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The Path To Leadership
We podcast about strong leaders, loyal employees, avoiding burnout, and raising profits building strong cultures. Everyone is a leader, but the path isn't always easy. Developing critical skills to build stronger, more successful and profitable organizations.
The Path To Leadership
AI as Your New Best Colleague: Exploring Modern Workplace Automation
Ready to uncover the hidden potential of AI in your workplace? Join us as we sit down with Rob Ervin, the Digital Learning Manager at Smithfield Foods, who shares valuable insights from the recent Training Magazine Tech Learn Conference. From his journey from sports information to instructional design, Rob emphasizes the importance of teamwork and adaptability in navigating today’s fast-paced digital landscape. He also offers a peek into the development of innovative training programs , revealing how AI is quietly revolutionizing our daily operations.
Imagine AI not as a job-stealer but as your most efficient co-worker. In this episode, Rob demystifies the role of AI in business tools you're already using, from Buzzsprout to LinkedIn, and introduces the exciting new AI features in platforms like Articulate Storyline and Vyond. We discuss how to stay relevant by embracing AI and learning to input effective prompts, maximizing its potential to enhance productivity. Plus, we tackle the nuances of automating managerial tasks, emphasizing that while automation can significantly boost efficiency, it requires thoughtful integration into your workflows.
Tune in for a conversation that promises to transform your perspective on AI and its place in your professional journey.
Follow Catalyst Development on LinkedIn @catalystdevelopment, @drkatieervin, @jennascott
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Learn more about Supervisor 101 at www.cdleaders.com/supervisor101
Learn about LEADERs Institute at www.katieervin.com/leaders
Theme music by Emma Jo https://emmajo.rocks/
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Path to Leadership. I am really excited for this special episode. Today I'm going to talk to someone who's known me for quite a while. I'd say, oh, I almost hate to do the math maybe 25, almost 26 years, excited to introduce everyone to my husband. Hey Rob, how are you?
Rob Ervin:I'm good. How are you? Things are going well, I see. Happy to be part of the podcast.
Dr. Katie:Well, and I'm excited to have you on today. Anyone who knows me knows of you and our kids, and I tell stories on the podcast all the time and in real life, but today you're bringing a special conversation to light that we've been having for quite a while.
Rob Ervin:Yeah, I attended a conference this last week. It was the Training Magazine Tech Learn Conference and it was very, very focused on artificial intelligence and I walked out of there on Thursday afternoon with my head just about ready to explode. With everything that's going on in the world of artificial intelligence and we hear about it all the time, we've been using it and we don't even realize it. And it's coming, it's here, it's happening and it's time for us all to get on board. I think.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, I think you're right and it's funny because us all to get on board. I think, yeah, I think you're right and it's funny because you were at your conference and I was at my leadership Kansas sessions and you're texting me all these exciting things and you need to be using this and you need to be doing that and I'm like, just hold it, we're going to talk about when you get home. And then I was like, let's just talk about it on the podcast so we can share it with everyone. But before we get into tips and tricks other than my better half, tell everyone who you are, what you do, all of that good stuff.
Rob Ervin:Well, that's always my number one job is to be your better half, but during the day I am the digital learning manager for Smithfield Foods. You might know Smithfield. You might buy our bacon or Nathan's hot dogs or something like that. We have facilities all over the country and I'm based out of our Kansas City office here. It's one of our corporate locations. My main job is to develop online learning for our corporate employees. We have a few others around the company that develop for different parts our safety FSQA, our food safety quality assurance groups. You know they do a lot of their own training, but I kind of focus on the sort of the global reach of our corporate employees around 7,000 or so and then I work in our learning management system and just any kind of fun media video type projects that they can send my way, I'm all for it.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, and it's a massive role. I know you'll be humble about it, but I mean you take care of training development. I always tell people. People are like, what does it mean for digital learning? It's like, well, he runs Smithfield University and he works with internal customers to really deploy training programs digitally, and I mean everything from what's the one? It's not Pig 101, what's it called?
Rob Ervin:Well, we did one called Farm to Fork, which used to be an in-class kind of thing, and we'd send people out to Virginia, to our corporate location out there, and they'd spend a week learning about basically how the company, how it functions, literally from the farm to the fork and wildly popular, and we were able to turn that into an online module to assign to people who are our new hires, to give them a little bit of a idea of what all that we do and we do a lot of different things.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah. And then all the way to annual trainings, all the things that are critically important from a nature and legal standpoint. So you do all of that.
Rob Ervin:So with a lovely team underneath you teams I've ever worked on in my career. I can't say enough good things that we are focused or we're spread all over the country, but when we get everybody in the same room and we have our team meetings and I just get so jazzed up I'm ready to run through a wall after that's over. So it's a good group.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah. And so talking about the best team you've ever been on, it's so interesting. You know, I talk about everyone's path to leadership not being straight, and yours definitely was not a straight path. What, what?
Rob Ervin:do you mean?
Dr. Katie:I know, I know. So I think it's really important to start with. So your bachelor's degree is in radio and TV, right?
Rob Ervin:Right, I was a radio and TV major at Murray State University in western part of Kentucky. I wanted to be the next play-by-play voice of the St Louis Cardinals and that was it. That was all I wanted to do. And you know, as you get older you start realizing, gosh, that over there kind of seems kind of new.
Rob Ervin:So that major transitioned into college athletics and I spent several years in college athletics, working at two Division I universities as the sports information director, which is basically the PR director for the athletic departments, and so I did that for a few years and eventually found my way into government contracting and it sort of all circles back to that radio and TV broadcasting because I started doing narration, recording narration for some online learning projects that the Army at Fort Leavenworth were developing, and it became, it became sort of my thing and that transitioned to eventually becoming an instructional designer. And now I I guess I'm to where I'm supposed to be that what I always thought I'd be is a online learning developer for a major pork company. I mean, who doesn't start their life out like that? Right, it is true, that is true.
Dr. Katie:I mean that's't start their life out like that. Right, it is true, that is true. I mean that's everyone's goal. Is you know how can I get closer to the bacon? Well, maybe not everyone. Shout out to the vegans we love you.
Rob Ervin:Right right.
Dr. Katie:But it is and I think it tells a story too, and we both talk about this all the time with our kids and you know our nephews and you know it's kind of being open to the universe and what's out there and available to you, and neither of us would have taken this wild path that we took to where we are without kind of being open to what the universe was offering to us.
Rob Ervin:I think some people, you know, you come out of college and you think I want to be an accountant. I love numbers, I love doing accounting, and those folks do that for 40 years and they love going to work and going into work every day and that is fantastic. I mean, that is fantastic that you found that passion right away. But for some of us and I know you say that what do we want to be when we grow up?
Rob Ervin:Some of us, that line is very back and forth and up and down and left. I mean, it's all over the place and you're twirling around sometimes you don't know, but you know you feel good about what you do for a while and then maybe something else piques your interest and you think, oh, I want to try to do that for a while. And there's nothing wrong with that, I don't think. But I've been really lucky. I've worked a lot of different places and for the most part I've always had good managers. I co-owned a company with a couple of guys and you talk about a high-performing group Working with those two guys was fantastic.
Dr. Katie:So it's really kind of propelled me to where I am now. Yeah, yeah, and it's, you know, it's being open to the unknown and being available, which you know brings us to kind of this crazy place where we are right now in the world with artificial intelligence. And I know, when it was first introduced to me a couple of years ago, it was like social intelligence. And I know, when it was first introduced to me a couple of years ago, it was like is that cheating? What is that? I'm not comfortable, you know. I come from an academic background, so it's like academic integrity. What are we doing? And, like you said the very beginning, with this conference, like it's here, we've got to get comfortable with it.
Rob Ervin:Yeah, we had a keynote speaker that started out with look, we understand those of you who are in education have been freaking out. I think it was November of 2022 when the first iteration of ChatGPT came out. People lost their minds, and obviously so, and you could understand why. And gosh, these young kids in college figured out how to use that technology quick, and so there were a lot of safeguards put in place and a lot of ways that people are trying to, you know, keep AI as part of the learning process, but also make sure that you are doing the rigor of the work that you need to be doing, and and so, yeah, I've got a lot of, a lot of sympathy for the folks in the education world.
Rob Ervin:You know, in the corporate world, it's sort of been sort of a. You know, based on what I learned at the conference was a little more eye-opening the, the manufacturing groups, the, the technology groups. They're like oh, can I do? What can I use to? How do I use these automated or these tools to make things that I do on a daily basis more automated, to free me up to do other things, and that was really, I think, one of the biggest eye-opening parts of the whole week.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting because in my leadership Kansas class we kicked off in Lawrence, kansas, and so we kicked off at KU and we actually had a panel on artificial intelligence and it was two professors and then it was a person who worked for the state of Kansas and the professors are struggling with the ethics of using AI and what does that look like? And the person that worked for the state was like it's here, we've got to adopt it and learn how to use it, and one of the things that you and I talked about when you got home was even just the basics of knowing how to use it. It doesn't complete your work. It helps you with doing your work to be more efficient, to kind of get started in that, but it's not a copy and paste solution for anything.
Rob Ervin:No, and it was really kind of shown to us as we should consider AI as our co-worker, our assistant, our. I thought, oh my gosh, I've always wanted an intern. Now maybe we have our. We can have our own interns right there. And you know, every company is different. There's nobody, nobody is falling behind. There was definitely a sense of oh my gosh. I came here because I need to learn, because I feel like my companies were losing ground somehow.
Rob Ervin:Ai is a baby right now, ai is a babbling baby that doesn't know exactly what to do, and we're trying to help that baby along and teach it and it's learning. It's learning very quickly, but we're such in the infancy stages of this. I mean, ai will be based on the keynote speaker I'll have to find her name here. She was super, super good.
Rob Ervin:We are looking at the future the way we looked at the future of electricity, the way when the internet came, and obviously we certainly are not going to do. I mean, can you imagine if we turn the internet off what everyone would do? Oh my goodness, what happens is be like turning the electric. You know, if we turned our electricity off, what would people do? And AI is going to be like that and she really believes we have to just continue to learn from it. We learn from others who are using it and it'll be this constant evolution of figuring out how it best works for us and each individual is going to be different. Everyone's going to be using it as an assistant differently and I mean, I think it's just so exciting.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah, and I think it's funny thinking about that and getting comfortable, being uncomfortable and not knowing. I mean, I'm very transparent. I'm 48 years old, you're 54, right.
Rob Ervin:Did I do the math right? I don't. I think I'm 29 is what I go with.
Dr. Katie:Right, but I say that because you know the younger generations, our kids will likely figure it out very quickly. I mean, we remember the days where you know with, you know AOL and dial up and you know those kinds of things. I mean that was just such a stretch to learn, and so we still sometimes have a hesitancy with technology, but the younger generations, that's all they know, so they're very comfortable playing with this and figuring it out.
Rob Ervin:Oh yeah, absolutely Absolutely, and there was some trepidation amongst people that I think a lot of people have is that AI is going to replace us, and there's been a lot of that.
Rob Ervin:You've seen people on TV, you know, talking about Skynet. If you remember the Terminator, the Terminator movie, skynet will, you know, eventually ruin the world and take us over and we won't even need to be here. But I saw a great quote that one of the presenters had that said AI won't replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI, and that really brought home to me that we need to learn this. We need to learn how to use this, because it will pass us by. If we don't just like so much of all of our different work, the different jobs that we have, if we don't improve, if we don't figure out how to get better, faster, whatever it will all become, you know, it'll pass us by. It really will, and I think that's what AI is going to really, really help us keep speeding up. It will help us speed up our learning process as well. Yeah, it will help us speed up our learning process as well.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, and I think it's interesting because even just our day-to-day business, you know, we see AI everywhere, you know, in Buzzsprout, where I, you know, put in the podcast, like it gives me the opportunity to use ai. Now, you know linkedin, and I think I actually saw it on instagram the other day with the latest update, update where you know it will, you know, generate, you know, your postings. Canva has it. Um, so it, it's really everywhere.
Rob Ervin:We just have to kind of tap into it so I I use two authoring tools, mainly one called articulate storyline and the other called beyond. Beyond is a tool for developing videos and and storyline is more for the. For those who may not know, storyline is more than more of an authoring tool. That allows me to build online modules and it's it's really, really a slick thing. Last Thursday, I think there was a buzz around the conference because they storyline articulate storyline pushed out their AI assistant, built into into the program and I mean I just looked at it a little bit today and, oh my gosh, it is. It is crazy.
Rob Ervin:You're generating audio files. You're with a with a human like voice that sounds actually human like. You're generating audio files with a human-like voice that sounds actually human-like. You're generating videos. You're generating pictures right inside of your storyline file, as opposed to having to use some sort of outside source for that. Vyond is the same way. Vyond has basically given us the ability to I can build you a video based on a topic. So you know, build me a three-minute video on change management and does everything for you and you think, well, gosh, that's going to replace me. I don't think that's going to replace me at all. I'm going to have to learn how to best input a prompt into these AI functions so that I can make sure that I'm accurate and able to quickly implement it into my workflow so that I can get projects done faster. I just look at it as like holy moly, I can get more done instead of having 22 projects stacked up.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting you talk about putting the prompts correctly, because you and I were talking about that as well. I use chat GPT. I play with it a lot because I'm still really uncomfortable trying to figure it out, and so I'll put in a question. You know, like help me come up with a, you know, workshop proposal for this, and then I'm constantly finding myself having to be like now put in three you know three objectives in here and do this, and so I'm still practicing how to even get good at that. And I know at the conference they talked about how to put in your asks, so it gives you good information.
Rob Ervin:Yeah.
Rob Ervin:So I think what's the theory of this? Is it the 10,000-hour theory or 1,000-hour theory or something like that? You can become an expert in anything if you spend 10,000 hours. I forget what it is. The folks at this conference said you should spend 10 hours learning and playing with whatever learning language model that you might have. Is it ChatGPT, is it Claude? Is it Microsoft Copilot? Even you should be playing with those.
Rob Ervin:But yes, the prompt is what really allows you to come up with quality products, and we saw one great example for those instructional designers in the room.
Rob Ervin:You ask it to develop a two-day workshop based on change management or whatever, and you ask it to give you the topics, you ask it to give you the breakout sessions, you ask it to do everything, and then, oh, by the way, make sure that you include the Addy model as a part of this, or Bloom's taxonomy or any one of the learning models, so that it flows as it should and you're following the learning models that are out there.
Rob Ervin:And then, when you're done, you ask it a question and say, okay, now you've done all this for me, what have I missed? And then it comes up and even adds more to it, so you can constantly refine your product and then, when you're done with all that and you have the product exactly where you want it, you tell it. Now write me the prompt for this to get to this point, right where we're at now, so that you can keep it in a prompt library and you use that prompt library, your team can use it, other people in your team so you're not constantly reinventing the wheel or someone else may take that prompt and they want to change it to a different topic or slightly different here or there. They've got what they need in the prompt and they might just need to change a few things. I mean, it's really, really impressive.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, I thought that prompt library was so interesting. It was like, yeah, I'm constantly reinventing the wheel when I ask it a question and so and I didn't realize and I've only used ChatGPT I should play with the other ones. But to keep asking it questions, to keep dumbing it down or to, you know, fill it up to the spot that I need it, and that's not something I realized I could do at an eighth grade level, or you want it written for professionals, or whatever you want to do.
Rob Ervin:You can shape the tone of what you want it to write. Basically, anything that we write, ai can be your first draft and it gives you a place to start and I think we've all had our brain blocks where we're like I know what I want, but I can't spit it out and to have the AI just give you a starting point. It's not always going to be perfect the first time In fact, it won't be perfect the first time but it gives you that starting point where you could have a discussion with your team or someone else and you just start refining things and it's very powerful as a way to collaborate with people by just giving you an initial start.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, and I think the highlight in that what you said is it gives you that good first draft, it gives you that starting point and I have seen people you can tell when people just cut and paste things over to LinkedIn or cut and paste things over to a document. This is a starting point. You still want to make sure that it's in your voice that you didn't miss anything. A lot of times what I will see people on LinkedIn and it makes me so crazy is you can tell they just cut and paste, so like the word hashtag is written out and says hashtag or it'll be in parentheses like insert sailboat here, and it's like you didn't even read it.
Rob Ervin:One of the great examples I saw was how a leader would write out an email to their team and then they would put it into one chat, gpt or whatever, and ask the AI to soften the wording of this email. And the reason was is they are kind of a straight shooter and they're sometimes not. You know, they don't really, you know it's not on purpose, but sometimes they come off as a little cold or a little, you know, too direct, and the AI can soften it a little bit and send it out. Then you can copy and paste it and send it out that way. So you're not, you know, you don't come across as so harsh, and I thought that was a really unique way to use AI to just kind of help us with our tone, with just the way we communicate, and so many people said that they thought that was a really good use of AI.
Rob Ervin:And one of the other funny stories they related to us was one of the larger companies that spoke to us I forget exactly what it was, but this was probably four years ago and one of the. They did their presentation to their vice presidents and you know, here's what this can do and here's what this can save us for our frontline workers, and went through this whole thing. And at that you know it's still at that time, a lot of the VPs were still in the buzzword stage and they thought, wow, this is so cool. And one of the VPs raised their hand and said, hey, can this help me write emails? Because I could spend all day writing emails. Can it help me write emails? All these leaders and the people that work for them. And that simple little task was so important to that VP because they wanted to get it off their plate as much as they could so they could focus on something else. And there's a perfect example of how the AI as a partner could help us.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because we at Catalyst Development we will have people write their leadership philosophy and it's, you know, getting people just started, just said were important to you and get started, and it sounds so basic, but some of these basic functions that take us way longer than we wish they did, ai can simplify that so we can actually lean in and do the bigger work that we need to do.
Rob Ervin:Yeah, and I think that was exactly one of the points was think about how your managers can focus on so many other things. If, yes, yes, that that would be very, very helpful, because there are so many of those little tasks that we as managers or or whatever, end up having to spend our days with which. If we could somehow automate that, wow, yeah, what a gift.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah. And so I'm sure the recommendation was like, ok, everybody, just flip the switch, turn it on, like go for it. That was not.
Rob Ervin:That was actually not what they recommended, and where a few people raised their hand and said, hey, that's what we did and it horrified them, because there is definitely a risk out there and you as an organization do not want to just turn this on, and those of you that have it I'm sure your IT has done more than due diligence to give you a firewalled version of it or some sort of parameters that they've allowed. If they've allowed you to have that, there's some sort of safeguards to keep someone, say, accidentally putting proprietary information into an Excel spreadsheet and uploading it to ChatGPT, or a PowerPoint with some, you know, trade secrets that you really don't want out there, that you put it into ChatGPT. So you've got to have these safeguards in place and I would guess probably the same way the educators had this worry about AI, the IT departments and the cybersecurity teams probably just absolutely had their heads explode. Because it is out there. You put something in, you type something in. It is out there for anybody and you definitely have to have those safeguards in place and hopefully your IT department has developed a policy.
Rob Ervin:I think HR, learning and development, it should all be working together on developing a policy, a policy, for what gets put out there, a policy, what happens when you build prompts and just, I mean there are entire. There was an entire session just about developing the first parts of your policy. And as we have sexual harassment policies and if we have all kinds of different policies like that in the future, we will all have an AI policy, I'm sure.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, and that's so important, and I don't want to gloss over the importance of not putting private or proprietary information. I mean, it's still the internet. Even if you're using Microsoft Copilot, it still goes out into the internet. So there is cybersecurity concerns, there's all kinds of different things. So for those of us that might be a little naive and think, oh well, it's just between me and my browser, no people can get into it if they hack it, and I'm sure also all of them Microsoft and ChatGPT, and all of them have some safety mechanism in place. But still we've got to protect our data.
Rob Ervin:Yeah, and I think what the answer is for so many of these large companies that I heard is they developed their own GPT but it was firewalled off, so it was firewalls to the outside, but it was firewalled off, so it was firewalls to the outside. You may have teams that develop their own GPTs that might be firewalled off to the rest of the company. I mean there's so many different security setups that you can have. But yeah, just think everything you put out there. You would not want your social security card or your social security number out there or any sort of else, your credit card number or anything like that. And we don't need anybody getting fired because they put trade secrets out there and chat GPT and somebody got it that shouldn't so yeah, yeah.
Dr. Katie:And before I ask you to share some tips and tricks, there was another really interesting thing you talked about about I believe it was a manufacturing facility I could be totally you'll have to remind my brain, but that they had these like three page prompt for scheduling, and can you talk a little bit about that?
Rob Ervin:Yeah, so the gist of it was basically that these frontline supervisors and managers were having trouble. We're not having trouble, it just took them a long time to set up scheduling based on orders or, you know, coupled with their the workers that were going to be in, and they were. You know, all of this was run through spreadsheets and whatnot, and it became sort of a problem when any sort of unexpected thing happened. We had 10 people call in sick, or we had this big order from our number one customer come in, and what do we do? We don't have enough people, and so I can't remember they didn't really get into the specifics but what they did was they this, the, the AI team, this, this particular company had just an AI team, that's. This is all they did was help people with AI issues, and, and they walked through everything and they spent several months going through every single step of what this process is, and it ended up being a three-page prompt that ended up saving these managers and supervisors hours and hours and hours of time, and just, they were so happy to have this tool because it, you know, it was such a major part of their job when they could have been focusing on other things and you know that's just a very high level.
Rob Ervin:Look at those kinds of problems. But honestly, you think through everything that you do all day long, that you have just done for years and years and years, because that's just what you do, that's just part of your gig, and maybe it's not. Maybe we've never asked why are we doing that? And AI may eventually get to the point where it's like why are we, why are we doing that? And AI may eventually get to the point where it's like why, are we?
Rob Ervin:why are you doing this all the time? I don't know, this is just what we've always done, but those type of mundane tasks which are important to our jobs, AI, I think, can help us.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah. So I know you told me when you got home you have pages and pages of notes and things you're going to have to kind of decompress and work through, but I know there were some immediate things that you were texting me like you should check this out and I've used this and what about this? And we got to see our daughter and her friend over the weekend and shared some tips and tricks for them for college. So what are some of the kind of cool things that you learned about that you didn't know exist?
Rob Ervin:Well, I think the first thing is you've got to get out and play with it. You've got to get out and play with it. Make sure it's good with your IT group first. I've got to put that caveat out there. I've got to put that caveat out there and you probably, you know, if you go rogue and your IT group says we are not ready for AI, and you go rogue on your own on your phone or something with a chat GPT that you've checked out yourself, I enter buyer beware on that.
Rob Ervin:But there are several, several interesting tools that were just that I just picked up as we went along, and one of them is a very simple tool and we we could I think we could all use it and it's called otterai and I have no affiliation with these.
Rob Ervin:None of these groups are paying me anything.
Rob Ervin:I will just tell you what it helped me do during this three-day conference is it's a transcription app that I added onto my phone and it recorded all the different sessions.
Rob Ervin:You know, you go to these sessions and you're trying to furiously write down all this sessions and you're trying to furiously write down all this and you're trying to take pictures of their presentations because the presenters don't always give you their cool information afterwards and so you're trying to do all this stuff. But this particular app is just super cool because it gives you a pretty good transcription it's not perfect, but a transcription of everything that is said in that meeting and once it's done, it processes and then it gives you some highlights, it gives you some outlines, it gives you the main topics that it believes are what happened in this particular presentation and it just really is really cool to be able to do that and do that so quickly. And you know, I'll probably use that to the different sessions. I'll be able to kind of compile all that together and it'll help me build a you know, a PowerPoint presentation that I can share with colleagues and whatnot.
Dr. Katie:You know a PowerPoint presentation that I can share with colleagues and whatnot. You also fun. You learned halfway through that you can also be taking pictures in Otterai.
Rob Ervin:I know what a deal Now all this is going on. And then this really nice lady showed me this, because I saw her doing it on the first day and I was like, hey, what's that little thing? You got there. And, yeah, about halfway through I realized, oh my goodness, all these slides that I'm taking pictures of, I can use that and it will place them where this is being talked about in the AI or in the Otter AI transcription and, holy moly, what do you know? It's like fantastic and so, yeah, that was a really, really cool feature. So another one and I saw it and it really really freaked me out. I mean, it was amazing.
Rob Ervin:And we're talking, we're on a podcast right now. A lot of us probably listen to podcasts and this was a tool. I believe it's from Google and it's called Notebook LM and the lady that did the presentation had not really used it before. She kind of like the night before her presentation had heard about this and she's like I'm just going to throw my presentation for my session tomorrow and put it into Notebook LM and just see what happens. And she, so she played for us, what happened and it took her presentation. She had a QR code for her LinkedIn profile, as a lot of presenters would do. You know, connect with me on LinkedIn and it produced a summary of her presentation and it also produced I think it was a 15-minute podcast and it had two realistic voices and they had a conversation. They had a conversation like you and I are having a conversation and it looked at her LinkedIn and it said, oh, you know, debbie, debbie, obviously she's a leader in the AI world, she's done a lot of this and that and everything, and you know she's going to talk about. She talked about whatever she was talking about and the two voices had a conversation in a conversational tone and went through her entire presentation and I think we were all just absolutely stunned by how cool that is. And now, of course, I can't wait to, now that I'm home, I can't wait to try it myself because I want to do that too.
Rob Ervin:Um, but I you think about the, the uh, the implications with that on producing a podcast, or you, how about, as a learning tool, if someone can listen to a podcast while they're doing something else I wouldn't want to multitask, necessarily, but driving on their way home, a podcast that summarizes a meeting that they had, or something like that earlier in the day that they couldn't attend and it just it's just so fascinating. And again, we are at the baby steps of all this. We are we are just barely scratching what the surface is and this kind of technology, similar type things. There was something, um, it's called artificial general intelligence, where ai learns and it understands and it starts to do things, and right now we're in a generative location in the pyramid of learning for AI. But this artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was thought to be 50 years away. The experts thought it was 50 years away. The experts thought it was 50 years away and now they're saying that we probably will have AGI by mid-2025. Isn't that crazy.
Rob Ervin:I mean that is just absolutely crazy. And there's so many tools. There's so many tools. There's thousands of tools out there.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, it's interesting because I know Jenna Scott on my team was saying and I think it was chat GPT, I'm almost a hundred percent certain, um, she, she said ask me questions so you can get to know my tone. And it was asking her all of these questions to get to know her, so it can write social media and help her in you know her communication. So it will write in a style that sounds like her, that it has her tone and and all of that and I think it's fantastic. But it's also kind of a little creepy. It's a little creepy.
Rob Ervin:It is. It is, but it's trying to learn and it wants to help us. It wants to help us and that's what we have to. That's what we have to remember. It's trying to be our assistant.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah, which I am all for a virtual assistant, and there's one that I had mentioned to you before you went to the conference that Emma Blankenship uses, and it is a motion AI where it will take your task list with your priorities and it will generate your calendar for you, so it's helping you get things done in a timely manner. And for the people who listen to us all the time you know we love the working genius, and so those of us that are frustrated by tenacity and avoid checklists it's schedule things in your calendar so you can't avoid them anymore.
Rob Ervin:I think there's some new iPhone commercials that are out and they're actually showing some of the AI capabilities where the person I forget her name says, hey, who did I meet with in that meeting last Thursday? Because she can't remember the person's name. And then Siri, who's an AI helper, says oh, you met with Dave Smith last Thursday at the so-and-so restaurant. And I mean, that is AI through and through, right there.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, yeah, and that's a game changer, because now I won't call Jenna Scott and be like, hey, random, what's the name of that restaurant that starts with an M, that has a salad that I like so much. She's like it's McLean's, yeah, or you, yeah, or you, so, um, this is awesome. I know we can talk about this for hours and we still will as soon as we stop the podcast, cause it just is constantly going and changing, because it just is constantly going and changing, and so I think the big message is don't be afraid, learn, and, you know, open ourselves up and be educated on this, and I think it's really important. So, as we're getting ready to close out, I know we've been talking about AI, but we got to kind of bring it back to the spirit of a path to leadership, and I ask the same questions of everybody, and just because we're we're married doesn't mean you get out of answering this question. So, to the, to the level you're comfortable sharing what is the biggest career mistake or misstep that you have made?
Rob Ervin:Well, this is where I say, oh boy, gosh, what am I, what am I? Gosh, holy smokes. I think for me, I have always been this person who's been very content being a part of the team given a task, go getting the job done and be done with it, and I've never been one that was much for personal development or anything like that. So I wish I had started that when I was first out of college, spending more time on working, how I could get better at specific tasks, specific tools and, just you know, learning in general. I've. I've worked, like I said before, I've worked with so many good people that have been, that have helped me along the way. I've been so lucky.
Rob Ervin:I hear I, you know, I hear the stories of the folks with the terrible bosses and everything, and I just sort of like hide over here because I'm like, oh my gosh. I can think of one really bad boss that I've had in my entire career and everybody else has been supportive and helpful and accommodating and everything you can think of. But for me, I think I wish I had spent more on my own personal development to get better. I mean, you know it's, we're always learning, we're always doing things, and. But I wish I had done that a little bit better when I was younger. But you know, if I only knew then what I know now, right, we could all say that.
Dr. Katie:Right, right, and you know, I think it that's such a good point because it's especially younger in our career. It's like head down, grind, grind, grind. And it is important to invest in ourselves and to take that time. And I think that's a cool thing that I see, you know, with the work you're doing now, and I mean I have a front row seat for it and I'm biased I love the work that Smithfield does, I love their bacon, but to see a team that believes in each other and supports each other and the growth and learning, that's really powerful. And you are very lucky, because not every organization has that, which is, you know, good and bad. I mean we have to have the bad experiences to get to the good ones too.
Rob Ervin:Well, and I think the younger generations that are coming into the workforce, they want this development. How do I develop myself? How do I improve? How do I, how do I get that? And I think those of us that were generation X, maybe not, maybe we didn't do that so much, but you know, I think it's really cool and that's one of the fun things about working with new folks that come right out of college, because, holy moly, they can teach us so much stuff.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, you know that's so funny.
Dr. Katie:I think you know I tease all the time that.
Dr. Katie:You know I'm I'm doing the book research, I'm doing the, the research on generation Z, but also we live it every day with our amazing son, who is working full time in his first grown up job, and our daughter, she's finding her way and and for us it's kind of like that's not how I would have done it, but that's OK, we're going to, we're going to figure this out together whole nother, three and a half hours on all the things that we learn from not just our kids but the amazing Gen Zers that we get to be around all the time with our friends, kids growing up and and in the workforce.
Dr. Katie:And and I think that ties this conversation up with just a beautiful bow because it's it's leaning on those Gen Zers, it's leaning on the ones that are so comfortable with technology, instead of being embarrassed that we don't know or be intimidated because we don't know, but really leaning in and learning from them and saying, you know, I'll call our daughter from the golf course and say, hey, my range finder isn't working, what buttons do I need to push? So being uncomfortable and, you know, reaching out to them to learn.
Rob Ervin:Well, one close to final thing is I saw where even those companies who have not embraced AI yet there is something like seven, I don't know. I don't know where the stat came from, but I saw it on one of the slides and it struck me is that 70% of the workforce, whether you're using AI or not, are using AI in their daily lives, in their daily work and whatever they're using it. And just be aware. And we all need to get on board and we all need to play with it and we all need to get out there and learn it for ourselves and make our days easier, right.
Dr. Katie:Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking our car conversation onto the podcast. Give everybody a little peek behind the curtain of the talk we have around the house all the time, which is about all the cool work we get to do and the things we experience and the neat thing with us being in kind of adjacent type of jobs to be able to share our learning experiences together. How did that happen? How did that happen? I brought you over to the dark side. You were not in HR and I brought you over to the dark side. I was like look how fun training and development is.
Rob Ervin:Okay, I didn't realize that, all right.
Dr. Katie:I take all the credit.
Rob Ervin:As you should.
Dr. Katie:Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for joining us on the path to leadership. I look forward to hearing your feedback. Please share it with me. How you're playing with AI, what you're learning, how is your company using it? What have you learned? Please reach out and share and I look forward to talking to you again next time on the path to leadership. Bye, everyone.
