This episode is an insightful discussion of me and my very lovely guest Hollie Whittles, an award-winning TEDx speaker and director of two digital companies. The conversation explores the impacts of AI on businesses, highlighting practical applications that can save time and money, and provides examples and guidance on how business owners can effectively integrate AI into their operations.
We also touch on the ethical considerations and potential biases associated with AI use. Hollie shares her personal career journey from talent management to leading her own companies, and her ongoing voluntary work promoting digital skills and entrepreneurship in schools and small businesses.
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
- AI is a valuable tool for businesses: AI can automate tasks, improve efficiency, and provide valuable insights, leading to cost savings and increased productivity.
- Ethical considerations are crucial: As businesses adopt AI, it’s essential to address ethical concerns such as bias, privacy, and transparency.
- AI is accessible and adaptable: There are numerous AI tools and platforms available to businesses of all sizes, making it easier than ever to integrate AI into operations.
If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE
Connect with Hollie on Linkedin, Website
Connect with Teresa on Website, The Club, Sign up to Teresa’s email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter
Transcript
Teresa: AI is everywhere, but what does it really mean for our businesses and can it really save us time and money? And is there anything that we should be looking out for and steering clear of? That is what I’m discussing today with my guest, Hollie Whittles.
Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast, and thank you so much for joining me. Honestly, I appreciate you taking your time out. and hanging out with me. It’s really, really awesome. So this week we have an interview and I’m actually interviewing one of my very good friends who I have known for quite some time, and we joke that she’s quite a big deal.
Hollie Whittles is an award winning TEDx speaker, author and director of two digital companies, Fraggleworks and Purple Frog Systems. Her passion is to educate, entertain, and engage. Spending more than 7, 000 hours speaking to audiences across the UK. She has helped hundreds of business owners to grow their businesses.
Hollie is in constant demand. Her charismatic and knowledgeable approach empowers people to get results. They want their adoption of the right technology, strategic planning, and digital marketing. Hollie is also the national policy skills [00:02:00] champion for the Federation of Small Businesses, FSB, and is the vice chair of the CompTIA Community Executive Council.
She also sits on the boards for Digital Leaders, Career and Enterprise Company, and the Digital Poverty Alliance. So she has quite a bit of experience in this sector. So Hollie is all about technology and AI. Basically one of the businesses you run, as you will hear, is a is at the forefront of doing some of this stuff.
So what I wanted her to do was to come on and talk a bit about AI, maybe demystify it because Hollie isn’t a techie person. Her husband who she runs her business with is more techie than she is. And one of the things that she does and one of the things that she speaks about is AI and how we can use it in our business and all of that good stuff.
And I don’t know about you guys, but at the moment I am seeing everybody talk about AI, I mean I have for a while but I am literally seeing you know, how to run social media using AI, how to do a webinar using AI, how to, [00:03:00] like everything just tags on the end using AI. So I think this is a really good conversation. We give some really practical ways in which we can use AI in our own businesses.
I give a couple of examples of how I’m doing it. And hopefully it gives you a little bit to think about from the AI point of view. So without further ado, here is the lovely Hollie. Hollie, welcome to the podcast.
Hollie: Hi Teresa.
Teresa: I’m very excited to have you on. As I’ve already said, you are a very dear friend of mine and we’ve already been laughing because we just stumbled over the first bit, which was.
Hollie: No, I forgot how to say hello.
Teresa: It’s tricky sometimes. It’s tricky remembering who we are, what we do, how to say hello. It is tough sometimes.
Hollie: Yes.
Teresa: Molly, I always start my podcast the same way. One day I might change it. I’m going through a lot of tweaks at the moment, but for the time being, we’ll stick with it. Please tell us who you are and how you got to do the thing that you do today.
Hollie: So thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here. So my name’s Hollie. I’m from Purple Frog Systems. I’m one of the directors. We set up in 2006, I [00:04:00] think from a place of working for really big corporate where I’d burnt out and we were like, what can we do? My husband was in the same position. So we set up our own company and then we’ve gone from strength to strength and we do data analytics, machine learning, AI.
So very much on the kind of the cutting edge of IT and wouldn’t change it. I’m probably unemployable now.
Teresa: I think we all are. If you’ve had your own business, like that’s it. No one can ever employ you ever again. So let me go back a bit. First off, corporate, what did you do in corporate world? I feel like I should know these things about you, but I’m not entirely sure that I do. So I’ll ask.
Hollie: Yeah. So I used to work in talent management. So we ran sort of corporate programs across an entire enterprise level organization. So we had like apprenticeship, programs, we had graduates, we had vice president programs, and I organized some of those and we took people off and out the business and checked them off cliffs to see what would happen.
And yeah, so it was all about sort of growing people and people development, but it was a big sort of IT consultancy. So they were all techie [00:05:00] people.
Teresa: Okay. And your husband came from tech?
Hollie: He did. Yeah. So he was running a gaming systems company. So he was their IT director, but it’s a big American company.
And they basically ran slot machines for all the casinos from Vegas all around the world. So he was always flying over there.
Teresa: Nice. I mean, it’s not a bad place to fly to.
Hollie: No, exactly.
Teresa: So you decided both at the same time to come out of your employed roles and start the business together.
Hollie: Yeah, so he, he went first.
I stayed an extra two years, but I was still a director of the business and then I, I sort of left my role to join him. So yeah, we, we kind of have, we got married, we bought a house, we went on holiday, we changed jobs, we did everything all around 2006. We just had some sort of midlife crisis. I think.
Teresa: It was quite a year or two.
Hollie: Yeah.
Teresa: What made you go into, explain in very layman’s terms, what it is you do for big businesses now? [00:06:00]
Hollie: Yeah. So I always use the analogy of someone like Richard Branson or Alan Sugar, and they have very, lots of different arms off their business. So he has like Virgin balloons. He has Virgin Atlantic. He has all the different arms of Virgin.
If he’s sitting in his office thinking, how is the entire Virgin group doing? You’ve got all those different organisations and systems that don’t talk to each other. So he probably just wants one dashboard that he can look at To view how well his entire organization is doing. He can drill down into which bits he’s interested in.
So what we do, if we put that reporting layer over enterprise solutions, it doesn’t matter where the source systems are, whether they talk to each other or not, it could be SAP, it could be Excel, it could be access, it could be an HR system, it could be anything, it could be a webpage. And we allow people then to make meaningful decisions from that data.
And then with the advances in AI, the next thing that we do is we apply machine learning to it as well. So what can we predict for the future using that data? So it’s all about [00:07:00] empowering businesses to make better decisions.
Teresa: So what made you guys think, oh, that’s what we’re going to do, like, because you obviously neither one of you had come from that specific thing.
You have the tech background, yeah, and obviously tech knowledge. But what made you go, oh, let’s have all the tech things, we’ll pick this thing and we’ll just go with it.
Hollie: Yeah. So I think we went with what Alex’s brain liked the best, really. So he’s really good at sort of architecting systems and very much.
It was before the cloud was a thing, really. So he was kind of designing these big data warehouses. So we started the business off doing that and it was called business intelligence then, but actually it’s now more referred to as data analytics. So he was very much, that’s the technical path. That’s my area of expertise.
At the time we weren’t going to have employees. So we were like, just going to do it with ourselves. And then as we started growing, that’s when I joined and we’re like, maybe we do need some employees actually. So I bring all the people management, the strategy, the marketing, all the things that you [00:08:00] need to run a business that’s non technical, so together we kind of cover all the different roles you need to be successful.
Teresa: Yeah. And I think that’s the thing, cause people often, especially in the techie industries, they are really good at the tech bit. They don’t always necessarily have the other skill sets, but the same with, you know, it’s like someone with our skill sets going into the tech, not being able to do that.
So it’s cool that there’s two of you together that kind of bring both of those skill sets. So you were in the business, you have a big part in the business, but you have a whole side arm of things that you do as like, I want to say voluntary and it pretty much is all voluntary what you do, isn’t it? So explain that side of what you do.
Hollie: Yeah, so for me, while we were growing the business, I was really interested of pathways into that business. So the first kind of thing that I did was I’m going to go and do some talks in schools. So I became an enterprise advisor, which then connected me with the Careers and Enterprise Company. And then to promote the business, you start doing a bit of business [00:09:00] networking and I was approached by the Federation of Small Businesses, who kind of explained to me, as well as them being a membership organization, they also have these additional voluntary roles where you can kind of help them champion other businesses, and also you can get involved in policy. So, they kind of hooked me into that, and I started off being an area lead, so very much promoting stuff in our local region. I then became the regional chair, which was then, very much West Midlands focused, so I was sitting on negotiations about HS2 and digital infrastructure, 5G rollout, all that kind of stuff.
And then they were like, actually, we’ve got another role for you. And it just kept escalating, which was a national role, which was all about skills and apprenticeships. So the next minute I’m chairing MP round tables, popping down to the treasuries, talking to the department of education. So that is all very much ticking my box of connecting people together, helping others, and also attracting young [00:10:00] people into our world, because you can have such an exciting career in digital. So it’s just about securing those things.
Teresa: That’s amazing. Like, amazing that, A, you volunteered to do this stuff, because when you run a business, like, You know, we were just talking about it.
We’re friends, but we haven’t like hung out for ages because we’re both so busy. And like, so to then volunteer your time to do something like that. And it sounds like it takes up a chunk of your time.
Hollie: It does. Yeah. And it is a cost to the business, but I think it’s something that is really meaningful. It gives me my sense of purpose, to be honest.
So I feel like I need that and I can, I can feel the difference that I’m making.
Teresa: That’s really nice. Cause like, You do deal with huge companies in a very tech way. So that probably like the giving back element doesn’t feel as strong, whereas doing something that, and it’s back to that whole, you have to design how your business looks and what works for you.
Cause someone might look at you from the outside and [00:11:00] go, why would you volunteer your time doing this when you are super successful over here with this big business? And. But that doesn’t light you up as much or that doesn’t give you everything you need. And like you always do. And since I’ve known you’ve always gone into schools and done things, I mean, which honestly, I’ve gone into a couple of schools and done things that scares the living daylights out of me because these teenagers are terrifying.
And I have one, so I know, but like, you know, so for you to be like, you know, going out there and having conversations with them. But this is, and this isn’t what I brought you on to talk about, but this is really interesting because I’ve got my daughter at the moment working in my business, which is awesome.
And I get her to do all sorts of different things. I’m really trying to encourage her to consider having her own business and to consider the options, not necessarily straight into work or straight into, like, I don’t think schools do enough to go, well, one, what different, what different roles are there for starters?
Because you are in a world that moves at the speed of [00:12:00] light, literally the speed of light. And so those roles, like when, you know, you and I like have some marketing background and my, when I did my degree, there wasn’t even really websites as such. There were websites, but there weren’t even that like bigger thing.
There was definitely no social media, like the term content creator, like, no. So even in my role or in marketing, it moves at a pace, but like in tech is moving at such pace that roles are being created that were never created for roles that were being done and now being assisted by AI and all that sort of thing.
So for you to go into schools and go, Hey, this is a world that you could get into and actually something that they might be interested in. So I’ve got Bea at the moment, my daughter doing, I say that like, you don’t know who she is, but I’m saying it more for the audience in case like you. Who’s Bea? That’s my daughter.
She is doing like a Pinterest course for me. So she’s now getting this whole thing. Like she’s on Pinterest herself from a personal point of view. And now she’s starting to realize, Oh, like there’s a business reason people use Pinterest. So, you know, again, trying to give her something that she would have an [00:13:00] idea about or an interest in and then going, let’s learn how we can do it. So. I love that. I think it’s awesome.
Hollie: Yeah. And I think it’s really important because like you say with the schools and the curriculum, it takes so long to actually change what the curriculum looks like. We have to then go in there and bring it to life. And what I’m trying to say to students is that you’re not necessarily going to go into a role.
A, we don’t know what it is because it doesn’t exist yet. But B, rather than just thinking about English and maths, let’s think about entrepreneurship, creativity, problem solving, basic digital skills.
Teresa: Resilience. Yeah. Why are you not teaching all those things?
Hollie: Yeah. This is what we actually need.
It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in, a carpenter still needs to know how to create an invoice and put himself on Facebook. So, and it’s also breaking down those genders. Like I’ve just said him for carpenter, but I’m trying to sort of communicate. It doesn’t matter what gender you are, you can go into any role.
But what regardless of the role, we need those work ready skills and it’s that [00:14:00] proactive attitdue can do and it’s breaking down those barriers and just make it accessible for everyone.
Teresa: Yeah. And I, I love that. I mean, I could go down a whole other direction here in saying that I’m currently having a discussion with my daughter’s school because I want to take her out of school to where in fact, by the time this podcast comes out, we would been gone and back but we’re actually going to Japan and the Philippines, which I am so freaking excited about.
And in the Philippines, we’re meeting Johanne and her family. Johanne works me. And we’re meeting her family, and we’re bringing them to us in another part of the Philippines and giving them a holiday. And like, I am like, surely to goodness, and Bea will understand more about what Johanne does in my business and how she lives.
And like, surely that is much better than sitting in school for a week, but not necessarily agreeing with me at this point. So I’m arguing the toss with them because it’s like, I would much rather give my daughter the skills of [00:15:00] experiencing new things and understanding new things and traveling and like understanding how other people live and how she can make a difference to those people.
And. Yeah. Anyway.
Hollie: She, she will hit the ground running because you’ve taught her how to communicate with people and how to network and she’s going to need that whatever role. So this is where I think they need to be less rigid with the curriculum. And it’s not just about student encounters. It’s about teacher encounters.
You know, we’re talking about AI and a lot of people that I know are just like, well, how am I going to embed that into my subject? My subject. PE. And I’m like, well, you could get them to make a spreadsheet of like all their sports teams and then you can make it into a pie chart and do all this stuff. It’s a good idea. You know.
Teresa: And that is the other thing like they’ve got to keep up on this as much as we have as, as business owners, as parents, as, so let’s get onto the AI conversation, because I was saying to you before we started that at the moment I am seeing like every masterclass webinar, download, blog, podcast about how [00:16:00] to do something with AI, how to build a business using AI, how to write a lead magnet using AI, like. So let’s just talk about, because one of the things you’ve talked about before, when you’ve been in things in my world is the fact that AI is not new. So what do you mean by that?
Hollie: So it’s already been around for quite some time. It’s embedded into our phones. When you think about things like, I hope, it’s not going to go off now. I’m just going to cover it. Alexa and Siri, you know, AI digital assistants, it’s in Netflix, the thumbnails that it shows you, it’s been tailored to you using AI.
Amazon, when you buy stuff, it’s suggesting other things to buy. That’s basket analysis. It’s analyzing the kind of things it thinks that you’re going to like. So AI has been hit around here for a long time. So quite often when I’m doing talks, I give all these examples and people are like, Oh yeah, I didn’t realize I was already using it.
Like it shouldn’t be this thing that’s really, really hard to do. And a lot of the sort of consultation work I’m doing with the government is that we can’t just have fixed [00:17:00] personas of data scientists, because if you’re a micro business, if you’re a sole trader or a small business, you’re probably not going to have a data scientist.
You probably are going to have someone that’s having a go doing some marketing. They pretty much know what they’re doing with social media. They can schedule some stuff, but well, how do I use chat GPT? How do I create a video using Sora or Dolly? And it’s kind of those people that need those AI skills.
And it’s not just about how do I, I use something. It’s how do I, like, if I’m using chat GPT, how do I refine those searches to get what I want out of it? And it’s not just asking it questions. There’s so much more it could do. So with AI, I’m trying to sort of demystify it and make it easier and more accessible for people.
At the same time, I’m doing this consultation piece with the government and try and say, look, we can’t just force everyone into being data engineers and data scientists, because that’s not going to happen in the real world. There are going to be people doing those roles. And not for a lot of [00:18:00] businesses.
Teresa: And when you think about like chat GTP, the reason that blew up so big in the world, you know, I’m in is because so many of the business owners who listen into this, who I speak to on the daily basis, like they are doing so much of it themselves. They are creating their content. They are coming up with scripts of things.
They are creating social media posts. They are coming up with ideas of what they can talk about. So. Weirdly, the more, like the, the more AI that comes out, the less, or the way I see it is the less skilled people are using it.
Hollie: Yeah. That’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Yeah.
Teresa: Like, because we’re on the receiving end of it.
So I’ve just come back from an Adobe conference and one of the things that they talked about a lot was Adobe Firefly. And Adobe Firefly, for anybody who doesn’t know, is basically their AI version of it can create anything. So you type in text to image. What is it that I want? I want a, so I’ve got this weird thing on robots, like cute retro [00:19:00] robots, like I freaking love them anyway.
So like you could type in, because you’ve got purple frog, you could type in a purple frog sat on a lily pad on a computer, like, and then Firefly will create that image for you. And again, the people who might use that and not designers necessarily, yeah, they might use some of the stuff and, and they definitely at this conference, Adobe definitely showed like how photoshop users can integrate things like regenerative fill and all this stuff that is so freaking cool.
So yes, there are people with some skills, but actually the majority of people that we’re going to be using most of this AI are not skilled in that place or otherwise they’d be doing it anyway, wouldn’t they?
Hollie: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s a really good analogy of you’re just talking to it saying, can you create me an astronaut with a red woolly hat that’s sitting on a skateboard that’s flying off into the distance and it just does it. And it looks really good as well. And some of the video stuff that I’ve seen, you know, you know, show me a [00:20:00] picture of a woman walking down the street with all this happening and it just does it.
Teresa: Horrifying. So let’s get on that point actually. because again, there were points when, when I’m going to someone, Oh yeah, they had Louis Theroux as a keynote. He was awesome. He was so, so good. And they were doing like a wordy association thing. And so when they said AI, what word comes up? And I was like playing along in my head and I immediately in my head went scary and or terrifying.
And he said something else. He said, actually, the first word in my head was, like scary or something, but I thought as we’re at this conference, I better not say it right. But anyway, so let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about some of this very cool AI stuff, like that they showed some of the video stuff and it is Nuts, like literally nuts what it can do.
When do we get worried they’re going to take over the earth?
Hollie: Yeah.
Teresa: Like when is Skynet happening? Like, do we need to worry about these things or are we okay?
Hollie: Yeah. I mean, there’s so much work around [00:21:00] the ethics and the morality of all this happening at the moment. You know, how do you program a machine to think like humans do, and you’ve had this with like self driving cars, which actually I’ve been driving around for quite a number amount of years with no accidents and people didn’t realize.
But when you’re trying to program them, that very much comes down to cultural differences. Like if there was a scenario with a car and it had to swerve to miss something, and it could either swerve and hit an elderly person or it could hit a child in the UK, it’d say save the child. Whereas if you were to ask that question over in China or Japan, They would say save the, save the elder.
How can you program for those kind of things As a human, you, you have, you have an instinct, you know what to do, but the ethics and the morality of it is very much ongoing and especially down to like facial recognition. I know that the Hollywood actors really worried about their faces being used. Their voice is being used.
Yeah. Like the deep fakes of Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman. But in terms of it taking over our jobs, like, you know, I’ve seen many websites [00:22:00] about our robots going to take over my job and all this kind of stuff. And if you watch Terminator, you think Skynet has already happened, but I kind of spin it more positively that yes, it is going to take our jobs, but we’re going to be doing something else.
AI is going to free us up. It’s going to be our friend that’s going to help us do our jobs better. And our jobs are going to change. And we don’t know quite what that’s going to look like yet. So AI will become seamlessly integrated into our environment in the background. And there’s a lot of work being done on green technologies and net zero and stuff.
And I think they’re very much kind of embedding all of this together to kind of take away the noise and the clutter of our worlds.
Teresa: Yeah, I love it. So let’s talk about, and I’ve got, I’ve got an example, which I’ll start with and then get some from you. Let’s talk about how, what some of the cool things that you’ve seen in AI that are helping us in our businesses today.
So where I’m at today, well, I say today at the point of recording this again, by the time this goes out, I’ll be well past this, [00:23:00] but already gone. In fact, AI is now called something else. So I had the lovely Becci McEvoy do my social media for me and I’m a victim of my own success that I have helped her create an online business.
She’s created it and now she doesn’t want clients, which is brilliant for her. And I’m so very pleased, but that left me in a point of, okay, well, what am I going to do now? And she does things like creates my show notes for me, helps come up, well, not helps, comes up with titles to my podcast for me and various other things like that.
So I have taken the decision. And like I said, I’m, we’re literally at the cusp of handing over. So. As we’re recording this, it could have gone disastrously wrong, and you’ll find out later on, I’m sure, on a solo episode. And I will talk about it on a solo episode, so it might have been in the past. It’s very confusing when you bat your head.
Yes. It’s like, am I in the past? I’m in the future. Where am I? So we are looking at ChatGTP taking My recordings of the podcast, potentially doing a transcript, although we currently used a desript to do a transcript. Either way, that [00:24:00] transcript then being plugged into ChatGTP, which I am paying for now, for me and Johanne, so we can use the same and level four, whatever it is, I’ve no idea.
That is then writing some show notes for me and coming up with podcast titles. So that is a place where Now, I didn’t get rid of Becci to use ChatGTP, but I’m at a point where, okay, I don’t have her. I’m not going to have her. I need to make a decision. Do I bring someone else on board to do that? Or is there things that can do that for me?
And is that going to be good enough? So already, if that is the case, I will save myself a chunk of money every single month, which again, as a small business owner is really, really useful. So what great examples have you got that people are using or you’re seeing that are helping business owners today?
Hollie: Yeah, so I know someone, in fact, you know her as well, Lucy Hall from Digital Women. She’s got loads of content, as you have, of all the people that she’s ever done podcasts with and interviews with. So she was trying to create loads of little like bite sized snippets so she could actually get them online.
[00:25:00] So rather than the full half an hour interview, she was just putting two minutes slots. She used an AI, she just literally pointed at a folder where all these videos were. The AI went through and it pulled little two minute slots. for that. And then she just used those and stuck them online. I was just like, wow, how.
Teresa: Well AI did that.
Hollie: Yeah. AI did that.
Teresa: Which, which one? What.
Hollie: Do you know? I know you’re going to ask me what she used. I can’t remember.
Teresa: Okay. We’re going to find that.
Hollie: In the nose.
Teresa: Yeah. Hollie’s going to find that out. Tell me. We’ll put it in the show notes because we’ve got plenty of time because it’s in the future.
Hollie: but come on that, that’s the future.
Teresa: I know. Honestly, it really is quite messed up sometimes. Like I said, this is like, when you bat your head, this is where the problem comes, because you’re like, where is this going out? And what am I saying at one point? That’s awesome. That again, like you said, that could save so much time.
Hollie: Yeah. And actually what it came with, cause I was like, Oh, I’m going to go and check my snippet now.
And actually the bit it had chosen, I’m like, yeah, that’s all right, actually. You know, it’s not me halfway through something. It’s a very good little two minute thing. So with all the thumbnails [00:26:00] and everything, but I think the biggest, the biggest thing I’ve seen is a Microsoft co pilot. So they have spent an obscene amount of money developing their AI solutions, and they bought OpenAI.
So, you know, all these different suite of projects, well, ChatGPT is actually Microsoft AI owned now, and with Copilot, that is something that’s coming through. All of our systems, Word, Office, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel. And the idea behind Copilot is that you could be on a call and you could be given some actions, like can you read this document or can you create a spreadsheet, this, that and the other.
Copilot has just done it while you’re having the call, the end of it. There’s your analysis done, there’s your PowerPoint, there’s your breakdown of what that Excel is actually saying, and you can plug Copilot into like your websites and have it as a chatbot. So rather than you have to manually answer all your questions on your website, it creates a chatbot for you.
So there’s a massive change coming with Microsoft Copilot and people using that.
Teresa: So is that [00:27:00] in place now?
Hollie: Yeah, they’re rolling it out as we speak and they’ve just spent like an obscene amount of money on it, like I couldn’t even put a number on it.
Teresa: So how does that work from a, like, so if you’re on a phone call or whatever, or if you’re on a, so I guess you’ve got to be in a Microsoft product.
Hollie: Yeah, I think, yeah, you’d have to be in a Microsoft product, you know, you know, when you join, like, sometimes zoom meetings and you see, like, AI, open AI joining it, it is that kind of concept where you have to enable it and configure what you want your co pilot to do, but, you know, The application for it is endless.
Yeah. And you know, like I don’t wanna be spending time typing at minutes, you know, so some of those AIs that you plug in, like Otter AI’s brilliant, is on the minutes for me. Like the notepad that I bought for my meetings. I use a remarkable. Yeah. And I like, I, I really like writing things down, so I like doing calligraphy, but at the end of it I just click convert to text pdf it myself.
There’s my minutes done. There’s my notes done. Yeah. It’s amazing.
Teresa: Is there anything that, [00:28:00] is there any warnings or anything that you would be, like, just go steady on it? Like, so I know there’s some things like ChatGTP where basically when you plug stuff in, they get it. Like, they’ve got it, it’s out in the internet, it doesn’t belong to you necessarily anymore.
Is there anything that you would be like, you’ve seen something and you’re like, oh no, be careful on that front?
Hollie: I’m always quite guarded. I don’t always sign up for everything straight away. I kind of, wait for it to be tested. I might sign up for a beta version of it and have a go. So I think it’s just being sensible really and what feels safe.
So I’ve not seen any specific examples, but I think, you know, when people say about things like internet trolls and you know, what are they going to do with all this kind of stuff? And I’m like, unfortunately that is in human’s nature. There are going to be those bad actors and we’re going to have to manage that.
We can’t. stop it and block it completely. If you think about all the spam emails we get, some of them still get through. There’s, it’s something we’re going to have to live with, but I think I’m just trying to promote the [00:29:00] positive uses of it and things like, like my husband and I, Alex, we were talking about a book the other day and we couldn’t remember the name of the book.
We couldn’t remember the name of the author. All we could remember was one chapter. So can you imagine like trying to search Google for that? No idea. We did a bit of searching, couldn’t find it, stuck it into chat GPT. It came back within like two seconds. It said this book that you’re looking for.
Teresa: That’s so good. In fact, I was looking, I was, got really distracted earlier by watching some training on something, because I do find this AI stuff fascinating. And I was watching some training and they had a plugin, which they have in Chrome, I think, which basically, when they search something in Google, it brings up ChatGTP’s answer.
Like, and that’s as much as I know. So I feel terrible. Like the people are going to go, what is it? How? No, I have no idea. But basically what they said is they were trying to unsubscribe from something and. they had to download all their data or something to stop paying for this thing. So of course they put that into Google and the first [00:30:00] like five things that came up were sponsored ads of people trying to sell them something similar to the name of the thing they were trying to cancel.
Whereas ChatGTP went, this is how you do it. These are the steps.
Hollie: I’ve got that enabled. I’ve just switched to using Bing and I’ve got in the sidebar. Yeah, it’s popping up now and it’s doing that for me as well, which actually is really quite useful. I mean, you can turn it off if you don’t want it there, but actually, yeah, it does add that narrative around it.
I have just thought of a good example, actually, of things that I’ve seen where it might not be such a great idea and it’s around that element of unconscious bias. So like in a human resources role, we might be using an AI to screen your CVs. But there’ve been lots of sort of case studies about, well, it learns from history.
So if you’ve only ever employed white men, that’s what your AI is going to pick. That’s what you’ve taught it. So it’s about training those models and trying to eliminate that unconscious bias that you didn’t realize was there.
Teresa: We had at the summit, and she also spoke at a couple of other places, not my stuff, but she spoke [00:31:00] at Marketed Live, Joyann Boyce, who talks a lot about inclusivity and diversity.
And she did a whole thing around the bias of AI. And as you just said that I remembered it. And that is the only thing, isn’t it? Like, it is built on the information that we’re plugging in and if we’re plugging in biased information it’s going to give us biased information back. So I think in terms of there needs to be a sense check somewhere of this stuff and just go and actually is that right, like is that what we want to see or. Is it being biased? So.
Hollie: Yeah, exactly. So, and that’s, you know, some of the examples I quite often give, you know, can do all this amazing stuff for us, but you still need a human to kind of sense, check it and go, does that feel right? And I think with a lot of this stuff, it’s trusting your gut instinct. If it doesn’t feel right, or you’re not sure about points that just don’t do it and just, yeah.
Teresa: And that’s the other thing, like I was thinking about, you know, what I didn’t say when I said we’re going to get chat GTP to try and write our show notes is I will read them. I will read the show notes to make sure that that makes sense, and I’m happy with it, and we will [00:32:00] get it to suggest titles for it, but like, I’ve plugged in emails before, so I’ll write an email to my list, and I’ll throw it into ChatGTP and go, can you improve this, or is my grammar okay, or whatever, and it will throw an email back to me, and I’ll be like, that sounds nothing like me.
we’re not using it. So I think there has got to be, it’s never going to get to a point where I don’t have to have eyes on it or don’t have to look at it or it will just do it all for me. I am still going to be keeping an eye on what it, what the output is to make sure it’s still in line with me. Cause at the end of the day, It is me that I’m putting out there.
So, but hopefully it will learn from the podcast and from the transcripts and from all of that of how I am. And that was another reason I paid for it is because you can start to get it to learn better if you pay for it.
Hollie: Exactly.
Teresa: So yeah, although I’m still playing with all of it, I still don’t really know.
I just pretend Hollie, I’m just pretending , I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation, honestly. It’s so cool and there is so much cool stuff out there and it’s really awesome to have a very smart friend who. Is it like the [00:33:00] forefront of all of this, not just within her own business, but also like having conversations with the government.
Pretty awesome. You are quite a big deal, Hollie. That’s how we tell ourselves each other. Yeah. We’re like our own little cheering squad. You’re amazing. No, you’re amazing.
Hollie: I mean, America or something.
Teresa: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m taking it. Hollie, thank you so much. Where do you hang out most? Where would you like someone to come and say hi if they want to come and say hi.
Hollie: Come and say hi, find me on LinkedIn. I’m literally Hollie Whittles on LinkedIn. So I’ll come up there. So it’d be great to connect.
Teresa: And we will make sure that we hook up to everything in the show notes. Hollie, thank you so much for joining me. It’s been a pleasure to have you.
Hollie: Thank you. It’s been lovely to be here.
