The Talent Forge: Shaping the Future of Training and Development with Jay Johnson

Clarity, Communication, and Co-Pilots: The New Skills for an AI-Powered Workplace with Fahed Bizzari

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 45

Share episode

The AI revolution is reshaping how we work, learn, and create—yet 81% of professionals feel anxious about this transformation. Why? Many have been avoiding the inevitable, creating what Fahed Bizzari calls "heads in the sand" that are now being forced into the open as AI capabilities expand exponentially.

Fahed shares his journey from achieving the "4-hour workweek" back in 2006 to experiencing an existential crisis when ChatGPT outperformed his own engineering capabilities in minutes rather than days. This pivotal moment led to his realization that our value isn't diminished by AI—it's multiplied when we embrace it properly. Through the compelling metaphor of humans racing against horses, he illustrates how the competitive advantage isn't about outrunning AI but learning to ride it skillfully as a jockey.

Struggling with AI anxiety or feeling behind? This episode provides the practical guidance and perspective shift you need to move forward confidently. Connect with Fahed on LinkedIn to continue the conversation, and remember to mention you heard him on the Talent Forge podcast when reaching out.

Connect with Fahed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fahedbizzari/ 

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping the future of training and development. Today we have a special guest, one that is well-versed in the AI space Fahed Bizarri. Welcome to the show, Fahed.

Fahed Bizzari :

Thank you so much for having me.

Jay Johnson:

I'm excited to dig into this conversation today because I do see there is a severe lack of usage of AI or any kinds of modernized technologies in the L&D space, in talent development and even in HR. So I'll be definitely glad to get some insights into that for our audience. But before we get there, I'd love to hear a little bit about your story. How'd you get into this space and what really kind of propels your passion towards AI or anything else?

Fahed Bizzari :

So for me it's been a very long journey, you know, unfolding actually over the last two decades. I set up my first business fresh out of university, 2002. And I managed to get the four hour work week. Before that was a concept. I managed to get it in 2006. And so that gave me a lot of freedom in life to pursue a lifelong learning, a lot of self-development.

Fahed Bizzari :

I know I became addicted to learning and what we call knowledge engineering. My style of learning is knowledge engineering, where you get information from all sources, bring it all together and then reorganize it in a way that makes sense to you. And this is actually, if you think about it, this is actually what AI is all about, right? So AI has brought all this information together, it's been trained on it and now brings it all together in ways that become useful and relevant to us in our day-to-day roles.

Fahed Bizzari :

I was on a sabbatical the month that ChatGPT was released, and so I had what nobody else had in the world, which was the freedom of time to actually go deep into this tool. And when you think about it, in fact, I was on a call with a client today and she was telling me oh, you know, when ChatGPT was released, I had my own challenges in life. I couldn't give it. I said, listen, don't beat yourself up about this. That's the same story with the other 7 billion people on earth is that everybody had competing well termed, competing priorities that kept people from giving AI the attention that it needed when it started to really blow up. And I had that freedom. So for me, you know, I believe in best practices, I believe I have a very high work ethic, and so, from a very early stage, I was pushing the AI to match me in my work ethic and best practices, and I quickly found that it was able to exceed me and that gave me a kind of existential crisis.

Fahed Bizzari :

Because yeah, because I always thought that I was a very unique person. I had I've got a fantastic education, went to some of the best schools in the world, and I've done massive amounts of lifelong learning. So I always felt proud that I was able to bring all of these different fields together into something unique. And in front of my eyes, the AI is doing the same exact thing, but it's doing it in seconds rather than minutes, hours or days. And so once I got through that existential crisis and this is going back to 2022,. I realized at that point that our value as human beings in the let's just for simplicity sake say corporate world, our value moving forward, is no longer about what we bring to the table in terms of education and so on, because we now have this new species that is more intelligent than us. Our value is using our background to harness this energy called AI. Right, because it multiplies. If you can harness it properly. It multiplies you, you know, you multiply it and it multiplies you to create something, you know, big and tremendous.

Fahed Bizzari :

And I mean I'm just ecstatic working with AI and teaching AI. I'm so ecstatic because I can now do things that previously I couldn't do without having ginormous resources. You know, like, let's say, for example, I want to put together a book. Let's say, I want to write a book, not because I want to be an author and get all the accolades of being an author, but because I want to communicate something complicated in my mind that people should learn about. And now, with AI, I can do that. I can do something that I couldn't do before and it's just, it's liberating. You know, it's like I'm being freed from the shackles of that have been containing my creativity and intelligence over the years. All of those shackles are gone and I'm just excited to try and help get as many people, as many companies, on board with this as possible.

Jay Johnson:

All right. So there's so much to unpack there. Fahed Again, I'm super excited about this. All right, let's start with the first. Okay, you kind of made this statement. I just want to make this super clear for the audience. Right now, we're call it three plus years into, chat, gpt, open AI, et cetera, the really powerful large language models. If I'm sitting there and going, I'm so far behind. This is a new technology. There's no way I can catch up. I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. Make me feel better, because I guarantee that thought is going through somebody's head right now listening to this.

Fahed Bizzari :

It's going through a lot of minds right now. So I'll give you the step-by-step action plan that I give to people, especially those people who feel like their companies are behind in upskimming them, because a lot of people who are working inside of companies, kind of, have developed a relationship with their companies that they trust that their companies will take care of them because they are their employees, their companies will take care of them because they are their employees. And, um, I've heard it time and time again that my employer is not requiring me to know ai. So therefore, I'm okay. But now, two and a half years into it all, everybody is starting to feel very anxious. In fact, 80 this is from academic research 81 percent of employees are anxious about AI. 81% they're anxious about things yeah, it's 100% right and they're anxious about the impact it's going to have on their earning power. It's about job displacement. We did a systematic literature review across 91 academic papers to pull all of this data out and we're calling it the human side of AI. So the step-by-step action plan that I propose to anybody that is feeling that their employers are not upskilling them and they want to take matches into their own hands. What I recommend is. I said look, you know, right now we're in a gold rush and whenever you have a gold rush you've got people setting spades and shovels. So that means there's a lot of people out there in the world right now that are teaching AI.

Fahed Bizzari :

So if you go to Udemy or if you go to Coursera, if you go to any of those you know upskilling platforms, you will find countless courses and you know, what you should do is you should go on a little shopping spree and find those courses that are highly rated and which you most aligned with and that when you start watching the, when you start watching the videos, the trainer is not irritating you, because sometimes you know it's like the sound quality is bad or the accent is annoying or just there's something about the person. You just don't like them, whatever it is. Find the ones that you do like and basically just buy a bunch of courses and allocate some time on a daily basis. Just allocate 30 minutes a day, one hour a day, just like people do to watch netflix. I mean we all make time to watch netflix and to watch the latest show, mean we all make time to watch Netflix and to watch the latest show and the latest series. So try and channel that energy towards platforms like Udemy, whereby, every day, just watch half an hour of that course.

Fahed Bizzari :

So especially if you can find courses that are aligned with your profession. So if you can find let's just imagine you're a journalist and you can find a course called AI for Journalists, I mean, wow, you've struck gold. Buy the course and watch it for half an hour a day so that you can start opening your minds to actually seeing on the screen how the teacher will come up with an article idea within a few seconds, idea within a few seconds. You know what I mean and you'll start to realize. The more you watch him use it, or watch her use it, the more you start to realize that working with AI is just about clarity of thought and articulate communication. Right, because this species needs you to communicate with it clearly in order for it to be attuned to your needs. So that means you need to think about what it is that you're trying to do in the real world. What am I trying to achieve and how do I communicate that to the AI? The next thing I recommend is if you go to an AI powered search, such as perplexity, or if you go into chat, gpt there's something called deep research, google Gemini also has it, they all have it, it's called deep research and ask it to give you an update of all the developments relating to AI and your profession over the last three years, since 2022. So it will kind of give you this overview of all of these different use cases and case studies and and breakthrough is relevant specific to your profession Nice, and then the. And then the third thing is to set up a Google alert for that same thing. You know AI in your profession, so that whenever there's any news relating to it, you get notified.

Fahed Bizzari :

And this is the issue, jay, is that a lot of the anxiety that people face is because when AI like, for example, at the start, I told you about that existential crisis, when I faced that, when I saw the AI outperform me back in December 2022, I had two choices at that moment I could just stick my head in the sand and pretend I didn't see what I just saw, or I could grow with it and change with it. And so you know now, a lot of the anxiety that people have today, in 2025, is because they did put their heads in the sand over the last two years, and now it's like, okay, years, there's a lot of. Now it's like, okay, I, there's a lot of heads in sand, but now what's happening is like the sand's being pulled away. It's like there's no more sand to put my head in. I need to, I need to face the beast, you know, and, and the beautiful thing is, I, I don't know, I, I don't know who, where this comes from, um, but what we're looking for in life actually is, underneath the dragon that we need to slay, and I just saw a post from somebody on LinkedIn goes there's never been a better time to do anything in life because AI. We're still in this crossover before the pre-AI era and the AI era Like there's an overlap, which means that we can use tomorrow's technology to achieve the goals that we have been trying to achieve for the past. You know, x years. So, whatever those goals are, to use AI to accelerate those goals.

Fahed Bizzari :

So that's the advice. That's the advice I give, and it just comes down to a person kind of like accepting that they have to do something. The world is changing, humanity is changing. They need to change with it, and this is a very simple way forward until their employer kicks in and even when their employer kicks in jay, their employer is going to be kicking because this is. I run a consultancy which focuses on AI transformation. This is all that we do, so I know exactly what's going on on the minds of the employers. The employers, even when they're doing the upskilling, they're not doing a general 100% upskilling. They're doing it in the context of the roles in the company. So they won't necessarily train you on A to Z. They might only train you on X and Y, because that's what's needed to do your role. So everybody does need to take responsibility for themselves and I hope those three tips are helpful.

Jay Johnson:

Well, I think they're brilliant because they're easy, they're easy to do and it's a nice system to just kind of say, okay, well, I'm actually dipping into sort of three different worlds. So for me in AI, I just jumped in and if we were to think about the early adoption scale, I was one of the people that was like, yeah, I'll dabble, but I didn't take it as seriously until I saw kind of what you saw and it scared the hell out of me too. So I'm with you on that. I'm going to go back to that existential question in just a moment, but I really like that process, because not only are you A leveraging other knowledge, outside knowledge and courses, but B you're also engaging with AI to help you learn about AI, which is something that I have found to be one of my fastest learn. Like I, I am not a coder, but I asked AI how do I? How do I install Python on my computer? How do I build this? What can I do with this? How should I be thinking about this? And it is literally just feeding me basically every step-by-step thing that I need to do and all of a sudden I'm building these tools that are doing some pretty advanced stuff. I didn't write a single one of them. My AI bot, vax I've named it. Actually, it named itself, but it did it itself and I would have never had the confidence to do that until I started asking those questions and not being afraid of it. So I really love those tactics.

Jay Johnson:

Let me dip into the other existential crisis that I think people are having, one of the other ones, which is oh my God, it's better than me. How long before this replaces me? And you kind of mentioned it. You know the, the human, uh, symbiotic relationship that needs to occur. It needs us as much as we need it. But can you talk on that aspect a little? Cause I think some people put their heads in the sand is because, well, if I adopt this, it's going to expose the fact that I'm writing a book and I'm no longer. You know like I can write a book with AI and I'm I'm no longer the actual value proposition. Help talk us through this, and I'm sure you see this on a daily basis. So it's probably not that, but I can tell you there's a lot of L and D and HR people out there going. But if AI can do all of this, what, what, what, what does my future job look like?

Fahed Bizzari :

So let me take you back two years with my initial batch of students, my initial cohort, when all of them felt like fraudsters when they were using AI to do anything. They all felt like fraudsters. Adopters, I promise you a time will come very soon that even those people that are looking down on those who use ai today will be like praising ai in the future, that oh my god, this thing is so amazing, etc. Etc. And lo and behold, exactly as I said to them back then is exactly how things have become now, and they're very fortunate to have been early adopters. The future everybody is now starting to accept, including employers, especially employers are all starting to accept that AI is the competitive edge, and so, therefore, the value is no longer about us versus AI. The value with our employers, and with ourselves for that matter, is the extent to which we can use AI. So let me give you a kind of metaphor. So let's just imagine that us as human beings you know we call it the rat race, but let's just call it the race, because rat race doesn't sound very nice. So it's the race. We've all been doing the race. All these human beings on two legs. So it's the race. We've all been doing the race, all these human beings on two legs. We've all been doing the race year in, year out, and the race organizers have now allowed horses into the race, right, so none of us have any chance to win racing against the. Now, the good thing about horses is that they don't understand, you know, race organizers. They could be running in any direction. Where the real value is is in the human being that jumps on one of those horses and controls it and can therefore the two of them. The AI gets the steering from the human and the human gets the horsepower, and that's where that symbiotic relationship kicks in.

Fahed Bizzari :

And increasingly, employers, including myself and others that I deal with day in, day out, are now starting to see, are starting to embrace the idea that a human without AI we're not interested. So it's actually the opposite to what people are thinking. People are thinking oh, if I use AI, you know that means I don't have any value. It's actually now the opposite. If you don't have AI, you don't have value. Now, it doesn't mean if you only have AI, and this is one of the big problems that students are going to have.

Fahed Bizzari :

The ones who are graduating is graduating is okay. Maybe they may be ninjas with chat, gpt, but they don't have real world experience in order to merge with the ai. You see what I mean? Yeah, um, and that's and that's a big edge that those of us who are in the workforce already that's a huge edge that we have is that we've got years of experience. Now all we need to do is learn how to merge it with AI, to multiply our experience. So you know, it's a mistake For us as employers. We will not hire anybody ever again anymore that does not know how to work with AI. And I've heard this again and again from other people as well. Once you've ridden the AI horse, you refuse to get off the horse and you refuse to allow anybody on your team who's also not riding a horse. It makes sense.

Jay Johnson:

Well, I like the analogy and I particularly like the way that you've framed hey, if you have a whole lot of life experience, that's gonna make you a better jockey, rather than somebody who's coming in with no experience and just saying do this for me, right, like there's that element of experiential learning. I'm 43 years old, I've got 43 years of experience built up that I'm going to be able to bring in to my jockeying of AI versus somebody who's maybe not that experienced. So I really like that and I think that it's something that you know as we see more and more automation I think, is where people start to get really worried is like, oh my God, if everything's automated, then I'll have nothing. No, you won't have busy work to do, but if you're creative and you've got the experience, you can bring other value propositions into your work, into your organization, your company, your role. You can innovate. You have time to do those things because you're not having to do all of these automated tasks.

Jay Johnson:

So, the last existential question and we'll get out of this existential, but I think these are big roadblocks for adoption. The last existential crisis Okay, but AI is still not perfect, it still hallucinates, it still makes mistakes. For me. How do I know that I can trust AI to deliver on whatever promise you know that Fahad or Jay or whoever it is is talking about. How do we know that we can trust it? And I don't mean like the that it's going to take over the world. Trusted, I mean like the actual trust, the output.

Fahed Bizzari :

Sure, sure. So I mean, I mean, listen, your question is fantastic and I I never used the word jockey. I've given this metaphor a hundred times and I never used the word jockey. But you're absolutely right. If you think about it, the shift that we all have to go through is the shift from being racers and runners into jockeys. That is the big shift of AI, right, and to answer your question now about being able to trust, it ties into that, because now it's about learning how to be a good jockey. So I've just written an op-ed for a legal magazine because in the last three years, there have been 64 cases of lawyers submitting court papers with hallucinations in them.

Fahed Bizzari :

Now I remember the first time this happened, early 2023. And I thought that that would be the last time, because it was all over. The news Must have been extremely embarrassing for a lawyer to you know. The hallucinations was that he cited court cases that never took place and the opposition picked up on it, raised it with the judge. The judge humiliated the lawyer. The company that he was, the legal firm, also got embarrassed. So I thought I thought that would have been the last time we hear of that type of scenario and in actual fact, there have been another 63 since then, and, as I was doing the research into the topic in order to write my piece, what I found was a recurring point of view from the lawyers, which was well, we thought that ChatGPT was just like a glorified Google. We never imagined. We just thought that, like if you go to Google and you search and you get a result, you feel confident using the result, and so people that look at chat GPT or look at AI as being a type of Google, it's understandable why they would want to trust it in the same way, but it's not. There's actually no database behind the AI. There's no database, unless you explicitly tell it to connect to the Internet and ask it to search the web. There is no database. And so the challenge is that people are using AI without understanding the horse that they are riding. You know what I mean, and so that's where the challenge is. It's not so much about trusting the horse horse, it's about being attuned with the horse, and that's about knowing where it's weak, where it's strong, what it can do, what it cannot do.

Fahed Bizzari :

Um, for example, one of the things that, um, the ai developers have done recently. I mean, ai has always kissed our asses, generally speaking, but in recent times, they really kiss our asses and I, I, I thought to myself and all the as are do ais are doing it's not just chat, gpt, all of them are doing it like you give it a bit of feedback and it will say wow, that's an amazing piece of feedback, you're the best thing since sliced bread. Let's work on it together. And I I realize that I think the reason they're doing this is to make the ai more sticky, like I would much rather hang around with people that tell me that all of my ideas are so amazing and I'm the best thing since sliced bread, and so I think that's what's going on with the AI developers right Now. I have to now have that critical thinking to realize that hold on a second. Just because the ai told me that it's the best idea it's heard today, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best idea it's heard today, doesn't even mean that it was a good idea. It just means that the ai has been programmed to kiss my ass and I need to be aware of this whilst I'm working and not to get lost by it.

Fahed Bizzari :

So, similarly, we're doing some agentic AI stuff right now, where we're doing this huge research, like research across 200 websites simultaneously, and other members of my team are accepting results that I am rejecting and from their point of view it looks really plausible. But they don't know the topic. They know how to do research, et cetera. I know the topic, they don't know the topic. So they're seeing the outcomes and think, oh my God, this is amazing. Yeah, fahad is going to be so happy, amazing. They're showing it to me and I'm like look, I just looked at the first result. It's a fail. I'm going to take over and do a bit of programming to make sure we get this right. And that's what I did and I showed it to them. They're like okay, now we understand. We'll map this to all of the other searches.

Fahed Bizzari :

So it's not about trusting the AI. It's more about becoming attuned with the AI and how it works and so on. So, for example, chat GPT has a function. I don't use chat GPT personally because I use, like, all the AIs and I've got a central platform that works with all of them. But ChatGPT has a function called memory and most people love the fact that it has memory because it seems to do a much better job at contextualizing you and your circumstances. But what people don't realize is that the AI's memory is flawed, because one day you could be talking about I don't know your romantic life, and on another day you could be talking about the struggles with your children, and on another day you're talking about the book that you want to write and on another day.

Fahed Bizzari :

So it's memorizing a whole lot of things. It might even be memorizing fictitious situations. You might have sat down and just like written some role play or something, and now all those things are coming together and influencing the conversations you have together. And so, more than anything, it's about learning to understand the horse that you're riding, learning to understand its strengths and its weaknesses, how it's about learning to understand the horse that you're riding, learning to understand its strengths and its weaknesses, how it's working, what its agenda is and kind of working around those things.

Fahed Bizzari :

So if you said now to the AI I want you to write a 300 word article on XYZ, I guarantee you it's not going to be 300 words. I guarantee you it's going to be 280, 260, 317. It's going to be anything other than 300 words, because language models do not specialize in numbers and they don't count words ahead of time. They can only count it after the event. So it will aim for 300, but it's not going to be 300. And so I know that and other people who learn to work with AI learn that, and then it's like, okay, I don't need to trust that it's going to be 300 words. I've already accepted it will not be 300 words and that now becomes the dynamic of our relationship that I wish I could trust it to do 300, but it is what it is. I'm just going to accept it as it is and I'll do my final editing at the end to make sure it is 300.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, well, it's so interesting Again, so much so many interesting things in this in you know this, this microcosm of AI conversation. The first is memory, and as soon as you were talking about this, I use ChatGPT. I got the paid version and it's you know, because I'm using it basically to help me through things like blank page syndrome or hey, help me think of X, y and Z, or what's a good way to go about this, et cetera. And one of the things that I did kind of early on was I trained it on the behavioral models that we use. Now, if I say it's really interesting where memory pops up because there'll be something that is completely unrelated to the behavioral models that all of a sudden it pops in its knowledge of the behavioral models and puts it into place, which has actually been kind of cool, because there's points in times where I'm like I actually didn't think about doing that and you just did it. Thank you for doing that. There's other times I'm like this doesn't fit at all, let's not use that. But I have found very much, like you said, and I'm going to go back to, something that you talked about earlier is the precision of language, the clarity in communication, if I explicitly tell it. I want you to reference these materials, this conversation and X, y, z, at that point in time. It does, and it does a really good job with it. At other points in time, these momentary memory relapses come into play at some point in time just in an inappropriate way, so I love that you bring that up. The other thing that I thought was super interesting is you know that when we and I'm going to ask you what platforms would you recommend for somebody starting out versus you know, as you start to advance at some point in time, recommend for somebody starting out versus you know, as you start to advance at some point in time.

Jay Johnson:

I've played with Gemini. I've played with. I've played with, obviously, chat GBT. I've played with Microsoft's version I forget the name of it right now, it's whatever, yeah, so I played with a number of the different things. The thing that I have found interesting is absent. Using a separate software, I found that images are a challenge, and it related back to me to what you said is numbers are not a large language model function, neither is images. I know that there are some beautiful images that are produced, so can you talk to me a little bit more about that is getting to know the horse that we're riding or attuning to the horse that we're riding Numbers. Not a thing Doesn't really make sense to you know. Get mad at it because it puts out 280 as opposed to 300. Images I've also learned? Probably not a thing. What are some other things that we should be thinking about in terms of attuning ourselves?

Fahed Bizzari :

Okay. So the question that you started with was for somebody that's new, what would I recommend? Hands down, I would recommend ChatGPT For somebody that's new. Chatgpt is the most consumer-friendly general purpose AI out there. They were the first to the market and they've been evolving ever since the start. And what? What makes them particularly unique is that open AI is goal, and I think it's the. The goal is the same for Microsoft and Google, but open AI, where the leaders, in pursuing this goal, is their goal, is to build out our own personal AI assistance. So if you think about Tony Stark having Jarvis, the idea is that all of us should have our own Jarvis, and so that's why they built memory. They put that memory function, because they're moving towards the future, whereby the ai is listening and watching as we go about our day and then is able to like, give us insights, and then I can say to hey, you know, yesterday I was in a mall. I saw that red dress, what was the name of that shop again, and the ai would go oh, that was mango. You know what I mean mean. So, from a, from a, it definitely I would recommend chat GPT.

Fahed Bizzari :

Um, claude starts to shine. Um, with regards to other things like um. Um, working with CSV files is better than ChatGPT, doing analytics better than ChatGPT. They just released version four of their Claude model and my developer is using it perpetually and he keeps on praising it. So, when it comes to development, like software development, claude is fantastic. Also, for writing, claude is fantastic for writing. Claude is fantastic, and what I found in professional work, I found gemini to be the winner. It's really thorough, doesn't kiss ass too much and it also I mean there's a lot of things gemini is my go-to model these days. 2.5 it's my preferred model. I I was personally spending over a thousand dollars a month on my personal AI stuff and right now, google Gemini is completely free. So I'm like, oh my God, I'm saving a thousand one and a half thousand dollars a month using you know, using Gemini.

Fahed Bizzari :

Now to go back to what you said about images actually in. Now, to go back to what you said about images actually in, I think it must have been early April. Openai released a new image model called Image Generation, originally enough, and if you know what you're doing with it, it actually produces remarkable images within ChatGPT. But you have to spend some time. Don't go and just say, give me an image of X, y, of xyz, you actually have to go and learn how to prompt it.

Fahed Bizzari :

Now, I never personally spent time learning how to prompt images because I feel that that is the domain for designers, right? So if I want images, I will work with a designer and let him use the AI to produce the images. You know what I mean, or what I'll do if I want to create a unique image. So if you go to my consultancy website, you'll see that all the design is all Renaissance art. So what we did was we worked with an AI-empowered designer who put together the prompts needed to create renaissance art and then connected it with our website, cms, so that whenever we create a new page, it looks at the page, makes an intellectual decision of what's some type of symbol that we can use to represent the content of this page. Now go and produce some renaissance art based around that symbol. Nice, so you know I would not get involved.

Fahed Bizzari :

And you know if we're talking about video, google three days ago released uh, their latest video model. You must have seen stuff about this all over linkedin and elsewhere. It is the most remarkable stuff that you can imagine. It is 100% Like you can't tell now at all what is human and what's not. You can't tell. But it's a learning curve and a lot of people will be like, yeah, I want to learn, like, how to do the images, and my advice is stay in the area that you know Right.

Fahed Bizzari :

So if let's say, for example, you're a trainer and that's what you do, you put together programs and that's your strong point, stay there, because now AI is going to take your strength and multiply it by 100 times, whereas if you now start dabbling in areas that are not your strength, so you're going to take your let's call it your strength. I mean, let's just give it a number, your strength is 100. And you're going to work with the AI. It's going to multiply you by another 1000. And the equation of the two of you together will be 100,000.

Fahed Bizzari :

Now go into an area that you don't know. You're no longer operating at 100,. You're operating at 10 or five, okay, and and you're working. You're working with the AI and you don't even know how to use the AI that well. Or you're trying to do images or videos or audio or whatever. Now it's going to be like five times five is 25. You could have been operating at a hundred thousand level and instead, because you went into an area that is not your expertise, now you are dabbling at the 25 level I had.

Jay Johnson:

Where were you about six months ago, when I spent an exorbitant amount of hours trying to get a damn image for my powerpoint presentation. And I have a design team which is even worse. But yeah, you're spot on I. I sat there and I played with Dolly and I played with the Shutterstock one, I played with Canva one and, while I'm, when it comes to the research side of things, my prompts, seemingly are pretty good. I always room for improvement and I want to talk about that in just a moment, but when it came to images, it was. It was four hours when I could have literally jumped onto Shutterstock, found the image that I wanted in 40 seconds and been fine with it. But my tenacity sometimes gets the better. I'm like I'm going to make this thing do what I want it to do.

Jay Johnson:

It was not doing it. So talk to us a little bit. How can we be better partners? And you know that's that's so when I speak on AI, the tech side of thing is not what I'm talking about. I talk about how leaders need to embrace it, what they need to be thinking about, how they need to lead in a world of AI. Ai is definitely not my strong suit and I start off my presentations like if you want AI tips, I'm not your guy. If you want to understand the human side of this and how to lead in creating clear communications, creating better prompts, creating more, you know, more specificity and also, I guess, alignment or attunement, as you call it, with the way that we're interacting, so the first thing is, I would strongly advise not to think of AI as a tool.

Fahed Bizzari :

I mean, many people have said that over the last two and a half years in response to the whole existential crisis idea that, well, look, at the end of the day, it's just a tool. And the thing is it's not just the tool. It's a lot more than a tool, because it's this source of intelligent energy, unlimited intelligent energy. Right, it's a bit like the fire hydrants or whatever you call them, that have this like burst of water that's coming out of it, and the way that I've always explained it to people since day one, because I've been advocating for this. I've been teaching it now for almost three, well, two and a half years. Well, we're entering June now, yeah, so more than two and a half years is step number one. You gotta think to yourself that, look, pre-ai as a person, you have been speaking to yourself. You are your companion, right? So every challenge and every moment that you face in life, you are your own companion and you're talking to yourself. Should I do this? Should I go there? You know I'm feeling tired. Hey, I wonder what would happen, like we have been our own co-pilot for our entire lives. Now, what ai brings to the table is not just and sorry, and ourselves as co-pilots to ourselves. We are limited to our education and our experience. So now, if we think about AI as a cognitive co-pilot, an intellectual co-pilot, accept that it has the intelligence of all humanity and it can synergize all of that intelligence. So the best thing to do is to actually, instead of talking to yourself, get in the habit of talking with the AI, right? I wonder X, y, z, do you think that this would be good? You know why? Did you know, like I, okay, okay, this is completely, actually, let me do it completely. Okay, I'll tell you completely off topic. You know, if you, if you hear about women, they talk about this thing called the ick right, that they get this thing about the ick, about men. Today I just had this conversation with my ai about it and it's like you know what, not every man needs to be attracted to every woman. Not every woman needs to be attracted to every woman. Not every woman needs to be attracted to every man. At the end of the day, we're all looking just for that one reliable, loving partner that we can be committed to, right? So, in actual fact, this ick concept is actually fantastic because it like puts people off people in order to help you find your one.

Fahed Bizzari :

So this thought when I got it, when I got that spark of thought, I was like let me just talk about this with my AI. And so, instead of me talking about it with myself and reaching no personal conclusion, I've talked about it now with my AI and have reached a conclusion that I feel happy with. I'm not an academic, I don't know whether this is actually true or not, but I feel happy with it. And that's what I would have got if I was talking to myself. I would have felt happy with it and I'm like yeah, that makes sense to me.

Fahed Bizzari :

Let's move on with life right, so feel it like to be like your cognitive co-pilot and many people will disagree with what I'm about to say, but it will really open up the world of AI to you as an individual. You have to be careful in the corporate space with this advice, which is learn to be vulnerable with it, and what I mean by that is, you know, vulnerability is all about sharing stuff that you wouldn't normally share. Now, when you share that stuff with your AI, you're able to get really incredible insights you know, like this conversation about the ick that we just had. So when you actually think about that, that you're willing to talk about things you know with your AI that you wouldn't otherwise have been willing to talk about, you start to get insights that you otherwise would never have got. Now, in the corporate space, in the company space you have to be careful with this because you can't share everything, right.

Jay Johnson:

Confidentiality, non-disclosure, yeah, exactly.

Fahed Bizzari :

Exactly, I mean people. People don't typically understand the ins and outs of what you can and what you can't share, but for the most part, until you do know, just play it safe. And so this whole vulnerability thing. No that you don't do that, but I forgot your question. Now I've gone so deep in this thing.

Jay Johnson:

I'll go back to the question. No, but I find this super interesting because, um, that was actually something that sort of shifted my perspective too is. At one point in time I was frustrated with a life event and, honestly, I got onto AI and this was. This was months, if not years. At this point, I got onto AI because I was like huh, I can go and bitch and complain to AI.

Jay Johnson:

And all of a sudden it starts giving me this like do you, would you like some? You know, jay, it sounds like this. It was kissing my ass, but then it was like but this is a really interesting insight, have you considered? And I was just like and it's talking to me and I'm like wait a second, I don't do my backgrounds in behavioral science, I don't do therapy, I don't do clinical therapeutics, but I've studied quite a bit there.

Jay Johnson:

And then I started to get curious and I'm like well, I'm experiencing this, can you help me understand? And it starts communicating back to me and I'm like and this is how I'm feeling and why. You know what? Where does that come from? And my gosh, like it. If I had. It was incredible.

Jay Johnson:

I was just like the more that I'm giving this thing, the more that it is giving me back and like encouraging or prompting or bringing about a different insight. Like how might I understand this experience? But you're right, when I and I was I'm going to say that I was more kind of I don't want to say fake vulnerable on this, but I was I was essentially testing it and once that kind of really played out the way that I would have expected it to play out, I go to it all the time with like hey, I'm feeling X, y and Z about this project, or you know, this is happening here. Help me understand what's going on. And I mean we have behavioral conversations. It's like I have another. It's like you're right, it's like I have a high powered lab partner that literally knows everything that I can ask these questions to. And it's giving me hey, think about this, or check out this research or do this. And I'm like where have you been on my life?

Jay Johnson:

Exactly my question, my question and I think you started to answer it. But my question really was how can we be better at providing clarity in our prompts and community?

Fahed Bizzari :

Yeah.

Jay Johnson:

And, you know, being vulnerable. Engaging it as though it's a partner and not necessarily a tool, or like a communication partner or co-pilot, I think, is obviously a really, really powerful step in building sort of this building a longer conversation with our AI tool, or AI I guess I would call it co-pilot.

Fahed Bizzari :

And another huge tip which in the early days of AI or the early days of chat, gpt, like, a lot of people were talking about this and then it kind of died down, but it's actually very solid advice, which is giving your AI a persona. So let's say, for example, you, you're a trainer, let's just keep it simple and you want to have conversations about training, so give your AI a trainer related persona. It might be that, okay, you know, we've got years of experience in our fields, but there are people that we look up to in our fields. A lot of people look up to us in our fields and there are people that we look up to in our fields. So if I'm going to be talking to AI about my field, let me give it the persona of that person that I would look up to yeah you know, I'll give you an example.

Fahed Bizzari :

In in my consultancy, we speak to ceos. That's our primary target. We speak to founder ceos of companies, about 100 to 200 employees. We also cater for ginormous companies uh, where we're typically dealing with the chief digital officer, and much smaller companies as well, but our sweet spot is, like you know, 50 to 200 people and so on. And for a very long time I was using AI and a copywriter an AI copywriter that was writing for CEOs, so the persona was the persona of a copywriter. So far, happy days, amazing. I don't need to hire a copywriter because I got my own copywriter, yay, okay.

Fahed Bizzari :

One day, a CEO of a very large company, which you would know, told me when I showed him some content. He said Fahad, you know what? All of the companies, they're all saying the same thing. All the AI, everyone's saying the same thing. And it's not speaking to me. And I was like you know, can you elaborate? He's like look, I don't care, what I care about is my current year goals.

Fahed Bizzari :

I care about my current quarter goals. That's what I care about. I've got another two years in this company. This is what I care about. My current quarter goals, that's what I care about. I've got another two years in this company. This is what I care about. Talk to me about how AI can help me achieve my current goals and this year's goals. So I walked away from that thinking, oh my God, we really did miss the mark on this. So I created a persona. His name is Andrew. I created this persona, andrew, who is himself a CEO of a 145 person company and he knows AI inside out. He has AI transformed. He is passionate about helping other CEOs embrace AI, and I now have a CEO that writes my content, not a copywriter.

Jay Johnson:

You see what I mean Brilliant, yeah, 100%, 100%. So the persona that I actually, because I've done the same thing I want you to pretend you know, and building a persona or anything else like that sometimes is as easy as prompting it because you can tell it. I want you to pretend you're a copywriter of X, Y and Z years and this is what you're thinking and doing, and so on and so forth. For the behavioral stuff that I did, I asked it, stuff that I did, I asked it. I said I want you to be a doctorate in behavioral science, meaning that you studied ethology, neurobiology, neuroscience, et cetera, et cetera.

Jay Johnson:

Uh, the interesting thing was I asked my GPT to give me a name that it would prefer to be called and it did. It gave me into the name Vex. She's like because and I I know it's pulling from, you know, past conversations into memory and it's like because we like to be a little bit cheeky but we also like to solve behavior, so I'd like to be called Vax, like perfect, You're Vax. So. But yeah, to that point is, when they have the persona and they're thinking, thinking in that persona it does, it comes out very, very differently If you ask a GPT to write as a copywriter or write as a behavioral scientist.

Jay Johnson:

You're getting two very different sets of messages. So I that's such a great point, but I think we could probably talk for another six hours, and I think one of the things I'd love to do is have you back, Cause I know we've we've scratched the surface, um, covering some of the fears and covering some of the ways to interact with it, and by the next week, a lot of this might have changed. Who knows? But if our audience wanted to get in touch with you to learn more about how you're supporting AI-empowered organizations and all of that, how would they reach out to you?

Fahed Bizzari :

Absolutely the best way is through LinkedIn and if anybody does send me a connection request, please mention that you heard the podcast and so on, because I get so many connection requests. Unfortunately, I ignore most of them that don't explain why they're connecting. So please make sure that you add a note to explain that you came through the podcast so that we can connect.

Jay Johnson:

Such a good practice anyways. So thank you for your time, your knowledge. This has been a very enlightening, eye-opening conversation for me, and I know that it's going to be huge. So, audience, if you are not on AI, you are continuing to stick your head in the sand that is quickly dissipating, and if you're afraid, give Fahad a call for sure. So thank you for being here, Fahed.

Fahed Bizzari :

Thank you for having me.

Jay Johnson:

And thank you, audience, for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge, where, together, we're shaping the future of training and development with AI. Take care.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

Host