What is Everyday AI?
Will AI take your job? Probably. So that's one of the things that I wanted to talk about on the first ever episode of Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson. I am the host of Everyday AI. I'll get a little bit more into my background here in a minute, but I want you to give me about 14 and a half more minutes to go over that question, right? I just came out right away and said, will AI take your job? Yeah, it probably will.
So let me explain that. But before I do what is everyday AI. What is this podcast, this background? I'm live here, so if you see anything, that's me shifting in my chair. So Everyday AI is a daily newsletter, daily podcast, and a daily live show as well, all focused on helping everyday people like me and you use AI to leverage their career and to grow their everyday life. That's what this is all about. So, real quick about my background. And FYI, if you're listening to this on the podcast, in the future I'm going to be having other guests. I may be taking some questions live as people ask them. So if you are watching this on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, not sure what else this is on. If you're watching this live, feel free to drop a comment and in the future, there will be other guests. But today, I just wanted to take this first opportunity to explain even why I'm starting this podcast and why now. Why now more than anything? And also answer that question right. No. Clickbait here. I'm going to answer that. Will AI take your job?
Jordan's Background
All right, so let me explain real quick my backgrounds before you start to second guess or judge what I'm saying. So, again, my name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the founder of a boutique digital strategy agency here in Chicago called Accelerant Agency. And that's an important part of the show. So notice that I did not say I am an AI professional. I'm not. And if you're not either, that's okay, then this show is for you. Have I been using AI software for a couple of years? Absolutely. Have I used hundreds of them? Yes, we use a lot of software. However, I am not a highly technical person. I'm not out here coding new applications. I am an everyday person. I'm an everyday marketer strategist, whatever you want to call it. So if you're listening and you don't know anything about AI, that's okay. That's what this daily podcast and this daily newsletter is here. It's here for you. Because I do think that this technology is going to start causing some huge problems in the workforce.
So, yes, AI will take a lot of our jobs. But that's okay. That's something that we're going to be focusing on over the next couple of weeks and months. Okay? So one other thing about me, I get thirsty a lot, so I'm going to be taking drinks, right? There we go. All right. So my background real quick, and this is important because throughout the course of this show, I'm going to be drawing on things, and I want you, the viewer, to understand my background. Sometimes if I'm not experienced in a certain field, I'll tell you that. But even though I'm 37 years old, I've been in marketing and communications professionally for 20 years. Yes, I did that math correctly.
So I started as a full time journalist at 17. I was a junior in high school. I was working 40 hours a week at my daily newspaper. So I've been writing even before that. But I've been writing professionally since I was 17 and even before that, like I said, I was building websites, creating projects as a teenager. But I really started my professional career as a journalist at age 17. So one thing, even with me personally, I always feel like I've been frustrated at whatever industry I've been in. I've always felt has been a little slow to adapt. And in newspapers, that goes without saying. But I was even early on. So what I started probably in 2002, 2003, I was pushing for things on the website. No one understood. Why would we really put full stories on the website? And I said, let's do video. Let's do this.
So throughout my time as a journalist, spending that six or seven years, I was always pushing the boundary. The Chicago Sun Times, where I mowed my last stop on kind of my reporter journey, I was pushing video. I was pushing audio slideshows, had the first or maybe not the first, but the largest ever live chat in Chicago Suntime's history at the time. Kind of live blogging, so to speak, governor Rod Blagovich's in impeachment proceedings. So I feel that I've always been a little ahead of industries. Not saying that in a kind of a braggadocious way, right? Just that I feel whatever industry I've been in has always been a little behind the times.
So again, after seven years, I kind of got out of that and transitioned into working at a nonprofit. It was actually a weird story. I met this guy playing basketball when I was still working as a journalist. I kind of told him, hey, I was actually taking kind of some time off in November, December of that year, I was a Pulitzer fellow. So I traveled to Africa, did some multimedia reporting, fantastic experience. But when I met this guy, he said, all right, come back, work for me. So that's my second leg of my career journey. So I came back and worked for ten years at this nonprofit, working with at risk youth. But the last five years and this is relevant here. We essentially just became an activation agency for Nike and Jordan brand. So I spent five years essentially a lot of traveling the country, so going out to their world headquarters in Oregon and going to New York City a lot la. So we were going all over, just doing activations for Nike and Jordan. So that's where I really sharpened, I guess you could say, my agency skills. So after ten years at the nonprofit, kind of my third leg is starting Accelerant agency.
Jordan Today
So that kind of brings us to where we are today. So I started Accelerant in gosh, what's it been now? Four and a half years, so late 2018, I think, full time in 2019. So here's the thing. When I made my business plan back in 2018, I wrote down I didn't want to do marketing deliverables forever, because even at that time, I went back last night when I was kind of preparing for this first show, and I wrote in my business plan then that marketing deliverables were going to be short lived. I knew that websites, writing, photo, video, all of these things, how they happened, were going to drastically change in my business plan. I said, hey, by year five going to make a pivot into owning smaller companies. That's what I thought at the time. Still working on that, by the way. So that's kind of where I'm at now. So I actually just last week started working with my attorney to get Accelerant ventures up. So investing in small companies.
The Birth of Everyday AI
But what I'm actually most passionate about is what our team now is going to be spending a lot of time on, and that is this daily podcast, this daily newsletter. Because even at the time when I created that business plan, I knew I didn't know it was going to be this GPT technology or runway ML, I didn't know any of that. But I knew, at least in my field of marketing, communications, digital strategy, that things were going to completely change. So just to recap, because I'm going to get to this question, will AI take my job? So I just want to recap with my weird background of 20 years. I spent about, I'm looking at my notes here because I updated this, about 12,000 hours writing for major publications and big brands. So even with Accelerant, whether it's ourselves or through kind of other partners, writing for brands that you experience, read about, see on the TV every single day. So I've spent roughly about 12,000 hours writing for major publications and big brands. Probably 6000 hours designing websites, a lot of web design that's going back to when I was a teenager, about 5000 hours editing photo and video. Been doing that for a long time.
The first five years of the nonprofit was doing just everything in the marketing realm. About 4000 hours doing research and data analysis. A lot of what I was doing a year or two ago. Data is everything for a digital strategy company. About 4000 hours doing brand strategy and identity, about 4000 hours doing graphic design, and probably about 10,000 hours doing other miscellaneous tasks. Here's the thing. All those hours, thousands in the case of writing more than 10,000 hours, I guess that's what you have to do to be considered an expert in something with air quotes, right?
AI Does It Better
All of those things that I've spent 20 years of my life, half of a professional career doing, I'm telling you, AI does all of those things better than me. I'm not one of those people that's going to go out on Twitter and LinkedIn and say, oh, this AI, I'm better than it. I'm not. I am confident enough in my skills and my background and seeing where the technology is heading to know and I've already experienced this. AI already can write better than me, right? And let's not even talk about the output, which is probably 30, 40 X. It can write better than me. If I spend time to train a model, it will write better than me. And if you're new to AI, don't worry, I'll get back and let you know what all that means.
Photo, video. We'll be talking on the show about things like Mid Journey, Dolly Runway, ML, photo and video. It's fantastic. Research and data analysis. We'll get into this. But now you have most of you have heard of Chat GPT, but now you have these things called baby GPT, auto GPT that are fantastic for research and analysis. It's wild. It's essentially you having employees that work very fast around the clock, working with each other. And then we go into brand strategy design. I'm not going to go through all these things piece by piece, but it's getting to the point where, if you haven't noticed this already, the best AI programs and companies and advancements out there are outperforming the professionals. And again, I'm fine saying that.
Hey, great example. Last night, my wife handed me her phone, two pictures. I'm sure you've seen these on Twitter. It was two pictures of a cheetah. She said, hey, one's AI, one's not again. Here's a little something about me. I would love to be a full time Safari photographer. I would love it. Went on a couple a couple of years ago. So I've taken photos of cheetahs. So I'm like, all right, you can't fool me. I said, all right, this one's AI. I was wrong.
So it is crazy what knowing what program to use, how to use. It can give you better results or comparable results that even to someone who is in the field like myself. I told you, I've spent thousands of hours shooting and editing photo and video. I couldn't tell. So I think you've seen the pattern here. All of these different skills, all of these different job types. We didn't even get into things like CPAs, your accountants, your lawyers, even some of those other jobs that maybe are out of the creative field, AI is going to massively disrupt the economy. I don't know what that means yet. We'll be talking about that a little bit on the daily podcast and in the newsletter, and bringing in guests who probably know a little bit more than me.
AI Will Replace Jobs
But I do want to talk about one thing here. Quick on that. It's a quote from Sam Alman, the CEO of OpenAI. So on a podcast in the spring of this year, 2023, I'm going to read his quote. He even said this in his quote, that people weren't paying enough attention to it, but I'm going to read his quote. So he said, the current worries that I have are that there's going to be disinformation problems or economic shocks or something else at a level far beyond anything we're prepared for. And I don't think that gets enough attention. Economic shocks. That's what I want to draw on. Yes, AI will be replacing many jobs. So the same way that in the this is probably a little bit before I started working. So apologies if this is wrong. So in the think, for the most part is when companies really started to accept being on computers and making computers a part of the workflow. And then in the 90s, kind of getting on the internet, that process took, you could say, a decade or more. And I think that changed the workplace from maybe like a one to a two or three. Right. This is changing where we're at from a one to a 100. And it is happening fast every day.
When you think that you understand what's going on in the AI space, something incredibly large happens. So will we be working for robots? Are we all going to be unemployed? No, I did write a post last week on LinkedIn. So look me up. Jordan Wilson on LinkedIn. So about Blockbuster, right? And I hope this point illustrates it because I'm not going to go on for too much longer. We said 15 minutes. So Blockbuster at its height, employed about 85,000 people. And we all know what happened. They didn't adapt. The industry said, okay, you're done. So you had companies netbox netbox, I combined two. There netflix red Box, I think, were two of the first companies. So Netflix, excuse me, at its height, employed 13,000. Couldn't find great numbers for Red Box. It was a couple of thousand. So going from 85,000 at Blockbuster to 13,000 at Netflix, did tech innovation kill 70,000 jobs? No, because tens of thousands of jobs were created because of that. So you had hundreds of content studios that didn't exist before. Because when you give consumers more ways to consume content, when you give consumers more way or just more content options, you have, again, hundreds of now good size studios. Those jobs didn't exist before. There was way fewer production companies because there were fewer outlets for it.
So you can make the case that in streaming, for video streaming, it probably created a lot more jobs. We didn't lose those 70,000 jobs. You could say it was a one to one disruption. So here's the thing with AI, and I'll leave you with this. If you aren't using AI right now, if you're not learning AI right now, there is a chance that whether it's in three months or three years, there's a good chance that your job could be at risk. This isn't not trying to instill fear in you. That's the reality. We're already seeing plenty of stories, fortune 500, doing tests with AI in the workplace at a pretty high rate. You'd be surprised. So what I'm trying to say is, you need to learn how to work with AI the same way. How? If you have a desk job, there's no such thing as a desk job now without using a computer, right? I do think that's going to be the case sooner than you might think. We're talking maybe months, but probably a couple of years where there's not going to be many desk jobs where you're not leveraging AI.
Final Thoughts
So that is what I want to leave you with. Will AI take your job. Maybe. But as long as you are using AI, you have a great chance to grow your career and also grow your personal life as well. There's so many applications for AI. We're not going to get into them today. I'm going to wrap up this show.
Now. We said 15 minutes, but it's the first one. It's the first one. So we went a little long. And if you're still listening, that's fantastic because I want you to go to your everyday Ai.com. We are giving away two year long subscriptions for premium chat GPT. I see on Twitter, a lot of people just say, like, oh, I'm not going to use it the paid version, it's too expensive. I'll keep using the free version. I'm fine. If it's slow, you should be using the premium version.
So go on there, sign up for the newsletter. We have information about that. Giveaway in the newsletter. Please do that. Thank you for listening.
As a reminder, we'll be here every day live on these streaming platforms and your favorite podcast provider as well, too, today. So Spotify, Apple Music, Google, wherever else podcasts go, we're going to be there. I can't thank you enough for tuning in today to listening to this podcast. It means so much.
Like I said, pivoting away from having a successful business model at Accelerant Agency. And I'm pivoting away to be here every day for you. For you readers, for you listeners. If you're watching this on a stream, doing this for you. Because I feel with my background, our crazy talented team at Accelerant, I think we're very well positioned to be a resource for everyday people like yourself who are trying to use AI. So with that. Thank you so much for tuning in.
Can't wait to talk to you tomorrow.