Latest / AI for HumanIT / Ep001 Why this podcast exists
Transcript
- Bruce Cullen: Hello and welcome to AI for Humanity. I'm Bruce Cullen and if you're looking for an AI expert who's got all of the answers, you've probably clicked on the wrong podcast. I'm a product guy, a community leader, a dad, and someone who is genuinely fascinated by how AI is changing the way we work, build, and solve. Like a lot of people, I've spent the last couple of years very much experimenting with AI. And sometimes it's been fantastic, but other times it's been completely useless. And quite often for me, the answers have lied in iteration rather than trying to deliver everything in one prompt and expecting perfection. In each episode, we'll explore AI one prompt at a time. We'll talk to the people who are using AI for something interesting, from AI adoption in enterprise to governance to building things new together. Together we'll figure out what's useful, what's hype, and where humans still need to stay firmly in the loop. No magic, no pretending we've got all the... the answers and we've got it all figured out, just real conversations with real people. So, grab a coffee, open your favourite prompt machine and let's learn together. This is AI for Humanity, let's get started. So, this is our, obviously, very first episode. So I figured rather than get a guest on, at which point I would normally introduce them and start to have a very interesting conversation with them, I kind of thought I should explain who I am and why am I doing this, for real. There's no sort of script or anything for this. This is very much ad libbing. So this is honest, you know? So I'm a product guy. I'm a director of product and community at a company called Workspace DNA. And in my day job, I'm building products that involve AI. But that hasn't always kind of been the case. And even in my time where this has been the case, I've seen AI change so rapidly as we all have over a relatively short period of time. and I'm starting to see the impacts on the industry I'm in and certainly seeing the impacts on other industries as well. So we're on the wave of something that is going to change the way we work for real and I don't just mean in tech or in IT. This is going to be a big deal and I'm really interested about how this is all going to shape out. So that's why I'm doing this really. I've been in software almost all of my career. I started off in IT support. back in 2003. So first and second line support. And since then, I've done a large number of bits and pieces. And so go back to 2003, we're talking about sort of like Windows XP rollouts, dealing with paper jams, upgrading SQL databases, a whole data center in a physical rack in a cupboard with air conditioning. That kind of world, basically. So I've seen a fair old bit change in my time. So I IT support for maybe 18 months or so. And then I went off to university where I studied IT. And then afterwards I joined Citrix, who make virtual apps and desktops that are solutions as a software tester, initially as an intern and then as a graduate. And I was testing everything they kind of made. started off by testing their 3D remoting protocol, HTX 3D ProGraphics, which was really cool and a great way to get into software and a great way to get into testing as well. And there I learned a hell of a lot. I was there as a tester for sort of four years or so before I moved into project management. I felt I'd done what I was gonna be able to do in test at the time, frankly. I didn't have any coding skills. I still don't have any coding skills to this day. So automation wasn't really a... path opened to me at that time, let's say. So I looked at project management and I did project management. I ended up running Citrix flagship products, ZenApp and Zen Desktop, as they were called back then, so that kind of dates it a little bit. Both the on-prem variant and at one point the cloud variant as well. Saw that transition from on-prem to cloud happen. Very big company, lots of learnings there. But then I went off and I joined a startup called Squared Up. We were sort of, I would think 25 odd people or so when I joined. Squared Up do still do to this day dashboarding and reporting software. And it was really eye opening at how much stuff is out there that isn't just within your software engineering sort of department. Cause it was the first time I really experienced, you know, the full range of skills you need to build a business frankly. And it led me to sort of spinning out a company in 2019 called Cookdown with another guy called Nathan and that name matters because he's going to be my first guest. We'll come onto that a little later in this show. As far as Squared Up was concerned and Cookdown was concerned, I had a great time and that was where I first became a product manager, figuring out what customers want, prioritizing things, feeding things into the engineering team and getting them built and delivered. course presenting on the results. And this is all sort of pre-AI. After this I was involved in founding a company called IDO, another dashboarding and reporting company, this time for Intune. And it was during this time that I would say I probably really used AI in anger. Prior to this, sort of 2002 timeframe I reckon, I was using AI at Squared Up for, you know... demos and blog writing and a little bit of social with very mixed responses. I remember giving it my CV effectively and my LinkedIn profile and asking it to write me a speaker bio for a conference and it just fundamentally failing and hallucinating saying I was, it got my name right but all of my credentials it completely mangled. In 2002, you know, it's not that long ago in the grand scheme of things We were talking down the pub, me and a friend of mine, the other day about COVID and about how that was six years ago. This is all since COVID. Yeah, so my first entry to AI was very much demo-ware and blog creation. It was all right for scripts actually, not bad for scripts. And the blogs kind of worked, but they didn't, they sounded super generic. This is very much, know, type of prompt, get a response kind of use of AI, level one basic stuff. In 2023, I reckon, I probably started to it for image generation for work initially, though it was in those days where all of the imagery generated looked a bit like a bad cartoon, but it was a great way to kind of explore what else you could do with AI and music generation too, although that was pretty much for fun because I found it and it was fun to play with. And then 2025, so last year. was when I actually used AI for the first time to actually start designing and actually start coding with it. I was blown away with how it enabled me to code. As I said earlier, when I was a tester, I couldn't automate because I couldn't script, let alone code. And now I'm able to, in air quotes, code full blown applications. Now obviously, I'm not really doing the coding, but the thing it's sort of shown to me is what it can do, but also how it's going to change the way we work. Because ultimately, if AI can generate reasonable code, what's that going to mean for the people that wrote it before AI existed? Very interesting. The other thing that I said there was about design, using it for design. When I worked on Cookdown, the startup that I was involved in founding as a product manager, And my initial wireframes and product mocks were all originally they were in Microsoft Paint. Yes. We joked and called them paint frames basically, because they were bits of screenshots I'd annotated and scribbled on and stuff. And then I would glue them together to create flow in PowerPoint. And that was only sort of like what, 2019, so it's not under 10 years ago. And I went through FIGRA in the middle as well before using AI to generate full HTML mocks, which are fully interactive. For me, this has been game changing for speed initially, because obviously Figma is, Figma without AI of course, is very time consuming. And back when I was using Figma, I was using it with real designers, where I'd sketch something up, send it to a real designer. They put together a real design, but it would take them, you know, a good few days to a week to come up with something. And then there would be iteration with humans over that time to get something that I was sort of happy with. And even then it was normally UI rather than UX. Now for me the difference is really, really important and it's very relevant to what I'm building right now in my day job. In that almost I don't care what the UI looks like. It's gotta be functional, pretty enough, but the thing that really matters for me is the flow. If it's intuitive to use, it doesn't matter what it looks like, people will figure it out and be able to actually use what you've built to get to that cool functionality. and I've been looking at how you actually measure effectively what people do with your UX and your product to actually figure out what features do they use, how do they access them, what buttons are they clicking that don't do anything or shouldn't do anything. So for me, it's been very transformational as a product guy. Today it powers a lot of what I sort of do in my day job from stuff like a daily to-do list to... I was building a thing this morning to help me figure out which events are out there that we might consider sponsoring as a company and give me sort of effectively personal software. So there's two pieces to that. There's sort of the research piece, which events are out there that are the right kind of fit. But then, you know, there's a human decision, there's human in the loop there with me deciding, yes, this conference is something we should look into. No, this one doesn't fit the bill. This one may be next year, a bit expensive. and I've effectively built something that I can then make into a full-blown system, which is fantastic. And of course, I'm using it in my day job for product mocks and actually writing bits of code as well, bug fixes and small features only, of course. I wouldn't advocate for product guys like myself building everything, because you end up in sort of vibe coding pickles, let's say. And then the product I'm actually working on in my day job is called ATP360. And the whole idea is it lets you turn a document, a prompt, or a video into a structured test case with steps and defined pass and fail criteria, which it will then execute using computer using agents. So computer using agents and the different capabilities, the efficacy of the models that underpin them are very sort of top of mind for me right now. How do we train the model? How do we make the thing better with data that we collect from the product? Even things like this podcast. I would have made on previous webinars and live streams and stuff, intros and outros by hand in something like Canva. Whereas for this one, what you saw on intro to this show was all Claude design. No human apart from myself was involved in producing it. The same with the intro music, that was all generated, all the text you see, all the logos you see, the website. The vast majority of posts for AI for Humanity will be AI influenced. I don't often post just straight AI content, because I don't like how it doesn't sound like me. So I'm working on figuring that out right now. I've got an admin portal for the backend of the website that handles all the uploading and posting. and generating descriptions and things for each episode, all built by myself, all built with AI, and all built in probably a week, I would say, maximum. Didn't take particularly long to do. So that's me in AI and why I'm doing this effectively. I'm really keen to hear from you as to who you think I should talk to on the show, to hear their journey, to hear what they've learnt, what they've done with AI. because obviously I don't have all the answers. I'm very much on a learning journey right now. And it sounds like there are many people out there who are also on a similar learning journey. So if there's something you think, yeah, it would be great to have you speak to this person, please do let me know. I'm on LinkedIn, Bruce Cullen, and we'll get it done. And my first guest with that in mind is going to be the name I mentioned earlier, Nathan Foreman. So Nathan is the guy I started Cookdown with and so we've worked together for a long old time. We've been through multiple different companies together and he's the person that introduced me to AI as a builder rather than simply for blogs and bit of scripting and has really challenged me to kind of go further. So Nathan is working as a senior software engineer, today. And in the year or so since I started to use it and he was using it alongside me, I'm going to speak to him about what's changed, what he's working on now, and what he thinks the future will kind of hold. But one thing I'm definitely learning on this journey is that none of us have all of the answers. AI is evolving so fast and the best way to keep up with it is not by pretending to be an expert, it's just by staying curious, frankly. If you liked the show so far, although this is very early day, so please, please do listen on to episode, full episode one, the next one, rather than just me waffling on by myself. But if you like what you've heard so far, you can connect with the show on LinkedIn, or with me personally, just search for AI for Humanity, or for me, Bruce Cullen. I should say, humanity does not have the Y on the end. AI for human-ity. very clever, I see what he did there. And as this show evolves, I'm hoping to introduce round table discussions too, which I'm kind of excited about. Because the other thing I've learned as a product guy, you speak to loads of different people and everybody has something to contribute to the conversation. It's not just a one way thing. And everyone's adopting AI, they have different politics, different governance rules, different understandings basically. So I want to hear what's really happening in the real world and not just sort of the headlines, but the lessons, the success stories, the mistakes, and the discoveries that come from the people who are using this stuff every day. So I think the round tables will be great. And again, speak to me, me if you'd like to be involved in them. I'm planning for those to be sort of super open so anyone can join in just like a team's call or something. I should also mention that AI for Humanity is proudly sponsored by Workspace DNA. This is the company that I work for in the spirit of full transparency. At Workspace DNA, we help organizations understand the ripple effect of change before they hit deploy. So whether you're patching a single application or validating complex multi-application workflows, our platform helps you identify issues early, reduce risk and avoid those dreaded production surprises. And when everything's tested and validated and is good to go, we can help you deploy those changes with confidence too. You can try Workspace DNA for free at WorkspaceDNA.com. And that's the sponsor bit out of the way. So as I say, in the next episode, I'll be joined by Nathan Forman and you'll be hearing more about sort of the foundations of my journey into AI, but also what he's seen as a hands-on active senior developer working for a fair size software company today. Thank you for listening to today. And if you've liked it and you're learning AI like the rest of us, until next time, stay curious, stay human, one prompt at a time. Thanks for listening, goodbye.