Alex: Have you noticed the growing divide between those who are thriving
with artificial intelligence and those who are being left behind?
Today my guest dives into what's driving this AI divide and why
empowering everyday users is critical for a fair and inclusive future.
He goes on to share practical advice and real world examples to help you
support those who are struggling to embrace AI and close the gap.
My name is Alexandre Nevski and this is Innovation Tales.
Artificial intelligence, revolutionary tech, or the ultimate headache.
If you're a business leader trying to navigate this AI craze, you might
feel a bit like you're standing in the serial aisle with way too many options.
Enter Justin Simpson, co founder of Here.Now.AI, whose weekly newsletter
helps over 20000 readers make sense of AI without drowning in jargon.
His mission?
To help people and businesses use AI to work smarter, not harder.
In today's episode, Justin tackles the AI divide, a problem where some people
are zooming ahead while others are stuck at the starting line, wondering
if this thing is worth their time.
He'll share practical tips, real life examples, and a no nonsense
approach to help you lead your team.
Without further ado, here's my conversation with Justin Simpson.
Justin, welcome to the show.
Justin: Good morning, Alex.
Thank you for having me.
Alex: Oh, I'm delighted to have you.
Your work with the Hear.Now.AI newsletter has focused on making
artificial intelligence accessible to everyone, not just attack savvy.
But I would like to start with a bigger picture question.
Why do you see closing the AI divide as such a critical issue?
Justin: I lived through into the first age of technology when a lot
of the benefit of that technology accumulated to a small group of people.
And once AI came out and one could see its power and the speed at which is
changing, I have great concern that even more on even more quickly, the benefits
would accrue to those who understood and could leverage this new technology
versus those who are left behind.
And I'm passionate that people not be left behind.
Because it's such a liberating and powerful technology that I think it
does have the ability to help across a broad spectrum of society, but
society needs to embrace it and at least play with it and engage with
it in order to get those benefits.
Alex: I definitely see where you're coming from, but somebody might argue that the
AI divide isn't as urgent because tools are becoming more and more intuitive.
How would you respond to that, perspective?
Justin: Well, in the consumer world, or this thing, space,
if you like, is becoming more accessible and that will continue.
But in the workspace, we just had, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg saying he
expects his software engineers to be 30 percent more productive in 2025
because they're leveraging AI tools.
And the implication is if you're not 30 percent more productive, you can expect
to be replaced by someone who is, so I think that there are a number of factors
that could change dramatically, for example, small businesses, and I engage
with those even here in San Francisco, which is the world capital of AI.
If you like, there are small businesses who aren't using AI.
And when I explained to them, this is a marketing department, a client
communications department, a customer service department, all of which you can
set up and use easily and quickly, now.
If you don't, someone is going to.
And so Fei Fei Li, who's a professor of AI, one of the, she is called the
godfather, godmother of AI at Stanford, the Center for Human Centered Artificial
Intelligence, said your job won't be taken by AI, but your job could be taken
by someone who knows how to leverage AI, and I think people who are sitting
back and waiting for it to become easy and accessible risk missing out.
Alex: I see.
So let's move on to the newsletter.
Can you share your story, how you came with the idea?
Justin: Yeah.
so sitting here in San Francisco, of course, you see all the exciting
stuff, the cutting edge, what's coming next, and that partly
informs this urgency that I have.
And so I started this newsletter to say, for non technical readers, let's find
ways to help people understand what AI is, because there's a lot of big conceptual
discussion about the longterm future and artificial general intelligence
and all sorts of slogans and slang.
But for general people, the best way to experience what AI
is is to do something with it.
So every week I put out three or four different applications that
are intended to improve your life.
At work, at home, or at play.
So some of them aren't that serious to me, playing around with creating
AI music for most people is fun.
But for a few it's a career, and something to be taken seriously
and a creative endeavor, et cetera.
But for most people being able to write, a few sentences of description and
have it turned into an engaging song.
Is a wow moment to help them understand this is a powerful
technology rather than something that's going to transform their lives.
So I put out a random sort of selection of those.
Therefore, I look at 30 or 40 apps every week to decide what seems
to be in the category of useful.
Alex: You said 30 or 40, but it can't be random.
you probably have some way of selecting the ones that you consider would be
the most interesting for your, readers.
Justin: Yeah, there's an awful lot out there, and some of them
are quite obscure, so they would appeal to a very niche, audience.
Some of them are put out by unclear sort of groups that don't
make it and identify themselves.
I won't put something on the newsletter if I don't know
exactly who's behind the software.
And so some folks, perhaps in their rush to get it out, forget to tell you
who they are and what their story is.
some will expect you to pay first and then discover if you like the software.
And so I don't put those in generally.
They are something which has a free trial or a lower tier level
that people can experiment with.
And then the sort of general thing of thinking, if I'm a non technical
person, would this be interesting to me that I could say, Oh, I could try
this with respect to my professional life or with respect to my home life.
Alex: And so can you share, maybe an example or story from a
reader who applied something they learned from your newsletter?
Justin: There's two, if I may, one is a fun one.
I put out a story about an app, which takes a photograph of a
family member or yourself and turns it into a Pixar cartoon.
And so many people came to me and said, I know I should be focusing
on the things that have helped me at work, but that was such fun.
I spent way too long doing that.
And I think that's a success as well, because it's helping understand the
power of the, of AI in its own way.
But something that's very useful, I put out a piece about a tool
which I use myself all the time.
I'm not gifted with high speed typing, and so I saw an app called
Flow, which lives natively on my Mac.
I'm in the Mac environment.
And anytime I hold down a key, takes my voice and records it.
There's a lot of transcription apps, but this AI filter recognizes that I'm human.
So I say, or ah, or I correct myself.
I say, I'll see you on Tuesday.
No, Wednesday.
And what comes out very quickly at up to a couple of hundred words a minute
is a sort of coherent version of what I've said, and that can be filled in
whether I'm writing a script for an AI generation, a letter, an email, et cetera.
And I wrote about that, and a lot of people have told me that they've
adopted that as, uh, because they also, like me, are not high speed typists.
Alex: That's, an amazing example, a very useful one.
Can you think of anything more, let's say controversial or maybe an
unexpected reaction you've received from something you shared on the newsletter?
Justin: not so much from a specific app, but I think there is a lot of concern
about AI in general, and the fact that I take an optimistic view in the newsletter.
I'm trying to encourage people to use it, so I'm not inclined to talk about
the long term consequences of AI and I know several people have pushed back
and said, why don't you engage with the risks of job loss or the threat
to different industries, et cetera.
I'm aware of those, and, consciously thinking about what
the implications for society are.
But I choose in my newsletter not to engage with that.
It's not intended to be a holistic philosophical view of AI.
It's a very hands on, light, experimental version.
Alex: Yeah, that makes sense.
And so if there was like a simple exercise or experiment that our listeners
could try today to understand the potential of AI or learn about a new
tool, what would you recommend to them?
Justin: So for starters, I think that ChatGPT is the main adopted, encounter
with AI that, that everybody has.
and I encourage people to go and play with it because it's not
the same ChatGPT that they might have played with six months ago.
It's a very much more sophisticated animal.
So even without leaving that ChatGPT environment now, for example, you can
set up projects where you keep a set of information, documents, data related to
a specific topic, and you just have a conversation with that particular topic.
So it's not the general knowledge that ChatGPT has of the world.
It's just the knowledge of your particular set of files and links, etc. You can
ask ChatGPT to send you a reminder.
For example, every morning I get from ChatGPT a list of the top news stories
and technology of the previous day.
I get a forecast about weather for the day.
So those are called tasks, and ChatGPT is now engaging, and this is the beginning
of what we're going to see a lot of in 2025, which is not just AI as a source
of information, but AI as a partner that executes for you on your behalf.
In the beginning, what I'm describing are quite simple tasks, it's going
to be a matter of weeks or months before regular folk, not just skilled
programmers, can ask an AI to go away and research a holiday, including travel and
hotels, where you come back with a plan.
Probably at this stage, they don't want to give their credit card information.
So it'll come back as a here's what I booked.
If you like it, put in your credit card and it'll finalize.
But that capability is coming very quickly.
So I think exploring every week, putting aside half an hour to play
with ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever your preferred version is, and just
push those technologies a little bit in the hopes that one of them sparks.
And you say, Aha, I can use this at work.
This would be a good feature.
Alex: I could contribute maybe, that you could use ChatGPT to learn
languages, like in conjunction with maybe a Duolingo or something like that.
But if you are like me, need a lot of practice, which I'm very, I don't know,
avoiding as much as possible when it comes to learning foreign languages,
but you can use the audio interface of, the ChatGPT app to have a very natural
conversation where essentially at the beginning you prompt, the model to act
as your kind of, learning buddy, or maybe even a tutor and you just say, I
want to practice, in my case, Spanish and then have a conversation with me.
And, it's, it's, a use case, which to me unlocks, it's not replacing humans, but
it is creating a situation where in this specific case, for me, there's a lot of
stress involved when I'm practicing a foreign language and there's much less
stress when practicing, with an AI.
So can you think of maybe like once a person has become relatively
familiar with ChatGPT and the new features, that are being rolled
out, what would be the next step?
For somebody who is not techie, as you said, but, is feeling the AI divide.
Justin: Somebody would think through their life and say, where is there a highly
repetitive task, for example, and can AI help me by replacing, that would be one,
and that might be at work or at home.
Some people are comfortable, for example, saying, I'm going to let AI
screen my emails and identify those which are important in some way.
For most of us, our life is such a sort of cornucopia of different
things that your home email is probably not a good candidate for
scanning and summarizing by AI.
But if you're at work and you have a work email address, that is just
customer feedback coming in to address complaints or compliments or questions,
et cetera, it's entirely possible quite straightforwardly to set up a filtering
mechanism, particularly if you're already on Microsoft and you have copilot, or if
you're on the Google ecosystem and you have Gemini, and I think experimenting
with that, is a fun way to understand the technology and also to, to see the
possibilities that you might say, great, I'm going to go ahead and probably with
a little bit of help, but possibly by yourself, implement something like that.
But you do it at the sort of individual level first to see that
you're comfortable with the output.
That would be one.
Analogous to your learning, languages, which I think is the excellent
example, by the way, I think it's a really fun way to leverage this
conversational ability of ChatGPT.
And I love the fact that in its latest iteration, you can interrupt it.
You can change its direction.
You don't have to wait for it to finish an answer and then interact.
It's a very much more conversational, but, Google has a fantastic product
called Notebook LM. And, this could be for any topic that you want to learn.
It could be something highly complex with a lot of research material,
websites, documents, et cetera.
It could be something very straightforward that somebody has forwarded you a hundred
page PDF and you don't really want to read through it without understanding.
So in NotebookLM, you upload whatever the content is, or you point to the
website or the YouTube talk, etc. Then you can engage with it however you choose.
You can ask it to prepare a summary, you can ask it to prepare a Q&A.
Most excitingly, though, is that you can ask it to create a podcast in which
two people talk to each other in a very engaging way about the content.
And so for a, for somebody who wants to learn but is not really that engaged,
it's a fantastic way to do that.
And now, not only that, but you push a button and the podcast stops.
And one of the hosts says, I think we have a question from the audience
here, and you interject your question.
Related to something they've said or the topic, they answer your question
in live real time, which I think is an extraordinary demonstration of AI
capability, but also is addressing ways to learn for people who don't like to absorb
information just by reading the 100 page PDF for, doing it the old fashioned way.
Alex: I'm so glad, Justin, that you brought up Notebook.
I think it's definitely in that set of tools that should be in that, second step
after getting familiar with chatbots.
From my personal experiences with Notebook, I would recommend people to try.
Notebook and use it, especially that you mentioned YouTube, especially with
YouTube, because YouTube is full of, content where to learn new skills,
very practical skills very often.
for example, I was helping a friend of mine, a tattoo artist with, She,
she wants it to get a bit of, help to go from image to video, essentially,
images of her, work to make that into clips for social media, et cetera.
And, there is a fair amount of tools out there.
And for some of us, at least in my case, I have been using YouTube to
learn about a lot of these tools.
Obviously, I don't know every one of them.
just like everyone, like other people, I have to do my research.
And that research often took me to YouTube.
But it takes a lot of time and a bit of emotional control not to click
from the thing that you're researching to all of the other cat videos that
YouTube recommends or whatever it is.
And so the pro tip I would have for our listeners is if you're researching
on YouTube, rather than listening and watching all of the videos for a
specific topic, grab their URLs, drop them into Notebook LM, and then have
maybe the podcast tell you a summary.
But in which you can inject the questions that you actually have.
So in my case, I was working with this, with this friend and I was able to get the
system to generate a podcast specifically for if you're a tattoo artist, this
is what you can do with your designs.
And, I think that's, one of those, you refer to them as an aha moment before.
I think that's definitely one of them.
Justin: Yeah.
Alex: I would want now to move.
Because you've already mentioned using these tools at work at some point once
you're relatively comfortable with them.
So I would like to move also in the activity that you have with businesses.
I know you've been offering and running AI workshops.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Justin: Yeah, I think that there's quite an interesting phenomenon going on at the
moment, and surveys are obviously changing as quickly as the technology is changing.
So you have to take a snapshot and assume that it's representative,
but it's just to give you an idea.
But the idea, which I think has been repeated and in my experience is
correct, is that fewer companies have worked out what they want to do as a
company with AI than people who are wanting to experiment and leverage AI.
So you have this gap between what is a what's the corporate policy
and how should we use a I versus the individuals who are going and saying,
Aha, I can make my life quicker, faster, more efficient by using these tools.
And so, what I'm trying to help with this sort of closing that gap.
And not closing that gap by coming at it like we might have in my earlier
career, when if a new technology came in, it was imposed from the top down.
There's a new version of Microsoft Excel and everybody in the entire company
has to use exactly the same version.
And so we're inevitably two versions behind what's going on, but
that's what you're required to do.
You will learn it and you will do this.
We'll have you very top down, very hierarchical.
The liberating power of AI is that it's not.
It's a bottom up skill set.
It's you looking at your work day and saying, gosh, if I could automate my
email responses or summarize documents or prepare my PowerPoint presentations
more quickly and more efficiently, that's going to make me better at my job.
That's sort of nature of the liberation that comes from this AI technology.
So those two have to be married together.
And so the workshops are an attempt to do that.
To try and help everybody think through strategically, for a particular type of
business, what are the sorts of things that AI lends itself to that will make the
business better and more efficient versus things where it might introduce risk?
So the poor guy in finance who thinks that he's going to get a great
boost in productivity by uploading confidential corporate financial
information into ChatGPT probably needs to be constrained a little bit.
But the person who's writing customer service responses using ChatGPT
probably doesn't and can leverage and the company as well as the
individual can benefit from that.
So thinking through that sort of task matrix of risk versus benefit,
thinking through, ethical policies, Some AI chatbots already try to build
in some sort of ethical limitations.
Some, on the other hand, believe in entire freedom.
And so you can get some quite unpleasant stuff floating around in there.
So what should my corporation do to think about that?
and thinking about, should we standardize on a particular system or should we
have a number of different approaches because the larger the corporation,
the more the historic inclination of these corporations is to pick one
standard, part of the AI revolution.
And we're talking about the speed is that from one week to the
next, one model is faster, better, quicker, more efficient, et cetera.
And so picking one in January of 2025, you have really no idea by the time that
system comes online at the end of 2025, whether what you've picked is correct.
So I think about how you architect that.
And so I think there's that workshop incorporates all of that.
And then also, because there are still folk who are uncomfortable
with the idea of prompting.
That in their minds, ChatGPT is a sort of Google replacement.
I ask it a question, I get an answer, and that's it.
And the answer is either good or it's bad.
But actually, it's an interaction.
It's a conversation.
And so taking a workshop where you take something with a bland, generic question,
and you get a bland, generic answer.
And over the course of 40 minutes, thinking about how to prompt to get the
best out of ChatGPT or the Google or whatever it is that you're using and
looking at the answer at the end and saying, gosh, it is better if I structure
my prompt, if I position it in certain ways, if I make it clear what I want,
if I say, write an article like the New York Times or, in the style of Axios,
I'm going to give very different answers.
And so playing with those sorts of tweaks to help people understand it's not just
a one off, ask a question, get an answer.
Alex: That sounds very comprehensive because you've talked about the risks
and, the guardrails or other measures that, organizations can put in place,
the benefits depending on the type of industry you're in, and then all the
way down to how somebody uses prompts or goes through a conversation, how
that's different from doing a web search.
So yeah, it sounds very comprehensive.
How much time Do people invest to go through these workshops?
Justin: Generally, three hours is a sort of bare minimum where you can cover at
a high level what I've just described to you, but do it in a hands on way.
I really hate the idea of talking for three hours, almost as much as
somebody hates the idea of listening for three hours of conversation.
so three hours of engaged workshop is really a sort of covers the sectors
and then a full day gives you really, more opportunity to dive into some
of the topics in more detail and have more calibration of the audience and
fitting the specific circumstances, what the relevant content is.
Alex: All right.
And I guess the various pieces that you were listing earlier also are like about,
about like somewhat of a menu, right?
It's not that in three hours you necessarily do all of them.
Yeah.
Justin: Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Alex: What was the most surprising transformation you've seen in the
participants in one of the workshops?
Justin: I work with a, a security business, which is
basically run as an agency model.
It's a guy who has contacts in the world of people who, can
spend time with security guards that are full time employees.
So he goes and gets the contracts and then places a security
guard, at specific locations.
And it's a two man show.
His wife runs the books and the business, and he does the front office,
if you like, selling the contracts and then placing the security guards.
And with a little bit of work from AI, he is putting out a newsletter,
which makes it look as if it's a 30 man corporate operation.
Topics in security.
should I have drones at my event?
things that are really engaging, really professionally done.
and done by this two man team with a lot of other things going on because
of the efficiency of AI that can create the content formatted and
presented and distributed in a very customer friendly and efficient way.
There's another very happy story of a person who, here in San Francisco used
to be a big radio personality working for one of the big stations and decided
to go into the business of coaching, teaching people how to prepare for media
interviews, teaching people how to do big public speeches, teaching people
how to create a social media persona.
And she will tell you that she doesn't start any of your engagements without
first going in and having a conversation with ChatGPT about how to prepare.
I'm going to talk to the executive of a corporation that does such and such.
And he is interested in creating a social media personality.
What are the ways that I might engage with him?
Just for some extra ideas and creativity, some generation, and it becomes a habit.
So I think those are ways in which small businesses in those cases
can appear much more responsive and, effective as marketers.
And there's other applications in that sort of small, medium term business,
which can also be quite, again, the aha moment that we're looking for.
Alex: Wow, those are great examples.
And so as we're about to wrap up, I usually ask for a book, maybe a tool or
a habit that has made the most impact on you in the last 12 months and why.
Justin: Mustafa Suleiman, who's now head of AI at, Microsoft, but before was one
of the early pioneers, has written a book called The Coming Wave, which is a sort
of analysis of the bigger picture that I don't write about in the newsletter and I
don't generally talk about in my seminars.
But I think it's important to understand because there are a few books coming
out now on the topic, but it's important to get a grasp for what this means for
society because we're not talking about transformation for our grandchildren.
We're talking about transformation in our lifetimes.
I have more gray hair than you.
My horizon, by definition is a bit shorter.
I'm seeing the transformation happen now.
It's not something that I'm thinking about.
There is a negative side to that, which is job losses.
But there's also a very positive side, which is job creation, job
reinvention, job satisfaction, increase, etc. And it's starting to
happen now and Because of human nature.
It's not happening as quickly as the technology could allow it, but everybody
should have some idea as well as some self reflection about how can I am I exposed
this way and how could I benefit from it?
And my hope is that with a little bit of thought and creativity, most
folk can find a way to come out on the positive side of that, but I do
know that disengaging or waiting or doing nothing is not the right answer.
So the two are together.
One is perhaps that book, The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, and the
other is the habit of playing with AI.
Experimenting, whether it's through my newsletter or just web scanning or
anything else, finding different ways to understand the power of the technology
and then hopefully think about how it might impact you in your life at work or
at home or at play is not so bad either.
Alex: All right, we'll make sure to link both the book and of course,
your newsletter in the description.
And the final question is, there's, is there something that you would expect
to remain constant 10 years from now?
And why?
Justin: Human creativity will be an essential component of this.
I think the AI is going to get smarter and faster.
I think more and more rote stuff will be done by AI agents rather than by humans.
I think a lot of the material is going to be written by AI, but at the
end of it, the stuff that's really going to matter is the stuff that
isn't programmable, that just resides in the human brain and the human
instinct and the human creative spirit.
So to me, that's the constant.
It's just a question of how it's engineered to maximize
the benefit to the human rather than to the AI system.
Alex: Brilliant.
That's great.
Thank you very much, Justin.
Justin: Thank you, Alex.
Great pleasure.
Alex: Justin gave us a lot to think about today.
From the growing AI divide to practical ways we can bridge it, he is adamant.
that AI isn't just for tech experts, it's for everyone.
Staying engaged and experimenting with artificial intelligence
is key to staying relevant.
His insights challenge us to ask ourselves, how AI not just a tool
for ourselves, but a force for empowering those around us, our
teams, communities and organizations.
If you are ready to dive deeper into practical AI tools or want to bring
actionable strategies to your workplace, check out Justin's newsletter.
The link is in the description.
It's a trusted hands on guide for non technical users and his workshops are
an excellent resource for organizations looking to break down barriers to AI
adoption and craft a smarter, more inclusive roadmap for the future.
As always, we have more exciting topics and guest appearances lined up.
So stay tuned for more tales of innovation that inspire, challenge, and transform.
Until next time, peace.