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So welcome everyone from a wet and windy, think Greg, both of us are in environments where it’s wet and chilly and but what can we say, right? It’s winter, it’s that time of year. I’m really happy this afternoon to be joined by Greg Matusky. He and I had a recent conversation around fascinating topic. I know it fascinates everyone, but I think our conversation was particularly interesting.
around AI. And afterwards, I reflected a lot on what we could continue talking about. And Greg, we’re going to do that today. But before we get started, I’d love you to just introduce yourself to everyone. Sure. I’m Greg Matuski. I am a podcaster in my own right. have a podcast called The Disruptions Now, where I talk to people from all over the world, including yourself, about AI and how it’s disrupting commerce communications.
and our culture. besides that, I am the founder and CEO of Gregory FCA. It’s a US-based PR agency, one of the 40th largest in North America. And there’s such a connection between AI and much of what we do in narrative development that it was almost a natural to become deeply involved in it and to
learn everything I could, partly to protect what I have and partly to expand my own worldview. I love that. And I think you’re already saying something to me there because while we were preparing, I said to you that recently a lot of leaders have asked me, how do I explore this topic of AI? How do I think about it for my business? But what I’m hearing you talk about there is the importance of learning.
continuous learning and curiosity. So maybe you could share with me, how did your personal journey of curiosity start, right? Because one can either be fearful or see the future as a positive. How did your journey start? Well, it started probably right at the start of the pandemic. And I was fortunate enough that I have a son who is very technically literate.
And he told me I was facing an existential threat in my PR firm and I didn’t know anything about it. And I said, what is that? And he said, machines will soon be able to write and think and do many of the chores that you’ve done as part of your career. And I said, I think that’s pretty impossible, but we’ll go with that and we’ll build that out and see how it works. So we started a very rudimentary, it wasn’t an LLM, but it was a content
an automated content platform here inside my PR firm. And then when ChatGPT came along and was made public, we suddenly realized that we’d already done a lot of experimentation with what would become known as prompts and a lot learning the machines. So it was a natural that we could absorb it. And in fact, we built our own platform in March, 2023, which was called Right Release. And we’ve gone on to
to become one of the most, think, AI enabled communications firms in the country, at least our list of awards suggest that. it was done a little bit out of fear, but more than that, it became an obsession of mine, mainly out of curiosity. And it became intriguing to me to understand what the limits of machines were, how you could push them, where you could find their boundaries, but also
where you could augment your own abilities. So that’s my story and it’s been a fascinating ride. And I think you talk about boundaries and augmenting abilities. And I think this has been an AI week for me, even though it’s so early in the week. And say the last week, because in the context of boundaries and augmenting our own capabilities over the last week, I’ve often had communications from others where I clearly go,
No, you really didn’t write this or it’s missing. I just knew it. It would have been a piece that they needed to write about a piece, something, and it just missed the human touch and human connection. And I could just I could just sense it. So before we go on to some of other questions that I want to ask you in your work with your team, how do you how do you strike that balance between augmenting
And still keeping the human connection so that there’s a true AI-human partnership. Well, I think part of it is there’s, I think, a saying in AI that you get the best results when you have a subject matter expert driving the bus. And I worry a little bit of what I do is a bit of a parlor trick because I’ve spent my life writing and learning the process of communications.
and trying to teach other people. My son’s always reminding me of this and that I’ve always known how to speak to others about what good writing is. And it only came to me late in my career. I never knew why we use the active voice until I started listening to other writers explain why it’s so important and how we communicate. And so I had this reservoir of understanding how to talk to a third party about writing. And that’s what I do when I create.
And I think it’s really helpful that I had all that experience. Now I can, the lovely part about this whole equation is I can share that experience. For me, it’s been easier to teach people the intelligence instead of the information. What I mean by that is what really stands and throttles human communications a lot of time is we have to balance two aspects. One is all this data. You know, what is a verb?
And how do you transition a paragraph? And what is a legitimate opening? that’s information, that’s data, which a lot of us can’t hold in our mind while we try to create meaning. And that’s the storytelling aspect of it. So I think I’ve, in a lot of ways, in here within my PR firm, in all the training we’ve done, I’ve shown people how not to worry so much about the data and focus on
what you, the audience, what you want them to walk away with and what real writers contemplate when they want to deliver a message. And so in the con in that context, how do you then use AI? Do you use AI to help with the story or with the data? Well, there’s aspects of all of it. And we use it for content, which is a mixture of the data in the storytelling. We use it to workflow.
For workflow to reinvent how we do things so that we can do them with less friction between our clients and third parties. And then we do it for productivity as we work forward so that we can show real ROI on what we do. Yeah. And I think I love that, right? So it’s not one or the other, this or that. It’s really part of the whole journey of what you do. And I think that makes me reflect on what are some of your thoughts?
for CEOs, leaders who are just embarking on this journey, wanting to put a toe in the water, maybe those from more traditional or even regulated environments through to those who are not as regulated, but still a little bit unsure. What would be some of your advice? Well, I think you have to understand that we’re all new to this, right? And it’s funny. I’ll often talk to my wife about AI.
And she’ll ask the exact same questions that are asked at machine learning conferences. For instance, will this solve our energy crisis? Will this help us solve climate change? Will this be the the ruination of civilization as we know it? Those questions are asked. So in this realm, there really are no stupid questions because we’re all new to it. We all started within the last four or five years with LLMs.
Right. I machine learning has been around for 30 years. But with with what we see today with the it really was a Columbus moment when chat GPT was introduced because it was the first times that mere mortals could communicate with technology using natural language processing. So I think the first the first aspect of it is to understand that this is a safe environment to learn in. And even when you
speak with I spoke recently with a PhD who was a computational linguist and he was so interested in what I had to say as a as a storyteller and he came from it from a mathematical point of view of what forms language. We had an incredible conversation and my naive questions of him weren’t looked down upon. It was just for him to understand how to how to
Better capture story and what he does mathematically. So I think leaders have to understand that we all started, most of us started business leaders within the last four or five years. So we got to get on the bus somewhere. the longer, right, let’s say train, the longer that train gets away the station, gets away from the station, the harder it’s going to be. Fortunately, there’s been people who’ve been along the whole time. And the other aspect of that is the shadow AI.
And by that, it’s meant that your employees are using this unbeknownst to you or the enterprise. And that’s a scary proposition. determined early on that this wasn’t going to be social media when young people brought into the enterprise my space and Facebook. This is too important that leaders have to
create the rails and the safeguards to bring it in effectively, and then encourage its use in a way where there is no penalties, right? That you can experiment, that this isn’t going to escape into the wild and launch missiles, right? There’s nothing you can do to make a mistake. So the way we did it was lots of training, an environment where we celebrated and shared successes.
Because leaders can’t be the only ones that are the disciples. You need to create a core team of people who equally know as much as you or advance past you and create an environment where everyone can contribute. And then you can start looking at all the important aspects in workflow re-engineering. And that’s a ground up thing. And I think what scares a lot of leaders is that this is not
Does not have to be an iterative process. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb by iterating on the candle. He created a whole new way to electrify the world. And if you let that go and you just give up some of your authority and your expertise and bring in other voices of how we could re-engineer this, you’re well on your way to creating a new kind of business.
That will be just as vital in the future as it has been in the past and is right now in the present. I love that. And what I’m also hearing you talk about there is vulnerability, the old topic of no fear of failure, authenticity. So I think from a leadership point of view, it also has implications because
Doing everything that you’re saying there requires a different leadership style that’s more open. That also says, I, as a leader, I don’t know what I don’t know and I’m on this learning journey with you, but we all have to learn together in order to create something that is actually more effective, more efficient and really augments what we all do significantly so today. So I love that. And the lovely part of that is we’re all in the same position. I mean, I’ve been at this for four or five years.
And I wake up every morning thinking, I don’t know nearly as much as I should know. I’m an imposter. I should be learning every second of the day. It’s moving that quickly. So we all have those same fears. And the only way to do it is to create an atmosphere of sharing and learning. And the most important core trait I find is curiosity. Curiosity, And curiosity, vulnerability, and…
I think there’s also the art of storytelling in there because I think that’s another way in which we can help drive away some of the fear that might exist around what AI can and can’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t do. Yeah. And my storytelling has, I never talked to my employees about productivity, although I know what the productivity numbers are. I always talk about safeguarding their career and that if you don’t master these tools, just don’t know these tools, but you have to master them.
You will always be successful no matter where you go, no matter who you work for, or no matter if you should strike out on your own. You will be successful. That’s my number one core value. And because of that, they trust in learning more, right? And it’s made them more, our employee attrition is to actually down because they believe they’re learning something they can’t get anywhere else. And it’s become an important tool for their career.
Going back to the leaders, what would you say should be the first step as a leader? Okay, I’m open to learn what’s the first thing I can do. I’m going to start the journey. What do you think is the literally the first thing I should do? You had your son, COVID, you had a bit of time on your hands, I’m assuming. in today, what would be that first step? Well, I always go back to, I always laugh when I see
the safeguards and the guidelines, right? Because we have one, and that is stay current on what’s going on. If you stay current, you will understand what the risks and the opportunities are. Actually learn how AI works. There’s still, this is an incredible state we’re at, there’s still people who believe that if you enter a prompt, right, it’s gonna be immediately exposed to the world.
as a whole, right? And there’s all kinds of misconceptions out there. There’s still, I read an op-ed recently about how, it was very negative about AI, how AI would just add to prejudice and bias without any recognition of the tool that it is to tease out bias and prejudice and to use it as a narrative tool to understand where your own language may…
be biased, right? It can do that. Nothing else could have done that in the past. So I think it’s really important to learn what’s right. I think it’s important to work with people who can show you what the opportunities and the risks are, who sit by you and introduce you and have you overcome your own concern that you should look foolish. We all look foolish. If I look back,
Things I did two years ago in AI today. They’re foolish I had a whole course on how to write a prompt which I never talk about anymore because It does pretty well without the this formally structured prompting So I think they have to become vulnerable. Like you said I think they need to work with people who want to celebrate and really move these things forward And then I think they need to set up a legitimate
They need to set up a legitimate training program. This is change management at this point. And it’s gone beyond just you should be using this. Even in my own firm, I struggle with getting people to always go to AI first. mean, chat GPT, I’m a chat GPT user, it’s where I started. I have a bias towards it because that’s what I know best. It’s open on my desktop from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. I use it for everything. And it’s been incredible.
the little things I can do, but also the big things I can do with it. So I think leaders need to really get a core of people who are positive, who are thoughtful, who understand what the opportunities and the risks are, and can understand what third parties are telling them. Because a lot of times, developers like shiny new things and don’t understand core businesses, and there’s a real risk when you go out.
in the world and look for somebody to develop a platform and they don’t understand the process of the company and how it could be rewired. So I think all those are important to leadership. Yeah. And I take away from that it being on your open, on your desk from first thing in the morning, play with it, use it. It doesn’t only need to be used for, you know, amazingly complex topics. It’s you can make it befriend it. Right. And that’s how you’ll learn.
to take slightly bigger steps every day. Greg, if people want to hear more from you, just repeat for us again, your podcast, where can they get in touch? Learn more, I’d love to share that please. The podcast is The Disruption is Now. We do an episode a week. We’re often talking to actual product developers, but we’re also talking to PhDs from around the world who can give insight into where the…
broader game is going. The instruction is now. My website is gregoryagency.com. And my name is Greg Matusky. I’m all over online. If you just type that in, there’s only two of us in the world. So you’ll come to me eventually. Thank you. I really enjoyed this. yeah, here’s to continuous learning curiosity and who knows what will come next is what I say. Absolutely. Thanks so much. Thank you.
