Latest / Full Tech Ahead / AI is Just a Smart Puppy

Transcript

AI is Just a Smart Puppy · Full Tech Ahead

• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Hello and welcome to Full Tech Ahead.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Amanda Rizzani, and I'm excited to be here today with Graham Glass.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: He is the CTO of Cypher Learning.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: How are you doing?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing great.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Amanda.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Can you share a little bit about Cypher Learning?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: What services do you provide?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we provide a state-of-the-art learning platform that's targeting organizations that want to keep their entire extended organization, in other words, their employees, their partners, their customers, up to speed with all the latest happenings.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, you might be a uh a listing company in real estate, and it's really important that you keep your brokers and employees and everybody else connected to your system up to speed with the latest.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that is what we are focused on.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, interesting.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: So we're talking about employee retention.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: And when you lose employees or staff or partners, you know, you're losing a lot of that knowledge that's captured and that causes problems.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: So you seem like the perfect person to speak with about this.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: What, first of all, what are some of the key problems that occur when it comes to losing employees or losing those partnerships?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: What are some of the key issues?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, the most obvious issue, if somebody's got a lot of institutional knowledge in their head and it's either not recorded anywhere, or it's recorded in a bunch of scraps of paper and odd Google Doc files, then if you ever need access to that information, it's really, really hard.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so what you need to be able to do is a systematic way for your employees to constantly capture information so that if they do decide to leave or or use part way for any reason, that knowledge is is still there for other people to benefit from.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think a big problem is most people maybe they don't put what they do day to day, even like you know, what their job entails and the the different daily tasks.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you bring in a new employee, you're basically training them from the ground up on what they're supposed to be doing day in, day out, where to find everything, because that's not already there.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: So um certainly a solution to that would be helpful.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the the ideal thing in this day and age, because now we're living in the age of AI, is to allow all that knowledge to be captured and turn into ideally some form of educational materials so that it's either an automated task or very, very lightweight.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because no one is gonna say, oh, I need to go to my LD team and see if they can create a course on what I do every day.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're just gonna tell you to go away, they're too busy.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a this is a really good example where AI can be used to do this stuff in a very, very easy way, which does not involve using the precious time of an LD professional.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think it's twofold.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: You can use the AI to, I guess, create these educational training courses, but you know, we're also hearing more and more about how to use AI to automate some of these things.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: So, where do you stand with that and uh finding that balance?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Are there some things you're finding that AI can actually come in and do some of those things?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I'm I'm I'm AI pilled in the sense that I use AI all the time.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I'd be a fool not to be honest, but I have to be very careful about how I use it.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, I'm a very technical CTO, so I am part of a team that builds software all the time.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I leverage my expertise in systems architecture, in how to divide and conquer into very well-structured systems, and I guide the AI that's basically my assistant, so that as it's generating code, it's really high quality and clean and presented to me in a way that I can then review it and audit it.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, what you tend to find is human beings more and more uh focused on high value operations and AI helping those humans to accelerate their ability.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I absolutely love it, but I didn't see any time where an AI is going to replace my expertise at this high level.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: So there at Cypher Learning, I'm sure you've worked with a whole lot of different organizations.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: Can you are you able to share any specific examples of how you improved on their knowledge retention process and the outcomes?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, I can't share any names with you because um because I can't.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have their permission.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what I can say is that there are a lot of companies now are setting up a university, basically, like an online portal where they capture a lot of the knowledge about how they do things, and then they allow their employees to either enroll in the university and learn about things whenever they like, but some of those courses will be will be monitored and made mandatory.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I can say is the idea of a university associated with a company is really popular.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like we at Cypher, we've got Cypher University, and so that's where we put a lot of ways that we do marketing and sales and engineering into courses, but we use our own tools to do that because at this point they're so good, it would be silly to have to, you know, to get someone to build those things manually.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so, one of the things that we have a lot of expertise in our company about best practices and how to structure educational materials, micro learning, small courses, detailed courses, just in time learning.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole spectrum of these things.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so we are sharing those insights with the AI that we've built, so that when it does build a course, it looks like it was built by an expert, not like some spit out, some five-minute, you know, piece of garbage kind of thing.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, quality, I think, matters.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I think this is a benefit that a lot of companies could look at when it comes to perks, maybe even adding to that skills or certifications that they can earn through the university.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm seeing a little bit more of that where it's a perk, the the free knowledge that they can have access to.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think, you know, putting my own employee hat on, I like being part of a company that actually gets it and is modern.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's a bit weird.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you went home and you used an AI to learn things really quickly and it's like easy and fun, and then you go into your company and everything looks like it came out the 1980s, and you've got these old jukeboxes of funky courses that nobody cares about, and they're out of date and they're clunky, then you think to yourself, what is my company doing?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how come I have a better experience in my kitchen at home than I do in my corporate learning environment?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we're really focused on trying to modernize the way that people learn and the way that people keep up to speed with their business and the way that they share knowledge.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And and clearly, AI is a huge boost to um to our abilities to do that.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, absolutely.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and now that we are incorporating AI more into different business areas, we do have to also think about the security of that data and all that knowledge.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: What advice do you have to make sure that all that knowledge stays secure within the company?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so what one of the standards uh in the field of AI is called MCP.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And without going into details, it allows you to expose in a very secure way bits and pieces of your corporate data to people who have who have authenticated access.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, and they're not that hard to set up and they are secure.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And once you provide access through MCP, then you can then allow other agents to access that information and process it.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, in our particular case, we want people to be able to use MCP to connect to the cipher platform to get really useful data about how students are doing, for well, learners in general, how they're doing.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in the past, it was quite clunky.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you had to use some API service, which is highly technical that very few people can use, or run a report, which is oftentimes out of date unless you're generating it every day.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you think about things agentically, you just say, hey, if we're using a tool like Cypher Platform, then I'm gonna allow Claude to connect to it, get all the latest information, then pipe that into my reporting system, and then turn around that and pipe it into an automation system to take certain actions.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I think part of it is how do you make that your data accessible in a secure way?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: But then it's like thinking out of the box like how can you leverage this?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because this kind of stuff was impossible just one or two years ago, and now it's actually relatively straightforward.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, AI is advancing so rapidly, as you mentioned.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: How would you advise business leaders to stay ahead of this rapid technology advancement and to harness it to the best of their ability?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I would say that MCP is a really critical technology because that's the way that you share important data with other AIs.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think another thing is, and I've experienced this myself because I've been using AI since ChatGPT 3 came out, is that you want to recognize the fact that AI is like a really smart puppy.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is it's really, really smart, but it will follow you around and wag your tail, wag its tail to almost anything you ask it to do.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it always wants to make you feel like you're great and you're doing the right thing.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So if you give this super smart puppy to the I know when I do this analogy to the wrong kid, it's gonna do all kinds of weird things.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, so for example, when I'm building software, I really know best practices for software engineering.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I guide it very carefully.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that little smart puppy goes in the right direction and builds really good things.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't want, you just need to be very cognizant of that and let everyone in your team know that so that you don't want people losing track of so much of the expertise is in the human mind, not in the AI.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's a really critical thing.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I would say when it comes to doing things like choosing a learning platform, a lot of it is go with people who are like proven thought leaders.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So Cypher, for example, was the first company to release the AI pad course creation, period.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the first company to release the AI pad cross-check, where we use one AI to check the output from another.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I could go on, but I think that there are some companies that are a little bit laggered, maybe don't quite know what they're doing, and then there are other companies that are really breaking new ground.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what do you think's next down the road?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, I I'm a big fan of just the idea of a personal agent.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been talking about this for years.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not just saying what you know Google's saying today, or Zuckerberg.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I really like the idea of every employee gets a personal learning agent, and that learning agent helps that human to stay up to speed, put together a skills plan, you know, helps them to collect their knowledge and share it with other people, uh, helps them um to always stay on top of the latest technologies.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as we all know, the world is moving so fast relative to just two years ago.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, literally every week there's a new thing that comes out that I need to stay on top of in order for me to do my job.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so having an AI assistant that knows all about your job title, your responsibilities, your teammates, your work habits, what skills you need to do the job, and then helps you, I think that is definitely a huge focus of cipher learning.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, like I say, uh I'm more than happy.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I can give you a little taste of what we're up to.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that is definitely the direction for corporate learning.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sure.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to share now for our audio listeners, they may not be able to see it, but you can you can walk us through it.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I'm gonna talk to the AI.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: So my hope is that your listeners will actually literally just listen to what goes on and probably can figure it out.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I've got in front of me, dear listeners, is a little agentic panel uh which supports voice, and it will basically guide me through creating a course.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now you could drag and drop Google Docs and videos and all kinds of stuff.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: In this case, I'm just gonna build it from scratch.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but this is really all about putting the power of AI and LD best practices into the hands of everybody.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm just gonna put it into voice mode and hopefully it'll speak to me.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, tell me about the course you'd like to build.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to build a course called How to Price Anything.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: All right, I'll get on that.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I've saved that as your course title and topic.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Who is this course for?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Small business owners, freelancers, and consultants, product and pricing teams, or something else?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Small business owners.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'll set it to that.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, audience is small business owners.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: I've also chosen a professional tone with clean modern illustrations.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: How much do they already know about pricing?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Are they new to pricing?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: No prices.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'll update that.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then saying 60-minute course, please.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'll set that.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome how quick it is.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And for your audience, as I as I'm doing this, it's updating the screen and showing me everything that I've selected.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: You can go backwards and forwards, talk about it in natural language, or type.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now we've created a brief which describes what the course is gonna do.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And next up, I'm gonna generate an outline which will take about five seconds.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm listening.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: I've got the outline ready.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: It covers calculating full costs, setting profitable prices, checking customer value, comparing with competitors, and testing and adjusting prices.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Building takes about 10 to 15 minutes, and the build card will show each stage as it runs.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Shall I build the course?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Choices are build a course.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: So it's that simple.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: You can just talk to it, and in minutes you have an entire course built.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then the course itself is really high quality.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Interactive widgets, gorgeous state-of-the-art graphics, informational images.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: It looks really high-end.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: And this whole thing takes, you know, 10 to 15 minutes for everything.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I appreciate that demo.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: And for those listening, they were able to hear it speaking in natural language.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: You could just literally tell it and it built out the whole course.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's really phenomenal what AI is capable of doing these days.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: Really, I am just mind-blown.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: We keep saying it how quickly it has advanced, but it really is true.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: So, to that note, what's the key takeaway you can leave our audience today with?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think the key takeaway is that it's easier than ever to capture knowledge and distribute it knowledge.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And AI, I think, is a huge enabling technology to allow that.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: I use that in my personal life all the time, but obviously the mission at Cypher is to bring that to everyone.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure, Amanda.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: And if you have any comments or questions, leave them in the comments below.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'll make sure to respond back as soon as possible.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: And until next time, have a wonderful day.