Welcome And Why Damien Matters

SPEAKER_04 0:23

Go ahead and we'll just get started. You ready? Yeah, yeah. And we could even do that part if you want, uh as part of the discussion.

Richard Bliss 0:28

Sure. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Richard Bliss. You're listening to Digital First Leadership. Uh, now I have a wide variety of guests I've had on the show, uh, but I have to admit, and they're all special. And I say that about every guest. And yet, and yet, uh, Damien Real and I have known each other now a couple of years. We've met in person off and on, and I am invited to the show because he's one of the most fascinating people I have ever met and enjoyed a dinner with, a conversation with, whatever it is. And so, Damien, thank you very much for joining me.

SPEAKER_04 1:02

I'm so thrilled to talk with you. And I would say that every conversation we've had, I've come away smarter than uh I came into it. So I'm really thrilled to be able to be smarter after these uh these few minutes.

Richard Bliss 1:11

Oh my gosh. If that's the case, then then I'm gonna have to up my game the next time I see you because uh it's it it here's why. Here's why. You have now when we first met, you were with one organization, but recently, uh since we uh last time we talked, you have you're part of an organization. So let's help the audience understand uh who you are. Clio, right? You're part of Clio. Let's tell the audience a little bit about Cleo and your specialty. Sure.

Clio And Vincent Explained

SPEAKER_04 1:35

So uh Clio is uh is a legal technology company that's being used by solo small lawyers all the way up to the biggest law firms in the world. Um, and we help uh lawyers do their work better. Uh and so really um the our flagship product is called Vincent. Uh Vincent, uh, if you ask a lawyer a legal question, it might take about 12 hours for them for that lawyer to give you an answer. Vincent does that 12 hours of work in about a minute and a half. Uh so we have yesterday's case, yesterday's statute, and yesterday's regulation. So Vincent will not hallucinate like ChatGPT will hallucinate, or like Google Gemini will hallucinate. So we have grounded in truth, that is grounded in law data, uh, that is going to be uh doing not just legal research, uh, but if you upload a contract, we'll give you 200 pages worth of analysis of that contract, no prompting necessary. Uh, if you have a complaint that's been filed against you, we give you 200 pages of analysis, much like a lawyer would do, no prompting necessary. And that would reflect maybe 300 billable hours. So, how much would 300 billable hours at$800 or$1,000 an hour, how much would that cost under the old world? And how much does this cost the in-house counsel under the new world? So people like go ahead.

Richard Bliss 2:39

Well, you're making an interesting point because, and I'm seeing this more and more, and it uh, and that is no prompt necessary. And I am discovering more and more as as I do my own demos with my own clients as I show them AI, because now I I I look at prompt engineering the way I looked at basic, uh, basic in college when I was studying programming. Oh, here's basic, and then it was Fortran, and then it was COBOL, whatever it was. And it's like, I don't want to do that. Instead, I want to figure out how to take these tools and then make them applicable. So there's no prompting, that really is a trend that's coming with the development and the specialization of AI so that you it already knows who it is and who you are. Is that right?

SPEAKER_04 3:24

It's not it's not just coming, it's here. Um, so literally, as we speak, um, I just got off the phone with two uh startup founders uh that said, Hey, I want to build this thing for law schools to be able to help them be more humane, uh, that is bring the humanity to uh the lawyers, because really the humanity might be all that's left. As my machine cranks out motions, briefs, pleadings, and contracts. Um, all that's left for lawyers really is to essentially be sales, uh, to be able to say that um, you know, rainmakers uh and law law firms, another name for rainmakers is a good read salesperson. And so as my machines are cranking out the motions, briefs, pleadings, and contracts, really all that's left is sales.

Richard Bliss 3:59

Uh is that a skill set that most attorneys are prepared to turn on is to become their lead salespeople?

SPEAKER_04 4:07

Well, I'd say that if you want to make partner, if you can make partner for the last 30 years, then the answer is yes. Because if you want to make partner, you bring in rain and you're a good salesperson. Um, but what I think most law firms and law uh lawyers don't understand is that that's all that's left. That is the uh the type of work that you're doing is not going to be figuring out what the best strategy for uh lawyers are because literally right now I'm building a agents, and people your listeners may have heard about agent swarms where you have a whole bunch of agents doing work. So I'm building an agent swarm where I have an associate lawyer uh agent who looks at your emails, your documents, uh, and your everything that you give to me, uh, and then says, what are the potential causes of action? Breach of contract, patent infringement, and say, okay, now what are the uh state's laws that govern it? Does it govern by New York law or California law? And then it analyzes that law to see what you need to prove to prove breach of contract under both those. And then we take your facts and be able to put those into elements one, two, and three. And all of a sudden, if you're missing elements one, two, and three, um, I create questions for the uh for the client saying, Hey, can you fill in bucket two for me? Because it's missing. And then after that associate agent does its work, I'm throwing it up to the partner agent, which criticizes the associate agent and says, Hey, you missed this and you missed that. And the associate agent says, Oh, you're right. Let me go back and do some more work. So they jam a little bit. And then we throw it over to the opposing counsel agent. And the opposing counsel agent will throw rocks at our stuff saying, No, no, no, my client's gonna win. And let me tell you all the ways my client's gonna win.

Richard Bliss 5:32

And that agent right there, the opposing client agent, translates easily into sales for any organization. Because here's here's what I'm experiencing, Damien. And why I wanted to talk to you is because I talk to a I train salespeople, I train salespeople how to use LinkedIn, I train salespeople how to have a digital front put footprint. And here's what's happened with every single client. Are you using I asked them, what are you doing for AI? And they're like, oh yeah, our products for AI. I'm like, no, what are you doing for AI? Oh, well, we have these AI tools internally for our salespeople. I'm like, no. What are you doing so that your salespeople become comfortable with the idea of using AI in general, not as a and the article I'm putting out says AI is not software, right? AI is not software. And so what I'm seeing is that as you're talking here, is that that's trans this transfer of action is so hard right now for organizations to understand that they need to train their people on how to be comfortable with this new digital associate, digital partner, digital, where they continue to think that they're looking for a menu, a drop-down and save button. And okay, how do I how do I install this? You see where I'm coming from?

No Prompts And The New Lawyer Job

SPEAKER_04 6:46

I do. Yeah, and too. Um so um I I'll I'll finish uh my lawyer thing, and then I'm gonna go to exactly what you're talking about in a second. So my associate bots and partner bots jam, send it to opposing counsel's bots who jam, then I throw it up to the judge bots, who then throw rocks at it and be able to say, I'm gonna rule for uh the other side this time, then I throw it to judge number two and rules for my side this time. And I can run it through a whole bunch of scenarios and say 66% of the time, this argument wins, and give that to my associate bot who then can iterate a bit more. All this is done before a human even sees it. And then once uh this whole process we go through a bunch, then we give the end product to the human who sees it for the first time, and then they can say, I love it because it's bulletproof, but let's change this little thing and then throw it back to the agent, then do it more. So this is not the future, this is the present. So that's the on the lawyer side. On the on the uh sales side, what you're talking about, is the startup that I'm working with, literally just got off the phone with 10 minutes ago. Uh they said, Um, this is kind of what I'm thinking for software. And we literally transcribed the discussion that we were having. I threw that into what's called a product requirement document, which is what I as a product person would give to my developers to say, here's all the things I want the product to do, and here's maybe the technical ways to do it. I gave that to Cloud Code. And now, as we speak, Cloud Code is going through a nine-phase process that might have taken a team of uh 50 developers a year and a half to do. And it's literally happening right now while you and I are talking here. And it's giving me a prompt to ask me a question saying, Do you want to use this GitHub repo or that GitHub repo? I'm gonna say, hold on because I'm talking to Richard, uh, and Richard's more important right now. But I could just say, yes, do this than that, and the other thing. And I'm gonna get about a year and a half works worth of work, development work, um, by the best coder in the world. Uh, this is uh so the um the it's one, uh the coding Olympiad, um, where uh there's only one coder in the world that's better than cloud code right now. Uh and so this is now um it's uh so you think about the old world with your salespeople. Gosh, if I want to spin up a sales app, um, I have to hire this idiot for cheap, or I have to hire this brilliant person for expensive. But even the brilliant person is maybe uh number 150,000 in the the world. This is number one in the world, number two in the world. Uh so now this number two in the world, Pearson, I can I'm spending$200 a month on cloud code to be able to spin up this application for the startup who couldn't afford the number two coder in the world to be able to build the startup thing. So, what can a salesperson do to be able to say, I want a sales app that does X? They literally say that, and then the the AI will ask them, tell me, do you want this thing or that thing?

Agent Swarms For Litigation Scenarios

Richard Bliss 9:14

And then you have here's where I wanted to go is that most salespeople aren't gonna do that. They're just like I gotta go sell. I'm not gonna be writing apps, I'm not even gonna have my AI write apps. What they are gonna do, though, is what you just identified, and that they're not thinking about is wait a minute, I'm gonna go in and talk to a prospect. What possible what possible uh pushback am I gonna get? What is my pet competitor probably saying? They're probably running this product. How do I position myself to be able to talk to them? The scenario building that you just talked about, where the agents are talking back and forth to each other, this is where salespeople are missing that opportunity to say, look, you can sit down and have the AI be your competitor and say, all right, make your pitch to me, and then have it actually develop it back as a counter to that pitch. And I and I think this mentality of talking, or what do we, Damien? What's the word we use about how to use our AI tools to do what you're just talking about? The thinking with us, not thinking for us, but thinking with us.

SPEAKER_04 10:15

It's collaboration, just like we've been doing with humans for the last millennia. Uh, and that collaboration is, you know, people say, well, don't anthropomorphize the AIs because they're just machines that are figuring out the statistically likely the next word. But to say that, that they're only predicting the statistically likely next word, is underselling what you and I are doing. Because literally right now, I'm predicting the statistically likely next word. And I, as I speak this sentence, have no idea what the last word of that sentence will be. I'm just going through and going word by word until I figure out what the last word of my sentence is. So, really, you and I are uh statistically likely thinking machines in the same way that the machine is.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Which is why I think we enjoy talking to each other because we have no idea where that conversation is going to go.

SPEAKER_04 10:57

That's right. So, so all that's to say is that we, uh that is Richard and I are collaborating right now, uh, and we are collaborating in the same way that I'm collaborating with Claude. And so, if we think about it this way, two ways to get to the end goal that you've just described, that I, as a salesperson, want to be able to then collaborate with uh with the AI and be able to get uh my competitors uh you know throwing rocks at my product and me to have counter responses to my competitors so I can give my client the best pitch. That's really the end goal to give my client the best pitch uh by stress testing it with my competitors' arguments. Um, I could do that. Uh option number one to get to that goal is to be able to use ChatGPT to do that and have a few rounds of doing this work. Option number two is to use something like Cloud Code to be able to say, hey, stress test these ideas. I'm a salesperson that wants to be able to uh have my competitors. Here's my product, here are all my competitors. Oh, and by the way, Cloud Code, find all my other competitors I don't know about. And then Cloud Code will have agents spin out and look up for web searches and give you competitors you don't even realize are there. And then say, okay, now based on all those 30 or 50 competitors I have, create a bunch of questions that I uh I should answer to be able to say what my how my product is different than their products. And then after you do that, be able to have the best pitch that I could ever do for this particular client. Um, ask me which client I'm gonna be working with, and all I have to do then is uh, and then Cloud Code will go out and research that client and be able to find out who this decision maker is, what is the org chart and everything it knows from the web. And so then this application will then I all I have to do is say client is a client X. I put the name of the client into the application, and then it does all that work for me. It goes out and finds all the competitors, it figures out if client X is working with those competitors, it finds out the best pitch for client X, and it gives me on a silver platter.

SPEAKER_03 12:42

So option one is to use chat Chat GPT, and I prompt.

SPEAKER_04 13:26

I am back. Uh so uh it turns out that uh my my fiber optics uh they killed. So I so I'll you can tell me where I cut out and then uh you can uh we'll come back.

Richard Bliss 13:35

You cut out with the finger up saying well, I don't remember where you cut out.

SPEAKER_04 13:40

So yeah, so let's so I I'm gonna you can splice this however you want. I will. So people people often think I need to jam with ChatGPT and I need to be able to go back and forth with ChatGPT, but they don't realize that um that back and forth can be automated using things like Cloud Code. And I all I have to do is I say, I want my client X, and then Cloud Code will build an app to go out, search the competitors, give you a nice response to those uh competitors on Client X. And um, all I have to do, the only input I have is Client X's name.

Claude Code And Automated App Building

Richard Bliss 14:11

So in my case, here's what I'm doing, and and I'm doing a much simpler uh basic. So I'm using Claude, the$100 max um, and I'm creating projects that basically act as my I have a chief of staff project. And so it's the one who keeps track of all my emails, it keeps track of all my calendar, it keeps track of uh everything that I need to do, keeps track of, okay, here's your priorities. I check in with it every morning. I have my copywriter project in Claude that says, okay, it knows my framework, my ethics, the way I write. It has copies of my books, everything. So that when I need to actually create content, I go to it. Using these, then I come into my CLAD uh chief of staff, it goes out, grabs all my emails, grabs my calendar. Okay, Richard, here's what's on your list today, here's where we're at, here's where we are financially. I've just looked at your billing, and all of that is allowing I lost Damon again. We might have to start over.

SPEAKER_03 15:16

You still there?

SPEAKER_04 15:21

Uh hopefully you're still recording. Um so yeah, so I'm I'm now running off my phone's hotspot, which uh even that cut out. So um I so yeah, so I you you were talking about maybe you could start over to make sure that with the recording has your your Claude Code process.

Richard Bliss 15:34

Well, I'm not using Claude code, Damien. What I'm using is just Claude um uh uh co-work and max. I just have max, and so what I've done is on a simpler scale, and I've been sharing this with my clients who are just it's the comfort level I'm trying to get them past. So I go in with Claude Project, I have a project, it's my chief of staff. My chief of staff every morning has a startup script that goes and reads my emails, my calendar, identifies my what's left over from yesterday, and so we work then on my proposals, projects. I have another project that is my copywriter. And the copywriter has my ethics and my writing, my framework, and everything that when it comes to Richard Bliss. I wrote a personal bio just for Claude so it knows things about me that it can never find on the internet. It's never been written down. Now, when I have something to do, I'm like, okay, I need to write an article or I need to work on something. My copywriter handles it. But my chief of staff is the one who's keeping track of everything I'm supposed to be working on. Now, the thing here that you've been talking about, I'm just using it at a pretty basic level, doing a lot of this manually. What you're saying with cloud code and everything, I could start to actually implement this and just say, here, here, this is what I'm trying to do. Set this up for me.

unknown 16:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:47

Uh set this up for me and connect it to all the systems I use. So I use Gmail. I also use Google Docs. I use it, I also use these Microsoft things. So I also, so really um, this uh through MCP, which is something your users might think about, think of that like a way that uh that your AI can talk to Google Docs and talk with Microsoft Word and talk with Microsoft Outlook. Uh and so I I think that uh not only can it be able to uh you know tell me all the things I need to do today, but um actually do the work for me. Uh if you have if you have uh an email, uh a whole bunch of emails that are just you know, can you meet at this time or that time? Figure out the time that works, draft the response, and then you could be able to say, Hey, either I want to be a human in the loop to be able to hit send on the draft that you've done, or just do it for me if if you you're confident enough, right? So I I think this is where we're going that uh there's a real question as these are all things that your chief of staff, your human chiefs of staff, you would have paid a lot of money for, but you're paying 200 bucks a month, which is a lot less than any human would cost.

AI As A Sales Sparring Partner

Richard Bliss 17:42

It is, and but my EA, uh Marcy, she's been my EA since 1998, 99. And so I asked her the other day, she's like, I said, uh, you know, are you worried that it's gonna take away your job? She's like, Oh no, not even Claude can deal with you, uh right. And and listen, let me let me share something because we've been talking about Claude and Gemini and chat, and everybody asked me why Claude. And this is one of the things that prompted me to talk to you today, was Claude, because the other day, uh I'll just share the story with you. And the other day I had a proposal to a fairly big proposal to send out to a client. And I thought, you know, I wrote it myself based on the call I had with the client. And I thought, I'll show it to Claude. I throw it into Claude, and Claude comes back with one line, all bold, all caps. Do not send this to your prospect. And I'm like, what? And so we have a discussion, it's like, Richard, you really did not do a good job with this pro uh proposal. Here's why. So Damien, I said, Oh yeah? Here's a transcript from the call. And Claude comes back and says, Oh, this is worse than I thought. And at this point, I'm like, wait a minute. And I start arguing with Claude. And Claude finally comes back and says, Richard, I'm getting worried that you're desperate because you're defending bad decisions. And so uh I put up with this a little bit and I get up in the other room and I go in the other room, I tell my wife, I'm like, Claude's being mean to me. And she's like, Okay, whatever. Well, I sat down with a friend because Claude has, as you know, different has instructions, it has memory, it has files. Uh, and as we were talking, and as I was telling him about this, he noticed that my Claude had no instructions. I had started it up, I had created another iteration and with no instructions. He said, Richard, it's it's got open guard, there's no guardrails here. All it had were the files that I had fed it, which was my book, my writings, my bio. He said, It's just being you. And when I told my wife that, she said, Oh, now you know how I feel when you talk to me. That's so funny. The point here is, and it comes back to all of a sudden I'm interacting with an entity that knows me, is interacting with me, is informing me, and yet I'm also getting pushback. You mentioned Chat GPT, and the one thing that I hear with ChatGPT or even Gemini is the sucking up, the telling me. Yeah, everything you want to hear. And yet, is Claude that different?

SPEAKER_04 20:11

So uh Claude is made by a company called Anthropic. Of course, uh anthropomorphism comes from the humanity, right? So, so the um anthropic was created by a bunch of open AI refugees that they left open AI, which makes Chat GPT, and made uh anthropic to be able to say we want a more humane AI uh than open AI and ChatGPT can create. And the idea with that is that um it started by Dario Amade and his sister uh and uh and uh some other founders, and they said, we want the AI to have a constitution uh that is not just uh you know like a US constitution, which it is, but also like a human constitution. Richard has a constitution, uh, you know, dispos constitutional disposition, Damien has a constitutional disposition. So they want Claude to have a constitutional disposition, both in the governmental sense and the personal sense, to be able to say that they will only do things that will benefit humanity, uh, and they will be able to be more humane in the way that they do things. So anyway, so that that is uh as you think about product differentiation between Claude and uh OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, um, each of them have different constitutions, different guardrails to be able to say, okay, what will they do and what will they refuse to do? And to what extent will be they be sycophantic? Uh sycophantic is the sucking up that you talked about earlier. Um, you don't want the AI to be too sycophantic. Uh, and everyone's probably had this experience that they worked with the OpenAI or uh even Claude sometimes, or even ChatGB uh Gemini, uh, they say, that was a brilliant idea. Oh my god. Right, right. Right, which which feels good. Uh, but often we as humans don't want that sucking up. We don't want that sycophantism. We want the good friend to say, Hey Damien, you're kind of kind of going off the rails here. Let's do it.

Richard Bliss 21:46

You're defending bad decisions, Richard. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_04 21:50

So Anthropic is maybe of the of the models, maybe the best at being able to not be sycophantic and to be able to say, even if the user doesn't want this, maybe this is what the user needs. And this is something that um when you're building models, um, that is when they're training you know, GPT-5, and when uh anthropic is building uh you know uh Claude 4.6, um, they use something called human reinforcement, uh reinforcement by human feedback. And that human reinforcement is as they're training it, um, they have an output, they have two outputs, and the end user says, No, this output sucks, but that output is good. And so what What the during the training, what they do is they actually are training it to be as most helpful to the user as possible. And that, if not done well, will lead to sycophancy. People say they're sucking up. So um so open AI trains their models in a way that to be less sycophantic maybe than others do. And that's maybe the reason that does differently than uh others. You said open eye, you meant anthropic. Anthropic does things differently than open AI, which does some different things than uh Google's Gemini.

Claude Pushback Sycophancy And Guardrails

Richard Bliss 22:49

So so I don't know if you're able to discuss this or talk about as we wrap up. And that is lately in the news, Anthropics is under pressure to remove those guardrails, right? To allow the US military to use anthropic without it having those ethical guidelines. I don't know what we call it. Are you do you have an opinion about that? Is that something that you can kind of talk about?

SPEAKER_04 23:15

Yeah, I I I only know I don't have any inside baseball on that. I know what's been talked about in the news. And the two sticking points I think that um that uh that anthropic is pushing back on, and the guardrails that they say that this is uh this is not negotiable, is number one, we do not want and uh Claude to be used for uh mass surveillance of American people. Uh and that you know arguably is unlawful to do mass surveillance of the U.S. citizens. Um, so that's point number one is that they don't want those guardrails to be removed. Uh they want uh Claude to refuse to do mass surveillance of the domestic. And then number two, they don't want it to create autonomous weapon systems. They don't want Claude to be used to be able to say, uh, to make kill decisions uh on its own. Uh those are the two sticking points that apparently uh the Department of Defense, which it still technically is, even though the administration wants it to call it the Department of War, uh, the Department of Defense has said, no, we want you to remove the guardrails on mass domestic surveillance. We want you to remove the guardrails on autonomous killing machines. And that's what they're pushing back on. And um the fact that they're pushing uh the Department of Defense is pushing on Anthropic, saying, do this thing, otherwise we're gonna call you um a you know domestic terrorist and then uh not work with any defense contractors that use you. Um, the fact that they're doing that with anthropic, but not doing that with Chat TBT or with Gemini or with Grok maybe implies that they are those three companies I just talked about, maybe are fine with removing those guardrails for domestic surveillance and for autonomous weapon systems, uh, which I think should strike some fear into all of us.

Richard Bliss 24:48

Well, I think striking fear into all of us about AI isn't uh something that we need to worry about because it's already here. Everybody seems to be. But the reason I like talking to you is because the practical application and the ability I watched you, and I'm gonna have we're gonna have to wrap up, but I watched you stand on stage and speak to a group of lawyers. Now it's been a couple of years ago, so it was still new, is such a relative fast-moving term in AI. But I watched those lawyers turn white when you stood on stage at the running legal like a business with Connie Brenton's organization, uh, when you and I were were there. And that was two years ago, three years ago, two or three years ago.

SPEAKER_04 25:26

Yeah, I think 20, either 23 or 24. It's hard to tell.

Richard Bliss 25:31

And that was basic stuff. You were just showing like, look, here I ran some prompts, here's what I did, right? That was just basic stuff. And now we've moved so far beyond it. So, what's gonna be this will be the last question I ask you. What's gonna be the challenge for an organization to become comfortable using AI within their organization, either on the legal side, on the sales side? There's a human element that is resisting this that I'm discovering. And it and I just come down to the word comfort. What is preventing people from being comfortable with AI?

SPEAKER_04 26:06

Uh, there's a saying that the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. So when I stood on stage at running legal like a business, I think I was showing them the future that was there, but was not distributed to the people that were turning white in the audience. So I think that's um the um, and that's point number one. Point number two is that there is uh, you know, technology moves exponentially fast while organizations move exponentially slow. There are all sorts of reasons to be able to say, no, I use this system which isn't AI compatible, or my boss would never let me do these things, right? So stuff that is technically possible for Richard Bliss as a small organization is maybe not uh possible for a Fortune 20 company uh because it's just there are so many uh antiquated systems and uh muck that has to be done through so many layers of uh you know security and other things that just make today's technology just not uh uh able to be uh pushed through in a way that it should be. So anyway, so um I think that um it will take society a while to be able to catch up uh because humans have inertia and they don't want to be able to do the next thing because gosh, I've been doing well the last 20 years, the way I've been doing these things. I don't want to have to learn a new thing. Um so anyway, so what is uh technology, technologically possible and what humans will adapt uh are running in two different timelines.

Richard Bliss 27:18

Damien, you used the word catch up. Is that even feasible in today's world, what we're seeing? Are they even going to catch up?

Military Pressure And AI Safety Lines

SPEAKER_04 27:25

Well, so just this morning you may have heard that um the guy who uh created Twitter back in the day, Jack Dorsey, runs a company called Block, which uh runs a whole bunch of uh bunch of companies, um, 6,000 employees in Block. Um he just uh announced the biggest layoff of uh of a publicly traded company in history uh because he said that um this is the future, not just the future, but the present. I'm laying people off today because AIs are doing the work of thousands of people. If I I think I remember correctly, I think he laid off between two and four thousand of his six thousand employees. Um and so this is uh so this is um not just the future, it's here. Um and uh there's Hemingway uh had a quote in Sun All Soul Rises that bankruptcy happens slowly and then quickly. And so I think AI is happening slowly, and then as everyone in Jack Dorsey's company learned quickly, uh, that now they don't have jobs. Um and so I think we all have to think about uh, do we um I I kind of think of this AI as a tsunami that we can all run in front of for a while, but maybe eventually it just crashes over all of us. And the question is how fast can we run in front of it?

Richard Bliss 28:32

So here's this, I promise this is the last question. With every disruption like this, there's opportunity. So, yes, 4,000 people lost their jobs of 6,000, but 2,000 didn't. So, what advice are you gonna give to the listeners that look, it's moving fast, you can try to outrun it, or do you grab a surfboard and try to ride that tsunami? And so, where would the where would the opportunity present to somebody who's listening saying, All right, I'm not gonna just stand here and let this thing wash over me? What do I do right now as an individual? What's your advice to them?

SPEAKER_04 29:07

Grab on with both hands and ride that surfboard, uh, and and really use a cloud cowork uh as a as a way to be able to be baby step into the systems and and see the power of agentics forms. And and it's it's that's kind of a dystopian term. I'd you know, I wish they could be.

Richard Bliss 29:23

When you say that, I think of Starlings, right? In the fact that everyone is adapting, adjusting to the next one. Now it's not quite the same analogy because you're actually talking about handing off and the work, but it's the adapting and moving almost in real time as they as they adjust to each other. And that's what I think about when you say an agentic swarm. I'm thinking about this constant movement of everything interacting with each other.

Comfort Gap Opportunity And Final Advice

SPEAKER_04 29:44

That's right. So number one is use these agentic swarms like starlings and they're all coordinating and working together for your benefit. That's point number one. Point number two is lean into your humanity. That is the fact that Richard Bliss and Damien Real right now are talking and having a human conversation in a way that is enlightening and terrifying and exciting to every one of the listeners. Um, that part of the humanity that Richard and Damien bring, um, there's value to that. As the AI is doing more of the work, people will buy things from people they like. And if if you create using your agent swarm a product that will be uh delightful and not have to me, me being have to be a product, uh a prompt engineer, but I just have your product that you're selling to me and I like you, and we talk about my kids, that humanity comes to the fore. So I'd say use the tools and work on your humanity.

Richard Bliss 30:32

This has been awesome. Obviously, too short, and uh you're so busy, I'm so busy. Uh I'm headed to leave the country here uh day after tomorrow for three weeks. So I was glad we were able to get this, uh, get this in when we could. Thank Damien, thank you very much for being on the show.

SPEAKER_04 30:46

I I'm so glad and I I am smarter as a result of this conversation. I'm I can now use you as a story to be able to say, hey, this this entrepreneur is doing amazing things with AI. So thank you for the opportunity.

Richard Bliss 30:56

You've been listening to uh the Digital First Leadership Podcast. My guest has been Damien Real, who is the uh Damien, how do you uh how do you just explain yourself over at Clio?

SPEAKER_04 31:06

Uh so I'm a lawyer since 2002 that builds products and also talks about the stuff I built.

Richard Bliss 31:11

Excellent. So if you found this interesting, which I you're you haven't been listening, if you didn't find this interesting, uh you can find Damien online, uh LinkedIn. And uh Clio is who's he's involved with. Thanks for listening. I'm always fascinating and I always learn something new. Hopefully, you have as well. Take care.