AI Change & The Gender Shift: Women in Business Today

Show Notes

The human side of business change and AI with TF Consulting founder Tania Gonzo.
We chat about why tech adoption so often goes wrong, how tools like VoiceFlow, ChatGPT and Synthesia are reshaping marketing and admin, and why solo entrepreneurs face many of the same challenges as bigger teams when it comes to change.

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Created and hosted by Sian Murphy with regular co-hosts Michele Yianni Attard, Kay Best, Rachael Bryant and occasionally Adelle Martin.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Adelle Martin

Host

Michele Yianni-Attard

Host

Sian Murphy

What is The Women In Business Radio Show?

Tune in for fun, inspiration and unfiltered discussions as host Sian Murphy interviews down-to-earth businesswomen sharing ideas, tactics and stories.

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Welcome to the Women in Business Radio Show with Sean Murphy, connecting women in business around the globe. He Hello, and welcome back into the Women in Business Radio Show studio. I'm Sean Murphy, and my co host today. Is Mikhael Janni Adads and our guest at the studio is Tanya Gonzo. Who is She is the founder of TF Consulting. She and they help clients achieve smooth business changes, focusing on user adoption, which is just such a key important thing. So we're going to be expanding on that later. Her speciality is helping clients evolve and take advantage also, so this is the second thing that she brings into it, and the two really are link together. We we're just having a little chat before we went on air, won't we about taking advantage of the ever changing AI, the evolving thing with AI and also the people demand in a business. So welcome into the studio, Tarnia. Thank you for having me. Oh and I met Tarnia. I saw her speaking at the Oh what was it the Kent Business Summits. Yes, yes, And I'm going to touch on that later hopefully. I'm just writing a note here because I do want to talk about this about how AI affects women in business disproportionately than men, And I think that's a really that's a really interesting topic. And very often sometimes when I first hear that, I think, oh, okay, all right then, because I don't like to think that I am at some sort of disadvantage or anybody is at a disadvantage in business and talking about employment where other people may be, you know, sort of setting the rules, but in business, I don't like to think that we you know, I think, you know, I like to think that we will have equal chances. It doesn't matter where we are, where we come from, what we do that we make that happen. But when I heard Tanya talking, I thought, oh, actually, hatredmit, I'm wrong. I never like to be wrong, none of us do. Yeah, no, but I really don't. But actually it was a very different viewpoint. So we will be coming on, for goodness sake, make sure that we do come onto that, because I've a few friendly Look. Look, can anybody understand that I can understand it? Yeah I can't. It's fine. Now another twenty minutes. I'll have no idea what that says. So Tanya, let's start off a little bit with what you do and who you do it with. So what I like to do is give people who are listening in a flavor of of sort of sort of things that you do and the type of businesses that are the type of people that you work with. So tell us what do you do. So to sum it up, I'm a business change manager, so I help businesses navigate change, so I can help with people change, So think about culture change or helping your team feel more like an inclusive or innovative environment. But what I've been doing a lot more of is digital transformation. So companies will spend lots of money investing in lovely sparkly tech, a lovely new toy, but then they don't communicate it properly, they don't train people up properly, and the whole people adoption of it is not really thought about. And if you are investing in technology with assumption that people use and save you money, if people don't use it, have you not wasted your money? So that's what I focus on helping with that people aspect. And I've got a small team and other people I work with who can do the more technical stuff, so making say CUSTOMERI agents or looking at like robotic process automation to help you a little bit more. What I do is I'm like a business translator. So if you've ever worked with a technology person, they're very smart, very technical. But if you want to get the detail of what does this mean for my business? What does it mean like in terms of deadlons or budget or whatever, that might be a bit tricky, but I'm actually quite good at that. I'm quite good at understanding technical speaking turning into business speak. And that is It's a key skill, isn't it, Because I think, you know, building processes, building systems, building technology that helps us to deliver that because that's what it's all. We don't actually need the technology. What we need is the speed and efficiency and the simplicity that it brings. Because technology doesn't like or dislike, does it. No, Technology doesn't I don't want to do that, that's boring. It doesn't go if it's in the wrong color, or I don't like that T shirt. It doesn't have any of that. It just does what it's built to do exactly. The people you need to weave in and understand with that. Unfortunately, what very often happens is that the technology system, the process, the piece software, the CRM or whatever it is, is built by somebody who's really good at that and making that happen, but they never think about what happens when they put it in front of John exactly who doesn't really like using that, Or they start implementing it in the system and realize that actually, suddenly, John, this is built to put one person into something, or add one person in, but John needs to add three people in. He needs to add three names. I mean, that's quite simple. Quite a simple example, isn't it. But it's the sort of thing very often it's something I've noticed with a CRM that it has you know, it enables you to put in one key person into your CRM, but what if you, as a business deal with two or three key people. Suddenly it doesn't work and you end up you end up sort of adapting it, don't you. And then you've got like three first names in the name field and three you know, three sur names in there, and then you've got three telephone numbers, and do you no longer have one contact? You've tried you have no contacts because you've tried to force them all into the thing. And very often that there is no crossover is the exactly. And I've had past experiences where people resistance was actually the block. And so I work for a big real estate company. They're bringing in a new CRM. We're using CRM now, and people are not adopting it because they had their black book off contacts and if I put it in the CRM that everybody in life exactly what if someone from wherever they work contacts my super important client and really ruins that relationship and trying to navigate that. I've also had other experiences where you bring in a new technology and I am the change manager trying to convince people to stop using pen and paper or whiteboard and pen instead of this news nazzy system. And it's really about appealing the layers. Like with that example, pen and paper, they didn't want to put it on because if their manager saw the opportunit unities that they're putting on there, the managers say, where's that one hundred grand opportunity? Just disappeared? But if it was on a whiteboard and pen, you can wipe it off and just explain. It never it never existed. It never existed, and you can land it and go wow, have fantastic, But now it's actually counted as a loss, isn't it Before it was again and now it's actually just a loss. And it was just an opportunity to exploring. They're just like starting that relationship with that conversation. But it was on the system. So where's the money? Yeah? And I think there were so many There were so many. I was going to say, touch points, what's happening, But there are so many different ways that that can happen. That in itself is not the sort of thing that you can systemize. Is it? Because one one person's reason for resisting using a new set of technology, it's going to be completely different for somebody else's. I know when I was managing that sort of thing, I had one person who was was say, elderly, it's the same. In fact, it's got the same problem. Actually couldn't see the screen properly, So suddenly you know that there's a local authority. We've introduced lots and lots of We've introduced new CRM systems, new databases which have loads and loads of little fields that actually couldn't be used. He couldn't see them. Well, actually this sounds a bit dark, but some better glasses, some specific glasses to enable screenwork, whereas somebody else didn't want to use it because they they just were so they had such a lack of confidence with using computers. They thought they were going to look silly that you know, they're going to be found out that they're actually not what's the word, you know, fluent in the you know, they're not capable of using a computer comfortably. So there are so many different you can't There isn't a tick box exercise for that, is there? No, that's not. And that's why I went back to studying my master's in business psychology at the Union of Kent where you met me. It was just to understand that because humans were so complex, Like you see businesses make decision and you're like, how did you get to that decision? Or you see things just happen and you're like, what was the logic? And sometimes there is in it's just like the way that humans work, the way that we navigate the world. And I wanted to understand that a lot more. I think when I was sort of doing stuff like that, one of the that was the reason why stuff didn't work. You look at a system on paper brilliant, what's the problem. But it doesn't work, And it's silly little things where people start to it doesn't work the first time something happens, they can't do it in that particular order that the computer or the system is driving them through, and so they switched the order and now suddenly we're not using the system anymore. Ah. And it doesn't take long before it's unraveled. Does it. No, not at all. Yeah, So that I think what we're looking at there is mainly about using and looking at implementing systems in the context of a team and a business. How does it relate to people are working by themselves? So if they are perhaps self employed or they are I hate that word soul opener. I'm going to make my own word up for that. I'm going to come up with my own I haven't got one. I'm going to make up my own word. But they work on their own in their business. There's still a process of change management, isn't there. It's just I don't know that we are absolutely you know that it's recognized that we're going through a process of change and that that needs to be managed. Yes, yes, I'm just thinking, Yeah, if you're on your own. Yeah, it's a big bit of moving outside your comfort zone and also deciding to do the change because it's so easy. If it's just due to deciding, you now, I'm going to keep doing it like this. Yeah. I think we're actually having a similar problem with TNS consulting, where we're like, let's actually automate some stuff like I'm really terrible at financial accounting stuff and numbers. I was talking about this to someone. I sot numbers around if you tell me forty. Three, yes, yes, So thinking about that's a point where that matters at. And then it's looking at what's available. That's the tricky bit. So I was like, do I go with Microsoft, Do I go with Google? Do I go for something custom made? And just all that choice just like overwhelmed me. And it really makes me empathize with my clients because that's what they're looking at. They're like, what's good for me? Should I get all three of them? Yeah? No, don't do that one. I sometimes have a so although I have a small team, it's it's sort of me. I then have to tell people what it is that I want to happen, and I will bring them into it. But mainly it's me. My downfall is I just love bright shiny objects. There's something new can let me go and have a look and explore what that will do. My particular tip for doing that is to recognize that you're going down the rabbit hole of I mean, there are so many of them, and actually to pull yourself back to key objectives. What is the problem I'm trying to solve here, and what do I want it to look like? Because sometimes I think we focus on what the problem is, but we don't focus on what the result, what a better result is, and we end up sort of solving that problem, but we don't because we create something else. I like to use this tool called blue sky thinking. So I imagine it's been successful, right landed on the moon, and then I think, how did I actually end up on the moon? And that's how I make those decis Visions and consultants are often like the chef who goes home to have burned toasts, because I can solve a problem for other people, but with me, I know exactly what I do. For a client, I'd be like, we need to do some business analysis, we need to gather some requirements based on the different word type, and then we need to map the systems available to us. But would I do that for myself. I'll tell you what, it's so difficult to do it. It's so difficult to do it for yourself. I can look at what somebody's doing, and I can see what's happening or what isn't happening. I can just see it. When I'm trying to do it for myself. It's in all of the colors and all of the sizes for one thing. There are, goodness, so how many layers they go on and on and on and on. I'll tell you what have you ever seen Harry Potter? Yeah, right, Okay, there's a scene in Harry Potter where they go into this vault where there's all of that gold and silver and it's just multiplying and multiplying. That's what it's like, Yeah, looking at my own stuff. And I think that's potentially why we need to bring somebody like you in to actually or somebody to actually Okay, what's going on here. Let's strip this back, so let us move on to some of the other stuff that you do, and some of them. What it was that I saw you talking about, which was about AI, So I use AI. I use it to brainstorm ideas because my brain is just like I said, all of the colors and all of the sizes, so I can find I can say a lot of stuff into chat GPT and it will come out and go, I think, what you mean is this, and there's like two points written down there. Yes, that's what you mean exactly that. That's it, that's what that's what's going on. I also use it sometimes to tidy up writing where it's not personal writing, where I'm using manual and I'm saying to tidy up and help generate. You can't you can't just go write a book, can you, and have a good book come out? A book might come out, yeah, but it doesn't mean it's going to be a good book. That is mainly where I use it, And what I see around those things is a lot of fear actually not from me, but a lot of fear from coaches and business organizers, if you like business coaches and personal coaches who spend a lot of time saying things like well aicult replace me, Well, bits of it it can if you're not doing it right. So I see a lot of fear around that, and I also see a lot of fear around from writers and artists thinking that AI can replace them, and a lot of people who think who don't actually know how A is going to replace them, but they're fairly certain that it is and that they're going to lose their job. They don't know how, but it's going to take away their job, and other people who think it's going to take over the world and it's going to be like Terminator and this is just the tip of the iceberg, and somebody's driving this and eventually we're all going to implode and die because there's a hidden agenda. So I'm in the My personal view is that it's at AOL and that when Einstein produced his I can't remember, which was the truly inspirational one of theory of relativity, nobody was really bothered about whether he used a calculator or not to help him add the sums up because he's useless at maths. What mattered was what he produced and how rele that was and where it fitted into our universe and ail world. And I think we're at that there's a calculator and we can use it, and that there's a lot of fear that the calculator is going to take over the world or take away your job. Well, it couldn't replace Einstein, could it. All it did was help you add up quicker. Absolutely. So that's my take on it. It doesn't frighten me. What's your take on it. I think the best way to kind of navigate really complex things that what I normally do is I look at the past. Really, So, like I mentioned that the Business Summit, I mentioned the sixteenth of September nineteen thirty seven. That was the day of the first televised football game, right, Yeah, so put yourself in their shoes. Now you can watch TV on football on TV that you don't have to go outside. You don't have to sit in the rain, you don't have to sit in the snow. You can enjoy it from wherever you are. Yeah. So that means logically, quote unquote, I'm moving my fingers now that no one's going to ever go watch football a football. Pitch or go to an so go to a news concert again, Yeah. And I can do that for this. So, for example, I went to a women's comedy show on Monday evening and that was really nice just seeing other women like being really funny I'm not comedian. I was watching and I think, what's going to happen I'm not a fortune teller, is that we're going to want more experience, just like football is now a massive experience, right going to the football games a massive experience, and there's so much things around it. There's like an industry around and it's worth three point one billion. So I think it's one of those it's too early to tell, and it is really stressful, really nerve wracking, and honestly, if I knew the future, I would be making some really interesting decisions and I'll be telling everyone in the future. But I don't. But all we can think about is change is overwhelming. And that's why, like a job as a change manager exists. Changes on overwhelming and it physically feels weird, like the ground underneath you is like moving or shape. So that's where I stand on it. But I think one key thing is to understand it. So it can't be nervous about something you don't understand. So if you're saying, oh, it can't take my job or it can't change my job, really play with it in anger, really explore it. As a writer, try and write a book with it, see what it comes out with, and if it comes out with absolute rubbish, then you can know, Okay, I'm fine. Just play with it in anger and start to examine what makes you human? Because I think AI is really pushing It's like, what makes you human? What's special about us and what we come up with? And humans were so resilient but also so very random, like all the stuff that goes viral. You're like, why why is that viral? Why is everyone watching that video and laughing like you can't make that up? And there isn't. Sometimes it's really difficult to analyze it, isn't it. There was a really sort of there was a thread that I saw that was posted on substack, and somebody had asked this question such an intro questions. Some of the answers. The question was you imagine you've just read a really enthralling book, you absolutely loved it, and then you found out it was written by AI. What would you think the people underneath who had said, well, I'd hate it, I wouldn't like the book anymore. And I thought that's just such an odd thing to say or do. I could sort of understand it, but something that you really enjoyed reading and you couldn't put down your enjoyment of that is now gone because that's how it was written. And I just I thought there was such an interesting take on it that you that you could take away, you could change your enjoyment. You could sweep I'm doing it with my hands out, you could sweep away your enjoyment. I didn't enjoy it. I hated it because it was written by Ai. But I think part of it I love to read. Part of being a reader is I kind of do build a relationship with the authors in my head, Like I love Julia Quinn, right, so if she writes something, I'm like, oh, what's next? You know, what's her story? Is she writing this? And I think that's is that part? You want a human story, like what made her come up with such a story and when is she coming out with more? And if it was AI loses that story. But you would have enjoyed the book. Oh yeah, And that was why I thought it was such an interesting It was such an interesting discussion that people could would that their enjoyment they're actually enjoyment of the book was dependent retrospectively on how it was written. Yeah, And I just thought there are certain circumstances where I don't know. If I found out that something was made cruelly for instance, that yes, you know, so if I saw a dress that I loved and then I found out that it was made in a way that perhaps exploited other people, I might go, Okay, I don't know that I can put that on. It now has a different energy about it. But my initial that's what a lovely dress, what a super cut actually hasn't changed. It still is. But anyway, I'm disappearing off gender rabbit hole. Let us come back up into how AI can actually sort of start to help our business. But also, one of the things that you were talking about when I saw you at the business summit was about how AI can disproportionately affect women. So can you tell us about that. I'll start with the women part. So one of my clients, so I'm like an AI change manager, helping them increase adoption of their AI systems that they've made right. And as part of this, obviously you do your research. You get really into this world. And one artogo I read was the World Economic Forum Gender Parity in the AI Age, and it described three ways that AI can change jobs, right, So it describes how it can augment jobs, so like improve jobs, get rid of Like I used to be a project manager, so every meeting decision logs, you know, writing down this person made this decision and that was a longer task than you can inspect expect, So that augments it, right, leaves me more chance to think, like, you know, what could actually go wrong and think critically, So it can augment. And the people who get augmented more or have impact in that its men, so their jobs are getting improved, essentially bosting their productivity. Right, is that because men spend more time in meetings. It's more than the role type, right, male dominated fields, and then the jobs are insulated, so let's call them AI prove where AI may still not really impact them. So i'd say, you know, if you are a scaffold or a plumber, and exactly as we're talking with thinking, oh yeah, if you imagine a plumber, that that's a male dominated field, right. And then the last one is disrupt So this is jobs which are more administrative based job roles where it's yeah, it's customer service like now my local Morrison's, it's literally just self service isn't it. And a lot of AI or augmentation in there. Right, So that's that's what I saw, and I was like, oh, my goodness, what we're going to do then? Right, so companies are going to adopt AI, We're going to do more of this, and job roles are going to change. Right, There's there's going to be This is me. I'm not a fortune teller. I wish I was, because I'd be buying lottery tickets every week. But that's what I saw, and I was like, geez, that's actually a bit of a problem. And then there's other articles. These are a bit conflicting. So a PwC study said women adopt AI less than men and then like the reason PwC, pw C and Coopers, yes for Ice Waterhouse and Cooper is a big for management consultancy company, very big, and was saying, you know, women adopt AI less than men. And some of it is that fear based on Another bit was that aspect of what do you call it, being worried about the ethics of it, right, so copyrighted material or the sustainability aspect of it, not wanting to do it because you know it uses a lot of water, whilst men would be according to that study. At more are going to get yeah, do help me, yeah exactly exactly, and then like further things saying like by twenty twenty seven, six in ten staff members will need upskilling and reskilling. So it's like a new skill. I kind of think of it like the Internet age or just changing things rapidly, right, and we really need to stay on top of it and explore it, like I said, a lot more. So, I'm just trying to think what we can do about that, because I think that's, you know, sitting here with perhaps people who individual business people, people who are running businesses listening in. I'm not sure what the impact on that as our audience is. I guess it may well be about just being aware in looking at it in the context of discriminating against a particular group of people. I guess it's about being aware that that potentially can happen in your business, and that you may have people working for you or with you that are feeling quite vulnerable about that when it actually nothing may happen. So you may need to deal with that if you're thinking about it the other thing, and this is just I don't know, maybe going a bit mad. But I'm thinking, you know, if it's getting rid of admin roles, if it's taking out a lot of the admin, it would be nice to think that it would also open up opportunities where some of the where if it's largely women that are losing those ADMIN roles, that maybe it gives them the opportunity to do other stuff. You know. For me, you know, sort of being a director of a company, a CEO, the admin is just it's just I hate it. I can't do it. It is absolutely exhausting. And yet I find very often that's what I'm doing. Is if you looked at what I do on a day to day basis, if you didn't know who I was, what does Sean Murphy do you think, Oh, well, she's responsible for email, or she's responsible she's responsible for a pile of old admin pooh, basically, But I'm not. Exactly and that's why I talk about it. So like my job when I was born probably definitely did not exist. Change manager helping people dot technology. What technologies were there in the eighties and nineties. Calculators exactly, computers, computers, actually, that must have been quite a big change, exactly. Yeah, computers. But there's jobs that don't exist that are going to exist in the future based on this. So it's not like it's just a shift and a very big shift into a new way of working. And it just happened so quickly. And obviously I can't slurt down, we can't slot down. None of us can so and the people that can that could potentially slow us down. I don't. I don't know that I, as an individual, have any influence over so really I need to decide am I going to be doing that or am I going to be running my business and doing what I do. So let's move on from that and go into I think some of the more interesting ways that you could start to use AI in your business. So you you were talking initially about you were talking about what are those things like little guys that do stuff for you. Let's talk about that because I think most people can can understand and know how to use it to write or to tidy up or check your spelling and that sort of thing and do some sums for you. Let's go on to some of the more engineered aspects of using AI that people like us, not ICI or anything huge, but just people like us. Can start to use in our business and some of the impacts that we have on it, and I think it might be quite useful if we I don't know what you think, can you think we go if we put aside any oh, well, somebody that could be somebody else's job or somebody else is losing that because there's always arguments around that. And I think as you do that, it will bring in you opportunities. So we're running businesses, How can AI help us? Yeah? Okay, So one of the things that I find really tough or difficult is the media marketing aspect of it. So as a business owner, much like Usha and I do the marketing, the finances, et cetera, et cetera. So what you can do is you can augment a AI agent. So that's literally just so I use something called voice Flow AI. Right, It's really easy to use, and I put in training materials in it and I said, this is what I sound like, this is how I speak. I get really tired of US English and the way they talk. This is your tone of voice, and this is the knowledge that you base your answers on. So I use quite a lot of So you're you're training this exactly the same as you would train anybody. You are training it on the words that you use, the tone of voice that you use. See the tone if you like, not not a voice, but the tone that you have. You are you relaxed? Do you have a corporate I like a conversational tone, you know, I don't like too formal, like dear sirs and madam Like yeah, absolutely. So the first first thing you're doing is you're actually training this tool to speak and be as you are exactly. And then you can give it certain time so you can do so much with it, like draft a blog post. So when I talk to my clients, one thing, one example I give is that there's an Air Canada case. Right, so in twenty twenty for a chatbot on the Air Canada website promised this guy a full refund and money on top. And because it did that, that's the decision the chapbot made. And it went to the I think British Columbia cord and they're like, we can't stick to what the AI is saying, like they just made that up. It's not in the policy. You didn't train it up. And they said, much like an employee, your chatbot is on your website just representing you and just talking to a person. You've got rid of an employee to do that, right, so it's still got the same accountability, So give him his money. So what I say to my clients is check, please check, so it can start something. A black out piece of paper is a very daunting thing. And then if you see a paper where AI is written absolute rubbish or nonsense, you know how to fix it. You do know how to you know what's wrong, and then you add your tone of voice and then you do that. So it's not like writing something and then sending it without human review. Please don't do that. Not in twenty twenty five, maybe not in twenty twenty six, maybe twenty thirty. I don't know what the future holds. Don't do that review it. So you can bring in agents who just start the work. Or you can bring in a process where you get similar type of email. What are you're opening out is right? A process where it like drafts it for you and then you can just say yeah, that's okay and send that off. There's lots you can do. You can like draft job descriptions. If you've got to hire lots of people, and you have no idea how to draft a job description for an operations manager, it can draft it and then you can start to check it for you know, do a check against what you really want and stuff like that. So it's like moving from a blank piece of paper to something rather than removing a whole activity when we're not quite there yet. So there's lots you can do as a business owner. One of the things as I'm was sort of responding to people who are asking questions about AI and saying things is for me is people very often say, oh, you know, this was written by AI for me. There's a difference between something being written by AI and with AI exactly. It's just it's an entirely different concept, isn't it. But I think it's a difference that for some reason it's quite subtle and people don't get it. But that's really what we're doing here, isn't it. Is you're writing a description with AI. So you can't job description. You're not going to get out anything that's going to be either useful to you or the employee or your business if you don't put the right information in. So you have to have what are the boundaries of this job description, what can't they do? What can they do? What are the health and safetyplications? You have to know all of this. You can't, you know, you can't just expect something to churn that all out without you putting good information in and challenging what you get out exactly. So it's not the I think sometimes people think, as I did originally, that they're just going to press a few buttons and out of your computer is going to come this entire thing that you can just use. You can't. You actually have to know stuff. Exactly, and you need to take the trime to train it. So I use when I'm training people up on how Tuesday. I so writing prompts. Really important is you can give it a persona So say you are in experienced travel consultant, right, giving give it a task. I'm going on a holiday. My children are six, seven and eight and they like swimming and chicken nuggets, ugets. And then give it an example of a previous holiday you've done. Right, we went to France and we did this kind of stopovers. And then give it the formats. I want it in bullet points, UK English conversational tone. I want it in a table and that really helps to get better things out of the AI system and use it. I use it for both things. Honestly. I use it for like personal logistics, because gosh, there is a lot of personal logistics. I made it do like a nursery schedule for me, like who's going to pick a little or up if he's in London these days and I'm in London those days, and someone needs to cook something, and then make us a shopping list of two thousand calories and I don't really eat fish, and you just like you just start using it and see how it like what it gives out. Yeah, use different different models, right, chat gupt is great, Try other ones. I've got co pilot embedded into my Microsoft. Yeah, Pine Pilot, Okay, good. Pilot's quite good. Because it's already in your presentation. So I highlight it and I'll be like, could you write me a summary of this case study that I'm putting in here? It will write something and it'll be too long. I'm like, please make it shorter and more conversational. Yeah, And then I look at it. I make sure I read every single word, write every single word, because I really care about my business and what's coming out of it right, And I think I'm really excited for the future because if you read something and I write it, there's going to be a typo somewhere in the ten page document, and I think that's going to go extinct. And I'm quite worried about that, like small, small typos. But yeah, that's what I would advise, just to play their bit. So let's have a talk about some of these tools. So I use chat GPT. I have like the premium version, which is like twenty pounds a month, and I just love how it can help me organize thoughts. Yes, I sometimes think a little bit differently than other people, and it can be quite overwhelming, and I love just being able to put in a lot of just stuff. Yeah, Robert and I speak into it. Sometimes I type, sometimes I speak, and how I can you know? I can then say what, you know, what the subject area is here, because sometimes you know you've got just so much rubbish going on. You can actually put them under key headings, and I think that's just really helpful to put it all together. Other times I might get it to write a manual, but I have to know who the audience is, I have to know what words they can use. I have to know what topics need to go in there and what or do they need to go in. I can't just go write a manual about whatever, So I use chat GPT for that. So voice flow AI, what you use that for? I used it. I was playing around with it on making a custom AI agent. I wanted to recreate myself as an agent, and I use that one and I was like, I literally describe myself. I was like, this is what you studied, this is what you this is how you speak. And then I use it as like another version of me because it is quite lonely right being the only change person in my business. I need someone to test I'm like, will this change people's behaviors eccessionly? Someone to test it with? And sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not so great. What else do I use? There's this really cooled training tool called Synthesia. So what you can do this is absolutely scary, is you could do a short video of yourself and then it creates an AI avatar of you and you can give training videos and it just speaks perfectly. It gives a bit of Uncanny Valley with the eyes and their mouth, but you can then do a whole training video. So if you're a big organization and you're trying to get time with a CEO to do a and your webinar and he's in Brazil and you're headquartered in London and there's no time to film it, you could get something like that like synthesia, where you can have like essentially perfect video. But that also, you know, that solves so many other problems as well, doesn't it. There are people he may to be I find it quite exhausting to be on Zoom for instance. I'm liking at your own phase, looking up my own nostrils. I mean, it's just exhausting, isn't it. And also there's a delay, you know that, there's a millisecond of a delay between you saying something and somebody else reacting. So to be able to sort of put something on that does that, it's scary. Well, it's it, isn't It isn't How different is it to recording a CD or recording or recording a piece of you know what those things are, cell cassettes or something and sending off a voice recording of that. I think we've got so used to seeing live Okay, So as I was going live and they're doing this live training and this live broadcast. We've got so used to seeing that that actually we don't have to do that. No, and I don't like doing that, so I'm going to try that. It's great for the introverts, definitely great for the introverts because everyone's doing content or putting your face out there, and that suits a certain personality type. But for others, like it doesn't suit me. I'll try it, and I'll always get something wrong. I would be reading a script, but I still say the wrong thing after like one hundred guys, and I'm just exhausted by the end of it, when I could have just typed it. Yeah, yes, I understand. So let's throw just a few of these, because then we could start talking about you and your business a little bit more. So. We've got Cynthie's, we've got voice flow AI, we've got co Pilot, we've got chat GPT. We've also got Microsoft tools. They have a whole suit of tools. So I mentioned co Pilot. I'm sure there's lots more to it. We've got Google. I went to a digital Digital Garage event in Cranbrook the other week, really lovely and they have so many tools. I think one of them is like notebook LLM, which is really good for research. There's Gemini, and then there's the other like tools that that AI develop I work with will be able to explain to you guys better, but not me. Yea, I leave it. There's also Claude, isn't there. So so I did a little comparison this morning actually, just as part of what I do, you know, So I was putting together some WordPress training stuff, and I got chat GPT to run a comparison of what it put out and what Claude would put out, and basically Claude came back being a lot more corporate focused. It was a lot more yeah, sort of corporate sounding. Didn't say it didn't sound like me. It wasn't supposed to sound like me. It will never sound like me. And the other thing that it said that it could do, which I thought was really really useful, is to be analyzed very large PDFs. You know, if we're dealing with sort of some academic papers, that sort of thing. Some of what I produce is very big, it's very long PDFs, and it would you know, so for me put it in there is there something missing from this? You know what else needs to go on? I find it's really good for sort of critiquing what you've done. This is my audience, this is what I'm doing, This is the objective, This is how long it is? What have I left out? What element should I actually be including in this course in this workbook? That isn't? Yeah? And have it come back so very useful? Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, So that's another one, Claude. So are there any AI systems that can manage your diary for you if you just speak into it. I know you've got Alexa and things like we've got at home. Well, are there any I think I need to look into that because I am not very good at that. I think I need to look into that. But I'm sure if there's not something already there, there's something that can be custom made. Excellent. One thing that would worry me about that actually is not being able to see what's happening. I see stuff and then I know it's okay, And I think with that things would be moving around and I would start to lose track of where I was and I would start to not trust the process. Okay, not if you were asking to change, but I'm okay. Interesting. We were talking earlier about women and AI and bookkeepers, like high percentage of bookkeepers are women, and the focus is that AI is actually enhancing how we can work because AI has been around us for many years. If you look at all the accounting softwares out there, they all have AI elements in there. And actually that improves workflow for the bookkeeper because you can upload information into any accounting program and the system will recognize if it's seen it before, hey, this must encode it, and then it's just the case of saying and yeah, you're right, okay. So I do think from the big massive ledgers that I used to start with when I was doing manual accounts to where we are now with technology, it's improved and enhanced that instead of doing maybe ten clients a week, you could do hundreds of clients a week. It's just by using that technology. But I think there's a more fundamental shift than that is, you know, you have a bookkeeper and they only have so many hours in the day. They can either spend those hours in putting your stuff and adding it up exactly, or they can spend those hours analyzing how you can change your business, grow your business. What is what's working, what isn't working? You know, if you want to work with what, If you want to work with a person, I would rather that they spent their time that all of that rubbish of putting stuff in that was all dealt with creative. The analysis may be so you know, so I can you know, as my bookkeeper can go okay, where did this money go? What was the where was the biggest spend, Where was the biggest loss. It can interrogate something, get some information, and then that person can sit down with me and go, okay, this is what we've got. Now what does it actually mean exactly? I think AI is like a super powerful US smaller medium sized business. If we're not scared of it, it's. Scared of It's true. It helps us compete on a bigger, bigger landscape. It helps us do so much more. And I think the reason I was so passionate about this so nineteen point one percent of UK businesses are female led and I was on a when I started TNS Consulting, I was on a women training program on starting your business, and a lot of the businesses that other women were starting were either started from a need, right, a traditional employment won't fit me and my three children. Yeah, and that kind of stuff, or to better serve society, like some of the businesses or ideas they're coming up with us, like, that's such a benefit to society. A group where women who have children with additional needs can actually get some respire or talk to other women. And those are the kind of business they're doing, and that's kind of what we need to support. Because money is money, But the non GDP benefits of the UK to supporting those kinds of businesses are immense and so super important. Absolutely, and very often those businesses are just not recognized. Yes, yeah, I think that's the that's the thing. They're not recognized. They're happening behind doors and behind children. Exactly does that make sense? You know, they're happening behind dinner being cooked and children being looked after. And yet then it's a major, major contribution exactly, you know what. One of the things, you know, one of the examples that I cite is if somebody has a disposable income of one hundred pounds a month and they start a business, go self employed, they create something that generates one hundred pounds a month, they've now doubled their disposable income. They've doubled the amount of money that they could potentially go out and spend in their community. If we helped every small business do that. Wow, But we're talking about if you go along to somebody very often grant funding that sort of thing and go Okay, I brought in one hundred pounds last month. You don't get you. Don't. But you're not even looked at. It's of no consequence. You're just fair. You are mucking about. You might as well not bother. Yeah, you're wasting your time and the time of the person that you're sat in front of. Please go away, cook more dinner. I think that's yeah, that's what I'm passionate about. So I was born in Zimbabe's I'm Zimbabwe and there's a lot of children who's like school fees or their school uniform was paid off their mum's quote unquote side hustles. Let me go by again at the market and these this money is raising children the next generation. Giving that kind. Of it's a major major impact and it's my hobby horse and I need to get down off it, okay, because Tony, we're coming to the end of the show. How can people contact you? Our easiest way is to go on my website ts dash Consulting dot co dot uk so you can have brook a fee call with me just to get started, or talk to me on LinkedIn. Tani at Gonzo my name is Abelt like Narnia, but with a T and Gonzo like the Muppets. I'll tell you what. Yes, now we understand, we've got it. So let's do a few quick fire up questions before we go off here. What do you know now that you should have known when you started out. That it's going to be okay. I think I started it straight after maternity leave and I was like, the world of work is not working for me, but I've still got so much to give. I've still got lots and lots of brain cells and energy, and it felt like, oh, let me do this or let me stay at home. What can I do with my brain? And I think if I could go back up, like, it's going to be okay, and what you're going to add to society or two businesses is very valid and your brain is actually quite useful to other people. So what's your top tip for your topic? Let's go with your topic being change management because that encompasses AI as well. What's the top tip for your topic? My favorite motivation theory, so it's called self determination theory by Detchi and Ryan, which says people in order to be motivated, they need three things. Autonomy so the freedom or to feel like they have control over their own choices. They need competence, the feeling that they can do it. And they need relatedness. They need belonging. And if you really tailor that to like your business or your employees, that really helps. You need people to feel some kind of control over their job and their role in their life. Yeah, that makes sense. You need people to be trained up or to feel like there's training to actually do their job, and you need to foster some kind of belonging if you want a properly motivated team. And firing the last one at what is your top tip for being in business? Top tip for being in business? Uh? I guess don't stop, just just keep going. Yeah, keep going. Put your name out there. It's quite scary, it's quite anxiety inducing. And then also when you make a breakthrough, you always feel like it's going to be like this massive day and someone's going to come out with confetti. It's being in business is just chipping it. So yeah, that's that's. My that's superd so, Ton Gonzo, thank you so much for being on the Thank you to my co host Mikael Future insights, and we will be back with the Women in Business Radio Show all very very shortly. Tune in next week to The Women Radio Show for more stories, ideas, and inspiration to help you grow your business