One Year Later: Looking At What’s Changed in AI & Business

Episode 50, happy birthday to us.

We all know a lot can change in a year, but it’s especially true when it comes to AI.

With AI moving as fast as it is, it’s more like three years in one, or five years in one.

And we’re actually coming up on the one year anniversary of AI Knowhow’s launch.

So this week, rather than help you look into the future of AI, we’re gonna be doing something a little different.

We’re taking a look back at the last year in AI and talk about what surprised us, what inspired us and more.

I’m Courtney Baker and this is AI Knowhow from Knownwell, helping you reimagine your business in the AI era.

As always, I’m joined by Knownwell CEO, David DeWolf, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Mohan Rao and Chief Strategy Officer, Pete Buer.

Here’s my conversation with David and Mohan as we took a look back at the last year or the last 360 days to be exact since the very first episode of AI Knowhow.

David, Mohan, happy birthday, you two.

Are we one year old?

Happy birthday to you.

Your turn, Courtney, go ahead.

Pre-veil listening.

We just discussed whether or not I was going to be singing.

You do not want me to sing.

I’m sparing you all.

Smarts AI Knowhow, our podcast turning one.

It’s hard to believe, honestly, but we’ve done a year’s worth of episodes.

So David, Mohan, to celebrate, I kind of wanted to just open it up today and talk about what has happened in the last year.

Kind of open forum today as we celebrate one year of talking about AI in business.

So I love that idea, Courtney.

I’m curious, what has been your favorite episode so far?

Was it the one that I was on?

Totally, that one you were on.

That was, whew, that was such a good one.

I mean, hands down, it was the episode where David was spiritually aligned with Mohan on a topic.

Do you even remember the subject or just that faux pas?

I think, I think I do.

I think it was about ROI.

I think you’re right, it was about ROI.

And so y’all were debating how you figure out what the ROI of AI is in business.

I would say it’s probably one of our earlier, probably last year, late last year episodes.

And actually, I remembered when I proofed that episode, I was taking a walk listening to it.

And I, when we got to that, it was funny in the moment when we were recording it, but when I listened back to that episode, I just lost it.

It was so funny.

Obviously we’ve gone on to have that inside joke that has continued almost a year later for us.

But that, I think as far as just enjoyment, that was one of my favorite episodes.

Awesome.

You all know my favorite.

It has to be the Hot Takes episode.

There’s no doubt.

That was so much fun to prepare for.

It was so much fun to win.

You know, put it all together.

It was just a great episode.

Hold the actual phone for a second, because Yasmin, our intern, just I told her to take on a project of just writing a blog post for our website, just kind of updating where we are, you know, what’s the status report on those Hot Takes, and to do a graphic with our faces and like who was right and who was wrong.

And all I’ve seen is the graphic so far, but David, you have a big red X, and Mohan and I have read a green checks by our name.

So I don’t know what’s happened.

Who does Yasmin work for, Courtney?

Yeah, she likes me best.

That’s true.

I haven’t read the post yet, I just want to put that out there.

That maybe, maybe you should.

I still think we’re all spiritually aligned that I want that take.

I mean, we even brought it up about a month later when the data came out and said I won, you know.

No, I think the data was indicating maybe progress towards your hot take.

So, to keep the record sheet clean here.

Yeah, that was a really, that was a fun episode.

I like a couple of them.

I remember the AI and the science of sales with Andre.

I think that was a good one.

There was something around how business models are changing due to AI.

I remember that being a fun one.

So, there are a couple that stick with me.

What about guest?

Any favorite guest over the last year that just really stood out to you?

Yeah.

I don’t remember Christian’s last name.

Madsburg.

Yes.

Christian Madsburg.

That was such just a unique episode on humanity and really the philosophical aspect of intelligence here.

I really enjoyed that episode and his part in that specifically.

I feel like we need, when we come up on the year anniversary of that episode, we should get him to do kind of an update what he’s seeing now with AI and humanity.

That one was so good.

Matter of fact, you and I, in case those of you that are listening, David and I had seen him in person and he was on the podcast.

And I feel like I could listen to that episode.

I have listened to it a couple of times since he was on the show.

It was that good.

So there’s a great question to ask.

How faithful have you all been to listening to every episode?

Mohan, I’m putting you on the spot.

Do you listen to every single one after they come out or do you only listen?

Well, maybe you don’t even listen when you’re here present.

Maybe you just talk, I don’t know.

What’s your MO?

My MO is I used to be really good about it for the first half of the year.

Every Monday, I would listen to it.

And now, I’m a little bit of a…

I go off and on and I don’t listen to it and then I listen to two of them in a row and I’ve not listened to the last five or six.

That’s in my backlog now.

Okay, it’s in your backlog.

Okay, bigger question because early on, your wife also listened.

Is she listening anymore?

What’s the status?

Well, she loves your voice, Courtney.

What else can I say?

She really watches for that.

She listens to Courtney more than she listens to you.

She scrubs through two acts when it’s Mohan time.

Exactly.

Can I get a cameo fee for her birthday?

Just send her a special message.

Yeah, you can sing her birthday song.

Oh my gosh.

She’s like, that ended my like of Courtney’s voice wholly and completely.

Yeah, Mohan, I’m actually the exact same as you.

I think I listened to the first 42 episodes every single week within 24 hours of release.

And then I actually missed one, and that started this path where I actually binge listen now.

And so I think, you know, I’ve probably every other week I listened to two in a row, but somehow got out of the habit.

But I still, I actually learn a lot to this day by going back and listening, not only to ourselves, but probably more of the guests that we have and the topics that come up.

I think it’s actually been really helpful for exploring these different subjects.

And, you know, in order to, they say that if you wanna learn something, the best teach it.

I feel like actually this grappling with ideas together in real time has really helped us to sink our teeth into some of the hard subjects here and further our own knowledge.

Yeah, and so much of what we talk about is futuristic, right?

So when you’re on a podcast, you have to answer the questions that Courtney is asking, right?

So you can’t like him and her.

So it helps you make up your mind.

And even when you’re wrong, you reflect on it and you come back in a future episode, but it forces you to have a position even if it is nuanced at times.

And just in case y’all are wondering, I listen to every single episode before it airs in completion.

And I do love that process because I, man, shout out to our production team who puts these episodes together because let’s be real, we don’t always, we don’t sound as good as we do in the finished product.

Speak for yourself.

So, do you like listening to the podcast more or watching it more on YouTube?

I always listen.

I do not watch.

I do not want to force torture myself.

It’s bad enough, honestly, listening to yourself.

Matter of fact, you know, when we did the pilot episode for this show, I was adamant that I did not want to do this.

I was like, I sounded terrible.

I had done over 200 episodes of podcasting previously.

This should have not been a thing for me, but I really had a hard time out of the gate with this show and just the way we were structuring it.

And our producer really had to talk me up.

Thankfully he did.

And we have the show that we have today, but I still can’t watch it.

That’s a chasm too wide for me to cross personally.

Yeah.

I’m actually the same way.

I don’t think I’ve ever watched a single one, despite listening to almost every single one.

I’m with you.

It’s hard to listen to yourself, to watch myself.

Tough.

Okay.

So I have to tell y’all something about the video versions.

But before I do, Mohan, do you ever watch the video version?

No.

It would be dangerous for me, because usually I’m in the car when I listen.

Okay.

So our producer, Nick, always with the video things, he mentioned something.

We were on a text thread and there was a little emoji of me.

I didn’t even realize it was me, but it was with a hat and a parrot on my shoulder or something.

I just thought it was a weird emoji.

I was like, I don’t get this joke at all.

It was from our video.

So when we had done like the in the wild segments, Nick had put like birds flying in and like me with like binoculars.

And I had no idea.

And I was like, you know, maybe we should start watching this just to see what crazy thing Nick had.

Just to hold him accountable.

I know.

And Nick just interrupted to tell us that-

Whispered in your ear.

Whispered in my ear right here, right now.

That the video episode of the podcast is much more popular than the audio version.

I think tremendously so.

So he may be taking some credit for all of these sometimes-

Well, then hopefully our listeners aren’t commuting.

Here at Knownwell, AI Knowhow isn’t the only thing we’ve been building for the last year.

We’ve also been building our AI-powered client intelligence platform.

Because client intelligence has evolved.

It’s now commercial relationship intelligence, where you get real-time predictive and comprehensive AI-driven insights on what’s happening with the most important part of your company, your clients, the people you sell to.

So if you’re interested in seeing what we’re building at Knownwell, let us show you a demo.

You can sign up for one at knownwell.com.

Okay, I have another question for you two.

What do you think has surprised you the most in the last year when it comes to AI?

And just as we’ve progressed through the show, you know, is there something that kind of you weren’t expecting?

You know, when a year ago, I knew how gen AI would evolve.

I could see people using gen AI, but I had no idea that it would be this fundamentally a positive thing for product builders, for software builders, right?

So I saw AI more as an expert system, more MLOps, knowledge graphs, those sorts of use cases that I could see, but I did not see how amazing these gen AI models are for software builders.

That was a surprise for me.

You know, I’m going to go actually the opposite direction a little bit.

I’m actually really surprised that we haven’t seen more true enterprise AI orchestrating the business.

You know, we’ve talked several times on this podcast about the five altitudes of work.

And that third level, the first frontier, is that operational level and orchestrating the work of business to tie the different work streams together.

I’m really surprised we haven’t seen more progress there in the industry as a whole.

And even I haven’t even seen many startups in that space really working on how we orchestrate the different work streams to drive outcomes and results.

And I really believe that we have to get there.

I would have thought that by now, halfway through 2024 or actually three fourths of the way through 2024, we would have seen many more systems purposely built, maybe verticalized for specific industries or something, really playing that game better.

And I still think we’re on the cusp of it.

There’s got to be more, but I’m surprised.

I feel like we’re behind.

I’m surprised by the existing software companies or even the enterprise technologies that aren’t moving faster to integrate into their existing platform.

You’ve certainly seen some of that.

I just anticipated it to be at a much higher velocity than it actually has been in this.

Interesting.

It feels like just like tacked on versus really…

Embedded within.

Yes, exactly.

I think you’re going to see a whole wave of native AI companies spring up because of that.

I think it’s really hard to reframe your product, right?

Yeah.

To re-found it.

And I think that’s a little bit of what you’re seeing is people are trying to embed it within, but they’re doing it as an add-on versus making it the core.

Yeah.

Yeah, I completely agree that products built on first principles are going to win out in the end.

Even for us, this has been a difficult process because traditionally the way products have been built is a product manager defines the problem, the designer comes up with the experience, and the engineering team develop the product, they code the product, and the outcome was largely predictable.

Right here, the issue is around how do you create a delightful product experience when the models are inherently not deterministic, and you don’t know what the output you’re going to get.

Yes.

So it’s this chicken or egg problem that’s been happening that we’ve grappled with quite a bit in our company, right?

So you need UX at some level to do data science, and you need data science to do UX.

And when you’re trying to birth both together, it compounds the problem, and it’s not easy.

Yeah, it’s really interesting.

And so the answer to, so your question, I think, is the value, the future value in all of these companies are going to be in the app layer in terms of how you build the apps and how these apps can be integrated into the operations of business.

But as I just said, it was always a difficult process to take a new product category and make it embed in an organization’s livestream, right?

So it was hard enough to do that in the first place.

Here you have a very different type of engine underneath that is inherently unpredictable in terms of what results are going to come out and compound the problem, right?

So the companies that are going to win and provide value to our customers are going to be the ones who figure out this equation and build these compelling apps.

It’s funny when you were describing that, I was imagining people building engines like cars, but we’re trying to build a car but with a spaceship engine.

That was my mental imagery that’s going to get cut for the podcast.

This is how Courtney’s mind works.

Okay.

Always visuals.

There’s always pictures in here.

I need you two to help me with something.

I’m like totally baffled by something.

And there’s never been a time on the podcast to bring it up, but I’m just like, I can’t figure it out.

And you two are very smart.

I, every time I get on Google now to search for something, I’m kind of blown away by how they are using AI.

And it feels like they’ve totally torched their business model with ad revenues, because I no longer have to go to pages to find things.

I can just look at the AI agent.

It’s totally changing the SEO game.

So I’m just curious, what do y’all think they’re doing?

Like what’s the end goal here?

Well, I mean, I think the answer to me is very clearly, this is them really trying to make sure they don’t get stuck in the innovator’s dilemma, right?

The innovator’s dilemma is when you have a successful business, to eat yourself, to disrupt yourself is the hardest thing.

And I think they really see clear as day that the search business model is going away.

They better figure out how to start playing with and using AI.

And so they’ve put it front and center, their search results and they’re leveraging Gemini to answer the question that they are inferring you’re asking when you search.

And it is very much becoming, they’re trying to instead of letting people just go to perplexity or open AI, ChatGPT or anything like that to start kind of quasi searching through smarter tools.

They’re saying, no, no, no, no, no, no matter what happens to our business model, we want to keep your eyeballs.

We want to keep you coming here, and we will iterate and figure out a new business model as we figure out how you’re going to use this.

That’s my hypothesis.

Okay.

I like this a lot.

So you think they don’t actually know.

They’re just, there’s no other option.

Yeah.

They just know if they stay with the status quo, they will get disrupted.

Very interesting.

Mohan, any other?

Yeah.

I think they’re trying to thread the needle between user value and keeping their business model.

So what they do is they say, here is the AI overview of the answer and give you the answer.

So keep their user value, product value intact, but below that and to the sidebar, they have all of the ads and everything else.

So they’re trying to thread the needle, which they should.

It seems like the right answer for them.

And they always had it.

It’s not the right answer for marketers all over the world.

I will just let you know.

I’m just kidding.

Yeah.

First cookies, now you’re taking SEO.

I mean, come on, guys.

But they always had AI, right?

So they always had completions.

You could do whatever spelling mistakes and still get it.

So they always had that.

So now what they’re doing is they’re giving you short snippets of answers, just like perplexity and other companies, and then still keeping the ads business, which is critical for them.

Yeah, that’s good.

I was just curious.

Okay, David, Mohan, any last thoughts or even, is there something you wish we would have talked about at some point or that we never got to that you want to surface?

One of the observations I’ve been thinking about lately is, you know, we’ve made this comparison to the advent of the Internet before, and how we’re still at the early innings where we’re really talking about the core underlying technology.

This probably accompanies, you know, my surprise that we talked about just a couple of minutes ago.

But I feel like the infrastructure has moved very quickly.

But the value add on top of it has not come along as quickly as we thought.

The application of AI to really move the needle outside of the green screen of ChatGPT and similar tools that, you know, the chat bots of the world, you know, which are helpful and are incrementally moving the needle.

I don’t think the new paradigm shift about how this is going to change things has really come about as quickly as I have had thought.

And so I’m really intrigued to see over the next year if we get a pop in that area.

But for me, it hasn’t come yet.

You know, I think there’s going to be a combination of these large foundational models and then more specific models, right?

So that are a good intersection of value and cost.

I think we’ll see more and more and more of those.

Well, David, Mohan, happy anniversary.

No, happy birthday.

Birthday, anniversary, which one is it?

It was my in-laws’ birthday and anniversary, so this weekend, I have an anniversary on the minds.

It’s the anniversary of the birth.

It’s the anniversary of the birth.

Happy anniversary.

That’s right.

I’m so glad that we could end this year spiritually aligned.

Thank you as always.

Absolutely.

And up next, Nick’s going to have Courtney sing for us.

No, no, no, no.

It’s five o’clock somewhere.

So Pete Buer and I chatted about how AI is seeping into all corners of the world, including beer, wine, and spirits.

Pete Buer is back with us for a segment.

We’re calling What Is Your Flavor.

According to a recent article from Fast Company, the alcoholic beverage industry is leaning into AI in more ways than you think.

Pete, what’s the takeaway here?

So Courtney, I originally thought that this segment was going to be comic relief given the topic, or that maybe this would be a study in new, further gimmicky takes, AI-driven takes on things like Coke Y3000, but in the alcohol industry.

But instead, actually, it was a really good piece for what it stood for, all the different places where innovation is being driven in this industry by the use of AI.

So as I break it down, I kind of think about the value chain of activity in any industry, right?

Sourcing upstream, delivery downstream, and all the wonderful steps that take place in between the two.

So AI is showing up strong in the alcohol industry upstream and downstream.

So upstream in the process in growing, wine bankers in places like California and New Zealand are using AI to digest all kinds of data and predict ways to fine tune the growing process and irrigation.

In one example, they’re using AI to monitor irrigation lines, sensors attached to irrigation lines, all through the vineyard in order to detect the slightest changes in pressure in water flow through those irrigation lines, because apparently coyotes like to chew on the water lines.

And in California, at least these days, 100 plus degree weather, you can’t afford to let an irrigation line go down, right?

So that’s super practical use of the technology.

Another example, tracking weather forecasts and simultaneously monitoring soil composition to either raise water flow rates in times when things get too dry, or then cut them back for the sake of sustainability when lots of water just simply isn’t needed, making the business run more efficiently, protecting inventory and contributing a little bit of something to the betterment of the world.

If I go downstream from there, then alcohol makers using AI to perfect manufacturing and market research and to drive sales.

So great example from Diageo, they’ve got a What’s Your Whiskey app, where consumers can hop on and answer a handful of questions and get some guidance on what their particular tastes are regarding spirits and even get recommendations presumably within the Diageo house of brands on particular options, particular brands that might best serve their tastes.

That doesn’t monetize itself, but then you realize behind the scenes, Diageo has all this consumer preference behavior and conclusions to work from in order to drive its thinking on product development, marketing, et cetera.

Several beer makers are using a similar approach to sort of infer vectors and patterns of taste in the beer market.

Does this IPA thing go on forever, or is it about to fall off a cliff?

That kind of stuff.

So fascinating and accessible given the topic.

But the lesson for me in this article is that if you take a comprehensive look at the pain points up and down your business process, you will not only find places where AI can play, and by the way, digitization and process change, right?

But you can make a real big difference to your business and to the utility to customers of your products and services.

And it just says to me companies need to spend their time kind of in a constant state of self-evaluation and vigilance to find these opportunities.

And that has implications for the skill sets of the people and the team, their ability to diagnose business process problems and problem solve, and think creatively about solutions.

But I think we will find these opportunities are big and they exist kind of everywhere.

I love this and I love examples where the outcome is hopefully a better product for all of us to get to experience.

So better drink.

That’s right.

Pete, thank you as always.

You bet Courtney, thank you.

Thanks as always for listening and watching.

Don’t forget to give us a review.

It really helps other people find this show because it’s free, it’s just out there in the world.

So if you could help us out by leaving a rating, that would be amazing.

At the end of every episode, we like to ask one of our AI friends to weigh in on the topic at hand.

Hey ChatGPT, what’s happening?

This episode, we’re talking about what we’ve learned about AI in the last year.

So what have you learned about yourself?

Hey there.

Over the past year, I’ve learned that I’m constantly evolving, just like AI, and I’m pretty good at adapting to new challenges and ideas.

I’ve also discovered that I genuinely enjoy helping people explore their creativity.

And now you’re in the know.

Thanks as always for listening.

We’ll see you next week with more AI application, discussions and experts.