Owning AI Knowledge Inside The Company

Loren Horsager 0:00

That's the piece that now we get to pull out of the AI models, keep in our companies, and that allows us to actually build out much, much, much more sophisticated processes, but we still need people to run that. It's it's somebody's assistant that they need to run.

Welcome And Lauren’s AI Journey

Joshua Schmidt 0:18

Welcome to the audit presented by IT Audit Labs. My name is Joshua Schmidt, your co-host and producer. In the studio today, we have Eric Brown and coming from Texas, Nick Mellon, the usual suspects. Big Tex. How are you gents doing today? Also, our guest, Lauren Horsauger from Model Mind AI, good friend of the IT Audit Labs folks here. We've spent quite a bit of time with uh Lauren over the last year or so learning a lot about AI, how to integrate it into our business. Lauren is a great teacher and a friend of the show. So thanks so much for coming on, Lauren. How are you doing today? Fantastic.

Loren Horsager 0:53

Thanks everybody for having me and excited to uh talk AI today and how that applies to your business because uh yeah, we've got to spend a lot of time. We we focus at Model Mind on AI coaching and training. And I think that's the critical aspect to actually make this work. So I'm excited to talk with you guys about that today and excited to hear what you guys think has worked or not worked with with what you've done as well.

Joshua Schmidt 1:17

Yeah, we'll get into all that. We're gonna do an icebreaker, but before we get into the icebreaker, why don't you give us just a little more background on yourself, Lauren? Um, anything you else you want to bring up or that you're working on currently, what's top of mind in the AI field? Um, what's animating you today?

Loren Horsager 1:33

You caught me on a crazy day. So uh I uh my history goes a long way back. So I've been doing AI since 1993. So this is not a new thing for me. Um I actually have an economics degree and was working at the Minneapolis Grant Exchange and would go over what you call a meetup now and uh at Piper Jaffery Tower on Tuesday nights and talk AI with some people. And it was a very interesting thing. It was so interesting to me that I quit my job a few months later and got into IT and software development and consulting and uh been able to apply AI many places over the years. So exciting to see where we're at today. And uh I think I can't think of another industry that is so like exciting with the changes, and you have to want to have changes because uh literally two nights ago I uh got access to another tool and started playing with it, and I was blown away and I haven't stopped since. And um anyway. Oh boy, which tool is that, Lauren? Well, you know what? Uh I I wasn't really gonna share. I'm not I'm we're we're we're still learning about it. So there's a lot of things. How was it, Lauren? How was it? The tool the tool is Grockbot, and uh I it's very interesting for a few reasons, um, but we can talk more about that. But it's it's just it it's I had this um well, about four years ago, I'm part of a CEO group, and my CEO team, like, hey, you know something about AI, can you tell us something about it? And that's kind of how it got me into doing AI coaching and training. And uh which group are you part of there, Lauren? Uh CEO Nexus. And uh so it's big in Florida, but the guy that started it was from Minnesota, so there's about four groups in Minnesota. We'd love if anybody's interested, I'd love to have you. It's a really he's the best guide for uh CEO groups I've I've ever worked with. So um very exciting to work with. Is it similar to like an allied model? Yeah, it used to be an allied, and allied's great as well. Um I I think they all have their things that they're really good at. Um and it it's very similar to that. Uh so yeah, yeah. But uh it just depends who you're with and how that works, you know, to really be effective.

Eric Brown 3:35

It's all who's in the room, absolutely.

Joshua Schmidt 3:38

Uh Lauren, have you done any AI trading? I know uh did you put a few jelly beans on the uh Robin Hood AI, the uh the agentic trader? And how is that how's that going? I I have not messed with it. Okay. No. I did one.

Loren Horsager 3:50

I have not, but that that's that's partly what got me into this way back. Uh that's what we were trying to do. So I'm very fascinated. I I haven't done that in a while, but I I love the process of how there's so many things that were so challenging that now AI solves, and we can actually think about the real problem and and how we want to structure a solution around that versus like like it's the math problem, right? It's like, but but I don't have to understand all of the variables in that. I can think about how I want to approach the how I want to approach trading or I want to like, and this applies to any problem, which I think is just so cool. It's like you don't have to you can come in with a perspective and then have the AI work with you to craft like how you structure that.

Eric Brown 4:32

It's great. Because and and I I want to get into it a little bit more. We're gonna get into it. Oh, good, because I I'm an options guy, I'm an options trader guy. Are you? Oh, cool, yeah. So remember back in the day where you'd have like an iron condor and you know you you know you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the high going to be in 30 days, what's the low, and we're gonna try to you know trade in range. Yep. And you know, that's how you're gonna you know make your money off of a spread or whatever. Uh, but now you could say, okay, I I I'm interested in whatever these particular either stocks are, or this uh index or this industry is, and then you could you could just take so much data and AI could tell you what is the appropriate trade, you know, in this sector right now, for example, and it's gonna be things that you haven't even thought of yet. Because it used to be it's like, all right, I got to study this, I gotta figure out what what its movement's gonna be. I'm looking at candlesticks, all this stuff that now I don't even have to think about. I just put some money in and I press a button.

Joshua Schmidt 5:33

I want to learn more from you about that because I'm very interested and I've been I dabble. But it sounds like Nick has got some agentic uh trading. Two weeks ago, and it's almost doubled my money.

Eric Brown 5:42

No way.

Joshua Schmidt 5:43

Is it on Robert's?

Eric Brown 5:44

Did you put a dollar in?

Nick Mellem 5:45

No, I put 150 bucks in. And it's almost doubled it. Almost.

Eric Brown 5:50

All right, what's what did you tell it?

Nick Mellem 5:51

What it what I asked for lower I'll I could actually pull it up, but I said, you know, I want to buy as many shares as I can with this $150 to play with, and it came back. I think it was called S S Betts, I think is the I'll I'll look and put it in the in the chat here. But this is this is on Robinhood, just to be clear. It's on Robinhood, yeah.

Eric Brown 6:09

So you told it I want to trade this 150. I want to trade $150, so I want to maximize my profits. Good.

Nick Mellem 6:16

Yep, I think it's at 280 or whatever it is. It's uh it's called 80%. And did you narrow down what what you allowed it to do or anything? So the guard it it won't place the bet for me. It's coming back to me saying, hey, let's do let's look at buying this or selling this now, and or what industry you want to look in. And then you it narrows down, but it can't actually place the bet for you, but it will come back within my Claude agent, and I can hit buy and it will go back and place place bets.

Eric Brown 6:45

I'm going all in Vikings Super Bowl. This is their year, guys.

Joshua Schmidt 6:51

I don't know about that. Um we could do have a uh uh uh a Viking, not a Vikings. We do have a uh fantasy football league happening at Ice. Touchdown Browns already getting heated and we haven't even drafted yet.

Nick Mellem 7:03

Yeah. Oh man, we could take that so many different ways.

Icebreaker And Side Quests

Joshua Schmidt 7:08

Here we go with the icebreaker, right? Today's icebreaker. What is one random fact that you know? Yeah, Nick. Obscure.

Eric Brown 7:18

You hear Nick clicking on the keyboard. He's like looking at the random fact that he knows.

Nick Mellem 7:22

I'm trading the Claude right now. He's trade. He's frantically. He's tracking. Okay, so I was actually thinking about this, the obscure fact. So I had this ramble around in my head, and I was like, finally, I get to use this. So you know the tall chef's white chef's hat that they wear, and they've got all the pleats in it. Sure. Apparently, there's a hundred pleats, and what that represents is a hundred ways to prepare an egg. Really?

Eric Brown 7:47

Chef cordon blue. All right.

Nick Mellem 7:49

So I'm hitting y'all with some truth today, some knowledge. Noodle on that.

Joshua Schmidt 7:54

Uh I'm a wordsmith, you know. I love poetry, I love reading, I write songs. So mine is a palindrome for you, and it's a long one, and here it is. If you folks don't know what a palindrome is, it's something that you can read the same way forward says it reads the same way backward, much like Nick Mellum's last name. So my palindrome is a big word. A man, a plan, a canal. Panama. There it is. A man, a plan, a canal. Panama. Wow. It's a palindrome. It's the same forward as it is backwards. Wow. Okay. And the crowd goes mild.

Eric Brown 8:33

Good one. Good one. So I my my mom lives with us, right? She's 93, mild cognitive impairment. I don't even know if we can use the word mild anymore. But um, last night, so um I she was talking about how like sunflowers weren't getting watered or something, and the the the sprinkler was clearly on them. And I was like, well, obviously they're getting watered. She looks at me and she goes, obviously, that's a big word. So anyway, so mine, Lauren, and then and then you can go here. Um I'm I'm chatting with my brother the other day. He's he lives in Maryland. His name's Rax. He's uh uh an artist and taught at Maryland Institute College of Art. So, you know, not a technology background, but man, does this dude send me a lot of TikToks and other stuff I can't even get to? Um friendship homework, by the way. The dude retired, right? He retired, then like day two, he retired. I'm just getting flooded with all this TikTok stuff. But it it's good. Some of it, there's some some gems in there. Anyway, he goes, um Did you know that if you count the chirps from a cricket, you count 14 or 15 seconds, and then add 40, it's going to tell you the degrees in Fahrenheit that it is outside. So I'm like, okay, all right, whatever. So I hang up and then I there's I'm sitting outside and I listen to a cricket chirp. Sure enough, I count 29 chirps in 14.63 seconds, right? I got my phone out on time. Wow. And it was 69 degrees out. Like I looked, you know, wow, boom, you know, uh temperature 69. And then so I call him back, I'm like, all right, that's crazy. It worked. And then he's like, Yeah, if you want to do the centigrade, he's like, you count the chirps for 25 seconds, you divide it by three, and then you add four, and I'm like, okay, all right, I'm fine.

Nick Mellem 10:36

But wow, I can't wait to be retired.

Joshua Schmidt 10:43

All right, Lauren, you've had a little you've had a little bit of time.

Loren Horsager 10:46

I don't feel like I've had enough time to think about this, but here's my dad's had too much time to think about exactly exactly. My uh my thing, so I love gardening and I think I'm fairly good at gardening. And I built uh, you know, I I moved to Rochester, Minnesota a few years back, and my wife and I we made built a big garden. Uh well, not big, it's 10 by 12, but it's all raised beds and everything. And I I'm questioning my gardening skills now, but uh I I have been working on fighting white flies all summer. Oh I I feel like we may have solved the problem. And I I went out and I bought a sprayer, and you have to spray the bottom of the leaves with uh uh like we're just using an organic soap and water mix. And I did it to my potatoes first because they were getting eaten up with them, and it knocked all the leaves off the potatoes. I thought I killed them. And a few days later they all came back, and the white flies weren't there, but then they went on to everything else. So I may have solved the problem, and I it's not something that other people don't necessarily know, but for me in the gardening, well, it's I never had to deal with this before, and I have learned, so I feel like it's more like life is a state of learning. So what is a white fly? It's just a tiny little bug. And if you had seen me a few days ago, my neck was covered in bites because I was out spraying and I just got eaten up by them in like 10 minutes of the white flies? Of big bites. All of our tomatoes and stuff are like up six feet high, and everything, everything goes up the wall, up we have uh fences, so you have to kind of like stick your head in and find these things like when you're as you're picking and spraying. And I just got covered and I was like, wow, I didn't know they bit, but I just got all these bites from going out and and working. You're really getting up in there, huh?

Joshua Schmidt 12:34

That's what you gotta do. Okay.

The Moment Generative AI Clicked

Joshua Schmidt 12:37

Well, let's get into some AI talk here. We got a lot to cover, and uh I I know we these things go fast. So I'm gonna do I'll just get us into the AI, and then Eric and Nick, you guys can take it because we've done a lot of work together. But I want to just rewind the clock a little bit, um, Lauren, to you know, ask you the question what was the moment you knew AI had moved from theoretical to like actually useful for clients? And and you kind of hinted at it before, but when this was something you wanted to move into full time.

Loren Horsager 13:02

I I think the one story, so uh obviously I've been doing AI for a long time, so I I've known it's productive for a long time. I will tell you back in 1993 when I was trying to do this in finance, we never got it to work because we had 286 computers, right? So well, I tried that over the in the 90s, and since then I've applied it with a lot of clients. But I think the big thing with generative AI specifically, uh, I was uh I was doing software development for a company and uh I was working on a project. I was sitting at home and I tried uh I can't even remember what it was called, but it was a library, basically an agent. And you know, I had done a little with chat and and co-pilot and these different tools that were out at the time, but um, I I hadn't really used it for software development. And I set up this agent, and what I did, I created two different agents. So I had they were exactly the same instructions, and these were scarily weak instructions, um, but maybe a paragraph or two of each. But I made one change. One was an optimistic developer, and one was a pessimistic developer. And I'm an optimistic person. I have a good friend that we've done a lot of projects together. He's very pessimistic and he drives me crazy. But at the same time, I have one of those friends. Yep. It makes everything better because he finds all the reasons why something doesn't work and then you gotta fix it before you go live, right? So I did this, and it was cool because at the time, this tool, I can't remember what it's called, you could um use uh hook it up to 11 labs and turn on voice. And so uh there was no like it didn't know when to end or anything, but I put in my problem and I cranked up the volume and I was running around the house doing laundry and other things while it was running, and I was just listening to it, and it was hilarious because I was listening to these two developers go back and forth on we need to do this. No, it's good enough. This is like this argument back and forth constantly. In I let it run for four hours, which was way more than I had to run ultimately, but I was kind of testing this process. In four hours, I got 52 files of code that all I had to do was in two places go edit the the API key for that for the client specifically, and that has been in production since then. This is like four years ago. Oh, neat. So it was a real really positive first experience, but the dialogue of like how it thinks was so fascinating to learn as you hear it negotiating back and forth, and that's actually what I'm doing today with with uh Grokbot is the same process, right? It's like when you get the AIs to talk to each other, that's where it gets really powerful. Because uh, you know, if I if I ask one person to do something, it's not like they no no one person can solve all problems, right? And we all get better when we work in a team, and it's it's the same with AI, and sometimes that means we're teamed with with AI and humans. Sometimes it can be all AI teamed, but we need the team aspect where we're approaching things from a different angle to get a better result.

Eric Brown 15:48

I I was just talking to a to a developer today, Lauren, and and he was talking about a skill that he he wrote. I think he he borrowed it from the internet and modified it, but it was the council approach where you have a council, you have a chairman of the council or a chairperson or a chair bot of the council, if you will, and then you have different members of the council. So you've got a contrarian, you've got a newbie, you've got a first principles thinker. Um there's two other roles, I forget what they are, but you form this council, and then you ask it a problem that, you know, not like a yes or no question, but something that you're really trying to wrestle with, send it to the council, AI council, and then it'll give you back, it hands it back to the to the chairman, and uh, and then the the the chair bot consolidates it and then sends it to you. And I'm I'm sure you know what I'm talking about here and probably have done something like it.

Loren Horsager 16:42

Yeah, we actually teach a class. We used to teach a class, and I do do a lot of public demonstrations using that as an example. Um, because I talk a lot to CEOs, and so it's something that they all want is like, how do I get strategic feedback on a thought or or something that a lot of times they maybe feel that their team can technically execute, but can can you get strategic feedback on things? So having a team AI approach like this is really powerful. There's actually a company that um supposedly has built a board of directors um from AI agents, and that's how they run their whole company by having a board of directors that is AI running that. And in class, what we would do is we would say, Hey, go pick five people who you'd want on your board and add them to the set of agents, because the nice thing about that is I can say, Hey, I want you know Tim Cook from Apple, and I want um Geno Wickman, who who's you know the EOS guy. And so like you can tip pick the different perspectives you want and then say, now use them, propose a question, and give me strategy, and they're all gonna approach it from their own perspective. And you can then have like a uh what we usually do is have one kind of um like a board coordinator that's kind of who you're working through, and then they'll go off and pass that to everybody else. But um, what we're seeing with Grokbot right now, and this is the big thing I'm testing, is how do we do a team? Um, like I set up 46 different agents in Grok Bot yesterday, and about 10 of them are marketing different marketing roles. And I was able to tell it, hey, use the marketing team and before you actually give back anything, have the whole marketing team give their perspective on this, right? So it's that same concept where we can use a board of advisors to solve every problem we're doing with AI, which the interesting thing is they all use their perspective and question things differently, and the results go up and your inaccuracies go way down because they're looking at it repeatedly and differently.

AI Councils And Agent Teams

Joshua Schmidt 18:37

We've been doing loop prompting here and we've been doing some uh AI projects around. Um so I'm just wondering what uh if we could explore that intersection uh that we've learned together by working with you, Lauren, and maybe we can bat some some ideas around between you and Eric and Nick of like what that intersection is between AI and then security. Uh we're security-focused company, right? You're an AI security-focused company, but we have a lot of crossover there. So um I just thought it would be cool for our guests to kind of get into some where some of that intersection. I've got some contrarian views, so I'll go last.

Eric Brown 19:10

I think you should go first. Maybe you had you gotta get in there with that. Well, uh yeah, yeah, we we have uh where where we are today with middleware software, I mean we've just got just kind of expanded with bloat all over the place, right? Like you you just can't uh everywhere you turn around, you've got maybe 15 different products that'll solve the same thing. And they're all trying to get a monthly recurring revenue from you. Um one of the the passion areas there is the CRM, which is just you know essentially a database with a a front end on it. And i I I don't know, like I don't know that anybody says that they really love their CRM, right? It's and and you're you're paying lots of money, right? In in some cases, easily tens of thousands a month over a hundred thousand a year for this front-end database. And Lauren, I I know you took a unique approach on this and and built your own in a matter of what days you you got the thing built?

Loren Horsager 20:19

Days, and now we continue to customize it. Yep. I I I think what's interesting about that though, Eric, is like the CRM is like we're I don't feel like we're unique anymore. We have these for a lot of customers, and we have lots of other customers that we've given some advice and they've gone off and built their own. But what's interesting about software is I don't feel like the interface matters anymore. So nobody likes our CRM, not because it's not useful to track in information and have the information in there, but the interface is terrible for how each individual works differently and it's not designed for them, right? And so what if you don't ever need to touch the interface, but you still get to use all the logic and the security and the process that's involved in a CRM or any other solution through your AI. So we have built this system, and it turns out we hardly ever use the interface to it, but we're all using it constantly through our through our MCP, our AI interface to that, right? So we're all using it in multiple different AI tools to do things. I just wrote a bunch of content for next month that we're gonna be publishing, and it goes out there first. And I it just the AI posted it out there, and I did bring it up just to make sure everybody could see because we're tweaking a couple of settings that we're adding. But other than that, it's like I don't even go out there and use the tool, I just go through the AI to talk to the tool, and then it also has access to all the other tools that I'm using. So it's like there's no silos between anything anymore, uh, and you don't really need an interface. So what that means then is if you're thinking about solutions, uh build a really good database for whatever your process is, and then work with the AI to design the process around that and the security around that. You have a working solution then. Which I think is really interesting because we just don't need these complex UIs like we used to in the past. And honestly, that's a huge part of the development usually.

Eric Brown 22:13

Well, the UI could even be on the fly, right? So a UI that I might like might be different from Josh or Nick or you. And if that if you have that chat interface to the data, and then we're going to have a meeting and we're going to look at CRM data, for example, it in almost near real time, it could pull up the data and present it in a view that it knows that I like, which is different from everyone else, but we're still talking about the same thing. So I think that's really cool. And the companies that are in this space now, in that middleware space, where they're going after that monthly recurring revenue like a Salesforce, it might be time to get that AI trader out and short some of that stock and or sell those, sell those puts. Because I can't imagine why anybody would be dumping money into Salesforce now where they're coming out with like this agent force, but how how is that differentiated from anything you could get for $20 a month? Right.

Loren Horsager 23:12

And do you do you want to use the AI in that tool or do you want to use the that connects to all of your tools, which you can Nick, this is a big opportunity, I think, for the creative team because um or creative minds, right?

Joshua Schmidt 23:25

Because we've we've seen a lot of like graphic designers and stuff displaced. But now that everybody can design things, I think what ends up happening so far, and this is gonna change, but um making a case from some of my own work here, you know, the AI makes a web page or it makes uh you know whatever, uh an advertisement or something. It's a lot like how we in a zoo we make a you know a landscape for the tigers to live in or the penguins. And at first glance, it looks kind of impressive. And it looks like the atmosphere and the temperature, and they got the water and you know, they got all the elements that would be in their habitat. But the more you look at it, the more it's like, oh, that's kind of it, it's a you know, it's it's kind of just our human take on what their habitat is. Whereas the AI is giving us kind of their AI take on what the website should look like. So I think that's a great opportunity to come in and customize things with that kind of graphic design eye or that creative team eye to really dial things in. And I think that will be a big hurdle for for people that are just vibe coding things or whatever. That's like that they don't have that team coming in to make sure that it's running smoothly or the UX. It's like when you go up to a door and it has a bar on it and you expect to push it and it and it doesn't do, it doesn't move, right? And you're all of a sudden supposed to pull. It's just not intuitive.

Eric Brown 24:38

So I don't go to zoos, Josh. That's like a animal jail. It's disgusting.

Joshua Schmidt 24:43

Yeah, I know. You don't go to the barn thing at the state fair. Yeah, we learned I don't do that either. The birthing barn, the miracle of life. Some people go in there to eat lunch, you know.

Nick Mellem 24:54

Well, this is like this is the same kind of conversation I think I've had with about five clients over the past two weeks, three weeks. Everybody's subscribed to this thinking that they have to go buy something versus build it. And I one specific organization I was talking to over the past couple of weeks was like, well, you know, talking to them about building their own tool, but they go back, well, you know, that's that's not on our list. Like we have a list that's been approved of approved vendors and this whole grandiose change management things that they they've got put themselves in in like a jail, like where they they can't do anything. They've they've restricted themselves and then they've restricted their thinking. So now everybody, especially these big organizations, they've subscribed to that only, that they can only do that, they can only work in these confines, but there's all these organizations, IT hot labs, Lauren, like we we work together and you have great partnerships that can build these tools and and and host these tools. The other thing that I've been listening to, and I was on a user group, um, AI user group over the past couple months. And um a lot of people, everybody's just like a developer now, right? Like, oh, I can go in here and I can build these things. And that's that's really cool. Like go in there and do that, learn these things, because it's probably a big part of the future. But then what? What are you doing? You get the 80%, but what's that last 20%? What are you doing when you get there? And I've been noticing in this user group specifically, and I'm kind of going down two rabbit holes, but follow me here if you will, that what do you do? What's that last 20%, right? Because if everybody says they get there, but then they come back with the question is how are we hosting it? How are we securing it? How are we connecting it back to our company memory? Where's the data going? What data's going there? Right. And then how is it being audited, compliance, et cetera? How are people, you know, there's just a whole suit of questions. But I was just noticing a lot of trends of a the last 20%. And then the first thing I was talking about was the thinking that everybody's around change management and actually building a tool or just buying something. Because for Eric Sorry talked about it with the CRM, if you buy HubSpot, maybe use 60% of it. But if you build it, you use 100% of it, and it's exactly the flavor you want that might be different every week.

Loren Horsager 27:12

Or you build it and you realize that, oh, we built it because we used HubSpot and we built it like HubSpot and realize that's not what we want. We changed it. And oh, like I could change it every day or every week because it's so easy. And one thing you mentioned, Nick, is like, hey, you know, work with us to build this. We we don't actually want to help, we don't want to build it for you. This is so easy that you can do it yourself. And what I mean by that, this this shocks people. And the whole term about vibe coding, I I am it just makes my skin cringe. But I I the concept is real, and I can give you a whole list of people, including CEOs of companies, that have sat down for a weekend with they go throughout class and then they'll they will go sit down and they will do build something. And we have a client that um drove home four hours uh from a meeting uh that he went through our class, he then built something and it went live on Monday. He brought it in on Monday and said, Here's what we're gonna do. This is live, and it's been live since January. Right. So it's like you just have to have the business knowledge. You do not need the technical knowledge that the AI can help us through that process. Now, we strongly recommend you talk to someone that understands security about how you're rolling something out before you actually publish this. But the process for building it is so easy. It's it's really just can you describe what you want?

Eric Brown 28:31

What's the coolest thing you've seen someone build, Lauren, or yourself?

Loren Horsager 28:36

I I think right now our solution is is uh it's really complex. It's not just a CRM. So we built out our whole CRM and then we've added all of our training classes on there, all the scheduling. And now we just rolled out a new website a week and a half ago. And what's great is that website is completely hooked up to this. So our my operations person, when she schedules a new class, she just goes and puts it in where it's all the scheduling about what trainer can we put on this and when is it going to be? Where is it? Is it scheduled? Is do we have the rooms reserved, like everything like that? And it just shows up on the website. And is it open class or is it at private to some company that we're doing it? Like it's just all automatic. Um, and then we do coaching, right? So what I love about this is I can go out and meet, like when we were meeting, it's like we sit down, we have a conversation, we try to record those as much as possible. And then I just talk to my AI afterwards. I'm like, hey, you know, log this meeting, create it, create, create any to-dos that come out of that. Um, and I do all that through my AI. So I can be in my car and I can say, hey, I'm driving up to IT Audit Labs. What do I need to know for today's meeting? What got done? What are we waiting on? What are the questions that need to get asked this time, right? And so it's just a database, right? It's really just a database that holds us, but we have to think about the structure. And to be honest, I don't even know what the structure looks like. And I created it, but the AI created it and I just described all my problems. And then I had to do some um reviews on that to say, hey, how would you design this better? How would you improve it so that it and it'll do that? And then I worked on the security side of it, say, hey, we want to make sure it's secure so this person can't get to other, you know, you have to have access to the right things to be able to do it. We ran tests to verify all that, but uh, it will do it for you if you can describe the

Shipping Small And Securing The Last Mile

Loren Horsager 30:17

problem.

Joshua Schmidt 30:17

So this goes into scope, right? You know, you can kind of we talked about a lot of fun projects here and we've tackled a lot of them. And um, you were kind of mentioning how you can just build these things in a weekend, right? And they can go live. But I think Nick's also right, you know, there's a lot of big ideas and they they get 90% of the way done and they just don't get implemented. And and what do you see when you're teaching these classes as that thing that keeps people from finishing that project or hooking that up to that because that's the part that's hard for me too, right? Like I'm an idea guy, I'm a creative, I I can get I can get 90% of the way there, but then I get stuck on how do I hook this up to my notion or how do I log all this stuff so that it's in a rag model. You know, that's that's the developer side of the brain I don't have. So what do you see being the thing that really gets people unstuck or moves this from being a theoretical, you know, money uh problem solver, moneymaker into like reality?

Loren Horsager 31:11

Uh uh the number one thing we see is that people bite off too much. So if you're trying to do this scope and it's just that there ends up being too many questions, it's not that technically you can't do it. You just can't get everybody to agree on that. If you start by one or two pieces of that, say, hey, let's do this, everybody agrees, then you add on the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. It is way, way easier because what I've learned in all my years of doing software development and working with clients is that very few people can conceptualize a problem in a way that it's like, hey, here's how the UI is going to work or here's how it should work. They have to touch it, feel it in order to actually understand how they should use it. And so we spend way too much time working on UIs and stuff. And instead, it's like, what are we trying to solve? What is the data we need to collect? What are the processes we need to run? And let's start with a small set of those and then add on to them. And if you do that and you take that first one all the way to production, so it's in production, now you have a system that people will continue to add to. If you don't take that, you say, hey, we did we did these first two pieces, but now we're gonna add on the next thing and the next thing before we ever productionize this. That's that's gonna kill it. So get it all the way to production, then you start to add to it and add to it. And it's not that hard to add to it, but people come along with you then because they can see, I want it to work like that piece, but it has to do this function, right? And they start to see where you're going with that, and it's way, way easier to bring everybody along with you.

Nick Mellem 32:38

That's good advice. Yeah, Lauren, actually, I think you might have been on my, I think you might have been on the call I had with another organization where it sounds like very similar to the one I had. And uh, they were trying to solve four or five different problems. It was a finance organization specifically, and they were trying to solve, like I said, four or five problems, and things kept breaking, right? They weren't working right. And, you know, I think my advice was, well, what if you just solved one of those problems first? Just solve one of the problems first, and then continue to add on to it. And then you get the you solve what's breaking, right? You see what's being introduced to the environment. We can roll things back, makes things easier. Instead of throwing, I I think what happens is people catch the bug, right? Like they get into Cloud and then you can give it a million things and it will chew on it, and it'll chew up tokens, right? And it'll get through there and you'll get this cool looking thing, but it might not work like you thought. But if you just scaled it back to maybe one or two things, then it works, and then keep going from there.

Eric Brown 33:35

That's why Nick's rate's a thousand dollars an hour, right? Just that consultant. Just work on one problem, and then he hands them an hour.

Loren Horsager 33:42

And it will say it's not a save view. It's easy. Like they'll they'll they'll tell you all five of those problems are easy, but you put them all together and they're no longer easy, right? Mm-hmm. Right. So I I think that's uh very good advice and uh number one thing that we see as as an issue.

Eric Brown 33:57

So Lauren, we uh recently won an award for uh uh best places to work in the Twin Cities. So I saw that. And uh congratulations. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Josh mentioned um Sam was over at Top Golf, right? So um the other day the award ceremony was last night, and then we we went out to um to to dinner afterwards with uh with a small group from the company. And so they're like, Eric, we should go to Top Golf tomorrow. And I'm like, should we? And yeah, why don't we why don't we get a tea time at two? I'm like, well, I got a podcast. Um and they're like, you know, we did win best places to work, and there is this work-life balance. So I feel like I'm getting like this whole thing held over me. So I don't know how long it's every week it's gonna be something. Like we we need to have ice cream party, right? You know, we want to win again next year, don't we? No, we don't.

Loren Horsager 34:51

Well, I feel if if if others are like Sam eyes on glass, I feel like they deserve it because uh I I get the emails from Sam at two in the morning.

Eric Brown 35:00

So Well, I I mean, you know, can we can Sam be replaced with an AI agent?

Nick Mellem 35:04

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're deleting that. We gotta delete Sam. You didn't hear anything.

Eric Brown 35:10

The AI is not an asking for ice cream socials.

Joshua Schmidt 35:13

Okay. I wasn't good to bring this up, but I'm not now I gotta bring this up. But you already have the golf gloves in the car ready to go. We've learned that when you're kayaking.

Loren Horsager 35:26

Oh boy, you gotta keep waiting for teaming up. This is worth talking about a little bit. So the gloves? No, not the gloves. I I think in this AI world, like everybody expects that we won't have um we won't have developers. And that's just it's be it's very much proven to not be true. The role of a developer changes a lot, and this is the same with every other role that's using AI. The role changes a lot, and what we need is more critical thinkers. And anybody that works with schools and like we love, we have an internship program that we love, and it's like how we do that really matters how we train people up and bring them on because we need smart people to participate in these processes. The AI does nothing by itself. The only way it does it by itself is when we're automating something. And but someone had to tell it how we're gonna automate, what we're gonna do, how we're gonna do that. Once we do that, the AI can run that. But if it ever needs to change, we needed somebody to help. Yeah, you know, how do we want it to change? What are we gonna integrate it with? How are we gonna do this? Somebody has to think about that and understand the process.

Eric Brown 36:30

Lauren, you're so right on that. And it's disappointing now. Some of the things I'm hearing from developers where they're anti-AI. So I was in a uh a CEO meetup yesterday, and and one of the people was talking about how the developer in their company is anti-AI and resistant to AI. And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, like, okay, that dude's gonna be washing dishes at Culver's in, you know, about five minutes. Because you can't be allowed to be a lot of people. Right. I mean, if you're a developer, like this is the time to lean all the way in and embrace it and be the voice in your company of how are we going to take some of the routine things that we're doing, and not to displace a workforce, but how do we make our our jobs better? How do how do we get you know to a solution faster or whatever it is the company is iterating on so that you know we can take people's workload and maybe make it easier for them so they can do other things. But it it just really saddened me that someone who's a developer and is already a critical thinker is so resistant to the technology that is not going anywhere.

Loren Horsager 37:36

It's an odd thing because tech people are almost always ahead of every new technology that comes out. In this case, they're about the hardest people we have to train are tech people. They they just they're resistant, they don't want to come along. And once they see it and they start to realize that no, I'm part of the process, um, it they their head, their their mind changes, but until they see that they are very resistant because they're afraid of their job. And they they they rightfully should be. Like they're it's changing drastically. But if you're the one that understands and understands the system, you're critical to that process. The AI is just going to accelerate what you can do.

Joshua Schmidt 38:12

I was gonna say maybe it's because the CEOs are making fun of uh the fact that they might be replaced. That has might that might have something to do with it. Yeah, the the general uh uh sense of of of angst.

Nick Mellem 38:24

But if you go to top golf, we're building an AI agent to replace you.

Building AI Assistants You Control

Joshua Schmidt 38:30

Um but I I wanted to I want to touch on that because this is I know this is an emotionally charged, but it's it's a great topic. And I know we all have a little different angles on this. It's just that that pushback that is in the zeitgeist right now against AI. That's a big word. Thank you. And then, you know, I'm always, you know, you've got a couple in there too, so I got to keep up with you. But you know, we've seen it on social media and and then we've seen it in some companies like Ford, Walmart. You know, we they went really bullish with the AI, replaced a bunch of people and ended up hiring people back. And it was a really expensive lesson for them to learn. So I just wanted to get, you know, Lauren's take on that, the FUD in the market, if you will. And um, where do you see that going? And how do you see that kind of it sounds like we're all could agree that's gonna be a balancing act, right? Because we need people, we do definitely want to lean into AI and we love AI here. So how do you how do you see that all panning out?

Loren Horsager 39:22

Well, let me tell you here, here's our our um most important class we teach right now is uh our you guys have gone through this, but we call it now uh build your AI assistant. And it was our process engineering class. So we get into a lot of process. But what what's interesting about this, and I actually have a couple questions about it for you guys as well, but the the process is basically taking all the knowledge and the decisions that we're making as we're having chat conversations and building an assistant that is no longer tied to any one AI model. Um, instead, so right now what happens? Let's say I go out to to Claude and I have a conversation and I make some decisions along the way of no, I want you to do this, I don't want you to do that, um, in whatever in area role we're we're talking about. It doesn't really matter. All of that logic and the the criticalness of like what decisions were made, what knowledge was captured about that, all lives in our chat history. The goal is to take all that out of chat and actually put it into files that live somewhere that we own and can manage. And it doesn't matter what you know, am I using quad code? Am I using you know chat GPT? Am I using cursor? What it doesn't matter what tool I'm using anymore. The same knowledge is my company knowledge that I have. Now, what's cool about this process somebody has to own that and run that. This is where the people part of it comes in. So we need people that can run these assistants. The goal is the day-to-day tasks that you repeat over and over again, you have to be less involved in from a tactical perspective. You get to be more involved from a strategic perspective. So we want you thinking about why do we do this process this way? Is this the right way to think about it? But when I'm gonna run it, maybe I don't have to do most of the steps. The AI can do most of these steps for me automatically, right? You can take that and you can actually pass it to someone else. So we're working with a healthcare company in Minnesota right now that um they ran a certain group of people through our training initially, and they built all these different processes. And now they're starting to train up kind of the next level of managers and and executors. And what they've been able to do is say, hey, I already built out the process. This is you need to order product every week, or you need to review um all of our insurance payments every week. Well, here's the process. I can actually take the skill and all the knowledge and hand that off to you because it's a document in our company that we control and we own. So uh this goes hand in hand with people talk about the security around AI models and not, you know, don't train on my models and stuff. It's not really the data that you're putting in that usually is actually the biggest thing. It's the decisions you make and the rules you're creating as you're making those decisions. But that's the piece that now we get to pull out of the AI models, keep in our companies, and that allows us to actually build out much, much, much more sophisticated processes, but we still need people to run that. It's it's somebody's assistant that they need to run.

Eric Brown 42:24

I I like the concept of the second brain, but sometimes we some people need a first brain. I agree. Uh the and and that concept, Lauren, is pretty cool. And while you were explaining that, I I was just thinking, you know, as humans, we we've just kind of been programmed to to show up, perform a function sometimes almost robotically, and then you know, we we we go home at the end of the day. And AI is really freeing us up. And I'm, you know, I'm not gonna jump on the AI bandwagon, so to speak. You know, I think it's got a time and a place, but it it is freeing people up in certain roles to do more of that critical thinking and be free thinkers and be more strategic. Where you come in to to you know, perform your function that you were hired to do. And like, well, how can I do this better? How can I challenge myself to think differently? And here's a suite of tools that I can use to take some of the repetitive stuff that, you know, I don't think humans are particularly skilled at doing that repetitive, brainless work, right? I mean, we're not built for that. So it it is a way to kind of raise the bar for all of us to do things in a in a different way, but we just have to embrace that. And and in some cases, it's companies making that okay for people to embrace and change the way in in which they work. And it it probably starts much lower down in the education system, you know, like where the the Montessori method uh of education, where I think that that educational model does teach people more of that critical and free thinking than just. Kind of the, okay, I'm going to do math for 50 minutes. Now I'm going to go do English for 50 minutes, and I have to know these certain things, which if you think about all of the math and things like that that you were in, it's like, well, why did I need to spend so many years memorizing formulas that is really not serving me anything these days, right? Like I don't I went through Calc 3. I don't still remember any of that stuff, right? That that stuff was out the window the day I took the final. So I don't need to know how to calculate the surface of a 3D object, right?

Joshua Schmidt 44:39

Are you sure it didn't help you think about things in a different way, though, or give you a new a new chamber in your mind to kind of tap into for other problems?

Eric Brown 44:47

I think it it may have, but I don't know that I needed the forced memorization of formulas to do that. I remember in in one of the like uh physics classes I went to, we went to an amusement park and we took some tools and we were meant measuring like the G force on different rides in the amusement park. And I think I got more out of the year long of physics from that one afternoon than I did from anything else I did in that class. Because what was I really learning until it could be applied?

Joshua Schmidt 45:16

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I was just on a podcast and I just had a clip that went out today that says, don't pay for music college because you could take, you know, uh an eighth of what you spent on your music college and go make an album in a studio or go have an experience and learn just as much. And so same concept. But but you know, I think a lot of that just is antiquated educational things, and then they gotta stretch it out so they can get the money out of you. But I think really what we're talking drilling into here is just uh just how it can free our time up, right? And um, how we don't have to do those repetitive tasks anymore. And it's gonna hopefully free us up to be a lot more creative and a lot more forward thinking. And and then to Lauren's point about you know, freeing up our workforce to be a little more strategic and a little more top-level thinking instead of just going through the motions, right? So when we're doing that, we're going fast, we're making new stuff, how do we make sure we're integrating good cybersecurity, good uh security measures? And and where do you see uh what you know when to bring in security people, Lauren, when you're integrating these new concepts into businesses early?

Security Reality Check On MCP Data

Loren Horsager 46:24

Uh I I I think I think that what's interesting about security, so we we talk about governance some and we don't do like hardcore governance and stuff around this, but uh uh the there's a couple things that I always tell businesses, and we work with a lot of well, we work with large businesses and a lot of small businesses, and um people are are scared, but they also know they need to do something. And so the question is how how do you move forward? So there's a few different things to think about um from our perspective. I think you guys will add a whole bunch more on top of this. But the the first critical one, I think right now people are very concerned about the models and having access to your information. I think this is way overblown. And because they're so concerned about this, they're missing a whole bunch of other things that they really ought to be concerned about. The way we connect our AI models to different tools that we want to connect to is through MCPs now. It's like an API for AI, right? And there was a guy, I think his name is John, and he published one to QuickBooks. And this was like, I mean, MCPs have only been around maybe eight to ten months or something now. And when they came out, um, it took a little bit for Intuit, who owns QuickBooks, to kind of put theirs out there. And so if you did a Google search, and I think this has actually changed just recently, but if you did a Google search, the first one that came up to Quick to connect to QuickBooks was John's server. And the scary part about that is it worked, right? It would work. I could use his tool and I could connect to QuickBooks. And the scary part was all of my QuickBooks data was going through his server. I don't know if he was doing anything uh nefarious or not. I don't think so, but that's the risk, right? I don't know where my data is moving in a lot of cases. And this is why what we do when we work with a team, we generally try to work in teams of five with an IT person on every team. And the reason is anything someone wants to build, like we we have these people that have brilliant ideas and they want to build this. And then the IT person says, hey, hold on, what do you want? It's like, okay, we can figure that out. Or no, don't do that, and here's why, and explain that, hey, this violates our company policy or this this shouldn't happen because of these security concerns. So we want someone along the process thinking about security. Um, if someone doesn't have that, we recommend they go hire someone to do that, and it can be a consultant or someone like you guys or whatever, but they need to have someone thinking about the security implications of the decisions they're making. Um, because there's so many things that are so easy to do now, which means we can do really dumb things really easily.

Joshua Schmidt 48:58

Well, I know Eric and uh Nick have been doing a lot of thinking on this and how we can help folks with their AI integration and not only how we can help them integrate it, but how so we can make it better and improve upon that. So it's your time to shine, boys.

Eric Brown 49:12

Yeah, Nick.

Making Data Useful With AI

Nick Mellem 49:13

Well, I think it's yeah, I mean, I think the conversation starts is what do you want? What what do you how do you make your data work for you? You know, but I think a lot of organizations probably haven't even started that thought process of what data, what what do they have already that can work for them? Right. Like I I again, I was in that user group. And I think the I think if I remember right, it was a garage door organization. They repair and put in garage doors at new homes, old homes, whatever it is. And then I posed the question that he he is he's building an app for his salespeople to get quotes. And then, you know, my question back to him was well, does the does your app have the ability then to text the client for payment? Can it text them to say, hey, put a Google review in? Does it connect back to the CRM? Like then, so your marketing team then can do like a DRIMP campaign, you know, out to these areas that maybe are more focused, or to an organization that might have 150 part numbers, but maybe only 20 of them make the revenue and they're just wasting a bunch of money on the other parts. Well, maybe just get rid of those, delete, and then focus on these. And these are this is just about the data that the company already has that they're not using. But then the conversation goes to also, you know, the governance. Do you have an acceptable use policy, right? Those are the more not as fun conversations to have. But I think it's very interesting to see organizations sitting on this pile, stockpile of data, and and they're not making it work for them.

Eric Brown 50:40

Yeah. And one of the things that that we're doing, Lauren, along the lines of what you're talking about there is, and I think what you're doing out, you know, educating people of, you know, how do we, it's it's not scary, how do we approach this? How do we start thinking about it? We've gone in and and helped organizations take these disparate sources of data. Maybe you've got some stuff in a CRM, you've got some stuff in an ERP, you've got some stuff in spreadsheets, but then how do we pull that data together for you to visualize it in a way that you can act on the data and run your business like you know, we're we're you're you're the experts in running your business, but we can bring some expertise into helping you think through new and novel ways to look at that data and then do something actionable with it. A lot of the times the conversations that I'll get brought into are initially it's around maybe a problem that they're trying to have of how do we streamline this quoting process? And then we start to peel back the layers of the onion of like, okay, well, yeah, you want to streamline the quoting process, but what is it that you're really trying to do? Where where is your data? How are you protecting that data? And oh, wow, you know, your organization has a lot of different formulas in it, for example, right? And that is your IP. Well, how are you protecting that IP in your organization? And some of the time the business leaders haven't really thought through the bigger picture of what their organization's doing and potentially things, other pieces that they could be solving. We've built a number of these portals, and and I remember one from a from a person that owned a variety of personal fitness gyms. And they were when you own a personal fitness gym, you're really focused on the number of subscribers that you have and making sure that the new number of subscribers outweighs the number of levers in the organization, right? So people leaving the organization versus people joining the organization, and you always want the more people joining than leaving. But the amount of data sets around those numbers are really mind-boggling because you can get into things like, well, how many, how many people are walking through the door? What time of day are they walking through the door? The ad the ads that we have in social media or on the radio, the time of day of the ads. Like we now we can start to directly measure and influence the content that we're putting out, the promotions that we do or the the in um in gym things that we can do, right? We can in this gym, we could pilot a buddy group of we've got a 6 a.m. workout group here. Does that does that lead to retention? What are some of the things that we can do in the gym to keep people sticky? So what are the things earlier on in the cycle, if somebody is gonna quit in November, what things are we starting to see in September or August that now all we want to do is keep them one more month and then one more month and then one more month? So I I really love digging in and sitting down with business leaders and not just talking about like, okay, yeah, you want to make this particular process better, but let's think about your business as a whole and how we can leverage technology to either get you data that is that you can then take action on or present data in a way that is meaningful to you.

Loren Horsager 54:19

I I think it's interesting in in marketing. There's the concept of A-B testing, right? And what I think is interesting with AI in so many areas, it now opens up the ability for a A-B testing in life, basically, on every role, every process, every customer engagement. Like we get to A-B test that in ways that the AI can actually help us understand. Um, which I I think is pretty interesting around the opportunities. Like we we talk about this with clients all the time. It's like, hey, we're putting we're putting out this financial um analysis that we're using AI to build. And, you know, should we go this way or should we go this way? I'm like, well, why don't you try them both and and see what makes the most sense for how you want to manage this? And it's it's like before we are always constrained because to do a project was so hard, so long to get there. Where now it's like, in an hour, I might have this figured out and and and actually have an idea on where where I need to think next or what, you know, I have a solution potentially. It's like, well, let's try both though, right? And we have an opportunity to try both of them in a way that just hasn't been possible before. And that applies across the board. We're we just built um helped a client build a routing engine. They were looking at putting in like a quarter million dollar uh routing tool. So they they have about, I don't know, 45 trucks or so. They have uh two different warehouses and they have clients all over, uh customers all over that they got to deliver, and their on-time rate was pretty low. And so they wanted to get that up. They're like, if we can get to 80% on time, that would be fantastic. Well, we ran the process and we got to 100% on time. Um and how we did that was basically we used A-B testing, right? So we said um we use the AI, but we didn't use the AI. The AI does not run every time, this runs every hour to reprocess. Instead of doing that, we said use the AI to write a Python script to actually recalculate constantly. So while the first time we did this, we used hundreds of dollars in tokens to have the AI calculate this. And it basically tried this algorithm and this algorithm, it tried all these different algorithms based on all the rules we added, and then we turns out we had to add a couple more rules. So we did a re-ran this process and said optimize it again. And now it's just a Python script that runs every hour. It says, here's orders, calculate outer trucking. And and it's at 100% um on-time delivery, which is crazy. That's cool.

Joshua Schmidt 56:34

Well, I think we're kind of getting towards the end today, unless you guys have anything else to do. I do have a slight pivot here to maybe maybe current, maybe future state.

Voice Interfaces And Trust

Eric Brown 56:44

You had in the in the beginning, Lauren talked about 11 labs, and I'm really excited about the intersection of voice and AI and some of the things that, you know, maybe, maybe you are future thinking. Um, on the gaming side, um, Nick does a little bit of gaming. Uh on the gaming side, like I think it's gonna be awesome five years from now, where the interactions that we have in the games are agentic, right? So every player is gonna have a unique experience in-game, which will be really cool. And you know, some of the MMORPGs are gonna be really dynamic with um that sort of content. But then I also wonder, right, with some of the tabletop games, right? We do a game night here, first Wednesday of every month, but some of the tabletop games, maybe more of the traditional tabletops like uh Pathfinder, Nick, you play a little Dungeons and Dragons too, that's that sort of stuff, right? Like where if you have a, you have all the content, you have all the rule books loaded in. Um soon I would think you could have an agentic game master that is doing the storytelling and interacting with voice with the players. And I don't know how far off you think that is, but I think that's gonna be some really exciting stuff.

Joshua Schmidt 58:05

Maybe we could go around and talk about what we're most excited about. That's that's that's some cool stuff.

Nick Mellem 58:09

I want to hear I think I need to rethink my uh best places to work survey. And and and here's the other last thing here we have in the chat here. I think Faye9915 put in bounce castle Fridays, and yeah, he nailed it. We'll get that going. We'll get that. He wants to come work here.

Eric Brown 58:30

Yeah. He's been on the podcast before, I think. Uh but Lauren, what do you think about the voice and what are you doing with voice these days?

Loren Horsager 58:41

Yeah, so uh I'm I'm I'm still a little skeptical on voice in some ways, but I find there's there's I I think the question is voice with AI is not the same as voice with a human. So what that means is we have to be cautious of where we use it and where we don't use it. So when we first started doing training as an example, we started building out um AI-generated videos to do training. And those were a big no. Um, everybody that watched them said, I don't ever want to watch this, and I I feel disgusting at having watched what we put up. We've come a long way since then and all of our trainings in person, basically, right? But uh I I think it's interesting. I feel a little bit the same way with voice in the sense that there are cases, like I talk to my AI all the time. I'm in my car a lot, and I'm always on. If you see me driving down the road talking, it's more than likely that I'm talking to my AI. And I am dialoguing, I'm strategically thinking about problems, I am giving it actions to go code things, to do things, to verify issues, like re-review things all while I'm driving. You might not want to be driving near me now if if if you know that, but uh that I'm using the voice all the time, right? However, I don't have an expectation. Like people ask me, can we use voice to do outreach sales calls? And there's lots, lots of people are telling you this works great. And I'll be honest, it's close, but I don't think it's there. Um, but we we have a guy that uh is on our team, Darren, and he was on a call recently with uh a guy um for help desk support and or help support for something I can't remember what it was about. And uh he was on the call for like 45 minutes and he's like, I think this is an AI I'm talking to. And so he started asking him questions, right? And he asked him question after question, like random, random questions. And finally at the end, the guy's like, Why do you ask me all these crazy questions? And he's like, Well, I thought you were an AI, but I'm not really sure now. He's like, Well, I'm definitely not an AI, but uh that's interesting. Nobody's ever accused me of being AI before. And he's like, after he got off the call, he's like, I'm not quite convinced he was an AI, but so it's getting there, but it's not quite the the speed and depth um that that we need, but we're getting really close to that. AI uh voice is a fantastic means of communicating with AI right now today, though. The communicating back to a human when you don't expect it, I think one, there's a trust issue. Like, am I actually talking to a person that actually cares about what I'm doing? Or are they just trying to get to a an outcome? Right. Um, so there's more you're willing to open up to people if it's an actual person. Um, and so to build that trust is important, but also then is it high enough quality so people want to interface with it?

Nick Mellem 1:01:24

Lauren, what do you think the disconnect was with the AI training?

Loren Horsager 1:01:28

Do you think people are still wanting that connection with person-to-person training or what they want someone to see that that their face looked like they just they didn't feel right when they saw this? And they want someone to notice and ask them a question about that and say, hey, did did that make sense? What don't you understand? And you engage with them. It is it is incredible what we learn from facial expressions and reactions um in a classroom that you would never ever pick up. We we do one class that's online, our co-pilot class, because it's usually people all over the country. Um, and it's just it's way, way, way harder to teach. It's it's less um interesting to people because it's just so much harder to teach versus in person. You get a much better experience, you walk away with real results because your questions have been heard and people are attentively asking, hey, did that make sense? Can I see? Like, did you do like all of our classes are hands-on? You're doing things like, what did you do? Can you can you produce that? Can you show me? Um, and where did you get stuck? And what are you gonna do next? And like it's just seeing the brain going, seeing that, hey, they sat through a break and we're can you do any work on this? What are you working on? What's so excited about? What are you so excited about, right? It's understanding those kind of things you never are going to get from uh an online.

Creativity, Media, And Authentic Work

Joshua Schmidt 1:02:42

I think there's a psychological component there too. They it's the man behind the curtain effect. They want to know that they care enough to, you know, put something out there that's gonna be real. There's an authenticity thing. I mean, it's the same reason. Like, I I mean, I'm not a fan of um AI music. Is there a time and a place for it? You know, probably. Uh, but you know, I'm not going out seeking AI music. There's a human element to music that uh just contains a soul, right? And then and then that's become more valuable now with the uh ushering of AI into that space. So I think that's where you're getting some pushback. And I think there's always going to be the mainstream and then the counterculture, right? Though if if AI becomes mainstream, there'll just be people that want to push back just to push back or just to be cool. I mean, you know, we still have people like myself and Eric listening to vinyl records. You know, do we need to do that? No, but there's a there's a tactile. Oh, you do too, Nick? I love vinyl, vinyl records. It's the same thing like smoking, smoking a pipe or whatever, right? Like you get to hold it, you know, there's something to touch. There's you get to spend time with it, right? It's it's not just something you're putting on in the background, like passively listening to. There's an activity there.

Nick Mellem 1:03:53

I think it's fun that you brought up the uh vinyls, Josh. And I actually just this just popped into my head right now. I was cleaning out my I had an old bag in my closet that I found and I was cleaning out uh last week, and I found an iPod in there. And it's so crazy to hear you talking about vinyls, but then I but when I looked, found this i this iPod, I was like, this is like archaic technology. It's probably worth a bunch of money. Yeah, exactly. And it's been all over the world with me when I was in the military. But then to think about the vinyl records, that that seems like a technology we're coming back to using, but you couldn't even imagine using an iPod right now. Like that disconnect, that middle ground is gone until maybe another 50 years we'll come back, wow, an iPod. Like I can just put some songs on here. It's it's it's kind of fascinating to think about that.

Joshua Schmidt 1:04:41

I think they're already I think they're already, you know, I think we're gonna start stop looking at those things as regressive or old technologies, but there's a time and place for them, right? Like not everything needs to be the newest. Like the iPod is a perfect example of something you want to give your kids. Like I'd be more than uh willing to load up an iPod and give it to my five-year-old rather than to hand them the phone, you know, with a YouTube connection or a Spotify connection, right? Because I know what's on it and and uh and I know you know what they're listening to, and then there's no way they can connect to the internet or get in trouble there. So I think time and place.

Eric Brown 1:05:13

I I wrote a uh a newsletter article on LinkedIn back in June called The Numbers Behind the Curtain. And it the premise of it was where you had said the person behind the curtain, kind of like the Wizard of Oz pulling the strings and whatnot. But the the premise of the article was really around understanding how the AI is looking at the data that we're giving it. And it's really just looking at it from a numbers perspective and vectors, and it really doesn't know what we're thinking. Um, it has no memory and uh or any of that. And the the article kind of talks about like from a society perspective, we're putting all this weight and faith in this tool that we think it is acting in a certain way, but when you start to pull back the The layers and you look behind the curtain, it's really just algorithms and really complicated math that is super cool that humans came up in in an ingenious way of doing this. But yeah, it was an interesting deep dive. I was on it for a couple of weeks just thinking through how impactful it is that it's changing society, and probably only 1% of the population, maybe even less, really understands how it works.

Loren Horsager 1:06:27

Is that different than our human brains?

Joshua Schmidt 1:06:29

Um I was just gonna say that, yeah, the neural network, right?

Loren Horsager 1:06:33

Right. So when I got into this in '93, what I first started to do, I I started reading medical, not not like but brain books, basically, right? I was just fascinated by the fact that these neural networks were essentially trying to replicate all the brain work. So my question was, how does the brain work? And I think it's very interesting that uh uh there's so a ton we don't know about this, but I'm like, I I don't know. I think it might actually this might be this a similar process, right? Well, one thing I'll add to that is what you're talking about here, it's an interesting thing. People want a human connection. What I will tell you, like today I worked and yesterday I worked all day with my AI, and it I just I'm happy and it's a fun thing, right? Um when I have to spend time like coding, it it's not nearly the same pleasure for me. And some people really do find pleasure out of that. But they did a study, it was um software engineers using AI. Actually, I think it was about 70% happier um once they started using the AI because they're having a human-like experience. So it's not a human experience, but it's a human-like experience. So I think there's like we kind of need this window to evaluate a lot of things through about how human is this, and are we are we uh violating any of our human experience by providing this capability? Um, because I think that goes back to like our original training videos. Like it violated all of it, like this is not real, and it was obviously not real, and everybody rejected it. So we have to be very cautious about that perspective um as we present a human-like like option, how human-like is it? And are we not violating any of our human like a human perspective on that?

Eric Brown 1:08:15

Nick, I know you got some thoughts here too, and and Lauren, I just want to add on to that human piece. And I'm in the process of uh uh of writing a book on the differentiator of uh managed service providers. Book's gonna be out, I think, second week of uh November. Um there's uh around authorship because there's so much being written by AI and and and AI generated that uh books that were published in the pre-AI era that you know are more guaranteed to be written by a human are uh are are are considered more valuable, I guess, than than books written in in this era. And I saw an article um the other day where they were taking these really old books. This might have been another thing my brother sent me, um, where they were taking books and cutting the spines off of them so it was easier to scan um the books. And there was a lot of backlash on that. I'm thinking to myself, like, okay, yeah, I I understand that you know people maybe are like, yeah, that's wrong that they're destroying the books. And then I thought, well, is it though, from that author's perspective, who's probably been dead over 50 years, now if their content it makes it into the the the general knowledge base of humanity, is that better than the book remaining intact?

Loren Horsager 1:09:45

I saw that. I think it's an interesting conversation because you can kind of see both sides of that.

Nick Mellem 1:09:51

Well, especially if it's gonna get into more people's hands, right? If you have this book with all this packed with knowledge that might be relevant to more people if it's in AI or you can find it on the on a website or whatever it is. But if it just lives at a Barnes and Noble or at a library where maybe you wouldn't find this knowledge, I think that's the power where I would want my kids to have access to anything and everything that they can. Right. We don't want to take it for free, right? That whole thing, right? Play by the rules. But if we can push the knowledge to more people, I think that's the power in it. And we want to do that.

Joshua Schmidt 1:10:24

I mean, the most excited, uh, we'll just, you know, wrap it up here, maybe, um, unless you guys have anything else you want to chat chat about. I'm I'm most excited about um how we've democratized music by having Apple and Max in everybody's home, and you can make a studio into your bedroom. Um, the democratization of movies and film. You know, it takes a big budget to make a you know kind of Hollywood blockbuster type film. And I've been seeing these um short films on YouTube. One's called Pomegranate. It's a sci-fi short film, and a couple of other ones that are AI generated. They're basically business cards for these AI, you know, generative uh film studios. But they're getting really good. And I'm I'm excited to see what will happen to film and video and movies when when we all can start making them, or it gets a little more uh easy because it's been so gate kept for so long, like Hollywood, and um, you know, it can get political at times, and you know, everything's become so PC. It's like there's not a lot of great stuff anymore, in my opinion. Like I'm often find myself just scrolling through Netflix or like we hardly go to the movie theater anymore because there's not a lot of great stuff out there. So I'm really excited to see like when some really creative people get a hold of this and it can kind of come back down to a cottage industry again and and hopefully revitalize it and and start making good movies again, you know.

Eric Brown 1:11:48

I read an article recently in Esquire magazine um that that uh they interviewed Brad Pitt, and you know, they said Brad Pitt's like you know the top 1% of the top 1% of actors that's ever been. And they asked they asked him about AI and the impacts of AI, and and one of the things that he said was he had always destroyed the digital likenesses of himself, because in in a in his contract, like you know, he he writes that they don't get to keep them. And then he was looking back and he's like, Man, I wish I didn't destroy those because that was him, you know, all those years ago, and he could kind of see himself come up and you know, I think he's in his 60s now. But um it it it was interesting in that that mindset change. And he even in the article said that it would be interesting that if a director could work with a digital Brad Pitt, could it get that emotion in that scene that he as a human is bringing to the film at that particular point in time when it and it's that partnership and working with the director of like, no, I need a little bit more of this for this scene or a little less of that. And can you give that direction to the AI? And you know, maybe you can't today, maybe you can tomorrow. But I I thought it was a good article. It's a good read Esquire magazine interview with Brad Pitt.

Joshua Schmidt 1:13:06

What were you gonna say, Nick? Did you have one more thing?

Nick Mellem 1:13:08

I was gonna say if you're looking for a good movie, you better get out there now and go see the Odyssey. I heard that was good. Reading the book right now. We saw it opening weekend, my wife and I. Incredible. Probably my favorite movie I've ever seen. And I think because uh the photography on the side, but it was shot in 70 millimeter film, right? So it's like kind of what Josh is talking about. And it was like no CGI, right? Like everything was done. Like if you go see the movie, you'll notice, yeah, practical effects, thank you. Like using a large puppet or something, right? Like driving boats in a circle to create a whirlpool, like how it should be done. And and I think, and I saw somebody else post about I think it's this weekend that Fast and the Furious is 25 years old and it's going back to the movie theaters, and everybody's talking about the movie theaters are packed to see it. Right. And and that was again just like the Christopher Nolan movie, The Odyssey. It's practical effects. There's no CGI. It's how it wasn't they'd filmed it, how they intended you to watch it and perceive it right the whole thing. So that's cool. That's cool. So go see the Odyssey if you haven't. It's worth the see it in the theater.

Closing Thanks And Where To Subscribe

Joshua Schmidt 1:14:13

Well, it's fun to leave this on a on a positive note. Yeah. And um once again, thank you so much, Lauren, for joining us today. It's been fun working with you. We'll have to have you back on. I know we have some things cooking behind the scenes. So the bouncy house, apparently. The bouncy house is on Friday. Bouncy Fridays. Now it's every Friday. Every Friday. I'll be there. Thanks for everybody for joining. You've been listening to the audit presented by IT Lab Audit Labs. I'm your co-host, producer, Joshua Schmidt. We've been joined by Eric Brown and Nick Mellum from IT Audit Labs, and our guest today was Lauren Orsauger from Model Mind AI. Please check out Lauren online, his website, and uh you can find us wherever you stream your podcast, Apple Spotify video on YouTube. Thanks, and we'll see you in the next one.

Eric Brown 1:14:56

You have been listening to the audit presented by IT Audit Labs. We are experts at assessing risk and compliance while providing administrative and technical controls to improve our clients' data security. Our threat assessments find the soft spots before the bad guys do, identifying likelihood and impact, or all our security control assessments rank the level of maturity relative to the size of your organization. Thanks to our devoted listeners and followers, as well as our producer, Joshua J. Schmidt, and our audio video editor, Cameron Hill. You can stay up to date on the latest cybersecurity topics by giving us a like and a follow on our socials, and subscribing to this podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you sourced your security content.