How AI is Reshaping the Workplace with Paul Roetzer

SmarterX founder and CEO Paul Roetzer joins the boys for a chat about how AI is reshaping the workforce in ways most don't suspect. Paul sold his marketing agency in 2021 as AI was already writing at near-human level—then ChatGPT showed up and things went into hyperdrive. Bentley and Gallup’s 2026 numbers say most Americans, especially young ones, don’t trust companies that use AI, while Microsoft, Google, and every CRM already do. Paul talks human-centered adoption, Jobs GPT, Copilot/Gemini/Claude stall-outs, why IT shouldn’t own this, and what IBM, Deloitte, and McKinsey actually sell. He walks through his Co-CEO GPT, a nine-month Anthropic/Claude build, HubSpot Breeze, Monday data agents, “human in the loop” versus a phrase he coins live, the 100-person split that becomes an HR problem, recruiting through a flood of AI applications, liberal-arts hires, and what he tells parents when asked about AI and entry level jobs.

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  Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Soash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Ah, yeah, it's the podcast your starting quarterback warned you about. It's the Chad and Cheese Podcast, everybody. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Soash is riding shotgun as we welcome Paul Roetzer to the show. Paul is the founder and CEO of SmarterX, an AI research and consulting firm. He's also the co-host of the Artificial Intelligence Show podcast. He's also a proud Clevelander. Paul, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  It is great to be with you guys. Looking forward to the conversation. It is a space I think a lot about, but I don't have a lot of answers. I have more questions than answers of what's going on with AI and the workforce.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  You're like a Browns coach. You're like the coach of the Browns. A lot more questions than answers. That's, that's okay, my friend. So before we get into all the, the AI of it, our listeners, our fans want to know, know more about you, the person. So what is it that makes Paul tick?

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, family, probably more than anything. I'm a, I'm a Clevelander, born and raised, started my company, my first company here, building my second company here. So I, you know, share your pain with being a Browns fan and all that comes along with that.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Does my hat bring you comfort or like, you know, shell shock?

• 3:13Speaker 04

  No, man. When we got on the camera, I saw it. It just gets that visceral reaction. It's like, oh, season is coming.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Winter is coming.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  So yeah, I, you know, a lot of what shapes me is my family, my kids. You know, even from an AI perspective, I, I look through the lens of what they're going through in eighth grade. My daughter's just starting high school and what the world's going to look like for them, what the job market's going to look like for them. I, I spend a lot of time thinking about that and working on that. And, but I also come from a journalism background, so I'm not a AI engineer. I'm not creating the models. I'm more the storyteller behind them. And then I think about the impact they have on people like me, like what, what's the impact on writers? What the, my wife is a painting major, an art history major. It's like, what's the impact on the creative industry and the people who make a living,

• 4:06Speaker 04

  you know, creating amazing things? And yeah, I mean, I think I approach AI with tremendous empathy for the impact it has on people and on the workforce. And, you know, I, I think personally, I just try and build a business and make as much time as possible to spend time with my family while they still want to be around me. I was still like cool enough for them to want to hang out with. So yeah, that's kind of what drives me right now.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Tell me you're a humble Midwesterner without telling me you're a humble Midwesterner. Thanks. Thanks for that, Paul. That was, that was very nice. That was very nice.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Appreciate it.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Excellent. Wait, Paul, so SmarterX, you talk about AI research. You also have the AI Academy. How did this all come to fruition? How long ago did, did this start? And I mean, what's, what's the actual like mission behind SmarterX and the AI Academy?

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, you know, I had started my marketing agency in 2005. So I was 27 at the time when I started the agency. We became HubSpot's first partner in 2007. So we were like the origin of HubSpot. Some people aren't familiar, HubSpot, big CRM company. We were the first agency that started reselling their software before they actually had a partner program. And so that sort of put us at the epicenter of marketing technology as it was evolving. You know, if you go back to 2007, when we became the partner, the iPhone was invented that year. Social media was starting to take off. So the world was just evolving and marketing, you know, in particular was, was changing. And then in 2011, I wrote my first book, The Marketing Agency Blueprint. That was the same year the IBM Watson won

• 5:39Speaker 04

  on Jeopardy, defeating the human champions. And that triggered for me like, oh, what is that technology? And how could be applied to marketing and business? And so I started just researching it and trying to understand it. And then we eventually created the Marketing Institute in 2016. And then that evolved after years of trying to educate, you know, the marketing industry about AI. ChatGPT showed up and everybody cared about AI. So SmarterX became more of like the broader parent brand where CEOs could show up and say, help us understand this. Cause a lot of my conversations started moving into the C-suite and heads of universities and, you know, leading educators and VC firms and government officials. And like, everybody was trying to figure out AI. And so SmarterX really

• 6:22Speaker 04

  has become more of a content and education is kind of where we focus. We focus on one to many. It's like, how can we help as many people as possible, as quickly as possible?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  So you sold your company in 2021, if I have my notes correct on that, to focus on AI. So GPT doesn't come out until 2022. Did you see something that no one else saw? Or was it just sort of a sense of this is going to change the world? I'm just going to get on and see where it goes?

• 6:45Speaker 04

  I don't know if no one else, but certainly we were early. Yeah. What had transpired was I'd started the institute in 2016, lost a lot of money for a number of years trying to like build, you know, the education business. We created MEC on our, our AI conference in 2019. So we had 300 people from 12 countries come to Cleveland in the first year of that conference. And then 2021, when I decided to sell the agency, what happened was I, I realized that all the things we'd thought about and been researching were about to happen, that there was an inflection point nearing. I didn't know ChatGPT was particularly coming out, but I knew that the AI labs had gotten advanced models that could actually

• 7:27Speaker 04

  write like at a human level. And so I knew we were nearing something. And so I decided to sell the agency to, to focus on all of it. And it just so happened that 18 months or so later, ChatGPT emerged and everything changed.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything definitely changed. And one of those things is how people feel about AI. Bentley University in Gallup actually came out with their Business in Society Report for 2026. And 79% of young Americans don't trust businesses that use AI, the highest of any age group. Now, the overall, I mean, they had 75%, 60% plus still, pretty high, 70%, 45 to 54. Everybody was at least 70% and higher with regard to distrust of AI. AI really needs marketing right now. They really need a narrative. They really need,

• 8:22Speaker 01

  they need a cheerleader, a champion. But I think overall, they need an educator with all of that. How are you guys trying to package this? Because we're not putting this toothpaste back in the tube. It's not happening. It's not happening. How are you guys actually wrapping all of that together in your institute to be able to, to be able to push this forward, to help these individuals? Because they're going to need it, whether they like it or not.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's a huge PR problem right now in the industry and the AI labs are becoming aware of it in part because of the political backlash to data centers and the environmental impact of data centers. So that's a very large issue that's going to be front and center in the midterms in the US this year. Our approach is like, we push for a human-centered approach to AI. We, we agree that it's not going anywhere. Like, I don't know how you could not trust a company that uses AI. Like, there is no company that doesn't use AI. So it's like, it's literally embedded into all the software we use. So if you use a Microsoft product, a Google product, any CRM system, like they all are powered by AI today. So it's just a part of the future of work. Like, there's

• 9:29Speaker 04

  really no way around it. So our approach is more about how do we bring people along who have resistance to it for whatever their reason may be, because they're threatened by it, because it's abstract and they don't understand it, because they worry about environmental impact, whatever their reason is, we encourage leaders at organizations to take a change management approach to AI from a, from an employee perspective at least, and meet people where they are, be empathetic to the fact that not everybody's going to be super excited about learning how to use AI. So that's part of our messaging, part of our kind of. Building an AI forward organization messaging. And then from a consumer perspective, it's tough. Like there's, there's a need to do a lot of different education around the benefits of AI. And the labs have really struggled to focus on that. They've focused more on the, it's going to disrupt

• 10:14Speaker 04

  and take all these jobs and it's gonna, you know, you know, make humans irrelevant. We're just gonna have universal basic end numbers solve it. Like their messaging's been horrible and they've now realized that.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Well, they've been back and forth about that messaging because it was, it's going to take everybody's jobs. And then it was, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. It's going to create all these jobs. And then at that point, they had no reference of, okay, what jobs is it going to create? Right? So you're right. It's almost like everything they've been doing, the Altman's, the Amman days. I mean, it's all been off the cuff. So again, you know, how, how can you and the academy really start to pull this together? Are you working directly with big brands to be able to help them transform?

• 11:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. So our academy has business accounts. So we have, and I'm probably approaching 400 business customers who come in, acquire licenses for their teams and then use our education to do personalized learning journeys for their organizations, you know, things from AI fundamentals to AI for departments, AI for industries. So we're trying to allow organizations to educate their employees. But in terms of like, how they communicate it to consumers and things, our approach is educate and empower the professionals within all of these brands so that they can talk more intelligently about the role of AI, that they can, you know, address consumer concerns about their use of AI, things like that. We don't do a ton of consulting work. We're actually going in and like building

• 11:46Speaker 04

  the plans for people and things like that. We're trying to empower the leaders to do that on their own.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Can you give us some sort of real life examples from your own business, Paul? I know, for example, you're a marketing guy. Marketing more than most is being impacted by AI, right? AI is buying keywords, AI is writing content, AI is making video shorts, et cetera. How do marketing employees evolving and adapting in this new world? What kind of skills are they getting to make sure that they can still be employed in the future as opposed to being replaced?

• 12:18Speaker 04

  The way I teach it is to understand how AI can impact your job today. So like I created a free tool called Jobs GPT. It's literally just a custom GPT that I built. We can give you the link and put throw in the show notes. It costs nothing. It's just an open AI built tool. And what it does is it allows you to go in and put your job title in or your job description and it'll actually analyze it and recommend ways that you can use AI in your job today and it'll provide rationale. So in essence, breaks it down to a collection of tasks and says, here's where AI can be supportive. Here's areas that AI can probably completely automate. Like if, if all you do is landing page design, you're going to want to broaden your skill set. Like that is not something that we're

• 13:00Speaker 04

  going to need employees doing solely in the future. So it basically tries to help you understand how AI will impact you today and then where it's going to go in the future. And so that's a big focus right now is just trying to get people educated on how can I use it? Because it is the fundamental starting point and a lot of, not just marketers, a lot of professionals overall across sales, HR, finance, legal, whatever, they struggle to figure out those first few use cases.

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• 15:30Speaker 01

  It's showtime.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Like everybody gets their copilot or their Gemini or their Claude or Chat GPT. And it's like, okay, it summarizes emails for me and it takes my meeting notes and it does these like basic things. Great. They don't know to use it as a strategic thought partner. They don't know it can, that they now have the ability to prototype ideas for apps or tools that they could never have done before. And it's just about empowering people to understand what it's actually capable of and then layering it over what they do and what they want to be doing. That's like higher value and more fulfilling.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  So we start talking about not having the consulting partner. I think that's pretty important because the education piece is big, right? But a lot of these companies don't understand, or you talk about team structure, workflows, leadership, hiring, you know, the actual operating models themselves. So they, they know the why, they know why they need to do it. They just don't know the how. And that's the, that's the big, I think, push where you're going to see a lot of companies, where CEOs are talking about, we're not seeing any ROI out of AI. Well, no shit. You're not seeing any ROI because you're telling everybody to use it. You're like forced, like, you know, token max the shit out of stuff. And there's no direction. They don't understand that. Look, if we're, we're

• 16:45Speaker 01

  looking at actual roles, a job is several tasks really chained together and they can be done in different days and different times, so on and so forth. What are those? And many companies, I mean, even many managers don't even know what the roles beneath them, what those tasks are. It feels like we need to break those down in little bite sized pieces to understand, hey, does this suck? And can AI do it? Because one thing that we can do is if we can take the shit work out of our day and, and just take it out of the day and let AI do the shit work, I think we'll have happier people. I'm not sure about that, but I think we'll have happier people.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  That's actually one of the approaches I recommend a lot because it truly is a change management thing. And so if you have friction, you're naturally just going to have employees who don't want to do it or like just reason. And what I always tell them is what's the thing they hate doing and build them an agent for it or build them just a simple AI assistant that can help them with it. And as soon as you start doing one or two or three of those where they're realizing, oh, okay, like it doesn't necessarily have to take my job. It's actually just going to take the parts I hate. This is cool. Like, do you have anything else it can do? That's why I say that you got to meet people where they are and you have to actually like, it's hard. Like it takes more effort to do AI adoption in a personalized way versus here's your copilot licenses, go figure it out, which is what everybody's basically doing. But it's the only real way to do it. It's the way to think about

• 18:09Speaker 04

  it from an HR perspective, from a change management perspective. And often what's happened is they put AI adoption under IT. They're not going to think about it this way. That's not, it's not how IT functions. It's an operations, it's an HR, it's an L D.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Consultants though, Paul. That's why they need consultants.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  Well, they pay the consultants. The consultants just want to come in and build the expensive shit. It's like, yeah, we'll teach you the change manager stuff, but like, hey, for $10 million, we can build this AI thing that's going to like change your life.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  It sounds like IBM, by the way.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  All of them. It's all consulting terms.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yes, Deloitte, IBM, yes, all of them, all of them. You're right.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  You're dropping the names, not me, but take your pick.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Here's as well, Paul. As CEO, I it changes how you do business. There's a, there's a popular commercial, I think it's for Paycom, where an actor goes through with his phone, which is on AI. And he, he knows how long an employee's been there and says, hey, seven years next week, you know, keep up the good work, or someone's falling behind. And hey, man, let's get back on that. How, I suspect it's a little more complicated than that, but I want to hear from a CEO with employees, like how AI is changing your role as CEO.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  So I talk a lot about how I use it predominantly as a thought partner and an advisor. Like I created co-CEO, a GPT, and this is in chat GPT. And when I say, for anybody's not done this, like when I say created, think of it like giving a project brief to an intern or an associate. I literally just write out, hey, I want you to function as my thought partner. I want you to like, help me solve problems in these specific areas. Here's areas where I'm pretty weak and I'm going to need more support. Here's a knowledge base. Here's our P and L statement. Here's our strategy roadmap. Like here's everything you need. And when I, when I need something, I'm just going to come talk to you about it. That, that's my co-CEO in a nutshell. And I talk to it like a half a dozen times a day about different things, like problems I have to solve, strategy

• 19:58Speaker 04

  docs I have to review, stuff I have to talk about my, with my attorneys or my accounts that I have like, no knowledge of. When I have to think about scaling an HR practice, like, I haven't done that before. Like, that's not my domain. So I work with AI. And then I'll, I'll have experts who I do bring in as real advisors, but I go in a much more educated standpoint when I talk to them. So a big part of it is helping me with, you know, information analysis, decision-making, things like that, that just gives me somebody to bounce ideas off of. And then the other thing is working on these very high value strategic initiatives that would have taken me hundreds of hours in a past life, meaning like, two years ago, that I can maybe

• 20:39Speaker 04

  do in dozens of hours now. And so like, right now, I'm working on a project that I'll probably start rolling out this fall, that I've been working on for nine months now, in collaboration with Anthropic Claude in particular. And it is, it is a massive undertaking. Like, there's individual components of this that would have taken me 500 hours, that I'm now able to do in five or 10 hours on a weekend. So that's how I use it. I don't have a bunch of stuff I need to automate. I don't have this like, super repeatable workflow I go through every day to be the CEO. It's like, every week it changes. The one thing I'm very, like aggressively pursuing is automation of data analysis and that extraction. So that every Monday, I get a report of what's

• 21:21Speaker 04

  going with the sales team, the HR team, the ops team, whatever. Here's the three things I need to know. Here's the next actions I need to take. That I'm trying to do, because that's something I need all the time. Is like, what is the real time information I need to make decisions?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  And there's so much data in so many disparate systems throughout companies, as it is, being able to take that data, start to contextualize, make sense of that data, because a lot of it is garbage. I mean, especially when you're talking one system to the next system. And many of these, you know, analytics dashboards that we have are just bullshit. I mean, they're just, they're, they're gorgeous, but they don't really mean anything.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  Noise. Yeah. Don't tell you what it means.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And I guess this is the big question is, you know, are we getting to the point where we can start to ask our agents in these different areas to start cleaning up garbage data? Because we see a lot of that in our space, right? In the hiring space, and just in the, in the people's space all the way through. Because, you know, you're working with humans, and humans are dumb. So you've got all that, you've got all that data, it needs cleaned up, it needs contextualized. Are you looking to actually do that for better analysis of that data? Have you started doing that?

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, we already are doing it. Yeah. In pockets of the company.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  What have you seen?

• 22:35Speaker 04

  It's incredibly helpful, because you know, if I think about all the dashboards I could go look at right now, to the, for the health of the company, I can go look at CRM data, I can look at sales pipeline data, I can look at, you know, audience growth, lead generation, I can look at P and L statements, I can look at revenue by business, you know, like, there's just, I could just spend my entire day looking at charts and stuff. And so what I basically think about it as is, what are the five things I need to know every day? Like, what are the questions I need answered every morning? Okay, let me just go automate that. I'm going to build an agent that's going to go pull that data from the different sources. And every morning, it just send me reports saying, here's the answers to your five key questions. And they could be related, let's just say it's related to like, audience growth, lead generation, revenue generation, profitability, whatever. Just pick your main KPIs. So what are the questions I need to ask? That I would normally

• 23:18Speaker 04

  zoom to the team, hey, doesn't, can somebody tell me where we're at with like, event ticket sales or whatever? And so you just automate the answering of those questions. And then you can use a tool like Claude or chat GPT to say, and what does it mean? Like, okay, I have the answers. What should I do with this information? So if you think about my co-CEO example, let's say that's paired up with this daily automated data analysis. Well, co-CEO knows all the decisions I have to make. So it's a, hey, the, the answer to this question, here's how it relates to the other stuff we were talking about last week. And it starts to like, bring context to those answers. And that's, you know, as a CEO, insanely invaluable. Like, if I can get to the point where I just have that real time information, and then the ability to go ask follow on questions. So

• 24:03Speaker 04

  like, we use HubSpot right now, and they have a Breeze assistant. You can go into Breeze and just ask whatever you want. It's just a chat interface. Say, hey, how many leads were generated last week? Or how many event ticket sales to make on happen in the last week to companies with a billion dollar or more in revenue? Stuff like that. It's just like, I can just ask questions of the, of the AI.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  I'm hearing a lot of things that are data related, sales and incoming, whatever, leads, and not a ton about my people and talent, and what's going on with things like morale and like, what questions are you asking related to your workforce? Or what kinds of questions do you recommend CEOs ask? And what, what things should HR be doing around AI right now?

• 24:45Speaker 04

  I have the luxury of building an AI native company, meaning ground up, everyone we hire wants to be a part of a company that is AI forward by nature. It's what we do. It's what they're signing up for. So I don't have the resistance to deal with about this. Now, that being said, we are also hiring a bunch of people who have liberal arts backgrounds, who maybe were creative professionals, journalists before they came here, who still have a passion for the thing that they do. And we're not trying to take that away from them. And so even though we're building AI native, I still am extremely sensitive to the human impact of the decisions we make around what to automate, what not to automate, when to let the human not only remain in the loop, but in the lead. And a lot of organizations don't know to do it that way. And so the bigger

• 25:30Speaker 04

  enterprises are like, the more established companies that, let's just pick a, you know, a hypothetical company with 100 employees. We always tell it to CEOs is like, listen, you're going to have five to 10% of your staff who are all in. They're probably the ones using Claude every day personally, like they're building their own agents to automate their life. Like, it's going to be a very small percentage. You're going to have like, 50 to 60% in the middle, who are fine using AI, like, they'll use it if they have to, like, they're not objected to it. They just don't have the time, or haven't figured it out yet, whatever. They'll, but they'll come along. And then there's going to be like, 10, 20, 30% who hate it, like, want nothing to do with it, for whatever the reason is. And so you have to be able to break your, your communications plan, your HR plan, your professional advancement plan. You have to be able to break it into those

• 26:15Speaker 04

  groups and make sure you're catering to the people who need to be brought along more, whether it's through peer-to-peer learning, mentor groups, different types of approaches to AI education. So again, we don't have to do that as much because we're starting ground up. But most of the companies that come into like, our AI Academy, or send people to our Maycon event, they're living this right now. It's like, wow, our HR department is not ready for this, because our HR professionals aren't AI forward. Like, they don't even understand the moment we're in and what these things can do. So they're not even the right people to necessarily build this plan and integrate it into professional development and comp packages. And like, here's one real practical example for you guys to think about. Take that 100 person example. Say 10 of those

• 26:57Speaker 04

  people are way ahead. They're just racing ahead. They're building agents, they're, they're optimizing all their workflows, they're innovating and creating entirely new, imagine where they're creating a disproportionate value, and they know it. And their peers know it. And yet, they're getting paid exactly the same as everybody else.

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• 27:45Speaker 04

  The friction that's going to come as soon as everyone realizes the value they're creating, is going to be massive in the HR industry.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely in the HR industry. Not in the sales industry, because you'll be making a hell of a lot more sales and get a lot more commission.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  You're just going to crush it.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So now you said something, and I don't want to dig into it, because we always talk about human in the loop. And a lot of times, when the human gets in the loop, literally, the decision's been shaped, or it's already been made, right? So talk a little bit about what you mean by human in the lead. When you're working with AI, and, and what we've seen, we've seen literally just automation, again, decision, decision shaped or, or made by AI. Talk about human in the lead. What's the big difference there?

• 28:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, honestly, it's the first time I've ever used that phrase. So I'm kind of like,

• 28:31Speaker 01

  I'm going to coin it.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm kind of rolling with it here.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  He's already made a GPT for it.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  So I created this, years ago, I created this human to machine scale. And it's basically like level zero to level four, meaning level zero is all human all the time, level four is I just give the AI a goal and it goes and does its thing. I don't even know how it does it. When I first created that back in probably 2019 or 20, AI could only technically get you to like level one or level two. The human was still having to set the data, you know, create the outputs, analyze the outputs. It was doing most of the work. We are now at a point where the technology is capable of like level three and in some cases, level four, where it's doing the vast majority of the work. So writing would be a really good example. If I needed to write my weekly newsletter, which I send every Sunday, I could in theory

• 29:19Speaker 04

  say, hey, pick the five most important topics from the week, write quick summaries, here's 10 examples of what it looks like with the tone and style, write this thing. And then I literally just review it and hit send. That's kind of like the human in the loop where I'm at least editing. The human in the lead though is, no, screw that. I like the writing process. It's how I learn the information. It's how I can talk about it unscripted. It's how I can answer questions about it. I don't want the AI to be a part of this. So even though it can, I am going to lead this process and maybe not even use AI. And so sometimes we choose to still actually do the hard work because the process is the point. It's like, why we're doing the thing is to become confident in the material, to be able

• 30:02Speaker 04

  to give presentations, to do podcast interviews, like, and so that's what I think about is the human in the lead is sometimes like, we're still just going to do the work, even though the AI could.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the challenges we're having, particularly on the recruiting side, you mentioned human in the lead. That's hard to do when there's a tsunami of, of job applications that are automated, are just too much to handle. So as a result, companies are fighting bots with bots and the humans are being taken out of the loop more than ever before. But companies are forced to do it because how else do we deal with this flood of automated applicants? What advice do you give in the recruiting process to keep humans in the lead when it's really frankly so hard with what job seekers are doing right now?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd break down the whole workflow and figure out which ones are human in the loop versus human in the lead. You know, it's again, it goes to that, you know, if you're getting 700 applications for one opening and you know that 99% of them are AI written and they're just being like submitted, automated, things like that, then I don't know how the human is in the lead on that. Like there has to be some element where you're, you, you build a trustworthy AI that you have a high confidence level, can filter through those things and surface the ones that matter. And you're constantly checking that process to make sure bias isn't finding its way in and that you're not setting up algorithms that are actually doing harm. Like there's all kinds of, you know, considerations, but there's elements of that workflow where, okay, AI is actually going to lead on this.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  And then once we get to this part of the process, that's where the human is now taking the lead and we're only either using AI in a limited capacity or not at all. So like, give you an example, I, I don't lead our recruiting and hiring process, but I have the final sign off on any hires still. And so when I go to meet with someone, I take a summary of all the notes, the previous people have met with them have given me, I analyze that, they write a profile on the person based on the summary notes, using an AI tool to like write the profile. And then I will go in and say, okay, what are the questions I should be asking this person? And I'll use an AI to help me develop the questions. And then I will go through and say, all right, well, here's some other questions I want to go down a different path. Or in the meeting, I'm not actually sitting there and like just reading the 10 questions from the AI. It's like, they're a starting point for me.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  It's like, it helps me get into a flow, but then I'm just going to get to know that person. So that's kind of how I think about it. It's like, there's ways we do use AI, but then like the human at the end of the day is still a decision maker and has to maintain the agency and the responsibility for whatever decisions are made.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  So talk a little bit about that with regard to your organization and, and literally your advice with regard to providing autonomy to those individuals. So you can have a standard operating procedure and say, look, we have human in the lead here. This is going to be automated, et cetera, et cetera. But you could also provide autonomy in that where, you know, maybe there could be some agents that are created individual by individual. Do you allow that kind of autonomy, would you say? Or would you go with more of a standard operating procedure? Hey, we all agree on this, go.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  To date, we've taken a bit of a decentralized approach where we educate everybody. I mean, obviously we have the benefit of, we, we own the AI academy, we create the content, all of our employees have access to it, all of them are required to, you know, go through different training programs. We have monthly sessions where we get together and just talk about different AI initiatives. We have build sessions where we build stuff together. We do workshops and like, we do all the things, basically.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Even with that, the ability for people to identify their own ways to integrate AI, build their own apps, build their own agents, it's very fragmented. Like, I always think of it back when I ran the agency, the hardest thing to train for was strategic ability, um, critical thinking and strategy. It was just like, I would spend 10 years with different individuals, trying to get them there and it just, it wasn't in their DNA.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  And I think of AI skills and traits are, are seemingly somewhat similar. Like you can give all the same people, the same information and training, and some people just excel at connecting the dots, like knowing when to use AI, not to, things like that. So we're starting to actually take a bit more of a centralized approach where we will have a set of people whose job is to go business unit by business unit, department by department, role by role, and help people identify the highest value apps, agents, automations to create that have the greatest impact on the business overall, while giving freedom to people who just naturally also excel at the AI side of their job. And if they have ideas for agents, cool.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Like, we still have to have governance over, we still have to know you're building it because we may benefit from that agent in sales over on the CS team, this, you know, the success team. So we're still learning, we're still trying to figure out what the right approach is.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Paul, you mentioned hiring liberal arts, you know, grads and journalists and people that maybe darn thought about in, in your line of work. You also mentioned having children. I have kids, a lot of people listening, uh, have kids and, and struggling with, what kind of advice do I give my kids for a world of AI and, and disruption? What advice do you give your kids or what advice would you give parents to give their kids in this new world?

• 35:13Speaker 04

  As I mentioned, my, my kids are eighth grade and freshmen in high school. So I'm, I'm not at the stage yet where I'm trying to contemplate college they go to or what profession they go into. We talk about it a lot. My kids know more about AI than probably most CEOs. They've grown up around the business. That being said, what I do tell parents who have kids who are in high school about to head into their college or, you know, kids in college or professors at universities or heads of universities, I basically say like, I'm not sure what career path is obsoleted, if any, be the best at AI, whatever it is you want to do. So I don't care if you want to go into philosophy, you know, be a journalism major, be an English major, be a doctor, be an economist, like whatever it is that you're pursuing, I would still pursue it.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  I would just be like top 10% of AI at that field.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  And so that's my general advice right now. And then also to make sure that they understand that critical thinking matters maybe more now than it did before, because it's going to become more of a differentiator, because too many people are going to give up on critical thinking because the AI can do it for them. And so what I want people to do is learn AI not as a crutch or a replacement to what you do, but as a way to augment what you're capable of. And so, for example, with my daughter, she, um, she's a very talented writer and she wants to be an author, like a published author. And so I'm teaching her how to use AI in a responsible way to support her writing, not to, hey, can you write me a chapter on this topic?

• 36:46Speaker 04

  And then like move on to the next chapter. So I'm a big believer in like authenticity really matters, but so does continuing to learn and maybe accelerating your learning by knowing how to use AI in a responsible way.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Got it. Uh, lastly for me, I'm, I'm going to be placing some Kalshi bets after this call. What does your AI say about the Browns season? What's the over under? Who's going to be the starting quarterback at the end of the year? What, what's your Browns forecast, Paul?

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Well, um, I have actually used it to do my March Madness bracket. I did use chat GPT for that, so.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  He's avoiding the questions about the Browns, Chad.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  I'll go Shador Sanders, but I don't think our starting quarterback's on the roster next year. I, I think that's, it's a totally different player and I.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Over under on wins.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  They're not winning nine games. No.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Is that the over under? It can't be. It can't be. Your, your Kalshi's way different than, than my version of Kalshi, Paul.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  I would guess six, but I don't look at the markets too often.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Oh, that's Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of SmarterX.ai and Marketing AI Institutes, also the co-host of a podcast you should also listen to, the Artificial Intelligence Show Podcast. Paul, if somebody wants to connect with you or maybe listen to the show, where can they find you?

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, the podcast on the SmarterX side, it's actually just podcast smarterx.ai. So you can check that out. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, also on Twitter or X, whatever we want to call it these days. Uh, I stay pretty active there. And then, um, yeah, we have our big conference in, in October. Somebody wants to come to Cleveland and check out a Browns game and hang out at the convention center in Cleveland, in the Rock Hall, you know, join us at MACON, we'd love to see you.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Chad, this interview's been stressful. I need to go get a massage with Deshaun. That is another one.

• 38:30Speaker 06

  Oh, man. We out. Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast, the chat, the cheese, brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one. Cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss, so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen

• 39:14Speaker 06

  to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.