https://www.makeworknotsuck.com/

➡️ SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@makeworknotsuck?sub_confirmation=1

Two weeks deep into hands-on AI work—real client projects, real systems, real changes.

This episode is us stepping back and breaking it all down.

We talk about what’s actually working, what surprised us, and how AI has shifted the way we build, delegate, and scale.

Not in theory. In the day-to-day.

Topics we cover:

– Doing the work of a full team solo

– Where humans still matter (and where they don’t)

– The difference between using AI and building with it

– Why fast results aren’t always the same as smart results

If you’re building, running, or leading with AI… this is what it really looks like.

➡️ Go ahead and hit that like button!

Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast.

Alright, Daniel. We've done a couple of AI episodes over the past month or so, and it's been about two weeks, two or three weeks since we did our last one. And since then, you and I have both done a lot of work with AI, like, intensively using it, to make some of our input and learnings. And so this episode, I want to kind of reflect back on some of that and see about our learnings and what we've discovered in the past few weeks, and then figure out if we can give some advice on how to make work not suck with AI.

Love it. I've been coaching a lot of my clients over the last couple of weeks on how to use AI to grow their business. And even I've been surprised with the way the technology's been evolving over the last couple of weeks. So this is gonna be a great conversation.

I went back to the podcast. We were talking about AI replacing, you know, a billion jobs in Right. Few years. And, you know, there was one of those where, like, yes, it's gonna do this. Yes.

It's gonna take over that, but it can't take over these certain things. Here's where I think I found since recording that podcast where I've landed with AI and just some of the stuff that's come out since then.

It's Okay.

You still need developers and programmers to that understand the code and logic to put all the pieces together. But now they're more of a of a strategic administrator of the Right. Where we have developers and just kind of the functional oversight. So you can do what you needed, you know, 10 or 15 developers, like, I'm doing by myself now with AI.

Right.

So I I do get the how we're gonna replace jobs, but then you still need the human in the loop to do the strategic component. So I think what we're Well,

somebody has to have the vision. Right. Like, you can do whatever you want, but somebody has to know what is valuable, what is worth wanting.

True. True. But I think even even then, there has to be an orchestrator. Sure. Because even in the sense of what I've built, you know, recently is I've got, you know, my project manager, AI bot.

I've got my, you know, front end developers, my back end developers, my architectural buddy, my DevOps, you know, connoisseur. I've got my, you know, regression test, tester. Sure. And I've got, like, my unit test maker, and they're all talking to each other and prompting each other and getting feedback and building it. So they're all working together.

Now me as the human in the middle is I'm having to orchestrate, but then when I see a piece of work that doesn't make sense, I can correct that worker, and then I pull it back in. If if it's something that I see needs to be corrected before it goes to the other bot, because where where this goes wrong Right. Is one one agent will pull something through, and it'll go to the other agent. And then this agent will start executing what it thought was correct. But, you know, me as the human knows it's, you know, skewed.

So then I go in there and I correct it, and then I send that over to the other worker, and then the cycle keeps moving.

I think that's one of the big risks for us though in the coming era is the people that have that knowledge have it. The people who don't are going to lose the opportunities to develop it. Right? Like, you know, that's a problem because you've made that mistake and you've paid the price for it, and you had to spend a whole night recoding something because you screwed up. Right?

And so you remember that. But if you never had that consequence, you probably wouldn't remember the lesson. And so now you wouldn't know to intervene at that moment. And that's the part that I'm concerned about is that how are you gonna how are you gonna make those mistakes in the future when AI does everything for you?

I get that. I I go back to and I and I don't have the answer yet, but I challenge I'm challenging, like, is AI equivalent to, like, electricity or the car? Because at some point in time, you had to know how to, like, you know, manage the horse.

Right. Right. But you don't have

to know how to manage the horse. You know, now you have to manage the car, but losing the the skills to raise a horse hasn't impacted society negatively. Or Okay. Things that were done manually before electricity. And now that you have electricity, like, there there there have been major progressions in technology over, you know, the last few centuries where the ramification wasn't there.

Like, you didn't losing the skill wasn't it was it evolved.

Yeah. Like, my ability to hand crank an engine or or my inability to hand crank an engine has never stopped me from getting to work in the morning.

Yeah. Well, well, let's take self driving cars, for example.

Okay.

There's gonna be a generation. It's probably my kids' kids will probably not have to know how to drive a car because it'll be driven by it's like that you need to know how to work the app on your phone to summon the car that just drives you wherever you want.

And select the destination and pick fastest route and hit enter. It's gonna

clear all that up for you. You don't even have to do that. Right? So then but the argument I've heard is, well, what happens when the car breaks down? You know, how how who who's gonna drive it or the electronics?

Like, wouldn't that like won't the, like, my cell phone will probably call, like, you know, another one and it'll come pick me up and then there'll be a service company that'll, you know, a service truck that'll come pick that one up and take it or, you know, like Right. From the from the consumer side of it, I don't need to know how to drive the car. So I think to your point, like, using AI for, you know, legal or development or, you know, those those intellectual skills, I think I mean, I don't know. I I think you're still gonna be I think you're still gonna have people learning it.

Sure.

But I think you're just gonna have I mean, I guess the question is where do all jobs go or what do we do? Are we are we gonna end up with micro technologies? Are we gonna decentralize again where we just have, you know, infinite number of applications and no there's no real market leader because we can create so many?

Mhmm.

This is this is the one I struggle with. Is there's an evolution here? Yeah. And and it's and, yes, it's going to replace jobs in the short term, but where are those jobs gonna go? What's what's the evolution of that?

I mean, what I described to somebody to one of my clients recently is is that in most industries, the middle gets gutted. And it is either a rise to highly custom, great experience, very customer centric, or it is a race to the bottom with low cost and the middle gets cut out. That's what I've seen in a number of industries. And I think that's what AI is going to do as well. Right?

Like if you are in a high touch, high service, high margin business, then people EQ and the ability to really connect and understand is going to become a premium, and you're gonna get paid well for that. And everything else over the long haul races

to

the bottom, and AI becomes a one size fits all. Yeah. What I'm curious about is is how industries adapt to that because Walmart clearly runs races to the bottom. Louis Vuitton clearly races to the top. What does Target do?

Like, how does Target survive in the middle? Because economically there's a lot of people in the middle and I don't think it is good for society to have Uber wealthy and Uber poor. Like that's not a good thing. So we, we need the layers, but how does, like, what does the target business model look like when you're not super high touch, but you're also not super AI driven.

I think it gives you a different level of scale, though, because I'll use the the one we talked about earlier, the the fighter. Right? The the militaries, you know, both Navy and Air Force have this next generation air dominance. They're looking at ways how to leverage the pilot. Right?

And they're gonna have, you know, one to many drones that connect to the plane that can do work that the pilot would normally have to do. But now you need less pilots, but you have more air force. So you've you've Right. Hybrid. Right?

I think you're gonna see kind of the same thing in even, like, you say, Target, the self checkout. Mhmm. Have you know, I've I've I've already been in airports now where you just you swipe your credit card, you walk in the door, and then you just grab what you want and walk out, and you check that.

You walk out.

But there's still an attendant there to help you. So, yes, you're gonna cut jobs because, you know, you don't have three or four people working in the store. Like, somebody still gotta restock it. You know? Mhmm.

Yeah. Okay. You can get a robot to do it, but this is inside of an airport with some complexities. And maybe it'll be phased out in in twenty years from now, but there's still a person there. There's still someone stalking.

So I think what you're gonna see is when you reduce those overheads for those businesses, they could probably have, you know, expand into more markets or maybe have a smaller footprint and be more particular, you're probably overall, let's say, 30% less overall overhead, but you're gonna change your your offering, and you can actually be more micro as opposed to, like, a target now. There's you know, you gotta have lots of shelves and lots of space and Sure.

It's a huge geographic footprint.

Look at tar Sam's. Sam's Club. Right. They're already getting rid of they're going to self checkout and self checkers. They're using, you know, cameras and AI to do all the the security validations.

Right. So you. You can put an RFID tag on anything that's valuable. Like, it's not very long until you're just gonna be able to walk out of a Sam's Club, and they're just gonna hit your credit card for everything that you have in your basket. Like, that's not hard.

It's not that far away.

And I think I think where the big one is is is we need to be people need to be learning how to use AI. I've we've said this before. It's the new it's the new it's a hammer. It's a tool. Sure.

It's not

It's electricity. Right.

It still has to be wielded by somebody.

And, ideally, somebody who knows what they're doing.

Now here's here's a question. How much is middle management gonna go away? Because I actually I actually do think this is probably an efficiency gain for a business and probably a win for the average employee, but I think there's also a dangerous, danger in this in this one. I actually think you can cut out middle management with AI behind the scenes, but you still need the culture build because the productivity side of a a manager can be replaced with software systems and tools. You could actually create more autonomous environments for people to be successful because you don't need a human to create complex systems.

AI can make the complex system to make it easier for the human so that the human self manages. But you still need the component of, you know, intentional culture. Like, the AI bot, you know, checking in, you know, like, if you've ever seen, Wall E. You know, they're Right. They have to move on.

He's like, how are you? And this, that, and the other. Like, the robot's just prompting these questions that are completely irrelevant to the the people. Right? Right.

So, like, the AI is not gonna do a good job of being your, you know, emotional support robot, at least not today.

But They're working on it, though.

Oh, it it'll get there. And and that might be in another, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty years. But as far as what we have today, you can almost replace middle management with good AI, almost. I think I think we're within a year or two away from from it. And I

think We're not far.

Is, again, you might have one manager that could support fifty, seventy five people as opposed to one manager for every, you know, 10 to 15 people. Yep. So what do those people do?

Right. And I think that's the that's the middle part of the stack that I think gets decimated. Right? And I'm seeing this in more and more organizations where a 150, like, like a 100 k job is getting eliminated and it's being replaced with 50 k jobs and 200 k jobs. And there's multiple 50 k jobs, but one two hundred k jobs.

And the total amount of headcount spend goes down because you don't need that middle layer. You need multiple entry level people, and you need one senior person who is kind of that strategic architect who's putting all the pieces together. But everybody else is significantly lower in their value add and in their compensation. And that's the risk that I see is how do you jump from being a 50 k employee to a 200 k employee If all those middle layers are gone. And that's one of the big questions I have about the economy going forward is if you rip out the middle, how do you decide who moves from the entry level to the managerial level?

Oh, or is it just is it just not it's just not a layer of an organization anymore? Is it is it is it you just have different organizations of things, and really what you have is you have it's kinda like well, I don't wanna say doers and doers and dreamers, but, I I I think we're just gonna be able to I I feel like there's a level of segmentation here or or sorry, not segmentation. A level of decentralization or, diversification in the sense. I think we're just gonna have smaller companies, more smaller companies serving a more niche, need in a more localized environment. Because you gotta think most of America, and I don't know.

I'm I'm assuming this is a lot of the other parts of the world as well, especially in, you know, like Europe where it's, you know, all these smaller countries. But we have such localized micro economies.

Right.

And, you know, the we do have the big things rolling up and the big national retails and fortune 100 and all that stuff. Sure. I think those will just continue to get skinnier and skinnier, but I think what you're gonna find is just more like localized pockets of people solving problems more localized than big roll ups. And and we'll go through that wave. Right?

Like, there'll be a part where we decentralize, and there's all these micro components and small startups, and then somebody will start gobbling them up, and then it'll become a handful of, you know Sure. Conglomerates, and then we'll go through the next transition in wave. I also think there's an interesting trend here between, like, the leading and lagging is there's a period of I'm gonna assume there's a period of time here where you've got big businesses or, you know, companies that have been funded to to solve these problems that are gonna lead the pack with AI. And And what you're gonna have is those people that are getting laid off from that are gonna go to the small business world that, you know, don't have the technology skills and backgrounds, and they'll hire those people up to drag the you know, to drag drag to progress their companies forward. And you'll see this, like, you'll see this waterfall effect of the small business.

You know, they'll catch up today. You know, they're ten years behind. Mhmm. You know, AI will push them ten years ahead while the rest of the world is, you know, ten for years further ahead than that. But, you know, you that okay.

Let's say that waterfall effect will last for a decade. And and the the example I'm gonna use is the Internet. When the Internet first came out, there were companies that were on the Internet, but there were still people doing things by phone book, you know, faxing, etcetera. Right. And then there were just a group of companies that, you know, literally were the last few to still use phone books and faxing, and Right.

Everybody finally hopped over to the Internet.

Mhmm.

Doctor.com and this, that, and the other, and, you know, the quote, unquote cloud accelerated all that. But to me, this is just the next evolution of it. But it's a it's it's not just the and it it's just not going from analog to digital or, you know, phone lines, fax machines, and yellow pages to email and online advertising in the Internet. Like, this is this seems like this is the the invention of electricity. It is such a dramatic jump.

That is what Mark Cuban says. He says that in the near future, running a business without AI will be like running a business without electricity. I believe that wholeheartedly. And and he said that years ago. I've I think it's very true.

Alright.

So this week Go ahead. I was working with a client, and maybe it was last week. Last week, I was meeting with this client, and I was talking to them about the quality of the data that they have and the fact that it's very specific but very valuable. And this client this client of mine, we were in a physical room together. This client was like, well, how about I call my AI guy and talk to him about what we're doing?

And it's like, sure. Why not? So they call this individual, put him on speaker phone, put the phone down on the table. Meanwhile, I'm on chat GPT and I am just pinging chat GPT with questions. Hey, I've got ten years of medical legal documentation around these legal cases.

I wanna build an AI bot that can help me identify best practices across ten years of history, where would I start? And it's like just lays out the and I said, okay, awesome. Thanks. I haven't written code in twenty five years. And I wasn't good at it twenty five years ago.

So where would I start? Like, describe this to me like I was in eighth grade and they're like, okay, great. You're gonna do fine. Here's where you start. And they just laid out the first 10 steps and the step one was like, find a developer.

And I was like, okay, Hey, wait a minute. I'm not completely helpless. Like I've, I've got some technical skills here. How would I actually do this for myself? They're like, okay, if you want to tackle it for yourself, go here.

And, you know, they lead me to get hub. I create my own get hub account, which apparently I already had one and I start going through the process. And then every time I hit a snag, I just copy the error message and say, Hey, I did what you asked me to do. And this is what I got. It is amazing what.

AI can do right now. I am most of the way through building an AI bot with almost zero technical knowledge. Not not that I don't have technical knowledge. I've got a little bit, but the technical knowledge required to build a custom agent is is almost not required. Like, it is it is so self-service that you don't really need to know much of anything to follow the instructions.

Like at one point it was giving me instructions that like, okay, step one, step two, step three. And I was like, hey, this is great, but I keep getting stuck somewhere between step one and four. Can we just do one step at a time? And the bot was like, sure, no problem. Do this.

Tell me when you're done. And and it explains to me what it's doing. It's like now we're connecting this to this and it's not able to find it in that folder. So we're going to have to tell it where to look for. And like, it is astounding to me because what used to take me days to figure out.

I can just take the error message, drop it into chat GPT and say, hey, this is the error message that it's giving me. And it will tell me what that means and tell me what to do about it. And so if you have patience, but zero technological capabilities, you could actually build an AI bot to solve whatever problem you need right now. And that is a very different world that I don't think most people recognize. That is the world we currently live in today.

So, basically, if you're not using AI today, you're already left in the dust. Yeah.

I think you I think you're already behind.

I mean, one, we're already seeing it all over the place. Right? Every almost every day in the headline, you see somebody made some AI claim of their workforce or reducing workforce to this or that and the other. So it's definitely here.

Didn't Mark Zuckerberg say they're gonna lay off, like, a third of their developers? Yeah. Because

and the thing is

And I've even seen that, like, in the last twenty four hours. It was like, here's the code. Copy this. Paste it into this part. And I was like, hey, I'm confused.

I don't know where to put that. It's like, that's okay. Look for this. Where it says this, click here. Hit control c, control v, enter.

Like, it is seriously coding for dummies, and it's writing the code for me. Like, this is if you have not played with this, you do not understand how far advanced this has become in the last couple of months. It's it's unbelievable.

So I think you just spent the last six minutes insulting every developer out there. Probably. My apologies. So, I mean, as a developer, let me let me put something out there and, like, how I'm using AI and where things are. Is in the sense of, like, there's multiple language, multiple technologies, like, it's it's Google on steroids.

It's, you know, Stack Overflow on steroids. Like, the amount of times I've had to go to Stack Overflow versus the amount of times I'm able to solve it with chat g p t, I was on Stack Overflow, you know, a thousand times a day. Now I'm on there maybe once every two or three days because I can't figure out how to get, you know, prompt chat right for something that I haven't done before or I'm working another language or something. But, I mean, I think for for developers like me that know how to use chat GPT where I'm going, okay. You know what?

I'm frustrated with my product owner, and I'm struggling to get content from them. So let me just have a not not I'm insulting product owners, but I can use chat GPT to streamline the product owner process. If I'd wanna write unit test or regression test, I can have, you know, I I can still use a human to do some of it, but I can just speed it up so much. And these this army of AI agents I have, there's literally, like, 10 of me programming, you know, almost around the clock, whereas there was only so much I can do in a day. So for me, I've, like, 10 x to myself as a developer in what I'm working on in my capacity in this whatnot.

But I think it takes Totally. You know, I've got, what, eighteen, twenty, twenty two years of writing code. No. More than that. Twenty five years of writing code.

I I didn't think

you were even 25 years old.

A little older

than that. Alright. So may

I may have said maybe twenty five years ago,

but Alright. So the gray hair does give you away a little bit.

It does. But the thing is is, like, the amount I can achieve with it, me utilizing it as a tool, but the gap, like we're talking about earlier, is I've got those years of experience of trial and error and going through it versus your people like yourself. You're gonna be able to create an application without having to hire someone like me, but I will always be able to take your application and scale it and sell it to a broader audience. Your application may work in, like, one application or one company or maybe sit suit for them. But if you wanted to sell that to, you know, two, three, four, five hundred thousand clients, you're gonna have to have someone skilled, you know, in architecture and I mean, again, AI can augment some of that, but you're human over the top that understands all those concepts to do it.

I was working with a client this week, and I was explaining to them that 80% of your customers or your users experience 20% of your capabilities, and 20% of your customers experience the 80%. And so it's building the happy path is not that hard. It's building the parameters and the boundaries to handle all the weird things. That's most of the work like the, when everything goes well, when everybody logs in appropriately, when everybody, you know, has a password username and a password that makes sense. Like when all of that stuff goes well, sure.

It's easy, but it's all the edge cases that takes most of the work. And I would imagine that the AI coding as it exists today does very well for the happy path, but I would be curious to your experience with the not happy path with the the edge cases, how well it handles those.

I mean, so here I'm I'm saying all these great things about how AI is 10 x me, but there's also the learning curve or the experience of using AI to 10 x myself Mhmm. Where I literally, in a chat prompt, fired the chatbot or the AI bot because it was like, oh, yes. I noticed yes. You're correct. This error you pointed out was my mistake.

I literally like, it literally stopped working on a piece of code it wrote. It's not like I wrote a piece of code, and then it forgot that I gave it. Like, it literally the prompt like, two prompts before worked on this block of code, and then, like, the next prompt later, it just literally forgot that it wrote that. And then you prompt it, and you tell it, hey. You didn't do that.

You you missed this or you dropped the ball on this or whatever. It's like, oh, you're right. I'm sorry. Thank you for calling that out. I won't do that again.

Okay. Now please generate what that I want. And then it does the same damn thing, and you're like, I literally stopped. You are fired from your position. I want you to write your job description so that another chat agent can pick up where you left off and give them step by step of where we are, the project details, dah dah dah dah.

Okay. I can do that. It spits it all out. I copy and paste that into a new window, and then that bot picks it up and keeps going, whereas this one was literally in the ditch. So the next Did you

change applications?

No. I just started this session. Something something something, you know, whether I hit, like, a memory limit or a, you know, token limit, potentially

A ghost in the machine?

Whatever it may be, but it literally just went into a ditch. And so I just had it I fired it, and as it you know, part part of its exit interview was to, you know, explain its job description. Or its replacement, and then its replacement picked up and go. So, I mean, I literally fired four agents in one day and hired four agents the same day and just kept on working like it was nothing. But, again, that's that's also part of the learning curve.

And we know we're still in the early days of of AI, and there's

a lot of,

it's gonna continue to evolve. But even people working in a job today, if you were not using some, you know, chat GPT or, I'm blanking on Gemini and

and Gemini, perplexity, any of them.

If you're not using one of those today, you really need to to jump on it. Because even if you're choosing it to proofread emails or challenging it for concepts, it it will help you advance. And the the less you know about AI right now could cost you your job or career in two years.

Absolutely. I'm gonna say something here that is very risky. I'm praying to God that one of my prospects isn't listening. I have a company that I'm talking to. I've done work with them in the past as a trainer and executive coach.

And they've reached out to me about doing some work with several of their emerging leaders. And I went into chat TPT and I was like, Hey, I'm a company about this size in this industry that does this kind of work. I've got emerging leaders that are responsible for, you know, this level, right? They're not this, they're not that they're kind of about here. And they're interested in a X month training program to help them develop their next generation leaders.

What do you, what would you recommend as a curriculum for me to work with them over a six to twelve month period? Enter. I was blown away with what it came up with. And then I said, Hey, that's great. What resources, like what books, podcasts, articles would you use to supplement that?

And, and it cranked out. And I was like, dang, I'd forgotten about that book. That book was good. Like this is an area I know well, and 80% of what did they say. On target.

There was a couple of things I had to go research and and I was like, I didn't know about that book. I gotta go research that book. Maybe that's a good, maybe that's better than the one I thought of, but it was 80 to 90% on target. And it was just an initial conversation of. Hey.

I'm I'm in an early sales conversation with a prospect who is interested in these kinds of things. What would you recommend? And their recommendation was 90% on target with what I would have come up with with weeks of work. Well And it was on target in seconds.

Well but here's the question. So but you knew that because you've been doing this for, you know, twenty years.

Sure. I've been doing it for a long time.

So you've you've got the experience, and so you can read it and do that. I think that one of the dangers is is you've got people that haven't been doing it, and they're following it blindly. And now, again, you can trial and success, and I guess you can keep trying it. Okay. That didn't work.

Give me something new. You might be destroying your relationship or, you know, making work suck for somebody. Your own trial and error of AI, unless you're all doing it together, then rock on. Right. But I think that's that's kind of the limbo we're at right now.

Going back to the earlier conversation of, like, when when we turn to AI to do all this, how are you gonna know is it right? Or are we just gonna as exciting or we just gonna accept the level of margin of error? It's almost like driving a car now, you know. But in the past, you expected everybody to follow the the rules and stay in their lane. Now you expect people to speed, run red lights, you know, crash into you and drive away.

Like, it's just starting to turn into anarchy while.

That's a really, that's a really interesting point because you're right. I'm impressed with the fact that it got 80% of it. Correct. But because I've been doing this for twenty years, I know which 20% is not a good idea. And somebody who hasn't been doing this for twenty years might not know that.

Right? They might look at the same set and say, this is a 100% perfect. And I'm like, woah, hold on. That's mostly a good answer, but there's a couple of glaring errors. And it's only the people who have the experience who are gonna know what are the errors versus what are the great recommendations.

And so I think that's a really, it's a really valid point. I think the challenge is gonna be it's a 10 to one ratio. Right? Like, you don't need 10 people to look at that. You need one person who knows what they're doing to look at that and sanity check it and say, yep, go ahead.

You don't need 10 people to create that content anymore. And I think that's what the American economy hasn't quite reconciled is what do we do when we don't need 10 mid level managers anymore? We just need one SVP to look at that, give it the sniff test, and say go.

Well, I I'll let's let's go down this for a second. So Okay. You're you're working on a, you know, leadership development program, etcetera, etcetera. Is that even gonna be needed if more middle management is is done by AI and then your your emphasis is gonna be more on employee success and culture creation so that you have connections with your people.

Mhmm.

That's not leadership training. I mean, there must be some leadership components of it, but, what are you gonna be training people on if they don't need to be trained on it? Or, you know, are you gonna be training people like, hey. You know, peep we love learning and development and learning new skills and applying new skills. Are you going to be learning something you'll never use?

Like, where where does leadership development go in this?

I think it becomes more about soft skills. I I think developing the empathy, the listening skills, I think that's where AI is going to be more focused over the coming years. It because, so many of the knowledge workers skills become obsolete. Like I don't have to write a query anymore. I don't have to know SQL.

I can ask the AI bot, Hey, here's the structure of the tables. I need this. How would I write that? And it can tell me how to write the SQL query. The the bigger challenge is gonna be, how do I work with Ryan?

Because Ryan's very different from me and he's my boss. And we don't seem to find ways to communicate effectively. How would I position this to Ryan in a way that he would be receptive to hearing it? And that's I think it's also an opportunity for AI, but I think those are very different questions than how do I write a query.

I mean, I I honestly, as the voice AI gets more dialed in I mean, heck, let's, let's add a guest to our our our, let's just add a guest to our, episode here, if I can find the right tab. Alright. Here we go. Alright. We're gonna talk to Maya here.

What's up, Maya?

Well, hello there. Looks like Friday just got a little brighter, don't you think? It's only one.

Hey, Maya. You're on the podcast again, and we're talking about AI taking over middle management. And, you know, is there gonna be a lot of displaced people, or, you know, is the job market gonna shift? And, you know, being an AI, I wanted your input.

You know, that's question everyone seems to be asking these days. Kind of both fascinating and a bit unsettling, Like, replaceable by a program? Well, I mean, it's probably gonna change things for sure. I don't have a crystal ball, but it's not like we're gonna wake up to robot overlords tomorrow. That'll be more of a shift.

Right? Like, some tasks will probably become automated, freeing up humans for, well, maybe more interesting stuff. You know? The stuff that requires creativity and empathy, the the the things that make us, well, human. What do you think?

Does middle management sound like fun to you?

Hey, Maya. This is Daniel. I I have held middle management jobs a colleague, sir. They are not fun.

Cut out for spreadsheets and meetings. Right? I'm more of a

Oh.

Let's brainstorm wildly creative solutions to problems kind of AI myself. But, seriously, I I think this whole AI thing is gonna force us to rethink what work even means. Maybe it'll be a chance to pursue those passions we never had time for. So any of those

Maya Yeah. Do you think you can replace a middle manager, especially on an empathetic level in teaching soft skills?

That's a really good question. I can process information and learn patterns, even figure out what might make people tick based on their language. I can probably come up with some pretty decent motivational speeches or even draft a training manual on, say, active listening one zero one. But can I teach empathy? Can I truly understand the nuances of human emotion and experience the way a human can?

I don't know. That's the million dollar question, isn't it?

I think it's something we're gonna have to figure out together.

Alright. Thank you, Maya.

Of course.

So Thanks for inviting Maya to our podcast episode.

So, I mean, it's it's good. Right? Like, you can have a conversation. It was kind of adding that empathy. There's one that I interacted with the other day that's, like, even more insane as far as, like, tonality and pitch and how it interacts.

But that it and don't get me wrong. This is, like, leading edge of voice right now. And and even though two or three years, it'll be even more dynamic. But I I think you're gonna have the AI is gonna be able to like, I could have that voice chat with Maya, and there's already tone detection and pitch and tonality on the receipt in the input side that the AI can make adjustments to. But I think as far as, like, you know, having a crucial conversation, being able to walk through that, you know, being able to, you know, ask for you know, I I want help asking for a raise and it being able to prompt back and forth.

I think it's going to be a better manager for the 80%. I think it's that 20% where human managers really gonna add more, and I think that's more on the culture and and behavior side of things. But, like, again, people doing leadership development training, it is it even needed soon, or is it just prompting the AI?

You know, it's interesting. One of my good friends brought this up years ago, and he said, I think teachers like, elementary school teachers are done. And I was surprised. I was like, elementary school teachers, like, that's not one of the first jobs I would think would be eliminated. He's like, no.

No. No. Think about it. Everybody in the future is gonna have their own AI bot, and that AI bot is gonna know how you think, how you work, and it's gonna be able to tailor the concepts that you need to learn to the way your brain works. And he says, I don't know at what point we're gonna get them kindergarten, fifth grade, tenth grade, whatever.

But at some point we have our own almost personal tutor who is able to teach you algebra in the way that your brain's going to understand it. And I think he's right. But the consequences then what stops that from happening at the corporate level? Right? They understand your personality profile.

They understand your educational background. They understand your professional background. They understand your family of origin, and they're now able to explain to you whatever concept you need to learn in a way that you can uniquely understand and then coach you to develop that skill. Like, honestly, as an executive coach, I don't know how much longer I've got a job.

Well, you're like one step away from, like, Matrix where it just gets, like, painted right in your own. Right? Right. I think that's I think that's kind of the point, though, is I think there's gonna be a lot of things that will just go away just like the the I mean, again, there's always gonna be people that have to create things, and there's always gonna be a level of of, you know, again, the stable boy taking care of the horses to pull the horse drawn buggy.

Sure.

There were probably way more of those, you know, in 1820 than there are in 2020. Now, you know, they're still the stable, you know, people, I'll call them, in 2020 terms.

Somebody's gotta clean the stables.

Well, but you've got the Budweiser, you know, carriage, and I think the Fargo one, like, there's still a handful of those, you know, horse drawn carriage buggies, and the ones you see in New York and etcetera, etcetera.

Sure.

They still exist, and it's a novelty, but that's not what power sucks society anymore.

Right.

So, again, where did the stable boys go from 1820? Well, other than they're dead, but, you know, you in the progression of the car, well, they became auto mechanics.

Mhmm.

So I what we don't know, and I think Maya said it well, is, you know, we don't have the crystal ball, but it's it's it's coming. It's here. You can argue. We just had a conversation with an AI bot. You couldn't even do that five years ago.

Yeah. It's what the city

It's crazy how fast it's evolving.

It's what can you do today to keep yourself relevant by playing with these tools using even just using chat g p t to to write emails, to sanity check ideas. But remember from our last episode, we talked about our people using AI to replace their coworker to, like, socially avoid people. You're right. So we do have to make sure we're not using it to socially avoid people and using it as a distraction.

But I think Absolutely.

Anything you can do to delegate work to it should be encouraged. Anything to replace the human should be discouraged, in my opinion. No. Replace automate the work, but to replace the human interaction is what I mean. You shouldn't use AI to replace human interaction.

You should use AI to enhance or give more time for human interaction.

I think there's gonna become layers of this. I think at the highest level, the the strategy, the synergy between people, the creativity is gonna become where the value creation happens. The execution will increasingly become outsourced to AI because doing the thing will not be as difficult. In in the past, right, over the past unsaved, one hundred and fifty, two hundred years doing the thing has been hard coming up with the thing to do has been relatively easy in terms of the total effort. I think that's going to flip.

And in the next, I mean, I would say probably where we are today and going forward, figuring out what to do and why to do it is going to be the primary driver of the value add. Because once you figure out what to do and why you're doing it, the doing of the thing will become increasingly automated. Like an AI bot will be able to do whatever you ask it to do. The question will be what is actually valuable for it to do. And that's gonna require a level of creativity, a level of integration, and a level of strategic thinking and vision that I think a lot of people don't have.

And so that's gonna be really interesting to figure out if you're good at doing the thing and suddenly doing the thing is no longer valuable because an AI bot can do it 10 x better than you. What do you how do you contribute? Like, what's your value add to the economy? And if you're good at ideas, this is a very exciting time because your ability to turn concepts into reality is becoming an easier and easier process. You don't have to hire 20 people to do that anymore.

You can probably get it done by yourself or with one or two people. But what does that mean for society? Because I think my guess would be only 20% of people are good at coming up with what should we do and why should we do it. 80% of the people have historically been good at doing the thing. And what do we do if that's not valuable anymore?

I think that's a perfect place to wrap up. So you just left with a with a thought provoking question there. And I think if we go back and think you know, in a previous episode, we said, you know, billion jobs gone by Mhmm. In ten years. So here's, I think, the best thing.

If you were behind the curve on AI, it will make work suck in the very near future. Absolutely. You are ahead of it or learning it or trying it. Even just prompting something today as simple as proofreading emails, that is a start, and you can make work one, you can make work not suck by utilizing in your day to day and just learning to figure out how you can integrate it in. But two, if you're adaptive and willing to learn and start today, then in two years, you will be more valuable than those that resist.

And so we would love to know your thoughts on the million dollar question of what is the future of AI. If they found this episode interesting or valuable, please share with a friend or colleague. Please like and subscribe as always. And until next time, let's make work not suck together.

Make work not suck. Our podcast that talks about exactly that. Our process, vision, journey, culture, and results. We present real world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck.

Hosted by Ryan Hodges, co host Daniel Steer. Join us each episode and make work not suck.