AI Fluency & the Future of Presales

Adam Freeman: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 80 of two pre sales and a pod enjoyed by myself Adam Freeman and Todd Jansen. Hey Todd. Hey Here we go. We’re back again. Milestone episode here. And we’ve got a great guest for Lorick, Head of Solutions Engineering over at OpenAI. And we’ve been waiting for this episode for a little while and to get this date in the diary.

But this is a cool episode. And Zach, we’re going to be talking about AI fluency today and weaving it into your workflow and what it means for PreSales Team and the wider AI. But before I do that, do you want to just introduce yourself for people and where they can find you on socials and things?

Zach Lawryk: Yeah, sure. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me to the pod. I’ve been a long time fan. Zach Larek, head of SE at OpenAI. I’ve been here for almost a year. I’ve been a pre sales professional for lack of a better term, all my career, effectively. It’s been a long time. And you can find me on LinkedIn.

Very easy to find me. My last name is pretty unique. There is no other Zach Larek on LinkedIn. 

Adam Freeman: That’s brilliant. Thank you so much for joining us. And one of the things that we started with, and we were talking before we get [00:01:00] on air as well, AI fluency. And I thought you had just a lovely way of articulating what it actually meant to be AI fluent.

If maybe you want to elaborate that as a starting point. 

Zach Lawryk: Yeah, absolutely. So obviously I think about this a lot in my professional life. But I think one of the things that’s really important to me is first that. And we’ll talk about this throughout the podcast, I believe it’s really important, I think, for any professional and especially knowledge workers to develop and build AI fluency for themselves.

I think it’s a career differentiating skill. It’s something that people will put on their LinkedIn profile akin to other technologies like in the past, 20 years ago, it was Microsoft word. Linux, et cetera. And then it will evolve to the modern AI tools or stack as well. But I think what’s also as important is that, the risk of any new technology that has this sort of pronounced effect on productivity is that it can be concentrated in the hands of few, the folks that.

That have access to that technology or they’re on [00:02:00] linked in our Twitter or wherever X. I guess we call it now. Wherever we are in consuming information about technology and a lot of the folks that get left behind that are not necessarily on the cutting edge of what’s happening in technology or live on the coasts of North America.

So what’s really important to me is to make sure that, we as a company and in just general, like my own personal mission is to make sure that we expose this sort of technology to folks in any profession because I think as much as it is a career accelerator and a productivity tool for individuals and technology, it can be equally as beneficial for folks in any profession in any stage of your career.

So in a nutshell, that’s what’s important to me. And I think that there’s a real opportunity to make that happen for all. 

Adam Freeman: I thought, what was interesting, 

Zach Lawryk: Zach, 

Todd Janzen: Todd, 

Zach Lawryk: I think, 

Todd Janzen: We’re like stepping on each other and ask questions, Adam. No, 

Adam Freeman: I was just keen, but do you remember that a couple of episodes we had Susan Beal on and she made that killer line, didn’t she?

She said, nobody should ever be writing a first draft ever again. Do you remember it? It stood out for you, didn’t it? 

Todd Janzen: [00:03:00] Yeah. Yeah, I love what you’re talking about, Zach, and this episode is so cool because it’s a little bit of just a preview to what you’re going to be launching at DemoFest West Coast in February here.

So for those listening and haven’t booked your trip out to the West Coast, you should, and this is why we wanted to have you on the podcast is, I just don’t see a lot of thought leadership in the solutions, the pre sales profession right now, like there’s like, where do I go for some guidance and help?

And it’s so overwhelming. So I think, our profession is just so hungry for what, I don’t want to delay as too much. Like I want to get into the meat here. But before we do give us just a. Brief background on your career journey. I think that’s always an interesting for listeners.

Zach Lawryk: Yeah, sure. I started my career in tech actually before I graduated college, actually in high school. I know we don’t have time to actually walk through my entire career in technology because I’m so old, but I started actually a company in high school with a friend of mine and, we created a VB application actually that would go scrape names from AOL [00:04:00] and email those names.

And then if you clicked on a few of those, we made some money. So that was like our first foray into tech at the beginning of the internet. And then in college, started another company with some friends of mine. We had no idea what we were doing and ended up working with some offshore resources to build a Angie’s list, but, way back in the early 2000s.

And that didn’t work out of course, but I learned a lot through the process. But what I actually learned in starting those two companies is how much I like being at the intersection of business and technology. I didn’t know about the SE profession then, and I didn’t learn about the SE profession until a few years after college, but I lucked out, stumbled into salesforce.

com back in 2005, only because a friend of mine told me, Hey, they could probably pay you twice as much as what you’re making right now. And I was barely getting by in San Francisco. As I moved up there from San Diego as I graduated college, stumbled into Salesforce and actually started my career as like a technical account manager or equivalent.

And so I had accounts would help them with their Salesforce configurations and a friend of mine said. Hey, you should try out the sales thing. It’s, it seems [00:05:00] fun. There was a book called the sales advantage. I think it’s a Dale Carnegie book. We read that together and I was just blown away because it was, part art and science, and it was exactly what sort of got me excited about being at that intersection of business and technology.

And so fast forward, I’ve never been more excited about getting a job than I’m, when I got that first SE job at Salesforce, it just seemed like a group of people that were having a lot of fun together. Presenting to customers, closing deals, but also like experts in the technology. And that was like really exciting for me.

And fast forward. However many years I have just never been able to get away from pre sales because it’s such a fun place to be. And I think that’s, what is I think critical to our profession is, staying on the bleeding edge of technology. You have to be a technologist at heart.

But also understanding the business implications. And that is what led me to taking on a number of, leadership roles at high growth companies and lucking out along the way to picking the right ones and again, stumbling my way into open AI which has been, a really exciting development in my career.

Adam Freeman: Now, [00:06:00] the other thing to ask you is that how did it feel when you got that offer from OpenAI? Because it’s it’s one of the hot tech places right now, probably like Salesforce was. And so back in that, 2000s, when you got that job, you’ve almost had that moment twice, right?

What does it feel like when you get that offer? 

Zach Lawryk: It did feel like a bit of a parallel moment because I do remember, I still remember where I was when I got the email on my BlackBerry for the Salesforce job to say, Hey, you got it. And I was very excited. And now I remember where I was when I got that call.

For my now boss saying, Hey, you got the job at open AI and was equally as excited. I would say like for this job, I never studied more for an interview because I wanted to make sure that I was, aware of everything that’s going on, there’s a lot of content that’s out there on AI.

And so I did my best to study that I tried to get hands on with the technology as well. And I really prepared my ass off for lack of a better term. 

Todd Janzen: Zach, it’s so cool. You referenced Salesforce back in the day. That’s obviously where you and I first met just [00:07:00] some amazing times. And we mountain bike together.

Sometimes we have a lot of common friends. Yeah, there you go, Adam. We have a lot of common friends together. And I just remember for a month when I was talking to anyone, just being like, Zach got the big job. 

Zach Lawryk: Zach got the big job. Yeah. It’s I’m very proud to be here. And I would can’t imagine working anywhere else, to be honest.

Todd Janzen: Yeah you absolutely should be. All right let’s get into the meat of things. And Zach, I love that you’re here to give back, right? You’re here to help the profession. That’s why Adam and I do this, by the way. This is just in our spare time. But you mentioned AI fluency, right?

And you feel like this is so important for not just our profession, really anyone in tech to know but kick us off here. What do you mean by AI fluency? 

Zach Lawryk: Yeah, so on the spot definition, I would say AI fluency is just. A comfort in using these new technologies and integrating them into either your daily life or you’re in professional application.

And it’s just being [00:08:00] familiar with what’s happening in this space, both from a technology and like a broader movement perspective as well. Because, there’s tech, there’s a technology, of course, but there’s also the sort of social and economic implications of this technology. So I think it’s like those two coupled together in parallel.

Would be my definition of what AI fluency means and making sure that you’re integrating it into your daily life and understanding the implications. 

Adam Freeman: I’m really keen to ask you here, as a pre sales leader, how are you doing that? How are you integrating some of these AI workflows, because it’s personally, I love AI.

I think it’s a force multiplier, I think it’s cheat code when you understand it, but I think you’ve also got to have the human qualities that you bring to the table, particularly in our role, to really make the most of it, but it’s so hard to keep up with everything. It’s changing so fast. When that’s your day job, I can’t begin to imagine when you have to articulate that vision, how hard it is to keep on the front foot with everything.

But how are you really weaving AI in and how fast is your role changing because of that weaving of [00:09:00] AI into your job role, do you think? 

Zach Lawryk: Yeah, to address one of your earlier points, I think that this movement, if you will this trend in technology creates more anxiety than any other trend that we’ve had.

Historically, it moves so fast. I’ve never seen things evolve on a weekly basis in any other technology trend. So I think it’s one of the fastest moving technology trends. Hype cycles that we’ve ever seen. And that does create a lot of anxiety, both for customers and individuals and staying ahead of it is a challenge.

And I think key to that is, taking a step back and thinking about, and this is a lot of what we’ll talk about at demo fest, but it’s. First, like thinking about breaking down your job into what it means to be really good at your job profession and breaking that down into chunks in a way that can be aligned to what the technology is capable of.

And so the way that we think about it here, you’d be surprised that, it’s still a challenge for folks at OpenAI to think about how do we continue to integrate these new capabilities in a way that drives productivity for the individual. [00:10:00] And the company and what we do on an ongoing basis is we have these like solution workshop sessions where we say, Hey, we’ve got this new capability.

We’ve got this new feature in Chachi PT. Let’s break it down in the context of the work that we’re trying to get done and how we define excellence for our role and try to align technology accordingly to help accelerate various aspects of our job. And I think ultimately it comes to just being willing to experiment.

And being willing to play around with this technology on a regular basis, because I genuinely believe that we’re just scratching the surface. If there was like a corpus of use cases based on current technology that were probably in single digit percentage penetration of those use cases and our understanding of what this can be used for.

That’s incredible to think about that, actually. Yeah. And also say that somebody I think it was actually the chief scientist at Databricks said something to me in a podcast that resonated with me. He said, even if we never saw, we don’t see any further advancements in our current models and we stick [00:11:00] with 4.

0, let’s call it 4. 0, like that GPT 4 models are all we’ll have for the next 10 years. We’re still, we still don’t understand. All the use cases and the value that you could get from current models today. So that sort of to me speaks to like some of the, why people are anxious about this is that you’ve got like current technology and there’s still a lot of value you can get from what we have today, but the technology is also evolving on literally a weekly basis.

And now, like in the market, like there are many players in the frontier model space and everybody’s pushing to make progress on an exponential scale. How do you stay ahead of the progress? And also have a develop an understanding of how you can benefit today is a challenge.

That’s one of the biggest challenge we’ve had, I think, in technology. Yeah. 

Todd Janzen: I think something comes to mind listening to you, Zach. There’s this term in engineering we used to use analysis paralysis, right? And, I feel I’m guilty of that certain days. We’re just, it’s just so overwhelming, right?

I don’t know to start. And I don’t know, maybe for the listeners here, maybe we can just kick off talking about some [00:12:00] basics, right? I’m sure everyone’s experimenting with it, right? Maybe we don’t have to start, the letter a, but it. What are some of your tips for our listeners on just, where to start or where they should be focusing their time?

Zach Lawryk: I think you want to think about it as like an assistant sitting on your shoulder. So whatever AI you use, I like the idea of anthropomorphizing it and saying, this is your eye, your AI, you’ve got your AI sitting on your shoulders, any sort of task. You’re about to embark on you should be consulting your AI on a better way to do it.

It all starts with brainstorming. So you’re about to write an email. What’s the best way to write this email? I’ve got a memo that I’m starting. How should I think about brainstorming this memo? And that’s where the technology was two years ago. It’s very helpful. It continues to get better at things like text summarization.

The models obviously get more intelligent and smarter, so they’re better at helping you with brainstorming. I think that’s the first step is as you’re Embarking on solving a problem, a project, any sort of task, ask your AI for help with that. I don’t care if that’s Chachapiti or any other tool that you have, but you start there because [00:13:00] that is how you develop an understanding for how to interact with this sort of technology.

And then it gives you more ideas for what you might use it for in the future as well. I think that 

Todd Janzen: stuff. Love it. What what are some of your most common prompts that you use or your favorite prompts that you find yourself just almost daily using? 

Zach Lawryk: This is going to be really simple, but anything that I write, any, anything in written form, I’m asking it for help to be, to help make that a written form more concise.

More tailored to a particular audience that I’m interacting with anytime. And I, we do this a lot. We have a very doc heavy culture here at OpenAI to put everything in written form to communicate our ideas first. So we’ll do a lot of pre reads, any pre read I put together I’m always asking for help from my AI to say, Hey, how can you make this more concise?

Here’s the audience that I’m tailoring it to here are the ideas that I’m trying to get across. I would say it’s changed my behavior when, in the past, I would have, cared about formatting, spent hours on making sure that doc looks great. I just start with a literal brain [00:14:00] dump and I could capture all the ideas, all the things I’m working towards, and then I pull it into the AI to say, help me coalesce this into something that’s easier to communicate.

And then I iterate from there. It’s never going to create a final draft. That first time around but it does really help me congeal my thinking in a way that’s more precise. And that’s, I think the ultimate benefit, at least in the kind of first step of using your AI. Yeah. 

Todd Janzen: I love that. It comes to mind this analogy of you don’t have to summit Everest every time, right?

Like what if you could start at the base camp right below the peak? And I think that’s like a good metaphor for how AI can help you 

Zach Lawryk: Absolutely. And I would say also that I think some people are Hesitant, or they think it’s cheating that they think that they need to reveal that, Hey, I used, Chachapiti to help me with this first draft.

And we’re trying to break through that here and say, it’s okay. You should be using Chachapiti for every first draft. Cause you’re not, you’re wasting a ton of time. Yeah. It’s still taking your ideas and you can still be precise to say, Hey don’t sacrifice the tone or the [00:15:00] core content here.

I’m just asking for help with format or concision and. It still is your, they are your ideas. You’re just using the best tool possible to help you accelerate that brainstorming. And I think people just need to be more comfortable with that. And even if that means Hey, I use Chachapiti to get that help.

Fine. If that makes you feel better. But I would say that is a new, like mandatory step for everybody on our team is that they should be using Chachapiti for everything. In fact, we should be using it more. And that’s a big push for us this quarter. 

Adam Freeman: It’s a game changer. You guys are obviously in the Apple ecosystem.

And since it’s obviously. I’ve gone into that kind of, more ingrained into your iPhone. You can ingrain it into your operating system, personal, but it’s so much more. I spend a lot of time on the move. I’ll be traveling out to the U S and if I can’t now get my laptop out, I can just make a note in my phone and then the writing tools built within Apple.

I don’t know if people, I hope people have Apple users listen to this, have explored this because you can do some phenomenal stuff on the move now that normally would have been a desktop. Activity and I personally get so much [00:16:00] creativity from being in different places that could be sat on a plane That could be sat in an airport that could be you know If you’re on a train or you’re a passenger in a taxi suddenly you when you get those bursts of creativity You can make it concise to your point.

You can shape your thinking and it’s leading to all new kinds of ways of working I think that Limitless potential of it. We even into new devices, not just in how we work as well. I don’t know. Does that come up when you talk to people, the way you work and how you interact with this as much as what you’re interacting with?

Zach Lawryk: That’s exactly it. And that’s why I think it can be challenging at times because work is so diverse, in terms of our job functions. And the way you approach your daily work is diverse as well, depending on where you work and what industry you work in. And so I think that’s why the experimentation is so critical.

You have to get people for past that sort of blank page problem. The first prompt that they write, they just need to start experimenting, asking questions, asking for help on. Then they start to realize where this technology can lean into. And we’re doing a lot of things on our end to Productize that a bit to [00:17:00] make the onboarding easier or to think about, good use cases and solutions to get people past that blank change or that sort of that blank page issue.

But it still is a challenge for some and they just need to break through. And I would say also, a game changer, an absolute game changer is talking to voice mode and learning about topics because imagine if you have access literally to, a domain expert level expertise in any subject.

And you can just talk to that person in your car. I do it because I commute into work every day. Talk to them about any topic and get you up to speed before a meeting or if you’re just looking to, expand your knowledge of anything that to me is an absolute game changer that’s applicable not only to work but in life in general, which I think is really exciting.

Todd Janzen: Yeah. That feels like it could be an SE’s best friend right there. 

Zach Lawryk: Yeah, 

Todd Janzen: absolutely. That is part of our profession. You never have as much time as you want. You’re always cramming in some way, shape, or form, right? Just something to bring you up to speed really [00:18:00] fast. Oh my gosh, man, the next generation 

Adam Freeman: besties have got it either than we had it when we were learning, right?

If you’re listening to this and you start the career, you don’t know how lucky you’ve got it when you’ve gotta go manually research, right? Like with, we’re from the binary age right here, 

Zach Lawryk: really. And cramming for weeks. The days of the six month onboarding process are completely gone. Wow. Yeah, you have, there are still companies that have this today is maybe mildly controversial, but they won’t even put somebody in the field until they’ve got six months training under their belt.

We do the exact opposite here where we, get people off the seed really quickly. And, throw them right into the field. And so it’s an accelerated onboarding, but I think, you can get somebody up to speed and give them the tools and technology to support them to be an expert in any field in a very short amount of time.

And if a company has a six month onboarding process, they’re doing something wrong in my opinion. 

Todd Janzen: That’s a really big shift right there, right? Cause it, it’s this old notion of, Hey, you got to absorb as much information you can in [00:19:00] six months. And then you’re ready to this notion of, Hey, it’s an on demand world.

You don’t know what you don’t know, but when you need it. And now you have a tool for it. That’s a 

Zach Lawryk: big shift right there. I agree. And I think it should be mandatory that every technical sales customer facing professional has access to some sort of assistant.

Otherwise, and there are ways, of course, to hone in on those assistants, but those assistants will accelerate onboarding exponentially, which is a huge cost. Of course, like you, you’ve got people out of the field, not producing, not contributing. You can get them in the field much sooner now, as long as you have that little assistant sitting on your shoulder.

Adam Freeman: I’m just thinking out loud because we talk to a lot of enablement people in what we do now. And, when you talk to people who are powering the sales function, who aren’t quote unquote, but are really shaping the future of that, I think it’s one of the last major untapped potential areas improvement is onboarding.

And you’re right, you’re not just talking about taking days [00:20:00] off. You’re not talking about weeks off. You’re talking about taking months off. Absolutely. That is a huge win. 

Zach Lawryk: And it’s the technology is there today. I still talk to my, I talked to chat GPT in the car. And it’s weird because I’ll say good morning, how are you?

And that’s totally unnecessary, but I’m just trying to stay on their good side. And what I’ll do is it’s not just like asking, questions and answers. I’m actually asking hey, I’m preparing for a meeting. And I want to talk about WebRTC, for example. Because we’ve got this real time API that makes like voice interaction powerful.

Can you, can I run some things by you and you can tell me whether or not this sounds like I’m an expert and we’ll do like a role play and it’s really easy to facilitate out of the box, it’s just as long as you give it the right instructions saying this is what I’m preparing for. This is what this is the level of expertise I’d like to have.

Can we talk this through? That to me has accelerated my own understanding, but has been like an absolute game changer for folks on the team in terms of onboarding as well. [00:21:00] 

Todd Janzen: I, again, I just think back to our profession. So often you’re looking at the agenda, who’s going to be on the call and you’re like, Oh, it’s just, I don’t know much about, the marketing profession or, that, that is just a killer use case.

And it’s the second time I’ve heard role playing in the last month. Which I think, is going to be foreign to a lot of us, but we have a coworker who has a teenager in the house and I have teenagers in my house or one and that’s enough, but you’re not always going to get it right with teenagers and there’s always going to be some kind of blow up and I remember him talking about how he had this conversation with AI about the situation.

How could I have handled it better? It gave him a definition for kind of what had just happened. And then it asked him, do you want to role play out how you could have done it better? That just blew my mind. I guess where I’m going with this question, Zach, is okay, we’ve been talking a lot about business applications, but maybe give us a sneak peek in how you’re bringing this into [00:22:00] just Zach’s life outside 

Zach Lawryk: of work.

Yeah, there are many personal applications, of course, as well. It’s a Big part of our user base are folks that are using individual Chachapiti licenses, so they’re using it in work and in their life quite extensively. I, my personal use cases, I don’t have a teenager yet, so it’s not that intense.

I’m trying to pretend that’s never going to happen, but I’m only a few years away, but I do use it to do things like tell stories to my kids. Which is amazing. It’s a very fun and interactive experience where I can say, Hey, I want to tell a story about a princess who lives in a dark forest and it’s going to be six minute long, make it interactive.

So we can ask like a be choose your own adventure just shines in that use case. It’s really fun. And the kids love it. And it’s amazing to see kids be able to pick up this technology right away as well. Their future is going to be completely different. We also use it to actually create stories for the kids.

Like you can actually like write out a story and it will create imagery and you can print out those books as well. So you can make it both like a digital and analog experience, which is pretty [00:23:00] cool. This is just another fun use case. We use it to identify spiders because we have the vision capabilities.

So you can take a picture of any bug and say, what the heck is this? And should I be worried? And they say typically, no, don’t be worried. Although I did find a black widow in my my garage and I identified it appropriately and we got rid of that thing and and sprayed around. But at any rate, there’s, there are a wide variety of use cases.

I use it all the time for recipes, of course. Like this is a very common use case, but you can say this is what I have in the fridge and I’ve got, five minutes to make this happen. Can you help me out? And it’ll put together some Very good recipes that the kids like as well. And again, it’s like one of those things.

I think that those that experimentation carries over into your work life as well because you learn how to interact with a you learn, you know how it responds, you learn what it’s capable of, and that transfers easily to your work life as well. 

Todd Janzen: What I’m hearing is start taking the opportunity to bring AI in, right?

Like you don’t have [00:24:00] to do use it all day, every day, but like you said, if you cook, open up the fridge, give it a whirl there. I was on Irving street in San Francisco last weekend and there was a supermarket and they had so much produce out front. I’d never seen in my life and I was using it to identify like What is this thing?

Yeah. Like just toe dip. And that’s what you’re saying is just, maybe it’s bedtime with the kids. I love it. 

Zach Lawryk: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let me try it out. And I think it is critical. It’s the previous way to think about it. When the models were less intelligent is that you had this like college level intern that was sitting next to you and what would you give?

What tasks would you give that intern? I think that intern is obviously much smarter now that the models are at like this PhD level intelligence. But you still as a manager have to get comfortable with delegation. You’re used to taking on everything yourself. So I think it’s about developing that skill set and being comfortable delegating to things that like maybe the first round, it won’t work exactly as you like, but you’ll learn to refine your approach and the tools continue to get better.

So they get better on that first try, but you really do have to be comfortable with [00:25:00] delegation. And I would just start by delegating everything. So you like develop the experience of the AI and then you develop the experience on how to communicate more effectively and distribute those tasks more effectively.

Adam Freeman: I absolutely love that. These are such great practical tips. I just want to switch gears slightly if we can. Because there’s something I’ve been dying to know because I come from more of a, B2B software background. I’m an accountant. I demonstrate finance software, right? All of us love the demo. I think that’s really clear to get out in the open, right?

Todd we’ve talked about this so many times. We love the demo and anyone listening who’s not in leadership Yeah Enjoy these years because there is nothing like the buzz of doing a demo Closing the deal and someone going great that like it is just the best right best days of your career But i’m dying to know How do you actually demonstrate ai how do you go in front of a customer?

And demonstrate, cause you’re not showing purchase ledgers and PNLs. And, I do a wizzy report and a dashboard back in the day, but you don’t have that right. So how are you actually showing up and prepping and [00:26:00] demoing to a customer? 

Zach Lawryk: Yeah. We still are. Selling to humans for now.

And so we still, it’s really important that we have that emotional resonance and we still demo. I actually don’t think it’s too dissimilar from, when I started my career long ago, it was like 2007 when I delivered my first, Salesforce demo similar concepts. Like you have to do the discovery.

You have to understand the business that you’re selling to understand what they care about. But now you get to find even more exciting ways to accelerate productivity for those businesses. And we try to. We try to strive for these holy shit moments. That’s not an official term. We call it whoa moments internally, but we want to create those holy shit moments for people where they see how impactful this technology can be, whether that is like some deep analysis with our O series models, like that it can really create some holy shit moments.

When you think about a complex task or we load like a PhD level research paper and ask for analysis, that’s the sort of stuff that we look. To connect with customers and prospects and [00:27:00] then, we actually also try to break down like the day to day of the folks that we’re selling to if you’re a marketing professional, take me to you through your marketing campaign creation process today, and then I’ll show you what that looks like in chat.

You pt and they’re just blown away by what it’s capable of. And then on the A. P. I. Side, it’s a different business in the sense that it’s, it’s consumption business. So we’re looking for people to build applications that integrate the open A. I. P. I. S. And then we build examples of those like we have web applications that have, the integrated experience and then we talk people through those and it’s that’s more at a high level, like inspiration phase of the sales process on.

Then we work towards something that’s more tailored. But yeah, there’s still plenty of demos and they’re actually still mind blowing and still exciting to deliver. Absolutely love it. 

Adam Freeman: I was just sorry. I was just dying to ask that question of how you do that. But I think so many people. Yeah, it’s fun. And we’re still 

Zach Lawryk: working on it.

When you log into chat, you be to you today. It’s, it’s a blank page and you have to start talking to it. We’ve done the same thing that we’ve done at other companies where we capture. All the use cases. We’ve got a use case [00:28:00] repository.

We try to talk about how that links to business impact and how you still stitch together. A story is still very important. And I go back to some of the consensus material. There are different demo types depending on where you are in the sales process. And that’s something that we still hold true to as well.

Adam Freeman: Yeah. It’s going to be interesting though, as we develop, and we see this, we see now solution engineers that have been around our technology concept for a little while and they know how to live with it and we see people that are fundamentally having to change some of their beliefs of pre sales to get video into the cell cycle and they want help with that.

You must be going through something really similar because you’ll have it. You’ll have newer entrants to the business world who have just well, yeah, why wouldn’t we use it? It’s a logical step It’s a logical living in harmony with that and you’ll have some people are fundamentally changing their beliefs on how they work and like you say getting over that reluctance to say I had ai help me is almost like I’ve got to retract from a position and you must have to educate a lot right as part of yourself 

Zach Lawryk: Yeah, there’s a lot of change [00:29:00] management and I think if you If you prescribe to the or subscribe to the technology adoption curve, I still think like we were very much in the tech enthusiast phase of that.

And it’s very easy for, if you’re working at a tech company and you’re in San Francisco, New York or elsewhere and you’re plugged in. To think that, this momentum this hype cycle has been around for a long time, but for a lot of companies that are not in technology, I think they’re still, in that early or late majority.

And it’s still going to take some time to get those folks comfortable with doing exactly what you say to say I helped me with this. So you’re right. It is a lot of education, but it’s also helping them understand that it is okay. And that is also, as we talked about earlier.

Essential in their career development and their development as a company. 

Adam Freeman: Zach, I think we’re, we could sit and talk to you all day, all week. All day. Feeling as usual. And if this podcast is too long for you, upload it to ChatGPT, right? Get it to do a two minute summary. Yeah, you can do a summary, yeah.

Yeah, just upload it and see, but we like to end on a couple of things. And one is we like to like a golden takeaway. If you’re going to take one [00:30:00] action this week, what would it be? And I’m going to give you some time to think about it. I’m going to go to Todd first to give, what would your, the action be off the back of this podcast?

Todd Janzen: There’s four in my head right now. The the first one being just pick more opportunities to use AI. I think, Zach, you said about anything you write, I think that’s no brainer, right? We’re on laptops, computers. The other one that was mentioned was like, how do I take things that are traditionally kind of laptop functions to maybe more of a phone function?

That’s a big one. And then something I don’t think I’m good at, but I need to get better at. It’s not just the initial prompt, but peeling back the onion and it’s the prompts after that. I’m probably using an AI at a super junior level and I think that’s where I need to spend some time.

Adam Freeman: Black? Gold kind of takeaway? Anything that 

Zach Lawryk: Yeah, I’m going to dovetail off of what Todd said. I think it’s, Really important for folks to continue to interact with a [00:31:00] beyond that first prompt. I think that’s really astute observations that a lot of people like we have the statistics. A lot of people end on that first conversation.

I think I didn’t work. But the idea is think about it as that assistant of yours who has access to more intelligence than you’ve ever had. And continue to have a dialogue. And something, a takeaway for me and an action for me is like, how do we continue to think about making this more accessible to other industries?

And, I have a personal mission this year to go and talk to folks that are outside of tech and think about how they can apply the technology in more meaningful ways, because I think there’s a real opportunity here. 

Adam Freeman: Like what great takers. I think mine as I’m sat talking to you. I’ve just I’ve loved this podcast, right?

I’ve just loved listening to you can even tell the difference in how Todd and I are asking questions because We’re all at different places with this and I think it’s going to converge at a point at some point We’re not there yet, but that’s exciting. I love the idea that what I’m going to take away and do is I use prompts a lot, and I use it as an accelerant to the work I’m doing.

One of the things I’m definitely going to do, and I didn’t think of doing, was when you said, retain my tone, I’ll ask it to refine something. But what I’ve [00:32:00] never asked it to do is retain my style, my tone, my individuality. And I’ve always been really worried actually about sounding the same as everybody else, and I never wanted to be that.

And so what I’ll sometimes do is go and put my personality back into a document is created when I never even thought just to say. Retain my own tone and my own voice, so I’m definitely going to do that. We always like to end on two questions, don’t we, Todd? And I’m going to let you ask them this week, because I’ve asked them previously, and my throat’s sore, so I’m definitely going to let you ask them this week.

Todd Janzen: Yeah so first one, Zach, is what is your favorite bit of tech right now? 

Zach Lawryk: I’ll say Chachapiti. It’s an easy answer, but you know that it’s accelerated so much over the last two years and now you can write code with it. I can develop applications. It’s a total game changer for my life and work.

Adam? 

Adam Freeman: My favorite tech, and we’ve never asked who’s our favorite tech. So I love, I absolutely love my Logitech spotlight. [00:33:00] Presentation clicker. I don’t know if you’ve ever played around with one, but they, and what they use on the TEDx talks and in a remote first world, it’s so hard to use a laser pointer and a clicker.

And they just take your presentation to a whole nother level. And what they also do is just buzz when you’re getting within a certain time frame of the end. And I just find controlling the meeting. And even when I’m presenting and I’m not using the clicker, I like it in my hand. It just feels weighty.

Like it’s a lot of money for a clicker. I’ll let you go and explore that yourself, but I, everywhere I go in the world, that clicker comes with me. 

Todd Janzen: It’s funny because I love having something in my hand when I present. And so I’ll grab anything, a whiteboard pen, anything. I just I need to have something.

So if you’re going to have something, you might as well have something intelligent like that. The buzz feature with the timing that is, that’s huge. Yeah, that’s the last thing 

Zach Lawryk: you have to check that out for sure. 

Todd Janzen: Yeah. I’ll go last. This isn’t super high tech, but a number of years ago, bought these Sonos Bluetooth speakers.

They’re really small and they just go everywhere with me, [00:34:00] whether it’s on vacation and I can think back to family vacations where it’s the first thing I set up in the hotel room and kind of put on a soundtrack and I still think of those vacations and that music that was playing but the business application is you never know.

When audio is going to go down, if you’re doing a presentation. And you’re going to play something from your laptop and, the audience is not going to be able to hear it. So there’s a business application there too. All right, Zach, last question for you. Favorite pizza topping. 

Zach Lawryk: It’s a big controversial, but it’s black olives.

They’re delicious. They add an additional healthy component to the pizza and I’ll put them on any other pizza variety. Black olives. 

Adam Freeman: I have feelings on olives. 

Todd Janzen: I don’t know how I feel about olives right now. Adam you have to tell the listeners what you call olives. Olives. 

Adam Freeman: I don’t think I can it’s the only food I hate on this planet, it’s the only thing on the face planet.

I said to Todd, we were together, I said, oh, don’t come back with any of those Satan grapes. He’s Satan [00:35:00] grapes? Satan grapes, do not come back with Satan’s grapes, and olives I detest them for the passion. 

Zach Lawryk: But we can still get along, we’ll move past this, I think. 

Adam Freeman: Okay, we can still be friends.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, 

Zach Lawryk: I think so. Yeah, you just eat 

Adam Freeman: the olives. If we get like a mixed platter. I like hanging out with people that like olives, I love hanging out with Todd, I’m like, Todd, you can have all the olives. I don’t want any of the olives, just leave the nice stuff for me, right? 

Todd Janzen: I’m going to continue to order the Satan grapes in your presence.

Adam Freeman: The worst thing was when I gave that, he still came back with the olives. Olives on whatever we ordered. He’s just I don’t care if you don’t like olives. There’s plenty of olives. In fact, I got extra on this. 

Zach Lawryk: That’s really a good friend actually. 

Adam Freeman: Yeah. All right. Great. No, I just want to personally, I just want to say thank you so much for you giving up your time.

Hey, it’s come on the podcast because what a killer episode B for coming and speaking at demo fest west coast and the attendees that are in for a treat. Cause you’re going to elaborate on this and it’s just going to be a killer session. But see, I just want to say thank you to everyone that’s listened.

Cause You know on a personal level. I [00:36:00] love doing this podcast and Todd you’ve obviously joined Recently, but to get to 80 episodes in I think when we announced that I didn’t realize we got to 80 episodes today And I just think back of all the guests that we’ve had on all the listeners if no one listens There’s no point doing this but just it’s always been our way of giving back and I just want to say thank you to everyone that’s Made this what it is and continues to support us and we love you Hopefully we’re around for another 80, 100 episodes and beyond.

So thank you so much that for being a bit of a milestone guest and giving up so much of your knowledge to us. 

Zach Lawryk: Absolutely. Thank you. Long time listener, first time caller, and thanks for everything you do for the community, happy to be here. 

Adam Freeman: Brilliant. We’ll see you all soon. We’ll see those of you at DemoFest West Coast, go sign up if you’ve not.

And everyone else, we will see you for another episode very soon. Take care. Cheers.