The Future of AI in Marketing and Education - A Conversation with Nadio Granata

00:00 - David Brown (Host)

Nadio. Welcome to the podcast.

00:01 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Thank you. Thank you, I feel very honored to be to be on your podcast, david, having seen or listened to so many of your previous interviewees. Yeah, very, very honored.

00:16 - David Brown (Host)

Well, thank you very much. How's life on the boat these days?

00:19 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

It's. It's not bad, it's. We've. We're reaching that term part of the year now where it gets a bit tricky and yeah. So a couple of storms recently just made it a little bit tricky. My, my lawn blew off the other day.

00:39 - David Brown (Host)

Nice one, just for people listening, not, you know, and not EO and I know each other a little bit and actually I went out to see him last week on the boat, so I I've experienced what's the name of the boat again the Gabriella Sophia right.

00:53

So I've been on the Gabriella Sophia myself and it was lovely. It was really really nice, so awesome. Well, none of the reason I wanted to have you on a couple things. You're involved in a couple really, really interesting things that I think the listeners will also find interesting. I know you're a fellow with the chartered Institute of Marketing and that you've been working on a, an AI course for them, so I really want you to talk about that.

01:19

But I have some other questions about More general questions, about you know people who are marketers or or who do marketing for their own businesses, and those sorts of things like what are the changes they're gonna need to make over the next few years and and what skills are they gonna need to develop? But before we get into all that, maybe if you just do a quick introduction and kind of give a little bit of your background and and sort of you know how you got here to where you are today, and if we do, you know just a couple minutes on that and then we'll we'll dig into the meat of it.

01:49 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Okay, thanks, david. Yeah, um, Nadio Granata, not a not a typical name for somebody from others field in West Yorkshire, so I'm half Italian, half English, but I was born in UK, went to a Convent school just outside Milan when I was a young child. For about two and a half three years my dad worked over there. He was in catering, and we came back to to West Yorkshire and and subsequently I continued my schooling in West Yorkshire and and had to learn English and Then and then, by the time I was 15, I was ready for off, I was restless, I was.

02:33

School wasn't really doing it for me or, more likely, I wasn't doing it for school. To be fair, and and and I left home when I was 15, being there allowed to do that in UK not allowed to. So so my 16th birthday, I left school and I left home and big hug to with my mom and Offer one, and I found myself on the beach in Bali about a year or so later, where I bumped into Boris Johnson, spent three days with Boris. Don't tell anybody that, though. I spent three days with Boris.

03:06

No way and two other guys and and we're basically, you know, we were backpackers and we we stayed in what I think they call them Lozman's or pansyons or something in in Bali, on Couture Beach, and and then Boris went backpacking around wherever he went, god knows Whatever you got up to and I went on to Sydney with the other two guys who were already friends from, from the UK, one and we, because I was a chef at the time, I got into catering or followed my dad into catering, and I got a job straight away in Sydney, just over the bridge there in North Sydney, as a breakfast chef. So I was up at four in the morning, but I was on Bondi Beach by about 10. So that wasn't too bad.

03:52

That's nice spent six months as a as a breakfast chef there in Sydney and then and then after six months, one of the guys that I'd met I'm called Rick he came back to the UK to go to Cambridge University. The other guy came back to the UK to go to Oxford University and I had no qualifications, no university to go to, so I hitched out, I hitchhiked all around, I was. I went up to Cooktown, townsville, into Alice Springs there's Rock Darwin over to Broome, port Hedlin, down to Perth and back back into Indonesia and back to the UK. That took over a year.

04:34

And then, after about a year of being a chef vegetable chef over Christmas in a hotel in Huddersfield has a lot of peeling potatoes I I got a postcard, got one of those old things called a postcard from one of the chefs. Oh, thank you. Sorry, I missed off. I worked in Sardinia when I was 16. I worked in Sardinia, so I did Sardinia first, came back, then went to Indonesia, in Australia, then came back, and then I Then bought a couple of bicycles with my girlfriend and we ended up cycling to southern Egypt and back 12,000 miles.

05:17 - David Brown (Host)

That's crazy 17 countries.

05:19 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

We're only going to France. We're only going to France for Christmas. The wind was blowing and the sun was shining, and once you can travel a lot, you know get a lot of distance with. And we were free camping. We camped in the mountains, on the rivers and the beaches, and then we went through the Sinai, the Negev, the Sahara. We actually went through the West Bank, which obviously is a subject at the moment, and we got so how did you wind up in marketing after all that?

05:48

Because when I came, when we traveled believe it or not was boring as I am I used to write business plans. You know, you play Cludo or cards or Dot the dot or whatever we did. But but in and amongst that, I was my dad's entrepreneurial. He had a couple of Italian restaurants. It also had a Past, a factory, and so as a young teenager, I used to work in those Places empty the bins, do the washing up right and I yeah.

06:20

I guess I've got an entrepreneurial streak in me. And so when we came back from our travels, we got married and had three children and I opened up a pizza takeaway business and and I'm shortly afterwards, one of my school friends who had gone to one of those things called a university had said to me what are you doing with all of your client Information? You do pizza deliveries where you got the name, the address, the telephone number, and I said I'm putting it all in a paper bag for the tax man. And he said why don't you put it into a database? I'm like whoa, you know what's one of those.

07:00

And and I bought one of the first. I was one of the first of all of my friends to buy a computer, uploaded the data into that and a couple of years later I was at an exhibition a catering exhibition in Earl's Court, and some guys there were Talking about computerized order-taking systems and it was revolutionary. You know, and I and I rock up and on a floppy disk I've got two thousand customer names, addresses, telephone numbers.

07:29

So I got involved with. We're turning that into a point of sale order-taking system. It was my toe into tech and and I ran that what year was that?

07:43 - David Brown (Host)

that was here is the sorry. What year is that?

07:45 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Set the business up, one in 88. So it would have been about 92 93.

07:52 - David Brown (Host)

Okay, just to give some context to people, of kind of when we were talking about so that's cool, so you, you then started putting on this stuff in the database and started to go from there.

08:01 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Yeah, and and and we started doing these things called newsletters and things, and a little bit of desktop publishing and and things like this. So, so, running my own business, trying to grow it as much as I can that was my, my introduction to us pause, and I'd also worked at the pasta factory where we made fresh pasta and we were pioneers, you know. We used to Do our own packaging, labeling, pricing, distribution and I learned how to do all of that stuff in in a family business sense. So, yeah, after running my business for a number of years, I had a lot of. I had about 40 staff part-time, many of which had gone to the local university, and I had university envy, you know of course I got a second proficiency certificate which had got my name misspelled in it, and that was all I had.

09:07

So so I went to evening class two nights a week. I did. I was very lucky that they let me do a masters, but it was because I'd already run a business that I didn't need a first degree.

09:18 - David Brown (Host)

Right, I was also.

09:20 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Hason to add, I was also paying for my own degree, for the own course. So you know, when you pay for it it's a bit less.

09:28 - David Brown (Host)

Scrutiny goes on, and they're a little flexible, a little more flexible.

09:32 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

And, and you know I'll never forget that, that interview, and the guy called Giles Forbes when he, you know, he asked me about business turnover margins, hr, you know, etc. Etc, and and and that was second nature to me. So so, yeah, I did. Two nights away I ended up getting an MSC marketing management Degree. There was 32 of us who enrolled and only seven of us actually Qualified in that first tronch.

10:04

hen then I think it was about: 2002

10:54

is and Marketing plan back in: 2005

11:22

She was my first employer and yeah, she, she took me on under Part-time basis before I set up my own business and she taught me a lot. She was brilliant and Anyway. So around that business for a number of years and in and amongst that, my former lecturers at university Asked me if I'd go in and do a couple of guest lectures and two guest lectures became four and four became six and six became eight and I ended up Swapping I turn. I went to become a senior lecturer at the university. I maintained a couple of my clients and and kept a small marketing agency consultancy of one IE, me and and that enabled me to continue to do practical marketing while also teaching it. I wrote a bunch of modules at the university of Huddersfield, startwood. I wrote I was Marketing it, marketing for event management, and I wrote PR and sponsorship as the lead at the only person that taught sponsorship, and I also wrote a masters in play shaping, which is an area close to your heart.

12:40

Yeah, yeah as a local tradesman, as a local business owner and the founder of the Huddersfield food and drink festival, which grew to 140,000 people per year. I am Passionate about place, you know, travels a fair bit and and marketers. You know, when I was studying, marketing was all about Coca Cola. You know, I think Zara and yeah at some point in time.

13:08 - David Brown (Host)

All the massive case studies that I gave you to study that the enormous companies.

13:12 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Yeah, and a lot of it was American back back in those days and and I'm thinking you know I'm anyway so I was very lucky that I was sponsored onto a course called common purpose Change my life. Common purpose was was incredible, and it was the it's basically 12 months, one day a week oh, sorry, one day a month cohort of 32, all about leadership in the community. So you learn about governance, education, health, etc, etc. And I did that while studying my degree and and it was probably more valuable to me, certainly on a life Time, life basis, but it taught me leadership, taught me not to be afraid, taught me how to take information and Analyze it in my own way.

14:02

You know the textbooks you're out, yet when you to get a textbook, you sort of taking their analysis. But this course is like no, it's your interpretation, you see the world differently and you're entitled to express that. So, yeah, became a marketing lecturer and and we also set up a degree course in Hong Kong. My Chancellor at the time was Patrick Stewart, I from Star Wars stuff I've never actually not Star Wars, that's the one.

14:34

Yeah, star Trek.

14:36 - David Brown (Host)

Star Trek.

14:37 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

And I've never really seen it. But anyway, really nice guy and we used to call him one take Patrick, because he introduced the university to TV advertising and he was brilliant today.

14:51

Right the university grew rapidly and we were sent over to Hong Kong to partner with Hong Kong Management Association and I delivered courses over there. So brilliant experience, great time. But I was it. I wanted to get back into industry and I joined forces with a couple of other guys who had founded FreeServe and I got Simon Pearly and we launched something called Jumble Aid and Jumble Aid was a portal for recycling unwanted stuff. I think you'd refer to it as Vinton. Now I think there's a Vinton.

15:27

A Vintage, but we were before digital cameras and it didn't fly. It's a shame it didn't fly. It costs a lot of money, but it was the right thing in the right direction just too soon. And I went back into academia and became a teaching fellow at Leeds University and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and then developed an algorithm for measuring social media performance, and credit to wasn't me that wrote, wasn't me who had the idea. It was somebody else who had the idea and had the technical capability. But we put this algorithm together using we took the APIs from all the majors and social media platforms, aggregated them and created automated reports. That was 10 years ago, nine years ago.

16:28 - David Brown (Host)

Right.

16:29 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Right Ahead of its time and we launched that at Leeds Business Week, which was sponsored by a little company from San Francisco called Salesforce, and they'd helicoptered in their senior teams. They wanted to open up the North of England and I spent three days with Salesforce at this exhibition, this conference. They were my first customer. They loved what we'd done and two years later I joined one of their partners in London. I moved to London and became a brand director for one of their fastest growing partners, a platinum partner called Make Positive. I'm well. We saw the rebrand. We grew 40% in two years and that sounds a lot and it was a lot. But to be fair, salesforce were growing 28% themselves. So you know the marketing.

17:27 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, it was massive. It was massive at the beginning. Yeah, um, I I know there's been a lot of story here, but I really wanted you to go through that because I think one of the important aspects and one of the things I like sort of about your story is is that you started off as a practitioner, right Like you were doing marketing before you went to school to learn about marketing, because you had to make your business run. And I think that ties into some of the stuff that we're going to talk about, because we're at that same sort of point in history, I think, where the it's really important, for I think the people who are the practitioners, who are getting down in the weeds with AI at the minute, are the ones that are probably going to be successful long term, because we're the ones that are actually like trying to figure it out, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and it's the same experience you will have had.

18:20

You know, running your small business. You know you try a flyer and you go well, that flyer didn't work very well and that cost me 500 quid, you know. And then you go okay, well, I've got to try something different. So you know you were doing the hands-on kind of testing thing in the beginning, which is kind of what we're doing now, um, and I know that you're hugely interested in doing that. So you know what are your, so what are your thoughts. You know, having gone through the whole educational thing and been an instructor around sort of marketing, how do you think AI is now changing the way marketing works and the way marketing is done?

18:56 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Um, crikey, that's a massive question. Um, I think it's, I think it is changing a lot and it will change a lot more. Um, for those of us who embrace it and allow it, um, and it's phenomenal, it's phenomenal. There are others who will be resistant to it and I suppose, if you look at the um life cycle of AI or whatever, or I shouldn't know my model, should I want to say the early, early adopters, you know um you know, I think we are early adopters.

19:30

We're definitely not pioneers by any stretch. I might have been a pioneer when we wrote the, the algorithm, 10 years ago, in a sense, um. So I think the world, it's more than marketing, david, the whole the world will not be the same again and I and I believe that to be. I know it sounds big, it sounds maybe a bit careless of me to say that, but seriously it um. Entrepreneurs tend to um. They need a toolkit, don't they? We need, you know, if you're an entrepreneur, you need, you know, you need, you need a good ally, you need a good listening here. You know, you don't, you don't make it on your own. You always have somebody else or something else in there. Well, you've got, you've got your sidekick with your chat GPT, or your Claude, or your Bard, or, or, if you you know, you've got your Nadioai. Ask me anything about business and marketing and my own chat bot will will give you some answers. So, so when Margaret, I've just wrote a long piece yesterday, a long article about um, it was about paradigm shifts, and we have been through many paradigm shifts, um, starting pre-industrial revolution.

20:49

ocietal marketing in the late: 1990

21:44 - David Brown (Host)

I don't remember.

21:45 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Um, you know, prices were fixed by a manufacturers and not. We've forgotten about this stuff. We've forgotten about it. It's way in the past. But, um, we became a nation of shopkeepers, a nation of entrepreneurs and small businesses. Now you multiply that forward, now you take that forward and we will come, we will grow even more independent businesses. I remember going to one of your sort of events, which was a smart city event in Manchester 15 years ago. Uh, it was part of the, you know, and I brought the master's degree in place, shaping and it's part of the research, and I can't remember who we're speaking. But he said that our shops are going to turn into micro factories and we will have 3d printing. And we're going. What's 3d printing, you know?

22:37

and unfortunately, I think the example at the time was a revolver. You know you can make a gun.

22:43 - David Brown (Host)

Of course yeah.

22:44 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Which was not very. You know, I think I prefer the corkscrew example, but that's, that's where we're at. We can, you know, go down to your high street now and you'll see. You know retail shops are closing but you will see micro businesses that can deliver services, et cetera. So it is changing the whole landscape, specifically for marketing. If you want to put some titles to hyper personalization, hyper targeting, hyper automation, just stick hyper in front of stuff and and you know you pretty much, pretty much got a handle on it.

23:24 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, I think I think you're right. One of the things that we're seeing already, I think, is is a lot of people are able to start businesses that maybe weren't able to do it before because they didn't have the time or they didn't have the knowledge. But the tools like chat, ept and Bard and the others, you know, save so much time and so much effort. I mean, you know, I've talked about this on the podcast before, about how I use AI tools to do things like transcripts. Like transcripts just to have a transcript of a video used to be really expensive and it used to take days because somebody had to manually type it all out and they had to put, you know, the speakers in and the times in and all that stuff and it it was a barrier to having something like a podcast because only a few people could really, you know, had the time and the money to be able to do that, to put out a quality product. Now, in the last nine months, 12 months, you've got all these tools out there that enable us to do these things. I mean, we'll finish this podcast tonight and we were talking about this earlier. We'll finish this podcast tonight. I'll sit here. I'll do a rough edit of it, I'll upload the stuff, I'll get the transcripts and everything back in 30 seconds or a minute and then it'll be. Basically it'll be ready to go and then I just need to do a bit of the sound processing and then you know. But it all moves so quickly and I think that really is enabling a lot of people to set up new businesses and to do new things. What?

24:52

But I also think that it's, you know, again, it's having a big impact on things like copywriters. And this is where it kind of gets back into the marketing question, because in the past, you know, people might have hired a ghostwriter or something to write blog posts for them and those sorts of things, so they'd actually pay someone to do that, excuse me. Now they don't have to and they can get. Yes, you know the content that the, the, the air tools, generally generate isn't as good as you would get from a copywriter, but it's like 80% of the way there. And so just the saving of time, you know, for people who are trying to do those sorts of things. And I guess you know again, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you and we've talked about this a lot just together and as well, I wanted to kind of bring it on to the podcast to make it a little more public and I guess there's different types of kind of marketers.

25:45

We talked about this as well, right? So there's there's professionals who market. So there's professional marketers, cmos and people like that who do it as a for a living. You've then got business owners and small and medium sized businesses who need to do their own marketing. So they've got sort of a separate need and a separate set of tools maybe and and something that's going to have impact there. And then we talked about students as well. So you know, you've got the students studying it. So what, what sort of skills do you think those three separate groups are going to need to have over the next few years? Or do you are they similar, or do you think there are different skills that they need to have? And what do they need to do?

26:27 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Do you think Well, as with most of your questions are very long and very detailed and the answers need a long time. Just a little one. Well, I'll try Right. First of all, just because we can set up businesses doesn't mean to say that we should. Just just because we have, of course, we are now more on, we are now more equipped than we used to be, doesn't mean to say that we should go ahead. You'll know who was the guy that said we've all got a book in us, but it doesn't necessarily mean we should write one. Was it Hutchins?

27:03 - David Brown (Host)

Oh, was that Peter Hitchens? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it was Peter Hitchens, yeah.

27:06 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

So you know, I think the same applies with business. So don't let's get so carried away. Just because we can write our own copy or we can write our own marketing plan, we can write our own business plan that the world needs, what we've, the widgets that we're going to be producing 100%.

27:23

Yeah, but let's split it up. So, in terms of professional marketers, charted marketers such as myself, then what will AI do, ml, machine learning, sas what's that going to do for them? Well, I you know we're going to be much more productive, we're going to be able, we can produce things in lightning speed, and I know this because I've done it myself. You know, I was writing a marketing plan for a project and actually somebody else wrote the marketing plan for me exactly a year ago, exactly this week last year Simon Canani, super, super guy. He and I were putting together plans around resilience training, resilience coaching, helping companies and particularly partners in the Salesforce ecosystem to become more resilient. And he wrote the marketing plan in a day. And I'm like what the heck? That's my job. And he'd been introduced to chat GPT and when he showed me the results of it, I was flawed.

28:39

I was actually quite, I was very concerned. I thought, oh my God, I'm going to lose my job, my children are going to lose their jobs. My 10,000 graduates have got around the world marketing graduates. What are they going to do? And so I spent a few months looking into it and becoming more. I suppose can I use word expert more, more, more used to using and I became more confident as a professional marketer. I've now got a brilliant toolkit and if other professional marketers embrace it as I have, they too will have an amazing toolkit.

29:17

But at some point in somewhere on the in the funnel, somebody's going to lose out. So so if I can, if I can write copy and send it to a copywriter to polish rather than create, then there's some time saving that, etc. So there will be a knock on effect. Lecani is it? Professor Lecani said it's not. You know you've heard this loads of times now. I guess you know it's not AI that's going to put you out the job. It's the person that's using it when you're not using it that's going to pick up.

29:47 - David Brown (Host)

Exactly so, yeah, that's it.

29:48 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Professional marketers. I think they're going to need smaller teams. They're going to be more niche in what they deliver themselves and maybe, maybe, touch wood, more organizations will have more marketing plans, because, you know, I've never actually seen any study on this.

30:06

But yeah about less than 1% of the top. Well, 1% of any British industry has got a market current marketing plan. So, fingers crossed, more companies will have more plans and that will help them to steer their way through what may become an economic downturn. Individuals working within organizations who assume the role of marketing charities and they've got somebody that does a newsletter for them or puts an event together, etc. Etc. Well, if they're doing events, they're already probably using Eventbrite and Eventbrite's already using some AI form in there, etc. Etc. So I think individuals will become more competent within that role. That might lead to them becoming more and I expect them to become more influential.

31:04

So we've got a survey going and hopefully you can share the link to the survey and it's about where is the AI in you? So, as you as an individual, have you got any AI in you? Are you interested in it? I'm not. If you are, how interested and how, how capable are you in AI? But the same goes to your company. So you know who's. We had GDPR officers, didn't we? I mean, since Brexit, they've changed that.

31:31 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, but you know no same, we've still got them All right.

31:35 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

So we need, we need these officers. So who's your AI officer? You know who's who's AI? Fine, your organization. So to me, I see that being a major, major new role. The natural person to do that, I guess, would be somebody who is or was in marketing. They need to be able to understand business, understand what the, what the organization's objectives are, and then apply a marketing sorry, an AI audit to the organization and from that area AI audit, they can then put together a tactical plan. So those people are going to emerge. And then what we got?

32:21 - David Brown (Host)

students, students before we, before we go on to students. Can I just touch on one thing that you said? I really like what you said and I hadn't thought about this, but you mentioned that maybe people would get better. As just a passing comment, along and along there, do you think that, like the people who who you know they're not marketers but they have to do marketing, do you think that using AI tools will actually help them? Will they learn from the AI tools? Do you think they'll be able to not only to use the tool just to say I need to write a better newsletter, but do you think they'll actually use it to to make themselves better and to actually learn from it?

33:03 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Why not? Why not? Well let's find the parent, let's find parallels, you know, would you argue that somebody who used to use an abacus and now uses a calculator didn't learn more about maths? Or somebody who used a candle and now uses electricity? Yeah, I mean, I love that.

33:24 - David Brown (Host)

Well, yeah, that's, yeah, that's the example, isn't it that? You know, when electricity came, everybody started buying more books and, and you know, borrowing them from the library and people were learning on their own. That was just. It was just interesting, because I think there may be two camps. There's some people who just they literally don't care, they just wanted to give them an answer and you know they'll just, they'll take whatever it is and they'll just push it out and then. But I do think there's a big camp of people who will actually use it and try and learn from it.

33:56

I mean, this is what I got from the students, and you will have heard this on previous podcasts, but you know, I had Andrew Maynard who was talking to, you know, undergraduates at the University of Arizona.

34:06

I've talked to kids at a private school in Cambridge that I went to to do a career stay to talk about AI, and what I was amazed at is the students that used AI generally didn't use it to cheat.

34:22

They used it to write better papers or they used it to understand what they were, trying to learn better, and so there's a whole group of people, I think there's a group of people that are just, they're scared of it and so they pull up all the really negative sort of oh no, people are going to use it to cheat and they're going to do this, they're going to do that. But actually I think a lot of people are using it to try and make themselves better and, and you know, to help them be better at their job. Or you know they're not getting it to do the work for them, but they're asking it questions about the stuff that they need to do and then they're doing it and I think that's a huge, huge opportunity for people and it and it maybe it's a good segue into talking about students. But, um, but yeah, it's just interesting that you sort of drop that in yourself as well, that you know people might get better.

35:08 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Yeah, I mean, I think we, I think that we should look back to look forward and, you know, find parallels and you know, when we started, I don't know, using the wheel, did that you know? Did we go? You know we just got better, we got better at going in the right direction quicker and we did a bit more when we got there and we got home sooner. Maybe you know so. So you know, but if you, you know, if you, I wrote a vow of positivity. Um, no, I'll be. Let's. Let's rephrase that. I wrote it with chat gpt and I love it. It's on my website there. I love it because it says what I, you know my intention towards AI is positive, but it also says what my attitude towards any negativity towards AI. So I'm not blindly saying AI is going to solve the world's problems and there are, you know, some serious, serious issues around it. So that's so. You know, it's a balanced view, but, but unbalanced and positive.

36:15

But I think, yeah, we, we, we, we should, we could, let's, let's, let's play to the best, let's play to. You know, we are, um, I know, was it Andrew, andrew Maynard, who said, um that we teach to the mean, um, we teach the average student. Um, and, and that's because the whole system's geared towards you know it's a production universe. I think universities are gonna, are gonna, you're not gonna, recognize universities within the next two to five years, and and for good reason. Universities and I'm sorry to ex-colleagues or colleagues and people, but I believe passionately that we have too many students going to universities that aren't, that are delivering outdated content to students who are paying extortionate rents to have that student experience that actually during COVID they didn't get, etc.

37:13 - David Brown (Host)

Etc they're not giving any refunds to that generation of students, etc.

37:17 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

So I think that right of passage to go to a university, um, those days have to go um, and I think apprenticeships, um make a lot more sense. Getting a degree in a year, getting the equivalent of a degree in it, what you know? Why does it take three years to get a degree? Oh, sorry, I know why. Because children grow up, or our young people grow up, in those three years. Well, that's a very expensive, you know. Growing up period is, yeah, 70 000 pound sterling debt for a degree.

37:52 - David Brown (Host)

That, actually that content you could have learned in a hundred percent and it's even worse than the US because it's four years for most students. It takes four years to get through uni in the US, so yeah, yeah, so I think students will.

38:07 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Um, it's on us to enable students to use every tool they can to better themselves and to better society, and if we aren't good enough to assess them in a way that prevents cheating, then it's all it's on us, isn't it? You know? I mean, there is um. Bill Gates references a English teacher in um.

38:33

I think she's in Virginia and basically she allows her students to use chat, gpt yeah this is going back, probably uh or whatever, and they and they use chat, gpt and they do some amazing creative writing, but their assignment, their essay, is in the classroom. It's it's, it's supervised and it's freehand. Yeah exactly um.

38:53

So don't lose the art of writing, don't lose the art of storytelling, and use your imagination that that you've actually just had it blown sky-high by using chat gpt to take you into paradigms that you would not otherwise have been in. So good on her hats, off to her. She's found a way of enabling students to be far more creative and yet be assessed. And we can do vibers. Vibers are so easy to do. You know why. Why does a student have to do you know a two hour written exam?

39:26

yeah, exactly yeah, tell me what you know about marketing. Tell me you know, apply the ansaw matrix to these five. You know companies and if, if I'm not sati, and then you can put that through ai as well and you can check the voice exactly, I yeah, 100%.

39:45 - David Brown (Host)

So where do we go from here? What's next?

39:50 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

well, you, I, I think, um, we're talking about business. We've talked about um students and education, um societies a whole. I mean, did you see an article only today? Um, it was um. I hope you did see it because I posted it in the ai collected, so you should have gone.

40:11

I'm sure I saw it right, there was something to do with um weather forecasting, um oh yeah, I did see that, yeah, yeah, ai, I, I, um, developed weather forecast which is now proven to be more precise than the, the customary way of doing it. Now I'm sort of had a bit of a no shit, sherlock sort of moment when I saw that, because it was like, of course, you know, I mean, that is that's fairly, uh, expect it. We've seen developments in cancer, cancer treatment, um and uh, and other health health issues. So I'm an advocate of ai, I think. I think it's, it's, it's great and and and needs to be seen. I, I want to.

40:56

I really wish the bbc would stop pumping out this. You know they might do a five-minute piece on ai, and four and a half minutes are about, you know, scaremongering, um, and, and then you get a little piece that talks about some good that it's done. So we need to manage public perception. We need to get behind it. Can you imagine, david, if, if you know, we're just invented electricity? You know what's a bbc gonna say you know, don't use this, you can make bombs out of it it's dangerous yes, but you can also build hospitals and you can build incubators and and, and you know, etc.

41:32

Etc. So we need to find a better, more positive positioning on this, with its controls with controls, of course, I'm not advocating, not controls, um, you know. But so where do we go from here? I know where I'm going from here. I'm going to a conference tomorrow on ai, on ethics and, and there's been some developments in that and I think you know, and we're getting never so closer to the point where we can say, look, let's put a line on it, we've got it, we've got it, we know the ethical considerations of ai and and we're applying it. So now can we move on from that um, dialogue and um and get on with the thing.

42:16 - David Brown (Host)

So shout out to sharing. Yeah, shout out to Sharon Matthew X X podcast guest as well. Who's uh, who's doing that?

42:25 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

oh, he's a great guy sharing and I'm I'm looking for, I'm looking forward to seeing him. I'm meeting tim bennett. Tim bennett bennett has just developed bob hyphen e, bobby hyphen dot. Ai, which is the abyssal chatbot. So I've been training my chatbot for the last week um asking anything about marketing and ai, and it should give you a, a conditioned answer, a response that I have um given to it and some permissions that have allowed it to go, which is slightly different to the other chatbot that you'll see on my website at the moment, which is a twice one, which which gathers information from from chat gpt, and that's been revised as we speak um.

43:12

So so you know there's some pretty pioneering things out there. Some things aren't aren't perfect, um, but they're getting there. But tomorrow we launch the new level six award in marketing with ai uh. That is a charting institute of marketing, um endorsed, accredited award. It's a level six which is equivalent of a degree level. It's not. You don't have to do a degree and you do the, you do the mod itself and I've written the content for that um on behalf of the uh cambridge professional academy and we'll take on signups for that tomorrow um and can anyone?

43:55 - David Brown (Host)

fifth, of december sorry, we'll do that in the second. Can anyone register for that? Or do you have to be in the chartered institute, or can just people sign up?

44:07 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

um. No, you don't have to be a member um so anybody can sign up um and um and you'll see the um, the criteria, the, the um syllabus there and um and and the the. The test at the end of it is a multiple choice test. So it's not it's it's it's fairly. I wouldn't say it's lower level in any sense, but it's relatively easy to get on. But it's four professionals got you, it's four professionals.

44:36 - David Brown (Host)

I just wanted people listening to, not think that, oh well, I can't do that because I'm not a member of the chartered institute of marketing. Like anybody can go and sign up to do it, and I think that I just wanted to make that clear for people that you know, if you're interested in it, you can go and sign up. And um and and yeah, I jumped in a little bit ahead. I know you were going to say on the fifth of december you've got a webinar, so if people are interested in that, they can come to the webinar and find out more information, and then I think the course starts in january. Is that right?

45:05 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

yeah, that's right. Fifth, fifth, um, fifth of december, 11 o'clock I think. I'm. I do 30 minute taster um, 15 minutes q and a, um and um and then the course starts in january, but I think second week in january. I'm a bit vague with some of the details because I've had my head so much into writing the content. I'm like, yeah, I mean, I've got a, I've been, I've so enjoyed writing it and you know I've learned a lot while I was doing it. I mean, it's eight modules, it's, it's basically takes you from what is it, how does it work to, how can I apply it?

45:44

Um, I'm very much aware of not-for-profits and co-founder of the age of human. I'm a massive believer in democratization of ai. I don't want my kids, or any other kids that can't get onto the ai learning curve, to miss out. You know this is 21st century. Um, let's give everybody equal access to ai. Um, so we're setting up a time bank um, in fact just signed it off this evening. So there'll be a time banking facility that will enable people like us and hopefully you and your guests and others will go, you know what I'll give a couple of hours a month to to support somebody that wants to get on to into ai in the hope because it's not, it's, it's not um a written contract but in the hope that they'll do some some good chore for somebody else.

46:36

Yeah, uh, and that's how the world goes around. So, so we're gonna have highly professional courses, courses for professionals. I'm doing a course for ned's, not, uh, what's in head? Uh, non-exec director, um, who needs to be ai? Ai, if I'd, and there's a certificate for that as well. Okay, intense short courses. So for me, what happens next is taking the knowledge that I've amassed, turning into outputs, turning into um, um short courses. I'm talking with um, a marketing guru. Uh, it doesn't like being called a guru, but it is no one ever likes being called a guru but I'm happy to be the goo.

47:24

If you're the room behind the goo, I'll do the goo. You can do the room. But um, yeah, we're talking about putting a book together. Um applied ai.

47:32 - David Brown (Host)

So you know that's a great idea, I think we're getting to that point as well where a lot of people have talked about use cases. So what, in theory, could you use it for? But I think case studies now are going to become really valuable, where you know we're going to see some published results of people and companies and organizations who've actually used ai in practice and, and you know what, what return on investment have they actually got from that? And you know what are the, what are the sort of pitfalls that they've run across and things like that. And I know you know we've we've got a couple of events coming up later in the year that I think are going to be quite interesting around that, and potentially something next summer. So yeah, I think I think it's a great idea and I think it's a good time for it also.

48:16 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

So Can I give a couple of examples of them? Clearly I get excited about this stuff. Don't forget I'm a left school with no qualification. No, and I type with one finger. I am the slowest type I've seen it. I've just written a 95,000 word book, all with one finger, on a bloody phone.

48:42 - David Brown (Host)

I don't know how you did that.

48:44 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Oh well, it's my relaxation, what I was going to show. I was with you last week when we were brainstorming something On a flip chart. We put some ideas together, big sheet of paper, big ideas. You got your contribution, I did mine, and then we took a photograph of it and uploaded it to chat GPT and said can you turn this into a discussion document?

49:17 - David Brown (Host)

And it did. In like 10 seconds and I have no idea how it pulled. I mean, it got it. It's not 100%, but it got 95% of what we had written down and actually what we were trying to get to. It pulled all of that out. There were a couple of little bits and details that weren't exactly perfect, but I mean, like you, I just I really didn't expect much from it and was pretty amazed at what it managed to come out with.

49:47 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Yeah. So on the back of that, on Monday I was invited to I can't forget BGF. It used to be the War Office or something on the environment. It's a beautiful, significant building and in there is a charity I should have practiced.

50:10 - David Brown (Host)

I'll put it in the show notes for everyone. Don't worry, we'll get all the details correct in the show notes.

50:16 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

LBST, I think, is Anyway. So the charity is the support young adults getting into it, into work. And these young adults are from a background that might not otherwise have had certain opportunities. And so I was invited to talk to them about AI, and it was part of a one day workshop that had been put together by the professional academy, and so I gave a little introduction and then, as I was talking, I said look, can you all just make notes and do it in the mind map, draw some pictures, go wild. And anyway, towards the end of the session, I got them to take photographs of their mind maps and upload it to that GPT, and they were blown away.

51:08

And it's so one of the things I really like about AI it's instant. It's not like you plant something in the garden, you have to wait six months to see it go, and it's not. And I'm not talking about cheap tricks either, this is real stuff, anyway. So that was one. The other one is happened today. A friend of mine's son came out of university. Big debt, no, failed his degree. He was doing chemistry, he didn't get into the lab for two years.

51:39

By the time they got into the lab there was a Q of a mile long. He was there at four o'clock in the morning doing an experiment that he used to do at college. His education was lost, interest failed a couple of modules, is now out of work and looking for a job and he's got an interview tomorrow. So I said, look, send me the job spec, send me a CV and let me have a look at it. Well, I've done a fair bit of career coaching in academia, but it sort of came to me in a flash, sticking it in chat GPT.

52:15 - David Brown (Host)

I knew where this was going.

52:18 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

To interpret. So chat gave me a limited answer. Give me 10 questions to ask this person as if I was the interviewer and give me 10 questions that he should be asking the interview. I happened to have an hour spare, called in to see him, went through it put in. I'm not a softy, I'm a soft, especially if I haven't got much time. So I sat down and I was right, I'm going to grill you. Here we go and I tell you what, david. It was superb. It gave him a reference point. He knew it wasn't me, it wasn't me asking him these questions that mattered.

53:01

So, and when you look at, when you look at some stuff that PR Smith was talking about last week on his radio show, whatever he does talking about, you know we have concerns about sentience and we have concerns about, you know, chat GPT doesn't have emotions. Well, you know, sometimes you don't want an emotional conversation, you just want the details, the facts. An example of that is people with mental health situations, and I am seeing more and more evidence and this is not maybe statistically proven, but you know, would you tell your inner secrets to somebody who will have their own bias? We're concerned about bias with algorithms, but algorithms don't have ulterior motives. They might have bias. It might be unconscious bias. It might be conscious bias, it might be weighting. I put weightings in mind. I thought, you know, by 10 years ago, linkedin was a more appropriate platform than Instagram for businesses yeah, 100%.

54:14

Yeah, so we put weighting in that. That wasn't a bias, it was an opinion and it was factored in. So bias exists exists in humanity. So it's about to exist in algorithms, because they're the product of humanity. Yeah, but we don't put ulterior motives into algorithms. And you do get those in the boardroom, you get them in the classroom, you get them in society. So let's get over this bloody anxiety about you know bias. No, it's a good point.

54:50 - David Brown (Host)

And I think you and I talked about this the other day and it goes back to the podcast that I posted last week, which has turned out to be way more controversial than I sort of intended or ever thought it would. But a lot of people reacted very viscerally to the thought of someone, particularly an adolescent, talking to a machine instead of talking to a human. And I, you know, my point was and look, I don't, you know, I'm not invested in the company, I don't have anything. I just thought what they were doing was really interesting and I thought that it might be helpful for people who struggle to talk to people, particularly after COVID, where you've had a whole generation of young people who didn't go to school, who missed out on a couple of years of socializing in person that they would have had normally, and they probably might struggle more than the average person to talk to someone. And I thought it was a really, I thought it was a really interesting way to use AI.

55:46

And but, yeah, some people are, yeah, they really don't like, even like the thought of it, and so I may go back and revisit that again. So I'm glad you mentioned it and I agree with you. I think for some people it may be easier and, like you said, it's non-judgmental and I think that might be a you know, that might be an interesting factor in it, that people will feel that they're not getting judged. And it's interesting that you said that that young man, you know, kind of knew that those quite, it wasn't you sort of being really pointed and grilling, and personally it was look, I've got a set of questions here that you know that I think are interesting and I just want to ask them to you and and yeah, that's a really good use for it I'm surprised. Every time I talk to someone, I get some some different creative use that someone's done with AI, even if it's just something like that, and it's amazing, I love it, it's so good and that's part of the reason why I love having these conversations.

56:42 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

I give you another example that I was. I was teaching on the. What was it? It wasn't CIM, it was Institute of Professional Sales Management or something. And I was doing it's not it's not my normal subject area, but and I was teaching on financial management and and there was a. There was an equation in there lifetime value. So lifetime value and marketing. You know we talk about it, but we're not. Some of us aren't statistically savvy as maybe we should be, probably because you know what we don't teach at university anymore, because you know well. Maybe some universities do so. Let me get that factually correct. But at the universities I've taught at, a lot of the statisticians had left a long time ago and therefore your marketing students, when they do something like SurveyMonkey, surveymonkey can return a huge data set you can get a great sample set because it's so easy Mum, dad, next door neighbor, everybody in the local sports club.

57:52

you get huge volume of responses but we're not teaching interrogation, we're not showing our students how to, how to come. You know, get deep into the numbers and do the cross correlations and everything. Cross. What I forgot Cross. I can't speak properly.

58:13 - David Brown (Host)

Cross correlation.

58:15 - Nadio Granata (Guest)

Correlation, but we're still getting information out of that data and that's my, that is my worry, that you know we don't don't just take data face value. We've still got to learn the skill of interpretation. So, to go right back to your original question what skills do we need? We need to learn how to ask better questions, the future skill, one of our, you know, one of our great skills, as, as, as you know, many of people have learned how to type rapidly. You know that's a. That's a natural progression. So will be a natural progression to asking better questions because you're better, better the question. The more you know, the more appropriate the response.

59:07

And to that point, I would also like to add that the cost of data processing is a real cost on the environment.

59:19

So the example I gave to the students the other day was if Taylor Swift put something up on Instagram and she gets a million hits in in in a nanosecond, where does that data come from?

59:33

What's happening with that data? And, of course, there's a spike in data usage and some data warehouse somewhere. So that data warehouse is typically, but not exclusively, is, is is in some sort of remote place. That remote place is typically a desert. The desert is in a what we might call a third world country or sub-sahara country, and we're using water to cool the air conditioning units that cool down the data in countries that can ill afford to expend their water consumption. So, and I don't know, might come from you or somewhere where I saw that Google searches use a 10 to the amount of water or energy that a chat GPT search users, which is one hundredth of what a crypto fact, cryptocurrency calculation produces. So, as we my, my mission is to democratize AI responsibly and try and get enough, you know, try and make some dint in the population that uses less prompts, but doesn't bet that's energy.

:: 00:45

And it's great because I was. I was just waiting. I was like there was a brilliant segue to get to that, because I know that's one of the things that we wanted to talk about tonight, but it's good that we got there in the end. I'm conscious of time we are. We're already over an hour, so I don't want this to turn into a massive. I mean, we can we can go three hours if you want, but I think the listeners for my podcast may not be used to that. So I have my sort of standard questions, which you'll be well familiar with. So I assume that you'll be ready to answer these. But but I guess my first question is always for you is AI male or female?

:: 01:30

You know, I have listened to you ask this question many times, and somebody, someone just yesterday we talked about hey, my boat is a female boats are female Always.

:: 01:43

Italian. You know, in Italian language we sort of, you know, we tend to have masculinity, femininity, modern in the English language. So I understand why you asked the question. I think it's a fair question to ask. I have both. That's been Bob, bob, which is my version of my, the chatbot that I'm using most. But well, my, my granddaughter's called Bobby, so the name itself isn't, isn't it Give way? But I don't know. I think I think I can make me both, can it can be? Is human, male or female? Well, humans both.

:: 02:25

So, yeah, it's, it's equivalent of human Interesting, and so I know you have Bobby, which is your sort of your, your, your chatbot and AI. That's on your website, so nodioai if anybody wants to go play with it. But when you have a personal assistant, that's an AI, because that's coming and we'll have a tool soon where it can do everything for us. It can help us manage our schedules and book dinner appointments for us and all sorts of stuff. What do you think you'll name your assistant?

:: 03:01

Oh gosh. Well, I have somebody who worked for me a long time ago, who, uh, we did great things together. We did great things, and she knows me. I use the GC index. I don't know if you're familiar with the GCindexcom.

:: 03:19

Looks at proclivities looks at your strengths, looks at weaknesses, and I mine 10 out of 10 game changer and 9 out of 10 polisher. I think I'm about a three implementer and a five strategist, and it's those characteristics that when you compliment those, you get stuff done. And so Viv's back on the scene. I've dusted her off. She's come out every time and she's loving learning about AI, so I think I would call well. My nickname for Viv is Vivianda, so I would call my personal assistant.

:: 03:53

Vivianda, okay, I like it. That's good, and there's a story behind it as well, so there's emotion in it as well.

:: 03:59

You know. I mean you know Viv. You know she's a fantastic person and it's a real joy to and she's going to be running the time banking project that we're doing as well.

:: 04:10

Yeah, no, I've managed. Okay, so that's interesting. So I guess the last thing is is you know I always talk about the sci-fi, because there's a lot of sci-fi and I think a lot of the ideas that people have about artificial intelligence come from film and books that we've, you know, sort of grown up with. So where do you think our future is going to fall? Do you think you know, again, it's that more. Is it the Star Trek sort of perfect world, peaceful kind of universe where we're exploring but you know there really isn't any wars except for with, like, aliens? Or is it more the? You know something's going to happen. Maybe AI isn't going to kill us, but the civil unrest that comes from that is going to. You know we're going to descend into sort of a Mad Max kind of thing, or do you see it as some sort of cyberpunk, sort of something in between? And I know we talked about this the other night, but I'm quite curious to see you know where you fall on that scale.

:: 05:16

I remember when I was at school and our teacher was off sick and the headmaster took our class during your school and obviously he'd not prepared and what have you and he sat on the end of a desk Mr Lewis, he was called, he was great and he said okay, for the next hour I want you to write an essay about what you think the future looks like in the year 2020 and I think, without exception, we said we'd all be playing more sport and we wouldn't be working as much, and I think I said we'd all be eating spaghetti, and you know things like this. So I said then and I hope and I know hope's not a strategy, but I hope that we do cut down to four days a week, we do exercise more mentally and physically and we use tech to do good. I believe it can and should and will. I believe that we reduce the impact of politicians. I think you know politicians, we don't need them as much anymore. Let's change some of that stuff around, and no disrespect to them, but you know.

:: 06:29

That's a whole other podcast.

:: 06:34

So well, you know, and in and amongst that, I'm fearful that there will be so terrorism of some sort. But let's go positive. It'll be a beautiful world. It'll be healthier, happier, and we will work less for more reward.

:: 06:52

Brilliant. I really like that. So we've talked about the CIM level six award. We've talked about some of the events and stuff. We've talked about your website, nadioio. Is there anything else that you want to mention to people or somewhere that you'd like to direct people to go before we say goodbye?

:: 07:13

Oh gosh. So connection me on LinkedIn, nadio Granata. I then will invite everybody that connects with me on LinkedIn into the AI collective LinkedIn group and from that group I then invite them into the mighty network platform, which is where we store lots of white papers. We've got Mirella Lapota, her lecture on what is AI, etc. Etc. So we've got loads of great stuff. We've got a little newsroom in there. So anybody who wants to learn anything about AI from school leavers to thought leaders come and join us in the AI collective. Try and be proactive, try and share stuff with us. We practice, give us gain. So you get a lot from us. Give us give something back. Join the time banking. We'll set that up in the next, probably ballot time. This goes live, hopefully, etc. So that's about it Age of human, keeping on age of human. It's not the age of AI, it's the age of human and let's keep positive, keep doing that.

:: 08:23

I'll put all the links to all their stuff in the show notes anyway, so that'll be fine. So people can just look at the show notes and they can click through, and also on the, the episode on the website and that sort of thing as well. So, nodio, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure talking to you tonight, so thanks for your time. I know it's for people listening, it's eight o'clock in the evening already, so we had to do it at the end of the day. But it's been a fascinating conversation and I was really happy to have you. So have a good evening and we'll speak to you soon.

:: 08:53

Thanks, david, all the very best.