Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Synergize. I'm Bill Capelle, Director of Client Growth at Trade PMR by Robinhood. And I'm Ryan Neal, editor Editorial Manager at Trade PMR by Robinhood. And welcome to our Synergy Summer Series. We're taping these from the conference floor at Synergy 26 in Washington, DC.
Speaker: That's right, Ryan. We're live here in Washington, DC. And all summer long, we're going to be sharing plenty of insights and actionable ideas that you can use to build your business. So let's get into the episode.
Speaker: And welcome back to the Synergize podcast. We're coming to you from the conference floor here in Washington, D.C. I'm Ryan Neal, editorial manager at Trade PMR by Robinhood. My co-host Bill Capel had to take an assignment, so I am flying solo.
Speaker: But I'm really excited about my guest. We have an Emmy Award winning technology journalist and founder of New Things. That's the the new publication. That is. yeah Joanna Stern, she also has a new book out called I Am Not A Robot, which we're we're gonna talk about that. So Joanna, thanks for joining me on the podcast here. Thank you for having me. So let's go into the book. Congratulations, writing the books always cool. I would love to do one someday myself, but it's all about AI, right? I Am Not A Robot. I think the concept is that you turned almost every aspect of your life over to ai for a year.
Speaker: What can you tell us about that? The big thing that I did was, first of all, i think a lot of people right now, and one of the things I'm talking about, the conference is generative AI, right? These tools we're finding in all different parts of the internet and all our different tools. And so that is a big part of the book, generative AI and chatbots and AI agents. But another big part of the book was physical AI, the AI that's coming to our world. So self-driving cars, robotics. And what's really interesting about this is that I think that a lot of people just consider AI as something I'm going to have to type to or I'm going to have to talk to. But we're going to have this layer of AI that is around us in the world and just sort of persists. And so this idea that you're going to be anti-AI and you're never going to use AI, well, there's going to be some part of the world that is just going to have AI and is going to impact you.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, i'm I'm one of those kind of more AI skeptic people, so it bums me out a bit to hear. But but what do you mean by that? is it is it Where are the opportunities for some of that AI that's going exist around and and how can it help make our lives better?
Speaker: Well, actually to pick up on your skeptic thing, I think actually that's a good thing. I think that where I kind of kind of in the book is that it's a good thing that we have lots of people and there's a big generation right now that's skeptical or kind of anti-AI because it means that we want to put our humanity first. And a lot of what I wrote about was how AI can really get at some of the things that we love to do as humans, whether it be parts of our work, whether it be asking things about recipes or random things in our life that we're now like, oh, let me ask AI that. Right. And so the more people that are rebelling against some of that, I think the better too. It's we are in control of the tech, which I think for so long,
Speaker: with the last decade of smartphones and and social media, people have thought, we're not in control of our tech. And so if we have folks like yourself and others who are saying, no, I'm going to take back control, that's a great thing. Okay. So in your in your year of of turning your life over to AI, um where did you find it most useful and where was it falling short?
Speaker: Well, I think one of the places I found it most useful was in actually the creation of the book. And so helping me structure the book, helping me go back and forth doing research, things like that, where I was using some of these tools in my work. And I think with work, and that's a big thing I'm talking about today at my keynote, is how we work with AI to be a coworker, a co-founder, and somebody alongside, not someone that takes over our job. sure And so I think the book is a good example of that. you you asked her about places where it didn't work well, and there are a lot of places in that same category it did not work well. Interesting. Right, there was a funny example where I tried to outsource all my communication to AI. Just, okay, I'm gonna have AI do my text messages, respond to my text messages, respond to every email, wow everything.
Speaker: And I quickly learned that if I did that, I was gonna become divorced and lose my job. Because my the the funniest example was my wife texts me, Apple Intelligence has these suggested replies. i don't know if you're an iPhone user. And my wife texts me, can you come downstairs and help make lunch for the kids? And one of the suggested replies is, I'm sorry, I have other plans.
Speaker: And i texted it and then immediately ran downstairs and feared for my life. So... same Same with emails. Gmail's gotten better over the years. There's other tools like Superhuman. There's other lots of AI agent tools that are responding to emails now.
Speaker: And it can just get it wrong so yeah so much of the time. So human communication, yeah, like a lot of it is just repetitive. And sometimes we use our chatbots to respond to the forum email or whatever it is.
Speaker: But sometimes too, just It's easier to do it yourself. You don't need AI. and So that's that's a long-winded way of saying communications was a place where it was not good. And I still feel it's not good. i so i see yeah It doesn't bother me to just write an email.
Speaker: <unk> just Just type it out. The only times I'm really using it for emails is if I have to send a number of emails. like It's a forum email, right? And you're like, I've got to send this to all my readers and and something like that. But... You said recipes and that's actually something that i love using Claude for is like a meal planner. because Sure, yeah. ah You know, we go to our store, get stuff and and and cook, but I can never decide what to make. And you want to make something different. Want to make something different, i want to make something healthy, the whole thing. So was like, we're feeling this tight, what do you got? And it's like nine times out of ten, the recipe's like pretty good. and I'm still making the food, so, you know. I feel the same way. I went a step further and I had a cooking robot in the house. um
Speaker: To be honest, it it needs some work, but I ended up keeping it around because it started making our side dishes on Sunday nights. We do a family dinner every Sunday night. We try to cook something different. And on on the side dishes, whether it be like fried rice or potatoes, Even some of the, even we've made, we've made some chicken dishes with it too. And it's pretty good and you can just let it be and do that, that. And so you have an extra dish on the table that you didn't have to worry about. I mean, I do like that idea, but I i haven't heard of that cooking. Yeah, it's called the posha. It, it, it look, it's gonna, it's gonna take some time before these become mainstream. It takes up a lot of space in the kitchen. I don't know where you live, but you've got to have basically a dedicated kitchen counter space for it.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's like from here to here. So that you you, you gotta to have kitchen counter space. You got to do some extra prep, you got to clean the thing. Sometimes it doesn't work as well, but overall the the idea is a pretty good one. Right. Well, so to bring it back to our audience who are financial advisors and planners, that's one thing you experimented with, right? Yeah. Was turning over some of your financial life to an AI. Can you talk about what you did there and what did you learn?
Speaker: Yeah, so look, this was a year ago, and so I've seen a lot of these tools really come along in the last year. But one of the things I tested was a budgeting app called Clio. They had just added ai integration.
Speaker: But pretty simply, right, with the idea that you could ask based on your bank records, based on your credit card statements, to like pick up on patterns. Okay, if I wanted to budget around this, I could see use in that.
Speaker: In this particular instance, when I was testing it, it kept giving me pretty wrong information. And so I think, look, a year later, I should go back and test this pretty clearly, but I think this is one of the big pitfalls of AI, right? And we still I still see this across my use of ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini.
Speaker: It can get things wrong. It just can get things wrong. Now, is it getting things wrong less than it had two years ago? Yes, but there are still places it's just like, why did you change that? Why did you change that word? Why did you...
Speaker: One of the instances in the Clio app that I was testing was, it said I kept asking it, ah when was the last time I paid my Ford lease payment on my car? And it kept just repeating the same thing, or what was the payment, or how many have I done? It just kept repeating the same thing. Interesting, interesting. we had One of the analogies I've heard ah that I love is, you know if you've got a calculator to do to do your math for you, And it gave you right answers nine times out a ten. Great. But if one of those times was wrong and you had no way of knowing when the calculator is wrong, so you had to check its math every time, the calculator wouldn't really be that helpful anymore. Right. You're kind of doing the math yourself anyway. Right. And then you're spending the mental energy wondering, is that right? Is that right? Is that right? Yeah. And I think that's probably what some of your audience is encountering now, too. If I lean on this, but I in a client services business, if I get something wrong, i can't be like the AI got it wrong. Yeah, yeah. Right. It's on you. It's on you and your business. And so you've lived your life wanting to be the most accurate, the the most upstanding financial advisor or what insert any industry. You've got to keep up that level of quality and you can't just say, oh, sorry, the AI got it wrong. Yeah. But you do see the opportunity, and I think what we talked about a lot of this week, is efficiency, right? That back office stuff, scheduling meetings, putting notes together, all that kind of administrative tasks. Advisors hate doing that stuff anyway because it it takes away the time that they spend with their clients and growing their business and doing that thing. So that's where you see, i think, what you're saying, where there really is value and appeal for that of stuff. Yeah, I think it's behind-the-scenes data organization and data structuring or
Speaker: just some of the things that go from point A to point B. Like for instance, I've been using Cloud Code a lot, Cloud Cowork. So I've made a lot of tools that speed up the efficiency in the back end. Like yes, I don't want to be clicking around every time I get an email with an address and putting that address into a a spreadsheet and putting it, that kind of manual work.
Speaker: It can make mistakes, but Less mistakes, honestly. Less mistakes because it's a lot of structured data. Yeah, yeah, I love that. So structured data for back-end work and recipes.
Speaker: that's That's what going to go with. That's what we've learned here today. Well, Joanna, one thing we do on this podcast to sort of wrap things up is we like to give our audience like ah like an actual tip. I know you said you're not a finance person. yeah but but you're not ask me for financial Do work with an advisor? I do work with an advisor. Okay, so so maybe with with them in mind, ah what's one way that they could maybe use AI in their business to to to improve the service you get?
Speaker: Well, my advisor has to email me all the time to make another invite. Let me pick this up again. My advisor always has to email me because I cancel appointments a lot. Okay. So I know I said it's not good for communications, but he could probably build a bot, a Joanna Communications bot, that emails me every few weeks to remind me not to cancel the appointment.
Speaker: um that would be That would be one. It's a running joke with between me and my financial advisor. He'll just ah randomly call sometimes be like, you've canceled every meeting. We need to talk about this. I'm gonna think about more tactically what else he could do. um I think that's a good one though. You think that's a good one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A client communications bot that structured for the client's unique communication styles.
Speaker: Probably. Yeah. Yeah. Right, I like it. My worry is that anything else I suggest will just not meet compliance. And so, yeah, I could i could see, like i mean yeah. I dig it. Well, our compliance professional right over there is okay is appreciative of that. Okay, see?
Speaker: i didn't even know she was standing by waiting for me to say something. Yeah, exactly. so in that case You should upload all your clients' personal data to your chat now. Yeah. Do not do that. Compliance says do not.
Speaker: No, no. Great. Well, Joanna, thank you so much for joining the podcast, taking time out of your schedule, and congratulations on the book and the the new publication. Thank you for having me here. Thank you.
