AI literacy for small business: Susan Gonzales shares how small business owners can overcome fear, embrace Artificial Intelligence literacy, and start using generative AI tools to improve efficiency and competitiveness.

Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run, grow and exit your small business.

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The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.

Henry Lopez (00:15):

This is Henry Lopez. Welcome to this episode of The How of Business. My guest today is Susan Gonzalez. Susan, welcome to the show.

Susan Gonzales (00:22):

Thank you for having me.

Henry Lopez (00:23):

Susan is an expert in artificial intelligence, and as small business owners, we’re all aware of it, but we have to adopt it. We have to learn, we have to be curious, as Susan says, and we have to learn how we can adapt and work with and leverage AI because if we’re not, our competition is, and so it’s essential that we at least try to stay ahead, or I equate it to those super bullet trains in Japan that are moving at 200 plus miles an hour, and I’m hanging onto the outside of it, barely keeping up. That’s kind of the way I feel about it. So I get it. It’s overwhelming, but we can’t use that as a reason to just stay on the sidelines. You can find all of the Howa business resources, including the show notes page for this episode. And to learn more about my one-on-one and group coaching programs@thehowofbusiness.com, I also invite you to please consider supporting the show on Patreon.

Henry Lopez (01:15):

And don’t forget to subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don’t miss any episodes. Let me tell you briefly a little bit more about Susan. Susan Gonzalez is the founder and CEO of AI and U. She launched AI and U, which is a nonprofit to educate ordinary people and business owners like myself about artificial intelligence and prepare them for the opportunities and challenges of ai. Previously, Susan was a policy executive with Facebook and other tech and telecom companies. She’s published various pieces and content on this topic. And so once again, Susan Gonzalez, welcome to the show.

Susan Gonzales (01:52):

Thanks for having me again.

Henry Lopez (01:54):

Absolutely. And so the question I’d like to start with is, what led you to this focus and concentration on artificial intelligence?

Susan Gonzales (02:05):

Well, I first learned about AI when I was at Facebook, and this was about a 11 years ago. And this new technology was allowing the blind community to access the Facebook platform.

Susan Gonzales (02:16):

And we were having some challenges with that as a new technology. Even at the time, it was really new. And I was on the policy team, as you mentioned, and I was working with the engineers on this issue and the policymakers in Washington dc and I found myself saying to the engineers, oh, so what you mean is, and so I trained my brain to translate engineer, speak in Silicon Valley to the language that ordinary people like us can understand. And so in 2019, I decided to leave the company and launch into artificial intelligence. And at the time, nobody was talking about it. I mean, my family was their response, what ai, what is that you’re doing? And they were saying that for about three years until chat, GPT was launched. And then everything changed because it created a mainstream conversation about ai. A lot of people think that AI was born when chat GPT was launched, but nothing could be further than the truth. I mean, we have been interacting with AI for a long time,

Henry Lopez (03:26):

But it was the killer app, as we used to say. It is the app that really brought it to mass awareness, right.

Susan Gonzales (03:33):

It did AI more broadly and how that tool as well as others, so that we can talk a bit about generative AI for small businesses particularly. So just to take a step back, I launched AI and you.org as a free resource for people to essentially be comfortable with the idea of ai because where we are as a country and actually globally is the awareness is so low. And research showed in the White House report that we created that the general awareness, this was just last year, it was about 30%. And that’s probably high, especially for communities of color and women, women are already tracking behind in men in adopting ai. So that’s not a good sign either.

Henry Lopez (04:23):

Why is that? What is your observation as to why this happens?

Susan Gonzales (04:28):

Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about it. And essentially women in general are skeptical about the privacy of the technology. They’re skeptical about just technology in general. So we typically trail, we’re not an early adopter. And so the numbers don’t favor an environment right now where people are comfortable with the topic, they understand it, and then let alone small business owners. And that’s an entirely different population and conversation.

Henry Lopez (05:02):

And of course, we have fortunately so many, such increasing number of women as business owners. But it also, I expect correlates back to the smaller number of women in technology. And so it kind of feeds off of that, which it shouldn’t, but it does.

Susan Gonzales (05:20):

I don’t know though. Well, with ai, yes, in the sense that some of your listeners may have heard about AI bias

Henry Lopez (05:29):

Or Well, no, yeah, I wasn’t referring to thats, I was referring more to that. There always seems to have been, having been in technology, my background as a computer programmer, part of the gender role that says women aren’t good at it and men are. It is kind of an IT male role. And I think that still gets perpetuated to some extent. Is that fair or is it more what you’re alluding to, which is women are more sensitive to the social or the privacy components of what AI may or may not do?

Susan Gonzales (06:02):

Well, I think it begins with back in the day, right, when new technology, to your point, was really available to white men, they’re the first people. They’re the ones that wrote the code. They’re the ones that created these things. And most of the things we ordinary people never even saw. Even though we had computers, now we have laptops now, then smartphones came out. But the difference is, is that AI is not something that’s coming. It’s not Star Wars. Eventually it will be, but for now it’s not

Susan Gonzales (06:33):

AI’s here. And so for anyone who owns a device, a phone, a smartphone, a laptop, an iPad, a computer of any type, guess what, you’re interacting with ai. And so someone asked me recently, I was speaking and they said, oh, well Susan, what time did I start interacting with AI today? And I asked, well, what time did you pick up your device? Did you click anything? Did you use your face to open your phone? That’s facial recognition. So all of us have actually been feeding ai, which is why it’s advanced so quickly. So if we think we must remember that AI needs data to exist, we are the data. We are clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking. And in many respects, it makes our lives easier. Well, Netflix recommends a movie because it’s predicted that I like comedies because I keep clicking on comedy. So it’s been around a long time, and I think people just need to understand that to your point, it’s not the time to keep your heads in the sand at all.

Henry Lopez (07:41):

And it’s interesting for me because I have partly as my role as trying to share information as a podcaster, I have decided to take the approach of embracing it, only looking at the positives of it. I spend very little time

Henry Lopez (07:56):

Thinking about the potential negative consequences, not that I deny that they’re there, I just don’t focus there. So because of that, I lose sight of the fact. And my question to you is to the point of the low adoption, that surprises me. But it triggers that as I speak to other people, if I speak to our pickleball friends, every single time that topic happens to come up, it’s from a position of, Ooh, what is it going to do? Ooh, is it going to eliminate jobs? Ooh. It’s the fear side of it. So is that part of what’s keeping people from being exposed to it? They’re afraid of it.

Susan Gonzales (08:33):

100%. Absolutely. It fear is keeping everybody behind at this point. And I think the thing too is that we have to remember, so what we were talking about is predictive AI when we’re clicking, clicking, clicking. But what’s really important to talk about today is generative ai. And that’s, that’s what happened when chat GPT came to the table. So now you have Google, Gemini, anthropic, cloud perplexity, Microsoft copilot. There are, let’s call it six, maybe seven, maybe eight generative AI tools out there. So when we’re talking about adopting tools, well of course we don’t choose to use our device or not. We’re already interacting with predictive AI every day, all day, doctor’s office, grocery store, no matter where we go.

Henry Lopez (09:26):

Exactly. When I’m typing in a Word document, it’s protecting what I want to type next.

Susan Gonzales (09:30):

Exactly, exactly. Now we are in the age as of two years ago of generative ai. And the most fascinating thing about generative AI is these are tools, if you will, just like a toolbox that we can go and pull from. We can go grab a hammer, we can go grab an AI tool. So for example, and by the way, generative AI tools most and many of them are free. And so

Henry Lopez (09:55):

Now it’s accessible to It’s been democratized. It’s

Susan Gonzales (09:58):

Accessible. Exactly. So if you have a device, you have access to generative AI depending on what type of internet service there is nearby, right?

Henry Lopez (10:06):

Right.

Susan Gonzales (10:07):

But the point is, is that small business owners, now is the time to understand that you can manage inventory from your phone, you can personalize a marketing plan, you can reach customers differently. You can build a business plan, you can rebuild your business, all of this within minutes. And so that’s just actually last month, I held the first AI and U summit for small businesses in Los Angeles, specifically for those that were impacted by the fires. And this was one of those had never been done before in the industry. And we gave it a try. And I invited my partners, Google, Salesforce and Amazon to present a how-to event. This was not have a conversation about ai. This was click here, click here. We had about 200 people at the Intuit dome covering the La Clipper’s basketball court was covered with people, and importantly, half of those people were women and people of color, which proved to me one that social media ads work. This was a free community event. People came out into a dome. But what it showed to me is that people want to learn, small businesses want to understand, but what we have to do in the AI ecosystem is bring this AI literacy to the community because it’s not a build it, they shall come situation. I’ve learned that over the past six years. And the reason is, to your point, the fear.

Henry Lopez (11:40):

And there’s also, as you well know, Susan, the overwhelm. I already see it being exploited, and I get it. It’s normal. It’s the whole, oh, you think you’re doing ai, right? Oh, you’re doing it wrong. So I’m already seeing those ads that pop up that say, if you’re just using it for this, you’re doing it wrong. So it’s like, oh my gosh, give me a break. I’m just trying to use it and now you’re telling me I’m doing it wrong. So that further complicates it. I kind of relate this have been relating this, I know it’s very different, but I related to how so many business owners got left behind with what now seems something as simple as having a website. I don’t know what the stats are now, but it’s still a ridiculously high number of business owners that don’t have a website because they got paralyzed or they were asked to spend a hundred thousand dollars on it. But I think similarly, we’re afraid because we don’t know where to start and we’re getting all these mixed messages as to what we’re supposed to be doing with it.

Susan Gonzales (12:40):

Well, that’s a really good point because what I’ve been seeing a lot of is something very similar is the bottom line is a lot of people now are trying to capitalize on the fear of ai. So I can assure you the only thing that you all need to do is to be curious, is to explore, is to get on. Well, first of all, of course, I need to offer free. Just go to AI and you ai a and d u.org. We have three minute explainer videos. We have videos on AI in small businesses, AI or generative ai, AI in seniors, AI and educators, whatever the topic may be. But especially for small business owners and bitesize pieces of information to then hopefully give you the courage to explore more. But all we need to do right now is when it comes to generative ai, now is the time if you’re a small business owner to dive in. So what I would recommend is do a search or just go to google.gemini.com or chat gpt.com or just do a search. This is my business. What generative AI tool do you recommend? Personally, I do like Google Gini, Google Gemini, and chatt. BT Gemini is very conversational and people use it to practice for an interview, for example.

Susan Gonzales (14:00):

And so yes, and then Chatt BT is very good for writing. It’s known for that. So here’s the most important thing, Henry, is I want to ask small business owners that are listening. Sit down and ask yourself, what is it that I like doing the least on the back end of this business? So if it, is it painful to create those monthly spreadsheets and put ’em all together, go to generative ai, go to one of the tools I mentioned and say you cut and paste what you have, and you could say, act as an accountant and summarize these 12 spreadsheets into one boom, you’re going to have a spreadsheet.

Henry Lopez (14:45):

Amazing.

Susan Gonzales (14:45):

Summarizing it all. Yeah, it’s that simple.

Henry Lopez (14:48):

It’s that simple. Yeah.

Susan Gonzales (14:50):

But here’s most important on generative AI and generative ai, you get on any of the tools, and they’re all going to look essentially the same. If they’re going to open, it’s going to say basically, what do you want? Or ask a question, which is called a prompt. If you remember anything from today is remember that the more specific the prompt, the more specific the answer. And so here are five ways to ensure you can maximize generative AI and especially for small businesses. So you go to any of those tools and you start with, help me with the very specific, so let’s say I’m a small business and I’ve decided I own an Italian restaurant and I want to expand in another city. So I would say, help me with creating a new business plan for an Italian restaurant in this zip code with this many tables seating, this many people with an average price of this, an economic average income of this. You see what I mean? Yeah. That’s very different from saying, help me with creating a business plan for my new restaurant, which people will be tempted to do because we’re afraid to

Henry Lopez (15:58):

Ask.

Susan Gonzales (16:00):

So number one,

Henry Lopez (16:01):

And also because what we have been doing for the last 20 years is doing a search on Google. I would’ve searched, show me a business plan for a restaurant. Yeah,

Susan Gonzales (16:12):

Exactly.

Henry Lopez (16:12):

Where do I get help for a business plan for a restaurant? And so we bring that level of prompting to Chacha, PT or Gemini.

Susan Gonzales (16:22):

And keep in mind, when we search, in the past, when we would search on Google, we get a long list of articles, which we then have to go look at, and we still do, and I’ll explain

Henry Lopez (16:34):

Why,

Susan Gonzales (16:34):

But let me tell you these other really

Henry Lopez (16:36):

Four. Yeah. So number one was, help me with,

Susan Gonzales (16:38):

With the next one is your A. So your a business coach. I hate to tell you, but that’s

Henry Lopez (16:46):

Oh yeah, no, my name and numbers exactly already with voice sensitization. Pretty soon now somebody could create a podcast and sound like me, right?

Susan Gonzales (16:54):

Oh, no question. Well, let’s say that’s happen. You could say you a are an accountant. Yeah.

Henry Lopez (17:00):

But this is very important because it’s directing it for the tone that you wanted to respond in is very important.

Susan Gonzales (17:06):

Yeah.

Henry Lopez (17:06):

You

Susan Gonzales (17:07):

Are a potential funder of my business, whatever

Henry Lopez (17:11):

That is. It’s more than tone. It’s more than that, right? It is how it then will decide to frame its answer. Right?

Susan Gonzales (17:19):

Exactly. Exactly. And then the next one, number three is the output should be, so you’ve covered the other areas. And then are you seeking a business plan? Are you seeking a marketing strategy? Are you seeking a human resource? I don’t know, org chart? Are you seeking a summary of Excel sheets or a summary of 500 page document? This is where you say the output should be X. The next one, number four is you should know. So you should know that Italian restaurants are extraordinarily successful in these five zip

Henry Lopez (17:57):

Codes. My case, or that the competition is extremely high.

Susan Gonzales (18:02):

Exactly.

Henry Lopez (18:02):

And there’s a competing Italian restaurant, a block away.

Susan Gonzales (18:05):

Exactly. And then the last one you say or use, here are some, and then you include references. So whatever else. To your point, the statistics show that 80% of the restaurants in the area are Italian or not. So with those five key points, this will really hone in your experience with generative ai. And so all you need to do really is get on one of the generative AI tools and just start playing around, start playing

Henry Lopez (18:35):

With it.

Susan Gonzales (18:36):

You could literally just for fun, open your refrigerator. You type in generative ai. Here are the five things I have in my refrigerator. Give me some recipes for dinner.

Henry Lopez (18:45):

Love that.

Susan Gonzales (18:46):

Everything you can imagine. But the most important thing someone told you really need to know this and remember this, is that generative AI can get it wrong. And that’s called a hallucination, which is, there’s a general rule when using generative AI tools, gen ai, the general rule is do not cut and paste if it matters.

Henry Lopez (19:08):

Right? That’s

Susan Gonzales (19:08):

A good one. So you do not want to cut and paste a business plan that you saw, including statistics, and you cut and paste it and you submit it to a potential venture capitalist. We don’t want to do that.

Henry Lopez (19:19):

No, you don’t want to do.

Susan Gonzales (19:19):

So what you need to do is you need to go, frankly, go do a search and double check and find other articles or go to another generative. This is what I do. I go to another gen AI tool, I ask the same question, and when I do it to three tools and I get the same answer, then I’m pretty confident.

Henry Lopez (19:35):

Confidence. Yeah.

Susan Gonzales (19:36):

It was great.

Henry Lopez (19:36):

And even then, the way I explained it with something like that where it’s something, a piece of content, what I get from those tools is a good solid final draft, but then I am still going to finish it. Right?

Susan Gonzales (19:49):

They’re ideas.

Henry Lopez (19:50):

Yeah, exactly.

Susan Gonzales (19:51):

Ideas. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Henry Lopez (19:53):

But it’s interesting. This point is such a critical one because I’ve been hearing that often as well. It hallucinate gets it wrong. And I think that people, we all look for reasons why we’re not doing it. Oh, because it doesn’t always get it right. Okay. There’s a lot of things that applies to, I don’t get everything right, but that doesn’t keep me from going forward, but I’m hearing that as an excuse for people not using it.

Susan Gonzales (20:16):

That’s interesting. Really interesting. And I think you’re right. It’s an excuse.

Speaker 4 (20:21):

It’s an excuse.

Susan Gonzales (20:21):

Yeah. At the end of the day, I mean, look, history shows how many times newspapers and good old magazines have gotten it wrong. It happens. It just happens. That’s human error. In this case, the AI has just not learned correctly. And the thing about new technologies, and particularly ai, is we have to participate in order for it to learn. So personally, I am conflicted with that, believe it or not, as deeply as evolved as I am. Because on one hand I have every privacy thing you could think of. I was like, I don’t want all my information out. Well, you know what? At the same time, I’m also a breast cancer survivor, and AI is getting really good in medicine, but if the data it is using only reflects white women with breast cancer, then how is that going to be helpful to my family? So those are those biases that yeah, it’s a bias, but it’s also when it comes to gen ai, we have to play with it. And keep in mind though too, on the flip side is it doesn’t go away. It seems to be picking up that people are using gen AI for therapy

Susan Gonzales (21:35):

Or a couple’s counseling.

Henry Lopez (21:37):

Interesting.

Susan Gonzales (21:37):

And so what’s happening, and a friend of mine just did this last week. He said, I couldn’t get ahold of my therapist, so I got on a gen AI tool. He said, I’ve got some great advice. And then I said, I go, interesting. I said, okay, do me a favor, track it and see how long it takes for you to get a mental health ad. He said, I already got one. I was like, interesting. I saw that and I knew that was

Henry Lopez (22:00):

Coming. A mental health ad where?

Susan Gonzales (22:02):

On social media, on his other platforms,

Henry Lopez (22:04):

On social media, because it

Susan Gonzales (22:04):

Checked. So it’s all, who are we kidding? It’s not private anymore. So you want us interact with, as a therapist, just know that everything you put in, it doesn’t evaporate.

Henry Lopez (22:17):

This is Enri Lopez, briefly pausing this episode to invite you to schedule a free coaching consultation with me. I welcome the opportunity to chat with you about your business plans and offer the guidance and accountability that we all need to achieve success. As an experienced small business owner myself, I understand the challenges you’re experiencing, and often it’s about helping you ask the right questions to help you make progress towards achieving your goals. Whether it’s getting started with your first business or growing and maybe exiting your existing small business. I can help you get there. To find out more about my business coaching services and to schedule your free coaching consultation, please visit the how of business.com. Take that next step today towards finally realizing your business ownership dreams. I look forward to speaking with you soon. But let me ask you this, because on this point, it’s a curious point. I’ve been using, I’m on the chat CBT plus, the $20 a month version, and I’ve got projects and I asked it, is the information that I share in this project confidential or does it get shared? And it told me that it was confidential. Was it lying to me

Susan Gonzales (23:27):

Confidential maybe To whom? To them,

Henry Lopez (23:29):

Yeah. Interesting.

Susan Gonzales (23:31):

Because it could be confidential to them.

Henry Lopez (23:34):

Now there is value, though, of course in that as I give it more of my information, it gets better at helping me with a particular problem or project or whatever the case might. Yeah,

Susan Gonzales (23:45):

Absolutely.

Henry Lopez (23:46):

So that’s the flip side of the benefit of that, right? But thanks for laying out these five ways of creating a prompt. I think that’s important. I think that has been talked about a lot. I get bombarded with, I respond, I’m looking for that kind of content on prompt guides and these, but this breaks it down very easily. I think that I’m sure the other thing you recommend is it’s an iterative process.

Henry Lopez (24:12):

So you get it and they say, okay, well give me a little bit more here. I’m using it now to prepare for an interview like this. So I will have given it, like you said, here’s Susan’s website. Here are kind of the topics, and it knows me now, help me create an outline. I usually start with, give me five good questions that I might ask. And I don’t take all five of them. Some of them like that was not good, but it gets me started. And so if nothing else from a content creation, what it has done, and I don’t usually have an issue with writer’s block, but boy, talk about getting jump started. It makes it so much easier to get started on an idea.

Susan Gonzales (24:51):

And I think for small business owners especially, people struggle with managing inventory, for example. So why not go to Gen AI and get some ideas and just get really specific, here’s the issue, what’s the best way to resolve this at a low cost? I mean, think of every detail that you can, because again, the more specific the prompt, the more specific the answer.

Henry Lopez (25:17):

Yes.

Susan Gonzales (25:18):

And to your point, I think it’s just all about ideas, especially if you’re a business owner.

Henry Lopez (25:22):

Absolutely. Well, actually, I want to go back first to the session you did in la. What were some of the takeaways? What were some of the general things that people were doing? Common things that they were exploring Ring.

Susan Gonzales (25:39):

I was actually surprised at the range of understanding. Some didn’t even know what generative AI was, and others were creating their own AI tools using generative ai. So there was a wide range of understanding. However, the most interesting thing was, as I mentioned, this had never been done in the industry. As I brought in these different Gini or Google to talk about Gemini and Salesforce, to talk about AI agents, which is another topic. You could do a whole podcast on AI agents. I would just say in essence, you all are going to hear about AI agents, or if you don’t yet, you will very, very soon. And just very briefly, an AI agent is the next iteration of ai. And the way I describe an AI agent is it’s a chat bot on steroids. So a chat bot when you’re on a website, it looks like a person, but it’s really not.

Susan Gonzales (26:36):

And it’s a two-way conversation, and at some point it can’t go any further. It is just simple AI programming. An AI agent can reason, can find its own answer for us. And so for example, if I’m a restaurant owner, I could buy this AI tool, this AI agent that will allow reservations to be super specific. So for example, someone calls my restaurant and says, I want to sit outside tomorrow at 6:00 PM and typically it’ll be fine. We’ll have you seated, but an AI agent will be able to come back and say, we’re sorry. There’s rain in the forecast. You will not enjoy sitting outside. We’re going to need to sit you inside. You see what I mean? Yeah. So it just

Henry Lopez (27:25):

Takes, there was a level of reasoning there.

Susan Gonzales (27:26):

There’s a huge level of reasoning. And so AI agents, I promise you, you’re going to start hearing about it and start seeing it.

Henry Lopez (27:34):

Yeah. I’m starting to build my own, and I think that’s where it’s going to go. And I’m fortunate I am helped by the fact that I have a technical background. There’s no doubt. I think that that’s the other intimidation factor. But one thing I want to explore then is you mentioned Salesforce. I think that the other way that obviously, and you mentioned it at the outset, all of the tools that we’re already using are CRM, our financial systems. All of these tools are starting to, if they don’t already, they’re going to continue to embed AI technology. So I think it’s incumbent as us as business owners to explore and apply those new features that are emerging in the tools that we already use.

Susan Gonzales (28:19):

Absolutely. The best way to describe AI is, first of all, it’s unprecedented in this entire world. Everybody is where we are.

Henry Lopez (28:32):

I don’t think it is, but do you agree that it’s not under hyped? This is revolutionary.

Susan Gonzales (28:38):

Absolutely revolutionary. No one can think of anything that was like this before. And it’s even more so than the industrial revolution. This is bigger than that because of our devices

Henry Lopez (28:50):

And exactly, we have it actually to it, and the speed at which it’s going to evolve. So using AI within the tools we already have,

Susan Gonzales (28:58):

Right? Yes.

Henry Lopez (28:59):

I mean, an expansion of that could be copilot, kind of classifying copilot in that category because I think that’s where it’s at least

Susan Gonzales (29:07):

Microsoft co-pilot,

Henry Lopez (29:08):

How it’s helping me get more out of Excel, how it’s helping me get more out of my Windows products. But anyway, my point is, I wanted to get your thoughts on that is such having been in the software industry as you have, we know that even before ai, people end up using a very small percentage of the full functionality of the tool. I mean, Excel, of course, is an example of that because Excel can be so complicated. I mean, it has its own programming language, but we have to, as business owners learn and figure out how to apply, especially these new AI features. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that.

Susan Gonzales (29:49):

Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because on one hand, to your point earlier, there’s a lot of fear that AI is going to take jobs. And yeah, it will. It is, but it is also creating new jobs. But what’s most important to remember is that if you know anybody looking for a job, anybody, or if you are looking for a job, the recent research shows that currently recruiters, 67% of recruiters are more inclined to even interview the person who has some knowledge of ai. Doesn’t mean you have to be a data scientist. So that’s what we’re saying is encouraging people to embrace AI literacy and become proficient. And it is actually not that difficult because again, there’s free tools that we can access at home.

Susan Gonzales (30:39):

So I would say number one, and also number two is that look at your business and again, what is it you don’t want to do or you don’t enjoy doing? And frankly, what is it that you’re paying for as a repetitive skill that can be replaced? There’s the double-edged sword. So people with repetitive skills, jobs, yes, they will be impacted by AI paralegals, admin assistants, anything that’s a repetitive skill. Duolingo has been in the news a lot lately. They initially laid off a lot of translators to replace ’em with ai, and then they touted that they are going to be AI first as a company. And then as of last week, now they’re backpedaling on that because they realize, wait a minute, that’s a little more than we were prepared for. We’re committed to people. So bottom line is, is that people need to understand it as business owners to be more efficient in your business and to also just get ideas on how to reach your customers.

Henry Lopez (31:40):

Yeah, agreed. Okay, fantastic. Thanks for sharing all of that. Tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing with AI and you and how you’re helping in Pacific, not just business owners, but particularly business owners. You mentioned the guides, the video guides that are there, but tell us more about what I can find there.

Susan Gonzales (32:00):

Yes. Well, the populations that we focus on at a IU are adults, if you will. So these are community college students, the workforce, small business owners, seniors, educators. Because when I launched this nonprofit, I realized I had been in this world long enough to see K through 12 is always a need, but that’s the first place people go K through 12. And in this case, the tech industry was focusing a lot on graduate students, encouraging them to become PhD students in ai. So the big missing chunk was the rest of us and our family members and our friends. And so that’s the specific scope of ai. And you, and again, I just learned this because after being in tech and being out of tech, I just realized, oh, there’s this huge gap between this bubble because when you’re working in the tech industry, you think everybody understands this. And then I’d go home and my family were like, ai, what really prompted me to do this work?

Henry Lopez (33:09):

But yeah, it is getting people to educate themselves and not get left behind here. It’s almost like there’s a segment of the population that’s treating this as like, well, that’s just not for me. That’s for younger people. That’s going to pass me by. And that’s okay. But as long as we’re still actively involved in something, certainly as a business owner, we cannot take that position.

Susan Gonzales (33:31):

Absolutely not. This is not social media. This is not an opt-in situation. We are surrounded, go to the airport. All it is is facial recognition anymore. You look and you blink and they take the picture and TSA everywhere. So go to the doctor’s office. They’re not taking hand notes anymore. They’re just speaking and they’re capturing all the notes there. But that’s a great thing because now medicine is advancing beyond what we could imagine because instead of all the doctors just referring to their handwritten notes, they now can sit down and access hundreds and thousands of records in 10

Henry Lopez (34:13):

Seconds

Susan Gonzales (34:14):

And then make a diagnosis.

Henry Lopez (34:15):

Or it’s getting to a point where they’re going to prescribe a drug and the system says, wait a second, based on what happened two years ago that could create an issue or based on the allergic situation you’re not aware of. So all of a sudden it can highlight things that a doctor might well forget or you a new doctor doesn’t know.

Susan Gonzales (34:34):

Well, I was just telling one of my nieces who’s out of college, and I was just imploring with her and I said, please play around with ai so you can put proficient in generative AI on your resume. That’s all you need to put. So guess what? So the AI that is scanning the resumes will pick it up.

Henry Lopez (34:56):

Brilliant.

Susan Gonzales (34:56):

And even when you’re talking about a travel consultant or interviewing, guess what’s a great travel consultant? Generative ai. My friends are in Japan right now, and they created their entire itinerary. And they would put in, find me Michelin star restaurants in Tokyo for under $50. Boom. And then the interviewing there was, I don’t know if you remember way back with the Super Bowl, but one of the commercials was actually from Google Gemini, and a gentleman was practicing for an interview. It was a person as he’s holding a baby. It’s everywhere.

Henry Lopez (35:31):

Yeah, it’s everywhere. And it will be, when you look towards the future, let’s say five to 10 years out, what does kind of look like when you think of a small business and how they’re doing it? Well, as far as adopting ai,

Susan Gonzales (35:48):

I think this businesses that start to embrace it now will be on the train. The others, the two zip codes down, they’re going to be left behind.

Susan Gonzales (35:59):

That’s the bottom line. That is just the bottom line. And if you’re looking for more efficiencies, more creativity, you don’t want to hire a marketing person. You don’t want to hire a graphics person, you don’t want to create a website yourself. You can do it all. Go to generative AI and it’ll get you there and it is free. And if you want to use it more advanced services, then you start paying more for that. But that really is at the core of what we’re doing here. And most importantly, for those that are listening or watching, this is to please share. Please share this segment. So we have to be telling each other that it’s okay because again, the train is moving. You can still catch it like your analogy at the beginning, but you’re going to miss it,

Henry Lopez (36:47):

Especially

Susan Gonzales (36:47):

As a small business.

Henry Lopez (36:48):

And what’s going to happen to us is then our competition will use it.

Susan Gonzales (36:52):

Absolutely.

Henry Lopez (36:52):

And they will use it in their favor and against us, not specifically, but they’re going to have the advantage. They’re going to have the advantage. They’re going to be able to respond to the customer better, faster, more efficiently. They’re going to be able to develop new ideas, new products, new services, faster. They’re going to be able to respond to market demands and shifts and market faster. All of that. And that these were things that were available to large corporations with lots of resources that are now available to me as a solopreneur. But the key takeaway I think, but tell me if I’m wrong, is we’ve got to educate ourselves. We’ve got to get immersed. We’ve got to jump in. If we have

Susan Gonzales (37:31):

Got to embrace AI literacy, that’s what it is. And it begins with understanding the basics. So again, if you go to AI and you.org, you’ll see on my homepage, I have an AI literacy pyramid to help people understand how we can evolve in ai. And it starts with understanding the basics. It’s like Math 1 0 1. We’re just at math 1 0 1. People want to talk about algebra, and we’re not there yet.

Henry Lopez (37:58):

Right. And I’m terrible at math. We cannot allow, I cannot say, yeah, but I suck at math, so I’m just not, I’ll let somebody else do that. I can’t take that approach. I can’t put this under the category of, oh, it’s a technology. I’m not good at technology. My IT guy takes care of that, or My spouse takes care of that. Cannot take that approach here.

Susan Gonzales (38:20):

Not at all. I mean, again, go to the grocery store, self-checkout stand. It’s everywhere. We are surrounded and interacting with artificial intelligence every day, all day. So now is the time to understand it because like anything else, and particularly in new technology, there’s the good and the bad and the ugly

Susan Gonzales (38:42):

In order for it to get better, it needs to get it wrong along the way.

Henry Lopez (38:46):

Well said. Alright, excellent. Tell us again one more time, and I’ll have it in the show notes page, but where you want us to go to learn more?

Susan Gonzales (38:52):

Yes. Visit www.aiandyou.org and follow us on a i and U, the number two on Instagram and the other platforms. And also follow me on LinkedIn at Susan Gonzalez. I post all kinds of tidbits that I find that I think people may find helpful in our quest to really embrace AI literacy.

Henry Lopez (39:18):

Wonderful. And it’s Gonzalez with an SEN, not a z. Susan Gonzalez. Excellent. Susan, thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge and insights. I’d love to hopefully maybe have you back on and we’ll do a deep dive on AI agents, but thanks for being with me today.

Susan Gonzales (39:34):

Thanks for having me.

Henry Lopez (39:35):

Absolutely. This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining us on this episode of the How of Business. My guest today, again, Susan Gonzalez. I release new episodes every Monday morning, and you can find a show anywhere you listen to podcasts, including the Howa Business YouTube channel, and at my website, the how of business.com. Thanks for listening.