In this episode, I speak with Susan Roth, Senior Director of Marketing at Netrality Data Centers, about her remarkable journey from marketing leader to AI agent builder. Susan shared how she went from being uncertain about AI’s role in marketing to becoming a pioneer in building sophisticated AI workflows and agents, while managing a small marketing team and investing significant personal time and resources into her education.
What makes Susan’s story particularly compelling for healthcare technology marketers is her practical approach to implementation. She’s not just theorizing, she’s actively using it to transform how a small marketing team operates. From editing video in minutes instead of hours to creating automated research workflows that cost just $1.50 per execution, Susan demonstrates how AI agents can enable small teams to compete at scale. She also offers a pragmatic yet optimistic view of AI’s impact on the workforce, emphasizing that organizations will need people to manage and maintain these systems, and that the key is learning to work alongside AI rather than being replaced by it.
For marketing leaders feeling overwhelmed by AI’s rapid evolution, Susan’s advice is straightforward: start small with low-risk use cases, embrace discomfort as part of the learning process, and remember that AI literacy is an ongoing journey rather than a destination. Her most important message is to “do it scared”—because waiting on the sidelines is no longer an option for marketers who want to remain competitive.
Key Topics Covered
- [00:00:00] – Introduction
- [00:02:00] – Discovering AI as a Human Evolution Story
- [00:06:00] – Learning Resources: Marketing Profs B2B Forum
- [00:09:00] – Shifting Behavior: From Search Engine to Strategic Partner
- [00:10:00] – Introduction to Agentic Workflows
- [00:12:00] – The AI Build Lab: Four-Week Foundations Course
- [00:16:00] – The Builder Mindset for Marketers
- [00:18:00] – Key Tools: Notion, Typing Mind, and Cassidy
- [00:20:00] – Daily AI Applications in Marketing Work
- [00:21:00] – Use Cases: Research, Content Creation, and Video Production
- [00:25:00] – Building 50 Agents: From Research to Email
- [00:28:00] – The Cipher Agent: Automated Sales Research Workflow
- [00:31:00] – AI Adoption: Strategic Use vs. Individual Tools
- [00:33:00] – The Future of Marketing Teams: Humans and Agents Working Together
- [00:35:00] – The “Do More with Less” Question and Workforce Implications
- [00:37:00] – The Importance of Hiring and Training Young People
- [00:39:00] – Advice for Getting Started: Pick One Small Use Case
- [00:40:00] – Learning to Prompt and Using AI to Teach AI
- [00:41:00] – The Ongoing Journey: Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
If you are interested in discussing this or any other topic, let’s have a chat. Reach out to me directly to schedule a no-obligation discussion. This isn’t a sales call, but rather an opportunity to talk through your questions and challenges.
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Full Episode Transcript
Adam Turinas: [00:00:00] Hello, Susan. Welcome to the show. I’m so delighted you’re here. Let’s start things off by hearing a little bit about your journey.
Susan Roth: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. My journey I’ve done a lot of things in my career. I started my first career as a travel agent, believe it or not.
I was a travel agent for about 10 years, and I’ve done a million things in between. I’ve been a tech writer, I’ve been an events guru. I’ve been a marketing leader, for the majority of my career now. So I’ve been a marketing leader for about 20 years.
Adam Turinas: Well, you must have started in your teens.
Susan Roth: They’re no kind. Well,
Adam Turinas: We mess each other when you were working at CTG. So you know, one of the things I that’s interesting about you from an industry perspective is you worked in a lot of different industries, but heavily focused on demand and B2B. and what.
P, my interest is we’d sort of lost touch over the last year or so, but I sort saw you pop [00:01:00] up on LinkedIn and showing the stuff that you were doing with ai and I thought, wow, when last time I talked to Susan, which wasn’t that long ago, AI wasn’t really that much of an issue. And in that relatively short period, you have come up that learning curve.
You’re doing some things with AI that aren’t, you know, that are that, that are impressive. So, let’s start with what was your AI moment?
Susan Roth: My AI moment. So, the journey has been kind of crazy. At CTGI started a literacy program and from there it was just kind of a deep dive When I got laid off a year ago in July of last year, I got laid off.
So, you know, I was doing a lot of exploring and, what I wanted to do with my life and where I was gonna go next. I think the AI moment for me, it was November of 23 before I left CTG had watched a Gartner. Webinar. It was seven disruptions that you may not see coming. And you know, we were a year out at that point from the chat [00:02:00] GPT moment that everybody remembers, you know, and I was expecting a year end.
Forecast and the typical thing that you would hear, but they were really talking about AI in a way that I had not experienced before. They were talking about everything from SpaceX to talent to the future of work, and that I really realized that AI just wasn’t a technology story. It was a human system story and a human evolution story.
And then the takeaway from that is that I had a choice. I could. Integrate AI into my workflow and really explore it and learn everything I could about it right now, or risk getting left on the sidelines and in the dust.
Adam Turinas: I think that’s amazing. I think that, so anybody listening to this should think about those words.
that’s very profound. And when you would. Showing When you, were sharing ai, what you were learning about AI with your colleagues? [00:03:00] How did they react? I mean, this is a year ago, so you know, chat, GPT was already, a thing and Claude was already a thing, but, so I’m curious, like how did they react and adapt?
Susan Roth: There was a lot of mixed reactions. There was, All over the board, there were your early adopters and there were mostly your laggards and people who were really scared on my team. You know, especially you had heard all kinds of things. You know, even then AI is coming for your job. There was a lot of fear and it’s such a new something that nobody knew what to do or how to start.
So yeah emotions were all over the place and so, yeah.
Adam Turinas: Yeah. And, you’ve, invested your own time and frankly spending your own money on becoming AI literate. tell us about that journey.
Susan Roth: So, I started the literacy program at CTG, simply because there was. Nobody doing it. And you know, I was feeling like we were getting, as a team, we were really [00:04:00] getting behind. And I, you know, by the summer of it was the summer of 23. I just was on the way to my, lake house with my husband.
I’m quiet, the wheels are turning, and he’s just like, what are you thinking about? And I said, I just have to figure out a way to get the team on board, how to get us to move faster. So over that, you know, long holiday weekend, I brainstormed a literacy program, came back, pitched it to my CMO. we kept it low cost, we kept it, optional.
We branded it to make it less intimidating and more fun. So kind of paint your way, was born. So productivity and AI to nurture talent. And so, that was really important for me from a leadership perspective and an AI literacy perspective, not only to teach myself, to kind of bring the team along with it, I think from my entire AI journey.
When I was at CTG, they had a subscription to, marketing Profs. And Marketing Profs has an annual event called B2B Forum, and that was the beginning of my deep dive. You know, there [00:05:00] were multiple leaders in the space of every marketing discipline, you know, Christopher Penn and Katie, Robert, data scientists and marketers and, deep in the space.
Andy Cina is an A SEO expert. And just learning from them how they were integrating AI into their day-to-day, into their workflows was really enlightening for me. In the beginning. Allie k Miller she’s a definitely leader in space. I took her course early on and I think she and Paul Rader at Marketing AI Institute were both Lee, both.
Hugely impactful on my AI learning journey, and they, taught me so much and they were just showing me what’s possible. So it was really kind of enlightening.
Adam Turinas: I’m familiar with many of the folks that you mentioned. I, think I subscribed to most of their newsletters. And, I’m a big fan of Paul Rai, so I listened to his podcast, religiously.
and actually thanks to you, I’m [00:06:00] going to Mako, uh, which is Make On is the annual marketing. AI conference and I think it’s the seventh. And I think when they started it, you know, maybe they had two or 300 people. Now it’s 2000, 3000, something like that. And, I’m really excited about that.
So. you know, you are, you are like me, you’re not a tech person. You’re not a tacky, right? I mean, I don’t think you’ve got a degree in computer science. I, you know, no, nor do I. No, you’re like me and you’re a marketing person from way back. but you know, a lot of what you’re doing is self-taught, and so I’m, really curious to know.
How you’ve come up that learning curve, particularly learning some, some technical things. I saw you doing some things with some sort of ag agentic type things. Tell us a little bit about that.
Susan Roth: I think in the beginning, the biggest learning curve, is, you know, aside from learning basic prompting, which tool to use when, The biggest learning curve [00:07:00] was just changing my behavior, shifting my behavior. I think in the beginning everyone uses AI like a search engine and a strategic thought partner. I think the agentic workflow path has just been. Crazy. I don’t even know when I started paying attention to that.
Yes, I do. I recall leaders in the space, you know, mark Benioff at Salesforce and Dharmesh Shaw at HubSpot with his agent ai. You know, you see these trends in the market and they’re talking about agents and they’re talking about agentic workflows, and I really thought. I need to understand this. I need to understand how they work.
I need to understand why you would use them. And then you know, you start looking at these and they’re not really affordable for a lot of companies. So from a workflow and understanding agent’s perspective, I was like, I need to figure this out to see if I could just build them for my own business.
Adam Turinas: yes, absolutely. And once you came to that decision. How do you get started because that’s quite overwhelming. [00:08:00] I, think just to sort of pause a second, from the research that we’ve done in our market and other research that I’ve seen, I think the majority of people have kind of gone up that sort of first part of the learning curve.
I’d like to your point, they’re using it. Many people are just using it like glorified search engines. Lots of people are using it for writing content because it’s doing that better and better. And some people are using it for things like image generation, maybe creating personalized emails, even creating personas.
That’s kind of where the use cases stop. And so you’ve gone several steps beyond that. so once you said, okay, I need to. Starts taking some steps with agents and, and, taking more agentic approach to that. How did you get started? Why did you get over that hump?
Susan Roth: Well, and you definitely don’t go it alone.
I could have no idea even where to begin. I’ve been in a lot of different. Communities, [00:09:00] AI communities, marketing communities, and, you know, you hear a lot of courses, there’s a lot of noise out there and you just sometimes don’t know where to start. But when you start hearing the same names bubble up, like you’re familiar with Paul, you know, the reputation kind of precedes them.
And so I had heard about, um, an AI build lab with Tyler Fisk and Sarah Davison and had attended a few, Of their free courses on Maven, just an hour intro and just, I was seeing what they were building and how they were doing it, and I was just blown away and I’m like, I have to take your course. So, it’s intense.
They have a four week foundations course. That’s a prerequisite to their 10 week AI build lab. And, the four weeks they set the stage, they give you all of the best practices, but then. The 10 week is like a graduate level class and it’s a deep dive.
Adam Turinas: Wow. And so, I mean, how much time is involved in the four week and then the 10 week?
Susan Roth: So the four weeks, so [00:10:00] they offer, it’s a 90 minute live. Every Monday and then Thursday and Friday are, all of it is optional, but, and you can listen to recordings if your schedule doesn’t allow. So they have an additional 90 minute homework session on Thursdays and they have another 90 minute session on Friday.
And aside from that, so those are the lives and then they have self-guided study. And it depends on the week. I was spending probably four foundations. Eight to 12 hours of, you know, my own time and just watching videos and re rewatching videos and doing homework and they give you assignments and that kind of thing.
So, for foundations eight to 12 hours, aside from the lives and, but a build lab is a different story. it’s quite intense and it’s an exceptionally Larger investment of time.
Adam Turinas: tell me about Build Lab, what’s involved there and how much time?
Susan Roth: They’ll probably not want me to say this up publicly, but, it’s the same [00:11:00] setup, from a live perspective.
There’s three lives a week and I do, morning before work and after work, and it’s usually about 20 to 24 hours. A week.
Adam Turinas: Wow. Wow. That’s, uh, yeah. That is intense.
Susan Roth: Mm-hmm.
Adam Turinas: I get hats off to you for doing that ’cause you’ve got a, you’ve got an intense day job. I know you’re really good at it. Me too. And so doing something before and after work.
Like that for, basically 14 weeks. Right. I mean that’s, yeah. That is intense. That’s extraordinary.
Susan Roth: Yeah.
Adam Turinas: so kudos to you. Thank for doing that. So, you’ve gone through the, 14 weeks of intense training. Then what?
Susan Roth: I’m doing it again. No, no way. What do you mean I’m doing it again?
Yeah. So the last week of cohort I was in cohort five, is your, capstone project and you submit that. And then [00:12:00] the next build lab started the Monday after and I started again the Monday after. the majority of their students go through the program.
Twice. It is such a cognitive overload. You’re learning not only the tools and all the things that you know, I didn’t hear you learning things about system instructions and evaluations and temperature and. And all of the things that I even, I didn’t even know existed. So you’re learning all of those concepts.
You’re learning best practices, you’re learning the how, but you’re also learning all of these other tools. You know, they use, Cassidy and Notion primarily and typing mind in their course. So you’re learning all of those new tools and just. And they’re so generous. They have so many bonus sessions.
Like, I couldn’t get through all of the bonus sessions because there was just so much content and there’s only so many hours in the day. So now that I’ve done it once. I can go and I [00:13:00] can just listen and participate and do the, activities and they give you an opportunity to branch off and do your own projects.
So it’s really cool because I’m, bringing my own consulting work and projects to the table, and they give me guidance and they walk through and, give me ideas. Well, maybe you, you should try it this way, or you should, you know, build this agent to support this work. And it’s been really amazing and super cool and fun.
Like I’m a builder, you know, marketers, we build things, we build brands, we build events, we build campaigns, we build and I think a lot of marketers have that methodical, systematic approach to getting a job done. and it just is a really natural progression and parlay into ENT workflows.
Adam Turinas: I want to get into.
Gen workflows and how what you build, how you’re using it in your, job. In a second. But before we get into it, you mentioned three tools there, capacity, notion, and what [00:14:00] was it? The, I can’t remember the third one, taking one. Tell us about those three tools.
Susan Roth: Okay, so Notion is, a database. So notion is what we use for. Creating knowledge bases and evaluation systems. once you put an agent through its paces, you have to log the performance so you know when you’re starting out. They start out as assistance and assistance over time, humans and AI together evaluate the performance of.
You give them a job. You know, just think of it as an intern. You’re teaching them your business, your voice, your processes, and you teach them and they learn by doing. And you give them these tasks. And then you have to evaluate, just like any manager would, you evaluate their performance and you give them feedback and they’re, you have to have a way of recording that feedback so they can also learn [00:15:00] from the past.
Record. So Notion is a database where you store all of that information, and you give them information to, you know, like a library of your, your, your website, your brand guides and all of those things. So learning. That in and of itself was interesting and, never knew it existed.
typing Mind is an amazing tool. it is a dev. Environment where you can have access to, almost every LLM that you can think of, and you test out and build all of your agents in this dev environment. And again, you start testing them and it’s a lot less expensive than going into Cassidy. Cassidy is, an exceptional.
Build tool. It’s similar to, I think you’re familiar with Make or, yes. N Aen, there’s a lot of building platforms. Cassidy is similar to that.
Adam Turinas: Got it. Excellent. Yeah. so Notion was something which I’ve used, I played around with, it’s sort of, it strikes me as [00:16:00] a sort of like, it’s a much more intuitive version of a wiki, in the sense that it’s sort of, you are able to create.
Uh, essentially pages that people can access and short share, you can share resources much more easily. but it’s really, it’s so easy to use and, I think it allows you to spin up pretty good pages pretty quickly. we use make.com in, in the stuff that we’re doing.
yeah. It’s very interesting. By the way, for anybody listening, I’m gonna get all the links to all of the. People that Susan’s mentioned and all of the resources, and there’s to be a long list of links down in the show notes. Okay, so you up the learning curve now.
Tell us about how you are applying this in your work.
Susan Roth: I use AI a hundred percent every single day in my daily workflow there’s so many use cases. It’s just now in ingrained in what I do. You know, I, do deep research pretty regularly. you’re researching the market, your competitors, data center trends.
I’m using it to you. You know, you [00:17:00] never have a blank page anymore. You have a 24 7 thought partner wi in ai. It’s just, it’s really fun. It’s really cool. You can ideate, you can create outlines to get you started. You can, help it to refine campaign messaging, copy headlines, ab tailoring, messages to personas.
I use it for video creation. we use Hagen as a tool and descrip. recently We had remotely recorded a customer testimonial, got the transcript from the third party who helped us with that, and previously we would’ve spent, two or $300 for them to give us, you know, social snippets or extras that we would want to use.
You know, we do all of that ourselves in house now, you know, you can take that transcript from the testimonial recording and turn it into. Multiple. I think the last one we just did, we had seven different assets per social. and then you [00:18:00] take the transcript and then you help build an outline for a written.
Case study that goes along with it. So the time to delivery now and the resources that you have to do your work is amazing. You know. Hey, Jen, we use for, we just had one of our third parties who helps manage our Google campaigns. We gave him video and he was doing some video ads for us, and he is like, you know, we should probably have some intros and outros, branded and you’re probably gonna need to hire some voiceover person to do that.
And I’m like, Nope, I could do that. So he is, Hey Jen, we have it done less than 30 minutes. it’s incredible
Adam Turinas: what’s the difference between hey, Jen and discreet.
Susan Roth: They’re very similar, I think, Hagen is, deep into avatars. They have, I hate to keep naming all these new tools, but there’s another, platform called 11 Labs that only worked with voice, but Hagen is, combining avatars, voiceovers, you know, you can pick any, Accent, [00:19:00] any male, female, and then just nar you give it a script and it narrates it for you. it’s different. I love both tools for different use cases. I use script primarily for, editing video app. So if you have. It’s amazing to me. Now, you know, I’ve been in marketing for a long time, and editing video used to be something fantastic, time consuming.
And, now you can drop in transitions, drop in all kinds of graphics. and, you can change. You can cut scenes, you can cut entire paragraph, I call it paragraphs because it’s like a Word document, is that if you don’t want this section to this section or this sentence to be in your final product, you just hide it or delete it.
That’s crazy to me. It’s just amazing.
Adam Turinas: it’s nuts. That’s cool. talk about some of the agents that you’re building and how you are using those agents in your, in the work that you’re doing. Or, maybe that’s a work in progress that you’re planning on
Susan Roth: [00:20:00] Agents.
I have built about 50 agents, wow. Yeah. Everything that you can possibly imagine or, Envision and help you with your daily workflow. it’s just amazing. I’ve created research agents, I’ve created utility agents to help me format things. I’ve created brand, agents. I created, An email agent who is trained on my voice and how I like to write emails even down to a subject line.
I am very particular about how I send messages out, and I trained an agent on how to do that so it can draft my emails. I never let them send it. I always, there’s a human in the loop and I always review them, but it’s amazing.
Adam Turinas: just, I wanted to, just to drill down on that one a bit because.
think it’s relatively easy to create A-G-P-T-A custom GPT to do something like that. Mm-hmm. What is it that’s different from an agent perspective? I mean, what’s [00:21:00] different in terms of the experience or the workflow?
Susan Roth: So custom GPTs. Are fantastic. they elevate an LLM and they personalize them to you.
you can give them instructions, you can give them your brand voice, you can give them resources to really improve the output. So custom gpt are. All about, context and consistency. So you’re, giving more context to the model so that it, it does what you want it to do better. The difference between a custom GPT and an agent, there’s a step in between, as we talked about, there’s an assistant, an assistant is connected to not only your brand voice, but it’s given.
A library, you give it a knowledge base, you can plug in tools, and from an assistant perspective, you start working with an assistant and you show it what good looks like, and you iterate, and then you evaluate and you keep, [00:22:00] there’s a rubric there’s a, a set of. Instructions, but a grading system.
So how well did you do the thing that I asked you to do? And you use, you know, a human in the loop and you use AI to help you evaluate so that you keep refining and refining those outputs. And as when they get good enough, then you graduate them to an agent. So an agent means that they have agency. You give them a task, you give them the instructions, and you let them think through.
How to get to the output. Giving them, you know, there’s guidelines and guardrails that the human has put in place. There’s extensive system instructions. You can connect them to two different tools and see how the different tools change the output. So agents, bring LLMs to a completely different level.
Adam Turinas: I think that is one of the best. Descriptions. I’ve heard of the differences. I’m going to make sure that when we produce the blog that accompanies this, that, that is really clearly in there. [00:23:00] That’s such a really simple, elegant description of it. to you. You were telling us about some, some of the other agents that you were building before I jumped in there.
tell us about some of the other agents and tools that you’re building.
Susan Roth: Sure. My favorite one is always the last one that I built. So I built, an intake agent called Cipher. cipher gets triggered when somebody goes to my website and schedules time on my calendar. So once that, the trigger, it starts a workflow.
Cipher goes to work, researching the company, the industry, the people who are gonna be on the call, their LinkedIn profiles. They do a SWOT analysis of their business. And then the workflow combines all of that and all of those findings into a sales brief. And it sends me an email. It takes three to five minutes and it costs about a dollar 50.
Adam Turinas: Fantastic. that’s remarkable. That’s great. Amazing. Yeah. So I think [00:24:00] one of your, superpowers is the, a pragmatic view of what the future looks like. ’cause I think that a lot of people when chat GPT came along and people started to play around with it. Was, they had, one of three reactions in simple terms.
One is, wow, this is cool. Lemme get on with my job. Or, this is cool. Oh my God, what’s this could have all kinds of negative impacts. I’m going to pretend it’s not here. And then I think folks like yourself who are looking at this and saying, this is gonna be a big disruptor. It’s gonna change things.
If I embrace it, maybe I can figure it out. And I’ve got a kind of a view about where I, what I think will change. So I think you’ve got a very pragmatic view of the future impact that this is happening. And I think in the way that you are operating, your marketing team, I mean, you’ve got a small marketing team, right?
it’s you and a [00:25:00] couple of people maybe.
Susan Roth: Two
Adam Turinas: people. Two people.
Susan Roth: Hopefully one is coming on board on Monday.
Adam Turinas: Okay, great. Okay. Well that’s, now I’ve, I’ve had conversations with a lot of marketing teams and everybody’s play as, as I mentioned, you know, they’re sort of, I think it’s sort of close to a hundred percent of marketing teams are using AI in some capacity.
But in the survey that we conducted with the Health Tech Marketing Network. Less than 8% of marketing teams are using it in a strategic way, which basically means that they’ve actually sort of basically AI enabled their operations to any real extent. They sort of, you know, other than individuals using it to do their job a little bit better.
I did have a conversation, and it’s actually in a episode that’s coming up with Nick Panai, who’s the CMO of Vallon. And he’s got a big marketing team. It’s, I think it’s over 90 people. but what they’ve done in terms of AI enabling their operations is [00:26:00] extraordinary. I mean, I really think it’s definitely on the cutting edge in our industry and I think frankly, for marketing teams.
But what you’ve done, I think, is. The other end of the spectrum in terms of scale. You know, there’s a lot of people in our community who are, have small marketing teams or a marketing team of basically a marketing team of one. And I think for them the potential is even greater. But it’s even harder for them to come up that learning curve ’cause they don’t have the resources.
So I’m sort of curious as like, first of all, where do you think. This is going, what do you think it’s gonna look like in a few years? And then we’ll come back to some advice that you could give for people like yourselves.
Susan Roth: I think there is going to be a fundamental shift in how marketing teams are structured.
I think agents are going to definitely be part of your team. Workflows are gonna be embedded into every aspect of the business, not just marketing. It will probably start with marketing. ’cause [00:27:00] we’re tended, we tend to be the trailblazers of an organization. I think leaders are going to be managing people, teams who work alongside.
Agent teams to get the job done. I think that it definitely, I can see that happening in very short order in two years, max.
Adam Turinas: Two years. Wow. you know what? You could, you could be right. I think that’s the, I think so, yeah.
Susan Roth: So bigger organizations, I should clarify, larger enterprise level organizations are gonna take longer because it takes longer for the, the ship to move.
But yeah, organizations that wanna compete, you gotta compete with, agent force with agent ai. and, and. I think it’s important for people to see what’s coming and not shy away from it. Just kind of embrace it and learn, because if you don’t, you’re gonna be on the sidelines for sure.
Adam Turinas: I a hundred percent agree. It raises an interesting question to me, which is everybody know everybody’s under [00:28:00] pressure to do more with less. So arguably what you’ve described. Enables a small marketing team, any marketing team, to do more, right? You can just basically, if you’ve got things set up right, your team can go and do so much more.
What I’m not sure about is the less part of it. Does it mean that. CEOs are gonna be saying to all of their departments, including marketing, okay, you’ve gotta cut people. I mean, that is happening in some organizations. I haven’t heard that in our industry. I haven’t heard, I was pleasantly surprised when we did the research that the questions from the CEO are not like, how can you get rid of people and replace them with AI agents?
It’s more. How can you help us? This is great. These tools are really cool. Show me how you use it to increase the top line.
Susan Roth: No, you’ve seen that with Mark Benioff in his own organization. You know, he very publicly said that he had a a 9,000. the person [00:29:00] workforce that he was cutting back to 5,000.
’cause he just didn’t need 4,000 heads. And that was very public, but very privately. He’s now hiring those people back. So I don’t think that
Adam Turinas: they’re there. That’s very interesting. I didn’t know that.
Susan Roth: Yeah.
Adam Turinas: I also think that a lot of this. Is grandstanding of saying I’m doing a layoff, but rather than a layoff being a negative thing, which is our business is not good, is we’re doing it in a positive way.
I kind of think it’s maybe AI washing, but you know, I worry for, the 20 somethings or even some of the young, even some of the 30 somethings, but particularly the 20 somethings who are Coming outta college or like year two or, you know, years one, two, or three. they have the opportunity because, you know, arguably they’re always more sort of tech facile to teach everybody how to use this stuff.
that’s at one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is it’s just, there’s just not. there’s not the space for you. We don’t need you because we’ve got agents doing what we had, the more [00:30:00] inexperienced people doing in the past, and that, worries me a lot.
Susan Roth: I think smarter organizations will take a different approach. It’s shortsighted to say that I’m not gonna hire young people because I have agents who can do that work. your workforce is aging. That experience has to come from somewhere. You have to teach the humans how to manage the tech and how to manage the agents.
I could have the best agentic workforce in the world, but they’re still gonna break LLM, uh, These big companies keep dropping new models. They keep dropping, they ship, updates, and that sometimes causes the agents to not perform the way that you thought. There’s maintenance that’s working.
Required. So if, you don’t think that you need people to help manage these systems, I think it’s a mistake. so if it’s my organization, I’m bringing in young people who have a different fresh perspective, who have, AI skills, but you can teach them they can learn from your more [00:31:00] tenured people in your company because they’re still human things.
It managing is managing. You have to, you know, to be a good leader, you have to listen and machines don’t listen. All of those human attributes need to be taught and learned somewhere. So I think it’s really critical for people to give young people an opportunity in your business to work alongside these agents and learn how do these agents work and fix them when they break.
That’s. A really critical piece to all of this. You know, someday we may get to a point where there’s, that is on my wishlist. If I had a, a self-healing agent who could do all of the maintenance when things go awry, that’d be amazing. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near that yet. Yeah.
Adam Turinas: Thank, I’m kind of relieved to hear it.
Susan. as we bring this to a close. what advice do you have for people who’ve, who are sort of standing there thinking, I need to do this? but I dunno where to start and I don’t have our time in the [00:32:00] day. they’re both overwhelmed by the opportunity and the threat, and they’re also overwhelmed by the lack of time that they have.
what advice would you give to them? Now to start on the journey that you’ve been on.
Susan Roth: think it depends on where you are on your AI journey. If you’re just beginning, I would pick one small low risk use case and experiment. You know, try using, AI to turn a research paper into patient friendly talking points or, you know, summarize.
An FDA update for providers. You know those kinds of small, little harmless things will be a, a single step that you can take to give you hands-on experience and build your confidence. Nothing’s going to break, you know, the AI. You can have a conversation now. it’s just amazing to me if you’re not comfortable typing, just have a conversation, you’re not sure where to start, say, you know what, I’ve never used an [00:33:00] LLM before.
I don’t know where to start. Where should I start? It will give you a lot of good ideas. It’s amazing. I think if you’re standing on the sidelines and you’re afraid, the biggest piece of advice I could get is do it scared. If you’re afraid of something, jump in because this isn’t going away. And it’s, something really important for you to learn, take baby steps to learn it.
There are a ton of resources out there, free resources that can help you get started. there’s a ton of them. I, I can share. I’m happy to have a conversation if anybody wants to. there’s a lot of things that you can do to just get started. And if you’re a little bit further along and you’ve been dabbling with AI and you’ve been, you know.
Having chats and you’re really not getting the, outputs, it’s usually probably a, a learning curve from how to talk to it. Having learning how to prompt and if you don’t know how to prompt and you don’t have the resources to take a formal course, there’s a lot of free ones out there. And AI can also help you learn how to prompt, just ask it.
[00:34:00] It’s amazing.Adam Turinas: Susan, this has been a terrific conversation. I’ve learned a lot. I know anybody else listening to this will learn a lot, and above all, I think they’d be inspired by it. I certainly have, I’m wanna thank you for sharing so openly about the journey you’ve been on or that Johnny, you’re on.
I mean, they do not, it’s not like you’ve arrived there, right? No. No.
Susan Roth: And that’s the other thing about AI is that. It’s not deterministic. It’s not like you’re learning Excel. It’s not like, you know, in the past we we’re used to software where you can, I wanna be an Excel guru and I’m gonna either take class or I’m gonna take some lessons and I’m gonna learn, functions and pivot tables, and I’m graduate to macros and then I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be a guru.
I’m gonna know all the things. I’m gonna have the experience and I’m gonna, I’m gonna master Excel. This is. Changing so fast you are understanding that you need to be comfortable being uncomfortable, understanding that this is, there’s no end game. This is a continual [00:35:00] learning journey. And kind of switching your mindset to know, I’m on it, I’m in it, and I’m gonna keep learning and keep expanding my experience with it so I can get better.
that’s the biggest takeaway for me is just understanding that. this is ongoing. I’m in.
Adam Turinas: Susan, thank you very much for, taking part in today’s episode.
Susan Roth: Thank you. Thank you
