427- The Hidden cost of AI w/Cody Aldinger

427-Cody Aldinger
Host: Mike Kelley
Guest: Cody Aldinger
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Mike Kelley: Welcome back to another, You've Been Heard. The space where we've
built specifically for the IT leaders of today, and the rising stars looking to
secure their own seat at the leadership table. Our goal is to ditch the
corporate scripts and have the kind of raw, conversational, deep dives it
actually takes to lead an organization into tomorrow. Cody, we really appreciate
you joining us today. Thank you for your time and for being so open to sharing
your experiences with our community over at youvebeenheard.com. To our
listeners, we're sitting down today with Cody Aldinger, the VP of it at KLJ.
Cody manages the technology landscape for thirty offices around the US,
reporting directly to the CEO. A real gem in Cody's leadership in his
philosophy, is his blunt realization that a huge part of his job isn't
technology, it's sales. He spends his day convincing business leaders that it is
worth listening to, moving beyond just keeping the lights on to becoming a vital
voice at the executive table. Cody, we got a lot of ground to cover from the gap
between AI hype and business reality to what it means to be the sole technical
voice on an executive team, but I'd love to start by handing the floor to you.
Could you introduce yourself to our listeners and share a bit about your eight
year journey to the BPC?

Cody Aldinger: Yeah, awesome. Thank you Mike. Appreciate you having me. so yeah,
so as you mentioned, Cody Aldinger, I've been with KLJ eight years. I've been in
the IT space since two thousand and four. really so okay, twenty two years,
started as an intern in a different engineering firm, worked my way through kind
of the basic help desk support stuff that most IT people go through. So, worked
through help desk support and system administration. did some, help desk
leadership kind of managing that support team was able to take a little bit of a
kind of a side journey into software development, which I think is a kind of a
unique opportunity. I guess it seems like in the IT space, once you pick a path,
down the development world or the, infrastructure and support world, it's hard
to get experience in both. so I was able to take, two years and do some
development work, which I think really helped my kind of overall, strategy when
it comes to it stuff. And then I moved on to a hospitality firm where we, was
part of a company that worked in an owned and operated one hundred and eighty
six hotels, throughout the US. Okay. part of about a five thousand person
company. That company was then bought by, another bigger company and, then
eventually moved over to KLJ where I'm at now.

Mike Kelley: So let me jump in real quick there because I have a touch of
hospitality and tourism in my history to bartending, room service, all that kind
of stuff. What were you doing in because you were already in your technology
career? So were you doing software development for them or.

Cody Aldinger: So I moved over to them to kind of help start a bigger IT team.
we were part of kind of a two hundred and fifty person, maybe corporate
oversight of the hotel company. Right. So. Okay. I was not in a physical hotel,
but we were in the corporate office and I provided a lot of, kind of the
strategic leadership on the IT side of the house there as well. started a small
help desk team. when I moved over there, it was only, I think three people at
the time that were managing this so needed a lot of work, helped to build up
that team. And then I switched over into a role that was really focusing on,
integration and automation. So really, moving things like, data entry that
happened at the hotel properties, and got shipped back to the corporate office
on paper and was hand entered, moving that stuff into more automated processes.
So, I think.

Mike Kelley: sixty plus properties and they were still sending in the paper.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. We were one hundred and eighty six properties. And yeah,
when I started there, we had back rooms full of banker's boxes and they were
three months behind on entering financial data from the properties that a team
of people that was just doing data entry. so being able to take, technology and,
find ways to automate that, get it in to the systems in real time. it's just
kind of a game changer for.

Mike Kelley: What year was that? Because yeah, that sounds like it was on the
mid teens twenty twenty twelve.

Cody Aldinger: So not.

Mike Kelley: twenty twelve. Okay.

Cody Aldinger: Early not that long ago. Yeah. I was there twenty twelve to
twenty eighteen.

Mike Kelley: So wow. Okay. And for them to be still doing hand entry of stuff
that was printed at another location versus integrating all of the systems. and
actually, the, hospitality tourism for me was where I learned that lesson. I
kept telling myself, I'm never going to do sales. I'm never going to do sales as
I'm waiting tables and upselling the special of the day or, bartending and
finding out what we had too much of in stock and trying to help move that. And
that's when I had that aha moment of everything is sales. and so I kind of had
that before I went into technology. what caused that moment for you?

Cody Aldinger: Yeah, I grew up at a young age in the food industry. So my
grandpa and eventually my aunt, owned a restaurant my whole time growing up, I
spent five and a half years as a fry cook and customer service. And, my aunt had
driven into me the customer service mindset. And then, when I got into it,
support, it kind of carried with me. yeah, I think I was fortunate to be able to
realize at a early age that the people that I'm supporting on the help desk were
my customer, and my goal was to make sure that they were happy and they, enjoyed
the interaction. And as I kind of worked through my career through, leading the
help desk team eventually to, leading larger IT teams. That is still one of my
major focuses. So I try to instill that customer service mindset. and the sales
piece of it, kind of comes along, for the ride a little bit, but I think, as I
began, really in my career implementing new solutions, I started to realize that
a lot of what I was doing is trying to convince people that the solution that
I'm pitching is the right one, or at least is a solution, right? Working with
them to understand if it's the right one. And a lot of times when it comes to
technology, people don't understand what's possible. So I'm coming up with crazy
ideas explaining to them, how it's going to make their life better. And once I
convince them, then it's a matter of proving it right. Then it's a matter of
kind of earning that trust and saying, hey, this is what we said we could do.
And, here's the deliverable that does that.

Mike Kelley: all of the interviews and all of the guests that I've talked to on
You've Been Heard. That seems to be our core thread. Our core capability is that
piece being able to speak both languages. to be able to talk to the texts and
then be able to talk to the executives and or, just the regular person sitting
at the, at the computer out on the floor doing whatever job they're doing. I
think one of the other core tenets is our ability to listen and then.
Solutioneers.

Cody Aldinger: yeah. And I think, when it comes to AI, right? Bringing this kind
of back around a little bit, that is one hundred percent the number one thing
right now. and what I'm doing a lot of in my current role is listening,
understanding, what is the problem that the business is trying to solve and
understanding if AI is the right tool for that job.

Mike Kelley: So, okay. and I'm going to kind of just dive head first into the
deep end of the pool on this one. and I was going to bring us right back to AI
too. So I'm glad you circled in on it. so AI and the expectations, the reality
and the, in practice, there are so many leaders in the hype cycle up at the top
of that thing at the highest peaks of the hype, thinking that this is going to
be the. Ground or the, it's just earth shattering, change the world kind of
thing. and you're talking about, okay, what's the reality of it? So what are you
seeing in that disparity? How close is reality to the top of the hype curve? Or
is there a large disparity?

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. I think in some ways it is. It is going to change the
world, right? And it already is, in today and it's still in its infancy. with
that said, I don't know that it's going to change the way, people think it does.
or that it's going to. Right. You hear all the horror stories of, we're all
going to be dead in three years because AI is going to take over the world. And,
I'm not worried about that. Right? that's the fear. I think right now our
limitation is just our understanding of how best to use it. It is going to be
another tool in the toolbox. And quite honestly, I compare this and I know a lot
of people do to the dot com boom and all that kind of stuff. It's like, you
don't get to pick whether it's coming or not. You just have to, get on board
with it and figure out how best to use it, how to protect against it and how to
use it to your advantage. and is there going to be bad things that come from it?
Absolutely. There already is. but there's also a lot of good. And if you look
back at when the internet became a thing and if people said, I'm not doing that,
it's scary, where are they at today? so you don't get to pick, you just gotta,
like everything with the good and the bad that comes with it. You gotta dive in
and learn it the best you can and, understand how to protect yourself and how to
use it to your advantage. So, I get asked a lot in my position of, is my job
going to get eliminated? how many people are going to get cut because we're this
AI tool that we're putting into place. that's not the goal for us anyway. and I
don't think it's the goal for a lot of people. I think it's, trying to make our
lives better and trying to make the monotony go away and make everybody's, work
more efficient and more enjoyable.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. I see and hear that part of it. I also hear, of course, the
fears, those questions of, hey, is, my job going to get eliminated? I'm trying
to remember what conference I heard this at, but I think it's going to be more
of it's not going to be AI that's going to replace me. It's going to be somebody
who uses AI better than me or uses AI period. When I don't is going to replace
me. because they're going to get rid of some of that monotony and they're going
to move a little bit faster and they're going to accomplish it a little bit more
through that. I was just having a conversation with somebody else a little bit
ago. and we were talking and I wonder what your thoughts are on this. the word
hallucination and how we're using hallucination whenever the responses or when
AI drifts. That's another term that I'm starting to hear a lot of, guardrails,
hallucination and drift. the, hallucinations. I think we're doing ourselves a
disservice. I was actually just talking to one of my kids in between interviews
and saying that I think utilizing hallucinations were not categorizing the
problems, the common mistakes that are coming from the generative models and
thus trying to fix that specific mistake. and so that we can tighten up and get
it better. we're just saying, oh, it's a hallucination. It just happens.

Cody Aldinger: But yeah, I think you're spot on. I think the word hallucination
is a fancy word for flat out wrong, right? Yeah. It's just, it's just wrong.
Right. Provided the wrong answer. And, you hear a lot of comparisons of, AI
tools are like, new fresh out of college people that, maybe, don't have all the
answers, but they're eager to provide an answer. Right. And there's lots of
different things and analogies that you hear. But quite honestly, I think it
comes down to the person interacting with the AI tool to tell it exactly what
you want, right? if you have something in your mind that you're expecting to see
as a result, lay that out as clearly as possible to whatever AI tool you're
using and you're going to get better results and you're going to get, less
hallucinations. if you're clear and can communicate it with it properly. And I
think that's probably the biggest challenge that I see right now, is prompt
engineering, right? The term prompt engineering is becoming a thing and it's
becoming the center of a lot of training courses around. How do you talk to
these agents to get the best, answer that you can. And that's a real thing.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, it most definitely is. again, another one of the common
threads that I'm trying to remember the exact way this one was stated to me, but
it was that we're moving away from being the content creators to being the
context creators that, we now have to really provide that context, which is that
prompt engineering is providing the context of the solution that we're looking
for. one of the simplest ways I can put it, it was somebody challenged me to
take a transcript and to create a prompt for the c I o a prompt for the CEO and
a prompt for the CFO and feed the same transcript into all three of those
different prompts, looking for the summary and then recognize what's different
amongst that. So that you get a more holistic answer from the summary versus,
just that narrow point of view. And it's a chance for us to expand some horizons
that way, around that prompt engineering.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. I've not heard it put into that form before, but I think
that's, spot on. So, I took a virtual training course here a year or so ago, and
that was the first time I'd seen a prompt template. And something that was a
page long from a prompt. And, we're all used to Google searching right now where
it's, you use ten words maximum and it's totally different now. And people just
haven't figured that out yet in a lot of ways. So, a lot of my job and my team's
job as we roll out AI tools is going to be training people on how to use the
tool properly. because if we just hand it over and say, here's a fancy tool that
can do lots of cool things, use it. they're limited by their own creativity.
They're limited by, what they're used to Google searching and now it just
becomes a different way to Google search. So we really have to train that
context. And, as you said, how do you create the context of what you're trying
to get out of it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. and so then there's always the fun around, like helping.
Well, so I to have to create some of the training and provide some of those
trainings and starting to bring in things like the, skills and the memories and
then again, the prompts and the context and then teaching people when to break
into a new conversation. Yes. It's the same tool, but break into a new
conversation because right now it's taking all of that prior conversation, plus
the new ten words that you've added to this new question that's on a completely
different topic. So unless you want to know about how the anti flea stuff that
you're putting on your dogs affects the lawn, whatever you're feeding the lawn
to grow the lawn because those are two separate conversations that you've had or
questions that you've asked the generative model in the same conversation. Now
it's trying to correlate those two things together versus, okay, this is a
distinct conversation. So let me start a new conversation and let's just talk
about the dogs. Or let's start the new one about the lawn or how do I auto
process my email or, and hopefully people are recognizing how much it can help
them with those little, the monotonous tasks. And This is one way I tell on
myself. I love computers because I'm kind of lazy. I want the computer to do the
work for me. So especially any of those repetitive, monotonous tasks. I hate
those repetitive tasks.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah, it's funny you say that.

Mike Kelley: People love them, but go for it.

Cody Aldinger: I was just going to say, it's funny you say that because I've
used that my whole career as well. I get people that ask me like, man, how'd you
figure out how to do this stuff? Or, why are you so smart with automating this
thing? I'm like, because I don't want to do it. I'm lazy and I don't want to do
it. So that is my sole focus. When some of that stuff comes up, I'm like, I
don't want to do this anymore. I'm going to find a better way. And it's not so
much that, I want to learn the new cool way. It's the fact that I don't want to
do it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. I'm copying and adding formulas to Excel spreadsheets and all
of that kind of stuff, the Vlookup.

Cody Aldinger: So yeah. I think one of the biggest things that I've seen as a
benefit and this has come up just kind of recently, I'll give a little plug for
a book that I read that has just was recommended to me by somebody else. But the
AI driven leader is a book that I read here recently, and it kind of it really
emphasized the use of AI as a thought partner, and using that terminology. And
that really has kind of changed the game for me and a couple others that I've
been working on our business leadership team of help me think through this
thing, right? So you tell the AI agent, I've got this problem. and one of the
other tips that this book says is ask me one question at a time to get enough
context before you provide a solution. Partnering those two things together has
kind of shattered the glass ceiling for me and a couple others. where you start
to realize that AI tools are better than a Google search. and they can really
provide a very different train of thought and help you work through kind of out
of the box solutions that you maybe wouldn't have thought of before. And that
one of the people that I'm working with right now, one of our other business
leaders, just said to me this morning, I'd never realized how much I needed a
thought partner. And it's game changing. I'll tell you.

Mike Kelley: which model, if you don't mind me asking.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah, I mean, we're pretty much in Microsoft copilot right now
and just using their default auto model selection tools. I've used it with
ChatGPT and some of the other basic stuff as well. And it works very much the
same. But we as a company are very Microsoft heavy. We're in, Microsoft Teams
and all the Microsoft Suite. We've got power BI reports and, using Microsoft's
fabric environment for data modeling and that kind of stuff. So copilot made a
lot of sense for us because it's got access to the entire Microsoft graph. so
that's been our tool of choice so far. we're kind of evaluating whether that's
the still the right long term play. But I think for right now it is.

Mike Kelley: I'm interested because I started down that path with our
organization. And then I actually quickly jumped ship. what do you think about
the agency and has it changed? Because last time I was really working with
copilot, I would ask it to do something and it would come back and say, oh,
great idea. But I cannot interact with this. I can't start a word document for
you. I can give you the answer here and you can copy and paste it. Yeah, but I
can't generate it for you.

Cody Aldinger: It's getting better. I'll say that. It's definitely not the best
AI tool on the market. Right. And I think there's reasons for that we could dive
into or not. But I think we could potentially get better solutions at times
using another competitor. you look at ChatGPT as an example, they do one thing
and they do one thing really well, right? Copilot is a part of Microsoft and
Microsoft does a lot of things. and there may be, Microsoft, my experience has
had a, kind of a reputation of kind of starting slow and then all of a sudden
they catch up and they're, best in breed down the road. so we're maybe riding by
it. What's that?

Mike Kelley: I said that or they buy it.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. Right.

Mike Kelley: Best of breed and incorporate it.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. exactly. So, for us, we're maybe riding that out a little
bit, but I think there is enough benefit to us from a security standpoint and
from an integration standpoint that, I don't have to spin up an MSP server to
get ChatGPT to integrate and then say, well, it integrates with these five
things in Microsoft, but not everything. copilot is kind of there and out of the
box. It's the easy button, if you will.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And okay, so connectivity and access to the full Microsoft
graph and all of the endpoints, does make sense.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. I was just going to say to your question on the agency, I
think it's getting better. There's still some things that it doesn't, do well. I
don't think it creates power points very well. I can't tell it to delete all my
emails for me. it'll say, I recommend you do this, but it's not going to click
the buttons for me. Claude has its desktop app, which, can do some of the,
button clicking. I think they're getting there, but they're not quite there yet.

Mike Kelley: So yeah. and actually, that one leads into another area, the
security of it and the use of other tools in the public tools and the, shadow AI
while, team members or, peers, coworkers are waiting for us to roll this out,
waiting for them to go through. We're waiting for them to get through the
classes so that we know that they're using it responsibly. They're waiting for
us to make them sign whatever documents so that they can use it locally. and, or
they're not waiting at all. And just go into Gemini and GPT and Claude and
Piglet pick whichever one nano. are you guys doing anything in that realm? What
do you guys.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. And I think for us, that's what's held us back a little bit
from being further along on the AI journey, than what we are today because we
wanted to get the security in place first. If I go out there and start training
people on, here's all the cool things you can do with AI tools, but we don't
have the security in place. it's going to take off like a wildfire and it's
going to be, really hard to wrangle in at that point because once people get on
a certain tool of choice, it's going to be tough to get them to switch. Right.
Especially if I like ChatGPT better. Copilot doesn't give me as good answers.
Yeah, I get that. But there's other benefits with copilot. for us anyway, so,
having those conversations is going to be a lot easier, if we can limit it from
the start. So we have been going through the security process of it first. we're
about four weeks out from having Microsoft purview in place. and purview is
going to do that security for us where it will limit, AI tool usage unless
otherwise approved. So from your work computer, if you try to go out to whatever
name a system, it's going to deny it, right? It's going to block it and say, you
can't use this. It's blocked by organization. they would have to come and
request access, which then allows us the ability to kind of vet out, what that
tool is and its security and all that, once we get that security posture set up,
then I'm more comfortable going out and saying, hey, we're giving you copilot to
use, here's how you can use it. Here's some of the cool things you can do with
it and kind of let them go at that point.

Mike Kelley: So how much Development. How much advanced usage are you and your
team or how much are you enabling that today? So you know the code creation.
yeah. Cowork is one of those platforms for that, but copilot tries to do some of
that.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. Good question. So we're not doing a whole lot of cowork
yet. we've got a small use case. We've got about six hundred and fifty employees
in the company. I've got thirty nine I think right now with copilot premium
licensing. everybody else has the copilot free chat. So obviously the
difference, the copilot free chat is, just web based models. Copilot premium has
access to the internal graph. You can create your own custom agents. I have one
of our business leaders that I worked with, that had the, probably the best use
case so far. And that's in proposal and content, creation. where they're using
it to help, analyze RFPs help, review and create content for proposal documents.
and they've really seen a lot of benefit from that. They're helping it, using it
to update resumes. So, as people work on many different jobs a year, keeping
those resumes up to date is a challenge in itself. So they're using it for
things like that as well. So that's probably, the biggest use case of what I
would call custom copilot agents right now. And I think we've got a couple other
people that are starting to use it for research, feeding it tools and feeding it
websites they typically would use for research, kind of centralizing that as
well. So those are probably the biggest two right now. So nothing too automated
yet. And I think I'm really skeptical and hesitant as myself. that going back to
the hallucination thing, you don't want to just pump something out the door
automatically with AI tools right now.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, yeah. You definitely want to be or wise consumers of these
products are going to be validating everything before they let it go. I've seen
a couple of things generated and people just attaching it and throwing it out
there, without really reviewing it. and one, it's kind of obvious. And two, you
start to find some of those hallucinations and it takes away some of the
validity of what's being produced or trust.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah, there's a lot of reputational risk that goes along with
that as well right. There's legal risk, obviously, in some cases, and there's
reputational risk that your customer is looking at you going, I paid you to do
that. Yeah.

Mike Kelley: So I could have asked that. I could have made that prompt, too.

Cody Aldinger: Yep. Exactly. we talk a lot about, the time saved on content
creation or doing the task is going to be spent on, quality control before it
goes out the door instead.

Mike Kelley: or into the context to create it. Correct.

Cody Aldinger: Yep.

Mike Kelley: what other challenges are you running into? what's an unexpected
challenge that you've come across with this realm, since starting on the
journey.

Cody Aldinger: I think the, go back to the glass ceiling thing. everybody's got
kind of this glass ceiling of what they think AI is for and what it's capable
of. and it's capable of so much more. But nobody knows how to use it yet. And
that has been the biggest challenge for me as I'm working with people to break
through that ceiling, show them the aha moment, right? Show them, what is the
use case that I can put in front of you and have you get amazing results that
makes that light bulb go on. and it's different for every single person. So I
have to do a lot of listening and asking questions of, what's the monotonous
stuff that's taken away from you doing the productive stuff? what are the things
that you spend most of your time doing, and trying to really hone in on the use
case. I've failed in that more often than I've succeeded, I think at this point
where I think it's going to be really cool and I show them a way to use it and
also like, yeah, all right, whatever. That's useful, but not the aha moment that
we're looking for. So I think. For me, that's the challenge that I'm kind of
battling right now is you look at for us, we have six hundred and fifty
employees. If we want to get good at it, how do I find six hundred and fifty
different individual aha moments and get that out there?

Mike Kelley: Yeah. how do you make that epiphany spread? one of the ways that
I'm hoping to approach that is really not not looking for the six hundred and
fifty, but I'm trying to find the individual, the hungry ones that are like
trying to pull AI from us and say, hey, give me, I want to try, I want to play.
and making them or helping them to one, enjoy their aha too. To leverage the
tool and show what could be. And using that as the attack vector. for the rest
of the people around them, the, rest of the department, the rest of the facility
or the group, as somebody like, hey man, check out what I did. and they're happy
and they're proud of what they've done and they show it. Hopefully that helps
spark those ideas. and now it becomes that more contagious spread. any fears
around that?

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. I think this is different from most IT solutions that we've
all dealt with throughout our careers so far where they're top down driven in
most cases where this is more grassroots effort. the end users are longing for
this and wanting to use it. And they're asking, how do I do it? Right? And if
you don't put the guardrails in place, that's the part that scares me a little
bit. and hence why we're trying to put some of these guardrails in place
ourselves before we go out there and blow the horn too loud. because when
somebody gets excited about something, they're going to show their friends and
if they get excited about it, they're going to start doing things as well and
being able to control that a little bit. Right. I hesitate a little bit because
you want to control it in a way that, secures your company, secures your data,
secures your brand, that kind of thing. You don00t want to cripple it either. So
it's a little bit of a fine line right now. And I think that's a big challenge
for us is training and rolling that out, encouraging use because there is
benefits, but also not limiting it so much, that they don't find the value.

Mike Kelley: I'm trying to find a segue and I don't have an easy segue, so I'm
just going to be blunt and switch a little bit. part of what we're talking about
is like just the training and enabling people and setting them up for that. And
then, the data, the data governance is going to be key. And we're hearing a lot
about that. but I know that you raised a flag, around another conversation, the
processes, let's talk about the processes and throwing AI at processes. what are
your thoughts or advice or fears? what are your hopes and aspirations when it
comes to processes and these tools?

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. So I think, I was just at a conference in San Diego a
couple weeks ago, and I heard somebody there mention it in one of the sessions I
was in. But, it resonated well with me that if you grab an AI tool and throw it
into your current process, you're likely just doing a bad process faster. and
really, those processes that we've got in the business world today are designed
for a world that didn't have AI.

Mike Kelley: Right? they were created and probably created before two iterations
of technology. anyway, even though it's not as game changing as AI is, but those
processes and people still defend it with the, but this is the way we've always
done it, right?

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. and, change is hard for everybody, right? and especially
when you start pairing that with, well, if you do that for me, what am I going
to do? Right? What does my role look like after AI does this thing and you
change that process. so then you're just kind of more apt to get pushback and
fear. But, I think really we all need to take a step back and look at our
processes and as a whole and say, knowing what we know now, knowing the tools
that we have right now, would we or could we or should we redesign the process
from the start as a whole, with AI being the center point and insert ourselves
into the process where it makes sense versus other way around.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. I'm thinking maybe this is a perfect place to start talking
to that thought partner.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah.

Mike Kelley: Hey, here's my process. if we were to redo this, talk to me about
how could we do this better? Leveraging tools like yourself.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah, that's a great way, to have that conversation with the
thought partner of, even if you have a process diagram, a workflow diagram,
whatever, you can upload a pdf of it and say.

Mike Kelley: A picture of it.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah, right. I need you to be a thought partner. ask me one
question at a time until you have enough information. I'm looking to redesign
this process with, AI as, the forefront of the process or whatever, or, how do
we make this more efficient using the tools that we've got today?

Mike Kelley: All right. I'm curious because one of the things that I've been
doing with my prompts is I will tell the prompts as I'm trying to design
something, I'll say, okay, no changes, no writing code until I explicitly say
so, but ask any clarifying questions. ask me or present thoughts on this. Can we
do it better? And I'll throw those in there, but I'll get like four or five
questions. what's causing you to say, ask me one question at a time.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. And I think that's part of one of the game changer moments
for me was that piece of it. Because when you get five questions at a time and
you answer those, your next question does not have the context of the first one
necessarily. so if you ask one question and you answer it, it says, okay, now
based on that, here's another question. Here's a follow up question. so I think
you can get similar results. but I feel it just kind of focuses in a little
better with the one question at a time thing.

Mike Kelley: Okay. Well, I'll have to ask and try that a couple of times and see
what the results are because I'm getting like five questions and I end up
producing like a full page or two pages of answers. And I'll make sure to grab
question number one and its answers and throw some context in. And then question
number two, that it's prompting me with. and, each of those questions have been
distinct pieces of the whole of the goal, but, I just found it interesting that
you kept saying, ask me one question at a time.

Cody Aldinger: So yeah. Yeah. In the book that I mentioned, obviously is where I
got that idea from. and they explain it pretty well in there, but I think it's
your question number one, you answer it now, question number two has that
context. So it might say, okay, based on what you said on number one, how would
you answer this now? so it starts to build versus, giving you five questions at
a time. They're all based on that first individual prompt.

Mike Kelley: Okay. one of the reasons that I've learned to tell it, don't take
any actions, don't do anything until I explicitly tell you is because I've also
had these tools, especially the ones that have more of that agency go off and
just radically change portions of the code that have nothing to do with the
current prompts and what I'm talking about dealing with or trying to fix at the
moment. And so I've started to learn to tell it, okay, you are only to affect
code that has to do with this portion of the conversation, even though I'm
leaving all of that prior context in that conversation. So because like I'm
working on, interactive, summary web page of something. So yeah, have you, come
across anything like that or.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. I think what I would do in that situation is explicitly
tell it, you're not the doer, you're the thinker, right? Help me think through
the solution. Don't do it for me unless I tell you, which I think is similar to
what you're doing right now. Basically, let's talk about it. First, let's
generate ideas before you actually go do anything.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, let's get to that solid plan defined, not just you run off
and do things in between each one of our prompts.

Cody Aldinger: Yes, exactly. and I think that example is a perfect,
representation of why this is a hard concept for people to grasp right now with
AI. because depending on how you tell it to function, you might have really bad
experience with it. So if you have a developer who's never used AI and they ask
it a question, it changes all their code. You think they're going to use AI
tools anymore?

Mike Kelley: yeah, Especially if they haven't backed it up or checked it into
the repo or if it radically changes it and they don't have that beginning copy.

Cody Aldinger: Correct. Yeah. So teaching that context and teaching people how
to interact is going to be. Extremely critical.

Mike Kelley: I knew some of those things and I didn't even think about that when
trying to build my first little agent to help me. it was the pain of having it
radically rewrite things and destroy itself or destroy the agent that I'd spent
lots of time trying to get to. And so I was happy with where I was at. Ask one
little thing and then suddenly. Yep.

Cody Aldinger: and I would bet your first couple of prompts were one or two
sentences, Max as you dove in right away until you figure out for sure, if you
heard. Yeah. You dive into something and say, help me analyze my finances. Well,
That can mean a whole lot of things. But if you're looking for, help me build a
personal budget based on this amount of income and this amount of time period,
you get specific with it, you're going to get vastly different results.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So, kind of back to that use case that I
threw out there of the CFO, CEO, and CIO angle transcript. and then learning how
to get the different summaries and then maybe feed those summaries back in and
say, okay, summarize the summaries and give me a holistic, but yeah, the page
long prompt or the page of context with the prompt, to set up the overarching
goal, development and code writing. You guys doing any of that yet? Or are you
talking about that or are you figuring we're doing.

Cody Aldinger: We're doing very minimal. we don't have a custom dev team. we try
to maybe this is my own leadership philosophy, but I'm not a huge custom dev
guy. I think you can kind of handcuff yourself a little bit at times, but,
there's things like, some power BI Dax queries and whatnot that we're using code
for some, basic spreadsheet formulas. we do a lot of design work with AutoCAD
and there's Lisp routines and that sort of thing that are kind of per user, in
some cases. So we're using it for those types of things, but we don't do really
any kind of what I would consider custom dev with, your typical coding
languages.

Mike Kelley: So okay. Yeah. all kinds of history and opportunities for me in the
organization that I'm working with around all of that and trying to navigate
those waters. however, this is about you and your experiences. so we'll focus in
on that. so okay, the training, get rolling that out. Are you rolling it out to
all six hundred in mass? Are you going to run classes? once you run classes,
what are you going to do after that?

Cody Aldinger: So I think what we're going to end up likely doing is we've
already got copilot free version, kind of out there, for all users to use. We've
not trained on it yet. We will. Then we were scrambling to make sure that it was
authenticated into our environment. But, everybody will have access to that.
It's really the licensed version that we need to be strategic about. And, when
people are coming to us saying, hey, I need to use AI tools. my first question
is, what do you want to accomplish with it? Right? Starting to ask those
questions of what are you trying to do? Well, I want it to help me, clean up my
emails. Okay, cool. You can do that with the free version, right? it's like,
where does that line get crossed where we actually have to purchase a copilot
premium or deploy kind of pay as you go agents for specific tasks. so that's
kind of we're going to have to ask a lot of questions throughout to figure out
where it makes sense to buy a license versus using something that's free.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Have you come up with methodologies for measuring the
utilization of those purchased versions?

Cody Aldinger: We have not yet. purview again, is going to help with that
because we can get a lot of categorization on how people are using it. who's
using it? how often people are using it. That's going to help us kind of govern
the process. And, make sure that the people that we're paying for licensing for
are actually using it and understanding, what types of categories of, things are
they using it for? Again, I don't want to pay for a license version for them to,
create their home meal plan for the week. but if they're going to use it for
something, valuable, that's what it's there for.

Mike Kelley: So yeah. And so when I first started doing it, I was asking the
infrastructure team to keep an eye on that utilization and, okay, we gave it to
the executives, which of the executives are actually touching it and using it
and who's doing what. they struggled a little with it because of course it's
coming back and you can see who's touching it and using it just through the
regular infrastructure, but it's coming back with a new ID and my team was not
yet really used to transferring UIDs into usernames or, government names. And,
so they were struggling with that transformation, but once they recognized, oh,
wait, I can ask it to help me do that. Yeah.

Cody Aldinger: I think for us, again, the adoption is really going to come down
to training. I've rolled it out to the thirty nine or whatever people that have
it right now. And some of those people aren't using it. And a lot of times they
asked me for it, I gave it to them. And now I'm seeing that there's no usage
there or very minimal. So then what do I do from a leadership standpoint? Do I
just strip the license or do I go talk to them and say, hey, you're not getting
the value out of this. What can I help with? and a lot of times you're going to
get those responses like, well, I tried it this one time. I didn't get a great
answer. So, I just stopped using it or forgot I had it, or I'm not sure how to
use it, and then helping them work through that. And that's where training is
going to come in and we are going to do kind of global or I'll say, company wide
training. I've got a couple mechanisms within our organization that I do like
monthly tech talks. I've got some internal channels that I can post to some,
helpful tips and tricks. we'll create some good prompt examples that we'll get
out there for people to say, hey, here, try this prompt. and I'm hoping that
that kind of opens up some of the eyes on how better to use it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. and actually, I was thinking of myself of doing some like
lunch and learns and, I don't think center of excellence is a good one for this,
but somebody else gave me one, center of performance or center of utilization,
trying to just get the group of people who are using it in there talking to each
other and being able to help each other so that now, it's so new. And our
chances to use it in so many different ways are so large that, and you're going
to be amazed at what the guy over in accounting is going to come up with. I know
I need to be able to hear what he's doing with it because he's going to give me
ideas.

Cody Aldinger: Mhm.

Mike Kelley: And yeah.

Cody Aldinger: There's so much of that going on. and we do have an AI user group
that I put together. and, it's primarily made up of those people that have the
premium licensing. Just to get them in a room, like you said, and like, what are
you guys finding super valuable or what road bumps are you running into and
share that knowledge?

Mike Kelley: I wonder how many of the thirty nine that got those licenses are
utilizing other external tools. and how do we as the IT leaders figure that out
without slapping on the mask that keeps them from. I'm thinking of the, silence
of the lambs. that mask, you were talking about the handcuffs and I'm trying to
think of moving it to that next level. Yeah. Cody, this has been a wonderful
conversation. we have a question that we like to ask on, on You've Been Heard
and that is what are we talking about? Or what are we not talking about today?
That you would make a prediction that in eighteen months we'll be talking about
this topic. what thoughts do you have in that room?

Cody Aldinger: I think for me, the one that I'm kind of watching closely is the
pricing model around AI and AI usage. AI is changing so quickly right now, and
there's so many startups and, so many companies that are adding on AI tools to
everything that nobody really knows how to price it yet. And the way that
they're pricing it and selling it today is not cost effective in most cases,
from what I'm finding. I'll use copilot as an example, right. The premium
version is thirty bucks a month per user, three hundred and sixty dollars a
year. Yep. I can make, a pretty good use case that I get that much ROI pretty
quickly. But if I take that time, six hundred and fifty employees, that's a big
number real quick. And that's only one, tool. So, now if you're like, well,
ChatGPT does this thing better. this pocket of users also needs to have access
to ChatGPT. that's another thirty bucks a user per month, right? Like this thing
can get out of hand in a hurry. And now we're seeing, the usage being paid in
tokens, which I joke that this is monopoly money at this point because nobody
knows what that means. You can't measure that. you don't know how much a prompt
is going to cost you in terms of tokens. so I think the pricing side of this is
just a kind of a disaster right now. And I think there is going to be a bubble,
if you will, where it's going to drastically change in the next twelve to
eighteen months, I think. And it has to as people start to roll this out there,
people are going to realize that it's it can get really expensive real quick. I
mean, again, copilot, if I was to roll it out to all of my users, our Microsoft
licensing is going to be fifty percent more than what it is right now, just
overnight with one tool.

Mike Kelley: Right? And actually, I did a little bit of a calculation off of
that. if at that thirty dollars per month, as long as there's no token cost
behind copilot, if somebody that's making sixty thousand a year, thirty dollars
an hour, if you can save them fifteen dollars a month, then it pays for itself.

Cody Aldinger: Mhm.

Mike Kelley: and it was surprising to me, but that fifteen dollars or that
fifteen minutes per month or was it per week? that they constantly got to keep
trying to save themselves that amount of time.

Cody Aldinger: And how do you prove that you've done that? Right? how do you
prove with data that you've actually saved that time and that they're not taking
off fifteen minutes earlier or whatever the case is. Right.

Mike Kelley: So I can do little bits here and there, hey, I was able to create
this presentation in an hour, instead of the seven hours that I was foreseeing
at taking. Yeah. but once I get to that level of productivity, now I've got to
ramp it up from that level of productivity. I've got to keep ramping it up to
continue to pay for it.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. And I think when you throw the token thing into the mix, I
think Microsoft's at least the last I looked, they sell like the per use tokens,
right? You can buy a pack of twenty five thousand tokens for two hundred and
fifty dollars in the pay per use model, I think they say is, a minimum of three
tokens to twelve tokens per interaction. Cool. I have no idea what that means.
But next year when they change their pricing, they're not going to up it from
two hundred and fifty dollars to three hundred dollars. They're going to say
your minimum is now five tokens to twenty tokens. How do I budget for that? How
do I know what that's actually going to do to my bottom line? And how do I plan
for that? You just don't know.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Because you're going to have that huge disparity in the
users, the person that's going to put in the eight to ten words and the other
person that's going to use five to six attachments for the context. and then ask
that ten word question, radically different cases, radically different token
usage between those two cases.

Cody Aldinger: Yeah. And now we've got an AI tool that we're putting on our
financial system right now that uses tokens as well. But their token model is
not the same as Microsoft. So we get, I think, fifty thousand tokens per user
per month for this pricing model. So, now I'm looking at overages and it's going
well, it's three dollars and fifty cents per million tokens over like, well,
three dollars and fifty cents isn't much. But when I use it in a matter of three
prompts, I'm doing math going like, this thing is going to get out of hand,
right? It's going to get ridiculous real quick.

Mike Kelley: So it's going to be exponential.

Cody Aldinger: that's why I say it's kind of monopoly money right now, because
nobody knows what the actual currency is.

Mike Kelley: Yeah.

Cody Aldinger: So I think there's more to come on that in the next twelve to
eighteen months. I think that's going to look radically different. because
people are going to have to get competitive in order to get these tools into
place. Nobody is willing to sign on to long term agreements or big price tags
right now when things change daily.

Mike Kelley: So yeah, and they're changing daily. They new models, new things.
So, as we come to a close on this, what is the one thing you want to make sure
the business and or your peers or the people following us into the leadership of
it in the You've Been Heard Community. What's the one thing that you want them
to hear from you?

Cody Aldinger: Yeah, I think I'll circle this back to the start of the
conversation in, kind of the listening and I go back to a quote that, people
don't know how much you don't care how much until they know how much you care.
it's a quote that I heard, I think John Maxwell who said it, that I heard it
from, I don't know if he got it from somebody else, but listen and understand
that, and allow people to understand that you're here to help make their lives
better. And you want to use technology as a tool to do that, whether it's AI or
anything else. being that strong business partner and letting people understand
that you're there to help them is going to be critical, especially in this AI
world right now where nobody knows what to believe, nobody knows what it's
possible and what it's capable of. and I think that's really going to go kind of
a long way when it comes to this. So we don't need to walk into the room and
speak technical jargon and, try to prove that we're the smartest person because
we know big words. it's more of how do you bridge that gap and help the business
user understand what AI even is?

Mike Kelley: Yeah, I love that closing thought. So thank you very much, Cody. We
truly appreciate you sharing your time, your experience and what you bring.

Cody Aldinger: Awesome. I appreciate you having me on. It's been a lot of fun.

Mike Kelley: Thank you for taking the time to be on You've Been Heard.