Introduction
Nice to have you back for another episode of Digital for Productivity. And in this episode, I would like to start talking a little more about artificial intelligence. And here I am very, very happy to quote Karlheinz Land, who replied to the question of whether he was afraid of AI: I think I’m less afraid of artificial intelligence than I am of human stupidity. And there is a lot in this quote and a lot that explains the journey of this podcast and the journey, the associated offer, which you can take advantage of with me. Most of you know me as Mister iPad.
When I started my own business in 2010, the iPad came out and everyone laughed at me when I said that: I think it’s a truly revolutionary device, especially for managers, board members and supervisory board members whose job isn’t to fumble around in Excel spreadsheets. And it’s a great device for field staff, especially in situations where I might not always have a desk, for example when I’m in the catering trade, when I’m in the food retail trade, when I’m in steel with a farmer, I don’t usually have a desk. Then I need a device that I can operate with one hand with my big finger. That’s why the iPad.
And in the meantime, I have not only supported companies such as Coca-Cola or Radeberger, but also sectors such as Volksbanken and Reifeisenbanken and even DATEV tax consultancies, where you realize more and more that an iPad can be a great addition to a PC in consulting situations. The whole thing is never a replacement for a PC, it’s a supplement. And I feel the same way about AI. AI does not replace computing as we know it, but AI is a further development of this whole topic.
And funnily enough, I once looked to see what was the first book I read on the subject of artificial intelligence. It was a book about AI on the C64. Maybe some of you will remember: the C64 came out in the 80s and I’m still very, very grateful to my father today that he fulfilled my birthday wish, which was not combined with my birthday, and that I got a C64. And even then I was already thinking about this topic. And if you say: Yes, wait a minute. Yes, it’s been around since the 50s.
No, artificial intelligence has been around for much, much longer. There are different starting points, so Miriam Meckel and Dr. Lea Steinaker, for example, in their great book “Alles über alle auf einmal”, which I can highly recommend, set the starting point above all in 1843, when Ada Lovelace was commissioned by her boss, Charles Babbage, to translate a paper, a research paper. And dear Ada Lovelace said: “Well, I noticed a few gaps in the translation and a few additions that I would like to include and she just put them in.
Ada Lovelace is considered to be the first female programmer, and she was actually a woman. So the first programmer was a woman.
I was at an event recently and a top manager said to me: “Hey, wait a minute, that was Helmholz, who was there even earlier. And Helmholz did indeed invent the binary number system and made a very significant contribution to the field of programming. However, Ada Lovelace is currently considered to be the first programmer.
And then in the 1956s, there was competition. Several researchers got together and said: Okay, we’ll found this discipline of AI.
In the 1950s, there was the Turing Test, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, where Alan Turing said that the test was whether a person notices that there is a computer on the other side or not. And in many areas, people have long since stopped noticing.
Definition of artificial intelligence
Yes, what is artificial intelligence? There are many definitions of artificial intelligence. One definition that is very practical for me is that AI is artificial intelligence systems that replicate human thinking, i.e. are designed to behave like humans.
Ideally, the whole thing should be rational, because artificial intelligence, for example, is something that is now being used more and more in customer service areas. And there is always this issue: wait a minute, I want to communicate with a human being and not with artificial intelligence. And many people see it that way, but not everyone does. And if you look at it, Klarna, for example, has deployed 700 employees in customer service differently and has said: Okay, we’ll replace that with artificial intelligence. And it was not only a significant cost saving, which I’m sure most of you can fully understand, but customers were not only just as satisfied, but more satisfied. And why is that?
And this is not the only study that shows that customers are more satisfied when they have customer service via AI.
There are three main reasons for this. Point number one: AI is generally easier to reach. Everyone knows that you have to wait on hold for hours. Point number two: AI gets to the point faster, usually grasps the problem more quickly and gives a more precise, better answer. Point number three: AI doesn’t have a bad day and doesn’t get stroppy. Has anyone ever experienced an escalation in customer service because they were perhaps having a bad day or the AI wasn’t on the line but a human was and they were having a bad day? And you may have noticed: ChatGPT was recently introduced with the new 4O model. And O stands for Omni. And Omni means that more channels are understood, i.e. even more language, even more images and also including emotions.
And if I look, before the pandemic I was at the ADG’s digitalization forum and at the ADG’s digitalization forum was my colleague Müller from Trend One, a trend researcher, and he showed a video of how good the Fraunhofer Institute’s facial recognition systems were back then – in 2019 or 2018 – for recognizing emotions.
And AI doesn’t understand emotions. But Ki can interpret emotions wonderfully and is better at it than many a husband, including myself. And can then respond accordingly. If you don’t believe it, try an application called Replika.
The replica app
They are available for smartphones and you can create a digital twin or a digital friend. And Replika, the idea, how did it come about? It was created by a woman whose boyfriend was killed in a car accident. She simply wanted to continue communicating with him and then dumped all her WhatsApp communications, emails and voice messages into the AI and used them to create a replica where she could talk to him. And when I look, it was my mother’s birthday last Friday. Unfortunately, she’s been dead for a long time. I think it’s a great, great pity that I don’t have anything there that I can really feed into, feed into systems. And I would love to talk to my mother again and, of course, live is always better. But there are also interviews that you may have seen or heard before.
Sascha Lobo talked to Albert Einstein, for example. There is a very interesting interview with Steve Jobs, for example. And especially when you have people in public life where there is a lot of information, then I can still fall back on them as a resource, especially when someone is no longer alive.
We are in a podcast format here, where things can go a bit left and right. But I would like to come back to the basic idea that I said at the beginning: Is AI now what just throwing everything else away means… do I throw away my iPad because of it? Am I throwing away Microsoft 365 because of it? No. Artificial intelligence. Tell me, before we start with artificial intelligence, let’s start with common sense. And AI is the icing on the good cake. And if you have a very, very good cake, then it’s even better with cream. Or if you buy a great fragrance from Douglas and you package it beautifully, then of course that’s something completely different. And of course you say: wait a minute, AI is not just packaging, AI is much more. And that’s absolutely right.
Let me put it this way: if you have a great car now and you simply get a better engine in it again, one with a different engine, then it might be a more suitable image. But AI is just that: Where does AI stand today? Or… what is the idea of it? The important thing is to first understand AI. And what is AI? The idea systems that try to replicate human behavior and think in the same way. And AI doesn’t know whether it’s right or wrong. AI is a probability machine. What do I mean by that?
What is AI?
So if you now say blackbird, thrush, finch and … Would you say starling, because starling is what you have usually learned, because it’s the next thing you can do. There’s a second version: blackbird, thrush, finch and titmouse and the whole bird… I’m deliberately not adding to it now. I’m sure you know both versions. An AI would output the “blackbird, finch and starling” version because it occurs much more frequently on the Internet. In other words, systems and ChatGPT is the system that is currently the most transparent to most people in terms of AI, simply because it is communicated very strongly in the press and because ChatGPT has made one. AI has been around for ages, but AI used to be for nerds.
And thanks to ChatGPT, it’s now so easy to access that anyone can simply type something in and get a result. So a lot has changed. So against this background, it’s now simply available to you. But always saying there is the next likely solution. That’s why in sales, for example, it’s called “next best action”, which is also super good. It works very, very well there. And if you say it’s something completely new, Amazon has been doing it for years. When you shop on Amazon, they always say: customers who bought this also buy that. That means you get recommendations. Incidentally, these recommendations are not based on this topic, which is what it says: customers who bought this also buy that. But of course your purchasing behavior is also taken into account. Not just your purchasing behavior, but also what you looked at and didn’t buy. In other words, this data is taken into account and many of these systems already contain AI. We always say that AI is new. No, AI is already in many things. If you take Siri or Alexa, for example, AI has been in there for a long time, even if we sometimes say it can’t be AI, as stupid as it is.
Is AI just hype?
AI is a technology, like many others, that we either radically underestimate or overestimate. So it’s usually the case that when something new comes along and we say: this is the salvation of the world, we totally overestimate it. And now we’re at a point where we’re already slowing down again after this hype, there’s this Gartner Hype Cycle, where we’re slowly entering this phase of disappointment again, where many people are saying: Yes, it doesn’t work like that after all. And those who are really productive there then move a little further out of this valley of disappointment and enter the realm of productivity. I always compare it a bit like riding a bike. Anyone who has ever been given a bike by their parents may remember: yes, bikes, I love them. Then we started riding our bikes, kept falling on our backs and luckily our parents then said: “Just hang in there. Maybe we couldn’t fly like we originally thought we could on a bike, but now we can ride a bike properly. It’s a bit like the topic of AI. So… And there are a lot of fears here. And these fears, funnily enough, most of the fears that are there are less justified than other fears that you should have.
AI brings the fear of job loss
Let me tell you what is a fear that you should have less of, namely a fear of AI stealing your job. I don’t think AI will steal your job, but I think people who use AI as a tool in their industry will overtake those who don’t use AI. Let me give you a very specific example: Advertising, graphics agency. Many people say: Yes, it’s being stolen by AI. Yes, if you say you don’t use it and if you say on the other hand: Okay, there are freelancers, for example, i.e. one-person companies, who say: You companies book a flat rate with me for €10,000 a month. And for this flat rate you get all your graphic requirements delivered by me within one working day. A €10,000 flat rate and everything you need within one day. So, no complicated coordination and so on. They do it with the support of AI, of course. But of course they know which systems you use. They know how to use them. They are always on top of using the best tools. The customer gets it much faster, and ultimately even cheaper.
These are business models where solo performers, individual people, make six to seven-figure revenues per month with minimal effort through AI automation. So that also means this topic of syncron speakers. If I look at HeyGen, for example, there are AI-based video systems. I can translate my keynote speech, what I’m saying today, lip-synchronously into all languages. And if you had never seen me before, you wouldn’t even notice that I didn’t speak it in that language. So the quality, and in three or four months’ time you won’t be able to tell the difference, even those who know me. So the quality of these systems is getting better and better every week. So, when I look at it, I now find that when I watch series or movies, it totally irritates me that it’s not the voice and not lip-synced. Yesterday, for example, I watched an episode of Madam Secretary on Amazon Prime, which I found very, very interesting. And there was a series where the protagonist, the three former US Secretaries of State and the US Secretaries of State, had asked for advice. There was Madeleine Albright, there was Colin Powell and there was Hillary Clinton.
They dubbed them in German and it totally irritated me because I know how the voices of those people are and it wasn’t lip-synced. That totally irritated me because I said: it doesn’t fit together at all. So what you can also see here in the field of synchronization is that AI will ensure that things are more productive, that you can do more in less time, that the quality is even better, that you can do more, that you can do more in relation to the time, and that the quality even increases accordingly. If you say now that I became a dubbing actor because I don’t want to deal with the subject of IT at all – bad cards. If you say, wait a minute, I provide my customers with top quality dubbing translations that are great. And if there are perhaps situations somewhere where the AI is still a bit off, I can supplement that with good, real dubbing actors and I’ll rework the whole thing, those are the players who will win this area. So it’s a bit like the cab drivers who said: No, cars are evil, and the others who said: Okay, I’ll always switch to cabs, and I’ll switch to cars and instead of one tour a day, I can maybe do ten tours a day and earn significantly more money. I might have to invest a bit and it might take me two or three years to reinvest my car, which I had to buy, but from the third year onwards I’m even more successful than before. And I think that’s like electricity, like the steam engine, like the car. These were all things that made business models obsolete, but created new ones, and that’s also the case with AI.
And for me, the definition of an entrepreneur is someone who always looks: Okay, how are the framework conditions changing? Where are there threats that I have to adapt to, where are there opportunities that I can take advantage of? Where do I have strengths? Where do I have weaknesses? In other words, the classic topic of SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, and that I as an entrepreneur have to react to this and say: Okay, where do I perhaps need to work on my strengths in order to be able to exploit the opportunities that I see here? That’s why you’ve come to the right place, because you’re dealing with the topic of digitalization and AI.
I’m not going to rename this podcast from Digital 4 Productivity to AI for Productivity, by the way, because Digital for Productivity is the umbrella term I’m dealing with.
So I’m an IT sparring partner, which means I’m a personal IT coach for managers. I ensure IT fitness. And what I see for my mission, what I see, I simply see a lot of managers who are just so out of touch with the subject of IT and who simply say: I have my IT manager, I have my IT department. And I think that’s a mistake. I think it’s important that CEOs in particular need to be up to speed on key issues. In other words, they need to be up to speed on topics such as AI, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, in other words, the question of data management, ERP systems, CRM systems. And on the basis of my more than 35 years of professional experience up to managing director of medium-sized companies, I am simply the sparring partner here who helps managers to say: What relevant technologies are currently available that can already be used today? Because one of my mottos is to simply use technology. What are things that you should have on your radar? What are things that you don’t necessarily have to do? What should you try out? Because one of my mottos is not to complain, but to try things out.
Conclusion
With this in mind, I hope you enjoyed this first focus episode on AI.
Over the next few weeks, I will also be providing you with more background information on the subject of AI here. Feel free to write to me if you have any specific questions and, as always, I will of course also share my experience reports with AI with you here, because you know I won’t let a non-swimmer explain to me how to swim faster. Of course, I regularly try out AI tools and will also regularly report here on which tools are really great and which tools you can do without. So you can take the shortcut with me.
With this in mind, I am delighted that you were here again. I wish you a successful week.
Until next time, your personal IT coach for managers, Thorsten Jekel.
Also available in: Deutsch
