  I have $729.71 in my bank account.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  We bought, you know, a 1.3 million dollar house on a $350,000 income.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  On the podcast, What We Spend, we ask those questions. It's a show about money and all the feelings that come with spending it.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  I want to be the kind of person who can just take care of the people in my life.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Listen to What We Spend, an Odyssey original, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:22Emma Grede?

  I try to speak to so many people that I work with about how they're using AI. And the number of people that are actually bringing other data points into their searches, it's actually like way less than you think. And so I think that that's a really important thing because you are talking about not just giving context in, you know, from yourself and the way that you speak it in. You're like, okay, like then I'm going to like bring in past evidence. I'm going to bring in data points. I'm going to bring in some Excel financial information. You're like adding so that whatever you get out is going to give you back this like really truly rich information.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Also, I'm exhausted. Like you want me to constantly remind the AI system who I am and what my background is? No, I have one document that says these are Ally's 2026 goals. Now, I might consistently update that document, maybe once every quarter or something. But now if I am developing a new productivity system, you know, I have like a morning briefing where every single morning I get a download of my calendar.

• 21:22Emma Grede?

  All right, well, Ally, Ally, wait. We are going to, first of all, you just said two things that for everyone listening to Aspire, they're just like, wait a minute, morning briefing? And you spoke about goals. We're coming back there. But before we move on, what I want people to understand, because I think that there are just so many, and I'm not going to call them tools, systems, whatever they are, right, out there, from chat to Gemini to Grok to perplexity, like, you know, Claude, on and on and on. People don't know what to use for what. And so when you are thinking about what tool or what platforms you use for each thing, like, how are you contextualizing that? And should we all be using more than one thing? Because something that, well, you know, I think we've all heard is the more you use it, the more it understands you, the better and more nuanced the information you get out. So how are you thinking about that?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  So the more that you use one, I'll just say like master tool. So that's kind of the ChatGPT, Claude Gemini. It's like these everything machines that have coding and images and conversation back and forth and the ability to create spreadsheets and revenue models. All of those large tools, let's just say, large systems can help you and are building up memory on you. So for pretty much everyone, I'm going to say, pick one master tool that you just like the style of response of.

• 22:36Emma Grede?

  Right.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  And so some people are going to pick Claude, some people are going to pick ChatGPT, et cetera. But just pick one that you can anchor a lot of your experiences around. You're going to connect it into a lot of other systems. So my Claude, my ChatGPT, all of those are connected into my Gmail, into my Google Calendar, into my Notion.

• 22:53Emma Grede?

  So you're giving full visibility to those systems to connect into everything else that you use every day?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  So that.

• 22:59Emma Grede?

  And you recommend that people actually do that?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Assuming that you don't work in extremely high.

• 23:05Emma Grede?

  You're not working for MI5, it's like, you're good.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And if you are, talk to me because it sounds pretty cool and I want to learn more. I think like, if it's very high risk, be smart about it. But for the most part, we have thousands of really top enterprises making those connections and they're opting out of data sharing.

• 23:24Emma Grede?

  So what are the benefits of you attaching like your email to whatever system it is that you're using for AI the most?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  So just like we talked about with context hunting, you want that context to be updated in real time. So the ability for me to say like, hey, can you go out and look at my recent two weeks of email? Can you come back with like what you think my energy score is? And based on that, can you figure out whether I should take a vacation next week or four weeks after? And you can look at my upcoming calendar to see how feasible that is? Like, that sort of visibility into. How your whole business or whole life is happening. That's definitely one. You know, I know a guy that set up an entire app that just gives him. He calls it family O S. And it just gives him a readout for his like kids, his wife. It tells him like all the emails that he got from his school. It uses the shared calendar and so, but it just puts it all in one place.

• 24:16Emma Grede?

  Yeah, I do it for the school emails because I'm famous for not reading school emails. And I tend to sit there on a Sunday and scroll through and try to get the gist of it. So now it's like I bundle together the whole week's school emails. And I'm like, tell me anything I need to know. And it's actually amazing at just summarizing that. And I'm like, maybe the school should have done that for me. Can I ask you, do you have like a modality or a cheat code that you use to kind of approach every interaction that you have with A I?

• 24:44Speaker 01

  A very important thing that is like making me stay humble is that A I is a lot better at coming up with its own prompts and at coming up with its own reasoning steps than I am at telling it. So you asked about meta prompting. I am very infrequently going to a system and say, do this exact thing because I have done it the last way for 20 years and you will copy me. Just assume that you're wrong. Assume that you're doing something inefficiently. Assume that it's not as good as it could be. And so you're going to go to these systems and say, listen, here's the general thing I want to do. Help me help you figure out how to get this done. So that interview mode, that is a very common first step.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  And I'm 99% of the time right now, and maybe it'll change by the time this comes out. I'm using Claude Code for 99% of my work. And so just the ability to talk back and forth and then for me to say, okay, go solve that. Show me what it would look like to go solve that. I can, in the span of an hour, start to get a prototype of like whatever it is that solves my problem. Just ask it to be your co pilot on these problems and like really treat it as a first class employee. Like, don't treat it as this little thing to hide in the corner. Imagine if it was a supportive mechanism for your entire team, your entire business, and put too much responsibility on it, put too much onus on it

• 26:15Speaker 01

  and see what it comes back with. Like really truly try and break it.

• 26:18Emma Grede?

  That is such an interesting way to even think about it. And I never thought about that before. This is the one thing in your life that you can totally overload without any sense of guilt, any worry. You're like, this is just a resource that is at your disposal and there's no limit essentially.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Totally. And, and there are, you know, risk scenarios, right? It could, uh, there's data privacy concerns. So obviously you want to be safe on that. You could run out of your tokens and it'll say, sorry, you know, come back in four hours when I have more brain power. It could give you maybe the wrong answer, not the best answer, but I am pushing back going, are you sure that's the right answer? I even, this is going to get really weird, but if I solved it with one AI and I get this perfect outcome and I go, ah, this is the plan. This is how I'm going to do my daily competitive research. Anyone would normally just launch that thing.

• 27:12Emma Grede?

  No, you've got to go over to the other one.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  I'm going to go to a second AI and go,

• 27:15Emma Grede?

  I do the same thing.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Hey, can you judge the hell out of this?

• 27:18Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  I would say, can you check it for this? Can you check it for this? And I will have these AI systems battle to make sure that they've been tested to improve.

• 27:26Emma Grede?

  Hundred percent. I do exactly the same thing. I think especially when you are feeding information in, like financial information or data, to then look at like multiple systems and see what they give you back is pretty interesting, actually.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  And I, so I do a lot of revenue modeling. I do a lot of forecasting. You can say, I want you to, this is now going to be very advanced, but again, every single person can do this. You can say, spin up four different agents. You're just literally in natural language. There's no coding. Hey, spin up four agents. I want you to build out this model in one method. I want you to go and research and find best in class for McKinsey. In the second one, I want you to find best in class, Mr. Beast. Third, I want you to find best in class, Emma Grede. And fourth, I just want you to pretend like you're my mom and you're scared of, you know, high risk and, and do it from that angle.

• 28:15Emma Grede?

  Me, your mom, Mr. Beast and McKinsey. I mean, it's a, it's a motley crew. Let's go.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  And then you have these four answers. And again, you couldn't do that five years ago because we just didn't have the time.

• 28:27Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  And now I can run any single highly critical business task by like 10 different personalities. And in the span of 20 minutes, make it two X, five X more robust. So like, I'm all for productivity. I think productivity is great. I think if we didn't have productivity, no one would be using this thing, right? But creating higher quality work, work that's been seen by more second set of eyes. Like, that is where AI really shines.

• 28:55Emma Grede?

  I feel like we've all had that moment where we've seen something or we've read something or we hear something that we just know is AI-generated. And we immediately kind of get this feeling like it really bothers people. And I wonder what you think about that.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  That's a super intentional thought. I love that. I too feel icky when I read it. And I'll say, I feel icier in really human situations. So if I'm talking to a therapist, let's say, and they're very clearly reading off their screen, wow, comma, Ali, comma, that sounds really difficult. The landscape of what you're dealing with, I'm like, ah.

• 29:33Emma Grede?

  You're like, come on. I mean, there was one so disturbing circulating online the other day, the priest that was very clearly giving this sermon. And then they read out the end of the prompt.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  It's not just a sermon.

• 29:43Emma Grede?

  No.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  It's a reinvention.

• 29:45Emma Grede?

  Would you like another version? And I was like, no, she didn't say that. You know, that just is horrifying, right?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  People are using it for wedding vows. People are using it for things that I wouldn't. And so I think it's fine using it for things like, I don't know, Google Ads or something that just feels lower risk.

• 30:01Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  And by the way, there might be some businesses that say, I want to show up authentically no matter what. But people are using AI to, you know, transcribe their podcasts to be able to turn it into helpful transcripts. They're turning their newsletters into audio overviews. There's a lot of accessibility gains from it. But if the actual core writing, if the first draft was written by AI, yeah, it's low quality. The best thing that people can do is take their own first pass and then have AI do some of the review, do some of the poking and prodding and review it from five different points of view and, and try and, you know, twist it and figure out what's going wrong. But we are best off if we are still the first draft.

• 30:43Emma Grede?

  I couldn't agree with you more. I think that there is some stuff that you just can't AI your way to, right? Like having a taste level. Like, there is so much within the world of podcasts. That we use AI tools for.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:57Emma Grede?

  But at the end of the day, it's like the guests are who I want to speak to, right? There has to be a taste level and there has to be an energy and there has to be a connection and a level of interest. And that stuff is all innately human, like you can't fake that piece of it.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  And also you would have a way worse interview if you were hitting me with AI generated questions.

• 31:18Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  People think about just the one off moment of like, oh, I wrote my email faster and I got it out. But they kind of forget about the domino effect, like maybe you lose trust with one of your customers. Maybe that person that was going to share your newsletter to 10 family members isn't going to. And so people are so caught up in that first short term gain that they're missing the long term play of like what it means to build a business in the AI age.

• 31:43Emma Grede?

  And is that all just very personal? Like, how are you drawing lines? How do you speak to both individuals and companies about where you draw that line?

• 31:51Speaker 01

  So everyone has their own point of view and it's definitely a spectrum. For me, writing your wedding vows with AI, I would say no, unless you're getting married to an AI, then they probably love it. I think every single business has their own corporate values. And so if you are an entrepreneur, like really take a step back without AI and start to ask yourself like, what are the core values of my business? And then think about how does that interact with or overlap with or not overlap with AI?

• 32:18Emma Grede?

  The way that we've thought about this in our businesses is that there is just, it's almost like the other way around. As opposed to thinking about what AI should do, we think about what should AI not do? What are the places and the spaces that we need to protect? Whether that's creative or it's specific to product design or it's elements of marketing. But it's like, these are places where human touch just can't be replicated and then everything else should be AI.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  That's a really fantastic approach. The extra layer that I want to add on, and again, I work with Fortune 500 companies, private financial institutions, startups. What I want to also advocate for is to review your rules. There might be a reason that you didn't use it. It might be because AI performed too poorly on that task. And you come back six months later or a year later and suddenly AI would have been a massive help in that space. You have to maintain flexibility. You have to have people on your team that are willing to have that open mind. You know, one thing that we don't use it for is like writing client thank yous. That's just, it still would feel very weird to to have AI write that.

• 33:22Emma Grede?

  I want to talk to you a bit about trust because for so many people, the question is not necessarily about the appetite for usage. It's is the information I'm getting correct. Can I trust this information? So how do you think about that right now?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Couple of things. One, we talked about having multiple AIs weigh in on things. And I know that sounds like you're multiplying the errors, but actually you are reducing it as long as they're not in the same room.

• 33:45Emma Grede?

  Right? Because you're looking for the similarities, you're looking for where there's differences. And you're actually saying, okay, like, what is my experience telling me?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And by the way, so I've worked at IBM, I've worked at Amazon. When I was at IBM and we had to have people label images to say, you know, what's in this image, what's in this image? What we learned was that to make it go a lot faster, instead of checking every single image, you could just give that same image to five different people. And if four out of the five agreed, right, just like those recaptures, like, where's the bicycle?

• 34:14Emma Grede?

  Yes.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  If a whole lot of people agree, you should feel pretty confident that that is, you know, directionally accurate. Start using it with things that you know very, very well to get a sense of that bullshit. And anchor it to grounded data, like give it access to the internet, give it context documents, that's always going to improve it. The majority of errors that people show me where they go, see, Ali, I knew it, AI doesn't know anything. I open it up and I go, it didn't browse the internet. You're asking it a question about like the Mario movie and it's giving you, you know, answers based on data from 2024. Of course, it's just making stuff up. That is one. And then the last tip is going back to it and saying, no, I found an error. Even if you didn't find anything and just saying, no, a lot of this is wrong. Go and read through it again.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  And just kind of poking and prodding and not settling for a first go is also going to be super helpful. But you're right, the hallucination rate is still, you know, it's very low, it's under one percent. But it's enough that on very high risk things, I am poking and prodding to.

• 35:11Emma Grede?

  You have to. What do you think's the most common way that you see really smart people misuse AI?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Misuse AI?

• 35:18Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Uh, ooh.

• 35:20Emma Grede?

  Almost like the biggest mistakes that you see people make when they're trying to use AI really productively.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Definitely using it for the first draft of things tends to lead to overreliance.

• 35:31Emma Grede?

  I think that is great advice, by the way. Like, having the first draft be you and something that you came up with, and then getting AI to critique and go back and make it better, it's like, that's just to me, a no brainer. It should be the starting point of everything.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  The number of executives who are making so much money, they come to me and they ask about their kids, and they're worried about their high school kid just using ChatGPT or Claude or whatever to cheat, just cheat and write their essay. There was a study out of MIT done, that basically if you had AI write your essay, even if you then wrote your own essay, the originality, the creativity, the brain activity that second time around, even though you are only using your own brain and fingers, was worse. If those two were switched, if you worked on your own, you're in your own world and saying, ooh, this is the perfect essay, and then you wrote with AI, it was completely flopped. Brain activity went up, creativity went up, and it was even better than not using AI at all. So a lot of these-

• 36:28Emma Grede?

  Wow, I mean, that's just all you need to hear, isn't it?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, overreliance is one of the biggest fears. If I'm talking to anyone under thirty, right? People who maybe haven't yet developed their really deep expertise in a field, like someone who has worked for ten, twenty, thirty years in a field. Overreliance might lead to being less valuable in the workforce, so you kind of-

• 36:49Emma Grede?

  Yeah, people, people just need to rewind that and listen again, because that is such an important starting point, because none of us want to lose what it is that makes us great conversationalists, or what like inspires our learning. We don't want to dumb ourselves down, we want to use this tool to- Lift ourselves up. And so that starting point is really, really, really important. So for people that run businesses, whether it's like a company, it's a side hustle, creative practice, whatever it is. I want to ask you, like, what's the sort of highest impact starting point? If you're starting something, you're like, you know, in the early throes of a business, what should people be thinking about?

• 37:26Speaker 01

  The first thing that I'm going to say to do, which does not have immediate value, but is a lot of like, measure twice, cut eight hundred times, is you have to write up a context doc on your business. Maybe you have AI interview you, whatever, but I want an entire document. Mine is about five hundred lines.

• 37:44Emma Grede?

  All right, talk to me. What is a context doc? What are we doing?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Just like a description. So for you, you might have one on Skims, you might have one on Aspire. You might have one on Good American.

• 37:53Emma Grede?

  What's going in the concept doc? It literally is like, here's what we do, this is what we sell, this is where we sell it, this is what we price it at. These are our customers.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  What are you, AI?

• 38:02Emma Grede?

  That's what, like, that is literally what it is. It's like, here's our business and here's how it works.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Things that are not written down, things that are not codified anywhere. So maybe your pricing, maybe what you sell, all of your, all of your SKUs, those are on your website. Give me the behind the scenes, what I don't know, like, tell me your struggles. Hey, we've tried to hire five different growth marketing people. Here's why it didn't work. Um, here's why my team is a hundred people instead of twenty, whatever the thing is. You want to give things that are not written down, or else I would just say go onto the Skims website and pull stuff down. So things like, here's what I've struggled with, or I've tried three times to run a conference and here's why it didn't go well. Or I've always wanted to expand into Asia, but here's the three things that are holding me back. Things that you've never written down, things that if you were talking to an executive coach,

• 38:49Speaker 01

  and they pulled out, they unearthed these questions of like, the deep seated feelings, what would that say? That's how these docs get to be pretty long. So again, five hundred lines.

• 39:00Emma Grede?

  Yours is five hundred lines?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but AI wrote the vast majority. I was on my Tread desk, walking and just like, la la la.

• 39:07Emma Grede?

  Chat in a way, having another forty five minute conversation with AI. I feel like there's like a through line in your life. You're doing a lot of long conversations.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:16Emma Grede?

  What people are not maybe doing, do you think? Like, we're giving like really pissy, short ass prompts. And you are sitting there giving the full kit and kaboodle, background, everything that's in your head.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:28Emma Grede?

  Everything that happened, why it happened, full context. That is creating a document, you're feeding that to AI and then you're using it, that background to solve all the problems.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  There are times where I don't do that, right? If it's like, write me a baseline NDA and put it between me and Johnny Smith.

• 39:43Emma Grede?

  But if it is, make me a PowerPoint that is going to impress every VC that I walk in front of. And I give it three sentences that says I'm, you know, one of the best AI advisors in the world, go. Are you joking me? Like, what do you think it's going to do?

• 39:59Speaker 01

  There was a research paper done that basically said, the people who are really good at their job without AI are not necessarily the same ones who are good at their job with AI.

• 40:08Emma Grede?

  Oh, I love that.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Two groups of people and they figured out that one thing separates the two.

• 40:13Emma Grede?

  What is it?

• 40:14Speaker 01

  AI theory of mind. So can you picture yourself in the AI's, you know, shoes? Can you picture yourself in there and go, what would the AI agent need? If it were trying to make the VC deck, if it were trying to make an entire financial statement, make an entire hiring and growth plan for the next year.

• 40:33Emma Grede?

  But how amazing is that to think about? So you could be sitting there right now in a job where you're struggling, where you're not the number one golden, you know, employee of the company. And you could have this complete turnaround.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:47Emma Grede?

  Because you figure out how to utilize AI.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:50Emma Grede?

  Properly.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  The playbook is being rewritten. If you are someone that has been overlooked, if you are someone who for the last three promotions, someone's like, you're good, but sometimes you, you pay too much attention to all the other departments around you, you don't go deep enough. Oh my God, a generalist with AI on that, like. There's so much that can be done.

• 41:10Emma Grede?

  Amazing.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  So, so, so much, yeah.

• 41:12Emma Grede?

  God, I feel like that must just be so satisfying for people to hear because I think the prevailing wisdom that's out there right now is that AI is scary and AI is coming to get you. And if you don't know it, you're never gonna know it. And you're saying the absolute opposite. This is a tool that can supercharge even if you are not somebody who's like really thriving in your professional life right now.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I wanna both say the scary things.

• 41:35Emma Grede?

  Go on.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And say, yes, it can amplify you.

• 41:38Emma Grede?

  See, I'm an optimist. This is how, this is how I'm wired.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  But whether you're an optimist or a pessimist or whatever, the, the fact that you're afraid is not the same thing as feeling stuck, right? Taking one small step in, in the direction, like that is still movement.

• 41:54Emma Grede?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  And so I, I meet a lot of people who are afraid and I go, that doesn't mean you can't do something about it. Learning how to use these tools, again, figuring out a Claude code, codex sort of thing, scheduling one thing to run automatically. Like, I'm happy to walk you through just like a little bit of an AI-first work week that I have.

• 42:12Emma Grede?

  Give me an AI-first work week.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  So in all of these tools, including, by the way, in just normal ChatGPT or Claude Co-Work, you can schedule things to happen. So let's say that every single Monday, you're on a hunt or your team is on a hunt trying to figure out, what new podcast guests should we have? And so maybe the first step is looking at things that are trending and then within that, experts that are in those fields. So if you knew that AI was trending, you would look up experts, you would find whoever.

• 42:40Emma Grede?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Perfect. That sort of thing, why do you have to kick that off? Why are you the first domino? You know it's gonna happen every single Monday morning. That should run without you. So I have my morning briefing scheduled for me every single morning at seven AM. And again, going back to these context docs, I don't just say summarize my emails. Because who cares? Like, I could have a human do that for me. The reason I want AI involved in this, because I want to take in a million things of contacts that a human just wouldn't have time for. So I'm not just summarizing my emails. I'm summarizing my emails and maybe pre-drafting some replies. I'm pulling in my calendar and it's giving me a sentence description of everyone I'm about to meet with, or it's pre-making some of the decks that I have to present.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Or, because I feel like I have no social life in New York, it's finding me things to do in New York that night that I can book last-minute tickets for, that are aligned with the types of things that I want to do. And then, even after that, it is going through all these things that are working on my list, and it has the 2026 goals of what I want to get done. And every single day, it's giving me two things to say, "You gotta hit your weekly goal of this and this." And it's like a double check of alignment. The theme for my year is alignment. I want to make sure that the actions that I'm taking are aligned to the type of impact that I want to make on this world. I want to teach a billion people how to use AI. If I am stuck responding to emails about support tickets, am I doing the thing that I need to do?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  And so this AI is calling me out. But it can only do that because it's connected to these systems, it has that goal document. And I could have done this on my own, but I am reallocating my deep intelligence and expertise and trust and authenticity into client conversations, into one-on-one conversations, instead of summarizing my own calendar.

• 44:35Speaker 06

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• 45:05Speaker 07

  Hi, everyone. This is Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. And we want to tell you about Pivot, our twice-weekly podcast. That's right, Kara. What a thrill. It's a chance for us to break down all the big things happening in tech, business, and politics. Yes, and I keep you in check so people can make it through each episode, whether it's digging into constant changes in the world of AI.

• 45:23Speaker 03

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• 45:28Speaker 07

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• 45:34Speaker 03

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• 45:39Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  So if that sounds like a good time for you, especially Mr. That's right. You can follow us on your favorite podcast app to get new episodes every week.

• 45:49Speaker 07

  Boom.

• 45:57Emma Grede?

  I constantly talk to people about going after your goals and writing them down and then saying no to everything that isn't getting you closer to your goals. But then there is this struggle of prioritization. Everything else that's happening in your life, a bad hair day, like a migraine, like whatever it might be. What you're talking about here is so incredible because what you're doing is taking all of the thinking piece out of it. Like I have to do this. Okay. The prioritization. You're, you're actually delegating so much of the decision making so that you're

• 46:31Speaker 01

  The low end decision making.

• 46:32Emma Grede?

  But it's like you're freeing your brain and you're freeing your energy to actually focus in on the things that are going to move the needle. The things that are going to get you closer to your goals.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  It's also, I'm, I'm a people pleaser.

• 46:43Emma Grede?

  Oh, not me, babe.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  You should have an entire episode just dedicated to

• 46:46Emma Grede?

  With you and your organization, me and my lack of people pleasing, we could take over the world.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  I think at my core, I want to help everyone.

• 46:53Emma Grede?

  It's a lovely trait, by the way.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 46:55Emma Grede?

  It's better to be, it's almost better and nicer to be a people pleaser. It will do.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  But I think what AI gives me the second look into is really calling into question whether helping everyone means helping people in the right way.

• 47:10Emma Grede?

  Yeah. And you getting to this goal of reaching a billion people, because if every time you please somebody, you could actually see what it subtracts from what you're trying to do.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:19Emma Grede?

  You would, you would think about it differently, but you don't have that. And so the AI is actually helping you be so much like better at getting to what it is that you wanted to do.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  It's this like maintenance system and I find myself staying more on track because I'm not delegating large thinking. I'm delegating these mini moments so that my brain can be reallocated to the best work that I can do.

• 47:44Emma Grede?

  And almost like, and I hate to kind of be the, the spiritual person that, you know, is in the room, but it's like, Those menial small tasks are not the highest and best use of your time.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:55Emma Grede?

  So you are actually elevating your entire self by being able to put your goals right at the top of your list and then actually get to them.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  And I also want to call out a lot of people, and I've met them, are really proud of the work that they're able to complete on what I would think of as, you know, tasks that AI can help with. Their work identity is based on these tasks. They go, I'm the best person at reviewing our blog posts, whatever the thing is. I'm the best person there is. And it's really hard to come to terms with the fact that AI might be better at that task now. And so like, yes, I agree with every single thing we've said for the last, you know, hour and a half, whatever. But I still want to acknowledge that there are going to be people where it takes them several months to walk away from some of those tasks because you're going to be very good at that task. You've probably done that task for years. Everyone praises you for being great at that task. And I'm still telling you to walk away from that task.

• 48:48Emma Grede?

  Every time I've left something that I have been really good at, I've kind of opened up new pathways and new things for me and grown and stretched myself and become more confident and more resilient. Because as humans, like, human nature is that we have to progress, right? And so if you stay in that place of comfort for too long, you end up getting stuck. And I think that I speak to so many people who are frankly really good at their jobs, but they're bored. They're not challenged. And so I would try to reframe that and think about how you can supercharge the job that you're in and almost like shift what it is that you're good at in a new direction, right? There's so many different ways that you can think about this.

• 49:30Emma Grede?

  And as an optimist, I would be like, let's go 10, like, let's go in and see what you can shift and see what you can change because that's going to be really life altering. And I think in, in the best ways, forget like the, just the professional part of this. If you think about growth as a human, there's some really good stuff here, some really good stuff.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  I talked to like one of the best exec coaches in the world, best seller, whatever. And I said, what is the number one thing that you keep coming back to in all these conversations? And they basically said that for all. All of these execs that they advise and help with, that the vast majority of them leave their roles or pivot out of their roles too late. That when they feel like they are finally ready, they look back on it two years later, they go, why didn't I do it six months earlier?

• 50:13Emma Grede?

  Yeah, I wasted so much time.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  At the right time, it feels like you left too early. And only in hindsight do you go, oh, my God, I needed that discomfort.

• 50:21Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  I would do the same thing with AI. If you feel like right now is a little too early to pivot your role, a little too early to walk away from that task. Again, not 80% early, but 30% early, that means it's the right time.

• 50:32Emma Grede?

  It's the right time. Let's talk about something important because I feel like there's such a growing concern and a conversation about women being left behind when it comes to the conversation in AI. I'd really like to understand, what are you seeing? And what does that gap look like?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  We talked about this a little earlier, which is around gatekeeping. And gatekeeping is a powerful drug. And a lot of people are using it in AI. And you realize that when you use some of these platforms and systems and you build out, you know, a chief of staff that's working on your behalf and flagging things to you, you realize that you are gaining 10x on that task. Why would you tell anyone about that if you are gaining all of that value? So what I'm seeing a lot, especially right now, is uneven leverage because these early adopters are largely men. Because a lot of them are engineers, a lot of them come out with no value.

• 51:27Emma Grede?

  They're not opening up the pathways for women. Right, sorry, understood.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  A lot of, like, women have higher, these are scientific studies. In 75 countries studied, women outperformed men on verbal ability in all 75. Women go to therapy more than men, journal more than men, which helps with that goal oriented stuff that we were talking about. Higher empathy than men, again, might help with some of that, how to work back and forth with AI. Women have the skill sets in spades, especially because of how we work with AI agents today. But these systems are being adopted by largely technical, young men.

• 52:03Emma Grede?

  How do they?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  And because of the power of leverage and gatekeeping as a result, you might just not see these stories being told. Because they're getting done in private group texts. And so you kind of have to acknowledge that there are going to be people who are going to keep all of their cards close to their chest. And that they're disincentivized to share this information with you. And that you have to work twice as hard to grab and find that information. It's one of the reasons that I post online all the time.

• 52:30Emma Grede?

  All the time. No, and I see that from you. You post all the time. And listen, this isn't.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  You need to like.

• 52:33Emma Grede?

  This isn't just a reserve of AI, right? That's a bigger, broader business conversation and you could take the whole of tech. You could take, you know, politics at large and really apply the same type of thought to it. But I want to talk about women specifically and the uptake of AI. Like what's at stake if women don't change the behavior and become more comfortable with using AI?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  So stats wise, there's eight billion people in the world. Something like one billion ish have adopted AI at all. Out of that, you know, maybe a smaller percent are actually paying for it. And a tiny, tiny percent, less than one one thousandth of the world are using some of these agentic tools like Claude Code or Codex. So it's somewhere between like two and 10 million people. Out of a base of eight billion.

• 53:21Emma Grede?

  Wow.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  A lot of people look at that number and they go, oh, I have so much time. It's only, you know, point one percent. Fine. I'm good. What I want to share with the world, having seen the inside of companies that are leveraging this. The inside of solopreneur shops that are leveraging this is that the power that you get out of using that type of tool. Is the highest amount of leverage I've ever seen in my entire life compared to any other tech release ever. So you can look at these numbers and go, oh, I have plenty of time. Or you can look at it and say, oh my God, these 10 million are going to lap us before we even realize what's happening. The businesses of tomorrow that are being made by one person, five people.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  That needs to be started today. And they're being started with these tools that, again, only a couple million people are even using.

• 54:13Emma Grede?

  And are they being started by women as equally as they're being started by men?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not.

• 54:17Emma Grede?

  No.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Women adopt AI twenty five percent less than men.

• 54:21Emma Grede?

  Only twenty five percent?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. You think that that could have been bigger?

• 54:25Emma Grede?

  I think it's bigger. I think, listen, I only have like a tiny data pool, right?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:29Emma Grede?

  A few hundred people that work here and I am, my team will tell you, pretty consistent in asking,

• 54:34Speaker 01

  You guys using AI?

• 54:35Emma Grede?

  Who's using what? Oh, they're using. But let's be honest, it's like when I get the list from the girls.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:40Emma Grede?

  It's shorter than the list of things that are coming from the boys.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Do you also think the quality is different or is it just by number?

• 54:46Emma Grede?

  No, I think it's just about adoption rate. It's just about a level of, and listen, and I think a lot of this is happening socially.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 54:53Emma Grede?

  If you're a guy, in your group chats, in your text chains, in your DMs, you're getting sent stuff, your bros are sharing it and it's just a different level of socialization.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:03Emma Grede?

  And for women, perhaps that's not happening so much. And so that's like another one of the million reasons that I wanted you on today. Because I think there is so much stuff here that women are going to be able to grasp onto. So long as we like have the conversation.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:18Emma Grede?

  We share the information, not gatekeeping any information. And you do that so beautifully because I read your newsletter that comes on LinkedIn. And honestly, largely, that's where I'm getting like, you know, I'm gonna try this. I didn't know that was happening. It will prompt me to read something else that you've linked out to. It's just that encouragement to be on it. And I guess beyond systemic change, my question is, if you're, if you're a woman right now and you're, you're thinking about like, how do I close the gap for myself? What's your suggestion? Like, what should we do today?

• 55:48Speaker 01

  First, you're reminding me that in my inbox, I am getting DMs and it's like a very common template. Right? Where people are going, my name is XYZ, I am so and so years old. Usually it's like older than thirty, somewhere between like thirty five and thirty five. I've been using AI every single day and everyone around me thinks that I'm crazy. I agree with you on the socialization, but I have a theory that a lot of people listening to this are using AI a lot, but they're surrounded by people. Who have no idea what's happening. You might be better off, instead of finding the people, you know, that you went to high school with or college with. You might be better off going to like an AI meetup. And finding people who are in this. Space where they go, oh, I understand we're in act two. I understand we're in act three. I understand. What is needed from business professionals in this moment?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  And are willing to dive in. So just, you know, thinking about your circle. You should always surround yourself with people that you want to be more like.

• 56:39Emma Grede?

  What is that beautiful quote that I love? You become the average of the people you surround yourself with. So it's like, check out who's around you.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  By the way, let's go a little weird with that. You are the average of the five people around you. Maybe two of those people are AI. Like, maybe you decide.

• 56:54Emma Grede?

  Oh, one second. You just changed that one for me. Wait a minute, you're like, just switch a bitch out and bring in an Asian. Okay, really?

• 57:03Speaker 01

  But maybe you're, like, I'm mostly against AI companions and whatever, but like, they're amazing.

• 57:09Emma Grede?

  We didn't even get there.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Sparring partners.

• 57:11Emma Grede?

  But as a sparring partner, as like when we get down to this, like. You're really thinking about like this from a time point of view, right? It's like, if you're going to surround yourself with people. Then you need to surround yourself with, yeah, do it now.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  I think like AI is making me feel weird about time and that I think like time is a construct and no longer exists. But anyways. I think that urgency exists, particularly as it means learning AI.

• 57:32Emma Grede?

  You kind of just touched on it. I feel like there are so many people that use AI for therapy or for companionship. What do you actually make of that?

• 57:39Speaker 01

  I really want everyone to be able to get the help that they need. And I'm disappointed in our healthcare system that not everyone has access to that. So on the one hand, I'm like very pro people getting the help that they need. You also have states like New York who are working to ban. People asking questions about health into these systems. I think we're at a stage where people are still learning what is right, what is wrong. My bigger worry is with children. I am very loudly against, you know, AI toys. Without any sort of parent supervision. We're in just like the muddy muck of it.

• 58:17Emma Grede?

  I personally really get concerned about AI as a therapist, but AI as a coach. I think is a totally different thing. So I think it's. Really fine line. What about when you, you know, cause you just mentioned kids. When we think about AI being so like not, you know, accepted in schools, like my kids are at a school where AI is absolutely not allowed. They're young. Obviously they're not of kind of test taking age, but what are your thoughts on that not being an accessible a moment for learning in schools for the most part?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I think it's a very helpful tool to bring into the classroom when it makes sense.

• 58:52Emma Grede?

  High school age.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely at high school. I see people cheating on all of their tests and essays with AI. So my biggest thing that I haven't yet seen from teachers at large is changing the way that they test students because AI is there. So maybe you have, you know, essays being written by AI and then you have your actual students edit and talk about how it's bad or how it sounds like AI. Maybe you do more oral exams. Maybe you do more group projects. There are a lot of ways to test our children and make sure that they're progressing and growing that make more sense in the AI age. That's one of the biggest changes that I want to have happen. And then again, just having that constant thread of am I teaching over reliance or am I allowing over reliance?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Or have I given people AI access as a system of support? Education in general is always a bit behind enterprise, so they're still catching up a bit. Parents unfortunately have a lot of burden right now. I would have healthy conversations with your children. I would not advocate for AI as a companion. I would make sure that they are putting down their phone and talking to friends, human friends, but parents are gonna have a tough two to five years.

• 1:00:05Emma Grede?

  How do you think about that in terms of your own AI consumption? Like, because you do this for a living. You've been in it for years. You arguably have an unbelievable understanding of where it's all going, where it's headed. How do you balance that and make sure that you're being healthy, that you're doing other things? Is that even a concern of yours?

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  It is definitely a concern. There are some nights, like this is now we're doesn't, this is a therapy session. There are nights where I am using Claude Code and I get so into the. Thing that I'm building and just the magic of me actually solving my problems. I will all of a sudden look at the clock and it's five thirty in the morning. We're in the unhealthy stage of Ali using harnesses.

• 1:00:47Emma Grede?

  Thanks for being honest about that because you go in a rabbit hole with these things.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And I go to AI meetups and I'm not alone. It's not like I'm a weirdo. All these people are suffering from sleep issues. And I think it's a variety of things, just AI is not helping. So one is you might find yourself addicted to what you are capable of doing. And that can be a really self reinforcing thing that you just want to keep going and going. I think one of the best things that you can do, because again, there's always more that you can do, always more that you can build, always hours that you can take out of your sleep. One of the best things you can do is just carve out time to be non tech. So I have a group of friends in AI, there's about seven of us, like I guess 11 with partners. And we're renting out a home in a city that none of us live in. And it is a tech free weekend.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  And we have like an arts and crafts thing and like a performance hour. I advocate for people proactively blocking this time out to learn AI, yeah. But also proactively blocking out time and breaks. Some of my most creative AI solutions or thoughts or business ideas come from the off times. And you have to give your brain sort of some of these waves or else you're going to just completely burn out.

• 1:02:11Emma Grede?

  So before we wrap, a quick reminder that Start With Yourself is available for preorder and tickets for the live shows are available now. Starting April 15th, we're coming to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Boston, Atlanta and London. Visit emigre.com for tickets and full tour details. I cannot wait.

• 1:02:34Emma Grede?

  I love that you have this like giant mission of, you know, like reaching a billion people and turning this idea of like anxiety into agency. Will you talk a little bit more about that and just tell me what that type of progress actually looks like?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  So a lot of people have anxiety related to AI and a lot of people have anxiety related to all other parts of their life. What I have found is that one of the best solves for anxiety related to AI is actually testing the tool. Like when I really dig into it with people that have anxiety on it, it's because they haven't yet tested at the level. It's like a fear of unknown more than anything. And that once they actually test these systems, they go, oh, my God, I can't do this part of my job at all. Like, what was I worried about? And so I want people to start to reduce anxiety by having at least exposure to it and at least deciding that you hate the tool or you don't want to use the tool after that test. That's a big one. Second is definitely having that kind of group effort toward it and not feeling like you are alone. That is another big, common source of anxiety.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  And then I think the third one is this like identity work that people are having to go through. I've spoken with tons of people, educated millions. Those are the three core sources of anxiety.

• 1:03:47Emma Grede?

  They all chime very, very true. Yeah, that's what you hear from people.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is like, I'm a seller. Now AI is making calls or I'm a marketer, but now AI is managing an 80-country campaign at scale. And a lot of people are having to look inside and go like, what is my role in this future? And the complex answer is that that answer is still being figured out. But the bigger answer and why I talk about agency is because the answer is being figured out and it's being decided by people who are involved.

• 1:04:20Emma Grede?

  Beautiful, right? It's like you have to be in it to win it. It's like, don't ignore it because that's not going to be helpful at all. When you think about just your biggest challenges and your biggest concerns right now, what are they?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  As it relates to like my individual work or just as I'm looking at AI?

• 1:04:34Emma Grede?

  A little bit of both, really.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Oh, there are so many challenges. I think like education is still a massive challenge, especially as these. New types of systems come out. All of this has kind of happened in the last couple of months. So like, how do you manage a multi-agent file system with self-learning capability? That is just a hard thing to bring into the world. Also, cost right now is starting to become an issue. And the way that I think about money and the way that I think about time has literally changed since end of 2022. So I used to think of what is my hourly rate? Or ah, this is how I should calculate the cost of software and the cost of my time. And we had ways of measuring these things over the course of decades, right? What is the worth of your hour, like your lawyer?

• 1:05:19Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Or what is the worth of this tool? And I think one of the biggest challenges, and this relates to education, relates to all these other smaller pieces, is what is the value of time in the AI age?

• 1:05:32Emma Grede?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Because if you're

• 1:05:33Emma Grede?

  Oof.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  lawyer.

• 1:05:34Emma Grede?

  How do you charge for it?

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:05:36Emma Grede?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  No one, no one listening should be charging by the hour anymore. Like, that, that should be obvious, that should be dead.

• 1:05:42Emma Grede?

  I mean, that's like a

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Emma Grede?

  Yeah. That's just like

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Charged by outcome, charged by retainer.

• 1:05:47Emma Grede?

  Charged by outcome.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Charged by project, like

• 1:05:51Emma Grede?

  Oh, I hope my lawyers ain't listening.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  The, the shift that's happening, so that's on the time side. And on the money side, people are not looking at these tools going, oh, but it's $20 a month. And I don't know, or, or $200 a month, or $10,000 a month. They're looking at it compared to the outcome and the value that these things can generate. That's why I'm talking about that productivity is kind of a trap. Like, it's obviously important. But the idea that you can have AI help you create a brand new business line. Like, I'll give you, this is an enterprise example. But IKEA, they released a, an AI chatbot that was able to answer 47% of their questions. And they did not need the humans that they had before. They didn't need all of those humans.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  So 8,500 customer support agents were no longer needed in the customer support role. But they had 8,500 people that were crazy smart on the IKEA catalog, which is insane, as you know. And they had always wanted to create an interior design business line. So they re-skilled them into interior designers that were AI-supported. And so AI is coaching them in the process, AI is helping generate these new interior designs. And hey, put this stool over here and this table over here. This new business line generated 1.4 billion dollars in the first year.

• 1:07:09Emma Grede?

  That's crazy.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  If you hadn't thought about time and money in the new age way, in the outcome and growth and top line type way, you would have never started that business line. Time and money, the way that your parents taught you about it, the way that your accountant's probably thinking about it. It is completely different than it was five years ago.

• 1:07:32Emma Grede?

  Wow, that's... Yeah, I mean, that's insane.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, Einstein was right.

• 1:07:36Emma Grede?

  Yeah, literally, literally. And when you think about your legacy, you personally and what you're put here to uniquely do, what does that mean to you and what does that look like right now?

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  It's something that I'm like, always kind of thinking about, always tweaking a little. The North Star is definitely bringing up non-technical, non-coders, business professionals into this age. Because I think the best work of humanity is done when everyone's involved, not just amazing PhDs in science or incredible software engineers. Like, we need everyone. And so I want to get this into the hands of, you know, a billion business professionals. I just, I see the future of humanity as net better if I can do that. I have had two near-death experiences. And just like every time that I have come out of that, I'm like, this is the time to double down.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Like, I am dedicating my life to this, even if it means losing a little bit of sleep, even if it means sweating in a podcast room. Like, even if it means all these things, I have to do it. Because that is why I'm still alive.

• 1:08:47Emma Grede?

  I mean, how have we got to all of this time? And you just mentioned, what happened to you? Like, we're talking about that. What happened to you?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  I was in a... This sounds weird to be casual about it, but it's like my way of... You know, dealing with it. I was in one terrorist attack. I was in the Boston Marathon bombing. And then I was in a hotel shooting about a year ago.

• 1:09:08Emma Grede?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  But look at me now.

• 1:09:11Emma Grede?

  All right, we're going to move to rapid fire really quickly. What is the one AI tool that you personally can't live without?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Whisperflow, because I'm dictating nonstop. Typing makes me feel like I am a cave woman.

• 1:09:22Emma Grede?

  What's the last thing you asked AI to do or answer?

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  I was on a walk this morning and I did ask it to like tell me what tree it was in front of me. But then I asked weird questions and I was like, how many people do you think in all of eternity have climbed trees? And just was like getting to talk to it.

• 1:09:40Emma Grede?

  She is a curious Cathy over here.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  My head is like that, that view of the numbers all circulating around someone.

• 1:09:46Emma Grede?

  I can literally see it now.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  It's an outlet for my weirdness.

• 1:09:48Emma Grede?

  I can see it now. If AI didn't exist, what career would you have pursued?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Game show host. Is that weird? I'm like obsessed with game show networks.

• 1:09:57Emma Grede?

  I can see it, actually.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:09:59Emma Grede?

  You would have done a great job.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  I like love trivia. I love the crosswords. My like dad was in the crossword championships, like we are a games family.

• 1:10:07Emma Grede?

  I feel like it would be a really complicated game show, though. Like, do you know what I mean? What is a book that changed your perspective?

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Crucial Conversations, Thinking Fast and Slow.

• 1:10:18Emma Grede?

  A good one.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Atomic Habits. Those were probably my top three.

• 1:10:22Emma Grede?

  You're wonderful. This was absolutely amazing and I just am so grateful for the work that you're doing, actually. I think it's really, really important and I think that, yeah, I just, I find you so, I feel like everyone that listens to this podcast needs to follow you, needs to read your newsletter, needs to keep up with what you're saying and what you're teaching. You really are a wonderful teacher, like really, really first class.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you for that human compliment.

• 1:10:50Emma Grede?

  There you go. Thanks for joining me on the Aspire Podcast. For more strategies on how to build the life of your dreams, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

• 1:11:04Emma Grede?

  If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click Follow on your favourite listening platform. While you're there, give us a review and a five-star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend. We'll be so grateful. Aspire with Emma Grede is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Grede. Executive producer, Ashley McShan. Derek Brown. And me. Our executive producers from Odyssey, Leah Reese-Dennis, Asha Saluja, Lauren Legrosso. Producer, KK Sublime. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Schultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black. Video production by Evan Cox. Kirk Courtney. Andrew Steele. And Carlos Delgado. Social media by Olivia Homan, Catherine Bale.

• 1:11:48Emma Grede?

  Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sydney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company and WME. Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchinson Rose, Tim Meeke, Sean Cherry, and Lauren Vieira. If you have questions for me, you can DM me at aspirewithemmagreed. Grede is spelt G-R-E-D-E. That's aspire, A-S-P-I-R-E, with Emma Grede. Or you can submit a question to me on my website, emmagreed.me.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Anthropic is a research company first, built to make sure the transition to powerful AI goes well. When they launched Claude in 2023, its first users were businesses. Since then, it's been tested inside leading startups and enterprises. At DoorDash, a code migration that would have taken four engineers months to complete took one person three weeks. At Carvana, one team used to hunt through old tickets and code to answer a question. With Claude, they get answers 65% faster. And at Rakuten, engineers have achieved 99.9% accuracy on tough coding jobs using Claude.

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  Today, nine Fortune 10 companies run on Claude for the work they want to get right. And these businesses are helping Anthropic shape what comes next. Build your business with support from Claude at claude.ai/odyssey.