Becoming an AI Expert in Your Company or Industry

Key Takeaways

So, that's one of the top questions we get from people. How do I keep up with all the tools? And here's here's what I would recommend. Pick a tool in a category and use that tool. Well, well, wait a minute. This one does this. Don't worry. Your tool will also have that. The the the com the the competition, the moat that exists with any type of feature in a I don't know, an image generation tool or a video avatar tool, they don't last. Today I'm very excited to be joined by Chris Dagel. If you don't know who Chris is, he's the founder of Chief AI officer.com, a consultancy, training, and certification company that helps non-technical business professionals become AI experts. His podcast, which I strongly recommend, is using AI at work. Chris, welcome to the show. How you doing today? Thanks so much, Michael. This is a big opportunity and a big privilege. So, thank you for uh the chance to communicate with your audience about AI. I'm super excited that you're here today. Chris and I are going to explore how to become an AI expert in your industry. Um, any industry, whoever is listening in your industry. So, Chris, before we get into that, I'd love to hear your journey like how in the world did you get into AI? Start wherever you want to start and feel free to share that story. Um, born an entrepreneur. Um, so always had that that eye for opportunities. Um, most of my career has been in what I call growth architecture, consulting with companies, helping them uh remove dysfunction and scale their businesses. And when ChatGpt 3.5 came out in November of 2022, said, "Man, this is going to be a huge opportunity for somebody else because I just assumed that, you know, it required technical background or, you know, stuff that I just didn't have. I'm a non-technical business professional." And uh about a month later, I saw some knucklehead using chat GBT to do some amazing things. Said, "Hey, let me give it a shot." And um that's it's been on since then. Well, share a little bit more like Okay. So, like what was your what did you do after that aha moment or whatever? Like Yeah. You know, I think like a lot of people I'd been trained to use Google, right? So, I kind of used it like Google and I was like, "Nah, it's okay." But what happened? I I had that aha moment, right? Um I was using it to I think at the time I was helping a client with a growth strategy and I started asking it questions and I just kind of went down the rabbit hole with it and I I I started to figure out how to calibrate my questions to get the type of answers that I got and realized this thing is doing work for me that would have taken me a week, a weekend for sure and instantly I was hooked. I knew that uh with the proper understanding how to use these tools that I would be uh I would have certainly an unfair advantage over anybody that was not using these tools. And uh that kind of opened the door for me to realize, hey, there's a lot of other people like me, nontechnical business professionals that probably just don't understand they're a short step away from being able to really master uh their day for sure with the use of generative AI. And that led me to think about first I thought, hey, I'm just going to introduce this in my consulting business. And I had a mentor, leverage was his keyword. And I realized there's not a lot of leverage here. I can get more done, but I will still be stifled. And I said, you know what? It would be better if I learned how to master this stuff and then shared what I've learned with others like me. And that was really the leverage, one to many opportunity instead of, you know, me and a client leveraging the tools. And that that opened up uh chief AI officer and that definition came to me. I saw an interview with uh Peter Diamandis and he was talking about this role of a chief AI officer and he said listen it's not somebody that's a data scientist or going to come in and fine-tune an LLM. It's somebody who understands business and understands how to use these tools and they bridge the two of them together to be able to come into an enterprise small business soloreneurship and be able to start plugging it in here and here and here because they understood business. So, when did you start chief officer.com and and tell us a little bit about like the podcast and kind of what you're doing today? Um, I started chief AI officer in early 2023 simply as an idea. Um, and somebody said, "Hey, you should get that domain. Great idea." And uh, it was a premium domain at the time. I'm sure it's worth a lot more now, but said, "I'm going to double down. Let's get this domain." And I immediately started uh I already worked with some frameworks like EOS and scaling up things that a lot of the audience may already be familiar with and started to put those pieces together. Okay, well how can I leverage generative AI chat GPT essentially to support this and this and this and it it turned into this incredible curriculum that we've got that certainly focuses on tactical training, how to use the tools. Um but it also introduces something that's missing from a lot of the trainings out there which is the strategic consideration. How do I change management is a huge uh issue with this. There was especially back then there was a lot of fear is AI gonna take my job and we really uh put a lot of energy into how do we have that AI discussion in a company so that the individuals in that company they're not fearful of it they're excited about the introduction of it and um it's turned into really a fantastic opportunity for all the chief AI officers who've gotten certified through us. Yeah. And the podcast how long has that been out? We launched the podcast. I I started recording episodes in December of 2023. Uh first episode launched I think the first week of January 2024. Um and it's been an amazing opportunity. It's called using AI at work because I realized that people wanted to use the tools but they didn't know where to start. So it was really just intended to ask notables in business like what how are you using it? What like where I wasn't interested in in tool demos and things. I was really interested in, hey, I'm a business person. These are some hacks or some time compression uh opportunities that I've discovered and it turned into this. You know, I know this stuff really well. Every time, and I bet this happens for you, too, man. Every time I do an episode, I'll hear something I'm like, never thought, not not complicated, but I never thought about that. So, it's been this it's been part of my own journey really of growth uh and learning the stuff by interviewing others. Well, and I think it's a great compliment. folks that listen to this show, you should definitely listen to his to the using AI at work show because it's a it's a great uh we have a similar slightly different but similar like I think there's something we could all learn from both shows. All right, so let's get to the the real big question here, which is for those marketers or entrepreneurs or creators that are listening right now that want to put a flag in the ground and they want to maybe why should they consider putting a flag in the ground maybe is the question and say I want to be known as an AI expert in my business or amongst my community. What's the upside if that happens? Well, yeah, that's a great question. Um, we do a lot of research. We pay attention to a lot of research being done in the marketplace and there is a 2023 was a year of like people playing around with it right 2024 I think for a lot of companies was a year of discovery 2025 is the year where they're like look we have to do something about this and the demand for individuals whether or not you identify as an AI expert if you're an AI enabled business person uh let me give you a scenario two people show up for u to work with a client as a vendor or you know to uh get a equal on all levels, same school, same education, similar backgrounds, but one of them says, "Oh, and by the way, I I use AI regularly in my business." That person, will they get the job? I can't guarantee that, but they will certainly be moved to the top of the list because businesses are looking for you. If you know business and whatever your marketing, whatever your trade is and you know how to use AI to support your role, the demand I think there's a 500% gap between availability of talent and demand for talent at the SMB and lower middle market uh levels. So it is huge blue ocean for anybody who invests in themselves, takes the time, uses the tools and starts to have those aha moments and do what we call we in in our ecosystem we call it thinking in AI and that's when you're at the point to where doesn't matter the issue that comes up doesn't even matter if it's really your department but you're so capable with okay what should I ask chat GBT or whatever model you're using and you're able to dynamically just on the go and do that. If you're the person that walks in and you're like, I'm excited to to have the interview, excited to discuss about the opportunity with you, client, and we're an AI enabled um agency, an AI enabled uh contractor, vendor, employee, instantly. Bing, the ears perk up from whoever that hiring individual is, and they want to know more because they don't they don't know as much as you think everybody else knows if you're using these tools. You'd be surprised. the more conversations you have, there's just there's still a lot of of uh mystery about using AI when it comes to most business people. Uh we're recording this just literally days before Social Media Marketing World where I'm about to give a keynote in front of a couple thousand people. And one of the things that I notate in the keynote was a study that was done at Proctor and Gamble and I believe Harvard or uh Wharton was behind it. They studied 700 employees and they found that an employee who has been properly trained in AI will outperform an entire team of employees who are not using AI. Yep. So when you start to think about the ramifications of this, it's pretty big. And when you couple in the fact that earlier this year, Open AAI revealed that they have 400 million active weekly users of uh tools like chat GPT. But if you go back in time, it was 15 years ago when Facebook only had 400 million active users. It was 2010. It was January of 2010. And 6 months later, by July 2010, it went to 500 million. So we are at the beginning of another hockey stick growth period that a lot of people just don't actually realize that's happening. And the truth is that consumers are adopting AI much faster than businesses are. So I double down on what you say, Chris. If you can be an AI enhanced employee, which we're going to talk about next, or an AI expert, you have a radical unfair advantage because the demand is much greater than the supply. Would you agree with that? 100%. Um, there is, those of you who are listening to this, you already know this. you're able to do things in an instant instance instant instantly, let's say. Yeah. That um would have normally taken you another 30 minutes, a full day, uh you know, a week. It doesn't matter. You're doing it better. You're doing it faster. You're doing it with less human error, less resources required. And what business wouldn't want that type of superpower with their employees? Heck, every employee 100%. Okay. So, let's explore uh an example of an AI enhanced employee and just kind of like I know we prepped this question. I know you got some things to talk about. So, I'll just let you roll. So, a great example that we leverage a lot in our our communication is let's say you know the boss finds out that you've been listening to Michael's podcast here and they say, "Hey, we we'd love to know more about AI." And you said, "Sure, no problem. I can share what I've learned." And they said, "Can you do it in 15 minutes?" Right? Uh, sure, boss. Right. Here's what we tell people to do. First thing you'd want to do, let's say you're in the marketing department. Uh, a tool we recommend is perplexity.ai. A lot of you may be using it already, but it is rightfully being called a Google killer. You you all of us have been using Google for 20 plus years now. You go into Google, you you put in a search, and what you get back are uh results, but you still have to do the research. You still have to like tie the theme together. Okay, what do all these links mean to me? Perplexity does all that for you. It's like Google had a baby with chat GPT. And a way that I explain this that really lands with people. If you were to go to a library and ask the librarian, hey, where are the books on marketing? Librarian might point you over there and say, oh, they're they're in that section. Or they might even bring you a stack of books and say, here you go. It's better than exploring the whole library. It helped, but you still have to do the research. you still have to find like like what's good and what's bad. Perplexity would be like going to that same librarian asking the same question and them saying, "Okay, here's the books, but I've already read them, and let me give you a detailed outline of exactly what this concept means, how it's being used. Here's data points to support this. It does all the research for you." So, in this scenario, the boss says, "Hey, I want to hear more about it. How can we use it in the marketing department?" Simply go to Perplexity and do your search. Within 60 to 120 seconds, you have the outline of essentially a presentation for the boss and all the other peers that are going to be listening in on this presentation. Great. You got 12 minutes left. Most of us, we'd show up, we might have, you know, some notes scratched out or be reading off the screen. But if you really want to demonstrate prowess as, you know, an AI enabled employee, you want to use a tool called Gamma Gamma.app. And I'll provide all of these resources for you and I'm sure they'll be in the show notes. What Gamma does is the same thing the the Google comparison to perplexity. Gamma is to perplexity what PowerPoint would be to Google. You got 12 minutes left. How many slides can you build out? And even if you did, they'd be a little sloppy and it wouldn't be a good look for the quote unquote AI expert on the team. Take the output from Perplexity. simply copy one button. Go to gamma, paste, big blue button, big blue button, big blue button, and in about three, and if anybody's a gamma user, they'll know the blue buttons I'm talking about. But within about two minutes, you've now got a professionally prepared presentation that used the input that you gave it from your perplexity search. And now you're ready to go. You still got time to save. the next step. Well, just just real quick on the gamma thing because I've never used it. What is it? What's the output look like? It It looks like you had a graphic designer spend hours on preparing a presentation with images. It generates AI uh images through a number of models. I typically use idoggram. And okay, so it it's populating those on the slides. uh and you're you show up and it looks like you've been waiting like for days to present this because it's professional output. And does it does it uh work with PowerPoint and Keynote or is you do you have to go to the gamma website to present it? Do you know how that works? So you don't have to go to the gamma uh website to present it. It will actually output the file in PowerPoint for you. Okay. All right. And you could open that in Keynote if you're on a Mac or something. Okay. Cool. So how many minutes in are we so far in the 15 minutes? at this point like you know you've spent the 5 minutes okay you're done you're ready for the presentation the next step that I would suggest and and if you're not using an AI powered meeting assistant you know we show up to Zooms now and sometimes we're out in the AI space at least sometimes we're outnumbered by the meeting assistants but the reason that I like this is because it's going to capture everything so that you're not uh code switching oh and let me take some notes or let me review my stuff and you just present you just have a conversation with everybody with the confidence knowing that everything is being captured. Now, the reason that I like Fathom is because once the call's done, it gives me certainly a summary, but it's picking out all the action items that were discussed. It allows me, you know, well, Chris Zoom can record the meeting. Yeah, but you still have to wait for it to render and you know, I'm going to come back to that and before you know it, you know, you've forgotten. Oh, I meant to send that out right away. With Fathom, as soon as the call is done, you can push one button and send the link out to all the attendees, to one attendee, but it also, depending on the type of call, it has certain filters. So, it it's got the transcript, it's got the video, but I can say, "Hey, this was a sales call, and it's going to give me analysis of that call. This was a one-on-one, this was a product demo." It's got all of these pre-built features in there. One click, and it's now giving you an analysis of the call based on the type of call it was. And again, Fathoms free. So, you show up to the meeting, you do your presentation, you're good to go. Everybody's like, "We got to do this ASAP. Send us, you know, send us a summary of this." You don't just want to necessarily send them the the transcript from or the evaluation from Fathom. Take that transcript into chat GBT or Claude if you're using that. And you're going to tell it, "Hey, listen. I need to create an email for the attendees of this meeting. Um, here's the outcome." Like I want I want my boss to to know that I'm eager to assist the team in growing their AI skills. I'm eager to take a larger role with the organization because of what I'm learning in AI. Feed that in. Paste in the transcript. Dunzo. Copy paste it into Gmail or whatever your email client is. Send it. And this is all happening. Like if you think about it, that was a 15minute example, not counting the the presentation itself. If you're not using these tools, it's going to take you maybe 15 minutes, but you're going to show up sloppy. You're going to show up the best that you can do in 15 minutes as a human that is not AI enabled. Flip the script. People are blown away. And it looks like magic to people that don't understand this. How did he do such a good job so quickly? Wow. I love that. Great example. And I'm with you completely that if you know it's true, which I believe it is, that most employees inside of a company are likely not taking full advantage of all the things that we just talked about, they're going to be blown away because maybe they're familiar with chat GPT, but they don't understand all these other tools. So now, let's let's take it up a notch. Okay, that's that's a great way to impress your boss or your peers um or even some customers. But what if I want to become known as an expert in my industry? Um, talk to me a little bit more about upleveling. Yeah. So, if if any of you have imposter syndrome, oh, I'm not that good at it. Trust me, you're better than most. Um, my advice, it's the same for uh somebody just getting started, somebody that's already a certified chief AI officer. Your warm market has opportunities for you. your warm market that exists on your social platforms, whatever that is of choice. Start showing demonstrations. Hey guys, I just learned this new tool. Hey guys, let me show you an example of how I'm using this to uh create content, create images, whatever. You want to demonstrate, and it doesn't have to be super sophisticated. It's just letting people know that you're one of those people who are using the tools. There are people in your warm uh market, your network, your your social contacts. They're all looking for help with this stuff. And if they already know you, like you, and trust you, and they see you doing this, they're going to go, "Oh, let me talk. Let me give Chris a call. He obviously knows this stuff." Secondly, wait, before you go on, I I want to just um double down on that a little bit and expand it because I do believe, you know, obviously my company is Social Media Examiner, and I think there's incredible opportunity because the AI, the algorithms that run all the social platforms try to show content to people that are particularly interested in that kind of content. And I think people forget this sometimes. So if you start posting on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever your preferred social platform is or X or whatever about what you're learning, the algorithms are going to show it to people that are actually interested in that kind of thing. And that is going to kind of be great organic marketing for you because people that get picked to present or to be part of an article or to do all these kinds of things, they only get presented because there's demonstration publicly that they seem to be further along on the journey. And if they claim they are, but there's no public proof of it. Yeah. because they haven't been posting about it. Well, it's going to be a lot harder to raise your hand and claim you're an expert. It's a lot easier for someone to just notice softly over time that Chris or Mike seem seems to be posting about this stuff. I'm going to pay attention to them. I'm going to follow them and maybe maybe it's not me. Maybe it's someone I know in my network that's looking for someone like you and that's really valuable. So, keep going. You're about to say the second thing. Yeah. So, this conversation is happening in every business. So, what Michael just said was 100% correct. One way to uh certainly advance your career would be now that you're learning these things, the people that are sitting next to you, the the remote team that you're working with, start sharing that with them internally. There you go. You don't have to necessarily like, "Hey everybody, look at me. I'm the AI expert." It gets known, right? People start saying, "Oh, AI." They're like, "Oh, Chris is the AI guy." People on the team. And here's what happens. your department starts seeing these winds, these efficiency wins, the production timelines start shrinking. And the higher ups that are paying attention to these metrics are asking, "What are they doing?" And they're going to go to the department and they're going to find out or they're going to reach out to the the manager of that department. They're going to say, "Hey guys, these numbers look great. What's happening?" And they're say, "Oh, well, we got an AI guy or an AI girl, right? Like, who is that?" Right? The boss is going to say, "Hey, uh, let's go to lunch. I want to know more about this." this, they're going to say, "Hey, Chris, before you uh get started on that, we're having a meeting in here. AI came up. Can you jump in here?" And all of this visibility that you're getting in your your business ecosystem about, "Oh, you got an AI question? Yeah, go talk to them." Like, it it's obvious because they will start to see more impact from this and they're going to say, "We want more of this. We need some." Oh, we got somebody. They already know our business and they know these tools. That's our candidate. That's I love that. I love that. And and I and I I think I heard you say this, you know, when you teach other people, even inside the company, even if it's just onetoone or even if it's just one to a few in a conference room. Um first of all, that's a great way for you to kind of get your, you know, kind of get your comfort zone up a little bit. If you're facing a little bit of imposter syndrome, they're going to probably tell you, "Wow, that was really good. I want more of it." That's just going to kind of allow you to go a little bit further and a little bit further so you can ease into it. But it's also going to allow you to stand out because it's true that AI is legitimately, you know, it's the ones that embrace AI that are going to be the survivors in the grand scheme of time. You talked about how you had a person UIUX person in your community. We were going to share that story. Can you share that story? Yep. So people always ask, well, what happens when somebody gets certified in AI? So one of our earlier graduates from the program professional uh had worked with big companies in the UIUX environment. He gave me a call one day. He said, 'Hey, Chris, I got a big interview tomorrow. I was like, okay. He said, 'Can can you help me prepare for it? I said, 'Sure. Who's it with? Not going to name the company, but they do $34 billion a year. If I name the company, you'd go, "Oh, yeah. I know who that is." So, I said, "Man, you got this." I said, "Call me back though. Let me know how the interview went. I'm really curious." So, he calls me back the next day and he said, "Chris, I walked into a room. There were 14 people in the interview and they were all there to hear what I had to say." He said they even had a couple of their AI experts from one of the big consulting agencies. Again, you'd know who that company was. Said, "Man, how'd it go?" He said, "By the end of that hour, there was no question in that room who the AI expert was, and it was not those high-priced consultants." And now he is an AI strategist at this large multinational very well-known brand simply because he understood business and he went and learned these tools and he was able to explain non-technically to the people sitting at that table how AI could come in and support all of their operations, their strategy, their execution, everything and got the job still got it today. Happy camper. Love it. Okay. So, if we desire to really be perceived as an AI expert internally or externally, um have you found there's certain types of areas that are low hanging fruit, for lack of better words, to focus on um as far as like teaching others and sharing insights and stuff because obviously if you're really technical, you could overwhelm people. So, what's your what's your thoughts about like the early first moves that maybe people ought to make? you know, it's the stuff you're already doing. And again, I come from an EOS background. And in that environment, they have an exercise called delegate and elevate. And they ask you to really just list out the things you're doing on a daily basis and categorize them. And one of those categories are activities that I don't like doing and I'm not good at anyway. Those are the things that if those weren't on the table, you might really, really love your job. But because those are there, certain days are a drag or certain times of, you know, when it's time to pull those reports together, you don't like doing that. We start there, and we recommend that you do, too. Find the things you don't like doing, um, and you're not good at anyway, and start to use generative AI tools to either do them for you, to assist, and just make sure that like you're not spending nearly as much time doing stuff. That's the drudgery. And I can tell you that your audience should be encouraged by this marketing department, creative department. Easy, easy wins there. And if you're not using these tools in the function of those roles, I think you're going to be really surprised when you finally do after listening to this episode. Okay. So, let's assume some people in the audience have been doing this. Yep. and they are perceived inside their business as the kind of local authority if you will on AI, the one that everybody comes to and asks questions and they really desire to kind of go beyond just the business. They want to be perceived by um a larger audience um and perhaps they want to develop maybe eventually go off on their own, start a consultancy, start an agency. what would be the next steps that they should take to kind of put that flag out there? So, one of the easiest things for anybody is start hosting an event in your local market or you know for peers, competitive peers, just say, "Hey guys, we're having an AI meetup, right? You don't have to be the expert there, but because you're the person who's kind of bringing everybody together, you become the center of gravity and everybody else starts thinking, "Oh, Chris, oh, he knows AI. He knows everybody doing AI in this space. Super easy. It can be at a bar. It can be at, you know, the anywhere. It doesn't have to be fancy. And it's not about, you know, you saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention? I need to speak on AI." It's about you being the person that when they walk in the door, you're welcoming them. You're greeting them. And you may say, "Well, Chris, I'm not that comfortable." Listen, they're not there to see you. They're there to connect with other people who are interested in AI and you just get to be the the social butterfly or the wallflower, but you brought them together and that alone positions you as you know the apex in that room. Another great opportunity, every city has uh economic developments councils, uh chambers of commerce, uh business groups. They're always looking for speakers, but if you're going to talk about, you know, how to pick the right insurance, no offense insurance people, um, or anything like that, like they've heard it before, right? But if you reach out to them and say, "Hey, uh, do you think your audience would be interested in learning how to use AI in their roles in their business 100%." Because just like we've talked about, businesses can't find people that have these skills. Neither can these business groups. So that will, you know, they'll put you on a stage as at the next available opening or maybe even bump somebody because their leaders or the their members want to know this stuff and they can't satisfy that demand. What about when we transcend local um local uh meetups and local groups and we want to do some online things? Um maybe we can talk about podcasting and other kinds of content and what your thoughts are on on on starting with that as well. Yeah. So, I had never done I'd been a guest, but I'd never hosted my own podcast before. Um, and this is what they'll always tell you. Look, the first couple episodes, your first is your worst is what I tell everybody. So, the advice would be just get started in whatever excuse or well, it's complicated. None of that, especially with AI there. I mean, there's AI tools now that as long as you record the content, it will produce it. It'll throw in uh pre-roll, midroll, it'll throw in all of those types of things for you. And these the beautiful thing about generative AI tools is a they're easy to learn. Most of these tools are designed for you to achieve some level of proficiency with them in 15 minutes or less. So there is no big learning curve. So please don't be intimidated by that. Secondly, cost. Well, Chris, how much does it cost? I mean, $20 a month for a chat G chat GPT account, $20 a month for an idiogram account. like they're they're all priced to to be very accessible for you, not for like I got to get my company to approve it. Go spend the money, start playing with the tools. I guarantee opportunities are going to open up for you that without that you're not the person with that, you're the obvious candidate. Well, I'm going to throw some other wisdom in here and I just from being in this world for a long time with a lot of thought leaders and looking for them and discerning and stuff. Um I think that there are a couple o opportunities when you feel comfortable enough that you want to um create content for the world. There's really in my mind three obvious buckets of types of content you can create. First one is the written word. And what's great about the written word is AI can absolutely help you enhance that. You know, you if anybody follows me on the socials, I'm writing one or two times a week. I'm sharing stories. Uh I'm engaging with community. Um and I see a lot of my peers also do this. And sometimes they'll add images or they'll add short little videos of like something cool they've discovered with with tool X, right? And if they start doing that consistently with written word and images and and videos, all of a sudden more people start following them because they they find that stuff really interesting. And right now there's this massive desire to learn. Next level up is to get comfortable enough to actually um consider starting either a podcast or a YouTube channel. And the benefit of a YouTube channel is extremely big because YouTube will find you an audience that's interested in your topic if you do it well. And I will tell you that this is a little side secret. A lot of people that put on conferences and a lot of people that have really successful podcasts are seeking experts on that platform. It's a sourcing platform. So that's what I want you to think about is like that's a place where people are looking for experts and if you can get in front of those people's audiences and Chris you know this you're going to an event soon I host an event you get a lot of value when you're up on a stage would you agree with that 100% it's off the charts and then all of a sudden people want to work with you now on the podcasting thing um there's two sides to it there's the solo episodes and there's the interview episodes I'd love you to share a little bit about how you're using this content Because let's be intellectually honest, it was because Chris was on another podcast that I listen to that he's on this podcast and it's because he also has a podcast that I chose to subscribe to that he's on this podcast. So, why don't you share a little bit of the strategy that you've done with your show? So, listen, the easiest way to get access to an expert is reach out and say, "Hey, I I would like for you to be a guest on my podcast. It's amazing." And I know everybody's probably heard this before. It's true. So for me it was part of my own AI journey. I wanted to reach out to people who honestly I wanted to just ask them questions that were interesting to me about how are you doing that and then what tool are you like all those kinds of questions. Come to find out everybody else had those same questions of course. So you don't have to be the expert and you know like that everybody's expecting you to have all the answers if all you do is ask the right questions. Well Chris I don't know what questions to ask. use Chad GBT, right? Like that. That's actually how I started. I started with 20 questions and I would pick four or five and we just kind of go there and then allow your own curiosity to go off script. Hey, I'm more interested in that. Like Michael's doing that in his podcast. Like let's dig in here. And it's if you're interested in it and you're in you're in marketing or you know in in sales, whatever your your niche is, others are going to have very similar questions. And again, that's that that marriage of business understanding and the tools that makes you uh the expert in the room for sure. Okay. So, real quick question. How did you start? You said you've never really had a podcast until what, 2023? Is that when you started this show? Yep. The other show. So, how did you begin? Cuz people sometimes don't know, you know, they've faced some of these challenges. I don't have an audience yet. How in the world is anybody going to give me any time of the day? Like what what did you do in the beginning? Did you just tap your existing network? I I did tap my existing network and it was still early so you know every everybody knew who the AI person was in their group or their network because there weren't a lot of people talking about it. Um that was it was a lot easier than you'd think. Now of course the first couple times uh you know I'm a little nervous and that sort of thing. um it doesn't come through and especially if you don't if if you allow the conversation to just evolve and this is my this may not be best practice but this is what works for me. You allow the conversation to just evolve. Um people end up reaching out saying hey great episode and you're like oh really well let me do it again. And the key like with anything in success or business just keep doing it. Just keep showing up. Keep showing up. There's so many people out there that you can get access to if you preface it by I'm a podcast host. It's amazing. Okay, so so far let's just kind of explore what we've talked about. We started with, you know, start with your, you know, inside the business or inside, you know, with a small group of clients if you're a soloreneur. um and really just kind of get your chops and start really documenting what you're learning as you're learning it and just your mindset is I'm just a little further along than they are, right? That's really the truth, right? But then we we explored how over time all of a sudden people look to you because most people remember who brought them into something new and exciting as kind of like the person who kind of brought them on board, right? And that gets you some some kudos down the road that opens doors for you, right? And we talked about how that could lead to all sorts of interesting opportunities. And then we talked about how maybe you should consider um teaching formally other people inside the business how to do this or even your staff if you're the owner of the business like I am, right? And really dial it in. And um you know what we really didn't talk about is how do we refine our craft if we want to be an expert? Like let's talk about that a little bit, right? Because there's one thing to be an expert, but in order to be an expert, a lot of us know we've got to put the hours in to become an expert. So, you know, do you advocate don't be an expert, just be a little further ahead and others will credit you as an expert or do you advocate develop expertise? I'm just curious what your thoughts are. It's a great question and I'll tell you the way that I look at it is things are changing in the business landscape. chat GPT for sure. Then these generative AI tools, agents are the big topic of 2025. Vibe marketing, if anybody's heard that term, right? And it's this concept of of introducing AI into as much of your process as possible. I I me personally, my KBY index, I'm a high factf finder, high quick start. For me, immersion was important. Listen, there's so much free education out there, but the challenge is uh there's a lot of noise and not a ton of signal. This podcast, any podcast that's gone beyond, you know, a handful of episodes, they're probably uh they're probably understanding the topic well enough for you to be able to take nuggets away from every episode. And again, it's free. However, you could be the greatest in the world at this stuff, but if somebody's like, "Oh, my uncle Joe knows AI." Companies like, "No, listen." Sad state of affairs, but there needs to be some sort of an endorsement or uh certification or acknowledgement that this individual has followed a uh you know, a set process to become a quote unquote expert or master at this and they have completed that that circuit of training. and they have now received that acknowledgement that certification whatever it is. So I would encourage you look all the all the LinkedIn free courses as many as you can all the Udemy the cheap stuff they give you that certificates of completion those things matter right watching a thousand YouTube videos doesn't so I wouldn't say don't do the YouTube videos but also have built into your growth plan something that's going to show some sort of acknowledgement that I have completed a course of study on prompting uh on hey Jen on idiogram whatever the tools are that work for your business. It It will be the point of distinction between you and the other candidates for that gig, that job, that client. Yeah. And um folks, chief officer.com does do certification. They're one of the few that you can check out and we can maybe talk about that a little bit later. I advocate professional development always. Um we have the AI business society. we give you like a membership thing, but we don't really certify anybody because we just know this place is changing too fast. But, you know, there is something to that and I do know that that matters. That's a social proof thing, right? Or it's a it's a it's just an instant credibility kind of thing. But I want to come back to having a mindset of continuous learning. What's your thoughts on that? Because I'm telling you, if people stopped learning six months ago, don't you agree they're completely out of date at this point? I mean, if they're using the same old stuff they were using six months ago, because like it's changing almost every week. So, that's one of the top questions we get from people. How do I keep up with all the tools? And here's here's what I would recommend. Pick a tool in a category and use that tool. Well, well, wait a minute. This one does this. Don't worry, your tool will also have that. The the the com the the competition the moat that exists with any type of feature in a I don't know, an image generation tool or a video avatar tool, they don't last. this the the acceleration and velocity of of development of these tools is you cannot keep up. So if you've got some FOMO about I need to like test all the tools and everything, go watch, you know, one of the videos where they're using it, but you don't need find one. Get good at that tool and like that would be my advice. Don't get caught up in all these tools and you being too worried about it. However, 6 months ago, completely different landscape. Oh, I tried that tool 6 months ago. Have you tried it recently? It's a different tool now. It's so much better. Um, but honestly, just get started with something. Yeah, I'm with you on that. And if you decide it's going to be chat GPT, keep up on what they keep rolling out, right? Because as of this recording just a few days ago, they radically improved their image generation. And most people won't use chat GPT because their images look real sloppy. But now they look really good. Now they're they're a challenger to idoggram and idoggram just released 3.0 which is I mean it's like it's this land race and it's good for us as the users and consumers to be aware of what these things are capable of because the the leaps forward that they're making are quite large. And if you think you really know because you used it a few months ago, like what Chris said is, you know, you probably don't. Like for example, you probably don't know that Claude has web search, right? Or you probably don't know that chat GPT has projects, right? Depending on if you're using Claude, right? Cuz there's just so much innovation that's happening. Or you probably don't know that these things now have vision models built into them, right? Or that they can actually talk and talk back to you. I mean, like, it's it's just crazy. And that's the reason why I think I used to say that the social media industry was the fastest moving industry on the planet, which it was. But guess what? Now this AI industry, right? And it is an industry because it's a multi-billion dollar industry is radically changing absolutely everything. And I think the key is just to go out there and experiment and try these things. Would you agree? 100%. And maybe do it in a community. You mentioned your AI business society like plug in with other people doing this. The the benefits of that are you're going to learn about things from people who are focused on the same application environments as you are. But also there's this collective knowledge. You don't have to go out and test all the tools because there's thousands of people in a community and they're they're the ones that like 50 of them went and tested this tool and they're all saying the same thing. the the network that you can build in these communities is um it's a shortcut really to learning this stuff and then you find a scenario where oh I've never used that before. You go you've got some place to go back to and say hey guys what do you think about this and you don't have to spend hours doing research or hoping that you've got the right tool selected. You'll get people saying oh we we use this one regularly. It does this or that. Does it do this? It does. Okay, great. I'm going to use that. I want to say a couple words to the people that are that right now are saying, "Yeah, but there's already an expert in my industry." I'm just going to say this, okay? I can tell you having been 15 years in the social marketing industry. Not those people aren't going to be here forever. And there's so much more opportunity, right? Just cuz there is one person right now maybe who you think is crushing it. There are people that just for whatever reason aren't going to connect with that person, but they're going to connect with you because you have a different lived experience. You have a different way of communicating and there are people that are going to connect with you. And there are still like to my surprise almost every month I discover new people that are experts in Instagram or YouTube or something else because they have a unique world perspective that they bring to the table. And what do you want to say to those people who feel like it's too late? So people say, "Well, AI is like the wild west." And I thought about that. I was like, "Well, the wild west, you know, you think about you go out of the saloon and there's carts and people and no, it's not like that at all. It's more like the frontier, right? There's nobody there. So trust me, blue ocean all day long for anybody who just raises their hand and say, "Hey, I'm willing to share my my my knowledge of AI with you or your company." All right. Um where do you see all this going? Like let's just fast forward a couple years from now. Um it couple years from now is like a decade in other industries if not more. Um agents are a big deal. uh they are going to they're the ones agents will replace the jobs. People said, "Oh, AI is going to replace my job." No, I think the more accurate would be somebody who knows your job and knows AI. They're just a better candidate, right? However, understanding uh agentic application in businesses, you're going to realize, wow, like we just don't need as many people. Now, what does that mean? I I don't have those answers, but here's what I can tell you. the if you know AI and you're in the business, you're not going to be on the top of the chopping block list. Like they want to keep you around. Hey Chris, this agent thing, can we get you to look into it, right? Like you are going to continue to have economic viability even if the robots start doing most of the work. You're their person. You're their interpreter between our business needs and what's going on in that landscape. But it's it Michael, you just referenced it. Dolly 3, no bueno. Hey, chat GBT images, incredible. In in one day, things can go from it's okay to oh my gosh, I don't need this role anymore because I can go and type a prompt and get uh world-class output from that. It's it's not an option anymore, folks. It's just really not. Chris, if people want to connect with you on the socials, where do you want to send them? And if they want to check out your um certification and training also, where do you want to send them? Yeah. Great example of how we're using generative AI for content creation is my LinkedIn profile. My name's Chris Dagel. They call me Dr. Dagel, but if you go to just type in Dr. Dagel, I'll show up. You'll see so much. And it's humanlike output. It's not synthetic. It's not ob. Oh, that's obvious. They used AI for that. Um and that's what's possible with these tools. So, that's a great place. We provide a lot of content on there. Um, and Michael, I've actually done something special for this audience. I know like big privilege to be here and I want to make sure that everybody that's listening to me gets uh something special. So, if they go to chief officer.comststeels, Michael's last name. Um, look at the podcast, you'll be able to spell it. We've got a ton of resources there. They're all free. Um, we have a fantastic prompt fault studio tool that we built that 2000 and these aren't like these are you'll see when you get there. We've got tons of free training. We train all the time. We record it and we productize it. The stuff that you guys are going to get access to are free. Obviously, any of the tools that I've mentioned, even in passing, I'll make sure that there's links there for them. And these are tools that again, I'm non-technical. These are tools that I use that literally while you're uh sitting there having a cup of coffee, you could go from zero to hero in 15 minutes and you're like, "Oh, I'm going to use this at work today." So, tons of free resources there. chief officer.comststeels. Chris Dagel, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing my pleasure. Pleasure for sure. Thanks. Safe travels to the event.