This episode features an interview with Carolyn Clark and Shaun Randol. Carolyn is the VP of Employee Experience Strategy and Transformation at Simpplr, where she elevates the employee experience by driving innovation and revitalizing how employee communication is delivered. Prior to Simpplr, she led internal and HR communication at companies like Yahoo, Pandora, and GoDaddy. Shaun is the Editor-in-Chief of Digital Publications at Lam Research and the Founder of Mister Editorial, a mixternal communications newsletter. Previously, he spent 13 years leading communications at Bloomberg, BlackRock, and Splunk. In this episode, Amanda, Carolyn, and Shaun take on the vast world of AI. They discuss how they use tools like ChatGPT in their everyday lives, the role AI plays in internal communications, and security and ethics concerns in this new landscape.
This episode features an interview with Carolyn Clark and Shaun Randol. Carolyn is the VP of Employee Experience Strategy and Transformation at Simpplr, where she elevates the employee experience by driving innovation and revitalizing how employee communication is delivered. Prior to Simpplr, she led internal and HR communication at companies like Yahoo, Pandora, and GoDaddy. Shaun is the Editor-in-Chief of Digital Publications at Lam Research and the Founder of Mister Editorial, a mixternal communications newsletter. Previously, he spent 13 years leading communications at Bloomberg, BlackRock, and Splunk.
In this episode, Amanda, Carolyn, and Shaun take on the vast world of AI. They discuss how they use tools like ChatGPT in their everyday lives, the role AI plays in internal communications, and security and ethics concerns in this new landscape.
-------------------
“I don't think AI will replace you, but somebody using AI will. I also think that the number of jobs in our industry, there will be fewer because one person can do more using these technologies. Or maybe it's the same amount of jobs and people's time is spent more on thoughtful strategic work. Rather than rote, repetitive, junior-level material.” – Shaun Randol
-------------------
Episode Timestamps:
*(06:47): The role AI will play in internal communications
*(19:09): Segment: Story Time
*(26:40): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(27:13): How AI has already improved internal comms and HR
*(39:49): The dangers and fears of AI
*(01:02:23): Segment: Asking For a Friend
*(01:02:41): AI security and ethics resources
-------------------
Links:
Connect with Carolyn on LinkedIn
Connect with Shaun on LinkedIn
Follow Sam Altman, Founder of OpenAI
Visit Anthropic for more on AI ethics
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Carolyn and Shaun, thank you so much for joining me today.
Carolyn Clark: So good to be here.
Shaun Randol: Pleasure and a privilege.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. I wanna jump right in, right? I wanna spend as much time as we can talking today. I'm gonna look at ChatGPT and AI, cuz it's all over the place, right? It's in the news, it's all over social. I even had a notification pop up this morning about ChatGPT and AI from the New York Times Set, industry, events, conferences, you cannot escape it.
Amanda Berry: So today's podcast, we're gonna focus on ChatGPT and AI and how that's affecting the landscape in internal communications, HR, employee experience for better or for worse. So I wanna start off first though, by letting the listeners know something as I was thinking about this podcast and what I wanted to ask the both of you on here today, the idea hit me.
Amanda Berry: Ask ChatGPT, what I should be asking you. So that's what listeners are gonna get. They're gonna get questions from ChatGPT, and then some of my own. So just, just wanted to preface that and I bring that app Appealant. Carolyn, cuz I work with you at Simpl and you've really shown me some of the really cool stuff you're working on when ChatGPT and Shaun.
Amanda Berry: I spent the weekend reading the first part of your series on Mister Editorial Entit. It's titled Intelecomms, a practical series on using AI and corporate communications. You just published the first part and I, I read it over the weekend. I wanna tell our listeners how informative it is. Anyone who's listening should check it out on Mr.
Amanda Berry: Editorial website. But the first line of that, Series really struck me and I wanna just reiterate it and then get to you, Shaun. It, it starts off and it says, one day, not far. In the future, we will refer to life before and Life After Chat. G P T. I believe the release of this generative artificial intelligence platform in November, 2022 was a watershed moment in human creativity and innovation akin to the introduction of the affordable personal computer and maybe as disruptive as the printing press.
Amanda Berry: So Shaun, let's start with you, right? What is chat? G P T? I feel like we hear that phrase so much, but can you sort of to help define it for our listeners?
Shaun Randol: Yeah. The boring answer is that it's an artificial intelligence language model that's been trained on a vast array of text. It's been designed to understand and generate human like responses based on the inputs it receives.
Shaun Randol: The more interesting answer is that you can think of it as a virtual assistant that can engage in conversations with you. It can understand your questions, statements, and prompts as long as you're using natural language, and then provide coherent responses and generate text that's contextually appropriate and sort of simulates human conversation.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Anything you'd add to that, Carolyn?
Carolyn Clark: No. I mean, first of all, that opening line of that article that you wrote, Shaun, was I read it and I was like, yep, that's it. Exactly. I mean, I think that's key. And the only thing I will say, and I know we're gonna get into this, is. You get out what you put in. And I think that's what's key about a generative human modeled AI basically.
Carolyn Clark: But I know we're gonna get into all that, but no, I, he covered it. That's pretty good. Carolyn,
Amanda Berry: when you say you get out what you put in, can you describe what you mean by that?
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, I mean, I think I've been using it for a while and really just trying to oddly break it, which is never gonna happen, I realize now, but you get two choices here.
Carolyn Clark: You can think about what you put in as your prompt or you can just play with it. But my point is, if you really take a minute to think before you ask for something or you ask it to review something or change something, I, I think you have to do the thinking. And so that's what I mean by you get it out, what you put in.
Carolyn Clark: Sure. If you just put in, tell me this, you're absolutely gonna get something back. And it may be helpful, but the more you can kind of think about your end goal of what you're trying to get out of it, the better. I think your results are. And then certainly that learning that it's doing, which is supposed, I know we're gonna talk about kind of the fears around it, some of that, it does start to learn some of that language and it only gets better.
Carolyn Clark: And so as you're asking with whether it's ChatGPT or in another one, it starts to learn what you're putting in and what kind of things you're liking and you, you start to like and prompt it to fit like great answer or no regenerate this answer or whatever it is. And it starts to really understand what you're putting in and deliver even better results for you.
Carolyn Clark: Can each
Amanda Berry: of you, the role you see ChatGPT playing in internal communications and maybe how people are using it? And Shaun, let's start with you as you're working on that series, how are people using it and what are the role do you expect it's
Shaun Randol: gonna play? Well too soon to fully understand the role it's gonna play.
Shaun Randol: A lot of people are asking, for example, on best practices for using AI or ChatGPT, and I'm saying best practices. I we're, we're still in experimenting phase, like we need to design these practices as we go along. But right now I see it as a valuable virtual assistant, junior, associate slash intern. I have some very basic capabilities and can give anyone a headstart where you're just running out of time or you've never been confronted with that question or problem before and you're facing a blank page and just don't know where to start.
Shaun Randol: I think a platform like ChatGPT can give you that headstart can knock off. Hours and hours and hours of your work week just by putting together, uh, a response to a simple prompt. Like for example, let's say you are new in your internal comms career and you're two years in, and the c e o wants to send a message to employees about the death of an employee, a high profile employee.
Shaun Randol: Well, how often do you write notes from the CEO expressing grief about the passing of a colleague? Well, maybe you asked Chad g p t for that first draft, just, just to get a sense of what that would even sound like and where to even go rather than just trying to start from scratch. I see it as a first draft Jumpstarter.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. What about you, Carolyn? I, I know we've talked a lot about this. You're the one that really sort of introduced it to me and I was really taken back just the stuff you were writing in it. So I'm wondering if you would talk about the role you see it playing and then maybe some examples like Shaun just gave what you're using it.
Amanda Berry: For,
Carolyn Clark: I, I love the example Shaun gave of, of it being that junior associate or that intern. For me, I'm using it as an extra set of eyes, right? When I've been on internal comms teams where they've been big and we've had a very detailed editorial process where you're getting input from all the right people.
Carolyn Clark: Now being on a smaller team, that's kind of the direction I, I'm using it for a million different things. But when it comes to, sort of similar to what Shaun was saying, I'm using it almost like a gut check. And so I will generate something for myself and then put it in there and say, make this better or put this in a different tone or summarize this for me.
Carolyn Clark: Right? And so I'm kind of using it for all kinds of things. I'm using it for brevity. I'm a long form writer. I tend to write more than I should. And so I'll put in something and say, Hey, make this more brief for me. And the key here I think is that, and this is what I think Shaun was getting at, is it's, it's really a.
Carolyn Clark: Again, put in, put out kind of thing. So I'm not putting something in and taking it exactly right. I need to read it for the voice and tone of what my C e O might say or what the tone or voice of the company is, but it really becomes that gut check for me. And I really like using it for areas that I consider my blind spots.
Carolyn Clark: So I've always been in a comms role, right? I'm a good communicator, I'm a decent writer. I know how to handle crowds. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a product marketer or manager, and I'm not in sales, right? And so often what I'm doing is taking my biased writing, right? Cause everything we're individually writing is biased.
Carolyn Clark: I literally will say in chat g, pt, like for a sales associate, a young sales associate, tell me how you would say this for English. Second language engineering, super analytical person. Again, all of that you take with a grain of salt. Because there's bias throughout it. But for me to check my own bias that way has been hugely helpful.
Carolyn Clark: So I'm using it there that way a lot just to again, check my bias and and write more brief. And I think that's a concept that we're talking about ChatGPT, but there are so many other things out there and other tools. I use chat B G B T a lot, but I use a lot of other tools. And one of the other ones that I use very frequently is called Verb.
Carolyn Clark: And it is very much for fictional writers. And I use my stuff to then articulate a story, like tell me a story about an employee whose benefits were just taken away. And then I can kind of get myself into the mode of the person like this, the character. So I'm kind of doing that a lot too, to just try to trigger my corporate-Y brain into more of a storytelling brain as well.
Carolyn Clark: So again, I think endless. If I hadn't used
Amanda Berry: it, I would be hearing this thinking in my head that this is a really complex tool to use. Carolyn, can you kind of just walk through, if you had to write almost a help guide, right? You open ChatGPT, how you say, help me with this document, have it kinda more concise.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. And be more simple. Can you really just kinda walk through how the simplicity of
Carolyn Clark: it, so this all goes back actually to probably the early nineties when you think about how when we introduced search engines, right? When search engines were created, you were looking for a word, right? We started to see over, let's say 97 to 2007, we started to see a shift in how people searched for information very intentionally.
Carolyn Clark: And I'll give you just a personal example. I've said this before on this podcast, but I was at Yahoo for a really long time and had the opportunity to analyze search trends. And one of the things that we saw really clearly is people went from typing in a word, right? Like. Britney Spears. Okay, that's a great example.
Carolyn Clark: Cause she was the top 10 search person for very many years to what's going on with Britney Spears. How old is Britney Spears? Who is Britney Spears? When is Britney Spears next album. So you started to see the contextual searching change That is the headspace. I want people to get in when they're using AI is I want them to get out of the, like, I'm gonna type a word in and go into that curiosity.
Carolyn Clark: You know, I think about my daughter who's nine. The way she would ask me a question is the way that I'm approaching all of the AI things so that I'm getting neat. It is simple. You just need to change your mindset a little bit and ask it like you're asking a person and going in with this kind of reporter, like curiosity and treating it like a reporter.
Carolyn Clark: That's how you're gonna get the meat mostly out of it and start to teach it to answer questions. Shaun, what would you say? Do you think it's simple or.
Shaun Randol: Yeah, it's, it is very simple and I think that's, that's one of two ways that I would think about how to use chat. G P T. The first thing that people should think about is the name.
Shaun Randol: It literally says chat in the name, and it's the chat bot. So you can just ask it questions, it'll give you an answer, and then you can ask it to follow up or to refine it or to revise it. I mean, it's a, it's a chat thread. It's like you're texting a virtual assistant so you can have that kind of conversation.
Shaun Randol: The user interface is simple. There's just one text box on the page. So having that mindset of being able to ask more thoughtful questions is a great way to start with ChatGPT. But the next iteration of that is to assign ChatGPT a virtual assistant persona, and you may not. Know the questions to ask, but you can just tell it.
Shaun Randol: Gimme a headstart on something. So if, if I think about an example for that, this week I am doing some live reporting for an internal only conference, and our company uses Yammer as as our internal chat platform, the platform that is new to me. So I can ask ChatGPT. How would you report live from an internal conference using Yammer?
Shaun Randol: It gave me an answer, at least something to start with. It was more technical about how to set it up in the backend and use certain features and functionalities. But me being unfamiliar with the platform, like it just gave me a head start and a way to start thinking about. How to use Yammer in, in this instance.
Shaun Randol: So asking questions and getting more precise with that is one thing and having a conversation with Chad g p t. But the other is just like, Hey, I need you to do something for me cuz I've never confronted this in my life before. Where
Amanda Berry: do I start? I do, I do wanna just put in a word of caution cuz you're both talking about putting stuff in, copying something from work to get something back.
Amanda Berry: And I think it's important to people hear this more than once, probably throughout this podcast, that it's, you're really shouldn't be putting, you know, proprietary information from work in. What are you hearing about that, Shaun? With our listeners out there? What, what would you tell 'em about what you should and should not put into it?
Shaun Randol: Yeah, that's a great. Point, and I should even be clearer with the example that I just gave because ChatGPT, for example, is, is banned at the company that I work for. So I, when I'm talking about ChatGPT, in that example, I'm, I'm talking about AI in general because there are a lot of these chat bots out there.
Shaun Randol: The second is I absolutely do not put any information about my company into any of these AI platforms. With that example about how do I provide live updates from an internal conference using a certain chat platform, there's nothing about my company in that kind of prompt, nothing about my ceo, nothing about the products we make, nothing about our employees, nothing about where the, where the conference is happening.
Shaun Randol: The reason you want keep this kind of information about yourself and your personal life and your company out of these AI platforms is that they own the data, the information is stored on their servers. It is vulnerable to cyber attacks and the last thing that you want is to be compromising your company or your personal information should a leak occur.
Shaun Randol: Carolyn,
Amanda Berry: anything you wanna add
Carolyn Clark: to that? A couple things. I mean, I think one, it is a little bit of the wild, wild west, right? I mean I think it is a little bit, it is certainly worrisome. I to, I agree with everything Shaun said. I also, there are, I think recently they chat. She ChatGPT, which my goodness, we've tripped over the name so many times, which is funny.
Carolyn Clark: It makes me think like, yeah, we gotta, we gotta call it something different. But couple things. One, there isn't in incognito mode that can be used. You can turn off any record of your chat. So that's some options. There's some articles in the last couple of weeks that talk about that. But yes, I very intentionally.
Carolyn Clark: Will strip any information that I think is proprietary or personal. It actually, I find it does not limit the results at all. You can even put in pretend companies. So I, I think it is smart to be cautious. I also think we're gonna see people who are more cautious in life, right? So I'm one of these people where my mother will never give me her credit card information over text, right?
Carolyn Clark: I find that to be silly. It's not silly. I think it is absolutely a warranted fear. I think it's the same kind of thing. You're gonna see people who are more comfortable. I just think we don't know what the results will be. And I think Shawn's warning there is, it's risky. And so I think just being smart about it, the same way you would treat anything external that's internal.
Carolyn Clark: You should be treating it in that same way. But check out OG the incognito mode and the ability to turn off your chat record and history. That's one kind of quick tip you can do and I would encourage people to be using it on their personal devices. You know, making that choice for themselves and not necessarily their, their corporate given devices.
Amanda Berry: Let's move into our, our segment story time. Welcome
Carolyn Clark: to Story Time, story
Shaun Randol: time. You,
Amanda Berry: Shaun, I gotta say it. Your Mister Editorial. That shouldn't be a huge shock to anyone. I mean, your name and your bio and your About Me stuff is on Mister Editorial. I'm a huge fan of Mister Editorial. I look forward to getting your, your newsletters and going through your published content.
Amanda Berry: I use your archive almost like it's its own Google, you know, just to see what's out there, what I can pull from, what I can learn from. It's an amazing resource for folks. If any listeners haven't gone there, just go to Mister Editorial and check out his website. You're, you're an important thought leader in this space, as is Carolyn.
Amanda Berry: For our listeners, maybe who don't know what Mister Editorial is, can you give us a brief overview of Mister Editorial?
Shaun Randol: Tim, and thank you so much for being a devoted reader and friend for those compliments. Yeah. Mister Editorial started almost exactly three years ago in May, 2020, right when the pandemic was starting to rage, and it started as a lead gen, honestly transitioned to do some independent consulting.
Shaun Randol: My now wife and I knew we were moving to the West coast where I had limited name recognition, so I decided I was started a newsletter to start and get, starting to get my name out to do some lead generation prospecting for some consulting work, but, It's evolved. It, it now has thousands of readers from all around the world, which shocks and surprises and, and flatters and humbles me.
Shaun Randol: And I think there are three things that make the the newsletter succeed. One is that I'm providing tips and best practices and tricks for communications professionals, which we need because all of our work is behind firewalls and it's really hard to like Google for examples and screenshots and on how to do our job and see how other people are doing it.
Shaun Randol: So people are desperate for this kind of information and I try and help 'em out that way. The second is I'm a practitioner. That consulting gig lasted a hot minute. I'm back in the corporate world. I am in the trenches. I'm one of us. I'm one of the people. I understand the struggle and kind of. In the foxholes with them.
Shaun Randol: I'm not some on high consultant or somebody who's retired speaking from the clouds on how to do things. I'm like, yeah, well, the struggle is real inside the trenches here and, and, and I'm there with you. And the third is, I think I get to say a lot of things that other people are thinking but aren't necessarily allowed to say at their work for whatever reason.
Shaun Randol: So I feel like based on the comments and feedback that I get from my readers, that I'm often holding up a mirror to their own experiences and saying something that, that we're all feeling, but maybe can't say because professional decorum or politics or whatever it may be. So I love writing, I love editing, I love publishing.
Shaun Randol: I'm good at comms. Mister Editorial is natural manifestation of, of all of that.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, people can go to your website and sign up for your newsletter. I highly recommend it. Can you tell us about your current sort of corporate job? You're, you're doing the work, you know, you're in the trenches. Can you tell me just a little bit about what you do outside of Mr.
Amanda Berry: Editorial?
Shaun Randol: Yeah. I have an amazing job. I have a fancy title. I am the editor in Chief of Digital Publications for Lamb Research, a company nobody's ever heard of, but yet is a 65 billion market cap company. It's in the semiconductor industry. Speaking of ai, My company helps enable the microchip manufacturing that powers ai.
Shaun Randol: But what's great is that I'm in a external communications role. I am editor in chief of the internal news and our blog, and so it is a very rare position in corporate communications to have somebody who straddles the line between internal and external storytelling. It's almost exclusively internal or external.
Shaun Randol: If it's external, it's often with the marketing team. So it's a a really rare role and it's the reason why I joined the company, because the communications leadership, they recognize the future of corporate communications is the blending of internal and external into external and. Happy to join an organization that has that foresight and to help be a pioneer and a vanguard in, in the direction that I think our function will grow.
Amanda Berry: I feel like I wanna have you back on Shaun, just to talk about this role, the internal, the external. I know a lot of internal comms folks, including myself when I was more of a practitioner, struggled with that. Right. External does their thing, internal does their thing, and almost neither of the two the twain shall meet or something, you know?
Amanda Berry: But I, maybe, maybe reaching back out again. Carolyn. Carolyn, you are to this podcast. What Steve Martin is to snl. This is your third time co cohesion. That's nice. You're, you're, I'm have to send you a plaque that's like most appearances by a guest. Just remind our listeners quickly who you
Carolyn Clark: are. Yeah.
Carolyn Clark: Awesome. Thanks. And it's so good to be here again and the conversations are always great and I love getting to be on with people like Shaun, who I just super admire and read their stuff. Obsessively like you do, Amanda. So I kind of have lived in that practitioner life for almost my whole career and joined SIMR officially almost a year ago.
Carolyn Clark: And I have this really awesome job where I get to do the practitioner work still a little bit, which I. Still love to do, and I get to talk across the industry to other internal comms and HR comms leaders and understand their hopes and desires and dreams, and then meet internally with our product team and really get into the nuts and bolts of what we're building at Simpl to advance the internal comm and frankly, this external world, which I, I love that phrase of, of that kind of convergence between ex, external and internal, which are more and more just kind of converging.
Carolyn Clark: And then I get to do fun stuff, like talk all the time and read, and that I think is the most exciting part about my job. Don't, don't tell my boss, but I obsessively all day. Get to research and read what's going on in the communications in the HR space. And as somebody who lived in that practitioner life for so long, I would have tabs and tabs and tabs of articles I wanted to read constantly and not be able to get to them because of the day-to-day work.
Carolyn Clark: And so I spent a lot of time reading and researching and thinking, which is really exciting and makes me wanna go back to college because it is like getting to appreciate that deep research. And I probably get 30 newsletters and I prioritize a few, but I try to get through them and really understand what's happening.
Carolyn Clark: So yeah, so that's my, my gig. And I do have a consulting business on the side, so I still get to do a little bit of consulting, which is really fun and kind of helping internal comms folks and also employer branding teams. Figure out their their
Amanda Berry: path. Great. Thank. Well thank you again both for being here.
Amanda Berry: I'm gonna move us into our next segment, getting tactical.
Shaun Randol: I'm trying to figure out tactics and to be perfectly honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much, here I am in charge and trying to say, why did you sleep through tactics? Tactics.
Amanda Berry: Let's get back to this ChatGPT AI stuff. We had a nice fun moment. Now back in the trenches here cause we haven't really even scratched the surface, so, so I wanna dig in much deeper so listeners can get a better understanding. What are some ways you two both see ChatGPT AI has already begun to improve and transform internal comms or HR within companies?
Amanda Berry: Carolyn, let's start with you. Yeah, I
Carolyn Clark: think the two biggest tactical ways that I'm most excited about right now, and again, This changes every day. I, I'm, I think the possibilities are so exciting, but two kind of tactical things. One, I don't know how much time I've spent in my career creating FAQs around every single topic all the time, spending so much time doing that.
Carolyn Clark: And very, very tactically, I am using ChatGPT to create FAQs constantly. And its saving tremendous amount of time. And just to get really specific things that I'll do is I'll put in a, what would, and I gave this example with the personas. So I keep a persona in my mind and I say, okay, what would you know a mid-level sales associate ask about X?
Carolyn Clark: Right? Their boss is leaving, their company is going public. They missed their numbers, whatever it is, and it auto generates. And I will even tell it how many? Give me 10, give me 30 It. Automatically will generate those questions. And so for me to be able to then take those, put them somewhere, and then really start to curate them, that amount of time I would've spent thinking and asking and researching, I'm now able to get really quickly.
Carolyn Clark: So tactically, I'm loving the speed, the speed at which I can get things done, I think is huge. And then second for me, the biggest thing I'm using it, and I I talked about this, is gut checking bias and put in a message. And again, totally anonymously, right? I'm not letting people know who it's coming from, but putting in a message, if you were in this role, how would you receive this message?
Carolyn Clark: So again, I'm, I'm kind of very tactically using it for those quick auto generating things for me, and then gut checking, persona based things.
Amanda Berry: I, I know this seems like an obvious answer, but I, I just wanna ask it. How long does it take to get the information back when you, when you put in specifically those questions or that persona with that
Carolyn Clark: problem?
Carolyn Clark: It's instantaneous. I mean, it liter literally it is instant. Now, I will refine my question, and this is what I think we were talking about earlier, is like, you need to, you, you have to shift the way you're asking questions and really, as, as Shaun shared thinking about it, like a conversation, it is a chat bot.
Carolyn Clark: So thinking about it that way, so I forget that once I'm in the flow, then I can ask and it will just continually generate based on what I'm asking and refining. But it is instant. Yeah, I can
Amanda Berry: see it type out right there in front of you. Just question, question, question, question. Shaun, what about you? How are you seeing it improve and transform
Shaun Randol: communications?
Shaun Randol: I'm not really yet now. I can't speak too much about hr. It's a space I don't have much experience in, but I know for more than 10 years, HR has been using AI to filter and read resumes as a first round of, of recruiting, for example. But how HR is really using it at I, I'm not too sure for corporate communications.
Shaun Randol: Again, I think we're too soon, and I think that's for a couple of reasons. One, comms pros are like notoriously slow to pick up on new technology. I mean, Remember when, like five, eight years ago, everybody was like, we need an app. We need an app. And how quickly that happened five, 10 years after the, the app store opened up in, in Apple and so on.
Shaun Randol: So I think comms pros are, are too slow to pick up on, on new technology in general. And I think we're also, especially for internal comms, one of the last functions to get the budget resources that are needed to invest in these new technologies. So I think it's the transformation that we're seeing on the corporate communication side is happening on the individual level.
Shaun Randol: It's happening on the fringes and it's happening with those who are ambitious because as I said in the introduction to my initial piece on in telecoms, Talking about artificial intelligence and communications work. AI will not replace you, but somebody using AI will. And so I think those who are experimenting with the technology right now on an individual level within their teams, maybe their team doesn't even know that they're using it.
Shaun Randol: Those are the places that we're seeing a little bit of traction. I think for general purposes of like whole teams experimenting with AI technology, I think the safest place and the most fun is probably with image generation, because when you are asking AI to help create an image, it's, it's kind of, it is a benign act because you're not.
Shaun Randol: Asking it to write a memo in a certain CEO's voice about sensitive topic like layoffs or anything like that. Many communications teams don't have a multimedia artist within the function, but you need graphics to entice readers to, to your material. So why not experiment with something like Dolly or Mid Journey to create graphics, a resting graphic, uh, for, for your intranet story in a matter of seconds without having to tap a consulting service for thousands of dollars for a piece of artwork.
Shaun Randol: So I think when people start experimenting with something as benign as image generation, it could be the gateway drug. To using chat AI tools. I mean, there are hundreds of tools out there that, that we're not even touching on. So I, I, I don't really see too much influence in it right now. I can count on my hand right now.
Shaun Randol: The comms pros who I think are actually seriously talking about AI and corporate communications, and I'm talking with one of them in this podcast right
Carolyn Clark: now. I'm finding, the more that I use it actually, the more anxious and nervous I get. I the, it's this combo of excitement. You're talking about mid journey, and you're right.
Carolyn Clark: I think the gateway is on some of the image generating. But recently I generated head shots for myself and just to play, and my mind went so far. In the fear factor, right? Things so many scary things. Imagining, right? Like me as a persona who's not really me, if something were to happen to me in the future, I mean, it it not to take us in a dark road, but I think that the more that I'm digging into it all the more anxious I'm getting and excited.
Carolyn Clark: But I, on the image rath front, as a someone that's also a creative on the side and an artist, I'm starting to get super anxious about all of that as well. So I, I just think we are so much at the infancy of all of this that you're exactly right, Shaun. I mean, I think we could have the same conversation in three months and we're gonna have a completely different conversation.
Carolyn Clark: Cause nobody knows. But do, are you all experiencing that the more you're using it, is it making you more comfortable, more anxious? Both.
Amanda Berry: I mean, me personally, when you've shown it to me, I'm like, oh, that's neat. I'm gonna go in and try it. And then as I play, I realize I don't even fully understand its power, which gives me some, you know, a little bit of anxiety that there's so much there that I don't, I don't even know how to use it.
Amanda Berry: Fully yet, which makes me nervous. I can't, it's hard to describe what that means. It's, it's like the idea of like maybe looking at an elephant and they say you have to eat the whole thing. And the, you know, the, the joke is you eat it one bite at a time. And I'm trying to think of how to consume it in one bite.
Amanda Berry: So I know that that's sort, sort of a dark metaphor, but I, I don't fully understand it's power and what it actually can and can't do. And I know that's still being built and will continue to evolve, but I, that's where my anxiety comes from. I know I've heard, like you said, Carolyn, the artist having a real problem with this, and I do wanna talk about sort of the dark side about it.
Amanda Berry: But before we move on, I, I wanna let Shaun, I wanna hear how you feel about it. Cause I'm very curious if you're anxious or what, what your feelings are.
Shaun Randol: Yeah. Well, Carolyn, let me ask you, do you consider yourself an AI expert? Oh God,
Carolyn Clark: no.
Shaun Randol: No. And so you're one of the very few people who I know who are taking AI and comms seriously, I'm into this every single day.
Shaun Randol: I've got so many spreadsheets, so many reports, so many thoughts about it. And I would not call myself an expert either. And yet I think you and I know more than 99% of corporate comps professionals out there. Now, that said, neither one of us admit we are experts in this technology, and I look at what the actual experts out there are saying and doing, and they're kind kind of freaking out a little bit, and we're recording it on a day in which hundreds of AI professionals signed a one sentence statement.
Shaun Randol: It's about extinction, wasn't it? Yeah. It says mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war. And then it's signed by hundreds of actual AI experts, i e the people who built this technology. The
Amanda Berry: store's appearing everywhere, right?
Amanda Berry: It's not, it wasn't just on the New York Times. I know. That's where I got the, the notification from and then I googled it cuz there was a paywall and it's like, it's everywhere. So like PC Mag, like, so I was able to go in and read it. That really struck me as I'm getting ready for this podcast to talk to you all.
Amanda Berry: They're, they're saying there's a risk of extinction, not to be a doomsday, but that feels like the ultimate doomsayer. Yeah, and I think
Shaun Randol: there's a couple of things happening there. One is it's, you're gonna read about it because it's alarmist and media loves alarming stories. The second is, I think it is a bunch of cover your ass activity happening right now.
Shaun Randol: We have all the engineers and I, I don't know, psychologists and philosophers and programmers who have created this technology and unleashed it, and now they're kind of apologizing for it and for, uh, trying to distance themselves from it, from the negative consequences of the monsters that they released.
Shaun Randol: I think there is mostly sincerity here because I think that the individuals who signed that kind of statement believe themselves to be the. Trusted individuals who can help usher AI technology forward in a way that doesn't harm us. I think they're sincerely worried about nefarious actors leveraging AI technology to do bad things in terror society apart.
Shaun Randol: But I also think at the same time, they're like, we, we were against nuclear war caused by robots. We said so in a statement back in 2023. So don't blame us, but. I mean, they built it. So let's
Amanda Berry: dig into that. Cause it's not, I mean, I feel like risk of extinction is like the worst possible outcome. So everything else I'm about to say is really bad as well, but not as bad as full on human extinction.
Amanda Berry: But you have tech leaders like Elon Musk and Jeffrey Hinton, who's actually the godfather of ai, right? He left his role at Google and blew the mi whistle on this. But they're, they're coming out and saying this, this has some serious dangers to society or DRIs to society, right? I mean, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, there's chatbots that can learn.
Amanda Berry: Racist behavior. I mean, there's so much bad that could come from this, and I, I just wanna know what you all are hearing about this and maybe even provide some examples. I know Carolyn, you and I have talked about the, the Pentagon when, when there were photos that it had been bombed or was on fire and that, that had really upset you and, and, and when I looked it was very disturbing.
Amanda Berry: So I would love to hear from the both of you about the dangers and what you're actually seeing happen.
Carolyn Clark: I think what I go back to is the same fundamentals of everything that I've learned in communications, which is what I call the, the me questions. I go straight to that when I think about all of this, like extinction, terrible, terrible, terrible, but I can't even conceptualize that.
Carolyn Clark: For me, I go to the things that affect me, right? Things like exactly what you said, like the situation at the Pentagon. What that did, what that really, as somebody who's been in the media previous to comms, I started to really think about reliable sources and the definition of reliable sources and how that is gonna drastically change because of this and how people are gonna have to wade into that reliable sources water that don't normally.
Carolyn Clark: Right. Many corporations stay away from that space. They're gonna have to change their stance and, and say, look, these are the, these are the places that are reputable. Right? Or, which is a whole nother conversation. I go very much, it's cuz I'm a mom, I go very much into the, all of what you're talking about.
Carolyn Clark: The fears that I personally have around, I mean, it gets so dark, so fast. So I don't, I don't even, I can't even go there in my mind. But what I will say is I think naturally humans are gonna go to the me situation, and that is where I would start to think about those worries. I think about my aging parents and already my fears around scams and things like that.
Carolyn Clark: The, the possibilities. Become endless of, of fear for me and when it comes to that. So I think we are right to be cautious. I think we are right to think that we are, we are literally at the baby stages, not even like the one day old baby. Yet at the same time, I can list all of these fears that I personally have and I can list a lot of benefits I've been seeing over the last like four months that have drastically helped open my eyes.
Carolyn Clark: So it is a very complex place, but I think being worried and being cautious is better than being not, I don't even know if I answered your question there, Amanda, cuz my brain, I just go spin off into the bad scenario. It's, it's worrisome and exciting. It's confusing.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, it is very confusing. I think for me that's where that anxiety rests rights, right?
Amanda Berry: We're at the intersection of anxie or excitement and, and scariness. What about you, Shaun? What do you think about some of this? Like it, I mean, I wanna call them unfounded fears, but it's more like possibilities of what could
Shaun Randol: happen. I don't think any of it's unfounded, and anybody who's read Ray Kurzweil's the singularity is near, should have a sense that the end might possibly be near too.
Shaun Randol: If bad actors get a hold of artificial intelligence, I think the most immediate effects that we will see on the negative side are around disinformation, and that's fake photos, fake video, fake audio. Already, platforms like Spotify are removing thousands and thousands and thousands of AI generated music.
Shaun Randol: Russia right now is using AI generated technology for propaganda and, and their war in Ukraine. They're using it on the Ukraine side, they're using it on the the Russian side. I guarantee you that in the 2024 US presidential election, we will contend with fake video, fake audio, and fake photography. Maybe even from an outside actor trying to manipulate the US election.
Shaun Randol: I think Jonathan Ha, who is a social psychologist among other things, has a lot to say about how AI will ramp up that negativity and rage and misinformation and social media, which will have a vicious cycle against our new cycle and, and the way we perceive our fellow citizens and so on. So I think disinformation is the most immediate and real fear for me.
Shaun Randol: I think it has potential to tear society apart. Our American society is already fragile and I think the. The volume on, on this infor misinformation will be ratcheted up. Ironically, many people are talking about how AI will be needed to spot AI generated content and market as valid or manipulated. So that that's, that's one thought on like what, what I'm afraid of.
Shaun Randol: On the other hand, I think anybody who's seriously interested in artificial intelligence and its effect on society should approach the individuals who are in the media talking about this with a critical eye. Jeffrey Hiton is considered the godfather of ai. He retired from Google to speak out about the dangers of ai.
Shaun Randol: But guess what? Jeffrey Hiton built that ai. So like, weren't you aware of these dangers all along while you were building it and collecting your fat Google paycheck? Now that you're doing all right, it's okay for you to retire and speak out about this. Like where were you when, when you were building it for Google and when Elon Musk speaks out about Chad g p t and slowing down the advancements in artificial intelligence?
Shaun Randol: Well, Elon Musk is a co-founder of Open ai, which started chat G pt, and Elon Musk is starting his own competing AI platform. So I think he's less about the dangers of AI and more about falling behind in the marketplace, and he wants to catch up. So when, when people are speaking out, like who are they?
Shaun Randol: Where are they coming from, and. Weren't you aware of all this all along? Why didn't you tap the brakes before you released the monster here? So just think critically about the voices we're, we're seeing out there.
Amanda Berry: If, if as a society we could look at what people are saying and then what they're doing privately.
Amanda Berry: If people speaking out of against a, but then they're profiteering from a as well, that's a very, very common thing happening. It's really hard for me to go from talking about extinction. Too, just a fear that our listeners might have. I wanna, I wanna sort of step back on that, what we were just talking about cuz it is very dark and I feel like we could spend another 15 hours, the three of us just, just really going through and we could get our tinfoil hats on and some of that.
Amanda Berry: But No seriously, but I, I do wanna point out the ChatGPT cuz one, one of the fears, and it's again not exchange distinction level, but the fears you're seeing over and over and over, Shaun, you sort of alluded to this earlier, it's gonna take my job if I'm internal comms and I need to write all this stuff that like Carolyn is pointing out, then I can be let go and my boss can just use that.
Amanda Berry: So I'm wondering if you both will speak to that. It's taking my job or I'm afraid it's gonna take my job. Fear that's out there in public. And Shaun, I'll start with you because you brought it up about you won't be replaced by it, but if you don't use it. Then that's gonna be a disadvantage. So would you mind speaking to that?
Shaun Randol: Yeah. I don't think AI will replace you, but somebody using AI will. I also think that the number of jobs in our industry will just, you know, there will be fewer because one person can do more using these technologies, or, I don't know, maybe it's the same, maybe it's the same amount of jobs and people's time is spent more on thoughtful strategic work rather than wrote repetitive junior level material.
Shaun Randol: So five years ago there was a study of 200 tech applications and it found that 38% of PR work could be done using ai. So that was five years ago, 38%. Now we have ChatGPT, and an explosion of AI tools. I haven't seen a study on this lately, but my guess is 60 70% of PR work now can be done using ai. So what does that mean for the PR department?
Shaun Randol: Does that mean you still have five people working on pr? They're just being more productive and efficient because they're using AI tools to write press releases and media advisories and interview background notes? Or does that mean that department goes from five to one or two and the money is reallocated somewhere else?
Shaun Randol: The point is those two PR people left standing at the top of the pyramid and their company are using ai, and if they're not, they're being replaced by somebody who is. And so I think that's just the future of, of corporate communications. It will be as vital to us as the keyboard to do our work.
Amanda Berry: Carolyn, what do you think about this topic?
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, I mean, I com I completely agree. I don't think we know yet. I think it's a great statement to say we're not gonna all lose our jobs because of it, but you better get on board to using it. I don't know if that's true or not. I, I think things are moving really fast. What I can say is I, I feel pretty confident that the time that communicators spend on things that I would categorize as not strategic and not important are absolutely gonna be replaced.
Carolyn Clark: What I don't think is gonna be replaced is the ability to truly story tell, to truly dig in into a culture. I think we're gonna see communicators shifting more into this experience, understanding like really the human humanity, the stuff that you cannot generate, which is. Emotions and feelings as a result of something unexpected that I don't think, I think that AI is gonna be able to make assumptions, right?
Carolyn Clark: This the same way that I was talking about building personas, right? Even those beautiful descriptions that AI gives me when I give in a persona, it's missing the reality, right? The humanity of it. I think it can pretend that I don't think I can get to that. So I think that things are gonna start to get reprioritized.
Carolyn Clark: Storytelling, understanding, emotion, human psychology. I think all of those areas are gonna continue to thrive. I think your ability to work fast, your ability to write quickly, your ability to create bullets, stuff like that is gonna, yes, absolutely is gonna go away, but I think there, I have to hope and I kind of living in this hope that the part of my job that I think is the most meaningful, which is connecting with people telling a story.
Carolyn Clark: Understanding the human psychology of the workplace. I have to imagine in my heart that that's not gonna be replaced and that some of the other things are, I think we don't know and, and I think that fear is what is making people say like, oh, it's gonna take my job. Well then get smart. Like start, start using things, start exploring, start reading, start playing and testing, and also start honing what it is that can never be replicated, which is the, again, that humanity, that empathy, the things that make a lot of the communicators, great communicators.
Carolyn Clark: Figure out what those things are and really hone those as opposed to your ability to write briefly or to write well, or to write in a certain voice. That stuff is just gonna become, I think, irrelevant a little bit. I'm
Amanda Berry: gonna turn this just a second and, and think about it from an employee experience perspective, we just finished the conversation about how is it gonna impact my job?
Amanda Berry: But then as an employee, if a company is using J G P T or ai, how might that enhance my employee experience or employee engagement at an
Carolyn Clark: organization? I guess the question is, do they know? I mean, I think most people are not gonna know. I think that when it comes to sort of generative ai, when it comes to some of the, below the surface things like being able to perceive a tone, a feeling, a sentiment based on a comment or a reaction, I think we're gonna start to see hopefully, quicker responses from organizations in addressing.
Carolyn Clark: Culture concerns, feelings, stuff like that. On the generative side, and I might be, I haven't thought deeply about this section, but I'm just not sure the average employee cares how they get their, like, who has written their news. I mean, that's tough for the comms people to hear, but I, I don't, I don't think they know.
Carolyn Clark: If Amanda wrote it or I wrote it or Shaun wrote it, they probably think of the CEO wrote it, to be honest. So I don't know. Shaun, what do you
Shaun Randol: think? Agree with that? Employees don't care where the information comes from. As long as they get it. Many may or may not be able to spot generative content. I know when I use Dolly, At the beginning of the year to create artwork to accompany an intranet story.
Shaun Randol: Hey, look, it's a tech company. A lot of people spotted that it was dolly generated art and actually the artwork in that story generated more comments than the actual content. I think people were just happy to see Dolly appear on the inside. But I think you are right. AI is gonna have a bigger role to play in workflows and information sharing with employees, and they again, may or may not realize that AI is, is under the hood, powering all that.
Shaun Randol: General Motors did a study a while ago on what they deemed social AI and how documents information were surfaced for employees on, on the desktop. And what they found was ai. Revealing these documents or people connections, employees or projects that they didn't know existed but were popping up in their feeds because of keywords and and history and browsing.
Shaun Randol: It made them more productive, more efficient. It actually increased their happiness. It decreased attrition among that workforce and increase the quality of the output. So I think AI will actually have bigger influence on how employees connect with each other and share and find and information and this degenerative AI that they could probably care less about.
Carolyn Clark: And the only other thing I was gonna say, I think that is gonna have an impact is, is context. And I think the ability to get quick context on things either in both internally and externally, I think will also impact the employee experience. We as communicators spend a lot of time, right, thinking about.
Carolyn Clark: You're putting information out, you try to share the context of that as it relates to things in the past. That's a process, that's a long process that we spend time on. I think that AI is gonna speed up that contextual understanding, which I think speeds up workflow productivity, and I think is gonna cause even more engagement, both negative and positive enga, or if you could say engagement is negative or positive, but engagement, right?
Carolyn Clark: Because they're gonna have more context that they didn't have before. And I think we're, that communicators are gonna need to be even smarter because people are gonna have context that sometimes they didn't even think of related to history of a company, related to a specific situation. So I think that's gonna be another one to really kind of keep an eye on, is as more and more people get comfortable with the idea that they can get more context on things, that they're gonna use that context as they should to push their employers to.
Carolyn Clark: Push their bosses, their managers, for even more context. I think it's gonna be a bit of a, a cycle that I don't think many of us are prepared for yet. Can
Amanda Berry: can you gimme an example of that, Carolyn, what you're talking
Carolyn Clark: about? Yeah. So, you know, if you really basic, let's say you're really trying to rally your employees about your, the quarter you've just had, right?
Carolyn Clark: You've had a really, really great quarter and you go out and you're, you've got a communicator who does their research, right? And they said, this is the best quarter we've had. Here's X, Y, and z. Very, very quickly. People are gonna be able to, if they're interested and ag again, they, there is an inherent interest that has to happen to say, oh hey, chat gpt, give me the entire rundown of every quarter for the last 15 years of this company.
Carolyn Clark: Pluses and minuses. And I think they could come back and say, well, hold on a second. This quarter absolutely was great, but based on all the research I did in two seconds, it looks like 15 years ago we had a very similar quarter that had the similar results and then we had a big dip or some, like, again, something, it's just the ability to access information quickly, distilled without the depth of research.
Carolyn Clark: And I think again, that's the way that communicators need to start thinking about, not because I think communicators are hiding it, or I just think it's, again, it's bandwidth. You're, you're putting something together. You do not have the bandwidth to do 15 years of research on every single quarter of a company you've been at for two years.
Carolyn Clark: But if not, now you have access. The whole world is gonna have access to that, and I think we're gonna see it on the external side hugely. That's kind of my very basic, I mean, there's probably a gazillion more examples like that.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, no, that's, that's a good one. We're running low on time here, and honestly, we haven't even scratched the surface.
Amanda Berry: We've talked about all this stuff. It can do. There are things that we know already that we know it can't do right now or won't be able to do in the future. Shaun, let's start with you.
Shaun Randol: I don't know about the future, but right now, as we've mentioned before, it doesn't understand context, doesn't understand the context of your organization, and so the output from something like ChatGPT may be inappropriate.
Shaun Randol: Most importantly, it's not creative. Generative AI creates content based on content that already exists. It doesn't have much ability to come up with something original, and that's where the human using AI or not can stand out against this technology. The other thing is like generative AI doesn't handle rare events very well because again, it's basing its answers on things that have already existed or happened.
Shaun Randol: So if you confront an activity or an event or a circumstance that you need assistance with that just hasn't happened before, you're not gonna get much help there. So those are some of the things and you know, they can't love you.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Yes. It's funny that you said that when I was showing it to my husband, I was just showing him, I told it to write a song by, you know, one of our favorite artists to see What about this topic?
Amanda Berry: Yeah. I saw Carolyn haven't write a Taylor Swift song about a topic that you love Carolyn. But then I, I was, I was showing him and I was reading a news, it was in the middle of reading a news story and I asked Chad g p t to summarize this brand new news event that had been going on for a couple of weeks and it couldn't do it.
Amanda Berry: And then it said, if it's prior to this date, I probably won't be able to give you much of information. So that was a limitation I saw that sort of dovetails off of the ones you just talked about. Carolyn, what are you saying in terms of what it can do or real limitations other
Carolyn Clark: than Johnson? I think about writing on behalf of someone.
Carolyn Clark: So for example, our c E O has a very distinct style and voice, and I think it can learn his style and voice. Absolutely and generate things that sound just like him. What it cannot do is account for the day-to-day flux of our personal emotion, our personal changes in context and thought. And so I think that I could ask it to generate something really, really like nail on the head from our c e O, but it cannot tell me how he's feeling that day and how that feeling influences the way he's directing the company in that moment.
Carolyn Clark: And that is gonna come from two things. It's gonna come from the individual and it is gonna come from human connection that somebody has with that person to understand and talk to them in that moment. So I think we can get really close to really replicating voice and tone of a person. AI is never gonna be that person and have those same human.
Carolyn Clark: Interactions, fears, joys, and then a hundred percent what Shaun said about the creative piece. I, I don't consider myself a creative writer, but people that I know who are, I read something they've written and I know they've written it. There's authors in history that we've seen this. I have never once read something by Chad, g p t by generative.
Carolyn Clark: Anything that I've thought that is miraculous like that. I've never seen anything like that. It is always, I can spot it in a second. Yeah. And I don't think that is gonna change. I think they're gonna replicate, but I don't think they'll ever be that sort of big magic moment, as Elizabeth Gilbert would call it, that happens in true creatives that they can never be that.
Carolyn Clark: It try and it's gonna try and it's trying now, but it's not gonna get,
Amanda Berry: yeah. I think what, soon as you, the first time you do something, like come up with a list of FAQs, you see, I don't know if the generic is the right word, but almost not creative, generic that it comes with. It's like, like you both have said, it's a great starting point to, to cover that first maybe hour or two.
Amanda Berry: You'd be sitting there racking your brain, but it doesn't, doesn't really get to the heart of what you're looking for sometimes. Well, let's get into our last segment. Asking for a friend who's
Shaun Randol: asking for a friend. Hey, asking for a friend.
Amanda Berry: I wanna make sure that our listeners understand sort of what's at stake here. So I'm wondering if either of you have resources that we can point folks to about security and ethics when it comes to AI ChatGPT. Shaun, let's start with you.
Shaun Randol: Let me preface this by saying, Ethics and security are very specialized areas around ai, and I wouldn't expect any comms person to become an expert in this area.
Shaun Randol: We do a lot of communications with our employees within organizations. Are we experts in organizational psychology? We use technology platforms. Are we necessarily experts in cybersecurity or do we understand supply chain ethics around the computers that we're assigning to new employees? I wouldn't ask our fellow comrades to, you know, freak out about not being an expert in, in the security space around this, but I do think they should have some general awareness and knowledge o of the topic.
Shaun Randol: And if you're listening to this podcast and you're already on the right track, I think. If you just follow Sam Altman, who is one of the founders of Open AI and the creator of ChatGPT, I think he's doing a very good job of trying to explain ethical concerns around his companys technology. He's on a lot of podcasts.
Shaun Randol: You can find him in the media, seek him out. I think he is a thoughtful individual and he was recently testifying in front of Congress about this very topic. I think IBM has a good primer on AI and ethics, so you can just Google IBM Primer AI ethics and you'll find it. And I think if you want to get into the weeds around cybersecurity ethics and technical concerns, you can go to anthropics website.
Shaun Randol: Anthro is another AI technology company that actually tries to be ethically. Minded in the, in their output. So they have a lot of white papers that are generally readable by a lay audience.
Carolyn Clark: I mean, I think for me, there's a couple of really simple things that I'm doing. One. Very basic. I've set up Google alerts with a gazillion keywords related to sort of the era in general, but also some of the ethics.
Carolyn Clark: So that's one, right? Like at your basic, even reading headlines is helpful. I think you need to have it somewhere implanted in the back of your mind to be thinking of, I get a ton of newsletters on this topic. Some are helpful, some are not. They almost always touch at least once a week on something related to ethics and some of the fears and concerns.
Carolyn Clark: So I just try to really keep myself up to date. I also have been, I don't have this set yet. I wish I did so I could share it with everybody, but I've been kind of trying to track some of the leading higher education professors and researchers to see what they're putting out. Many of them are not putting out a lot yet for the same reasons that Shaun just said.
Carolyn Clark: This is just, again, the beginning. There's, it's so, but I'm kind of tracking a couple of those people. I'm happy to share once I get my list complete. I'm a big fan of just. Following researchers in general. So I'm just trying to really get as much as I can. I wish I had the energy to read white papers. I'm too busy reading all these newsletters, I guess.
Carolyn Clark: I think the key here is yes, if you can go deep and follow some of these people, please do it. If you can't, making sure that at the back of your mind it is in there. And I think that's gonna take repetitively bringing that topic up and being
Amanda Berry: aware of it kinda, I would honestly argue keep it in the front of your mind.
Amanda Berry: I, I, I really like that Shaun, you pulled out like since we're not experts in all these very specific topics and industries, it's hard to tell the ethics and the concerns around very specific parts of this. So we've seen the media, you gotta be careful not to be a doomsday or when it comes to it, you gotta really find a balance to strike and when you get overwhelmed, maybe step away.
Amanda Berry: It has a lot of good and a lot of bad, I'm sure involved in it as well.
Shaun Randol: There's a lot of froth out there right now, and I think you don't need to stay on top of the day-to-day movements check in once a week or once every three weeks. There's so much to talk about in the news. It's the hot topic right now.
Shaun Randol: It'll, it'll simmer down or settle down, so you've got time to catch up. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Well, Carolyn has Ashan. This has been so much fun. I really enjoyed this. I think we should do this again. Maybe we could come back on again and get to the 15, 20 questions I didn't get to. So thank you both very much for being here.
Amanda Berry: I really, really appreciate it. Thank you.
Shaun Randol: Thank you. I don't know about, but I'm keeping a spreadsheet and I've got hundreds of AI tools that I'm starting to track, and I have, I haven't even dabbled in 85, 90% of them. So this is a landscape that is evolving and is worth reconnecting or retouching.
Shaun Randol: Revisiting regularly over the next couple of years.
Amanda Berry: Really. Maybe we come back in a year and we see what's changed, right? Oh my God, everything will have
Carolyn Clark: changed in a year, maybe three months.
Amanda Berry: Well, you have to li re-listen to this first podcast and then we come back in and just sort of like, wow, boy, were we right about this?
Amanda Berry: And boy were we wrong about this. Anyway, before I let you both go for the day, let us let our listeners know where they can find you. They may have a lot of questions. Where can they reach out to you? Shaun, let's start with you.
Shaun Randol: I'll plug my substack newsletter again, Mister Editorial spelled out mistereditorial.substack.com.
Shaun Randol: If you subscribe to the free version there, you can always hit reply and connect with me that way. Otherwise, LinkedIn. Great.
Amanda Berry: And Carolyn and
Carolyn Clark: LinkedIn is, is the best way. And then of course, all things Simpplr. And carolynjordanclark.com. If you can get in directly in touch and please do like, and please call us on things that you, we didn't talk about that you wanna hear us talk about or that you, you think we were wrong about.
Carolyn Clark: I think this is the key with this is that, as Shaun said, like. I am so far from an expert on AI that I'm hungry to learn, so connect with me and let's learn together.
Amanda Berry: Great. Thank you both so much. This has been great.
Carolyn Clark: Thank you.
Shaun Randol: Thank you.