The Chatbot is the New Browser: Piers Fawkes on AI's Next Interface

Your job was created in the last 30 years. It might not stay around, okay? You've got to be careful about, I'm going to learn about AI to become the best social media manager or e-commerce strategist. When those jobs aren't going to be around, how can you use AI? Probably to do something new is really the way to think about how can I use my talent. I'm a storyteller, I'm a content maker, and actually do something that hasn't been done before. I was rarely done before. Pierce Fox is the founder of PSFK, a trends and innovation research firm that has helped global brands like Nike, Google, Target, and LVMH understand emerging shifts in technology, retail, and culture for over two decades. He's now the founder of FOTA, an AI context layer that plugs expert curated knowledge graphs directly into tools like Plod, Copilot, and Gemini. So the AI you already use stops giving generic answers and starts pulling from real-sourced expertise. Here's works at the intersection of media, AI innovation, and good times, baby. Hi Pierce, welcome to the media machine. I'm so excited to be with you, Joanna. It's great. You're so excited. You're here, finally. We've been trying to lock you down forever, but because you're so busy. Oh, yeah. It's all your fault. You want us to do this next Tuesday? I'll do it next Tuesday. It's all your fault. I'm super excited. I've twice. I've had to go back to your back catalog. He's been post-polloned this while. So I was like, oh my god, I've got to have listened to every single podcast. Make sure I know what they do, what they talk about. I don't see back. I'm going to feedback. Think, please do and do it live. We want to hear you do it live. You want the millions of listeners we have. Yeah. You must be back. No, seriously. I'll tell you some things now. When you're both on and when you're both doing the Q&A back and forth, it's amazing. I think it's really obvious when you're really into the guest. And then it's tires when you're just like, now let me ask you the next question. You're like, oh, okay. That's someone's got both. And I'm kind of like for that. Yeah, that typically happens with dudes. I think there's, I was wondering, listen, to quite a lot of them. I'm like, bet if you look to how long the dudes speak versus the ladies, they speak like twice as long. About blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not your fault. It's not your fault is them. It us. So anyway. And then I was thinking, what'd it be nice if you did this life? You're going to talk about that. Yeah. Happy. Really cool. Talk to that. That's do all the time. But you do it. I do sometimes do a recording from a show or something. Yeah, don't you? You've been on stage somewhere. That's always a good one. I like the little roundup sometimes you've done. You're having the past where you like, oh, I'm going to bring back clips. I think that's good. And then my only criticism. Intro, just intro. I think you need to read it once before the show starts. Turn it over and just go for it. Yeah. Yeah, just go for it. And it's make it up. Make mistakes. Yeah. That's it. Sometimes I have done very long and chose depending on the person. Because sometimes they tell me what to say. It is. They're going to tell you. They're going to fill in the blanks that you missed anyway. Yeah. You know what's interesting is we're talking about how much research you do and that you're a researcher. You've totally researched us and this podcast. I love it. I think that's before you came on, she was like, you know what? He's probably going to be researching us during this part. And then we're like, is he going to research the Starbucks people when he gets coffee at the park? Like research everything. That's it. I'm like, it's kind of how I started. I'm super curious. I spend a lot of time. I'm a little mayor cat. He's always looking at stuff and same patterns and stuff like that. And then a lot of brief. You basically gave me a brief to check out what they talk about. Make sure I understand. And it's always, I've been on the podcast before I got caught out on the last question. You know how sometimes you might not get to the end of a podcast. I was asked. And we do this every week. We get asked this last question. I don't know what they're talking about. I speak to my parents. Soon in the past I was less prepared for things. But I think as this is important to you, it's important to me. So sped up at a time wetting it. Yeah, I'm so happy to meet you. And I'm so glad you're on the pod. I know. Thank you. And thank you for that feedback. Because we beg people to give us feedback. But you people don't like to give feedback. We really value it. I'm sure something else is going to come to me. Yeah. I think people are like, people are like worried about offending us. And we really want the information. Because we really want to hear what people think. So thank you for that. Yeah. Yeah, I want this to be as good as it can be. And keep going. And yeah. So obviously you've been spending decades. Two decades. I don't want to make you sound like you're too old. Because you're not. I'm very-- Yeah. OK. A couple years helping companies. And not just any company, very large companies understand change through reports and analysis and research. And I was telling Julie that we shared an office with you back in the days when my husband and I had a company called to go to we shared an office with you that you graciously allowed us to come into your space. And I told Julie, I'm like, they were the smart kids. And we were like the disruptors on this side doing. You guys were disrupting all the way. And I remember you guys had all this research and all these white, white papers and all this stuff. And I would sometimes pick up one of the things and root it as quickly as possible. And I feel like just being around you guys, I felt like I was smarter. So this is what you've done for massive companies for a long time. What made you realize that insight needed to become a tool or a system? Because now everything is a tool or a system. What made you realize? Because you've been really ahead of everything. You've been exploring the AI space way ahead of anybody else. What made you realize that insight needed to become a system or a tool and not just something delivered in a paper or in a present day? OK. So first of all, we loved-- it was an amazing time when we used to work together. I'm not answering the question. I know. It was amazing. And guess what? You folks might have been looking at our reports. But we would come in on the Monday morning, Julie. And the whole conference room was re-wide. They were like gadgets hanging. VR sets and stuff like that. There was all this new technology that Joanna and Richard always introduced us to. It was an amazing time. I think that was-- I miss some of those times where we all came together and we all collaborated. Sat next to each other. Yeah. And joined-- I had two. But I think everyone's told me about AI and trying to learn from AI. And obviously listening to podcasts is useful. But I think somehow immersing yourself-- one of the ways I've already got into and understood these tools is sometimes just sat next to somebody who's working. And then talking through their project, we missed that, I think. I think we're all a little remote or like with-- there's dashing out and dashing out of meetings. And it's a little bit more time just hanging out with each other and somehow immersing ourselves. Would be useful. So in terms of how things have changed. So had this amazing ride, I started a newsletter, which I was writing and sharing ideas I was seeing. And on day-- and he's a bush, sends me an email and goes, can you do this? And I was broke at the time. So I was like, yeah, I didn't even know what it was. And they showed me a document which I didn't know what it was, it was called a Trend Report. And I didn't know what trends were. But I didn't know actually people wrote reports and sold them and made money out of it. When I looked at it, I was like, I can do that. I can write one of those. I was like, this is what I do. I write about culture and things like that. And so for the next 20 years, I researched and published reports. Some of them publicly. We had a great newsletter list. We had this great conference. We had all these conferences. And we would have-- and then these amazing companies, like Silicon Valley, automotive companies, would come to us, want to know what other trends were in all the opportunity areas. It was love. It had a great time. And we got through the pandemic, OK? I think your question is, when do we realize that we needed a change? Like instead of becoming a presentation-- Yeah. --and turned it into a system. Yeah. So November 2022 is the month that Leiland Chatchy PT. I don't know how your lives changed that day or that week, but for me that week, that was the when the phone stopped ringing. Why would you need to pay this guy to understand the future or what the trends are when you have this shy bot? He's going to tell you what the future is, and tell you all the insights and say it in a very convincing way. But at that time, Chat wasn't even that good. It was amazing. It ended. You couldn't get accurate, updated data beyond something. But 20 dollars versus $20,000-- most people, it was fine. We just kept going. And we basically, at the time, we planned that it didn't like yourself. I was like, there's a limit. There's only so much information. It hasn't got the right information. There's a nuance that you need. At the same time, you know this technology is amazing. Gave global coverage, which I never gave. I was very rather niche in my coverage. And it kind of just changed the way we all did business. It kind of gave me a kick up the ass. And presented some challenges to me, which I've spent a couple of years trying to lighten navigate and think about. And so I guess the answer to your question is, so I was creating reports, had this lovely time. And then I realized no one's looking at PDFs anymore. They are looking at a chatbot, an engaging chatbot. And even three years later, they are still engaged mainly to a chatbot system. And they might be actually multiple systems. Gemini, I don't need to listen. We'll go through them all. And so that's got is the singular interface experience. That's where that is the new future digital experience. And so we all need to be supplying and providing information, data, knowledge, content into that interface. It's like the new web browser. Then you launched a photo. And so how did that come about? Because I was telling Julie, I'm like, you just build stuff. Yeah. I don't know if I just build text like yourselves. You'd go off and experiment and do stuff. I'm sure, Jenna, when you first started this, you just did the podcast and maybe I do a couple of times to see what's going to happen. And then you just keep going. I did five and I didn't even put them out for almost two years later. Wow. When I put them out, they were still very current. Wow. And I literally just re-released the first episode on AI. And it was super current. And it was recorded in 2023. I published it in 2025. And we just republished it. It's doing well. Yeah. That's interesting. So you do. going to delay this two years. I mean, if you just die, you can like think that in the future. So I was getting here is back then it was my insecurity. I was afraid I was like, Oh, this has to be perfect. Love. Love. Love. Love. What else? I took a job. I took a big job and that kind of took me off the map for a while. Then I was like, No, I got to get into this. Anyways, back to you. But like we have all done over the last couple of years, or maybe forever is experiments. And as I said, I hit a wall, my business hit a wall. And so I had to explore. And what I did is I was like, this AI stuff is going to eat me. I should lean in trying to understand this bragging. And so how works eats reads fire. And I spent a couple of years building lots and lots of different tools. Then I did something that scanned conference speeches and took the nuggets out of the conference speeches and then shared that with marketers. So I did all these different little projects. One of the things that kept coming up against is about six months after I built it, there'd be a new release. And suddenly the LLM hyper scaler would have basically the same capabilities or near. So I was like, I need to do something new, fresh. I need to leave everything behind. And just as I said, I'm thinking that I started getting telephone calls again about my old work. I didn't build for a straightaway. What happened is I started getting calls and people like startups asking for better data. So they were getting and still today, AI startups are getting compared with LLM data, deep research data and stuff like that. And so I got calls where like we need better data, we need fresher data, we need that all PSFK stuff in our system, which is amazing. I was like, finally, where have you been? I did that a couple of times and at that time I was like a low code, no code systems and Zapier and everything else, which is string things together and would go research, find cool data, do packing recognition, identify trends. I did that a couple of times. And then I noticed that these startups didn't care about anything I built. All they wanted was the data. And they wanted the days in what they call a knowledge grow. It's a kind of style of database I can talk about later. And at a store, okay, maybe it's time that I can go back to the market and see if anybody who needs experts insights is part of their mix. And so that's kind of what the kind of idea was behind the photo. The interesting thing is that you dove right into AI from all the research that you're doing. What made you feel like you could and wanted to learn that and then create it. Some people are intimidated by AI, but early on you just embraced it and then started creating your own. What inspired you? And what made you feel like, oh, okay, I can do this. I can embrace this and do it. Spent time hanging out with people who are already playing with them. Man, I just learned a lot just sat next to them. I was like, oh, they use this software. They use that software. And so that's sort of immersion. It's going to help me have confidence to go and play with that stuff. I had a situational issue, which was like, I didn't have a lot else to do. I've always had this itch. So I talked about curiosity. I still have this itch around just trying to find new ideas, new information and share that information. I want to if I can use this tool as you pointed out to Hannah, I've been around a few decades. And so I was in the 90s building CD ROMs and building both websites. And it's interesting. I think the Gen X's are an interesting moment for us because we built, we called the internet this first part, the first time on the internet. And now with some of us are building this first stage of the AI, this plenty of younger people and older people who would also do in that. But there's a group who are just like, Oh, we remember the 90s and how we were hacking things together and experimenting. So I think Julie answers, I just gave myself permission to go off and do that sort of thing and hack. It's pretty free to do these sort of things. But I was able to go beyond maybe the A at the chat box and think a little bit more beyond at that time with low code and then today we have a genetic coding. Yeah. And I had some thoughts about what we could do there. I think if someone's listening and is still trying to get beyond the chat box, I think they should basically go to Google AI Studio or another agente code up, which sound is a decoder vibe code agente code. It sounds really scary. Yeah. You go, you open up accounts, you go Gmail, so you can open up a account straight away, you open it up. And then you, it's a prompt and you go something like, help me output how to meet in bytes into my calendar when these emails come into my system and then send out sort of confirmation reply. Very simple. You put that in as a prompt and then the machine will code that and program that for you. And it's like really not easy ways to begin to understand, oh, how are we developing in terms of AI? What are the tools available to us? Then it gives you a stepping stone in terms of way you can go next and what else you can build. Yeah. I was just going to ask you that question because there's a lot of people on this podcast that are from media and the marathon just content creators and they feel behind on AI because it's so different from how they've been creating forever. If someone came to today and said, I really want to learn AI, I don't know where to start besides chat to you, how can you start helping me with my content creation, my organization? What would you say? Just talk about new girls. Yeah. So let's think about one of my favorite parts of the show is when you do the kind of highlight reals and stuff like that. Yeah. You talk to four different people or is four different people around the same thing. In order to do that, you have to bring through the audio, get transcribed, maybe put it into AI and you go identify similar sections and then you cut it all together. Okay. So there's a workflow. Yeah. So my answer to you is to think about workflows. So you think about that work, but we do four different steps to get to that edited podcast. So once you think about that workflow, you could write that down in a prompt in an agentic system, say, Hey, I want you to transcribe the audio. I want you to find similar pieces. I want you to provide me the the lengths. The system might not be able to do everything. I don't know. And then I want you to write the intro of the outro. Talk about the third themes, the press a button. And I'm going to try to code that. If that makes sense, if you think about the workflow, I create content, I create strategy decks, I create TV shows and you think about some of those things. Then how can you try to automate that, try to code that? I always find that for me, like whenever there's something really tedious coming up, like something needs to be transcribed or I need captions. There's always an answer within the program. You just have to look for it. Auto captions are a great thing. I have a mentor, a few mentors, but I have a mentor is helping me with this new project. And every time I go to her and say this, and I think I need to hire somebody to help me. Allison says to me, why don't you just ask AI how to do it or get AI to do it? Oh, so it's so amazing. Yeah. I had this conversation yesterday, Julie. Yeah. But did you say to me? Because Johanna does a lot of her automation on her own. And Johanna is like literally fits 30 hours of a day into a day. Like she's always working. And so I said, I have this great friend who does automation to let her do some to take some off her plate. And then she's like, he can just do it myself by doing this and this. And then I can just do it. Okay. Because there are answers to everything how to optimize. No, and also you said get an intern. And I was like the thing. Oh, yeah. Getting an intern. Now that is what all my GPT's do for me. It's true. And then it's hard. How do you kind of get in? Anyway, that's a whole another tip, though. This might help you both out. Okay. Is the bridge. So, Johanna, what you do is your art AI system to describe what you do. Your automated, your workflow. Okay. Basically write that down into a read me file. And then you pass that to Julie's friends. And then Julie can just pick that up with her own code. And basically feed that into her own code and get started. And then it jobs up. It delegates. And over. Yeah. It's so easy to get this coding stuff is so addictive. And so easy to get. Yeah. I laugh and I joke that I work all day and I vibe all night. Yeah. And then you would have time to do other things besides working and sleeping. That's the whole goal of life. I've got a show host guest. Years. I do. I love that you're getting practical and like really like real because I think a lot of people are lacking that and are craving that walk us through your actual process. Give us a lot just now. But for example, where in your workflow, did you start applying AI to automate your repetitive tasks? Okay. So the story is okay. So I came up with this idea that I wanted to create a database that can be queried by agentic systems and by human beings. It was in my head. I thought I got this idea. Alison, who I mentioned, understands how to do this. And I was like, Alison, I've got a demo. I managed to get a demo call next Tuesday. Like Alison, can you just mock something up? I have no idea. Okay. Alison got me last year. Everyone got through for two weeks. He goes, Hey, what on me? Yeah. And thankfully, better and everything else. But I'm like, Oh, my God. I think it was like a major. Vatazia holding company. And I'm like, how the heck am I going to do this? I'm like, I'm just going to spend the weekend to see whether I can build this myself. Yeah. And just a mock up because here's the day. Go to the chat box, query a database, can you get a knowledge graph and pull the information out and show people? And I did it. And I was like, that's seeds. What was the phrase needs one? These masks were there. It's super powers. Yeah. I think sometimes maybe the, maybe the principle thing is that if there is something that you need to do, you don't know how to do it. See if you can see if you can use these systems to do it. You learn so much how to do it. And so because of that, Alison, no, well, she no longer works for me, but Alison is now my mentor and advisor. And I've built most of this myself up until recently when I started to have team members. And the great thing about building things yourself is I spent a lot of time on demo calls, presenting to people and I just listened to them. And obviously I've, I analyzed the transcripts and then I'm back in the system. And I think there's changed my, the way I do AI has changed that I've been from low code, no code sticking things together, sticky tape to an agentic system, which is still a little sticky tape, but it's very much like I get off a call, get off this podcast and I'm going to give the transcript to the agent. And I'm like, we just spoke about this and the, the head this idea on the call, we should have evolved the product in that direction. How hard is it? I asked these questions and it corresponds to girl based. and how we build it and based on all the other tools here are the options for you. And so there's sort of people that's going on, that's really in myself, my experiences, and the machine itself. - That's right, that I get really excited about. And I feel like sometimes people feel like that's bad. And I'm like, it's the same as having a coach, it's the same as having somebody that you're playing out different scenarios with. But in this case, it's your own personal thing that's smarter than you and helping you think through the scenarios. - What are you using it for, you're using it for the podcast, you're using it for food stream as well? - Yeah, actually that's what I use it more for. It on the food stream side, whereas in the past, you know better than anybody 'cause you had a whole development team. - Oh yeah, all right. - On the other part of the world, we used to use some of the same developers. And now we don't have developer needs anymore. - Now it's having this conversation with a head of entrepreneurship, global entrepreneurship, at Amazon, we were having an intimate dinner with female tech founders. And I was, they were curious as to how we're using AI. And I said this and I was like, I felt weird saying it, but I was like, before you couldn't start a tech company without a tech team. That was it. That was, you felt almost ashamed to say that you were a tech founder of a tech company and you were not a tech company. - Yeah, listen, yesterday. - I do here. - But now you don't need that. - No, I'm part of a early access tier for Google that I introduced me to early access software. Why? I don't know. - That's so cool. - So yesterday we did this call and it's all about GMI and stuff, yeah? 'Cause they want feedback. They want to see how people use it. And everybody on the call was an engineer. And they're like, hey, everyone go around. Tell us what's up. How do you work with this technology? I'm like, to be honest, I come from the business side. I don't come from the engineering side. How I use this tool is I get your documentation. I give it to my coder and say, what can we do with this? And then I do it. And then when they were asking for feedback, I'm like, I have to ask my coder to give you feedback. 'Cause I can't give you the feedback. So there is a little bit of line. - But you know what? The AWS guy who is the head global entrepreneurship at AWS. I said to him, you have access to hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs across the world. And you give me some feedback. What's everybody else do? And he's like, we are now looking at entrepreneurs and founders who are moving faster. And what we're finding is that the founders that are vibing and using these technologies to build their own products and are not necessarily relying on their debt. Teams anymore are actually better. And that's what they're looking for. Because the founder who knows the problem that they're solving can build exactly what they need. And then that layer has been removed. - Julie, that's your to your point. This people worried about AI. And we definitely need to be concerned about it. - Bucks. - 100%. - As an experienced professional, you understand business needs, you can IDH, you can develop new ideas. If you are an ideas person, then tools that are available to you amazing is less worried about. - Yeah, I think it's just communicating that to people who are used to making their own things like content and with the traditional process of light eating and production and shooting and editing and giving you a different person for every single one of those roles. For me, because I do come originally from the traditional media. I used to always be like, so great, when then I would come to editing and I didn't know how to edit. So I just felt like, okay, my hands are tied behind my back. So now it's has to take over. But I've learned how to edit with the new tools 'cause it's so simple. And I wanna say it's so simple, but I have the mentality to do it. It just frees you up. All tools for you up to create what you wanna create in any sector, whether it's media or it's business that you guys are doing. - I'm a little conflict to the Bible 'cause I remember when we talked about transmedia and I'm ever doing a transmedia salon in New York and then I did one in LA, like so-house. And coming to LA, it was just amazing how everybody was, the production was ready. You wanna do something tomorrow, we go to shoot some stuff and I get everyone together so quickly and New York just seems such a pain. People come up with creative ideas in New York, but execution just seemed difficult. Basically you had experts who were doing things. And I think one of my concerns about this tool is that we can do anything anytime is, maybe there's still a role for an expert and we ignore the experts just because we have a camera phone. - I don't think the experts go away. Literally, I did a talk of the TV Academy about this exact same thing. 'Cause I was like, I said, everybody's looking at the shiny object over here. Everybody's talking about how AI is gonna generate all the content for the future and none of us are gonna be like, we're all gonna get out of work. I was like, nobody's talking about the stuff here that's actually where AI impact the most, which is the less sexy stuff. - Yeah. - All the pre-development, like all the development and all the production stuff. Those areas are the ones that are gonna be impacted way faster and way bigger than content generation. People still need humans. Who programs the technology, the humans? Who then has to come up with the ideas for what we're humans? So it's still very much a human centered world and it's gonna be for a long time. The thing for me is when I use it, it's not like, yes, maybe I'm not hiring the developers that I was hiring before, but as a startup, we're always under financial stress, ways of having to make very tough decisions. So I no longer need to rely on somebody who's gonna tell me he's gonna take six months and $40,000. When now I go and I create my own tech requirements, and I feed them through a couple of tools to make sure that they're right. And then I build tech requirements and then I feed them into the lovable or replet. And then I start vibing like crazy and then I start, so I'm the designer, I'm the tech, I'm the CP of the product guy, and I take the product and then I test it in real time in real world. That would have taken me before six months was what all the developers would tell you. And then it was three months. And then it was like, oh, it was sprints of two weeks. Now it's like, if you tell me it's gonna take me three months or two weeks, that's too long. I don't have that kind of more money. So I don't know. This episode of the Media Machine is sponsored by Food Stream Inc. A technology enabled benefit corporation building the digital infrastructure that coordinates surplus food, community demand, and logistics. So food can reach the people who need it. Through Food Stream Learn, Food Stream Network and Food Stream Delivery, the platform connects, food access, education, and logistics to strengthen local food system. Learn more at foodstreamnetwork.com. You still need humans. We talked about this too, Pierce and I'm interested to hear your perspective. But even if you were to have AI or tech do every single step of a process of production, you still need the human to navigate it and make sure it's good. And it's human led and human basically approved. So that I think is never going to go away. But what do you think about that? - I think that is around, I'm nodding. I think my interpretation is, we ultimately, we want to hear stories that other humans want to tell. Either they want to tell it because of that acting or they want to tell it because they're the story writer or maker or something. They might be created using technology, but don't think in general, we want to hear stories made by machines. We might listen to music in the elevator that's made by a machine in the background. Spotify might have AI music, but we want to kind of understand the pathosmen and the lives of others conveyed through art and entertainment and content. And so I just think there's always going to be human telling the story. Whether a machine can do, can tell the story for that human maybe or maybe the human is the one presenting the story. There's multiple ways to do it. That's how I think about the human and storytelling. - And anything that's human centric and touched by a human is actually going to become a higher value now because we're all going to be craving that. We're all going to be looking. The other day I was telling Julie, there's a tool that you can type up the script and then put it through that and then that automatically creates the podcast for you that we don't even have to do it ourselves. But then it's, I don't want to sit there and listen to a bunch of robots. I want it. I love podcasts is because I feel like I'm sitting, I'm a flying somebody's wall and I'm listening to this really interesting conversation that I would never have access to. And like you were saying earlier, peers, live events are huge. People are craving that element. They want to be able to feel and see the human. And I think that the human touch will become way more valuable. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Humans need to be human. - We want to hang out with humans. We're social butterflies. We don't care about what other humans think of us. We care about what they're doing. We're nosy. And you got to remember that's what life's all about is as all those sort of different elements. Why we live not that we don't live to be efficient. What I do worry about is, and one of the things I think about right now is this idea that every job that's been created by the internet probably will be eaten by AI. And so I think every job that was before at the internet around so your entertainment execs, whatever you want to do. But I think the machine is good. The AI is good. It's basically taking all the stuff we've done over the last 30 years and I can make that better. When you talk about podcasts, you just send a podcast or rubbish, yeah. And then of the good ones to 80% of the content you might not need. Do you mind just one that 20%. So the machine is already listening to all these podcasts, learning from all these podcasts. So I wonder what the balance is between what you're doing and what's what the machine is doing in the future. - No, I sit down with the video. Do you want to sit there and I love movie trailers. I don't know why, but I love them. And I can sit there and watch them and repeat. And I started noticing more and more and there are all these fake AI trailers. And I hate them. I'm like, I don't want to see that. I want to see the real trailer. But that's why everyone hated that actress that came out. There was AI that even forgot what her name was. But I was like, oh, they don't want to watch an AI actress. I'm human emotion. - I mean, even with the trailers, sometimes they're misleading. Yeah. But a human has decided to mislead. But they want to get you in the seats. Yeah. What have they been, and I like, oh, is there ever. Rome-com, but it's actually thriller or something like that. But that's okay. Humans try to persuade you in that way. - Right now, so many people, 'cause we have a really big media audience, and so many people in the media industry are out of work and rethinking their careers. What skills or habits would you tell them to focus on if they want to stay relevant in the AI area? That's like, because you guys are so advanced, by the way, when you're talking about your businesses and what you're doing and you're so tech-forward, but some of the people coming from the industry are very, artistically forward, they're very creatives. Besides going to YouTube University, like we like to sound, what else would you suggest? - If your job was created in the last 30 years, it might not be gonna stay around, okay? You've gotta be careful about learning about AI to become the best social media manager or e-commerce strategist when those jobs aren't gonna be around anymore. How can you use AI to probably to do something? It's really the way to think about how can I use my talent? I'm a storyteller, I'm a content maker, and actually do something that hasn't been done before, or has rarely done before, and stuff like that is kind of one of my things. What does that mean? I think there's a lot of experimentation. I have wonderful friends in LA who are just banging out content on Instagram and seeing my friend, David McAwayne, he used to work in biopomy, used to do the insurgitials and all the kind of visual graphics. And he just puts out AI little videos, clips all the every single day and just sees what the reaction is. And so also make the stuff, put it out there, get a reaction, David won a little of AI at a war the other day because of how the work he finally did. But it took him two years of just putting stuff out there and no one was looking at it, no one was hearting it. And then you come up, if you are a crit, if you're a visual person, just keep looking at the visual stuff. But there was to think about some of the other tools that can automate it as well, make the rest of your life happy. I think everybody's gonna, we're gonna see way more entrepreneurs, we're gonna see way more, and we talked about this with Ellen Woke and Evan Shapiro, and Jim Lauderdack, we talked to all three of us. Like how the professional creator is gonna become a bigger thing 'cause all these professionals are gonna be out of works and they're all very talented, talented people from all walks of life are gonna embrace the snack and start creating more content and start creating things themselves, not necessarily just content, but just using the technology to build things that they can. Or they might just go and learn a new skill set. I know a lot of people going into education, a lot of people going into other areas, but I think that we're gonna see a lot more entrepreneurship, a lot more people building their own. - Yeah, my favorite podcast I listened to was the founder of Shopify. And in 2008 during the crash, he was like, there's the end of that business, and everything is gone. And in fact, it was the birth of his business because a lot of creative people, creative minded people went out, lost their jobs and built shops and built little businesses and stuff like that. And we have the sort of the mom and pop movements that we have today and the influence and the seeds of the influences and the influential shops and stuff like that, TikTok shop, is because of their moments and I feel that's what's gonna happen. It goes through a moment that we have the Ford Model T moment where the factory line changes and the jobs aren't there, the job's changed. It's gonna be some uncomfortable moment, but then we gotta go out there. I don't, I'm no good at making coffee in a coffee shop. Nobody wants me to do that. So like, so why have to go off and do something and it's gonna make me bored. I've got love talking to people though. I would love that. I think it's hard 'cause it's like, I have such an altruistic vision of what I want. Usually I really create, I've done it for 20 years also, even though I'm 27, it's so weird. But I'm gonna come to editing, I'll use the tools that are like de-script, for example, takes out the space, you can prompt all these things in de-script and then you can do all these other incredible things but I still like Johanna knows. I still like to go through a frame-by-frame after I go through the tools and just tweak until I'm so happy at the end and it takes a long time. It's 100 edits for a podcast, but I wanted to be perfect. - Not but you got better because at the beginning, you started lowering all the other stuff that we were using. - Yeah, at first I was like, no, I got it by half. - Yeah, I was like, I got it, I'm a creator, I can create things, I can do it and then it would take me days. - You gotta sweat it, that would be around forever. And it shows, I think it shows in the quality of these podcasts. - Oh, thanks. But I just think if I'm embracing AI and the tools, is not taking away from your creativity, your ability to make something great, it just helps you make it faster. - And as you describe it, this is a tool, it's not the output, it's not the final thing. There's something that allows you to do something. - Yeah, exactly. - And it's better in a different way. - Pears, obviously you're always talking to these big companies. Are you seeing any new trends and how companies are embracing AI? Are they struggling to build more modern workflows? What are you seeing? Because both Julie and I have worked inside the big corporation and they know how all the millions of layers of approvals get in the way every time of just progress. What are you seeing and coming to you for? - Luckily, because I have a network, a lot of people have accepted a call and been there. I've been able to show the father, the system, whatever it is, the marketplace that I've been building. And it's been interesting. I've been speaking to small advertising agencies, holding companies, brands, retailers, technology companies. And so there's been a number of different interests, the insights because of that. One is this sort of idea of bring your own AI to work. The corporations which have built something, built some sort of AI system. We have the consultancies and the big holding companies who've done that right now. At the other end, creative agencies who have not built anything and they have no idea. And then we have in the middle, we have companies who basically give everybody Microsoft Copilot and say, "Hey, we got a license for this." And what I'm seeing within this space is folks don't really want to use the thing that's system that's been built by their employer. It's crappy. How can you compete against the 10,000 employees at OpenAI? In the middle, even though you've got access to a decent AI system with Microsoft, you want access to Anthropic one day. You want access to chat GPT, go for a bit. One day. So what it seems, people literally, can you remember the bring your own device, movements, 15 years ago? People were bringing their phones. People were bringing laptops to work because the stuff that could then play was giving them was not yet enough. I'm really happy. I'm excited around that time. Yeah, if I know, it's at the exact same bit. I have a client, so I still do small consulting who has a second computer open while she's in her corporate work. So she can engage AI because her corporation won't lock her down. So that's happening. Obviously, she's not supposed to, but there's a moment we want the best capabilities to help us with our work. So there's kind of one thing that from bringing in AI to work is kind of a big thing that's happening. And I kind of feel you should let it. It's always, sure, give everybody enterprise license for everything and so the training, all that sort of thing. We don't need to worry too much about that. The second thing is around dashboards and systems. So what I'm building, I'm basically building a system where your AI and it could be Claude or it could be BPP open, can talk to my system. There is no dashboard. There's no place to go see it. It basically you pipe it in. You put a key in what they call an MCP URL key. You put it into your system and you can start chatting to my data, father's data straight away. So they call it as headless and sure it's been discussed before, but it's this idea of-- Yeah, so we haven't really talked about it since this is great. Thank you. So if we went through the development of the last company as AI tools where you would have to go log in to their dashboard, go use their system, OK? But as I said, right at the start, we really just want to use-- we want to use two or three different big hyperscaler systems, Claude Blubblub. So we want the software to work within our system. And we're already seeing that. We're already can see. You can use Canva in Claude. We can use whatever, some other system within chat GPT. That is our desktop. That is our dashboards. So any system that is trying to build a dashboard, a start-up founder, you need to stop, you need to pause right now, and you're going to think about how you can supply your experience, your data, your content into another LLN. And if you're the buyer or use the system, you definitely should think again if you think about buying a system which is mainly-- has its own UI and expects the users to go to them. I remember at CES earlier this year, I spoke to a pet of data, a big drinks company, our colleague drinks company, about fodder. And he said to me, we have 29 licenses for AI, different AI start-ups. And he said, no one's using them. No one's and remembers the password. He said, I just want five APIs. I mean, APIs is just like a calling response, yeah? I just want the machines to be asked the other machine, pull the data, and then we have that all within our own system. And I think that's where corporations, security, IT folks don't want to have all these different pieces of software. And at the same time, the user, the final user, the executives want to engage, experience and experience through the LLNs. I have a theory that more and more companies are going to become their own operating systems. And I think the next era-- and please challenge me and tell me-- I think the next era, people are going to start looking at how they build their own company as an operating system. So for example, I'm thinking more media. So in the meat space, you have the whole workflow, the whole supply chain from ideation all the way to beyond distribution. And all those systems are different systems and completely segregated. None of them speak to each other. So now, what I'm seeing is more and more companies are building where they are. And they're building in a way that they're eating up all the other areas. And they're trying to build the operating system for that industry. But I think that it's going to go even deeper. I see Netflix. I see Apple. I see Amazon Prime. I see them all becoming-- I think Amazon's already a system. But anyways, the point is that I think that they're going to start building their own operating systems like infrastructure inside. And I think that's going to be-- the next era people battling out for AI infrastructure. That's where you come in. So Hannah, that's a love that. Yeah, that's the next, that's the next chapter. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's going to happen. 100. But I'm making up, sorry, to your point before you said a lot of jobs are going to go away. I also believe they can change a lot of jobs are going to be born and one of them is going to be one that I am pointing. Yeah. Media systems builder. Media system. Yeah. I tell Johanna that the studio is of their smart. They'll bring her in and she can create those systems for them. I'm very global scale and then bring it down to earth for people to operate within it. Talk about it. People whispering to me they want this help. Yeah, they want to AIFI their business. But I haven't thought about reframing it as I'm going to treat an operating system. Yes. I'll bring you in into a pitch. Maybe if I get a conversation like I just talked about this and I was so worried. I was like, I wonder how people are going to react to this and people were positive about it. I was like, I think I might be a little bit rough. I think the way you talk about it gives kind of a set like I don't know what AIFI AIFI in the businesses. But as soon as you begin to suck down an operating system and I go, oh, okay, they all begins to crystallize. Yeah. And I think my watch is going back at echo and label my old point, which is as long as you don't think there's going to be a dashboard. It's going to be invisible. It can all be invisible. And I think about my work. I had built something a database that can be queried. But I've also built little chat box that agents in my Slack who taught to me when, hey, someone's doing a demo. And then I'm like, oh, could you follow up and send them a note and stuff with that. So I'm being built in those little things. So I'm kind of building a sales force around that. And I can slowly build, I'm slowly building departments for my company. Hopefully somebody else is going to look after this company one day. But soon this, I can see that I'm building an operating system as well. You are. Yeah. We frame it like that. It makes so much sense. So it's from small companies or big media companies. Look at it like that. You know how it's so funny, Pierce, because Julie and I were talking about this. I was like, I do a lot of research. I'm always reading. I'm always listening. I'm always like, I'm so curious. I'm like, I wish I could, I didn't need to sleep. So I could just learn all day and all night because that's my favorite. You have to sleep. What I'm noticing is that these companies are acquiring. And again, I'm going back to just media because I'm really deep in the media and also with security space. So I do a lot of research there too. But in this case for these audiences, I'm seeing a lot of this happening right now. These companies that would really just focus on payroll in the past are now acquiring the scheduling company. They're acquiring the budgeting company. They're like, no brainer. They're acquiring the casting company like the tools because now they're making their connecting the centralized operating system. And I think that's going to be the next wave where companies are going to go in that direction. I think you basically just described your next book. Yeah. I know exactly. And I actually think that you should call like TVAs been asking Johanna to speak to them at a television academy. You should pitch this that you want to talk to the Academy members about this. I don't know anybody else who talks about it. And then get the talk about this. But like even more. Yeah. And then do speaking is you don't actually go off and do the work. Just do speaking gigs. Be the speaker and the consultant, but like somebody else building. If anyone wants to speak, do wants to pay me to speak. Hello, my email. I'm going to get back to your place. As I said, where you friends it was quite fresh for me. Yeah. Yeah. It makes it so much more clear. I haven't helped people are going to hear it. Yeah. If you need like a junior consultant, somebody to come in to stakeholder interviews. How does your career do? I have a question for you with brains like yours and perspectives like yours. I like to hear. We both do what you think business will be like in ten years. Knowing that everyone's got chatbot or little agents, you have to ask is a human or is it not? Where will it be? How will people be operating? Or how far do you usually go? Are you usually asked to analyze an X3, 5, 10? Like how far do you usually go in your research? We used to go late years or something. It's funny. You think that sometimes you look at stuff. It doesn't happen and then suddenly all of a sudden innovation or whatever you were calling it. It goes in different sort of time warps. Sometimes you look at a mobile phone or something like that. For a while, I know we all talk about 2007 and everything else, but we weren't really using the phone for a lot of stuff for a quite a few years. And then suddenly everybody was using it. Everybody was using a whole bunch of stuff. Partly because of technology change, we had 5G and things like that. So my answer to the question, I'm looking out across a playground. I have a playground for the house which is sweet. But in some ways the world really have a change that matches. We still have the same human needs and the same human was for the people who in media, we still want to be entertained. We still want to be informed and things like that. And sometimes that might be on a big screen and probably will still be on a big screen or a small screen. But that's just how the mechanics to get there are very different. I will be going to optimize that. What do you see the biggest opportunity right now? I think what I talk about on ramps and off ramps. And so what I'm talking about is you have basically these highways with these massive trucks going down them automated truck which have the names of the companies open AI and throttic whatever. They go charging down. If you are trying to create a little product of some a new startup an idea that is in their lane or in their future lane, they're going to crush you. They're going to run you over. I did that with myself. I have a cute little project which is around helping people with repair bills, mechanics. It's a universal problem. You get the quote you like, I don't know how whether that's being ripped off and you can photograph it and it'll give you advice. Six months after I built that, Chatchy PT can do it. Everyone can do it straight away. It can. It's the same thing. So there's a lot of people who are building tools just because you can. And you're going to think, listen, can Chatchy PT do this or will Chatchy PT do this in the next 12, 18 months? And for a lot of things they are, yeah. So you have to think about how I'm going to either feed these machines or I'm going to take from these machines. So for fodder, we're feeding into these machines. We're feeding data that they don't use or the proprietary data. So there's going to be other opportunities like that. And then output is that what do I do as a result of that? But just don't get in the way of these huge trucks going down the I-95. Yeah, or unless if you are crazy enough to do that, says a person who's trying to eradicate food insecurity, you got to do it way different. Building a community, building something that you know that nobody can take that away from you. Yeah, the community, yeah, exactly. Not going to build a community. It's not a thing. They were going to build a machine. They might build a machine that allows all the rest of the owners and the people who need to get find the food straight away. Yeah, there's a chance that that could happen. Yeah, but that's not what you're building. Building a much bigger thing, as you said, a network, a community, and that sort of makes you different. One day you might swap in. If they build food stream, they release food stream, the technology for food stream, you'll just swap it in and use it yourself. And you're going to have a bigger branch. Yeah, exactly. All right, so good, good podcast TV show you're binging on right now. When I'm not listening to your podcast. But I'm running the parks or bridges really. I'm right now I'm listening to Soul of Octopus. Have you listened to it? I saw it. What is it called? It's called Soul of an Octopus. It's by Simon's Montgomery. I listened to everything. Yeah. It's a pod. It's a nice book. Audio book. But it is about, she's a journalist scientist. Her sort of exploration about consciousness, about animals, maybe animal rights. I haven't got quite got there yet. And through these very super clever intelligence beings. I'm enjoying it. I just did a little literature and now I'm like, this is super cool. My teacher, the octopus. Yeah. I love what we love. My octopus teacher. Yeah. I saw something today that just came up on my Instagram about a documentary. I think PBS did it about octopus, not to pie. It's just so brilliant. I can't believe people eat them. That's where I are. So once you do it. It's kind of hot. Yeah. Once you they're delicious and then you watch the documentary or the book and you're like, oh, really? When you're going to be like, yeah, I'm so happy that I got to meet you. I heard such great things about you from Johanna and I thank you for sharing all your knowledge and insight and perspectives. I hope I provided something. I really enjoyed being part of this and just hearing from your point of view. And just thank you for putting on these shows. You've got a lot of fan at least to have that. It's good. On to take it. We take one. I'm running Crossbeck Park. Yeah. So thank you. Amazing. Thank you. Here's the means the world to us coming from you. Thank you so much. Where can our audience us find you? They can find me on LinkedIn and they can check out photo fdda.ai and you can easily try and use that service straight away. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for joining us on the media machine. If somebody sent you this, it's because they care about you and your future. The media machine is created by me Johanna Salazar. I'm also the host and executive producer with Julie Kellen-Redding who is also the co-host and editor. See you next time.