Boost Your Productivity With AI (WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER)

Full video transcript

The most productive engineers who were having AI write the code for them were actually the developers who maintained the discipline for breaking down the tasks that they were going to tackle, even though the AI was actually going to write some of the code for them. So you got to think, let that sink in a little bit.

Howdy everyone, welcome back as we prepare for the final keynote of day two for the Scale With AI Summit 2024 with none other than Howdy co-founders themselves, Jacqueline and Frank, who will be coming on here shortly sharing a bit more about how Howdy and you can leverage AI to empower an AI-enabled workforce. Just after our conversation, Jacqueline, a few days ago, where you were sharing your vision of where Howdy’s going, and just the idea of how you guys are approaching the AI-enabled workforce, I thought it was perfectly aligned with where a lot of our sessions have actually lined up with this topic, and how we’re enabling people and leveraging this technology to save time and grow our businesses. So I’m looking forward to this session, and I think you said you had a presentation and some discussion that you guys had prepared, and if you’re all set then I’ll let you guys take the stage, give a little background about who you are, and the floor is yours.

Awesome, thank you so much Darby. I am very excited to be here today with all of you. I’m joined by my co-founder Frank Licea. I am the CEO and co-founder of Howdy.com, he is the CTO and founder of Howdy.com, and we started the company a couple years ago. Our company helps US companies hire and manage their developer team in Latin America – we do other roles as well, but I would say our core competency is in software development.

I’m really excited to share our keynote talk with you and hopefully it puts a nice little bow on everything you guys have been going through the last couple of days. Frank, you missed it, but Darby had asked the audience how it has been going, and we have a really high bar that we need to hit because they said it’s been the best and most useful, so I really hope we hit it.

Absolutely, I’m so happy to be here. We’ve got definitely a wealth of knowledge to share from the hundred or so customers that we work with, the 300 or so teammates that we work with. We watch them use AI, watch them do software development, watch them do marketing projects and everything, so I think we have a little insight to share, hopefully.

Yeah, and the way that this talk is going to go is I’m going to present a bunch of information – the way I typically like to do presentations is think of it like a subtitle, I’m talking and what I’m saying is going to reflect what’s on the slides, so it might go by very quickly. If you are the type of person who likes to do screenshots, don’t worry, like Darby said, it’s all recorded and you’ll be able to go back to it. On certain slides, like the first couple of ones where I’ll have charts and graphs, I will pause on those a little bit longer, but for the most part it’s more designed to help you absorb the information that I’m sharing, especially when we get in these virtual type of environments, sometimes it’s hard to just hear on the go. So that’s what I’m going to do, and then I’m going to pass it over to Frank and then we’re going to open it up for a Q&A, so hopefully we have a lot of time together to answer all of your questions that this presentation brings up. So without further ado, I’ll get started.

So this is the idea of the untapped potential of AI, which, like I said, you’ve probably been exposed to some of the crazy things that AI can do and how it can help you over the last couple of days. I’m going to talk a little bit about how there are two types of people when it comes to AI right now – there are the enthusiasts and there are the skeptics. The enthusiasts are excited about the potential of AI to revolutionize various industries and improve our lives and improve processes – they see AI as a tool for innovation and efficiency. Then there are the skeptics, and the skeptics are people that are concerned about AI’s impact, they’re concerned about the displacement of the human workforce, they’re concerned about displacement of jobs or income, and they have a fear that AI will take over and automate many tasks, leading to widespread unemployment. And of course there are people who vacillate between both – some days they’re excited and some days they’re scared – but the feeling about AI is extreme no matter where you stand, because we have the people that are very enthusiastic about it, we have the visceral fear about it, we have the extreme skepticism, and then of course the very cautious optimism. AI creates a lot of emotion, whether it’s positive or negative – it’s not like you could just be ambivalent about it.

But I’m here to tell you that this is nothing new – this is more or less how it’s always been. Any kind of major advancement that has ever come to humanity and humankind has created widespread fear. In the 1400s when the printing press was invented, there was widespread fear for twofold reasons – one, that the scribes were all going to lose their job and go hungry and die, and two, that giving information to the masses was going to cause human implosion. All it did was actually create a trillion-dollar industry, creating books and sharing knowledge and information. Same thing happened in the 1950s when computers were invented – there was widespread fear that there’d be no need for admins anymore or data entry jobs, when we all know how unbelievable computers have helped our economy. When ATMs were invented, people thought there was going to be no need for bank tellers anymore. When the worldwide web was invented, there was all this fear about really displacing the haves and the have-nots, and same thing with smartphones. So it’s more or less what’s always happened.

This chart was done a year ago, September 2023, and this was really the hypothesis of how much AI will impact each job, whether it’s IT or finance or customer service and sales, operations, HR, marketing, legal, supply chain. The orange here talks about how much of their job will be automated or significantly altered, and the yellow are tasks that are not so much going to have – it’s more of a small impact – and the blue is no impact. As you can see, information technology has the biggest offset based on what they’re thinking AI’s impact on roles are, and it varies based on department, role, and what sector you’re in.

So the invention of artificial intelligence has sparked concerns again, as we all know, about the potential impact on opportunities. However, similar to past technological advances, AI is more likely to transform the nature of work rather than eliminate it, and something we always say at Howdy is that based on the past, the creation of something has only created more. So as AI automates these repetitive tasks and enhances productivity, it will also create more income-earning opportunities and redefine existing roles, and so we’re going to require all of us, every single person on this call, to upskill and adapt our skill sets. At Howdy we are leaning into this and we’re thinking, how can we arm our team to be the most AI-enabled contributors out there? We want them to be educated on the AI tools best available for what they need so they can all be mini CEOs and mini CTOs of an army of AI agents.

If we go back, you can see 75% of it is going to be significantly altered and automated, so how can we enable them and give them the tools that they need so that now all of a sudden they’ve got a team of AI agents doing tasks that they used to have to do very manually. Now I’m sure some of you guys have heard this before, but they say Amazon is the company of 100 CEOs. Every single person on this call, or every single company, can have an infinite amount of CEOs and CTOs and CMOs and all the C-suite roles out there if they’re trained on how to do it properly. But we all know the learning curve is steep and it’s constantly changing, and you may feel behind, but don’t worry – we surveyed thousands of people across the USA at Howdy, and the good news is only 39% of people have used or are using AI on a somewhat regular cadence, whether it’s once a week or every single day. Only 39% of the US working population is using AI in some way – this means even being on this call puts you way ahead of more than half of the working population.

At Howdy we’re making a huge investment into the AI enablement of our team. As I mentioned earlier, we help companies hire and manage software developers in Latin America, and we plan to have every single one of them trained on the highest-value AI tools so each of our developers can produce ten times more than any other developer, and we’re going to talk about how we are going to do that. We’re going to share all this information on this call, and it’s actually way simpler than it may seem, but before we do that, let’s start with the basics. I know you guys have had a few days of fun AI, but I always like to go back to the basics when I’m doing a presentation. What even is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is a field of study that involves the development of computer systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as learning, problem solving, and decision-making. But what does that mean for all of us on the call? It means we can use it to our advantage – it means that we can increase our productivity by ten times, we can get rid of boring repetitive tasks, there are new untapped opportunities, it will improve our decision-making, and it will enhance our spending power. There’s a lot more it’s going to do as well, but those are the key ones.

When we surveyed the folks that were using AI, 65% said they save time on repetitive tasks, 55% have improvement with their workflow optimization, 70% created more resource allocation efficiency, and 80% were able to increase their focus on strategic work rather than just tactical, in-the-weeds work. We know AI dramatically increases productivity, but let me dive into just one of the biggest time-savers AI has helped with for me, so I can give you guys an example of how I use it and how I think about it. This is brainstorming and drafting.

I give a lot of presentations, and I’ve spoken at TechCrunch, Y Combinator, South by Southwest, and the like, and this used to be my normal workflow before giving a talk. On average it would take me 50 to 70 hours – the reason being I would spend about 10 to 15 hours doing research, whether that’s gathering information, reviewing industry trends, analyzing conflicting viewpoints. I’d spend another about 20 hours brainstorming different ideas, sketching concepts, storyboarding, outlining the presentation, getting feedback from peers. I then spend the next 20 to 30 hours doing the creation of the content – writing the script, creating the presentation, designing the presentation, refining the visuals. You can get really lost in the hours it can take to do a presentation, and then of course I would spend two to five hours reviewing, revising, fixing, practicing the presentation. That previous workflow is meticulous and an insanely time-consuming process – it requires significant time to research, brainstorm, and create content to deliver a presentation that is polished and impactful.

Now with AI I have a much faster way of doing this. There is an AI tool called ChatHub – you don’t need to remember it, but just so you know, it’s basically like six LLMs in one. So normally if you were to go to ChatGPT and talk to ChatGPT, or Llama, or Claude, or any one of those, you would have one screen – this is like six of them in one. So I used ChatHub, a tool with six powerful large language models, to brainstorm and generate ideas – it’s like I’m talking to six people at the exact same time. I then leverage the six different LLMs to refine my ideas, clarify key points, and use the different components to understand different perspectives – it’s like talking to six different people. Then I take all that information and work with ChatGPT to structure the presentation effectively, so these six LLMs massively shrink my research, brainstorming, and content creation from 50 to 70 hours all the way down to 5 to 7 hours. It’s the reason I’m even able to give this talk – had I been asked a couple years ago I would have had to decline because I wouldn’t have had enough time. It’s November 2024, and if you guys were ever part of a larger organization, or are currently part of one, this is heavy into budget season, heavy into strategic planning for 2025 – setting aside two weeks to work on this presentation would have just been a non-starter, but the great news is we were able to say yes because it wasn’t that much time anymore.

So saying yes to this presentation in three easy steps: brainstorm with ChatHub, storyboard with ChatGPT, and then create the presentation with a tool called Beautiful.ai – that’s how I was able to expedite this entire process. The benefits, as you guys know, saved me 10x the time, improved my efficiency, gave me a seamless integration with Google Slides, which is the one I always use to make all my presentations, and helped me with visuals and effects to convey to the audience. So 54 hours saved with a new workflow, going from 60 to 6 hours – that’s a 10x improvement. As a CEO and founder on the other end of this call, I’ve earned 54 hours back that I can spend doing other things that are mission-critical to Howdy.com.

I even use LLMs to be my adviser on all aspects and subjects – here’s another quick example. We have a corporate attorney that charges $750 an hour. Before AI, I would have to consult my attorney about everything, even dumb questions, because you probably didn’t want to Google random questions you had about certain legal structures, whether from contracts or implications – I had to consult them for everything, and they charge for everything, trust me, there’s no freebies in the land of the law. Now I upload all of our red-lines, get a deep understanding of what’s happening, and then send the lawyer to execute exactly what needs to be done. What used to be a 10-hour bill at $7,500 is now $750, because I get all my information from just talking back and forth with ChatGPT – I understand what needs to happen, I reach out to my lawyer, and say hey, these are the changes we need to make. It’s so simple and it saved so much money. There are millions of other ways to use AI to help save time and money – there are content creation tools you can use for text generation, for image editing, for video editing, for multimedia synthesis, there are AI task automation tools for calendar scheduling, email management, social media posting, data entry automation, project management, there are data analytics tools like Google Analytics.

[The presentation continues into a discussion of how Howdy trains its developer teams on AI tools, followed by an audience Q&A.]

Frank, tip number two – quick little tip for you all: it feels, because these systems are really magical, or they feel magical, it feels like I’m just going to give it a brain dump and start to work on that, and that works for the first draft 100%, but at a certain point what you want to do is take a step back and really start to break it up into tasks, and then tackle those tasks one at a time, just like you would any other complex project. I think that’s the big misnomer, right – yes, it makes complexity easier, but the tools for managing complexity are just tools for proper thinking, not necessarily magic wands, and especially not magic wands in the age of AI. So that’s the first tip for you there.

I want to add something – it’s also the reason why when you’re trying to offload what you’re doing, it should take days or weeks, not hours. I think, like Frank was saying, we’ve got these sexy tools that can do all of these things, but whatever it is that you’re doing, you’ve developed so much knowledge around that subject, and so if you really spend the time to break it down, it’s going to take a lot longer, but the more work you do upfront – especially however we’ve identified it, whether it’s in software development or customer service or in sales – the better these tools are going to be in offloading the productivity to them, when you’re going in accomplishing it. It’s proven time and time again – whether you’re 10x more productive, 4x, 1x, it really depends on how you break it down.

Yeah, that’s 100% right, and this obviously applies for a big complex project where you break it down and everything, and then use AI in parallel with that structure, but it also works for very easy tasks. One example is I was making a meal plan for my daughter who just moved.

[The session closes with audience Q&A and a partnership offer.]

If you guys want to go to Howdy.com/scale and you can say you’re from Scale With AI Summit, you’ll get the $500 off, but if you wanted to go directly to Howdy.com/scale, we have a special offer for everyone that joined the summit and also who are a part of Gen AI University – that’s $500 off, and if someone does go through and hire, it’s applied towards whoever they’re hiring through you guys. Awesome, it’s generous of you guys to offer that, and I’m just excited about our partnership and how we’re going to be able to continue to grow together over the course of the remainder of this year, but of course 2025 and beyond. And for everyone that’s tuning in with us here, thank you all for joining us for day two of the Scale With AI Summit – we’ll be back tomorrow live and ready to rock and roll, 9:00 a.m. Central Standard Time, to finish the summit out with day three. We’ve got a lot of great sessions planned for you tomorrow, and until then, keep coming AI on, and we’ll see you guys on the other side. Cheers, y’all. Awesome, thanks everyone, thank you for having us, thank you, bye.