Generation AI: Why Coding, College Degrees and Slow CEOs Are on the Clock with Matt Britton

A lot of big companies are run by CEOs in the late 50s, early 60s with golden parachutes that just don't want to shake things up. And that leadership might be okay for them because they're going to be retired in five years. But for the rest of the company, they're going to be in such a disadvantaged place because of the lack of change that's been embraced.

You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory. No fluff. No shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what's now, what's right. Because, hey, that's what we do here on your number one marketing and business show on Apple Podcasts. We appreciate you for making that. Can you believe it? I can believe it. I'm a big fan. Thank you. We appreciate it. We've got Matt Britton. He is the author of Generation AI. There's nothing more right now than AI. Matt, I hope to have you on, Matt. Yeah, I'm pumped to be here. Generation AI made very clever titles.

A lot of people don't is only really 25 years old in terms of being a mainstream consumer consumption tool. Before that, it was used in government and very sparsely in business. But we're still in the early days of the internet itself. Then over time, it became Gen Z. Gen Z is known as the iPhone generation, the social media generation, the first generation to grow up with both in a household, which obviously changed society in a big way. And now it's Gen Alpha, which is the AI generation. Right now, Gen Alpha is age zero to 15. They are never going to be a big one. going to know a world without AI, a world without technology that you can talk to. So with each of these major changes, what I found is large companies first push it off.

Yeah, that was an algorithm. And yes, AI, you're right, has been around like if you think about Netflix, and it tells you what it thinks you want to watch, or Spotify shows you the music it thinks you're gonna like that is AI. It's also true that the internet existed before America Online came out. But it wasn't until ChatGPT came out that AI was really unleashed to the masses. And the true power of what it can do was unleashed. And that's why we've seen such an incredible groundswell of interest and innovation come out since then. Yes. And I do this a lot. I think as you get older, I hopefully get wiser. I try to think outside of my own realm because I recognize I've been a marketer, an innovator and new media guy.

The reality is most people who do know about AI think AI is just chat GPT asking it to make a recipe for lasagna or to write a blog post for you. And they just understand the surface. And I think even the percentage of people that understand the surface is probably not as much as we would think. And you're right. We do suffer from Stockholm syndrome, so to speak, like we are in the inside of it. But when you get out there, you really realize that it is such the early days. And the thing about AI is different than other technologies. It's just the rate of change is mind boggling. Even people like myself that spend the majority of their waking hours in AI, it's so hard to keep up because its ability to increase its compute power is unlike anything we've ever seen before.

What are we trying to tell people with this book? What are people absorbed from this? The book is a societal view of what I believe AI's impact is going to be. Not just AI, but the fact that we have this new generation coming in that knows nothing but AI. AI. Because when you have new generations come in whose brains are hardwired differently, they become the catalyzing force for change. And what the book really tried to communicate is AI's broader impact as a result of both Gen Alpha and this new technology on business, culture, and society. And I kind of go deep into a variety of different temples and pillars of society, whether it's the future of the workforce and careers, love and relationships, parenting and education, entertainment and media and commerce.

And if you're an extra on a movie set or an extra in the office, you're going to be out of work. And that's sort of the analogy I like to give is that if you have IP value, if you have an audience, if you're creative, a lot of the things, frankly, you possess, right? You can leverage AI to create more content, to talk to people on a more personalized basis, to be more efficient and effective. But if you come into work every day waiting to be told what to do, and you're in a deterministic role where basically you move paper from one hallway to the other, or you're entering data, or you're just responding to queries, that's exactly what AI is now capable of doing in a way that arguably is better than humans are.

You know, like... become the best builder, plumber, whatever it might be. We've had this knowledge economy for so long where people were compensated for possessing knowledge. And that could be knowledge and knowing how to code, knowing how to write a contract, knowing how to read an x-ray, knowing how to do someone's taxes. All things that AI is going to take the place of workers for. AI arguably can already do your taxes better, write a contract better in most use cases than the professional services world can. If you're not going to be a builder in AI and be a problem solver in AI, then AI will disintermediate you. At the same time, what you've aptly pointed out is, if you're a problem solver in the physical world, that that becomes a skill set that becomes even more in demand.

But now knowledge is commoditized. The notion of learning is no longer memorization. It's really understanding some core new soft skills that I think will become the skills in the workforce, which are creativity, problem solving, critical thinking. That's really what matters. You think of, for example, graphic design. A graphic designer to date has been heavily compensated for the ability to turn the knobs and dials to take basically an image and change the shadows or the lighting or make it look a certain way. Right now, if you give AI a prompt, it can do that. So what does that mean for a graphic designer? It means a graphic designer is no longer going to be rewarded for understanding how to use the knobs and dials. It's gonna be rewarded on knowing what to tell AI to design.

Well, that's great. I'm using this microwave so I can cook four other things while it's going on. Is that a good analogy? That's a good analogy. The best analogy I use is photography. You used to need to know how to develop the film to be a photographer. You used to need to know how to operate these technical DSLR cameras and knowing stuff like ISO and F-stop. And now 99.9% of all pictures are taken on the iPhone. And you just need to know where to point the thing to and pick a filter and how it looks. Now, are there still use cases for professional photographers for weddings, for special events? Sure. Are they dwindling? Yes. What makes a great photographer right now is not knowing the technical skills of how to turn the knobs and dials, how to develop film.

It's actually having an eye on where to point the camera to. And AI is the ultimate analogy for that, is where do you point AI? How do you unleash its power? You no longer need to know how to do the knobs and dials because that's all beneath the surface. Yes. I think I took you one step, you took nine more. One day, one thing we're going to see is a boom in robotics. AI has evolved incredibly fast. The hardware side of AI hasn't, and that's just because of the physicality of hardware and the development cycles are longer. But what's going to start to happen is you're going to see a new range of hardware, whether it's toys that kids can talk to. I'm sure you've seen the movie Ted.

Kids are going to be able to talk to their toys. And they're going to remember things about the kid. And they're going to be friends with their toys. Sounds crazy, but they will. And you're going to have robotics in the household. And at first, robotics are going to mow your lawn and maybe cook for you. But over time, it's going to take your kids to school. If you think about it, autonomous vehicles, robo taxis are basically that. But there's just going to be a robot inside that's going to hold your kid's hand and walk them to school. We are going in that direction. Robotics are going to be taking over society in three to five years as soon as the hardware cycle catches up with the incredible software cycle of AI.

you can either wear or like put on your laptop. And when I'm in the office, I use it and it records every single thing that everybody says during the day. At the end of the day, it gives me summaries of what I said I would do, creates a to-do list for me, even adds things to my calendar, right? So it's listening at all points. It almost performs like a second brain. And over time, I can go back and say, what did I tell Joe that I would do when we met a couple of weeks ago? And we'll know it instant. That's one kind of early marker of the future of hardware is a device like that. if you think about the AirPods, the AirPods are one day and whether Apple makes or another company is going to have a camera in them.

So it's going to see what you're seeing. It's going to be able to obviously listen to you and you're gonna be able to hear. So with those devices, the only thing that's missing is a screen. Because once you have the screen, you basically replicate everything the iPhone does. People can say, what about a keyboard and voice recognition is getting so good that I'm not sure we're going to be typing for that much longer. And if we're not typing for that much longer, should kids even be taught to spell? How do you get the screen? Well, if you see what Meta and Mark Zuckerberg are doing with their Meta Gray Band glasses. They're creating mixed reality, where if you're wearing sunglasses, you can see a screen that's overlaid.

Scary, but we're heading in that direction. Yeah, I'll go down one layer further, but like the Matrix in a world where your eyes see what the computer screen is and what that world is. If you're watching the YouTube video, which you should be to see how good looking that Britain is, the author of Generation AI. I'm doing this like the physical world that I'm in. Does it matter where I am? Can I be in a ditch in Cambodia as long as my contact lenses are showing me a reality that I want? Well, that's why, you know, the Apple Vision Pro came out, which is these kind of immersive, they look like ski goggles that you wear. Have you ever tried it before? I have. Got a little dizzy, but I saw the future.

You saw, exactly. And you put those on. And if you watch a movie or, you know, a sporting event, it's like you're there and you could just be sitting on an airplane. Obviously, there are some issues with that. Like you said, you got dizzy and removes you from reality. But we're slowly inching towards it. I think 10 years from now, we're going to look back and all say to each other, how did we get here? How is this world so completely different? Over the last year or two is when that all started to change. kind of become in a stage of evolution where we're at the end of one cycle. I would call it like the digital revolution that started with the internet and included social media and included the iPhone and cloud computing.

I would actually put coding in that territory. If you look at open coding jobs in the United States, it's dropped like a stone. Companies are not hiring engineers anymore because AI knows how to code quicker, better, faster than humans. And if it's not 100% there today, I promise you it'll be there a year from now. Coding is really not a skill humans arguably were ever supposed to learn because it's not human language, it's computer language. And now AI is going to be able to, based on any prompt, create any technology-driven product, software-driven product you want just through a simple prompt. So that's a perfect example of something that people probably won't have to learn for much longer because basically it's all going to be done for you.

So I would put math in that same category. Now, there's a critical thinking component behind math, understanding how to solve the problem. And maybe math is more of a means to an end. And maybe it always was. But I think it's a really interesting point.

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Where if you don't, again, you're just basically an order taker, good luck because you're not going to be around for much longer in your current position. Exactly. I told someone the other day I'm interviewing someone or I'm talking to someone that's wanting to get a job with me or someone else. If you can't blow my mind with a prompt, I might tune out. If you aren't using an agent to do some task for you, you're probably not getting hired at all. Prompting is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how to use AI. Yeah, because two years ago, 18 months ago, it was prompt engineering. Yeah, I don't think that's a role anymore. AI now has gotten good enough where it can understand what you're trying to accomplish.

prompt that's slightly not as good to whatever that prompt was that it did in the past that worked. And it keeps going down that path where you probably know if you use ChatGPT, you don't really have to write full sentences because it kind of knows you. So you don't have to spell right. You just have to give it an inkling of what you're trying to accomplish and it'll do it for you, which is fascinating because it was not that way with the earlier models. No, because I'll start typing through a prompt. I know I have typos because I'm typing really fast and I hit bang the inner key. It doesn't matter. Typos don't matter a anymore. That's how I usually am in life is I run so fast.

The thing about creativity, Ryan, is a lot of optimists say, so Microsoft announced that they were cutting 9,000 people. And that was a quarter after they cut 6,000 people. It's 15,000 people. You know, almost as many people to fill Madison Square Garden have been terminated by one company alone in the last six months. And what a lot of people say is, oh, they're just going to have to reskill. And once they reskill, there's going to be more jobs for them. And that's an optimistic view. I think the issue is it's very hard to teach somebody to be creative, especially later in life, which is why I have four kids as well. Remarries as well. We have a lot in common. I have two girls and two boys.

But what I'm trying to learn the second time around my younger kids is really what's important for them to learn because the world has changed so much. And one of those areas I really want to teach them is creativity. So like when a song is playing, I will like make up lyrics to the song about maybe a family vacation. And now they're starting to do it. And making up lyrics to a song is coloring outside the lines. It's not knowing the words to the song. It's making up your own lyrics to the song. And some people are like, well, why are they singing their own version of the song? It's like, well, if you just do sing what everybody else sings, well, good luck in an AI-driven world.

And now my oldest son kind of does it better than me. It is actually more funny because he's creatively connecting the dots from one thought to another, which is kind of the beauty of like dad jokes a little bit. It's at least the ones that I tell him. They're intellectual dad jokes. I'm not saying they're really hilariously funny. Humor is about intelligence and being insightful. And that's a huge hallmark of future success. Jerry Seinfeld, the insights he had, if he worked in that agency, he would have created the greatest TV commercials of all time. Teaching humor is a great example of laying down the foundations of the skill sets that are going to be important moving forward. Yeah, it can take you dots, solve problems and all those things.

People aren't going to stop using AI because it's bad for humanity. And there is going to be a lot of negative consequences, job loss included, from AI, but it could cure cancer. There's so many things that it can unlock. And that's been the case with every technology. It's always become demonized. There's always been people that have been fearful of it. But it advances society. And we just have to accept it because it's here, whether we think it's good or bad or otherwise. Yeah, 100%. You got prompts and asking to do things. I would almost call it the implementation, the acting upon what is generated in a way. I would say right now there's really three levels of AI that most people need to understand. The first, the 101, if you will, is the call and response, which is like you put in a prompt, you get an answer.

And that's just like a better version of Google in a lot of ways. And it's obviously it's conversational and it does a lot. But anything you need to know in any format, you could ask ChatGPT or Grok or Claude or Google's Gemini and you're going to get the answer back. So that's kind of the 101. 201 is automation, where you can use a tool like Zapier, for example, or Make.com or NAN, where basically you can say, I want you to take this Google sheet, extract these three lines from the Google sheet, write a blog post about that and post it. That's kind of an automation where basically you build these steps where AI is kind of the blood, if you will, in between the organs of the individual applications that you're using.

And I'm talking about any application, be Google Drive, Google Sheets, Instagram. It could even create content for you. And I've done a ton and built a ton of automations for my company using tools like that. Agents are the next level. Because automations are deterministic. You're basically setting out what it should do. This is what you do, step one, two, three, and four. Agents, you're giving AI autonomy, where based upon the inputs, you're letting it decide what tools to use and how to accomplish things for you. That's one. And the other things agents do is they actually can interact with the outside world. I want you to plan a trip with my four kids somewhere where it's at least 80 degrees and there's a 10% less chance or less of rain.

And here's my budget and here's a part of the world and I want you to book the entire trip for me. And it will then take agency, if you will, based upon everything it knows about you to not only do the research for you, but actually go out and book the entire trip for you. And if that actually involves it making a phone call and using an AI agent to speak to somebody at the Ritz-Carlton, it's going to do that for you as well. And when you start to think about the implications of that, an AI agent, it could also take over your computer for you. And it could start actually doing things on your computer. And it starts to really replicate a lot of what you and I do all day.

You would have said that was crazy, too. But we listen to electronic music. So why wouldn't we watch computer generated content? Right. Yeah. You're not far off. And we do editing now where I don't have to re-record things because I have my voice cloned. We'll fix a word or two or a sentence or two very easily. Today is the worst it's ever going to be with all this. If you can get away with that now, with AI doubling its potency every seven months, where are we going to be two, three years from now in terms of how accurate that voice cloning or the video cloning of you is going to be? I mean, we're going to be at a place where I'm not going to know if I'm talking to your AI avatar or not.

Is that going to be the equivalent of people going into a vinyl store today? We don't know because society is so conditioned now to listening and streaming music that all of a sudden vinyl, even though maybe the sound and fidelity is so much better, it's looked at as sort of like a niche, nostalgic hobby. Will us consuming real content from real humans be that one day? I don't know the answer to. Yeah, it's interesting because when we're recording, there was a big backlash, some new album that's like risen up. I heard about that. An AI-generated band. AI generated band for the most part. They're like trying to say it's not, but I think it pretty much was. But you think it's a backlash. Yeah, I think I read that it's had like 400,000 downloads or streams.

Is that really a guitar? That music is a great analogy for kind of the synthetic nature of AI. And the reality is people are okay with it. And you don't see rock bands in the top 100 of hits anymore. Sure, there's country music, but even that has a niche audience. A lot of the mainstream top 100 is electronically creative music. Yeah, exactly. My dad has been in a band his whole life. I can play instruments would probably fall over on some level. Hear me say this, but if I can hit a button and I'm on stage and it strums the most beautiful guitar lake of all time, does anyone care? Maybe they appreciate the talent. Do you appreciate the talent of me knowing how to work my fingers and make them bleed?

So many companies are set up and kind of the organizational design really prevents them from taking advantage of AI. Because in order for you to really leverage AI, you need to eliminate layers, break down silos and move incredibly fast. Less is more, which is why you're seeing the smartest companies in the world reduce their workforces. But you're not like the Amazons of the world and the Microsofts of the world and Meta. But a lot of other companies aren't doing yet because they're seeing the future while other companies don't. I don't tell companies they should cut their staff, but they need to reorganize in a way... with their eliminating bottlenecks and breaking down silos so they can move fast because it's easier than ever to build a great technology and get going and compete with far less people.

You know, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI behind ChatGPT, said he thinks we're going to see in the next couple years a one-person company worth a billion dollars. Think of how many companies that have thousands of people that aren't worth a billion dollars. That's the biggest change I think needs to come is organizational design. And of course, with that, just everything. a completely new realm of skill sets that need to be adapted by people in order to be successful at an organization. So organizational design, the right skill set and the right vision and leadership is really what it takes to adaptively evolve throughout this. And many companies won't. You're going to see so much roadkill, so many blockbusters, if you will. Circuit cities come out of this because the ability for a new entrant to compete faster than ever is unlike anything we've ever seen.

And a lot of that takes courage as a leader. So if you're leading an organization, if you're leading a midsize agency, you're going to have to make some hard decisions. And you can't be fearful of change. You need to focus on the things that are important, not necessarily urgent. Like in other words, you can operate your business this week or this month, the same way as you have in the past, but it's death by a thousand cuts. But there's never a good time to say, you know what? We really don't need these jobs. We need these jobs. We don't need these departments. We need to combine these departments. There's never a good time to do it. But actually, the reality is the best time to do it is now.

We've got an AI story if you want to. I'd love that. Be awesome. Matt, hey, can't wait to build on our relationship. Really appreciate you coming on the show. Your wisdom is enormous, and I really love the way you deliver it. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate you, and thanks for having me on. Hey, guys, you're here to find us, ryanisright.com. You'll find all the links to Matt's book, his website, and how to keep up with him. We appreciate him for coming on. But more than that, we appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing.

Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram, at Ryan Alford. And watch or listen to every episode at ryanisright.com. This is right about now. Now quit waiting. Go win.