How AI is Reshaping the Workplace with Paul Roetzer

0:00Dude, it turns out that Winston, smart recruiters first, AI hiring sidekick, is taking all the grunt work out of recruiters day. Things like candidate screening, scheduling, all the admin garbage no one actually wants to touch, Winston can do it all. Man, you know I'm a fan of using new tech that takes the boring repetitive crap out of a recruiters day and allows them to have more time to connect with hiring managers and candidates. Yep, Winston is doing the heavy lifting while recruiters kick back and do the actual hiring stuff. You know, like talking to people. I really dig that smart recruiters is evolving out of the legacy ATS model and embracing cleaner processes using AI. With most ATS providers, it's like, hey, 2003 called and it wants its 30 minute application process back. No doubt, it sounds like Rebecca and the team are using Winston to push smart recruiters into the future while the ATS vendors are basically on an AOL dial-up modem with a dashboard.

1:05The smart recruiters Winston does the grind and the recruiters get the glory. For more information on superhuman hiring with Winston, visit smartrecruiters.com. That's smartrecruiters.com. Start using Winston today or I guess you can stick with it. Now we return you to our right-getter schedule program in progress. Oh yeah, it's the podcast you're starting quarterback warned you about. It's the chat and cheese podcast everybody. I'm your co-host Jolt Cheesman joined us always. Chad Solash is writing

2:06shotgun as we welcome Paul Wateser to the show. Paul is the founder and CEO of Smarter X. An AI research and consulting firm. He's also the co-host of the artificial intelligence show podcast. He's also a proud Clevelander Paul. Welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast. It is great to be with you guys. Looking forward to the conversation. It is a space I think a lot about but I don't have a lot of answers. I have more questions than answers with what's going on with AI in the workforce. You're like a Browns coach. You're like the coach of the Browns. A lot more questions than answers. That's okay. Before we get into all the AI of it, our listeners, our fans, want to know more about you, the person. What is it that makes Paul tick? Yeah, family probably more than anything. I'm a Clevelander, born and raised, started my company, my first company here, building my second company here. I share your pain with

3:06being a Browns fan and all that comes along with that. Does my hat bring you comfort or like shell shell man? I saw it and just get that visual reaction. It's like a season is coming. No, no, my turn is coming. My turn is coming. My turn is coming. So yeah, a lot of what shapes me is my family, my kids. Even from an AI perspective, I look through the lens of what they're going through in eighth grade. My daughters just start in high school and what the world's going to look like for them, what the job market's going to look like for them. I spend a lot of time thinking about that and working on that. But I also come from a journalism background. So I'm not an AI engineer. I'm not creating the models. I'm more the storyteller behind them. And then I think about the impact they have on people like me, like what's the impact on writers? My wife was a painting major and art history major. It's like what's the impact on the creative industry and the people who make living,

4:06creating amazing things. And yeah, I mean, I think I approach AI with tremendous empathy for the impact it has on people and on the workforce. And I think personally, I just try and build a business and make as much time as possible to spend time with my family while they still want to be around me. I was still cool enough for them to want to hang out with. So yeah, that's kind of what drives me right now. Tell me you're a humble Midwesterner without telling me you're a humble Midwesterner. Thanks. Thanks for that. Paul. That was that was very nice. That was very nice. Appreciate it. Excellent way. Paul is so smarter X you talk about AI research. You also have the AI Academy. How did this all come to fruition? How long ago did this start? And I mean, what's what's the actual like mission behind smarter X and the AI Academy? Yeah. So you know, I had started my marketing agency in 2005. So I was 27 at the time when I started the agency. We became HubSpots first partner in 2007. So we were like the origin of HubSpots,

5:09so if you want to familiar HubSpot Big CRM company, we were the first agency that started reselling their software before they actually had a partner program. And so that sort of put us at the epicenter of marketing technology as it was evolving. You know, if you go back to 2007, became the partner, the iPhone was invented that year. Social media was starting to take off. So the world was just evolving and marketing, you know, in particular was was changing. And then in 2011, I wrote my first book, The Marketing Agency Blueprint. That was the same year, the IBM Watson one on jeopardy defeating the human champions. And that triggered for me like, what is that technology? And how could be applied to marketing and business? And so I started just researching it and trying to understand it. And then we eventually created the marketing I institute in 2016. And then that evolved after years of trying to educate, you know, the marketing industry about AI. ChatGPT showed up and everybody cared about AI. So SmartRex became more of like the broader parent brand where CEOs could show up and say, help us understand this.

6:10Because a lot of my conversations started moving into the C suite and heads of universities and, you know, leading educators and VC firms and government officials and like everybody was trying to figure out AI. And so SmartRex really has become more of an event education is kind of where we focus. We focus on one to many. It's like, how can we help as many people as possible as quickly as possible? So you sold your company in 2021, if I have my notes correct, to focus on AI. So GPT doesn't come out until 2022. Did you see something that no one else saw or was it just sort of a sense of this is going to change the world? I'm just going to get on and see where it goes. I don't know if no one else, but certainly we were early. Yeah, what had transpired was I'd started the institute in 2016, lost a lot of money for a number of years trying to like build, you know, the education business we created, make on our AI conference in 2019. So we had 300 people from 12 countries come to Cleveland in the first year of that conference. And then 2000 when I decided to sell the agency, what happened was I realized that all the things we thought about

7:15and been researching were about to happen that there was an inflection point nearing. I didn't know chat GPT was particularly coming out, but I knew that the AI labs had gotten advanced models that could actually write like at a human level. And so I knew we were nearing something. And so I decided to sell the agency to focus on all of it. And it just so happened that 18 months or so later, chat GPT emerged and everything changed. Yeah, everything definitely changed. And one of those things is how people feel about AI. Bentley University and Gallup actually came out with their business and society report for 2026. And 79% of young Americans don't trust businesses that use AI, the highest of any age group. Now the overall, I mean, they had 75% 60 plus still pretty high, 70% 45 to 54. Everybody was at least 70% and higher with regard to distrust of AI. AI really

8:18needs marketing right now. They really need an narrative. They really need they need a cheerleader a champion. But I think overall they need an educator with all of that. How are you guys trying to package this because we're not putting this toothpaste back in the tube? It's not happening. It's not happening. How are you guys actually wrapping all of that together in your institute to be able to to be able to push this forward to help these individuals because they're going to need it whether they like it or not? Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's a huge PR problem right now in the industry and the AI labs are becoming aware of it in part because of the political backlash to data centers and the environmental impact of data centers. So that's a very large issue that's going to be front and center in the midterms in the US this year. Our approach is like we push for a human centered approach to AI. We agree that it's not going anywhere. Like I don't know how you could not trust a company that uses AI. Like there is no company that doesn't use AI. So it's like it's literally embedded into all the software we use. So if you use a Microsoft product, a Google

9:21product, any CRM system, like they all are powered by AI today. So it's just a part of the future of work. Like there's really no way around it. So our approach is more about how do we bring people along who have resistance to it for whatever their reason may be because they're threatened by it because it's abstract and they don't understand it because they worry about environmental impact. Whatever their reason is, we encourage leaders at organizations to take a change management approach to AI from an employee perspective at least. And me people where they are be empathetic to the fact that not everybody's going to be super excited about learning how to use AI. So that's part of our messaging, part of our kind of building an AI forward organization messaging. And then from a consumer perspective, it's tough. Like there's a need to do a lot of different education around the benefits of AI and the labs have really struggled to focus on that. They've focused more on the it's going to disrupt and take all these jobs and it's going to you know, make humans irrelevant. We're just going to have universal basic in them to solve it. Like their messaging has been horrible and they've now realized that.

10:24Well, they've been back and forth about that messaging because it was, it's going to take everybody's jobs and then it was a wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, it's going to create all these jobs. And then at that point, they had no reference of, okay, what jobs is it going to create? Right? So you're right. It's almost like everything they've been doing, the the altmen's, the almond days. I mean, it's all been off the cuff. So again, you know, how can you in the academy really start to pull this together? Are you working directly with big brands to be able to help them transform? Yeah. So our academy has business accounts. So we have, and I'm probably approaching 400 business customers who come in, acquire licenses for their teams and then use our education to do personalized learning journeys for their organizations, you know, things from AI Fundamentals, AI for departments, AI for industry. So we're trying to allow organizations to educate their employees. But in terms of like how they communicate it to consumers and things,

11:28our approach is educate and empower the professionals within all of these brands so that they can talk more intelligently about the role of AI that they can, you know, address consumer concerns about their use of AI, things like that. We don't do a ton of consulting work, we're actually going in and like building the plans for people and things like that. We're trying to empower the leaders to do that on their own. Can you give us some sort of real life examples from your own business, Paul? I know, for example, your marketing guy, marketing more than most is being impacted by AI, right? AI is buying keywords, AI is writing content, AI is making video shorts, et cetera. How do marketing employees evolving and adapting in this new world? What kind of skills are they getting to make sure that they can still be employed in the future as opposed to being replaced? The way I teach it is to understand how AI can impact your job today. So like I created a free tool called Jobs GPT, it's literally just a custom GPT that I built. We can give you the

12:31link and put it on the show notes, it costs nothing, it's just an open AI built tool. And what it does is it allows you to go in and put your job title in or your job description and it'll actually analyze it and recommend ways that you can use AI in your job today and it'll provide rationale. So in essence breaks it down to a collection of tasks and says here's where AI can be supportive. Here's areas that AI can probably completely automate. Like if all you do is landing page design, you're going to want to broaden your skill set. Like that is not something that we're going to need employees doing solely in the future. So it basically tries to help you understand how AI will impact you today and then where it's going to go in the future. And so that's a big focus right now is just trying to get people educated on how can I use it because it is the fundamental starting point and a lot of not just marketers, a lot of professionals overall across sales, HR, finance, legal, whatever, they struggle to figure out those first few use cases. It's commercial time. Look, we talk about global talent all the time. But let's be real.

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15:42on resume spam. Check out Smart Qualify at talru.com. That's t-a-l-r-o-o dot com. Talru, clarity and job advertising. It's show time. Everybody gets their co-pilot or their Gemini or their claw or Chatchy PT and it's like, okay, it summarizes emails forming and it takes my meeting notes and it does these like basic things great. They don't know to use it as a strategic thought partner. They don't know it can that they now have the ability to prototype ideas for apps or tools that they could never have done before and it's just about empowering people to understand what it's actually capable of and then layering it over what they do and what they want to be doing. It's like higher value and more fulfilling. So we start talking about not having the consulting partner. I think that's pretty important because the education piece is big, right? But a lot of these companies don't understand or you talk about team structure, workflows, leadership, hiring, you know, the actual operating models themselves. So they know the why? They know why

16:48they need to do it. They just don't know the how and that's the big I think push where you're going to see a lot of companies where CEOs are talking about we're not seeing any ROI out of AI. Well, no shit. You're not seeing any ROI because you're telling everybody to use it. You're like forced like, you know, token max the shit out of stuff and there's no direction. They don't understand that look if we're looking at actual roles, a job is several tasks really chain together and they can be done in different days and different times, so on and so forth. What are those? And many companies, I mean, even many managers don't even know what the roles beneath them, what those tasks are. It feels like we need to break those down in little bite-sized pieces to understand, hey, does this suck and can AI do it? Because one thing that we can do is if we can take the shit work out of our day and just take it out of the day and let AI do the shit work, I think we'll have happier people. I'm not sure about that, but I think we'll have happier

17:51people. That's actually one of the approaches I recommend a lot because it truly is a change of management thing and so if you have friction, you're naturally just going to have employees who don't want to do it or like it just reason. And what I always tell them is what's the thing they hate doing and build them an agent for it or build them just a simple AI assistant that can help them with it and as soon as you start doing one or two or three of those where they're realizing, oh, okay, like it doesn't necessarily have to take my job. It's actually just going to take the parts I hate. This is cool. Like, do you have anything else it can do? That's why I say that you got to meet people where they are and you have to actually like, it's hard. Like, it takes more effort to do AI adoption in a personalized way versus here's your copial licenses go figure it out, which is what everybody's basically doing, but it's the only real way to do it. It's the way to think about it from an HR perspective, from a change management perspective. And often what's happened is they put AI adoption under IT. They're not going to think about it this way. That's not how IT functions. It's an operation. It's an HR. It's an L&D. That's why they need consultants. Well, they pay the consultants. The consultants just want to come in and build the expensive shit. It's like, yeah,

18:55they should teach you the change manager stuff, but like, hey, for $10 million, we can build this AI thing that's going to like change your life. It sounds like IBM, by the way. Oh, it's all the consulting firms. Yes, Deloitte IBM. Yes, all of that. I'm all I'm here. You're right. You're dropping the names, not me, but take your pick. This is well Paul. As CEO, it changes how you do business. There's a popular commercial. I think it's for Paycom where an actor goes through with his phone, which is an AI. He knows how long an employee's been there and says, hey, seven years next week, you know, keep up the good work or someone's falling behind. And hey, man, let's get back on that. How I suspect it's a little more complicated than that, but I want to hear from a CEO with employees like how AI is changing your role to CEO. So I talk a lot about how I use it predominantly as a thought partner and an advisor. Like I created co CEO, a GPT. And this is in chat GPT. And when I say for anybody's not done this, like when I say created, think of it like giving a project brief to an intern or an associate. I literally just write out, hey, I want you to

19:59function as my thought partner. I want you to like help me solve problems in these specific areas, here's areas where I'm pretty weak. I'm going to need more support. Here's a knowledge base. Here's our P&L statement. Here's our strategy roadmap. Like here's everything you need. And when I when I need something, I'm just going to come talk to you about it. That's my co CEO in a nutshell. And I talk to it like a half a dozen times a day about different things like problems I have to solve, strategy docs, I have to review stuff. I have to talk about my with my attorneys or my accounts that I have like no knowledge of when I have to think about scaling an HR practice. Like I haven't done that before. Like that's not my domain. So I work with AI and then I'll have experts who I do bring in as real advisors, but I go in a much more educated standpoint when I talked to them. So a big part of it is helping me with, you know, information analysis, decision-making, things like that that just gives me some of the bounce ideas off of. And then the other thing is working on these very high value strategic initiatives that would have taken me hundreds of hours

21:01in a past life, meaning like two years ago that I can maybe do in dozens of hours now. And so like right now, I'm working on a project that I'll probably start rolling out this fall that I've been working on for nine months now in collaboration with Anthropic Cloud in particular. And it is, it is a massive undertaking. Like there's individual components of this that would have taken me 500 hours that I'm now able to do in five or 10 hours on a weekend. So that's how I use it. I don't have a bunch of stuff I need to automate. I don't have this like super repeatable workflow I go through every day to be the CEO. It's like every week it changes. The one thing I'm very like aggressively pursuing is automation of data analysis and that extraction. So that every Monday, I get a report of what's going with the sales team, the HR team, the ops team, whatever. Here's the three things I need to know. Here's the next actions I need to take. That I'm trying to do because that's something I need all the time is like, what is the real time information I need to make decisions? And there's so much data in so many disparate systems throughout companies as it is. Being able to

22:07take that data start to contextualize makes sense of that data because a lot of it is garbage. I mean, especially when you're talking one system of the next system and many of these, you know, analytics dashboards that we have are just bullshit. I mean, they're just they're gorgeous, but they don't really mean anything. Just noise. Yeah. I don't tell you what it means. And I guess this is the big question is, you know, are we getting to the point where we can start to ask our agents in these different areas to start cleaning up garbage data? Because we see a lot of that in our space, right? In the hiring space, just in the in the people space all the way through. Because, you know, you're working with humans and humans are dumb. So you've got all that you've got all that data. It needs cleaned up and needs contextualized. Are you looking to actually do that for better analysis of that data? Have you started doing that? Yeah, we already are doing it. Yeah. In pockets of the company. What have you seen? It's incredibly helpful because, you know, if I think about all the dashboards I could go look at right now to the health of the company. I can

23:07look at CRM data. I can look at sales pipeline data. I can look at, you know, audience growth lead generation. I can look at P&L statements. I can look at revenue by business. You know, like there's I could just spend my entire day looking at charts and stuff. And so what I basically think about it as is what are the five things I need to know every day? Like what are the questions I need to answer every morning? Okay, let me just go automate that. I'm going to build an agent that's going to go pull that data from the different sources. And every morning it just semi-report saying, here's the answers to your five key questions. And they can be related. Let's just say it's related to like audience growth lead generation, revenue generation, profitability, whatever. Just pick your main KPIs. Yeah. So what are the questions I need to ask that I would normally zoom to the team, hey, can somebody tell me where I would like a vent ticket sales or whatever? And so you just automate the answering of those questions. And then you can use a tool like Cloud or ChatchyPT to say, and what does it mean? Like, okay, I have the answers. What should I do with this information? So if you think about my Co-CEO example, let's say that's paired up with this daily automated data analysis, well Co-CEO knows all the decisions I have to make. So it's say, hey, the answer to this

24:11question, here's how it relates to the other stuff we were talking about last week. And it starts to like bring context to those answers. And that's, you know, as a Co-CEO insanely invaluable. Like, if I can get to the point where I just have that real-time information, and then the ability to go ask follow-on questions. So like we use HubSpot right now and they have a breeze assistant. You can go into breeze and just ask whatever you want. It's just a chat interface. Say, hey, how many leads are generated last week? Or how many event ticket sales to make on happen in the last week to companies with a billion dollar more in revenue? Stuff like that. It's just like I can just ask questions of the AI. I'm hearing a lot of things that are data-related sales and incoming whatever leads. And not a ton about my people and talent and what's going on with things like morale and like, what questions are you asking related to your workforce? Or what kinds of questions do you recommend? CEOs ask? And what things should HR be doing around AI right now? I have the luxury of building an AI native

25:12company, meaning ground up, everyone we hire wants to be a part of a company that is AI-forward by nature. It's what we do. It's what they're signing up for. So I don't have the resistance to deal with about this. Now that being said, we are also hiring a bunch of people who have liberal arts backgrounds who are maybe were creative professionals, journalists before they came here, who still have a passion for the thing that they do. And we're not trying to take that away from them. And so even though we're building AI native, I still am extremely sensitive to the human impact of the decisions we make around what to automate, what not to automate, when to let the human not only remain in the loop, but in the lead. And a lot of organizations don't know to do it that way. And so the bigger enterprises are like the more established companies that let's just pick a hypothetical company with a hundred employees. The way I always tell it to CEOs is like, listen, you're going to have five to ten percent of your staff who are all in. They're probably the ones using Clawed Every Day personally, like they're building their own agents to automate their life. Like it's going to be a

26:13very small percentage. You're going to have like 50 to 60 percent in the middle who are fine using AI. Like they'll use it if they have to. Like they're not objected to it. They just don't have the time or haven't figured it out yet. Whatever. But they'll come along. And then there's going to be like 10, 20, 30 percent who hate it. Like one, nothing to do with it for whatever the reason is. And so you have to be able to break your communications plan, your HR plan, your professional advancement plan. You have to be able to break it into those groups and make sure you're catering to the people who need to be brought along. Whether it's through peer-to-peer learning, mentor groups, different types of approaches to the AI education. So again, we don't have to do that as much because we're starting ground up. But most of the companies that come into like our AI academy or send people to our Maycon event, they're living this right now. It's like, wow, our HR department is not ready for this because our HR professionals aren't AI forward. Like they don't even understand the moment we're in and what these things can do. So they're not even the right people to necessarily

27:13build this plan and integrate it into professional development and comp packages. And like here's one real practical example for you guys to think about. Take that 100 person example. Say 10 of those people are way ahead. They're just racing ahead. They're building agents. They're optimizing all their workflows. They're innovating and creating entirely new, imagine where they are creating a disproportionate value and they know it. And their peers know it. And yet they're getting paid exactly as everybody else. Everyone deserves their best job. That's what Fiji stands for. We make a big difference for independent recruiters with the strength of our fast growing recruiter network. At Fiji, you can be your best self and work for the company you'd like whenever and wherever. We support you with the best digital and online recruitment marketing. We offer professional business development support, recruitment specialist training and a bit of rebellious network meetings. Let's join strengths and help more professionals find the job they love, celebrate recruitment and join Fiji at f-y-g-i dot n l.

28:35It's already been made. Talk a little bit about what you mean by human in the lead. When you're working with AI and what we've seen, we've seen literally just automation again, decision decision shaped or made by AI. Talk about human in the lead. What's the big difference there? Yeah, honestly, it's the first time I've ever used that phrase. I'm kind of like... I'm going to coin it. Yeah, I'm kind of rolling over here. He's already made a GPT for it. Yeah. So I created this... years ago, I created this human to machine scale and it's basically like level zero to level four, meaning level zero is all human all the time. Level four is I just give the AI a goal and it goes and does its thing. I don't know how it does it. When I first created that back in probably 2019 or 20, AI could only technically get you to level one or level two. The human was still having to set the data, you know, create the outputs, analyze the outputs. It was doing most of the work. We are now at a point where the technology is capable of like level three and in some cases, level four, where it's doing the vast majority of the work. So writing

29:39would be a really good example. If I needed to write my weekly newsletter, which I send every Sunday, I could in theory say, hey, pick the five most important topics from the week, write quick summaries. Here's 10 examples of what it looks like with the tone and style. Write this thing and then I literally just review it and hit send. That's kind of like the human in the loop where I'm at least editing. The human in the lead though is, no, screw that. I like the writing process. It's how I learn the information. It's how I can talk about it on scripted. It's how I can answer questions about it. I don't want the AI to be a part of this. So even though it can, I am going to lead this process and maybe not even use AI. And so sometimes we choose to still actually do the hard work because the process is the point. It's like why we're doing the thing is to become confident in the material, to be able to give presentations, to do podcast interviews. And so that's what I think about as the human in the lead is sometimes like we're still just going to do the work even though the AI could. Yeah. One of the challenges we're having, particularly on the recruiting side, you mentioned human

30:40in the lead, that's hard to do when there's a tsunami of job applications that are automated, are just too much to handle. So as a result, companies are fighting bots with bots and humans are being taken out of the loop more than ever before. But companies are forced to do it because how else do we deal with this flood of automated applicants? What advice do you give in the recruiting process to keep humans in the lead when it's really frankly so hard with what job seekers are doing right now? I'd break down the whole workflow and figure out which ones are human in the loop versus human in the lead. Again, it goes to that. If you're getting 700 applications for one opening and you know that 99% of them are AI-written and they're just being submitted, automated, things like that, then I don't know how the human is in the lead on that. There has to be some element where you build a trust where the AI that you have a high confidence level can filter through those things and surface the ones that matter and you're constantly checking that process

31:45to make sure biases and finding its way in and that you're not setting up algorithms that are actually doing harm. There's all kinds of considerations but there's elements of that workflow where okay AI is actually going to lead on this and then once we get to this part of the process that's where the human is now taking the lead and we're only either using AI in a limited capacity or not at all. So like give you an example, I don't lead our recruiting and hiring process but I have the final sign off in any hire still. So when I go to meet with someone, I take a summary of all the notes, the previous people that met with them have given me. I analyze that. They write a profile on the person based on the summary notes using an AI tool to write the profile and then I will go in and say okay what are the questions I should be asking this person and I'll use an AI to help me develop the questions and then I will go through and say all right well here's some other questions I want to go down a different path or in the meeting I'm not actually sitting there and just reading the 10 questions from the AI. It's like there's starting point for me. It helps me get into a flow but then I'm just going to get to know that person. So that's kind of how I think about it. There's

32:48ways we do use AI but then like the human at the end of the day is still a decision maker and has to maintain the agency and the responsibility for whatever decisions are made. So talk a little bit about that with regard to your organization and literally your advice with regard to providing autonomy to those individuals. So you can have a standard operating procedure and say look we have human lead here. This is going to be automated etc etc but you could also provide autonomy in that where you know maybe there could be some agents that are created individual by individual. Do you allow that kind of autonomy? Would you say or would you go worth more of a standard operating procedure? Hey we all agree on this go. Today we've taken a bit of a decentralized approach where we educate everybody. I mean obviously we have the benefit of we own the AI academy, we create the content. All of our employees have access to it. All of them are required to you know go through different training programs. We have monthly sessions where we get together and just talk about different AI initiatives. We have build sessions where we build stuff together. We do workshops

33:50and like we do all the things basically. Even with that the ability for people to identify their own ways to integrate AI, build their own apps, build their own agents. It's very fragmented. Like I always think of it back when I ran the agency. The hardest thing to train for was strategic ability. Critical thinking and strategy. It was just like I would spend 10 years with it, different individuals trying to get them there and it just wasn't in their DNA. Yeah. And I think of AI skills and traits are seemingly somewhat similar. Like you can give all the same people the same information and training and some people just excel at connecting the dots like knowing when to use AI not to things like that. So we're starting to actually take a bit more of a centralized approach where we will have a set of people whose job is to go business unit by business unit department by department role by role and help people identify the highest value apps agents, automations to create that have the greatest impact on the business overall while giving freedom to people who just

34:54naturally also excel at the eyesight of their job. And if they have ideas for agents, cool. Like we still have to have governance over. We still have to know you're building it because we may benefit from that agent and sales over on the CS team, the success team. So we're still learning, we're still trying to figure out what the right approach is. Yeah. Paul, you mentioned hiring liberal arts, you know, grads and journalists and people that maybe don't thought about in your line of work. You also mentioned having children. I have kids. A lot of people listening have kids and struggling with what kind of advice do I give my kids for a world of AI and disruption? What advice do you give your kids or what advice would you give parents to give their kids in this new world? As I mentioned, my kids are eighth grade and freshman in high school. So I'm not at the stage yet where I'm trying to contemplate college they go to or what profession they go into. We talk about it a lot. My kids know more about AI than probably most CEOs. They've grown up around the business.

35:55That being said, would I do tell parents who have kids who are in high school about to head into their college or, you know, kids in college or professors at universities or heads of universities? I basically say like I'm not sure what career path is obsolete. If any, be the best of AI, whatever does you want to do. So I don't care if you want to go into philosophy, you know, be a journalism major, be an English major, be a doctor, be an economist, like whatever it is that you're pursuing, I would still pursue it. I would just be like top 10% of AI at that field. Yeah. And so that's my general advice right now. And then also to make sure that they understand that critical thinking matters maybe more now than it did before because it's going to become more of a differentiator because too many people are going to give up on critical thinking because they I can do it for them. And so what I want people to do is learn AI not as a crutch or replacement to what you do, but as a way to augment what you're capable of. And so for example, with my daughter, she, she's a very talented writer and she wants to

37:02be an author, like a published author. And so I'm teaching her how to use AI in a responsible way to support her writing, not to, hey, can you write me a chapter on this topic? And then like, move on to the next chapter. So I'm a big believer in like authenticity really matters. But so does continuing to learn and maybe accelerating your learning by knowing how to use AI in a responsible way. Lastly, for me, I'm going to be placing some calcium bets after this call. What does your AI say about the brown season? What's the over under who's going to be the starting quarterback at the end of the year? What's your brown forecast, Paul? Well, I have actually used it to do my March Madness bracket. I did use chat GPT for that. So he's avoiding the questions about the browns, Jack, your standards. But I don't think I was starting quarterbacks on the roster next year. I think that's it's a totally different player and I over under on a win. So they're not winning nine games. Yeah. I don't think it went nice. Is that so, Runder? It can't be. It can't be. Your cow, she's way different than than my version of cow. Yeah, she's Paul. I would guess six, but I don't

38:05look at the markets too often. That's a Paula Ritzer founder and CEO smarter ex.ai and marketing AI institutes. Also the co-host of podcast. You should also listen to the artificial intelligence show podcast. Paul, if somebody wants to connect with you or maybe listen to the show, where can they find you? Yeah. So the podcast on the Smarter Ex site. It's actually just podcast.smarterex.ai. So you can check that out. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Also on Twitter or X, whatever we want to call it these days, stay pretty active there. And then yeah, we have our big conference in in October. So if anybody wants to come to Cleveland and check out a browns game and hang out at the convention center and Cleveland and the rock all, you know, join us at make on. We'd love to see you. Chad, this interview has been stressful. I need to go get a massage with the Sean. That is another one. And we are out. Thank you for listening to what's it called podcast. The Chad, the cheese.

39:06Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. There's a lot of shout outs of people. You don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar. Blue. Not show. Pepper Jack. Swiss. So many cheeses. And not one word. So weird. Anywho, we sure to subscribe today on iTunes. Spotify. Google Play. Or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.jad cheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grab cheese. It's so weird. We out. AI experimentation is easy. Moving your organization forward with AI is harder. October 13th through the 15th, more than 2000 marketing and business leaders will convene

40:09in Cleveland, Ohio for the 7th annual Maycon marketing AI conference. They'll tackle the hard questions. What should we invest in? What should we scale? And what's actually driving results? Here from leaders doing the research. What's working? What isn't? And what they've learned? You'll leave with clear priorities and proven approaches that you can put to work. Evergreen podcasts is proud to be the official podcast partner recording live on site. And by using code Evergreen 150, you can save $150 during registration. Register today at Maycon.ai with code Evergreen 150. That's mai-cin.ai