Transcript
Speaker: Today's episode is part one of a two-part series with Chad Carlson, co-founder of Blox.
Speaker: In this episode, we do a deep dive into this amazing new AI tool.
Speaker: Next time, we're going to really dig into what it's like to lead and run a startup.
Speaker: So, enjoy.
Speaker: Hi, and welcome to What IT Takes to Lead.
Speaker: I'm your host, Matt Detweiler, and today we're honored to have Chad Carlson, co-founder at Blox.
Speaker: Welcome, Chad.
Speaker: Hi, Matt.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Honored is a very strong word, so I'm glad you feel that way.
Speaker: But I do very much appreciate you having me on.
Speaker: Really enjoy your podcast.
Speaker: I like the topic a lot.
Speaker: Hopefully we can have a good back and forth today.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: So I am super excited to have you on.
Speaker: I've been using Blox for about two weeks now.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: It's really changed the way I do a lot of things.
Speaker: So for those who haven't heard, what exactly is Blox?
Speaker: So Blox is a software application.
Speaker: So that's the first thing.
Speaker: It does leverage AI.
Speaker: And I know AI has become...
Speaker: the topic du jour for the last six or eight or 12 months even.
Speaker: But what our focus really is, is on taking that application of AI and doing something very specific with it.
Speaker: And it probably fits very well with your target audience.
Speaker: So we're very much looking at
Speaker: leaders and relationship builders to help assist a lot of those day-to-day tasks that can be somewhat mundane but take up a lot of time and potentially effort.
Speaker: So there's a few things that Blacks does to assist in that.
Speaker: The first one is, and most importantly, is it captures a lot of the conversations that you have.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Those might be meetings, they might be Slack huddles, they might be all these different sources, they could even be face to face, but ultimately those conversations maintain and retain and produce a lot of information that are valuable to capture and make use of in the future.
Speaker: And then the second part that we do
Speaker: Because once you've captured that information, if it's not organized well for you, it can become very disconnected and lost, hard to find, uninterpretable, poorly referenced, and ultimately not very useful for the future.
Speaker: And that's the third point that we really focus on, is making sure that we can resurface that information in the exact moment that you need it going forward.
Speaker: So whether it be a conversation that you had with someone six months ago, and you want to
Speaker: to make sure that that information is available for the next time you speak or a topic that you've talked about continuously.
Speaker: Having that information at your fingertips and in a repository is really important.
Speaker: And that's what we focused on with building blocks so far is to really take those conversations and that information and take it one step beyond just capturing and retaining it, but also really making it useful for you in the moment that you might need it next, because you did capture it for a reason, whether it be
Speaker: a summary to share or to reference in the future or there's action items.
Speaker: But ultimately, that information should be useful going forward.
Speaker: And we think we have the solution to help with that.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Very cool.
Speaker: So blocks.app, correct?
Speaker: Blocks.app with no C. B-L-O-K-S.
Speaker: B-L-O-K-S.app.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was thrown off a couple times by that because we talked and I'm like, is that blocks.com?
Speaker: No, blocks.app.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Blocks.app.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So tell me when this is recording and for everybody that is listening to this, get out of your browser.
Speaker: get back to the podcast come on come on don't rush over there yet um so how is this how is this recording like how does it work so um we're a little different from the fact that our capture is driven through the hardware on your desktop so it leverages the microphone and the speaker and there's a lot of solutions out there that are
Speaker: native to the browser or Chrome extension and really only look for the information that can be captured through a conference service.
Speaker: Whereas our focus was more ubiquitous in our approach.
Speaker: We wanted to make sure that no matter how the conversation is happening, whether it's in person or using a conference service, or if it's even a podcast like this that you want to have a reference and a record of to include in your information store,
Speaker: You have the ability to do that without a bunch of extensions or plugins or bots that have to join the conversation.
Speaker: So it's really seamless.
Speaker: It's as easy as pushing the record button, but ultimately we've built the technology to be very smart so that it can detect if you're joining a Google Meet or a Zoom call
Speaker: or Microsoft Teams or Slack huddle.
Speaker: So that'll auto start and join that for you.
Speaker: And the way we do that is through detecting applications on the desktop, but we also integrate your calendar into it.
Speaker: And that comes into part of the tagging piece to make sure that everything's organized.
Speaker: So that combination of desktop hardware, of microphone and speaker, plus leveraging some of that other external information that's available through integrations can really help
Speaker: tie a nice bow on the package so that everything's ready for you when you need it.
Speaker: What I really like about blocks is just how simply it's laid out.
Speaker: This isn't salesforce.com.
Speaker: This isn't some giant CRM thing.
Speaker: This is almost like the evolution of Notepad in its simplicity.
Speaker: You have your home screen.
Speaker: When you link your calendars in, it has all of your calendars and appointments listed there.
Speaker: There's a big red button to start recording.
Speaker: You have a notes section, which we can get into a little bit more, but then there's to do, then there's a directory to keep track of everybody.
Speaker: And then there's tags, but going back a little bit to just the agenda and the notes.
Speaker: So once I hit record, what actually happens after that?
Speaker: So once you hit record, we're leveraging the mic and the speaker, like I said, but we're not an application that retains the audio.
Speaker: Our focus is a little more specific than that.
Speaker: So we find that the,
Speaker: The essence and the distilled information that's really important from a conversation is actually the summary part of it.
Speaker: And we do keep the transcript, but what we put front most and foremost is the summary itself.
Speaker: So that information, it's easily digestible, it's distilled, and it's often the piece of information that you're gonna wanna share.
Speaker: Lots of other applications give you the full transcript and the audio recording, but ultimately to go back and review that entire section is somewhat tedious.
Speaker: What you're really looking for is the summary, especially in the future, in six months,
Speaker: you're going to care about what was the specifics of that interaction and what were the action items ultimately.
Speaker: So that's one area that we really want to help.
Speaker: So capture the audio,
Speaker: generate the summary, but then not keep that audio.
Speaker: And that's from a security and privacy perspective, make things much easier to keep and retain.
Speaker: It's like having a really good note taker sitting in every conversation with you.
Speaker: It doesn't have the audio, which again, reduces some of the liability associated with capturing a conversation.
Speaker: So we find that part, keeping the summary and then it's very useful and powerful for the future, but also makes a lot of the associated liabilities
Speaker: less intrusive as part of the capture of the information.
Speaker: It's not like the screen recorders that you see in some of like Zoom and Teams and things like that.
Speaker: It's basically, it's almost as if somebody is watching the conversation, but without attaching any names to it.
Speaker: There's a lot of one of the speakers said, or the leader of the call said, but generally it leaves people out of it for the most part.
Speaker: Unless a specific person is called out to do something.
Speaker: So for example, I need to follow up with Chad next week about this thing.
Speaker: It's smart enough to know and see that, yeah, I'm talking about Chad and I'm going to make a, an action item for that.
Speaker: So tell me a little bit about the action item portion of this.
Speaker: So when we started building blocks, that was one piece that we always found important.
Speaker: Anytime you have a conversation, whether it's a leadership meeting, a daily standup or scrum,
Speaker: a call with a client or a customer, all those conversations, generally the most important part that falls out of those conversations are the action items.
Speaker: So the summary is great, but ultimately the things that you're accountable for and your feet will get held to the fire if you forget are those action items.
Speaker: So those are the ones that as part of the summary and the structure of our summary is pretty simple in the fact that
Speaker: You have a short summary of the conversation at the top, a basic breakdown of topics that were discussed throughout the conversation with a little summary of each topic that was discussed.
Speaker: But ultimately at the bottom, there are these action items.
Speaker: So things that were specified that needed to be completed and they're listed as suggestions, but ultimately you have the ability to select any one of those items
Speaker: and do a command T and that actually converts it to what we would call a classic to do list item.
Speaker: And that's where the, some of those other tabs that you talked about start to come into play where you can have your notes and your summary, but also those more actionable and specific to do's that have followup targets and maybe a person assigned to them and things like that directly in the application.
Speaker: And those are the things that we really want to take to the next step as we progress through the app to make some of those exchanges and transformations of summaries into action items even more autonomous for our users.
Speaker: One of the other things that really stood out to me about blocks is I was using a to-do list app, if you will, from a certain large search engine company who will remain nameless.
Speaker: But immediately when I started using blocks, it just became really intuitive because you can actually set alerts and you can set to-dos on specific days and everything as well, right?
Speaker: And they'll show up in your feed.
Speaker: Exactly, and that's the part of it.
Speaker: And again, we didn't want to make it over complicated by any means.
Speaker: So these are things that I need to follow up in a week or a day, but give yourself an easy target that's easy to find and ultimately pull those action items out of the notes.
Speaker: And that's one thing that we do that's a little different than most is that you can have your short little to do list checklist items, but you can also specify to do items in an entire note.
Speaker: And that will get pulled out and summarized and unified in our to-do view.
Speaker: So it's really a nice combination of notes with a specific focus on the to-dos if it's necessary.
Speaker: And that's part of the combination of capture to action item to helping get things done, which is ultimately the purpose and benefits of a smart app is to make you more efficient and effective in getting your work done.
Speaker: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker: So let's get personal.
Speaker: You ready?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: How did you personally use blocks in your day today?
Speaker: Give me some examples.
Speaker: So strangely enough, because I do have auto start enabled, I'm on a Mac, it's using it right now.
Speaker: So any conversation that I have now is captured in blocks.
Speaker: So that's step one, having that record and knowing that that information is available is super powerful, important.
Speaker: It's basically my insurance policy for any conversation I have.
Speaker: It's made it so that I don't have to touch a keyboard or pick up a pen for most conversations that I have.
Speaker: So I've been way more attentive,
Speaker: in any meetings that I've had, I've definitely focused on a person more than worrying about missing an action item or a comment, because I know I have assistants doing that.
Speaker: So that's the biggest thing, of course.
Speaker: But ultimately,
Speaker: The checklist part is a big thing, but what I really like and I use a lot, especially because right now as part of the phase that we're at in blocks is I do a lot of outreach and discussion with our customers and our users about what they like, what they don't.
Speaker: So a lot of customer interviews and a lot of that is organized based on this person to person interaction.
Speaker: So
Speaker: talking to matt or i'm talking to john or i'm talking to susan i have all these different people with different conversations and typically that would all get thrown in one big pile which would be very difficult to find but what we do is we've taken it and we start to classify that automatically for people and we use pages to do that so there's a page for matt there's a page for your company there's a page for our meetings and all those are backlinked together so that it's easy to navigate and find things
Speaker: or ultimately search for it if I needed to.
Speaker: But based on my calendar and my history, I'm able to navigate and find things related to people, to companies, to events very, very easily, as opposed to a classic note app, which is just one stream based on date and time.
Speaker: might be tagged with whatever tag I choose to give it, but our approach is very much specific to those people, company, event interactions, which I think in people's minds are very much touchstone moments throughout the day, because that's where I remember that it was part of this meeting and Matt was there, and I think it was on Tuesday.
Speaker: And that becomes a very easy way to start to find notes that were captured automatically or ones that I even took down manually in the old fashioned way, which blocks also supports.
Speaker: So for me, that's the big one is the capture and the categorization happens every day just because of the number of meetings and interactions that I'm having with people and having that information available there.
Speaker: And then on the page, we also include
Speaker: extra information such as email or attachments that are really relevant and easy to find.
Speaker: So for me, I don't have to go searching through emails or looking for attachments or documents so much anymore.
Speaker: And that's a big part of what Blocks is also about besides just capturing the conversations.
Speaker: There's a lot of other interactions that are meaningful to have in one single spot when you need it in a particular moment.
Speaker: So for me, that's my day to day.
Speaker: It's all about customer interactions at the moment and being able to
Speaker: maintain that record, but it's not so much pipeline driven that I need a CRM to do it because I don't need to create that structure.
Speaker: And honestly, I don't want to create that structure.
Speaker: Having it done for me has been really, really nice.
Speaker: And I know I'm slightly biased, but it has definitely changed the way I've operated and part of the reason we do what we do.
Speaker: Well, I'll tell you, I've been working with CRMs for probably 20 years or more now.
Speaker: In my career, it's kind of my jam.
Speaker: I definitely enjoy them more than ERP systems for sure.
Speaker: And one of the things that I've never seen before that you guys have done in this product is you treat meetings like people.
Speaker: And by that,
Speaker: What Blox does that I think is amazing is it's cool enough that it can, okay, let me tag the people that are in this meeting and attach it to their record.
Speaker: That's standard CRM stuff.
Speaker: But the meeting itself holds the notes.
Speaker: So if I have a standing meeting with a product group or something like that, and that thing is going on biweekly or something like that,
Speaker: The notes are actually attached to the meeting.
Speaker: So in theory, people could be jumping in and out of that meeting, but that standing meeting is almost like a contact or person in a CRM system.
Speaker: How did you guys come up with that?
Speaker: We have a lot of history.
Speaker: So this isn't the first time we worked together and calendar has always played a part in
Speaker: the products that we built.
Speaker: And for us, that was the key moment.
Speaker: Like when we were thinking about notes and the application that we wanted to build, we knew that events were so important to that capture.
Speaker: Because if you look through your notebook, it was the headings always associated to this particular meeting.
Speaker: And then you go through and then you're flipping back through pages to find the last reference to that.
Speaker: that meeting.
Speaker: So for us, it was just a natural approach.
Speaker: So instead of having them uncategorized, just categorize them to that event so that they are unified, because I think that's how people's brains work.
Speaker: And we're happy to have contrarian views to that to tell us if we're wrong.
Speaker: But having that information sequenced in that way and grouped in that way is really important, especially in a professional setting where
Speaker: I think most people do have that recurring meeting at least once a week, sometimes once a day, depending on what it is.
Speaker: And there is a sequence and a history to it that a standalone note doesn't capture as much as having that full series available to it.
Speaker: And that's why we went with that approach, because for us, it was a core grouping elements around our calendars.
Speaker: We
Speaker: know that there's no escaping the calendar.
Speaker: We just wanted to put a different spin on it and make this an element that helps with categorization as opposed to trying to integrate it into an existing calendar application.
Speaker: Yeah, and I know your product isn't specifically built for salespeople, but I think about salespeople and how they operate.
Speaker: And a lot of times, okay, I have a call with this person.
Speaker: We talked three weeks ago.
Speaker: Oh, goodness, what did I talk to this person about last time?
Speaker: And it's right there in your app.
Speaker: You can go right in.
Speaker: You can look at what was said in the last meeting.
Speaker: You could look at the action items and bullet points.
Speaker: You could actually make notes as well, which is pretty cool.
Speaker: right in that meeting.
Speaker: We're right in that directory contact so that next time you talk to them, it's right there or you can create an activity in there.
Speaker: So that's some pretty cool stuff.
Speaker: A lot of people think around sales when you're having all these interactions, but there's so many roles, especially in smaller organizations that have sales like roles where it's either your consultant or your solopreneur or
Speaker: Even a leadership role, whether it be leading a small team or the CEO of a small company, there's a lot of these applications that I don't think people naturally think that there's
Speaker: value to capturing those conversations until ultimately they've experienced it.
Speaker: I really think of this as like a hyper networking tool.
Speaker: This is really people, like you said, if they're in a small company and they're maybe a salesperson or a consultant, a leader, somebody that is doing a lot of networking and meeting a lot of people and trying to keep track of that.
Speaker: I know for me personally, I probably talk on LinkedIn way too much.
Speaker: Um, but I meet a lot of really cool people and LinkedIn's great.
Speaker: It's great networking tool, but where it falls down for me personally is in that chat function.
Speaker: How do I really look at all the conversations I've had with Chad over all these posts and all these things?
Speaker: And how do I really capture that?
Speaker: I've used a different smaller CRM product again, which will remain nameless, but more of a personal CRM.
Speaker: And what I found with that product is it didn't work with me.
Speaker: It worked.
Speaker: I guess on the side of me or after I remember to put something in there, it's not intuitive.
Speaker: It's not where you are, why you're working.
Speaker: And the cool thing about blocks is like you said, you have it up in the background right now.
Speaker: It's running.
Speaker: Once you're done the call, you can hop in, you can edit things up and capture the things that you really want to capture.
Speaker: It's a great tool in that regard.
Speaker: One of the other things that I thought was cool is you can add a lot of things after the fact in your notes.
Speaker: So I found you can use an app tag to throw somebody into a note that may not have been at the meeting if you want to associate it with that person.
Speaker: But you could also use tags, hashtags.
Speaker: Explain that feature a little bit more.
Speaker: Like what do you guys, what's the purpose of that?
Speaker: So the hashtag is really for those types of categorizations that don't necessarily fit a person, event, or a company, because we know there's things that get discussed that might not be related to one of those core objects.
Speaker: And being able to tag things in a freeform way, as easy as possible on the fly, either in line or in a tag section, is really powerful stuff that, again, to help coordinate and organize things in the future.
Speaker: And a lot of that
Speaker: We believe that having things organized and tagged up front makes it that much more meaningful and useful in the future.
Speaker: So there's a lot that we want to do with this tagging component within blocks to again, make it more autonomous and more seamless and potentially even more invisible so that it's more
Speaker: the ability to think less about doing it and more just have things happen autonomously that you would have done manually.
Speaker: So that tagging is really to help categorize topics that you discuss or things that aren't automatically labeled.
Speaker: And that's really completely up to the user's discretion on how they want to make use of that.
Speaker: tag topics or it might be projects or however they like to organize and label or file.
Speaker: It's really up to them.
Speaker: And that's why we included that because we do like the simplicity of having things automatically tagged to the events, the people and the companies.
Speaker: But right now, and we're working on improvements for that coming down is to have those tagging of topics and subjects done for you because that ultimately is a way that you're going to
Speaker: recall information and be able to find it.
Speaker: We just think that what we've done now, it's okay, but we have some ideas on how these categorization and subjects can be done even more seamlessly within blocks.
Speaker: So not going away, but definitely being more autonomous again.
Speaker: That's really our focus is to really have the work happen for you and the information presented back to you when you need it without having to think about tagging or
Speaker: editing and all that information.
Speaker: So it's exciting for us.
Speaker: We've definitely got a foundation, but there's a lot more to be done for where we actually want our application to be.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I also like how tags work across both notes and it works really well across to-dos.
Speaker: So what I started doing with my to-dos is tagging them for, is this a personal to-do?
Speaker: Is it a work to-do?
Speaker: What category does it fall into?
Speaker: And I can go into the hashtags and just pick out each one if I want to explore a specific topic.
Speaker: But I think doing that automatically would be really awesome.
Speaker: Yeah, like that, I completely agree.
Speaker: And we have plans in the works to enhance that for sure.
Speaker: But right now we have explored all our options and we found that topic piece is definitely have some value.
Speaker: Maybe not as much as the core values of our people, our events and our companies, but there's definitely a use case to be able to label some of that information.
Speaker: The thing that I like the most about you guys is you're just such tinkerers.
Speaker: It's like, I I've been firing over suggestions and things like that.
Speaker: And I'm getting back all these responses.
Speaker: Like I can't imagine how a human like yourself keeps up with all of this.
Speaker: I mean, there's a lot of stuff coming in.
Speaker: And it's true.
Speaker: And that's the stage that we're at right now.
Speaker: And that's honestly part of startup life.
Speaker: The fact that we're building something from a blank canvas, technologies evolved to a point where we're able to do something completely new and exciting.
Speaker: But ultimately,
Speaker: It requires feedback and sometimes we get stuff right.
Speaker: Sometimes we get stuff wrong, but we're always listening and looking for feedback.
Speaker: And I think that's one of the competitive advantages of being a startup is the fact that you're closest to your users.
Speaker: You're developing like real meaningful relationship and feedback loops that build a better application.
Speaker: And the challenge only becomes when, yeah, there is a lot of feedback to manage, but for the most part,
Speaker: people who use the application, trends and themes emerge pretty quickly if you're looking for them.
Speaker: And sometimes they hit you right in the face.
Speaker: You don't even have to be looking for them.
Speaker: And that's really important.
Speaker: So that's why we appreciate people taking on a beta application, trying it out, giving feedback, understanding that this is a work in progress.
Speaker: It's somewhat fashion, like it's always changing, always evolving and always improving.
Speaker: And that's part of building a new application.
Speaker: We're excited to do that.
Speaker: It's a challenge that we take on to build the best application possible.
Speaker: And ultimately that does involve tinkering, exploring, getting feedback, making changes, adapting all those things and iterating through it repeatedly to get it, to provide the best experience possible for our users.
Speaker: And we like to think that every day we win at least one battle to try to make the application just that much better.
Speaker: I've seen a lot in my journey with technology.
Speaker: I started out in the year 2000, Y2K days.
Speaker: I've seen a lot of stuff.
Speaker: I still miss AOL Instant Messenger, but there's not a lot anymore, be it desktop applications, be it mobile applications, even, I mean, I'll pull back a little bit because there are some exciting things in the world of AI.
Speaker: But it's generally people sort of just doing riffs on stuff we already do or just exploiting features of AI.
Speaker: And when I look at your product, it's just, it's such a fresh take on something that other people doing bits and pieces in a lot of different areas, but not really well and not really combined together.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think timing plays a big advantage for us in this case.
Speaker: Like we started building our applications
Speaker: at the advent of AI.
Speaker: So we didn't have a solution that we tried to add AI to.
Speaker: We built a solution that had AI at the core of it.
Speaker: And we're trying to look at it in a very holistic way instead of, okay, we have this feature, how can we enhance it with AI?
Speaker: It's how can we build a solution that has AI at the core from all elements of interaction?
Speaker: So how can we leverage AI through as many interactions with the application as possible to empower our users,
Speaker: to use that technology to do a lot of the tasks and heavy lifting and effort that may have been done previously, focus on a very specific problem set as well, instead of going too, too broad.
Speaker: And that's always a challenge, at least with our product development is to maintain that focus and our use cases and keep our audience, our target audience well served.
Speaker: But ultimately timing plays a big advantage to us in the fact that we're able to
Speaker: have started our solution from the ground up with a lot of this technology already in place.
Speaker: The challenge is it's evolving so extremely fast.
Speaker: Like it's amazing how much change has happened in the last eight months.
Speaker: Things are advancing.
Speaker: The good point is that for the most part, they're advancing in a very uniform way.
Speaker: Like they're stepping on top of what's already been built.
Speaker: So when the next disruption occurs, it'll be very interesting to see.
Speaker: what happens next.
Speaker: And we like to think that AI definitely acts as a very good assistant.
Speaker: We're not trying to replace people with our solution.
Speaker: And I think that plays a lot to our value.
Speaker: If you can leverage technology to assist and help people, as opposed to making it appear to be this thing that can fully replace you, then it's a way more
Speaker: a valuable proposition to individuals to really recognize that, oh, if I leveraged this technology, it would be like 23, 20 or 30 years ago saying, oh, being scared of the internet.
Speaker: Like there's all these technology inflection points that suddenly change the way we operate.
Speaker: And it feels like AI has become one of those just based on the mass adoption and media attention and audiences that are using AI, like kids in school are already being exposed to it.
Speaker: So it's definitely here to stay.
Speaker: I think about myself, I was raised in the PC era and the internet era, and then came mobile, then came social.
Speaker: And now we're getting into an era of AI that, like you said, school-aged children are going to learn how to master this stuff and they're going to be using it their whole lives.
Speaker: I went through certificate course with MITxPro that was about bringing AI products to market.
Speaker: It was basically, I think it was an eight-week course that we went through.
Speaker: And one of the things that they pointed out in there that you just highlighted is AI works best when it's working alongside and not replacing.
Speaker: And it's so funny to watch
Speaker: I don't want to say corporate America, but everybody looks at it as an efficiency.
Speaker: Okay, ChatGPT can write emails, so let's have it write all of our emails.
Speaker: But the best uses that I've found so far are just where can it work alongside me?
Speaker: Where can it be my assistant?
Speaker: When this tool very much feels like I have an assistant sitting here taking notes for me and collecting my thoughts and collecting the tasks that I have, it's a tool that you can work in rather than
Speaker: jump in every now and then when you remember.
Speaker: ChatGPT is also good like that if you're using it to augment your writing and not, I'm falling out of love with having it writing right for you because I think humans picked up really fast what is written by ChatGPT versus somebody specifically, but for riffing off of ideas, it's great.
Speaker: What are your thoughts?
Speaker: What are your quick predictions?
Speaker: Cause I do want to get into some other topics here, but give me your like elevator speech.
Speaker: What do you tell people about AI at parties?
Speaker: Uh, so for, for me, I think AI it's the first thing that's interesting about AI is that it actually is a topic of discussion at parties.
Speaker: Like coming from a very technical background, generally
Speaker: It's very rare to have these points where it's like something so technical and new is discussed by the masses.
Speaker: So that's really exciting for one thing is the fact that this is a thing that's touched so many people in so many different sectors.
Speaker: I think that shows the influence that it will have.
Speaker: But I think the thing that we really need to remember is that it's still in its infancy.
Speaker: If we look at how the internet started and where it is today, no one could have predicted where it's going to go.
Speaker: It is very difficult to understand it.
Speaker: The only thing that I'm really comfortable saying is the fact that
Speaker: We're very much just at the beginning.
Speaker: So like the internet, we tried to take this set of current workflows and simplify it or make it so it's doable on the internet.
Speaker: And that feels like what we're doing today with AI.
Speaker: It's like, here's all these things that we do.
Speaker: How can AI do them for me?
Speaker: But I think the next progression will be
Speaker: processes and workflows that are very much dictated and driven by AI from end to end with us humans more orchestrating and interacting with them to assist us, then it might completely change the way we work and interact with people.
Speaker: And that's really our focus is if we were to narrow it down how we want to leverage AI,
Speaker: It's to help assist in those interactions and communication with people to just build those stronger relationships.
Speaker: So that's, I think one thing that we can look at is within all these segments, how can this new tool help us modify our behavior, look at problems in a completely new way that
Speaker: we haven't even thought of yet, but I think we're just at the cusp of that.
Speaker: And I think over time, we're going to see a lot of very exciting things happen.
Speaker: It's really just a matter of maintaining the ability to evolve and make sure that we're leveraging the solutions that are there to their full capability, instead of just trying to recreate problems that we solve today in a new way.
Speaker: with a new tool.
Speaker: Let's take a step back and see how we can apply this technology to change the game.
Speaker: If you really dig into it,
Speaker: It's not like AI was born this year or last year.
Speaker: AI has been around for a very long time, but AI was sort of relegated to, quite frankly, statistics and probabilities and things like that.
Speaker: What's really come along with some of the more modern apps that we're working with is we're seeing like AI as a service or AI as almost like a platform where it's made that leap that anybody can use.
Speaker: Having it as a service makes it instantly relatable.
Speaker: It's not like we have to set something up or install a server.
Speaker: We go to a website or install an app on our phone and now we can play with this thing.
Speaker: And that's what's really helped the innovation flow.
Speaker: And then everything is really just riffing off of existing things and plugging into their application.
Speaker: We're really in an interesting phase of AI.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: It's interesting, like you and I were sort of a similar generation where we witnessed the birth of the personal computer, the internet, mobile, and now this.
Speaker: And it's, for me, there was all these false starts along the way, Web 3.0 and all these other things that didn't really quite have the same impact that you see when something is really sustained and takes a graph like AI has so far.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I think just the adoption of it and the way that it's gone from the garage to the mainstream so quickly and has offered so many tangible benefits to the mass population just shows that this is a new technology that's really going to change the way we operate as a society.
Speaker: In some ways good and in some ways bad, like there's always that with technology.
Speaker: But I think it's really important to be accepting of it and try to leverage it for the
Speaker: the biggest benefit on our day-to-day, and that's really important.
Speaker: Well, there you have it, part one of our interview with Chad Carlson, co-founder of Blox.
Speaker: Join us for part two of this interview, where we dive into leadership and culture at startup organizations.
Speaker: Please reach out to us via email and social media.
Speaker: Your questions and ideas are important, and we'd love to give you a seat at the virtual table.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: The content presented in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as professional or legal advice.
Speaker: The host and guests do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information or views presented in this podcast.
Speaker: Any opinions expressed are solely those of individual speakers and do not represent the views or opinions of their respective employers or organizations.
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