AI is your friend (promise) | Rich King Gawlas | Ep. 84

[JP] (0:00 - 0:08)

Y2K. The only thing I cared about on Y2K was he took away the KFC buffet. That's the only thing that happened, baby.

It's gone. Forever.

[Rich] (0:15 - 0:15)

Got it, got it.

[Dillon] (0:17 - 0:29)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:30 - 0:32)

What's going on, people? Hello.

[Dillon] (0:33 - 0:54)

And I've got Rich here. Rich, do you want to say hi? What is happening?

Hello. What is happening? Nobody knows these days.

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Rich, thank you so much for being here and for giving us a hook right at the beginning there.

What is happening? But why don't you tell us, introduce yourself a little bit, where you're from and where you're at now?

[Rich] (0:54 - 1:19)

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. So, Rich King Gawlas, I am based in Toronto, Silicon Valley North.

I have a four-year background in customer success, truly loving what I do, and have dovetailed a lot of that work, most recently, into AI education and training CS teams, as well as other revenue leaders, and how to actually use AI in your day-to-day. It's been a ton of fun.

[Dillon] (1:20 - 1:36)

It's all anybody ever talks about. So you're an opportunist in the best possible way, because I do believe I am a natural-born AI cynic. As JP knows, I think the first conversation I ever had on wax, so to speak, about AI was with JP, and it didn't go well.

[JP] (1:36 - 1:38)

Well, he is from Philadelphia.

[Dillon] (1:40 - 1:55)

Jeez, JP. Anyway, Rich, I want to hear, through the guise of our only question we ask, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? I want to know why AI is where you landed in helping CS professionals.

[Rich] (1:56 - 2:24)

All right. So the thing that's on my mind, and the thing that is the reason why I'm doing this, is that there is a huge knowledge gap between those who are actually using AI in a meaningful way, and those who won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. And it's a chasm filled with tons of misunderstanding, fear, narcissism, bravado.

Some people are like, I'm just going to replace my whole team using AI, and it's just, I think we're approaching it the wrong way.

[Dillon] (2:25 - 2:36)

Interesting. So that is both what's on your mind, and why you made this pivot to helping teams do this. So what's the solution?

Obviously, you're going to say education, but let's take it a level deeper, right?

[Rich] (2:37 - 3:19)

Yeah. For me, the solution to this, you're right, is absolutely education. But a lot of it actually has to do, more importantly, with experimentation.

Where we're at right now with AI is, this is the minimum viable product of the entire industry. We're seeing a ton of bugs. We're seeing a ton of misfires and hallucinations with AI.

And I get it. So there's a cohort of people who have already written it off. They're like, it's horrible.

It's not working for me. But from my perspective, it's all about experimentation. You just got to try it, and try it again, and try it again.

And using it one day, and then using it the next day, you're going to see some potential differences. And I think that's how we start to train ourselves to use this tool in a meaningful way.

[Dillon] (3:20 - 3:44)

And so I think it's an interesting, this idea of persistence is classic, right? We talk about it all the time. When we have decided we need to learn something, or it is the future, it is an inevitability.

How do we convince folks that aren't already convinced that AI is the future, and where we need to go? And you need to stop sitting on the fence, and you just need to power through.

[Rich] (3:45 - 4:42)

Yeah, it's the same philosophy you can approach with any customer success journey, a customer journey you do. So it's minimizing that time to first value. You need quick wins.

You need to figure out the little things that I think will work for you. And I think everyone's heard of the usual use cases of using chat GPT to write your email. And a lot of people will be like, that's not useful to me, because I know how to write my own email.

And that's fine. But imagine using chat GPT to draft emails in your communications with your client and the cadence about news articles that get published about your client. Imagine AI being able to generate an email that has all the top news items about your client, great conversation point, something you can fire off, but maybe something you're not thinking about top of mind.

So you can just have something like that run in the background, or using it to do new feature updates. Product team tells you about a new feature. You're sitting there trying to draft this email.

You can use these little use cases with chat GPT just as an example to build out more meaningful communications, I think.

[Dillon] (4:43 - 5:04)

Yeah, maybe a way to think about it is a lot of writers or folks that are going to write an email, they'll say, the last thing I want to do is look at a blank screen with the cursor blinking. And so this breaks down that first barrier for you. But JP, actually, you write a lot more than I do.

Why don't you talk about the way you look at AI? And maybe are you using it at all in in the work you do today?

[JP] (5:06 - 6:28)

Yeah, I think the important thing with the eyes is always going to be the context. Just like any data, like, what's the context of what we're trying to do? And I think, Rich, I really liked the way that you stated the gap.

That was extreme, right? Where you have people see them, like, for example, on LinkedIn, they'll make these posts with LinkedIn, I mean, with nothing with AI, excuse me. And it's pretty obvious that like, you just used AI.

But like, even worse that you didn't even check it. Like, that's the part that's there. Or like, they comment on something.

I've really seen people comment on my stuff. And it's a recap of what I said. It's like, you realize you don't sound like a human being talking.

So in that sense, that's a regression. You're taking a tool that can do a lot of things. And because you lack maybe the creativity, or because you lack a way to really just like contextualize things, you are going to use this in a certain way.

And I think if we can come the middle ground is if we can just agree that like, it's a tool some people look at and they're like, it's going to take over the world. When I was a kid, people were like, why 2k? The only thing I cared about on why 2k was if the ATMs were going to start shooting out money.

Now that's what I was about. But it didn't happen. All right.

[Rich] (6:29 - 6:32)

Stand out there with a sack of money or sack empty pillowcase waiting.

[JP] (6:32 - 8:09)

Right. The only thing that happened to why 2k was he took away the KFC buffet. That's the only thing that happened, baby.

It's gone forever. Right. But I'll say with the AI, the biggest thing to me is the context.

So like, when I go to use AI, the instance in which I use AI a lot actually, is since my job can be fairly technical in nature, what I may do is actually put in a concept and say, can you explain this concept to me in a simple way? So I'm using it for learning. You are taking something where maybe I have to look at all these articles or different things where it may take me a lot of time.

So simplify it for me. Then even if I do want to look it up later on, like I have more context, like it can be really powerful if you want to use it as a tool for learning or use it as a tool for doing things that are like very rote, things that like maybe I want to help me make an outline, but like I'll do the writing. Right.

Well, some people just want to be like, write me a whole article and that's not going to really work. Right. So I think like for me, even though I don't necessarily use it like as often as I'd like to, I see a lot of value if you're a person who's looking at it more like I want to leverage this as a tool to help me learn, to help me be better, as opposed to, I want to use this as a tool to like basically out of laziness, like work smarter, not harder, but sometimes people are just like work lazier.

And that's where I think people fall off with AI.

[Rich] (8:10 - 8:41)

Absolutely. And I think it's, it's one of those things that I think the sort of hype train is starting to come slow down a little bit. I think it's starting to cool off.

Everyone's not nearly as terrified of AI. And I think we're finally reaching that tipping point of like, okay, this is a tool just like Excel, just like Teams, just like Slack, just like anything else. And how do I figure out how to use this in a meaningful way that's going to help me be more productive, me be more creative, me be better at what I do.

You're right. I use the same thing where I use it as a learning tool for me. I wrote all my bullet points for this podcast using ChatGPT.

[JP] (8:42 - 8:48)

Oh no, bullet points. Hey, ChatGPT, sponsorship, baby. What's up?

[Dillon] (8:48 - 8:50)

Exactly. We're going to have to bleep them out every single time.

[JP] (8:50 - 8:51)

Open AI. Come on, baby.

[Dillon] (8:52 - 9:07)

Yeah. Well, Rich, that is a meaty topic. We could go on this forever.

I know I had a couple more bullet points I'd love to throw out there, but we're out of time, my friend. So you're just going to have to come back for a second round. But until that time, we've got to say goodbye for now.

[Rich] (9:08 - 9:09)

Goodbye. Thanks so much for having me on today.

[Voiceover] (9:39 - 9:44)

And find us on the socials at lifetime value media. Until next time.