Insights on the Art and Science of AI — Tips in Ten(ish) Minutes

0:00:06.5 Kirsten Lecky: Hello, welcome to WG Content, Tips in Ten Minutes. Today we have a very special guest with us, Diane Hammons. She’s our Director of Digital Engagement, she has been with us for a number of years, but has just recently moved into this role, which is a really big job. Has anything that has to do with IT, Technology and digital applications is always a big job, why don’t you talk a little bit about what you do with us today?

0:00:29.8 Diane Hammons: Yeah. So, director of digital engagement. I love that word ‘engagement’ and especially with how, what that means for WG content, because it’s about how we as a team interact with technology. It’s not just about buying software and training, it’s really about, how we use it, how it changes how we work and vice versa, sometimes it’s not the answer.

0:00:55.6 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Yeah. And I think how you’ve been able to think about digital engagement internally, for our operations and our business and how we run things, but also externally, how are we delivering the best experience for our clients. So the reason that I invited Diane to our Tips in 10 minutes is she came and met with our leadership team last week, and one of the things that she’s doing here is, really spearheading all things AI and I… We don’t need an introduction on AI. We certainly spend a lot of time thinking about it, working it, iterating it, testing it. I think in our industry of course, we spend a lot more time talking about it as it relates to content creation, and I know that’s part of what you’re doing, but one of the things I really appreciated about what you shared was really just from a business perspective, what are some of the tools and processes, and things that we can do to be smarter and more efficient and profitable, or whatever those things may be. And you really described it as change management. So talk to us a little bit about, I think you have some really good tips in there about how you can help the idea of adopting these tools to improve business. How have you been able to make that sort of very big thing a little bit smaller? Sort of what are some of the steps that you took initially to get this going?

0:02:11.4 Diane Hammons: Yeah, you’re right. It’s such a broad topic that you really need to narrow in so you don’t overwhelm yourself. You can kind of forever be spinning your wheels trying to know where to get started. So for me, it was identifying a few credible sources, what I want to read and keep up on every day, what will give me a good running on hot topics of the day, and help me understand some of the terminology. You also need to find your community. You know it’s…

0:02:39.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:02:40.5 Diane Hammons: This is new for all of us really, and it continues to iterate daily. So you need that community that, also has their ear and want to, you know, can give you ideas of this is what’s working for me. And then you need peers, you need others who are interested and passionate and enthusiastic also to help you explore because you can’t do it all yourself.

0:03:05.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:03:06.0 Diane Hammons: And you should, you should.

0:03:09.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:03:09.2 Diane Hammons: So let’s start with those credible sources, I mean for me personally, yeah, the Hustle is a great, it’s a snippet format.

0:03:17.8 Kirsten Lecky: Okay.

0:03:19.1 Diane Hammons: Newsletter. So I love that. If nothing, time to read only small things, it gives it to me in those sound bites. And it always covers business and tech topics. So inevitably that’s gonna cover AI. The Deep View is another one. It’s a little down and dirty. It’s kind of full of sponsored links, but it’s all AI all the time.

0:03:40.0 Kirsten Lecky: Okay.

0:03:40.8 Diane Hammons: I’ll surely get highlights about things like the EU and just what kind of software is out there, Fast Company and TechCrunch for longer form. And then someone I’ve discovered lately is a Creativity Squared. It’s a newsletter and podcast series founded by Helen Todd. And she’s… Well, she splits her time between Cincinnati and New York. And that kind of takes me to that second point of community. So Helen Todd is part of the community of AI enthusiasts, here in the Cincinnati area. And I can’t stress enough how important it is to find that in your area, don’t be afraid to look for those local conferences or meetups, because that’s where you get to talk to, not only like in our industry marketers, but also business leaders, developers. And that’s where you learn what’s working, what’s not, what’s new, what to watch out for, what prompt is working for someone.

0:04:41.4 Kirsten Lecky: And you realize probably that you’re not alone, I mean in terms of like…

0:04:46.6 Diane Hammons: Absolutely.

0:04:47.2 Kirsten Lecky: Just the feeling of keeping up with all of it and what do I do and where do I go and what’s next? And so that camaraderie I’m sure is very important too.

0:04:53.5 Diane Hammons: Absolutely. And it really is helpful if you feel overwhelmed, you go and you realize, okay, I’m not the only one. We’re all just trying to figure this out. And there’s a great community component to that. So you know, from there I mentioned, then you also need that team. You can’t explore all the things maybe you wanna explore, and you shouldn’t do it alone because you need other perspectives. So that’s what we did here at WG Content, we have a group called AI Pathfinders, and…

0:05:24.2 Kirsten Lecky: I love that.

0:05:27.3 Diane Hammons: Yeah. And that’s what we are, we’re finding our path.

0:05:30.4 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:05:30.4 Diane Hammons: Or jumping off the path of… It doesn’t…

0:05:32.9 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:05:33.4 Diane Hammons: Feel like it’s a fit for us. But, it’s a great group of people who…

0:05:37.6 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:05:38.3 Diane Hammons: Volunteered so they’re people, they don’t necessarily know any more. Or maybe some do, some know less about AI than I’ve discovered so far. But we’re on this journey of discovery together because we wanna…

0:05:52.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Yeah. I love that, I think, you know I love, first of all the idea of because we can get easily overwhelmed by just the number of sources out there, the headlines, the information around this topic. So really being intentional about, I’m gonna really pay attention to these three sources now, all the dozens are gonna hit my inbox, but I’ll really pay attention to these three. I think that’s helpful. You know, having a community of like-minded individuals that you can really work with and brainstorm and kind of rub shoulders with around these this work. But this idea too, of your internal community. So you asked for volunteers, you have this now, this committee called The Pathfinders, and these are all people within WG Content. I think there’s what? A dozen people on the committee, that are all curious and passionate about this, about AI. And you’ve now created sort of little subcommittees. So talk to us a little bit about why you did that and what purpose these little subcommittees have.

0:06:52.3 Diane Hammons: Well, I made it voluntary for a couple of reasons, but primarily, you can’t force the technology people, especially in these early stages. I mean, what we’re looking for are those change agents. The people who aren’t afraid to try, or maybe even gonna be inspired and feel they’re nurtured and enriched by the experience. So let’s go through that together. And then they become then, their buy-in helps influence their peers. So going down the road will help with change management for any solutions we may choose to go forward with. I was excited that we did have so many people who weren’t interested and because we did, we were able to divide into four different groups and really focus on them four different things. So we’re just getting more momentum quicker than we would’ve if it was just a few of us.

0:07:50.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:07:50.7 Diane Hammons: Now the important thing these groups are, they’re focusing on pain points. And that’s something, our kickoff meeting we talked a lot about, you know, AI can be a bit of a shiny object. There’s a hype cycle to, or at least it’s a feeling right now. But there is some real value and we have to, again, narrow our focus, on where that value is. And we also don’t wanna get discouraged before we even really get started. So, the way to do that is incremental.

0:08:20.8 Kirsten Lecky: Right.

0:08:23.4 Diane Hammons: Yes, there are things that in the future that we can’t even imagine right now that we might use AI for that could maybe change our whole business model. But for now, let’s just look at what’s right at our fingertips. What are the tools that we’re already using that may have be rolling out AI features? What are things that could easily be adopted but that are chosen because they’re fixing a pain point, they’re addressing a pain point for instance, a small pain point, some way to save someone in our company time, like gets rid of a mundane task.

0:09:02.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:09:02.2 Diane Hammons: Things like that. Let’s start small and have little wins before, and really start to understand what it means to incorporate AI before we go back.

0:09:11.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. I think that’s… Yeah. I think it’s so smart to think about… And especially, so your committee, it’s about a third of our organization or less or something. I mean, that’s a pretty good representation. It’s across all functions of the business. So you have all voices and brains and minds there in terms of the work that we do. And you started with this question of like, what’s gets in your way or what’s frustrating or what is a pain point? And we don’t even know if AI can solve this, but let’s just talk about it. Where do you spend too much time or what seems to bog you down? And then let’s explore how we can introduce these tools to help bring in some efficiencies or whatever the case may be. So I thought that was really smart. How do you hold everybody accountable to, now you’ve got all these subcommittees, and Pathfinders are out and they’re on their paths and their journeys. What is the kind of cadence around holding everyone accountable? And then, how do you have fun along the way? I mean, one of our core values is having fun here, so I know you’re very good at introducing and making sure that we’re having fun with very big change management strategies. So talk to us a little bit about that too.

0:10:16.8 Diane Hammons: All right. Loaded questions in there.

0:10:19.5 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Two parts. Yeah. Accountability and fun. Right? Those always go together.

0:10:24.1 Diane Hammons: Absolutely.

0:10:24.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:10:25.6 Diane Hammons: They can. They can.

0:10:27.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.[Inaudible] I guess.

0:10:29.8 Diane Hammons: Yeah. Let’s go back to… So, accountability, how do you do that? I mentioned the pain points. That’s where we have to get formal with the process. Each group has a business case that they’re following where it outlines almost in like a scientific method sort of way. It’s like…

0:10:46.5 Kirsten Lecky: Okay.

0:10:47.8 Diane Hammons: Here’s our pain point. Here’s how we theorized AI could solve it. Here are some things to start looking at and explore, and here’s how we’ll know if it’s working. That’s very important, because how do you know when to say, yes, move on or, no, let’s abandon ship. You have to say, what does success look like? So that’s what each team has is like little, this guidepost to say, okay, as we explore, does it do this, this, this and this? If not, maybe it’s not the solution for us, so at least not for solving this pain point. If it is, let’s keep, let’s move it down the road a little bit. Kick it down the road. Maybe get a few more people on board to test it because again, the more… As you start to introduce some more people in different roles within the company and titles, roles and, you get different perspectives, different use cases. So that’s kind of where we’re at now.

0:11:43.7 Diane Hammons: And as I’ve talked to the team, it’s… This isn’t their day job, so to speak, you know it’s voluntary. And so the great thing is leadership supports that. So they do give them the space for this exploration, but within the confines of obviously client work comes first. So, we can’t implement some hard deadlines. And again, we don’t really want to, because this is an exploration. I can’t say, this solution will reveal itself and be finished in two weeks. In two weeks we’re gonna see how it’s going. Does it still have the legs? Okay, another two weeks. Okay, another two weeks. Or, well, let’s move on to another idea.

0:12:28.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. No, I think that’s good. And I know one of the other things that you talked about, and you kind of left us homework for us was, as a leadership team, how do we assess risk? And that’s probably a whole another conversation, that I think you might be sending us some sort of questionnaire surveys to help us with those types of decisions. Anything you wanna, any tips that you wanna share around how to make, like how does an organization assess risk? And it doesn’t need to be like anything specific, but just things to be thinking about.

0:13:04.5 Diane Hammons: Yeah. I think there are a couple of key questions that you can think about as leaders, right off the bat. And, you know, part, that’s partly just what is it you’re trying to protect? You know, what are the greatest assets to your company and that you need to protect at all costs? Because once you identify what those are, then you can consider I mean, kinda have to take your mind down to worst case scenario because what if that was compromised? What would happen? What would happen to the business? Would it cease to be?

0:13:36.8 Kirsten Lecky: Right.

0:13:37.5 Diane Hammons: Would it just get a bad reputation, bad press for a little while, but it would resurrect itself? You know, as you determine all those worst case scenarios and then what would happen, that’s where you define what we can absolutely have low risk tolerance for versus, okay, the likelihood of that happening or the impact of the business would be minimal. So we can take our chances more with something else. And identifying that that risk tolerance helps the rest of us, in this case with AI Pathfinders. So it’s another one of those, how do we know when we’re succeeding? It becomes another one of those points to say, it protects this or it matches this level of tolerant… Risk tolerance.

0:14:21.4 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. And how does it also line up with I know in our case, we talk a lot about our values as an organization. I mean, certainly, you know, where those things need to be reconciled and aligned as we move through these different applications. All right. So we talked about identifying your sources, making, you know, making sure there’s just a few of those and not all of them, finding your group, finding a group of people outside your organization, and then having volunteers inside your organization so that you’re really working together. Then there’s buy-in and some of that with working within a committee. And then you talked about starting with the pain points and then exploring solutions for that and really just iterating along the way and having fun. I know, you know, you’ve branded this change management strategy. You’ve got all of your subcommittees branding their own little strategies or their tools too. So, anything else that you would like to add that you think would be helpful to our friends out there that watch these tips and…

0:15:23.3 Diane Hammons: Yeah. Well, you mentioned fun, Kirsten. And so I have to say, you know, while I say you have to be on one hand serious and formal about it because you wanna make sure your work is addressing a lot of need or pain point. You also… You know, don’t wanna waste people’s time. I mean, that’s obviously a thing. But you still wanna have a little bit of fun. It can’t be so regimented that it feels too much like more work.

0:15:52.7 Kirsten Lecky: Right.

0:15:53.8 Diane Hammons: That makes sense. I think that’s the important part of it being voluntary to… You know, to be in this. These are people who are passionate and curious and wanna learn about this anyway, so there is an element of fun in that. And then just, you know, not taking… Taking note, the accountability seriously. If you say you’re gonna research this by the state, you know, do that. You promise that team.

0:16:15.4 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:16:15.5 Diane Hammons: But don’t take yourself so seriously that you can’t admit what you don’t know, that you can’t laugh about when you don’t know, that you can’t, you know, like, share some of the things that inevitably come up with bad prompting and whatnot where, you know, and enjoy that laugh about it.

0:16:34.6 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:16:34.9 Diane Hammons: We’re all in this together and that part we can’t take ourselves too seriously.

0:16:40.5 Kirsten Lecky: Well, we appreciate you. I appreciate you. And I heard you killed it at the sway debate, so.

0:16:47.8 Diane Hammons: That was a panel effort. It was fun.

0:16:50.6 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Panel effort, but a ton of fun. So I really appreciate everything that you do, and we’ll be sure to include some of the bullet points from our conversation so that it’s helpful for other people. And then, certainly, if they wanna reach out to you I’m sure you’re open to that.

0:17:04.9 Diane Hammons: Absolutely.

0:17:05.0 Kirsten Lecky: For any conversation that they might have. So, thank you again for joining us and sharing your expertise.

0:17:10.4 Diane Hammons: Get a tip, leave a tip, come…

0:17:15.6 Kirsten Lecky: There you go. Right. Okay, thanks Diane.

0:17:15.6 Diane Hammons: Have a good one.

0:17:16.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:17:16.9 Diane Hammons: Bye.