Bring Out the Talent: A Learning and Development Podcast

AI Essentials: Equipping Professionals for the Future of Work

• Maria Melfa & Jocelyn Allen

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In an era where AI is reshaping industries and redefining job roles, understanding and leveraging AI has become essential for professionals across various sectors. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, AI will displace 85 million jobs but create 97 million new ones, underscoring the urgent need for digital fluency and AI literacy.

Dr. James Stanger, our guest on this episode of 'Bring Out the Talent,' is a recognized authority in security, information technology, and workforce development. As the Chief Technology Evangelist at CompTIA, and an award-winning author, blogger, and educator, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to today’s discussion. Join us as Dr. Stanger shares insights on the importance of understanding AI, the practical applications of AI skills in various job roles, and CompTIA’s new AI Essentials Series, designed to prepare individuals and organizations for the future of work.

SPEAKER_04:

Welcome

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to Bring Out the Talent, a podcast featuring learning and development experts discussing innovative approaches and industry insights. Tune in to hear our talent help develop yours. Now here are your hosts, GTA's CEO and President Maria Melfa and Talent Manager Jocelyn Allen.

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Hello, Jocelyn. Hi,

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Maria. Just getting in the groove over here, trying to put as much energy as I can into the Zoom since we're not together today. I

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know. I can't believe you left me stranded in our podcast room today. It feels very weird. I'm going to pretend there's other people in here with me. But we don't have to pretend that there are other people on our podcast because we have a few. Well, of course, we have our special guest. james stanger and we do have our one and only john lavenger who's our director of sales thank you maria yeah absolutely so we're excited for a very fascinating episode about a subject that i'm not sure if anybody has heard of but it's called a a.i.

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No, I don't think it's been on the market for too long yet, Maria. So we are happy to be introducing it to the folks

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here today. Exactly.

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Just

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kidding. I think we'll be hearing a lot more about it in the next five to 10 years.

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Yeah, right. Non-stop. Non-stop. Absolutely. We

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joke. We're joking. We're joking. But it's all we hear about. So in an era where AI is reshaping industries and redefining job roles, understanding and leveraging AI has become essential for professionals across every sector. In fact, the World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, which is just next year, AI will displace 85 million jobs but create 97 million new ones. So there's still a surplus. Emphasizing the urgent need for digital fluency and AI literacy. In this episode, we welcome Dr. James Stanger. Dr. Stanger is the Chief Technology Evangelist at CompTIA and a recognized authority in security, information technology, and workforce development. As an award-winning author, blogger, and educator, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to today's important topic. Welcome Dr. Stanger, aka James.

SPEAKER_02:

Hey, thanks, man. It's good to be here.

SPEAKER_04:

Yes, good to have you back. We loved our last episode, and it's great to have you back on this exciting podcast. It's

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good to be a repeat offender.

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100% of absolutely. Yeah,

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we'll clarify the messaging there, but absolutely, James.

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Just teasing.

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Everybody deserves multiple chances.

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100%. So a lot certainly has changed in the tech landscape, I guess. When will it never change? And it's great to see CompTIA's response. to this growing need for the digital skills beyond traditional tech roles.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's been fun.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay, yes. So we all know, so I guess just to kind of back up a little bit, maybe we don't need to do this, but we all know the term AI, but can you give us a layman explanation of what it really

SPEAKER_02:

is and what it means? I always use, you could call it a Venn diagram. How about that for starting with a layman's note? Think of a big circle, right? I think the big circle is automation. And just to kind of simplify things. We know you can automate lots of things, right? And you can use lots of things to automate things. tools. I'm talking about little scripts that can automate searching for a hard disk or automate doing something. Well, artificial intelligence, I think, is automation that's smart. And we can talk about, for example, in 1950, Mr. Turing came up with the Turing test. That's T-U-R-I-N-G, by the way. And the word I come up with is indistinguishability. If you have a machine that can behave as a human, and you can have a conversation with it, and it can anticipate, can do prediction, right? It can do improvements. Then that's artificial intelligence. That Turing test came up in 1950, 1955. You've got John McCarty, and McCarty basically said it's the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. Or much more recently, in the United States, the White House came up with a definition that effectively said something like this. It's any machine-based system that can make predictions and recommendations on its own and act on its own. So there's kind of a long definition, but there's kind of, I think, a good way to look at artificial

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intelligence. James, to piggyback off that, I've been reading variety of articles and there's a million opinions on AI and perspectives on how far evolved it is at this point. But we see some feeling like the Turing test has already been satisfied. What's your take on that?

SPEAKER_02:

I wouldn't say quite yet. I think more advanced approaches are have gotten pretty close to it. But when you go to ChatGPT and you engage in a dialogue, it sure seems like there's somebody fairly smart at the end there. So I can see where we're going with that. And remember, there's a difference between, there's at least two different versions of AI or types, right? There's the generative AI, which we all have known and loved for the last few years, couple of years, right? ChatGPT or whatever, based on large language models, predictive work. It basically takes billions or millions or what have you of data and can basically do smart predictions. So it can work conversationally, improve the titles of your essays or what have you, or write whole essays and do pretty cool stuff for you. So generative AI is there. Then there's predictive AI. Predictive AI basically is the idea that it can go in and then start, in a sense, telling the future based on the past and doing reading. So there's predictive and generative AI. And I I think, yeah, I think it was since 2017 when Vish Vaswani came up with that, at Google, came up with that attention is all you need white paper. You can Google that. I think that was a major jump, wasn't it? In getting closer or to that touring kind of standard.

SPEAKER_05:

James, can you tell us a little bit more about what CompTIA is doing with AI? We know that you have, there was a AI Essentials series developed, right? What was the true catalyst for CompTIA to wanna develop this series for people?

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One of the great things about working at CompTIA is that we do what the industry tells us to do. It's not so much that we all sit around and go, okay, put our finger up in the air and which way is the wind blowing and let's react to it. We like to think that in our own way, we can be predictive. And the industry basically said, look, the biggest issues that we have right now are not so much being surprised by AI because there are elements of the IT industry and various industries where AI has been existing for a long time, a long time. Spam filters, for example, have used various algorithms that are central to AI for decades now. But the reason why we got into it is because the industry kind of said, look, our biggest issue right now is not only getting people digitally fluent, but our biggest issue is really getting that interaction between AI, right? and human beings. So if this is AI and this is a human being, right? That space in between the two, that's really key. We asked about 500, for example, in one survey, about 500, 600 industry leaders. And they all said that the main thing, in addition to using AI for like automation and using AI for cybersecurity and for data, they really said, we really need to explore what it means to truly and productively interact with AI. And so that's why we came up with the AI essentials. We have tech plus, we have AI essentials coming out. In fact, it's already been released in some ways. So we've already gotten some great data back on that. So it's really neat that we listen so closely to the industry and then we can respond accordingly.

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah, I love that because there are so many resources available, but when it comes down to it, what you're saying is there's an essentials and how do you put those all together so that we can deliver essentials to get to the next platform? Because until there's a lot of people who understand AI, we're in that phase, I think I remember seeing of like the really, we're still in the early adopters realm. We're not quite at the full scale. So having that essentials available to all tells people a lot more about what they're capable of. and kind of what you said earlier, defining what it actually is. I think it's interesting that you've released it in some manner too. So you have some data and stuff. Can you give us a sneak peek into anything? Like what's the AI Essentials course all about?

SPEAKER_02:

So one of the first things that really is designed to get people to understand that AI is not just about generative AI. So not really the history of it. We really want to make this, we didn't want to make this something that was abstract. We wanted to make this something that was really driven by Okay, you're using, let's say, the Microsoft product. What's it called again? Copilot, right? You're using that. What are the real top areas that need to be improved with the human being to interact well with it? And one of the first things is, let's do better than just copy and paste. I call it the CAP model, the AI CAP model, copy and paste. Not so good. I don't know. Anybody remember when Wikipedia was relatively new? Anybody that old, right? Remember what most people did? They started copying and pasting stuff. Well, we've been doing that with ChatGPT. One of the first things that we realized that the industry told us and that our SMEs told us, you call it command prompt, you call it prompt engineering. Sorry, I geeked out there with command prompt, but you call it prompt engineering, but really how to ask questions better of AI. And that's part of that interaction thing. So that's one of the first things. We really delved into, okay, here's what people are doing right, and maybe some areas that can be improved in the dialogue with AI. And I think it's all about the dialogue.

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I've learned that so much, too. I think it's one of the first things that we learned collectively was not just... Give me this chat GPT that like you, you, in order to get the products that you want, that's not kind of like boilerplate because we know that it is being fed the information that it needs to bring to you is that you have to almost feed more information. You have to get very, very specific and include detail that you want it to retrieve for you. And if you, it's so much more powerful when, when you actually know how to interact with it. So I love that's where you start. Cause I think that was the biggest aha for me of being like, Oh my God, look what I can actually get out of it when I know how to entice the conversation a little bit more with it.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I like that, how you use that term, entice the conversation. I'm stealing that because we focus on- This is being recorded, so

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that's fine. We know where it came from.

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We're covered. And I'm sure you have AI sifting through it and going, oh, steal. I'm looking for that. Yeah, right? Yeah. So we'll do some data tagging. So how critical a thinker can you be when working with AI? And that's a question for everybody, right? Are you really being a critical thinker when it comes to AI? And case in point, I had some people one time, they were basically, I could tell they were copying and pasting stuff, using it, right? And I'm like, whoa, folks, let's do a little example. And the example I said, why don't you do some ego surfing with ChatGPT or with other AI things? And they're like, ego surfing? What do you mean? I said, look up yourself. And they found all sorts of factual problems with their own selves that I wouldn't know about. Right. If I was just copying and pasting. Right. So get have a good critical mindset. And I'm not saying AI is always going to lie to you or whatever, but it can fabricate. People will use the word hallucinate and all that. The other thing we do with with AI essentials is I like to use the phrase horizon of expectations. And that's a fancy phrase for saying. Hey, I don't even know what AI tools are out there. There's Copilot, there's Changi Biki, Gemini, et cetera. But what are the business applications, specific names of them, but also applications? In a business, when do you use certain forms of AI? For example, if you're using something such as Copilot, when is it time to, hey, I can have it do a summary of a document? Well, that's good, right? That can save you time. Because I think that's one of the real key elements of AI is that you can save time by not reading something or you can save time by getting a good redacted version of it. But how good are you at being able to think critically about so that you can ask the right questions of whatever tool you're using so that it redacts, and I shouldn't say redacts, but so that it can summarize information that you need.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. In using it, I almost feel like AI teaches the user to do that over time. I think everybody, when they first start using it, they'll get a response from the chatbot that, isn't exactly what they were looking for. So they'll ask it a question like be a branching question and they'll iterate their response. And then over time, I feel like users are like, wait, if I just put all this information in, in the beginning, I would have gotten to this answer a whole lot quicker. And yeah. And it just, it seems like the concept of, of prompt engineering is, is almost being self-taught just through use.

SPEAKER_02:

It's not a good way to put it. I'll draw an analogy years ago. I'm talking. several decades when voice technology was first starting out. All the voice technology companies, and I'm talking in the 90s, were saying, oh, well, all you have to do is train the voice recognition tool, right? And what I discovered really quick was I probably wasn't training the voice recognition tool to recognize James Stanger's voice. That tool was training my voice to behave in such a way that it could recognize my voice. Do you know what I'm trying to say? So sometimes there's... I like how you... put it that there's a two-way thing here, right? I think that's important. I think it's very important because there's a balancing act here. We need to determine as we use AI to innovate, right? That balance between input and output and who's modifying who can turn into the tail wagging the dog, or it could turn into something really fun and creative and interesting. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01:

So James, when we started hearing about AI, I think everybody's head went to This is largely for tech professionals, or at least tech professionals first, right? But, you know, as we can see, it affects, you know, I would even argue the majority of roles out there in corporate America. For the course that CompTIA is releasing, the AI Essentials series, who do you see being the ideal audience for it?

SPEAKER_02:

I'm glad you brought that up because this really, frankly, is for everybody. In the same way digital fluency is for everyone, this is part of that. And to be truly digitally conversant, a couple of things you need to know. How to work with AI. I think also how to think critically, but also how to understand where data is coming from. If data is the new oil or data feed the AI beast, you have to understand the synergies, the co-relationships, the co-dependencies, or however you want to look at that, the dependencies between things such as data and AI. So it does apply to everybody. And we feel that this is something, it's one of the things our survey pointed out to us. And it was a bit of a surprise to some folks because at CompTIA, we work with the techie geeky folks, right? And so we love that stuff, but we realized that the vast majority of the respondents said, this is something that's going to change every work role, AI, right? Every, whether it be in a data world, whether it be in an infrastructure world, cybersecurity, software, but well outside of that, from administrative assistants to people doing research, et cetera. So absolutely, it applies to everyone.

SPEAKER_04:

How many classes are there in the series?

SPEAKER_02:

We're starting out with the AI Essentials course, but yeah, we're going to be coming up with several. I'll put it that way. So last I looked, we had two or three coming out after that. So we're going to keep adding on to a half dozen or so. Excellent. And as part of our pathway kind of approach, it's the same way with cybersecurity. Back in the day, we started with, you could argue, Security Plus, if you want to talk about that as a security course. Our infrastructure back in the 90s with A+, we started with that with tech support. Now we have an entire infrastructure pathway. Now we have an entire cybersecurity pathway. We have an entire data pathway. We're working on software and now we'll have a whole pathway there too. Do you think? Yeah, it'll be fun.

SPEAKER_04:

Do you think there'll be any government mandates like the 85-70 as far as people? That's a good question.

SPEAKER_02:

I think there's the idea of if you want to talk about AI as a separate entity, right? Or will AI simply inform all of the other, you could say, pathways? I'll keep it in terms of pathways. So infrastructure, software, data, cybersecurity, if you want to get into the techie world, is new pathway AI and they'll always be separate. I think there's a certain amount of that, but clearly AI is simply going to change workflows and work roles within infrastructure, software development, cybersecurity, and data. So it's something that will be a standalone field, obviously, but it also will work its way into every job role. Is that what the question you were asking?

SPEAKER_04:

Yes. I just right now, because there's so much concern about the security and how corporations use it. I'm just wondering if there will be some mandates coming along very quickly.

SPEAKER_02:

I was talking, I was at a recent CIO running a forum. We had a bunch of people in Nashville. I also did it in Thailand. I also did it in the UK. And one of the things that came up was ethics and privacy in a big way, not only in terms of corporations acting ethically and making sure that privacy is is retained, right? Or honored, right? But also individuals making sure that they understand the implications of that. And with Haggai, there's a lot of concern, right? Sometimes they say there's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but I think there's a lot of people preying on that, right? Or a lot of people are, if they're not preying on it, their fault, they're succumbing to fear, uncertainty, and doubt, right? But I think there are legitimate concerns in the same way that we've seen with the internet, with technology, with the various applications of it, that there are huge privacy concerns. That's why we have really good legislation coming out of Europe with GDPR, California, et cetera.

SPEAKER_04:

Just moving more quickly than ever. It's just hard to keep up on the internet. That took a while to have adopters where now it seems like everybody is just using it or every single... All of our marketing platforms that we're using, everybody's introducing it. So it's just, it's very interesting to see where this all will

SPEAKER_02:

end up. It's going to be interesting because you've seen cynical uses of AI. Attackers are very good at using any new tool. or misusing any new tool. And I've noticed, for example, we all get phishing attacks, don't we? Emails and texts and things like that. Remember how lame they were. I've noticed since ChatGPT has been around, they've gotten better.

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They've gotten pretty good.

SPEAKER_02:

Maybe that's just coincidental, but I don't think so. But, you know, so you can use it from what some people will call it a cyber way. You can use AI, in other words, to create attacks, right? Or hone attacks. I was working with a bunch of pen testers here about six months ago. And they were talking about how it's really helping them improve their pen testing, social engineering stuff. And it was interesting to see how they were using

SPEAKER_04:

that. Very interesting. My daughter's starting college in the fall, and she's actually majoring in cybersecurity.

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Has she seen things? Have they been introducing

SPEAKER_04:

things? Not yet, but she's very interested in learning more about it. She's going to Wentworth University in Boston, and they have a really cool, innovative program and all the... cool cybersecurity labs and all that stuff, which she got very excited about. So we shall see. I

SPEAKER_02:

once heard from a person who's a granddad now. He was telling me back in the day when calculators were still relatively new to the user space, in other words, available to individuals. that when he was studying to be a CPA, they're like, no, no, no, can't bring a calculator in to the exam or can't bring it in into this area. You got to still use the slide rule. And it's interesting to see with some institutions early on in any way, they're like, oh, we got to keep JATGPT out of here because of privacy concerns or we don't want students cheating or whatever. And it's been interesting to see how They've kind of worked out some of the privacy concerns, some of the issues that are now saying, well, it's part of the workforce, so you can't keep it out of an education space either. I think when it comes to using AI tools, there are all sorts of concerns. For example, if I have some intellectual property and I want to refine it in some way and engage in a dialogue, if you're using a public-facing tool, that's what I'll call it, a tool that is basically just open to user space, you're now taking intellectual property and refining putting it up into something that then gets grabbed and will be used later and will manifest itself on the next search, right? So you're giving things away. There's that concern. But there's also that concern, again, that as you bring things in, right, not out but coming in, are you bringing things that are contrary to facts, that are inaccurate or what have you?

SPEAKER_04:

Plagiarism.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's plagiarism. And when it comes to the dialogue, it's funny because I ego surfed myself one time. I even took screenshots. I use it every once in a while as a case in point. Yeah, see, I can't remember what tool it was, but it was a generative AI tool. It took away my PhD, which is fine, but it gave me a master's in business administration. It gave me a couple of degrees and several certs that I don't have. So it took one thing away and gave me back a bunch of other things. So anyway, it's always interesting to see. Seems like a fair trade. Yeah, absolutely. MBA is far more relevant than English, I thought. So,

SPEAKER_04:

yeah. Yeah. I just looked you up. I didn't realize that you were a flamenco dancer.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm a flamenco. I didn't know that either. And here's the deal. I also heard that as a flamingo dancer. And I'm like, well, I've seen flamingos before, I think.

SPEAKER_06:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm a flamenco dancer. That's cool. Yes. If only.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So Maria was bringing up how quickly this is changing. We saw this with the internet and adoptions breakneck pace. But with all this really rapid evolution taking place, how's CompTIA reacting to that with this AI Essentials series? How are you staying current with all these latest trends and developments in AI?

SPEAKER_02:

One of the things that we do is that we embrace any tool and we do it from a policy-based perspective. We have to follow standards. For example, in our certs, we follow the ISO 17024 standard. So what we're doing is we actually use AI to help us do development, right? Not only in AI Essentials, but in all of our certs. But to keep current, the main thing that we do is we have updates that we've stepped up our AI research behind the scenes. And we do at least quarterly research updates about how AI is being used so that we can see various shifts and certain areas in the industry that seem to be adopting AI more. Lately, we're seeing software development really be the number one area. So we're watching those tectonic shifts very carefully. I call it tectonic shifts in the emphasis of how AI is being used.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so that brings up a good point. When it comes to AI, you know, what... What are the practical applications for folks in their jobs? So, I mean, you just mentioned a great one, and I've heard the same thing, that code development has been a huge focus for AI. But I suspect, and Maria was just bringing up the fact, that corporations are certainly aware of AI being utilized to generate content. But what are some other practical uses of it?

SPEAKER_02:

I call this the supplement model. And by supplement, the really cool uses of AI that we've seen involves supplementing existing approaches. And I'll give a case in point. There is a, I'll call it an infrastructure as code. It's really more of an automation technology called Ansible. And you can look that up. A-N-S-I-B-L-E, Ansible. Ansible has been around, what, 20 years. And it's really cool with four lines of code, maybe 10 lines of code. You can launch a thousand internet ships. You can update a thousand servers. You can launch a bunch of servers in the cloud and very sophisticated serverless applications, containers. It's using a bit of code. You can do amazing things to maintain systems or create new infrastructures. Okay. It's called Ansible. Well, IDM and Red Hat basically put together a really cool thing that basically combines Watson AI with Ansible. And that's what I mean by supplements. So Ansible has been around a long time. But now if you can, with intelligent ways, now take that automation tool and then make it truly creative, right? Now it's like, well, I see what you did there in maintaining those 500 servers and doing updates. Here is a new script that is an improvement on that and makes it more efficient. So we're seeing in things for container management and serverless application management and also in software development. So there's certain areas. For example, software folks are kind of realizing what I call the new 80-20 rule. The 80-20 rule has been around a long time in various permutations. And the 80-20 rule, though, is that maybe when it comes to coding, you could have AI create software If you just give it some parameters and it'll spit out code that will get you about 80% there. So if you have a week long project, let's say, well, now AI has gotten you to Wednesday, maybe even into Thursday morning in terms of creating code. Now, all you have to do is spend 20% of your time to refine that code because you can't just copy and paste it because it's going to be sloppy. But you tighten that up and now you can kind of add that bit of unique value. to it. So the software development has been very good that way. I've seen it in pen testing. For example, I was working with a bunch of pen testers. This was in, where was I'm trying to remember? It was in Australia, also in South Africa. And they were basically taking, they realized that they needed to create some code in order to break into a certain system that had a vulnerability. And instead of starting from scratch, what did they do? They just went to chat GPT or some tool like that and said, look, I need you to create a piece of code that can scan for a certain text string at a certain port. Well, created it right away. And they had to refine it and do a few things, but it saved time. So there are a few ideas. Awesome. That's helpful.

SPEAKER_01:

This question, James, I want your opinion on it because it can be a game changer, but it also comes with challenges. How does the AI Essentials series help learners understand the landscape of AI, the tools available, and how to navigate potential challenges? Do you think that's good directionally?

SPEAKER_02:

Sure. All

SPEAKER_01:

right. All right. So James, AI, we all know it can be a game changer, but of course it comes with its challenges as well. How does the AI Essentials series help learners understand the landscape of AI, the different tools available, and how to navigate some of those potential challenges?

SPEAKER_02:

It's a really good question. I think one of the challenges has to do with things such as privacy. And the AI Essentials course is basically going to give in a very quick way, but I think a very essential way, allow people to say, okay, here are the implications. If I make a certain choice, if I do certain things using, working with AI, what happens next? What are some of the things that can happen then? And it's not from a fear-based perspective. It's just understanding, okay, if I do certain things, then this will happen. Other things that from a kind of a tools perspective is understanding when to choose the right AI tool for the job. And because in the same way that there are a lot of internet tools out there from things like Slack or talk or email or whatever tool, a web browser, AI has a similar palette of tools. And so you just got to know when to use the right one at the right time and the implications that can, the implications of each of those types of tools that you use.

SPEAKER_04:

So we're talking a lot about all the challenges and uncertainties. So besides a listener taking the CompTIA AI Essentials class, what are other ways that companies can help address this fast-changing landscape that AI is bringing us?

SPEAKER_02:

I think one of the first things is the best way that companies can do that is to make sure that their workers are truly engaged. Digitally literate. And it doesn't sound like a real, what should I say, a profound point. But trust me, I've been following something that's called the UK post office scandal or issue. It's something that's been taking place over 20 years, but it's really exploded over the last couple of years. It's the UK post office problem. To make a long story short, there was a bunch of software that was introduced to manage the expenses and manage the accounting problems. at the UK, about 11,000 UK post office places around the United Kingdom, the software had a glitch, caused problems, people ended up going to jail. Now, the reason I bring that up as an example is now they've realized that a lot of those people who went to jail, most of them, if not all of them, the software was the one that was the problem. They weren't dealing with software that was improperly saying that they were stealing. Well, in their investigations, I've noticed one thing that nobody has really noticed is that many of the people that they brought in from an executive level to mid-level and even to worker level, I noticed many of them, the way they talked about the technologies that they used from email, standard technologies to web browsers, you could tell they weren't literate in those tools. And yet they were in a position where they had to be literate in things like understanding an Excel spreadsheet or how to save a document to a hard drive. They didn't really know how to do those things. One person always printed out everything that he acted on, for example, because he didn't like working with computers. What does that have to do with AI? Well, just about everything, because AI works in a computer space. It has implications in real time and real neat space. It has those implications in real time and real meat space. But if you're not digitally literate as a workforce, you're not going to be able to work with AI properly. And the tail will start wagging the dog, if you know what I'm trying to say. And that's, I think, one of the big issues that corporations are coming to realize is they need a more digitally literate workforce.

SPEAKER_05:

So there's a lot of speculation. I mean, it's kind of like one of the main things that we're talking out here, right, is the adoption and what we, what's preventing that. And it's definitely like nerves and speculation and like, what is this thing really? And are we going to have an iRobot thing on our hands here? Like say, it's true people. I know you're thinking, and I have one way or the other too. So what do you, what do we truly see? Because we also know that like, it's still very much reliant on a human component too. Like I think for the most part, at least in the, in the area that we're talking about. So In your experience with all of the involvement that you have with AI, where do you see it in the coming years? How is CompTIA preparing for the future now that you're in it and with what you're doing so far?

SPEAKER_02:

The main thing is that we're sending out a message in some ways, for example, act in an ethical way. And we mean that both to individuals and to corporations. We've already seen, I think, cynical uses of AI. Companies are still focused still investigating how to best use AI. I realize that many companies are using it, have been using it for decades, but most companies, most companies have not been. And so they're still negotiating the use of it. And so to get into this, so when you hear about, well, this company did a bunch of layoffs because, well, AI, I think that's a cynical use of AI. Not because AI changed job roles and work roles and everything. They're just... Some of these companies are frankly, they had problems because cheap money's not around as much anymore because interest rates went up. They had to lay people off and then they blamed something AI. I'm sorry, there's issues. There are times that has happened. But when it comes to really understanding how AI works, companies where we are at Compte here right now is we really have realized that people don't even understand the first elements of what AI means. From a generative AI perspective, what exactly is a large language model? How does it work? Where does the data come from? How do you make sure that you have good data going into AI? What are some of the governance elements that need to be put in place? What does AI policy look like? As you implement AI, a I'll call private version of AI. When I say private version of AI, you're not creating your own entirely new thing from scratch. You're taking, let's say, ChatGPT or whatever, and you're using a fee-based version of it so that you can have much more control over the knowledge base that you have and much more control over how it works. Do you have a policy put in place? So I think it starts from educating everybody from the board, the CEO, to a worker. I think it also involves though policy-based kinds of approaches. We don't need an ad hoc implementation of AI in the same way that we did ad hoc implementations of technology. When I say ad hoc, if you do things not in a policy-based way, you end up with cybersecurity issues. You end up with technical debt. You end up with issues that are hard to tamp down and figure out and rationalize. It will only be that much more complex if you do an improper implementation of AI. So it has to start from a policy-based perspective. And so we're doing a lot of work in that and an education perspective. To me, it's about policy and education. And once you do that, then you can end up using AI rather than AI using you.

SPEAKER_04:

And the class is going to be officially released in July?

SPEAKER_02:

The idea with AI Essentials, the release date, we're basically looking at kind of a late Q2, early Q3 2020.

SPEAKER_04:

You heard it here. You heard it first.

SPEAKER_02:

That's what we're shooting

SPEAKER_04:

for. You heard it here first. Dr. James Stanger and CompTIA Essentials. releasing soon.

SPEAKER_05:

And we are happy to be your first-hand look at AI and what it's all about. So you're welcome to the listeners for introducing it to you today.

SPEAKER_04:

I know, because they didn't even know anything

SPEAKER_05:

about it. Yeah, no, exactly. They haven't heard of it yet. We're just kidding. We're just kidding. It's just because we're literally being smothered by AI. That's the joke. Yes. Brie and I have this humor. Yes, we do. Speaking of humor and having a good time and fun, are you ready for the TTA 10?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I am definitely ready for the TTA 10.

SPEAKER_05:

Well, then here we go. Here we go.

SPEAKER_00:

TTA 10, 10 final questions for

SPEAKER_05:

our guest. All right, James, I'm ready if you are, my friend. You've done this once before. We are going to ask you 10 questions. Answer them as quickly as you can, and we will celebrate your efforts at the end, okay? So are you ready? You start. Is that one of the 10?

SPEAKER_02:

No.

SPEAKER_05:

All right. David, 90 seconds, please.

SPEAKER_00:

90 seconds on the TTA 10 clock beginning now. All

SPEAKER_05:

right, James, what is your favorite season of the year?

SPEAKER_06:

Spring.

SPEAKER_05:

You've been gifted the car of your dreams. What is it?

SPEAKER_02:

Toyota Land Cruiser FJ45. Oh,

SPEAKER_05:

we had an answer and everything. It's movie night. It's movie night and it's your turn to pick. What genre are you in the mood for? Oh

SPEAKER_02:

man, believe it or not, Western.

SPEAKER_05:

What snacks are you bringing?

SPEAKER_02:

What snacks am I bringing? Believe it or not, I'm bringing a cinnamon roll.

SPEAKER_05:

You're leaving on a jet plane. Don't know when you'll be back again because you're going to...

SPEAKER_06:

Scotland.

SPEAKER_05:

What's 10 plus 10?

SPEAKER_02:

What's 10 plus 10? 20. Yes.

SPEAKER_05:

Who would you cast to play you in a movie about your life?

SPEAKER_02:

Back when I was good looking, John Cusack. Believe it or not, there were people who used to think I looked like him. I don't now.

SPEAKER_05:

I see it. I totally see it. If you weren't in the learning industry, what career path would you have chosen? Oh

SPEAKER_02:

man, what a choice. What a choice. I would have chosen

SPEAKER_05:

welding. Oh, okay. You can only choose one for the rest of your life. Pizza or tacos? Pizza. Okay. Last question's at the top one uh spell ai for us james all right david there's 10 questions there um please give us the results

SPEAKER_00:

with the time of one minute 10 seconds james is a winner once again a two-time champion and a two-time champion deserves a Special salute. We have just that lined up for you now. Let's just say it may be particularly appropriate for an expert on AI. Let's take a listen and a look.

SPEAKER_03:

Guess who's back? Back to the podcast again. Say hi to James Stanger. Our wicked smart friend. Thank you. Let's say it together James freaking

SPEAKER_04:

theme song

SPEAKER_05:

for our podcast guest. You literally have a karaoke video of a song about you now, James. That's what that was. You know what I mean? That is the real deal. It exists in AI now. We fed that to it. You have celebrity status. It only takes one other person to be like, who's a legend in AI? You're everywhere.

SPEAKER_04:

When you're doing your world tour of keynote speaking you can play this now oh my god

SPEAKER_05:

yes it'll be the yep you have to have a wrestling ring and like a walkout because it's like it's gonna be your theme song right like it just starts playing and then you walk down and you just do your waves and yeah just get amped up before you get in the ring

SPEAKER_04:

well thank you so much This was a true pleasure. Always loving to have you on. And we look forward to the next time we have you on. And we could only imagine how things are going to be even more advanced.

SPEAKER_05:

For more information on AI training and taking the CompTIA AI Essentials course, visit us at thetrainingassociates.com. See you later.