Welcome & Bryan’s Background

Bryan Cassady 0:00

I'm writing a proposal for this company. I've created a series of personas here, and I say, look, what I'd like you to do is to evaluate this proposal from these five different people's perspectives. And I want you to have a conversation about what I'm doing. And now it's like you have five coaches in the room. And if your skin is a little bit thick, you can actually figure out amazing things.

Why AI Fails To Deliver Value

Joeri Billast 0:25

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories to this podcast. My name is Joeri Billast. I'm your podcast host. And today I'm really honored to be joined by Bryan Cassady. Hi Bryan, how are you? Hi Joeri. Glad to be here. Happy to see you. Guys, if you don't know Bryan Cassady, he's an author, an entrepreneur, and a teacher. He's the lead author of The Generative Organization, an AI playbook for exponential results, co-created with 35 AI and innovation experts. He has built eight companies across six countries and has taught over 30,000 leaders to work better with innovation and AI. So, Bryan, I'm excited to have you. Let's dive straight in. Many companies today are adopting AI quickly. Yet real business value often stays flat. So, from your perspective, where does the breakdown usually happen?

Bryan Cassady 1:26

Why is AI not working in companies? And the answer to the trillion dollar question is people are using fancy tools without knowing the objective that they're going to use the tools for. You're giving people tools without explaining how to use the tools, and then you expect everything to go fantastic. You got to think about how you put your system together and make AI a part of your team rather than a fancy, shiny tool add-on that's not doing very much.

Joeri Billast 1:54

Yeah. I see that too. People say they need to use AI, they want to be AI, an AI-driven organization. But what are maybe some early signals that tell you that they are using AI tools without changing how decisions actually get made?

Using AI vs Working With AI

Bryan Cassady 2:13

You know, I think this whole idea of being digital first, AI first, they're all tools. And what you should be is really objectives first. And where I know things are going wrong is when people are using tools, but they can't tell me what they're using them for.

Joeri Billast 2:30

Yeah, I think you often distinguish between using AI and working with AI. So what does that difference really look like in day-to-day behavior inside the team?

Bryan Cassady 2:44

Using AI is you got a vending machine. You walk up to the vending machine, you drop in a coin, and you get an answer that pops out on the other side. Working with AI is come to the vending machine, you discuss a little bit about what you'd like, and it makes you a fancy super thing, and it gives you exactly what you want. One is it's an oracle just giving you information back. The other one, it's a partner co-creating the things that you want. The first one is weak and doesn't really deliver much. The second one is truly amazing. And I think that, if you can get that one mindset, if you can only get that one thing where you say, look, I'm not using AI, but I'm working with AI, everything changes.

Objectives First And System Design

Joeri Billast 3:25

You're working with it, not uh not replaced by it, but you're working with it. Now, if founder, a CMO, they want to move from using AI to truly working with AI, let's say in the next 30 days, what is the first operational shift you would recommend?

Bryan Cassady 3:45

I think the first thing is actually just start with your objective. Why are you using AI? Look at your system, figuring out how it's going to fit in. The second thing, think about AI as a collaborative partner. Change your mindset instead of just using it, use it like you would use a colleague. You explain things to a colleague, you get things back from a colleague, you work together, you give it additional information. It's all about that one step in mindset. So if you want to change within 30 days, it starts it can start tomorrow. I can get you using AI differently in 20 minutes. And it's only about a swift in mindset.

Joeri Billast 4:30

Yeah. So how would you explain that idea in simple terms, I would say, to a marketer or an entrepreneur hearing it for the first time?

What Generative Organizations Do

Bryan Cassady 4:48

Generative means a lot of different things to different people. So I'm going to take my own personal definition. Generative is about making new stuff with existing stuff. A generative organization is an organization which is creative in specific ways and hopefully is using AI as part of that creative process. It's a look at the system and how the things fit together. And how do you add AI as an augmenter, not as a replacement? And the important thing there is really the system focus. And the problem is systems are not very sexy. People want, you know, I'm going to type a prompt and it's give me my social media plan for the next six months in 12 minutes. That's what people want. But the real value comes when you say, look, these are the things I do. This is how it can make me better. And you think about it as a system. And a way that a system works is usually you work within a framework. If you look at the area of innovation, which is my own specialization, it's about plan, do, study. Figure out what you want to do, do something, figure out if it's any good, and keep on going. You have to work within a framework. And there's lots of frameworks. I just have one. So the generative organization is an organization which just thinks in terms of systems and thinks about that system about how you add AI ineffectively. Question for you, Joeri. Is that simple enough to understand?

Joeri Billast 6:17

Yeah, it's simple enough. It's large enough and simple enough. I can still put my own interpretation to it, but maybe every organization needs to do that. It's about frameworks, about mind mindset, a mind shift. Organizations often are slow in doing new things. I've been teaching AI workshops too in Belgium to big companies. Even Microsoft was in my course. But then you see putting it into practice, it takes time. So now my question to you is Bryan: why does the idea of a generative organization matter now, today, rather than being something leaders could postpone another year or two?

Why It Matters Now

Bryan Cassady 6:56

I think the reason why it matters is we have this amazing new teammate, which is sitting there and available to everybody. And that teammate can fill in lots of holes within your organization. You can either fill it in right or it can fill it in wrong. And I think if you don't take a systemic view, if you don't take a bigger view, you'll fill it in wrong. If you take the bigger view, you fill it in right. Competition is getting so much tougher. I mean, the speed at which things move. I remember my old days at Procter Gamble. It took us six months to come up with a selling line. Now you get six minutes to come up with your selling line. Everything's faster. And to compete in a fast world, you've got to use the latest tools and techniques.

Joeri Billast 7:45

Yeah, for sure. Being an early adopter. It's not always easy, but it pays off. Now you talked about AI as a team member. Can you maybe share one concrete example where human judgment and AI collaboration produced measurable results? And what specifically made that collaboration effective?

Context, Stories, And Better Prompts

Bryan Cassady 9:00

I think the best example I can give you is I worked with a company who was trying to develop cold emails going out. Cold email is pretty simple. It's the most typical use case that people are using, generative AI. It's cold emails, internal messages. And he said, these emails are not any good. I said, but what did you ask the AI to do? I said, write me a cold email to sell this. I said, you know what I'd really like you to do is stop thinking about AI for just a second. I'd like you to walk down the hallway and I want you to give that to a colleague and see what they come back with. And he left for a bit. He came back and they said, shoot, he couldn't do it. I said, now how do you expect AI to do it? What you need to do is you need to give the context. You need to say what you want to do, you need to say what's special about you. Otherwise, you get this fluffy, empty language that nobody's interested in. So the collaboration point is actually thinking about just working together. And I chose that example, not because it's the best example, but it's the easiest and the one that people see again and again. You know, people turn up, do something in AI, say, give me an AI strategic plan. And I do this in my workshops all the time. Give me a strategic plan. Look, Chat GPT can't even give me an answer. I said, but could you answer that question? Tell me about the company. Tell me what your context is. You get it? It's it's this process where AI works with a context. And it's your job as a user is to pose the right question.

Joeri Billast 10:43

Yeah, I often explain it in that way to someone say that ChatGBT doesn't work or it gives me wrong answers. It's like a trainee at a company or someone at his first job, you know, finished studies, goes first day out at a new job. They just know the basic knowledge that they studied, but they don't know anything about the company they're going to work for. So they need to be fed with the right context to be able to do a good job. That's a comparison like some.

The SPARKS Framework For Better Results

Bryan Cassady 11:14

There is a fantastic book out. I sometimes recommend other people's books. It's a book called Primal Intelligence. It's about how stories drive the world. It's about a guy who was an English PhD professor wrote about Shakespeare in the business world. That's a far stretch. But one of the things that we've seen is the power of stories. When you're working with a colleague, a human colleague, a story will make an objective clear to that intern. We did the same thing with AI, where we talked about in terms of objectives, or we talked in terms of a story plus objectives. And what you see is a dramatic difference that comes out. So in fact, what you have to think about is not just telling what you want, but tell it why you want. What's the context? What's the situation? Because AI is a context engine, it's predicting from all the stuff that you have. And I think there's a real opportunity there. So it is like that intern. It's probably one of the smartest interns you're ever going to get in the organization. But there's two things that are bad about that intern. One, the intern will tend to agree with you. And two, it'll tell you how smart you are. Yori, that's a fantastic question. I've never heard that before. And you know, you have to get away from this and realize that you're leading the process. And I think there's a question there which comes up also at what point in time do you ask AI? One of the things I've seen very strongly right now is the need to struggle with a problem a little bit as a human being before you ask for help. If you haven't struggled with it, usually the question is not very clear. And what'll happen is AI will fill in the blanks, but it'll fill in the blanks with things that might not be the things you want the blanks for.

AI As Feedback And Revision Engine

Joeri Billast 13:07

I think that's a very good advice, you know. First try. It's of course also good for your human brain, you know, not to depend on AI, but do some thinking yourself, try to solve it, see what it comes up with, give it some struggles, like you said, and then it's much, much better. But it's like with everything in life or in business, that you need to put in the effort, and not everyone wants to put in the effort, they just want to ask AI. Are there maybe like three, four, five rules of thumb or that you would give people or marketers, founders using AI, maybe practical rules that they need to follow. If they do these, if they follow these rules, then they will directly get better results.

Custom Instructions And Red Teaming

Bryan Cassady 13:52

I can give you a long list of rules, but I'm gonna do it a little bit different. I'm gonna give you a word. It's like when you're back in school, and that word tries to get you to remember something. And the word is sparks. S-P-A-R-K-S. S is about speaking things out. Before you start using AI, make sure that your thoughts are clear. And a good way to do that actually is to go backwards and use your voice. Get the messy stuff, get the context which is there. P is about pivoting things. Um, we tend to go to the AI and ask it questions. A fantastic way to get better results from AI is let it ask you questions. So I need a new cult email. But before writing this, write, ask me three questions to help me clarify it. A is about asking for more. One of the things that people might now know is there's a regenerate button in almost all the LLMs. And usually the first answer is not the best. When you ask for more and regenerate, you get different ideas, but you can also give it feedback. R is about reframing. Reframing is ask your questions in different ways, the better the results you get. K is about keep on asking, keep on going. Don't give up at the first one. I mean, a great definition of creativity. I saw it's the things that you do after the obvious is gone. And the last one, and this is the most important one, is S is stop and think. Really, every once in a while I'll say, Oh, I've been typing here for now 45 minutes. Take a breather, go get a coffee, come back, look at what you've done. And when you stop and think, you keep your brain up. So the answer to your question, the rule of thumb, sparks. There I can give you 10 more things to do, but if you remember those, you'll hit 80% of what you need to do better.

Myths About Innovation And AI

Joeri Billast 15:48

Yeah, if I think if there is already anything that people should remember or can remember from this podcast episode, the takeaway, I think it's that because it's really easy to remember. Actually, when you say typing or a voice, I just love to talk with the AI because then it's in a non-structured way, everything that's in my brain, and you get a prompt which is long, but it which has all the context. Also, don't give up after the first answer, but try to be better and better and better.

Bryan Cassady 16:16

I think that there's so much you can do, which I can give you my own favorite trick. I use AI to beat my feedback engine. And I say, for example, I'm writing a proposal for this company. I've created a series of personas. Joeri, you might be one of my personas. And I say, look, what I'd like you to do is to evaluate this proposal from these five different people's perspectives. And I want you to have a conversation about what I'm doing. And now it's like you have five coaches in the room. And if your skin is a little bit thick, you can actually figure out amazing things that you miss on the first run-through. And I think, you know, we think of AI as a creation engine. Actually, AI should be much more of a revision engine, an improvement engine.

Joeri Billast 17:05

Yeah. Yeah. One prompt, which is interesting to do, is to ask AI what are some of the blind spots, you know, that you have that miss, maybe things you have been missing with all of the context. So just because it has all the prompts, all the history, and then some interesting things. Question for you. Do you have custom instructions for your AIs? Yes, I have a lot. I even made a TikTok video about it, and I need to update it. But that's one of the TikTok videos that got the most views, is all these custom instructions. That's really important.

Books, Access, And AI Tools Experiment

Bryan Cassady 17:36

For me, one of the easiest things somebody can do is go to your TikTok video about your custom instructions and upload some custom instructions that fix some of the problems that are there. AI is designed to be complementary. Tell it, be hard on me. Tell me the truth. There's something called red teaming. Um, when you give me an answer, go back and check to see how valid it is. Validate the sources. And what you can do is put this in your instructions, and every time AI runs, it will do those things for you.

Joeri Billast 18:11

Yeah, I put in my instructions, for instance, is that AI needs to give a level of confidence before it answers out of ten. So if it's a nine out of ten and I put five out of ten, I know it should know what it's talking about. But if it gives me a six out of ten, I know I should not trust the answer. That's something that I put in there, it works well for me.

Bryan Cassady 18:32

I've got in don't flatter me. So don't flatter me ever. Tell me the honest truth. If you don't know, ask, don't make it up. And then there's a whole bunch of other stuff. Yeah. You know, that's the time.

Joeri Billast 18:47

And it helps a lot. Also, for instance, for my agents that I'm running, I first give it a prompt and I ask ChatGPT, give me now the prompt for the agent to get the best results. So I don't give the agent directly the prompt. And just by doing a few iterations, it can work. So thank you for the practical tips, Bryan. Now, talking about myths, what is the biggest myth about AI and innovation you find yourself challenging most often working with experienced teams?

Turning Talks And Content Into A Second Brain

Bryan Cassady 19:21

Let me take it step by step. I'll take the biggest myth of innovation. I'm first and foremost an innovator and an entrepreneur. And I believe very strongly that innovation is the foundation of almost everything we're doing. We're trying to create stuff that's meaningful, unique, and valuable for the world. And there is this myth. I'll call it the Eureka myth, the light bulb myth. The idea that ideas pop up in the middle of the night, fully formed, and the other genius goes ahead. The reality is ideas look like they pop up overnight, but they're the result of long work. And it's about persistence. And it's about taking time to generate and improve those ideas step by step. Hence the name of my first book, which is called Cycles, which is about cycles improvement. The biggest myth around AI is that AI is going to help with everything. Actually, that's so far from the truth. AI helps sometimes and it hurts sometimes. And the trick for you do is to figure out the times that it helped, the times it hurts. And for me, the key to success there is not oftentimes not choosing what who's doing what, but is what order you do things. And how do you hand off things between AI and humans? Sometimes, and another myth which is there is that humans always help. Humans in the loop is always a good thing. No, it's not always a good thing. Sometimes humans actually just mess up everything. If you're looking at cancer diagnosis, when you have a cancer diagnosis from AI and then the doctor looks at it, he messes things up. If you have sometimes the other direction, which is you know, just feeling what's going on, yeah, the humans add an amazing thing. I don't know if you know, for example, in chess right now, you of course you know that AI beats human beings, but did you know that AI plus a chess master will always beat the AI? No, I didn't know that.

Joeri Billast 21:19

Yeah, yeah.

Bryan Cassady 21:20

So what you have is the human being has a feeling, he has a perception, he has intuition that the AI doesn't have. And sometimes that is an important thing to bring in.

Writing Faster With AI Support

Joeri Billast 21:34

Yeah. It's people that are now afraid that the I will replace them. No, it's it can take certain percentage of certain jobs, but the intuition and maybe taste, something that I heard from another podcast guest. You know, humans have a certain you can discuss what is taste, but humans have a taste. AI is just calculating as it's it's different. You mentioned your books already. Bryan, I've written a few books, you've written a few books too. You did something special, I think it was with your latest book. You chose to give away three PDFs of your book as an experiment. So, what are you hoping to learn? And maybe what early signals are you paying attention to?

Impact, Teaching, And Connecting The Dots

Bryan Cassady 22:20

So let me tell you the whole story. Uh, I went out with a friend of mine in Brussels. We went to a local cafe, and he said, Bryan, how are things going with your book? I said, Pretty good. Got some really good ratings, got a few five stars, got a 4.9 on average. I made a few bestseller lists, so on and so forth. He said, How many copies do you think you'll sell, Bryan? I said, Oh, maybe 15 to 20,000. He said, You know what? I want to do is I want to take this. Coaster here and tell you what your books are gonna do. So tell me how many people are gonna read your book? I said, Well, 25%. And he said, Well, I don't believe he brought it. You know, the typical business book, it's five to ten percent of people actually read the book. I'll give you twenty-five percent. How many of those people will actually understand the book and want to use it? It's another twenty-five percent. How many people actually use it? Well, maybe twenty percent. And what we came down to is out of the fifteen thousand books, we came down to a final number of 150 that actually people use what's in. I said, Man, you just ruined my day. You ruined my day. And we continued to drink a few more beers. And I said, Look, how could we change this? And he said, Bryan, you write on AI. Why don't you use AI? So what I decided to do was take away two walls in the process. One is a paywall. So what I can do is I can give away free copies of my book, and that takes away the paywall, the need to go up on Amazon, put in your credit card on my book. And secondly, I can take away the barrier to using things. I don't know about you, but I've got a ton of books behind. I can remember the title of the book, but I can't tell you the concept and framework inside. If I make AI access that information, I can use a lot better. So what we did is we took the books, made them free, added some tools on top, and threw it out there. So this is a live experiment. It started eight days ago. And what we see is we got lots of downloads, less than I'd hoped. It's about 2,000 right now. And I was hoping four or five thousand, but the big number is the usage level. So right now we're at 14% of people actually using it in a measurable way that I can identify. So what we see is an incredible increase in usage of the book. And it's actually given me some really nice comments. And for you as an author, one of the things that's happened is actually the sales of my book have been skyrocketing since. So giving the book away for free actually increased my sales. It didn't decrease my sales. Yeah, that's interesting. Now, would you want to do this with your book, Jordi?

Joeri Billast 25:07

I gave my audiobook away for free. It's available as a download here on my podcast. I'm not writing the book to make money out of the books. For me, as I'm doing the podcast here with you, building my personal brand, giving knowledge to people, giving inspiration, having an impact. And the book is actually a kind of a business card, if you want.

Bryan Cassady 25:27

Um yeah. Let me give you my personal experience there. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I travel a lot. I got on a flight, I turned on a book, I listened to the book, and I enjoy it so much. But do you ever try to go back and find the things that you listen to and really remember what's there? It's tough, man.

Where To Find Brian & Free Book

Joeri Billast 25:48

So what I do is I listen to the book and I want to find it back. What I then do is I take the book and then I read it. And then I find the things I've heard and I pay attention to those things. I can read faster because I know the context and I pay attention more. And then I take a marker or something like that, and I, you know, mark it in the book. That's the best way for me to remember. Yeah. Consume books, I would say, business books.

Bryan Cassady 26:14

For me, what I usually remember is I framework for a general idea. And now, if I had the book in a fully searchable format where I can search all my comments, all my notes, and everything like that, I just see it much more useful. One of the reasons I ended up with the idea is actually I've uploaded my own books to answer questions. And I've looked at how good my books answer the question versus me. And sometimes my books answer the questions better than I do. I said, wow, that was kind of clever. So I think the challenge comes up is for example, if you offer your audiobook, maybe you don't want to give your print book away, but make the text of your audiobook available in a GPT someplace. So somebody can ask questions. What would Yori do here? Why would he do it?

Joeri Billast 27:03

Yeah, actually, I I I have a GPT which is based on my blog, which has a lot of my content. I haven't uh I don't think I've shared it already. Maybe it's open to find. I just wanted to test it like you to see if what comes out makes sense. But yeah, that's a really wonderful idea to have like something come out. Does it make sense? Would I say this? And then yeah, it it it helps.

Closing Thoughts & Listener Request

Bryan Cassady 27:29

So what I've done is I've got 150 webinars and talks up online, and I actually downloaded 150 into Notebook LN, and it became my second brain. So I can actually go ask it and say, What would Bryan say? And it will tell me what I would say, and it's usually pretty good.

Joeri Billast 27:49

Yeah.

Bryan Cassady 27:50

And the the trick is actually you can do this with almost anybody up on the internet. So if you go to the YouTube channel, you can actually download all their YouTube videos.

Joeri Billast 28:01

Yeah, I know, and actually that's how I because I am I love to speak, it's easy for me to speak, it's way harder to write. So I had my keynote, I had my context, and Mark Schaefer said to me, Yeah, why don't you write a new book, Joeri? You have the keynote, you have all these podcast episodes. So I started writing this writing based on my keynote, but it was a short book, and then I uploaded the relevant episodes in sort of transcripts and a blog articles into Notebook LM. I asked it to find the right patterns in there, to find content that would support my book, and that's how it took off. I made a lot of progress, which was motivating me to finish the writing in two, three months instead of two, three years.

Bryan Cassady 28:47

My first book took me four years to finish. Four and it was painful. The second book took me around four months.

Joeri Billast 28:54

Yeah.

Bryan Cassady 28:54

Maybe the next one will be four days. Yeah, maybe. No. And I don't know if I'm ever gonna write another book. I mean, when you do the numbers, I can go speak at a conference and talk to a thousand people. Or I can spend four months writing a book. Which is the better use of my time?

Joeri Billast 29:13

I like to do both. I like to have an impact. I like to be on a stage to speak, and then people come to me and you have meaningful discussions directly after a talk. I like to come on a podcast to interviews myself, and I like to write a book. And I think it's putting it all together, having people coming to me after a speech that then get my book. I think that's that it's uh creates some enforcements because you put things together.

Bryan Cassady 29:39

I think for me, what I like about a book is the author had to spend time actually thinking about how to put this stuff together. They had to connect the dots. And I think that's good for me as a reader. It's also good for me as a writer. Because when you're forced to connect the dots, everything becomes clearer. I mean, there's an old joke, someone told me, said who learns the most in every class? It's the teacher. Because the teacher has to put the ideas out there.

Joeri Billast 30:07

Well, you write a book, it needs to make sense. You need to do research, you need to double check, and that really makes sense. But as you said, not everyone reads the book when they buy it. So then if they have the book somewhere and then they see, okay, Bryan is giving a TED talk or is giving a speech, then maybe they come to listen to your speech because they have the book, right? And then that's how it usually goes.

Bryan Cassady 30:32

I think actually it all comes back to that book I was talking about earlier, is primal intelligence. The way our brain works is we work off of stories. And we get enough content that our brain sort of ties the stuff together. And so if you have your podcasts, you have your books, you have this stuff, you can actually tie it together into something which is an insight. And an insight is really valuable. And I I mean it's funny because I got a lot of hate mail from authors about this recent action that I ran. I said, but you know, it's a fantastic thing. We people can actually use the stuff that you're writing about more effectively. And in the end, isn't that why we write or why we talk or why we do a podcast is to make an impact.

Joeri Billast 31:17

Yeah. Absolutely. Now, Bryan, we are coming toward the end of the podcast episode. I guess people are curious about the book. So, yeah, where can they get the book? Where can people follow you? Where would you like me to send them?

Bryan Cassady 31:33

I can send you to two places. If you want to find me, it's www.briancassidy.com, V R Y N C A S S 81. I'm the only Bryan Cassidy that I know in the world because both my names are spelled out. And if you want to get a free copy of my book and 13 AI tools that you can use with almost any book, it's www.books.geng-en-or-g.ai. And we'll put that somewhere in the notes here. And you can get a free book.

Joeri Billast 32:03

Absolutely, like my listeners know Bryan, and you know too. There are always show notes. There is a blog article linked to every podcast episode. So go find the links and check out Bryan's book. Bryan, it was such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks so much.

Bryan Cassady 32:20

Good question, Jordy. I think we're brothers from another mother sometimes. It's we got the same views, we're coming to the same solutions. And I think in the end, it all comes back to be taking responsibility for what we're doing, thinking smart, planning things out, strategy. AI is a tool, but you have to use it smart. I wish everyone best of luck.

Joeri Billast 32:44

Everyone listening now, I'm sure you have friends, neighbors, family members, people in your company, other entrepreneurs markets, everyone can benefit from this podcast episode. Be sure to share this episode with them. If you're not yet following the show, this is the right moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review yet, if you give me this five, it really goes a long way. Hope to see you back next time. Take care. This podcast is important and real digital. Check a lot of the live million design to make digital assets more intuitive for everyday users.