Dave Birss: LinkedIn Learning’s Most Popular AI Instructor – Episode 9

Dave Birss (AI-generated) Dave Birss has had a busy 2023. Since developing his first AI course for LinkedIn Learning early in the year, he has produced five more courses and has become the learning platform's most popular AI instructor. We talked about: his experimental approach to teaching AI how he helps companies understand the true benefits of AI the importance of using AI to augment people's skills rather than just to try and save money the elements of his AI manifesto use AI responsibly be ethical support your employees assign leaders keep learning always add a human layer to AI output the importance of critically consuming advice from anyone who proclaims to be an AI expert the importance of companies learning for themselves because there are few reliable consultants available now how unlocking the true benefits of AI can change companies' perspectives and help them see new opportunities the crucial task of understanding people and addressing their needs as AI is adopted his observation that it "cannot be AI or human, which is the way that a lot of companies are seeing it, it's got to be AI plus human" how the adoption of AI supports his point of view that generalists have an equally important role in the modern workforce as specialists Dave's bio Dave Birss combines the analytical mind of an AI geek with the butterfly mind of a former advertising creative director. This helps him make the ever-changing world of AI approachable, relevant, and occasionally entertaining. At the start of 2023, he launched his first LinkedIn Learning course on Generative AI. Since then, he’s released another five courses, all of which have gained fantastic ratings and reviews. In July LinkedIn announced that he’s now the most popoular AI instructor on the platform. But Dave isn’t just about online courses. He’s also a globe-trotting educator and public speaker, helping companies and individuals get more value out of Generative AI. He’s also a best-selling author with several books on creativity and innovation. And a former broadcaster and film-maker. As a sought-after keynote speaker, Dave speaks about AI, innovation, and creative thinking with a blend of science and dad-jokes. He’s a Scotsman who lives in London with his Haitian-American wife and two delightfully confused children. Connect with Dave online LinkedIn DaveBirss.com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/2QL01qN6uzY Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 9. Over the past year, we've all been getting up to speed on AI. Over that time span, Dave Birss has become the most popular AI instructor on LinkedIn Learning. Dave would be the first to tell you that he's not an expert on artificial intelligence. But he's a very experienced technology professional who has witnessed several major earlier tech revolutions, and he's an experienced teacher and consultant, so he brings a very pragmatic approach to incorporating AI in your work life. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number nine of the Content and AI podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Dave Birss. Dave is an educator, author, and consultant currently focusing on AI and AI education. He's the most popular AI instructor at LinkedIn Learning. Welcome, Dave. It's great to have you here. Tell the folks a little bit more about what's going on these days. Dave: Thanks, Larry. Yeah, I've been creating courses on AI this year, really. And I can't really call myself an AI expert. I guess I'm an enthusiast and I am an experimenter. I guess I do research to find out what works best, and then I share that knowledge with people. Dave: If you told me a year ago that I was going to be doing AI as my main thing, I wouldn't have believed you because OpenAI only released ChatGPT on, I think it was the 30th of November last year, so it's still less than a year old. And when they launched it, I just threw myself in, absorbed as much as I could, created some frameworks, easy ways of being able to teach people, and then I just released these as courses. Dave: I've got now six courses on the platform. Just released another one last week. And I'm about to release some courses on my own website as well. Yes, that's my life these days, doing courses and then helping companies get onto their AI journey in the best possible way because I think a lot of them have got the wrong attitude. They're not looking at AI in the right way. Larry: Yeah, interesting. Tell me more about that, because I think we all have opinions about AI. What are you discovering? Dave: Well, of course, companies, as you know, they will tend to have, "Here's our quarterly target, here's our quarterly goal. Can we make more money and spend less money in this quarter?" That's what they do. It feels as if that's the responsibility of a company is to do that. Dave: Now, if that's your attitude towards AI and that you're only interested in using it to save money, really, it's all about productivity, then you're really missing out on 90% of the benefits of AI. Because the real benefit of AI is not just to help you do less work and do work faster, it's to help you do better work. And when you do better work, that gives you an advantage in the marketplace. If you think that you've got this line across here, that this is the profit and loss of a company, you can only nibble away at that by starting to replace humans and tasks by AI. And what you do in return is you do a deal with the devil, which is you embrace the fact that AI is fantastic at adequacy, which means that you're going to get stuff that's all right, maybe just about average that you're going to get from AI. And if you're replacing humans by AI, you will save money, but you get adequacy in return. Dave: When you use AI, on the other hand, to make humans more capable of doing phenomenal work, of stretching further than they were able to stretch before, then really, the sky's the limit. At that point, you're gaining profit rather than trying to save cost. And the problem is that most companies are so focused on saving costs and this incremental growth, they're missing out on what is the real potential of embedding AI into your company, into your system, which is to do better work, to reach higher, achieve more. Larry: I love the way you're contextualizing that because going from that... I love that they're fantastic at adequacy. And it's like- Dave: They excel at it. Larry: They excel at adequacy. But the real potential here is in unleashing way more human potential on this work. And this speaks to the need for... Because that quarterly focus of enterprises, it's just notorious in any number of circumstances. Have you had any success or do you see ways that companies might get past that and start to think more strategically about how to embed the benefits of AI in their orgs? Dave: Well, when I talk to companies about it, they get it. But there are so many companies that their form of motivation for people in senior leadership is keep cutting costs. We're only focused on this quarter. And that kind of short-termism, I think, will really come round and bite you in the butt when it comes to business. Dave: One of the things that I've been doing from conversations with businesses over the last, well, this year since I've really been doing this AI thing, is that I've developed a manifesto that I'll shortly be releasing. Let me see if I can find my cursor on here and I can maybe bring up my manifesto. There we go. This manifesto is all about helping companies understand what they need to do to embrace AI properly. Dave: Zoom is doing funny things for me here. If I go back here, I can then share what I've got. I've created this manifesto, and I'll quickly take you through some of the points in the manifesto. I think that this first thing is what I was talking about, is that it's important that we use AI to augment people's skills rather than just to try and save money. I think that that's the main focus for companies that want to get real success and value out of AI. Dave: Obviously using data responsibly is an important thing to do. And that's something you have to communicate to your staff, what we mean by using data responsibly. You've got to be ethical because you've got to be guided by your head or your heart. Companies are used to being guided by laws, but we don't have those laws here yet. There will be lots of court cases that is going to generate some laws over the next few years, but you do not want to become a legal precedent. Because of that, you should make sure that you're thinking properly and guided by your heart and ethical responsibilities when you're making your decisions. Dave: You need to support your employees. That means give them training, give them guidance, let them know. If there are employees that are worried about this, you need to give them emotional support as well to help them on this journey. I think it's important of leaders. You need a butt to kick and you need a back to slap. And it's important to keep learning because this stuff's changing all the time. Dave: Just in the last few days, OpenAI has pretty much exploded as a company internally when Sam Altman was fired. And it looked as if he might be joining again, but now he's joining Microsoft. And everything's changing so fast. And then two weeks ago at OpenAI's Dev Day, they introduced so many things that really, really changed the whole world of AI. And then you've got some- Larry: I've got to interject real quickly. We're recording this on November 20th. And by the time this airs in a couple of weeks, it'll be completely out of date. But I think the elements of your manifesto are timeless. Yeah, sorry. Dave: Yeah. Yeah,