Mark Wainwright 0:00

Why did it take us at Breaking Biz Dev so long to talk about AI Well, that might be because tech is, you know, new still and that sales and marketing are, unsurprisingly human. But over the last few years things have changed. AI has become part of our lives, lo and behold, we found a few use cases that might be interesting to discuss. Let's talk about it today on the podcast.

John Tyreman 0:43

All right. Welcome doer, sellers, marketers, and sales professionals to another episode of Breaking Biz Dev. I'm John. He's Mark. And today we're gonna talk about ai,

Mark Wainwright 0:56

Here we go. Yeah. It's, uh, just to date ourselves, you know, we're, if, if anyone is listening to this far into the future where they have air cars and other things like that, then, you know, this is, this is going to seem decades old, but yeah. We're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about, uh, AI here in 2026. It, uh, is a constantly evolving. Controversial, um, helpful, dangerous, you, you know, whatever ripped from every headline out there. Uh, and we believe that there's some bad use cases, there's some good use cases, and there are opportunities, I think, for many people in, you know. New business development to start to dip their toes into using it and to, uh, find ways to, you know, make their, make their work product, make their work lives better.

John Tyreman 1:57

You know, mark, maybe it's because I grew up watching John and Sarah Connor in the Terminator series. I am a bit skeptical about ai and I think that's probably, um, been a little bit of why we kind of stayed away from this topic for so long is, you know, how, how is this gonna play out? Right?

Mark Wainwright 2:15

Right, right.

John Tyreman 2:16

and the rate of technology is just changing so fast too. I mean, that's another reason why we haven't really dove into it, just to see how it kind of laid out. we do have some good use cases for business development for our listeners out there, but that's not where we're gonna start today. Mark.

Mark Wainwright 2:31

Right. We'll start with the, we'll start with the bad stuff. Uh, and, uh, yeah, there's, I think, you know, as with anything, there's good and bad, right? So, uh, there's plenty of, uh, bad use cases and I bet that a number of people out there, uh, have either been tempted to wander down this path or have been on the receiving end of some of this as well. So, yeah, there's some bad stuff there.

John Tyreman 2:57

Yeah. And to kick us off in, into this segment, um. First, I wanna share just a quick clip from an interview that I did with Fedor Shimic, um, who is the founder of Own the Narrative. And, uh, Fedor and I, um, are kind of research geeks a little bit, and we nerded out in our conversation. But when I asked Fedor what he thinks is broken about business development today, and you can check out the full interview on YouTube. fed door's take is that People are operating from assumptions and not understanding. So let's jump to that clip real quick and we'll use that as a jumping off point.

3:38

So in my observation, the biggest problem is that business development is done from an assumption perspective. Basically, what I've seen happen to others and to me personally, is that people come to me and assume they have, that I have a problem that they're solving, right? And they assume that I will find myself in their version of the problem, right? So it's basically that they're pitch slapping people with- An assumption that they ha- that I have or you have, we have a problem that, uh, they're solving for, and they expect ourselves to find ourselves in their version of the problem. So it does work, but it's not working as good as it could, right? So that's what I think is most broken about, uh, outreach today in business development.

John Tyreman 4:37

you know, if you, if you try to build on, uh, a shaky foundation or an unsecured foundation, you know, it's just gonna crumble no matter what that is, whether that's a house or a business development strategy. So there's a couple of use cases that we have here that we've identified. Um. I'm just gonna number one, automated cold outreach through ai. I think that's just leading example of bad use case for AI in professional services business development.

Mark Wainwright 5:08

Yeah, this is a total sort of quantity over quality play where you know, you're just taking every dart you have and throwing it out there, and hopefully you're gonna hit. Something that looks like a dark board, that is the antithesis of, you know, what we talk about here about good business development that, you wanna engage with people personally one-on-one. You want to uncover issues, challenges, problems, et, et cetera, and understand how you might be able to help with that rather than just, the spray and pray whatever, whatever cliche you can use.

John Tyreman 5:43

Being on the receiving end of this just makes it that much more clear how this doesn't work or the, the taste that this will leave in your prospect's mouths. I've got two examples to share. So one was, um, someone who's reaching out to me to be a guest on. Either this podcast or another podcast. I, they didn't specify which one, but they reached out to me and said, Hey, I saw you on The Architecting podcast, which is, I was a guest on that show a couple years ago,

Mark Wainwright 6:13

Right.

John Tyreman 6:14

and they pulled the, when that, that bit of string of text architecting podcast in 2024 was a completely different text size from the rest of the email. Which like was, is a clear tell that the, that an AI is pulling that or scraping that in from somewhere. So that's one. Here's another one, mark, that really grinds my gears. I go onto my calendar and I see, uh, an event booked on my calendar, a webinar about ai, and it was booked on my calendar by an ai. And so I just think that's just so tasteless. There's no, you know, you talk about, we talked about on this podcast before asking permission. Well, this someone's booking an event on my calendar without asking permission, leaves a horrible taste in my mouth

Mark Wainwright 7:01

Yeah, it's totally the opposite of, of asking for permission. But you know, the upside of all this, and we'll get to the good side. Um, the good examples here is that, you know, the more and more of this stuff we see, the more powerful, a different differentiator, you know, your sort of. Genuine curious, uh, you know, business development activities, you know, make you a, a better and different option. This stuff is pervasive, so you can really differentiate your outreach, um, by just, you know, not, not heading down that path For sure.

John Tyreman 7:38

I don't know if you've experienced this, mark, but I, I've experienced this where I'll put a post out and then I'll get what's clearly an AI generated comment It's just, I don't know. It's just, again, this feeling of this guy's trying to like skimp out on human engagement, right? They're trying to skip that step of human connection and just try to get, try to shortcut to the result or to a conversation. But again, it just feels inauthentic.

Mark Wainwright 8:09

Sure, sure. Yeah. There's, there's, you know, this is, this is the quantity over quality thing, and it's, you know, this is not a new, this is not a new challenge. This is not a new problem. are we gonna take the time, make the effort, to have quality interactions with prospective clients, or are we gonna, take the other path of just spraying stuff out there and, whether using AI or whatever else, putting your name in the phone book, you know, under, aaa, you know, hot water heater service. You know, so you show up first, right? That's an old one.

John Tyreman 8:38

Yeah.

Mark Wainwright 8:40

you know, it's all the same kind of thing. It's just you're not. You're not shooting for any kind of measure of quality. You're just shooting for quantity. The third one is generating follow up emails. Uh, and yeah, I've never done this, but, I've received some, I'm certain that you have as well. So Yeah, generating follow emails, AI is touted as being a really powerful time saver. at the price of what, right at the price of everything we talked about here, you know, authenticity, developing versus eroding trust, et cetera.

John Tyreman 9:12

we've got another guest voice that we wanna introduce here. Uh, just a short clip. this is Brendan Reese. at the time Brendan was running his own consulting practice around AI and AG agentic automation consulting. He has since actually taken a full-time position at another, uh, another company. Um, I guess that just kind of shows how high in demand these AI skills are. But, uh, when I talked with Brendan, and again, you can check out the full conversation on our YouTube channel, Brendan was talking about different ways that businesses in particularly smaller consultancies, can use AI and AgTech workflows in their business development.

9:52

If our customers are, are buying based on relationship, if we're in an industry like that and, and we need people engaging with people, we should be looking at AI and, you know, kind of through a lens of how do we free our people up to talk to more other people? How do we keep that human element as kind of our, our, our, our closer, I guess, for lack of better terms? But something has to give because that, you know- Your sales reps have a full-time job, your BD team has a full-time job. It's full of things, including that kind of face-to-face interaction. Let's start to look at the aspects of how they get work done and deliver value that are not related to them face-to-face with a potential customer. Those are prime real estate, I think, to start to look at automation because you, you then get in a point where, all right, rather than, you know, ask our BD team to continue to push harder and harder and longer hours and longer hours, it's let's figure out where, where they're spending their time that we would rather them not. That might be in lead identification and sourcing. That might be, you know, a custom agent that is handling your CRM cleanliness and your lead follow-up for you, kind of based on, uh, email templates that we provide, but it can, you know, then kind of conduct that research on the prospect and put out very dynamic email content, for example. Those are two areas that I think about, you know, hey, if I want my BD team to be focused on building human relationships and, and closing deals like that, let's look upstream a little bit at how they get work done and figure out the aspects that happen before they're on the phone with somebody that makes sense for us to begin to look at automation. So some of the most common instances that I find are definitely in the lead sourcing, lead qualification. If you've got a clear ICP with clear criteria of wh- of who is and who isn't a client or a customer, that's gonna be perfect to be able to run through an AI system. And, you know, you can use a third-party tool like Apify, for example, to actually scrape LinkedIn or scrape the web to, to start to identify some of these people within your ICP. Um, the same agent can then go ahead and kind of conduct that personal research on them. Let's scrape their LinkedIn account. Let's understand who they are, what they post about, where they went to school, who they're connected with, whatever it might be, and start to combine some of those variables, um, agent side, so that that agent can start to handle either your drafting or even all the way through sending of that kind of sequenced outreach.

John Tyreman 12:09

what I liked about what Brendan had to say was he's, he said, how do we free up our people to talk to other people?

Mark Wainwright 12:18

Yeah,

John Tyreman 12:18

that's kind of like a guiding north star of how AI should be used in business development is to free up your time to be able to engage more on a human to human level.

Mark Wainwright 12:29

I didn't love a whole, you know, he mentioned some things about email follow-up that we just talked a little bit about there, so I'm, I'm not a, not a huge fan of, of that, but yeah, how do we increase and maximize the time that we're spending live sync in synchronous conversations with people and letting technology, help us do the other stuff

John Tyreman 12:48

I think that shows that like there are different perspectives and points of view on how AI can and should be deployed in sales and marketing. So let's get into some use cases that you and I have kind of agreed on Are these are some good use cases for AI in business development?

Mark Wainwright 13:07

I've got an example sitting like, it's lit literally on my screen right now because it's the product of a conversation that I had last week, which is, um, meeting recording transcripts or. Summaries or you know, whatever it is. But it's the product of a live synchronous conversation it's the, the note taker that takes the spoken transcript, uh, and then translates it into a short summary, a long summary. There's various, I have a tool that that will create a long summary with. you know, time marks, in it where you can actually go back in and, you know, the note taker says, gives me a little summary of what happened at 15 minutes into the conversation so I can go back into either the transcript or the recording and listen or read through the transcript and make sure. The summary was reflecting what was actually said and discussed during that point. And the tool I use does a handful of other things, as many do. It will summarize action items. It's always looking for, you know, it's pulling out some words, you know, maybe it's intonation, maybe it's sort of pauses of, okay, okay, what are you gonna do? Okay, what am I gonna do? Okay, let's set some next steps, things like that. So AI clues in on that language and create lists of action items. Uh, I can, and this is totally kind of off the top of my head, so I have zero. Actual data, John, to back this up. But I would say more often than not, the action items are okay, but it's not by, it's not a 90 10, it's a,

John Tyreman 14:45

Yeah.

Mark Wainwright 14:45

maybe 60% on 40%, uh, not quite, So all of these things require some human interaction after the fact. I will never take a verbatim meeting summary and send it out to someone without first looking at it, but it reduces the amount of time that I have to spend after a call to do my follow up. And It enables me to shift more of my attention to the conversation when I'm actually having it live

John Tyreman 15:16

Exactly. Yep.

Mark Wainwright 15:17

than busy taking notes. I've, you know, I'm okay at listening and taking notes'cause I've just been doing it for so long. Uh, some people are better at it than than others. Uh, but yeah, this lets my brain. Kind of reduces my cognitive load of trying to balance those two things a little bit. So it lets, brings me back into the live conversation a little more. So it's really good. I really like it.

John Tyreman 15:41

I work with this recording transcripts, turning that into written content, using transcripts as like the, the source and fuel for I, that's all I do every single day, one thing I've noticed is that in podcast conversations, and I'm sure this, the same could be said for sales calls, going back and actually listening and watching it, you, you hear things you didn't hear before. Tones in inflections, um, certain ways, certain things like hesitations on certain questions that shed a different light. So it's like, you know, having that conversation synchronously is great. Having the tape to go back and review it can be even more powerful. Then layered on top of all, you know, all these action items and summaries and next steps that the AI is pulling for you is super useful. I found that, um, like you mentioned, the AI can hallucinate and pull out quotes that like the counter, like you, they, people didn't say so like, that's why you always gotta go back and check, check the transcript and cross reference it.

Mark Wainwright 16:43

Yeah, it's a, it's a good one. I've, I've really enjoyed it. I would implore if people have not tried it yet, I would absolutely recommend that they do. And, you know, because of the simple fact that we believe that our brains are going to be able to record and categorize and file and then, you know, re recall all of this information. Far better than it actually does. Right. And that's not because your brain is broken. That's because you know, our heads just aren't built that way. Right. We're not. Our brains aren't built to be able to, you know, remember and categorize tasks and things like that. And, you know, we need to get those things when we hear them or when we create next steps, tasks, whatever else. We need to get those out of our heads as soon as possible and into a form where we can, you know, manage those tasks better. And what better way to do it, you know, immediately in live, uh, and

John Tyreman 17:42

it's still fresh.

Mark Wainwright 17:43

While it's still fresh, and let that, let the, the AI sort of record that information and then you can come back to it later. So yeah. Very good one.

John Tyreman 17:51

So that's, that's one, uh, under that kind of umbrella of like turning a transcript into written content action items and such. I mean, the same can be said for marketing, and I'll give you kind of like a, like a next level, like sales calls. That's one source of, that's conversations with the market, with, um, different stakeholders in the industry, past clients, um, teaming partners, all of these other like different personas. All of those meeting transcripts, interview transcripts can be fed into like an aggregate like spreadsheet, right? To like, if you're asking a set of standardized questions or if you're hearing common pain points. AI can help you categorize that and help you understand like in aggregate of all the conversations that you're having, this pain point ha pops up 75% of the time, right? Oh, okay. Well then maybe we need to dedicate some marketing resources to talking about that or to creating content around that, or maybe even developing a service that directly addresses that challenge.

Mark Wainwright 18:55

Yeah.

John Tyreman 18:56

And then I know that this is a little bit outside of business development, but I wanted to touch on it a little bit, mark. And that's training videos. So if you are in a position where you need to share information with other teammates, or if you are a manager and you need to help bring someone along, training videos are awesome, right? So record a quick video on Loom or Descrip or Riverside or whatever platform you're using. Zoom. Um, and then feed that into an AI to produce like succinct, like step-by-step instructions.

Mark Wainwright 19:30

Yeah.

John Tyreman 19:30

then that you, you, that it's an easy way to create a culture of process documentation. And as we've seen in that SPI research report that we've referenced a few different times, firms that invest in process documentation and operations tend to grow faster.

Mark Wainwright 19:49

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman 19:51

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright 20:05

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman 20:15

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright 20:20

and now back to the show. yeah, yeah. This, the second one is, market research, which I think is a fantastic use case. And, it's the hyper-specific version of your, current day Google search where it's spitting out sort of the top line, amalgamated. AI response to your search, it's that, but hyper specific, for your needs where you're trying to, dig into the details of what's happening in a, particular market. Who the players are, what are the dynamics, what are the ups and downs, could be a particular client, uh, research, whatever else. But yeah, that's, um, it's a, it's a big one. And to use it as a tool to understand the marketplace and then. You know, start to maybe build some potential lists for prospecting, for outreach, that sort of thing. And you've had some, I think you've had some use cases with that.

John Tyreman 21:12

do, yeah. In Q4 of 2025, um, I did a big research project and my goal, and it's available on my website if anyone wants to go out there and download, it's um, the 2026 State of podcasting and professional services.

Mark Wainwright 21:26

Yeah.

John Tyreman 21:26

And I built a list of, I think it was like four over 400 podcasts in across accounting, marketing, technology consulting, legal, like a e, C, all these different professional service industries. And a lot of that was manual research and outreach and just kind of like digging into Apple Podcasts and using the search bar on Spotify and YouTube and things like that. But I used chat GPT AI to augment that list building effort. So I would go into and prompt it with, can you please generate a list of the top 100 podcasts in accounting in legal? In all these different industries, it would format it as a CSV and then I would upload that to, I was using monday.com as my kind of central repository. You could use a Google sheet, you could use anything Airtable. Um, but that workflow of generate a CSV, I upload it, and then when I have the data set in there, I can actually export it back from Monday. Upload it back into chat GPT and ask it to amend the CSV file based on a list of, um, like categories. Like do they publish episodes weekly or monthly, or, um, how many episodes did they have published? What date was it published? The AI can go and scrape that information, bring it back into the CSV, and then I'll re re-upload that to Monday. So there's a lot like data appending. Research list building. This helped me build a pretty robust list that I then used to do bespoke, like custom outreach in a way that I intentionally, AI knew AI could not replicate. Like I would pull in their name or their podcast. I would reference something from a recent episode and then make it so that it, like they knew it was a human who was reaching out to them and did a little bit of research. And I got great response rates from it.

Mark Wainwright 23:33

the research, you know, to be clear creates simply a foundation for next action. You know, whether it's a, uh, whether it's outreach, whether it's a, a live synchronous conversation. if I have a bunch of res research that I've scraped a bunch of information about a specific company or an industry or whatever else, if I've pulled together that information to create a, create a foundation of understanding, I will absolutely test that with the individual that I'm talking to. It's like, Hey, I've done a little bit of homework. Here's what I have found do you find that to be true? You know, in my live conversation, you know, does this resonate with you? Is are you experiencing some of these things? And you know, they could say, oh, absolutely, that's exactly what's going on. Or No, not really. That's not our, nope, we're not, we're not seeing that. It's like, okay, great. Good proof point that it was either off the mark or spot on. So you absolutely need to use that as just a, a foundation of understanding that you then test for sure.

John Tyreman 24:32

Yeah.

Mark Wainwright 24:33

so next one, and this is pretty similar to that pre-call preparation because this sort of falls into the research end of things as well. So preparing for an important synchronous live conversation. You know, we've talked about creating a call plan in the past. There's a previous episode on call plans. There's a section of call plans that specifically is, you know, research. I think that's probably even the second. Second item on the call, how do you, how to execute on a call plan is like, that's the second item. Is that what research you're gonna do? The other part of pre-call preparation, I think that's cool. Uh, is question generation, that's a good way to use AI to help you sort of flip the script a little bit instead of being in the mindset of, okay, what am I gonna show'em? What am I gonna say? What, you know, what 50 slides am I gonna gonna talk about? And John, we talked about recently that slides don't sell, I think the power of using AI with question generation is that it's. It, it, it flips the switch in your brain that says, I need to be curious. I need to ask good questions. So your ai, whatever tool you use, is gonna come up with a few questions and you say, oh, right, these are good. I need to come up with more. So on your own, you're gonna come up with more, or you're gonna continue to refine the questions that, you know, your AI tool comes up, uh, with. Um, so it's a good way to put your head in that. That mindset of I need to show up, curious and ask great questions. Um, so it's a good prompt to get you headed down that path.

John Tyreman 26:04

You know what just dawned on me, mark, you know how we talk about three option pricing tables and how, you know our job is to help the buyer make a a good decision.

Mark Wainwright 26:13

Yeah.

John Tyreman 26:14

In this use case prompt, asking the AI to generate a list of questions is kind of like doing a similar thing, right? The AI is giving you the user the choice of selecting which questions make the most sense to ask the prospect instead of having to create those questions out of thin air.

Mark Wainwright 26:31

Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's, it's good in that, what you just said right there made me think of something is that I have a client right now that, that, you know, just one person who's kind of been experimenting with it is they're, you know, they're, they're coming up with their three option tables and then actually throwing them into, into whatever Chacha, bt, and it spits, it spits out some very interesting results.

John Tyreman 26:54

Are they pressure testing it? Like, hey, like poke holes in this?

Mark Wainwright 26:57

they're, um, funny enough, the word that popped to mind when you asked me that is they're trying to humanize it, which is kind of crazy, you know, but you've got these technical experts that are coming up with these, you know, detaily, you know, three options. They chuck the thing into, into their, their ai, and it spits back some slightly more narrative focused. you know, language built into these options, it describes'em better, it uses more creative, titles. You know how we talk about, you have to kind of assign a, uh, uh, you know, instead of just good, better, best or a, B, C, right? You have to be a little bit creative on what you call your options, and it does a pretty good job of that. And again, it's something they're gonna pull back out of the tool. And refine and edit and everything else, but it, it shifts, uh, this very technical sort of task-based 1, 2, 3, A, b, c sort of a, a methodology that the practitioner, and I'm, again, I'm talking about like people, like engineers and you know, other folks like that who are very technical in nature. It takes that. and kind of, smooths over sort of the rough, sort of technical edges of it and makes it more conversational, which yeah. Right. That's a little, you know, to say that AI makes it a little more human is kind of funny, but, um, it does, it does a good job of that. So that came to mind.

John Tyreman 28:10

And when you're talking about engineers, yeah, I can see how that could work. Um. underneath this umbrella of pre-call prep, I know we went on a little bit of a, a tangent there with the proposals and the three option tables, which is a great use case. I'm glad that we captured that and recorded that. Um, but the other example under pre-call prep that we have here is actually role-playing with an AI and simulating that next call with the ai.

Mark Wainwright 28:33

Yeah. To be honest, John, I have never done this, but I'm going to, uh, I will absolutely test this out and I would invite anyone to, to give this a shot, you know, because your prompts, you know, and people have talked about prompts and prompt this, prompt that, whatever else, but yeah, your prompt is, you need to set the, set the scenario. It's like, I'm this person. They are that person. You know, kind of understand who we are. I'm going to ask this question and then you spit back to me and expect it, or an anticipated, or you know, your best version of an answer. And then I'm gonna ask you another question or maybe a follow up on that. And I'm gonna, you know, so lo and behold, you've got a series of questions and answers that you've role played with the tool, and it may align with. Your expectations or you know, what you hope to get outta the conversation, or it may not, it may take you somewhere else, but at least you've got one example of how the, how the conversation could flow, And that's really helpful because I think a lot of people I talk to say, look, I cannot plan for a live synchronous conversation because they're, they're, always all over the map, right? We just, you know, I get into a conversation and 30 seconds later it's headed sideways. Right? They've suddenly. They've suddenly wrestled, you know, the control of the conversation away from me. So I think it's an e it's a, it's a fun way to play out, maybe even multiple scenarios on how this, how this thing's gonna go. And then at least. You have that context on which to plan and be ready, for the conversation to shift and move or whatever else. Because a lot of the people that I talk to, and we're spending a lot of time on this one, but a lot of people that I talk to, technical professionals have a difficult, difficult time being sort of agile in conversations. Right, because there are very linear there. It's, it's, it's meant to be very linear. When I help people prepare for a conversation, they think, okay, so it's gonna go exactly like this. And it's like, well, it might not. Right? So, so it's an interesting way for someone to role play in a very safe, sort of sandbox protected environment,

John Tyreman 30:41

our listeners are, are probably taking notes furiously right now on all these different use cases if they haven't tried'em out already. Um, but we've got one last one here and we can just touch on this one really quickly before we close. I don't know if you've seen the, like Will Smith eating spaghetti videos over the years and how in 2023 it looked like a deformed Will Smith, but today it looks just like it's, it looks uncanny, like him eating spaghetti. we're at a point now where if you can think of a concept. For an image for, maybe it's a webinar promotion image, or maybe it's a thumbnail for YouTube, or maybe it's a social tile where you want to convey a piece of information on LinkedIn or Facebook, um, AI tools like Claude, I'm sure, and, um, chat, GPT, Google Vo. These are all tools that can generate these images that you can use in your marketing, and you could even use as b-roll in your videos. That's, I, I use that all the time. Um, so yeah, just wanted to touch on that one before we

Mark Wainwright 31:47

people always love the, the, you know, the visual half of a framework, right? People always like, all right, here's all the words. Here's the bullet points and then I'm gonna present this visual. I have tried, you know, more than once to take a framework that I have crafted in a narrative and translate it to visuals and the results that I have gotten. Have not been, been great, but I probably just need to go at it a little bit further, uh, because, you know, I'm not the most graphically, you know, capable individual out there

John Tyreman 32:19

Me, me too, mark. I like Designer is like the lowest skill in my, my tool belt. But I will say that with tools like Canva and and Chat, GPT and all these other tools out there, I mean, it is kind of lowering the, the barrier to entry in terms of, if you can think of it and describe it in words, then your AI tool can really help you out.

Mark Wainwright 32:40

Alright, John, we have, um, we've talked way longer than I ever expected us to talk about

John Tyreman 32:45

I didn't think we would go this long on this

Mark Wainwright 32:47

Yeah, I mean, we're in slightly different generations here, John, so, you know, I know that your bleeding edge sort of acceptance of this technology stuff. And I'm definitely a, a, a laggard for sure.

John Tyreman 32:57

the big takeaway for me, uh, in this conversation is that AI is, is great in, its in the sense that if you use it to amplify your human qualities and you use it to create space where you can engage. Intentionally, actively in a synchronous environment with other humans. If you're using AI in a way to help you do that, then you're using it in the right way. But I don't think that AI should replace human interaction if you're using it to do that. That's kind of like the, the bad, the bad path to go down.

Mark Wainwright 33:33

half of understanding is, you know, creating, you know, some artifact, whether it's written or notes or whatever else that shows the person you're talking to that you, that you listened and you understand them. Right. The other half of it is the actual act of listening. So there's the, I need to be attentive and engaged and, you know, you know, my whole active listening skills and stuff. So that is a full half of this whole power of understanding is the active listening. And AI doesn't make you sort of an, a good active listener or engaged in the conversation or whatever else. it helps you with the product. You know, at the end, note taking and everything else, right? It helps that part of the understanding, but it doesn't do the first part, so for sure. Um, so yeah, so don't use AI to replace human interaction. That sounds screamingly obvious, right? and the challenging thing is like human interaction is always the big, time expense. It takes a lot of time for us to. schedule a conversation, get into the conversation, work through the conversation, summarize after the con, you know, like it takes some time to, to do that. So yeah, we can't completely eliminate that time needed in order to execute these important human interactions. we can't let AI shorten or eliminate that altogether.

John Tyreman 34:52

Totally, totally. Hopefully our listeners got some value outta this. Hopefully they learned, uh, something new that they can put into practice right away with their, their AI tools that they're using. and if you're listening to this and you have other use cases that we didn't talk about, reach out to us on LinkedIn. Um, that's where we're both most active and let us know what we missed

Mark Wainwright 35:13

for sure. John. This has been a fun one. Until next time.

John Tyreman 35:16

Until next time.