Skill Beats Hype: Practical Ways to Augment Your Work with AI

Meg Smith (00:10)
Hello and welcome to the AI Advantage show. I'm here with my co-host, Mark Smith. Really well, thank you. And in case you don't recognize my voice, my name is Meg Smith. I'm actually Mark's wife. And we are really excited to bring you a new show, a new format called the AI Advantage. This is something we've been thinking about all year. We've actually recorded the first and second episodes before a few months ago.

Mark Smith (00:16)
Hey hey, how are ya?

Meg Smith (00:39)
And then we got really busy writing a book, which was a cool project. ⁓ but now we've hit send to the printers and we've got a little bit of time back. And we realized that the reason that we first wanted to do this show, the AI advantage is probably more important now than it was even a few months ago. and that really is because we see AI becoming more and more part of conversations, not just around, you know, the, the, ⁓ coffee machine at work or in our case.

know, teams meetings, virtual conversations, but even in personal situations in our, you know, we went on a family holiday and we, became a big part of the conversations there. It's everywhere. And we know that it's coming with a bit of fear and uncertainty as well. What does this mean for me? How it's going to change the way that I work? And one of the things that we hear over and over again is this feeling of

Am I going to become obsolete? This fear of becoming obsolete and the feeling that everyone else is already way ahead of you. And it's too late to get started. And the reason that we first started talking about the AI advantage as an idea was we wanted to bust that myth a little bit, because what we actually see is the people that are able to get motivated to use AI to help them, whatever they're doing, right? Help them do whatever they're doing.

better, more, faster, higher quality. Those people are getting an advantage. And why isn't that an advantage something that everyone can have? And it feels like that feeling of like, ⁓ everyone's too far ahead of me. I'm too far behind. It's actually a bit of a myth. And we can see that in the user data coming through from Microsoft and from Google that says about, you know, 10 % of people are becoming power users. They are using AI multiple times a day to help them with lots of different things.

But I think this feeling of everyone's ahead and there must be this big ramp up is a myth because actually the data shows it's not a ramp, it's a cliff. So about 10 % of people are using it a lot. 90 % of people are still, you know, very early days of experimentation. So as you know, we've become people who are writing books and learning ourselves how AI works in the workplace and for ourselves personally, we want to share what we're learning and help you think about, um,

You know, how can you get ready to be future ready for the workplace of the future? And I mean, also most importantly, because we know that the world needs more AI podcasts, right?

Mark Smith (03:08)
Totally and I suppose that's where we aim to be a little different right? I feel that we are moving into what we're calling the intelligence age. I don't like to use the word the AI age. I like intelligence age because I think that more than just AI is going to be front and center for us in the very near future. And I'm talking about robotics, I'm talking about advancements in biomedicines and

So I think it's gonna affect so many areas of our life, not just our health, our mental health, our financial health, and to some degrees our identity. part of it, so what we wanted to do is not make this a show about yet, you know, what's the latest trends and tools and stuff, although, hey, I might drop one or two of those in myself, but really can we move from where, you know, you have a phone and that phone is pretty much an extension of you.

in your life, right? You are very much connected to it. If I took your phone off you for a month, I would be interested to see how you would operate as a person, because it's such an extension of us. And I suggest that AI is also gonna become that extension to us, just like the phone has been in the past. So therefore, how do you take advantage of that? How do you maximize that? How do you move to that being

such a part of what you're doing that you can leverage it and get the best out of it. How can you extend your human skills with AI so you can live a better life at the end of the day, right? Do what you wanna do. Scale the things that you wanna scale as an individual, not just necessarily for the organization you work with. And so that led us on creating this

this show where we can unpack, can take your questions and really think about how do I as a person augment AI into my life.

Meg Smith (04:56)
And your approach and getting excited about their future, like, that's your personality type, right? Like I, I remember we were in London, it was about 2018, I think, and you were reading, um, the book by Brad Smith, Tools and Weapons. Um, and you were so excited and I was so terrified. Yeah, we're very different in the way that we approach things in the way that we learn. Um, so we want to share a little bit of that too, and hear from, from, you know, you, if you're listening.

⁓ how are you getting past what we, well, I've certainly felt overwhelmed in this space and overwhelm, of information of that feeling of fear. ⁓ and I, for me, like getting into AI, ⁓ I came for me out of, you know, a career in technology and advertising technology where I was what I would call AI adjacent. I worked for Google. So I was able to talk about machine learning and how that worked in the context of advertising.

Right towards the end of my time at Google, Gmail was starting to write emails or finish your sentences with AI. So I'd had a bit of an adjacent experience of AI. So I wouldn't say I was completely out of it, but I can still remember how I felt when I first saw chat GPT work in November, 2022. I was on maternity leave, literally holding the baby, sleep deprived, brain not quite firing how it used to.

And I saw it and I just felt a full body experience of dread of thinking I've got six months left of my maternity leave. I'm out of the workforce. What is it going to look like when I get back? Am I going to have a job? well, you can, I, this is again, the difference between us, right? First day it's available. Mark's like, yeah, great. I'm into it.

Mark Smith (06:33)
What do you mean you sort?

Meg Smith (06:42)
I'm like, what are we, what is this? So you called me over. I was sitting at the dining table and you called me into your office, which is just off our dining table and said, look at this, look at, think, you you did a prompt that generated an article. And I thought, if this is what it can do, why would they, why would I be paid to write emails? Why would I be paid to write reports? That's what I was thinking, you know? And then, yeah, that's a really good point too, that it wasn't that I was like,

Where did I go from that fear? Probably, I probably sat and wallowed in my fear for a little bit. And then it was the, an intentional decision to learn as much as I could about generative AI and how it worked and start doing fundamentals. There's a couple of, you know, all the tech vendors offer them and there's great videos on YouTube to say, what is AI? How does it work? That's where I started and started

The more that I went from a, my gosh, this is scary and I might become irrelevant. Once I flipped that into a, how might it help me? How might I use AI? How might I understand it? And flipped into curiosity that allowed me to, I guess, unlock. I felt paralyzed when I was afraid and the curiosity was the thing that a little bit of understanding, a little bit of application at a time, I went from curiosity to actually now I'm a self-described AI optimist.

Mark Smith (08:07)
Yeah, I love it. I love it. And that word curiosity, I think is so, so important and key to, you know, how you approach something and how you make it part of what you do. And so I am the type of person that doesn't really get excited about theory or I don't get excited about hyperbole.

Right, where people think that this is, know, they talk about AI, for example, as theory. It can do this, like, but they don't do it like, I have done this. And so I've really, lately had this mindset of, it's not about knowledge, it's about skill. There's already all the world's knowledge. Google has made that available, you know, to everybody as part of their mission. But I think that what we need to do is how do I apply skill? And the thing is with applied skill is practice. It is,

when you prompt, it's been able to iterate beyond that prompt, beyond that bad answer. You know, I've just been recently using Copilot with GPT-5 and I gave it a bunch of documents as a reference. I was writing a response, a proposal to an organization. asked it to map out the timeline based on what the customer had requested. And I'm like, this timeline doesn't match at anything that I read in there. And I said to her, so,

I could have thrown up my arms and said, it's a useless tool. But I went back and said, hang on a second, I know that's not the timeline. You made that up. Please provide the absolute information. Go and research it. Came back, gave me the exact accurate answer, right? So it's about this prompting and engagement that is much more than just what is sometimes referred to as one shot prompts. You prompt it like you'd put a question into Google, expect the answer that's gonna come, that's it, and you're done, right? Where it's much more conversational and engaging.

You know, right now there's so many areas of my life as somebody, you know, that I've mentioned before on my podcast being dyslexic and having a work colleague say to me once, thanks Jason, that when he read something I'd written, let's say an email to him or something like that, he said, it makes my eyes bleed, right? And it's cause my mind knows what I'm saying, but often it wouldn't come out my fingers on the keyboard. In fact, I can see stuff that I'm typing on screen. I'm like,

that's not even what I'm thinking. And yet that's what's typed out on screen. So it's just the my brain works. So you can imagine how much AI has helped me. I can draft my email and then use features within the AI tool I'm using to actually redraft that email and make sense of my sometimes gibberish. And so I find it such an advantage to me. I'm taking on tasks

in business now that I would never have contemplated in the past that involved a lot of writing, a lot of analysis because I never had the skills, but my skill in communication plus this has now enabled me to do so much more than I could do before. And so I'm adapting and I think that's one of the key skills that we all need to learn in this new period of time that we're going into in our careers and the way things are going to work is adaptability.

right, is the ability to adapt to the changes that come. One thing that, and it's probably part of my personality type, is I love change, right? When Microsoft moves the navigation from, let's say, the waffle menu on the top left and they drop it down to the bottom left, and I hear people going, you know, they've changed the UI again. I'm like, cool, they've obviously done some analysis, this is a better way of doing it. I'm gonna adapt as soon as possible to the new way.

not try and leverage the way I've always done it because I'm gonna get stuck in my ways. And so I think it just opens up massive amount of opportunities for how we're gonna work going forward, how we're going to do what we do and bring joy ultimately into our lives.

Meg Smith (12:01)
I just want to say too that like, I don't think I've heard many people say that they love change. Like I'm happy for you, but I'm definitely of the camp of like, no, like keep it predictable. Keep it. ⁓ you know, let me know. I want to know how it works and I want to know how to get the right answer. yeah, adaptability for me is a skill I've been developing to go, what are the ways of thinking that will serve me even as things keep changing? Because I can't know.

what all my knowledge has doesn't stay relevant for as long. yeah, shifting into the skill development focus has been really helpful. Also just wanted to touch on what you said about that whole idea of gaining the knowledge for yourself, gaining the experience for yourself of working with AI helps you push past those kind of myths or secondhand opinions. So take your proposal writing example, right? So I've heard people

Um, kind of take that both positive and negative when they don't have an applied, um, experience of trying to get co-pilot or chat to be, to help them write a really good proposal that would actually have the outcome that you want, which is a, a deal. You want to get a deal from it. Some people, the op, the, the leader say who is great. Yep. I'm all bought into AI. Just get, just get the AI to do it. Just get the AI to write the proposal.

You know, they then in that one sentence completely dismiss everything that you've put into it, which is based on all of your experience, the negotiations you've led, the projects you've been on, the learning you've done, the certification you've had. What have you just read this week that's helped? You know, it dismisses all of that human knowledge and skill and experience. And so you just get the AI to do it. Anyone that has tried to get AI to write them a proposal knows the more you put in the higher quality of the output and the more you bring.

You know, concepts and frameworks, it's a lot. takes a lot to get a really good proposal out of it. If that's your goal. The other side of it is a criticism. you just got AI to write the proposal for you. Also gives that person a way to say they haven't actually had a go. They haven't actually been, you know, using their own skills with AI. They just borrowing secondhand opinions.

Mark Smith (14:13)
Yeah, and this is a lot of people have, particularly on social media, I see it a lot of it on X, this whole, what we call AI fingerprint, right? Which is phrases, it might be the ⁓ dash, the long dash, it might be the religious use of the Oxford comma, but particularly there's a lot of phrases that really, you know these are becoming AI phrases and the more you use AI, the more you become aware of these things. And you get these people going, having a negative opinion on AI, right?

Meg Smith (14:39)
I gotcha. Yeah.

Mark Smith (14:41)
about it and I'm just like, hang on. It's better to be experimenting and you might set up a few critics might get a little upset that you used AI, whoop-de-doo. Just give them the middle finger and carry on experimenting, right? Do not care what people are saying. There's a big difference because there'll always be critics and then there'll be people that are doers and you will evolve, you will experiment, you will get better and better and better and better while the critics are going, mm.

we don't like AI, you know, and so I encourage you experiment, you know, multiple times on multiple different ways that you're doing your daily life. As I say, can you get AI to the point that you're as dependent on it as you are your phone?

Meg Smith (15:26)
One of the best ways that I have really let AI be the thought partner and retain that role of thought leader, which is one of the tactics to stop, I guess, having just generic content be what AI helps you produce and have it be actual content that sounds like you and is based on your thoughts, is to get it to ask you 20 questions, play 20 questions. And that way, AI is prompting you.

You say, so I did this ⁓ to write a, have a bit of fun with Copilot to write a blog about traveling in Europe when I was about to go back to Europe earlier this year. I'm really lucky to have traveled a lot in Europe and I was a bit of a fun game to play with Copilot, but also just to like refresh myself about some of the travel mindsets. Cause I hadn't traveled for a while. It was so fun. And I told it at the start, said, Copilot, you're going to help me write a blog. I'm going to write a blog about travel in Europe. I'm about to go for work.

ask me 20 questions and it was, and I gave time. was the other key ingredient. Like this was not a 30 seconds later and I've got a blog post. I could have, it totally could have, but it would have been generic and not sound like me at all. what it did was give me pause and prompt me to go on lots of different questions. You know, what do I like? What's a really great cultural experience I've had made? had, I had fun walking down memory lane on that one. And then the, the blog that it produced was probably like.

85 % in my voice. And there were just a few things that I then went back and changed to say like, oh yeah, this is how I would slightly personalize it further. But that's a lot higher than the say 40, 45 % you might've got otherwise.

Mark Smith (17:06)
You know, it reminds me of electricity and why I like to liken AI to electricity is that, you know, when people go, you used AI to write this. that looks like you used AI to do that. And I'm like, that's like going, did you use electricity to cook your dinner? you didn't light a wood fire? You didn't get a old gas, you know, burner and you didn't do it the traditional way? ⁓ my gosh. And it's like,

I think it's gonna become that stupid a phrase in future, you used AI to do this, right? As I say, don't mind those people. Let them think that they are more superior and at a higher level to you. You get on, you use the tech, you make it part of you, and soon those folks will realize they'll wake up to a world that has moved on that they haven't adapted to. And so I think that

Meg Smith (17:58)
the next.

Mark Smith (17:59)
Yeah, don't let it stop you trying, trying, trying the tech.

Meg Smith (18:04)
That actually reminded me of, know, when we walked the Camino de Santiago, which is an incredible experience if you ever get the chance to do it in your life from just inside the border of France across Spain. We did it for about a month. It was on a sabbatical year and that, yes, it's a pilgrim route. So it has, it's steeped in history and in ⁓ particularly in Catholicism. We just did it.

Mark Smith (18:19)
53 days.

Meg Smith (18:28)
for our own reasons and we did it our own way. It's called the way anecdotally, the journey. And along the way, we met people who tried to impose their rules on us or on the other people. They were judging people for the way they were walking. was, know, getting a taxi was cheating. Well, we met a 91 year old Nana who was walking as far as she could every day. And then when she couldn't walk any further, she would get a taxi to wherever her bag had been sent to.

I didn't think that was cheating. Please tell me, please find someone in this world who can say to a nine year old grandmother who worked as, walked as far as she could in a day that she's cheating and hers doesn't count. Or sending your bags. People want to give you their rules, but everyone's on their own journey. So do it your way. And as Mark said, let them.

Mark Smith (19:15)
I like it. So we've come up with the thing called the Intelligence Age Framework and we're going to, the next 12 weeks, we're gonna go through one of those items each time. The show is going to be about practical human skills with AI and how do we augment AI into our lives. We're gonna do, it's gonna be us riffing backwards and forwards. We have another show that's coming out called AI Unfiltered, which is where we bring on guests to the show.

But this one's gonna be Meganai riffing. We'll take your questions and answers as you submit them. We're really wanting this to be a safe space where you can, you know, if you don't want us to mention your name, that's fine. We'd still take your question, get it on here and engage with you. We're setting up a WhatsApp group and we're going to, I'm gonna put on screen here now the QR code and the show notes. We'll put a hyperlink to it.

I will vet you getting in, right? I'm not gonna let just numpties get in there because I want this to be a collective engagement and really create a community around helping each other out. me, I know we've got this concept in Maori of our core.

Meg Smith (20:25)
Yeah, and in Tiao Māori and the Māori worldview, my favourite word or concept is ako. And it means both to learn and to teach. It's the same word that we use. And that has been something I've seen over and over again in my career and what we build into the programmes that we run, which is this idea of being humble and curious that we can learn from anyone. And as we teach people, then we help them learn as well.

Mark Smith (20:54)
I love it, I love it. So subscribe, we're gonna post this on Spotify, YouTube, it'll be of course in all your normal apps. If you're listening to the audio version, know that there's also a video version, which of course will be published on Spotify and YouTube. you wanna, because over time we're probably gonna share more things, what we're seeing, how it's working, how we're augmenting AI into our lives and how listeners are feeding back about how they're augmenting.

Share with your friends, colleagues. We really want this to be a collaborative podcast. you know, we wanna learn, know, true to that word, AQAW. We wanna learn as much as we wanna teach in what we're doing here.

Meg Smith (21:33)
Yeah. And just to give you an idea of what we'll be covering in next week's episode. So the first skill in our framework is digital fluency. And earlier this year, we both attended and spoke at a conference in New Zealand and there was an awesome keynote speaker there, Brett Gilbertson from Australia. And he talked about how we stopped training digital skills. We've stopped investing in it for the last 25 years. And I love this quote. I actually found it in my notes the other days. So shout out for still writing handwritten notes.

cause you, you know, hang onto them. You might find some gold there. He said, we can't binge watch our way out of a 25 year digital skills training deficit. And I love that because I've got so much value out of online courses. learn online in a mixed medium super well, but he's so right. can't just say, we've made a whole playlist of videos to help people there. It's got to be this balance of sharing the knowledge and applying the skill.

digital fluency is an area that is going to become increasingly important in, you know, as we use AI more and more. So that's going to be next week's topic. Join the WhatsApp group, the links in the show notes. And thank you so much for being here in our first episode. can't wait to hear your questions and yeah, get into the next topic. Have a wonderful week.