Why speed isn't always an advantage with AI, with Corinne Thomas

Join John as he talks with Corinne Thomas, founder of Ethical Sales, about what responsible AI adoption actually looks like inside real organisations, and how to implement it without creating confusion, risk, or resistance.

They discuss how AI adoption is usually driven by leadership, and why pressure to “move fast” often clashes with reality. Corinne shares what she sees when individuals respond very differently to AI, from enthusiasm to scepticism to outright fear, and why those reactions need to be handled deliberately rather than smoothed over.

The conversation explores why the biggest risks often come from overconfidence rather than caution, and why slowing down can actually accelerate progress.

They also dig into what helps people learn AI properly, and the continued importance of face-to-face learning, even when the tools themselves are digital.

The discussion also explored where AI is genuinely making a difference. Much of the value comes from unglamorous work, admin, proposals, funding applications, and internal processes, rather than the headline use cases people often fixate on. The episode returns repeatedly to the idea that AI works best when it supports structure, not when it replaces thinking.

The episode closes with a listener question on using AI for prospecting, and why expecting it to act as a data source often leads to unreliable results. Corinne explains where AI fits in sales research, and where human judgement and proper data still matter.

Visit the Ethical Sales website to sign up to Corinne's newsletter.

In this episode:

• The different ways individuals react to AI, and why that matters
  Why moving too fast often creates more risk than value

• The problem of shadow AI and uncontrolled experimentation

• What effective AI learning actually looks like in practice

• Why face-to-face still plays a role in building capability

• Where AI is quietly making the biggest difference

• Keeping human judgement in charge as AI becomes more powerful

• What AI can and can’t do in prospecting

Transcript:

John Bennett (00:18)

Welcome to The AIQUALISER Podcast where we try and balance out the AI noise with conversations about how people are really using it. And today I'm joined by Corinne Thomas, who is the founder of Ethical Sales,

which helps businesses grow ethically and sustainably. Hi Corinne.

Corinne (00:35)

Hi.

John Bennett (00:36)

So thanks for joining me. Before we get into AI, maybe tell us a little bit about Ethical Sales and why you founded it and what it does.

Corinne (00:44)

Sure.

Yes, so like many business owners, my journey started out of frustration really. I had done some work with sales agencies and found them to be less than supportive to their clients. They didn't have particularly ethical processes and I wanted to set up a company that really was rooted in growth with integrity. So the service that we offer is all about growth and

building up as an organisation but doing that with ethics in mind, hence the name Ethical Sales. So we established as a business development agency primarily working with mission led purpose driven businesses, anything from a sustainable last mile delivery service to a new carbon footprint accounting service for the food service industry and anything in between.

We've done that for the last five years and then obviously today we're going to be talking a bit more about how we've brought AI into our services as well. So now we very much focus on growth powered by people, process and tech, which is AI being a key part of that technology because you can't have one without the other, we've discovered. So we've been on that journey for the last couple of years with our clients and it's been really interesting and it's great to be here to talk.

about it a bit more.

John Bennett (02:16)

Great. So was there like a pivotal moment when you realized AI was going to become a big thing for your clients or did it just happen gradually?

Corinne (02:26)

Yeah, I think there was a pivotal moment when I started using...

AI more to support client work and then advising clients on how they could use it. And they were so receptive to it and they were saying that there wasn't, they just didn't really know where to start with it. But because I was seeing such an immediate impact in the way I was using it in my business, that was a bit of a light bulb moment for me that this is probably going to change my industry, the business development industry certainly changed enormously.

over the last 18 months.

Agencies and service providers, it's changing hugely about how they work. So it's going to have an impact on all our clients as well. there was that moment where I thought, actually, I think this is perhaps what everybody is saying it is going to be. It is like we've opened Pandora's box, there's no going back and everything is about to change. And then from that moment on, I just looked at everything through the lens of

what can AI do for my business? What can it do for my clients? What do I need to do to support them on the journey basically?

John Bennett (03:41)

Okay, so how did that start? How did you start to build that into your services that you offered?

Corinne (03:47)

Well, you know, I'm not one for doing things by halves and I didn't want to be one of those. There's a lot of them about one of those businesses that just suddenly stick AI powered on their service.

you know, and they just claim that they are now powered by AI and they're doing exactly the same things underneath, perhaps just with ChatGPT on the side. So I didn't want to do that. And so I started quite slowly and deliberately. And I actually come from a learning and development background. Before I launched Ethical Sales, I was a sales director for a global leadership organisation called Common Purpose. And I learned a lot about facilitation. And I'd also launched a sales training academy for the

two years called Ethical Sales Academy. And so I'd learned about how to deliver online learning and I'd learned about the impact of AI on that. So I brought those two together and decided to retrain as essentially an AI trainer. So I worked with an organisation, a trusted learning provider called AI for Non-Techies and I actually went on a six month journey to train myself to learn how to teach AI.

to non-technical people and that's where I started. And that's what took me through to the next phase of services that we offer which is AI training and implementation to SMEs and social impact organisations. So helping them on that AI adoption journey, doing it in a way that's building capability in their teams, thinking about how to do it ethically, so building, creating their policies and then also how do they implement it. So there's a lot of hands

on and troubleshooting that needs to happen if you're going to help an organisation to adopt it effectively. You can't just do a one and done and deliver training and then walk away. It doesn't really work like that.

John Bennett (05:40)

Yeah,

and you mentioned there there's a whole that they're all SMEs or value led organisations, but the whole range of companies that you work with across different fields. So who usually drives that decision to start using AI within the business?

Corinne (05:49)

It definitely tends to come from leadership. I'm hearing most that, you know, the board has come together and the chairman of the board or the CEO has got a bee in their bonnet about AI. Why are you not using it? You know, they want everyone to be five steps ahead. But the reality is that that...

it's more complicated than that. But it definitely comes from leadership. And the challenging thing around that is that you have two different types of leadership. You have the ones that are really gung-ho and really want to implement it fast and change everything and break everything. And then you've got the leaders that are very risk averse and cautious and actually quite fearful of it. And so they want to embrace it, but they don't know how. They want to do it in a way that's culturally responsible.

and I would say that I sit more in the latter camp so I want to support or I do support organisations that are thinking about how to do it responsibly and with their people in mind rather than just kind of going all guns blazing which you know as we've all seen in the headlines there's been some real AI failures ⁓ and I wrote a blog recently about you know what SMEs might want to look for in terms of AI trends this year and one of them was learn from the corporate failures that

are going to come out this year because it's the big companies that have embraced it very quickly that are the ones that are failing the hardest, falling the hardest.

John Bennett (07:27)

So you mentioned that there's kind of two approaches that leaders might take. You know they might be kind of more gung-ho and trying to go quickly or cautious and taking things slowly, taking their team with them. Do you see one of those more than the other or is it a fair split?

Corinne (07:44)

From my client base, I'm definitely seeing the latter because I work with SMEs up here in Murray, that are often family owned businesses. They're rooted in ⁓ traditional sectors, so manufacturing, food and drink, renewable energy, that sort of thing. And then I also work with national charities or social impact organisations, employee owned social enterprises. So all of those organisations are approaching it quite cautiously. They are

excited about it but they want to do it in the right way in a way that's culturally sensitive to their people and that means that it doesn't break things they don't they don't want that to happen to their organisation so I'm definitely seeing the latter but I think if you look at the

the wider kind of AI hype and the noise that you see out there, you might see more of the former. And I think that's problematic because everybody thinks that everyone's further ahead than they actually are. Yes.

John Bennett (08:42)

Yeah, there is a lot of hype isn't there and quite often when you get

underneath the hood of the hype it's actually this is the guide or this is the hack for doing this thing this way and when you get underneath it it's actually not much different from what we're already doing and I think there is that real fear isn't there as you say of being behind because it sounds, it feels like everybody else is so much further ahead.

John Bennett (09:02)

I was gonna ask you a question, but it might not be that relevant given the way the leaders that you work with are more cautious. But I was really interested in, you've got the decision from leadership to follow AI, to adopt AI. I wondered what sort of reactions you get from the team and from other people in the business.

Corinne (09:21)

Yeah. And I was actually speaking to exactly that with, with a client earlier on, they were concerned about rolling out AI in their organisation and how many of the team will be sceptical and not want to be involved in the training and not want to engage. And so there tend to be sort of three main camps. Really. You have the very excited and positive people who have maybe tried it a bit, seen the potential.

sure but all really want to learn and they're willing to embrace it fully in their day to day. They'd be like your AI champions of the future. And then you have the sceptics. So those are the people that have maybe tried it once, dabbled, not got anything from it, can't see how it's relevant to their role, think it's too much trouble to learn.

just don't really want to engage. And then you also have those people that are very fearful of it. And often the sceptics were probably fearful underneath as well. But those who are really afraid of it, they don't want to go near it. They are worried of breaking something. They don't want to do something that's going to upset their clients or their organisation. So they just don't want to touch it until they've been given some guidance and some training on how to use it effectively. And all three of those people will

greatly benefit from capability and training and support because of course the over excited ones will probably have the potential to go too far the other way. The sceptics really need to be brought along on the journey and they need to build trust.

and to show that actually look at these great things that are happening in our organisation, you want to be part of that. And then those who are fearful, you want to remove the fear by showing them that AI isn't anything to be afraid of, that there are the guardrails in place, that there is the policy, and that we can teach them how to use it in a safe, accessible way. So.

John Bennett (11:27)

Out of those three, which reaction kind of worries you the most?

Corinne (11:32)

I actually think it's probably the more excited ones because they can be the hardest to control. You know, if we're talking about

say, doing some initial AI capability sessions and then rolling out a small pilot in an organisation, which is often the journey that I'll take clients on, the excited ones will probably go too big too quickly. And they'll think of a really multifaceted project that involves huge amounts of automation and data. And it's about sort of taking them back to the foundational level and saying, look, we're not quite ready to start there yet.

⁓ and then you don't want to kind of dampen that excitement so you need to sort of channel that energy in the right way so actually they can be one of the the most challenging groups to work with. The sceptics and those that are fearful I'm fairly confident that once I can get in front of them or a decent AI trainer can get in front of them you can quickly show people the potential of it and the most important thing is to show them

examples that are rooted in their day to day. So they need to see organisational examples that they relate to. And that's what a lot of my training is based on is making sure that I bring in as much relevancy as possible to the training because that's what will change the minds of those that are sceptic and that are fearful. And the fearful ones are great to work with because you just need to hold their hand, you need to be supportive and take them step by step on a journey. And if you do that, then they tend

to be end up being your biggest champion so yeah.

John Bennett (13:10)

Do you find it's a bit like the hare and the tortoise? You know, the enthusiasts run off and then maybe the scepticals or the fearful might actually end up not winning the race but actually getting to an end result that's probably more solid.

Corinne (13:27)

Definitely, definitely. But you need your champions and you need people that are excited about this tech. And they're the ones that aren't afraid to put their, maybe their head above the parapet and say, look, we'll be the test dummies and we'll give it a go. And you need people that are okay with failing and learning from that because...

That's what I think AI capability is all about. You've got to be confident enough to have a good dabble, really good play, use it as much as possible, break it, learn what goes wrong, and then sort of go again. So you want all of them basically on the journey with you. Yeah.

John Bennett (14:12)

And how do you kind of, or what do you think the best approach is in terms of getting people on board? And I'll give you like a couple of stories from my experience. I've seen it done two ways. I've been in a big workshop once about AI where you get the whole team in and.

Corinne (14:23)

Hmm.

John Bennett (14:31)

I found that didn't land very well and it's hard to kind of cross that barrier and get people that are fearful across with you And then at the other end of the scale, I've seen it where you work with a small group, sort of a trial group first and get, as you say, show that relevancy in their day to day work, show how it can work. And they then become advocates you know that help you sell it into other people within the business. So what's your kind of, what's the kind of best approach there?

Corinne (14:59)

For me, I would prefer to work in a small, more of a small group setting if possible. So starting at leadership level, really getting the leadership team to understand what AI is about and how it can help their organisation. If we can start there, then we can build a program that works for the rest of their workforce.

I'm a big fan of face-to-face training which might sound counterintuitive given that we're talking about AI technology but as a trainer and a facilitator I know that I can engage someone far better when I've got them sat in a room with me than I have them behind a screen. So my preference is to try and get in front of people as much as possible or at least bookend the training journey with an in-person session up

front and then an in-person session at the end with some virtual training in between. That can work quite well. But yeah, think in an ideal world, you would start at leadership level, you would then build a program that ran through the rest of your workforce. You would want to deliver some pilots with maybe specific business functions initially so that they could work together as a team and learn about how it would be to integrate AI into their day-to-day.

So a couple of really safe adoption pilots and then some ongoing learning and development for the workforce to make sure that they're all, you know, they've got that support and they're building that capability gradually over time. In an ideal world, that's what it looks like. But of course, many organisations are at different...

different points in their journey. So I'm getting approached, for example, with an organisation that are quite far ahead in the sense that they've got their policy, they've got their steering group, and now they're just looking for some foundational training for the team. That's great, you know, I'll slot in there. Others are coming to me when they haven't even got an AI policy, the leadership team are all at sea, so then you're starting a bit further down the track.

John Bennett (17:05)

So you're adapting to whatever they need. One thing that you said earlier that I really, really identify with, and I think you make an amazing point there, is that this whole thing of face to face, we went through a stage, obviously, because of world events where everything moved online and we did, everything via Zoom or Teams.

Corinne (17:08)

Absolutely, yeah.

I'm home.

John Bennett (17:28)

You're right that this feels like something that would be well suited to that because it is so tech, you know, it's the end result is us working with a screen, working with computer to get stuff done. But that human element, I was talking in the last episode, to Russ Henneberry about community and you know how community and those sort of things are so important. I think that's, yeah, really interesting that,

although it's something so techy, that face-to-face element is so important, isn't it?

Corinne (17:56)

Yeah, it really is. And I'll give you an example as to why. So,

you can do a lot of online AI training, there's the government have just launched a new skills hub. You can go and do training with Microsoft, Google, IBM, whoever you want to. So you can build some of that foundational AI stuff yourself and anyone can do that now, which is fantastic. But what you're then missing is the interaction with the other human next to you where you can learn from each other. And so in the training that I deliver, people are doing things together in pairs.

They're learning, they're doing some hands-on prompting exercises. They may be learning about how to build their first AI assistant, whatever it might be. And it's that interaction between them and their peers where the sort of magic happens because they start to see that everybody's at a certain level. There was a training that I did recently with a bunch of businesses up here through the local chambers of commerce. And they started trading tips about how to build an AI assistant to write tenders and

proposals because they had common ground there. So that's what you can do. And also if you've got your fearful people and your sceptical people in a room, as a trainer, you can spot them and you can go and give them some attention. You can speak to them directly. You can try and bring them back into the group. It's very difficult to do that online. It's just much harder anyway. So I think there's a place for both because we can't all be available to do in person all of the time. So we need to sort of pick

⁓ moments wisely. If you've got a staff away day, think about bringing in an AI trainer or consultant to come and talk to your team and create that space where people can have the no stupid question scenario. And then if you've got a whole literacy programme that you want to roll out where you just need subject matter experts and you know exactly what you want them to train you on, well then bring them in and tell them what you want and then they'll devise a course for you to do virtually.

need both, but my preference, particularly if you're talking about that first step on the journey, building those foundational AI skills, getting people to understand what it can do and how it can relate to their day to day and how it relates to them as a leader in their organisation, you really need to be doing that face to face.

John Bennett (20:19)

That certainly makes a lot of sense. I wanted to come back to what you said earlier about the enthusiastic people, they kind of, they might run off and they might go too fast. What sort of things are you seeing there when people are taking it too quickly and going too far too fast?

Corinne (20:36)

Yeah, well, one of the biggest challenges for businesses at the moment is this rise of the shadow AI use. And under that definition comes a number of things. So you've got people that are using AI tools and platforms that haven't been approved by the company. They might not even have any approved tools or platforms at this stage. The second one is that they are putting information into those tools or platforms that shouldn't be going.

in. So data breaches are happening most through shadow AI use. And it's very problematic, both of those elements, because you might have somebody who isn't trained how to use a tool properly and is churning out not particularly good work. So you've got a kind of quality control issue there. You've then also got the potential of not understanding the guardrails. And so you might have somebody sharing some data.

that they shouldn't have done. And more and more organisations are now putting in place things like, we're going to track, you know, if you've submitted something to me, I'm going to track to see if it's been written by an AI. And so it's a big headache for businesses right now is how do we keep control? How do we keep the lid on without stifling the enthusiasm and the appetite and the fact that we can see this could be transformational for our business, but how do we wrest back

control because as we know nearly everyone has got at least one AI tool on their desktop ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever it might be, Copilot. It's a bit of a dangerous tool if you're not taught how to use it properly in my view.

John Bennett (22:20)

And just while you mention all the different models, what's your current favourite?

Corinne (22:28)

I'm fairly agnostic, I need to know a lot about all of them because my clients work with them all. But I'll give you a couple of use cases to how I'm using the tools in my day to day. So, ChatGPT is my go-to for business development strategy and for helping me to organise client work and I use projects a lot in ChatGPT. I find it really helpful for the strategy side of things.

And Claude, I use as my marketing assistant. So I find Claude's particularly strong in terms of copywriting. So that writes my blogs, it helps me write my newsletter, my LinkedIn content and all of that sort of thing. So, and if I have any client work that is involving marketing, then I would be steering clients toward Claude. Copilot, I find is a fantastic all-around workspace. It's designed to be a kind of workplace tool because it's integrated within your Microsoft environment.

environment. So Copilot is great if you've got SharePoint and you've got loads of documents, you can create notebooks, you can do lots of visuals with Copilot. There's lots more to Copilot I think than people realise and I've been going on a long training journey with that recently. And then I think one of my other key tools for me as a consultant is Fireflies AI which is a meeting note taker.

but I take it with me everywhere. So I went to a conference the other day and I recorded all the sessions in the conference. And then I was able to, create a really useful thought piece from that. But it's really important for me, particularly if I'm having a pre-training meeting with a client, I need to know exactly what they want. And I will use my note taker to help me because it's impossible, isn't it? You can't hear everything that people tell you. So I find that's a very essential tool. So I use them all in different ways.

and I've got loads of others that I play about with. And I think that's part of the beauty and the challenge of it, isn't it? Is that there's so much available now. It's sort of, where do you start? And I get asked that question a lot. Like, well, what's your favorite tool? What should we use? But really, it should be about, what does your organisation need and what are you using now? Because actually, if you're a Microsoft house, then it probably does make sense to make some use of Copilot. But if you're a Google house, then probably doesn't, to be honest.

John Bennett (24:54)

I think one of the things you said there, which is really interesting, the beauty and the challenge of it. Yeah, there is so much tools, there's so many new things coming out all the time. And that's amazing, but it's also really difficult, isn't it, to stay on top and to work out what's generally new, what's like the new shiny thing that's actually no better.

Corinne (25:08)

and

Yes.

Yeah, it's extremely difficult and that's why I decided to launch a newsletter. So I've got a bi-weekly "AI that works for you" newsletter and I try and put some relevant news in there that I think, you know, SMEs and social impact organisations need to know about, not all the shiny stuff. But one of the most difficult things of keeping on top of is just the development of the tools. So even with an established provider like ⁓ Anthropic, they've just launched two new elements to Claude.

which you now need to get to know. Copilot's gone through an enormous facelift in the last six months. So if you use Copilot six months ago, it looks completely unrecognisable now. And I think that's why I would always recommend, if you are going to implement AI in your organisation, get a trainer in who's, I spend probably at least a day a week just on learning and finding out about what's new and testing it so that my clients don't have to do it. So you need

get someone in who's a subject matter expert who can really help you with what's happening in the here and now because it changes you know on a daily weekly basis. I'm kind of hoping that we're reaching a plateau at the moment. I'm hoping that the tools have got so good now I hope that we might reach a bit of a, I keep saying this but it every every couple of months it's another upgrade so yeah.

John Bennett (26:37)

You just mentioned two new things from Claude. I'm conscious of not making this too time specific. But, so what's caught your eye lately with Claude?

Corinne (26:43)

Hmm.

Yeah, so Claude released a new function in Excel, which means that you can open multiple data sets at once and interrogate them.

And then it's also released something called Claude Cowork, which is off the back of Claude Code. And it's quite agentic, so it will help you do things like reorganise your filing space and things like that. it's got the sort of coding intelligence, but Cowork, you could use it if you weren't a coder, which I think a lot of people are very interested in. So yeah, Claude Cowork is something that I'm looking forward to having a play about with, but they literally just released it two weeks ago.

So yeah.

John Bennett (27:26)

Yeah, funnily enough,

I've been playing with it today on one of the topics we've just been talking about, which is, you know, I see so many things on LinkedIn, oh this is, you know, this is my new prompt for doing this, this is my system for doing that, and it's hard to work out if it's actually genuinely new or not. So I've been putting together a co-work project that builds a knowledge base for me. when I get a new one of these guides or whatever, can pop it in and then it comes back and it tells me whether this is something genuinely new or if it's something that's just an enhancement of something we already know or it's something that is actually just not new at all. So it is really interesting actually, Cowork I'm only starting to dabble now that this stuff, as you say, is moving so fast and moving on from just a box that we type something into and get an answer to something much, much broader.

Corinne (28:16)

Yeah and I think that's one of the biggest challenges is that because that's what everybody was sold into two or three years ago the box that you chat into and you get an answer back which in itself is mind-blowing.

But many people or organisations haven't moved on just from using it as a chat function. And unfortunately, if you're stuck in that mode of just question and answer and occasionally getting a reasonable output, then you're losing 99 % of its power, which is all to do with getting rooted in what it is that you're delivering your own organisation, what your challenges are and how it can help you

how it can help you work through those. But as with any new technology you have to get to know how to use it properly.

So if you're only using it on a surface level, then just like your CRM, if you only use a CRM on a surface level, you're not going to get what you need. And I think that's where I'm seeing now. So I'm seeing this shift from curiosity, which was very much last year and maybe the year before. we're dabbling. We're curious. We're going to try a few things to capability this year, which is, okay, this AI thing isn't going anywhere. People are using it anyway. We now need to get them to be capable.

of using it in a way that benefits us in our organisation. And that's the shift that we're now going through that I suspect will stay in for the next two, three, five years until we probably reach another enormous change where the AI becomes even more powerful and starts to create systemic change probably.

John Bennett (29:59)

Interesting, interesting. Might need to get you on again in a year's time and see if we had a quiet year and it's all calmed down or if it keeps on changing. So I wanted to go back to something that we talked about earlier a little bit as well. we talked about the excited people and... sort of how that manifests when they go too fast. How about the, you know, some of the other groups, the sceptical or the fearful. What does it take to help them feel confident using AI?

Corinne (30:30)

I think it's rooted in hands-on practice and that show and tell idea. So when I became an AI trainer, I deliberately found a learning provider that could help me to make sense of it to a non-technical audience. And so the way that we teach AI is a sort three-stage process. we explain what it actually is. We show, we do a lot of demonstrations. This

is what this tool can do. Look at this amazing piece of technology. we kind of show and then we encourage hands-on practice. So prompting practice is a really good one to start with, getting people to understand what a good prompt looks like and then helping them to see what the different outputs look like. If you've got a slightly more advanced group, it might be helping them to set up their first AI assistant with a repeatable task that they struggle with on a day-to-day.

and so forth. So, and then coming back together and learning about, okay, what happened there? What did you learn? What was the challenges? You know, do a bit of Q &A so that you're creating that real learning environment. And I think that's what you definitely need to do for those who are fearful and sceptical is you need to break it right down for them and really show them in a hands-on way what it can do for them and their roles. And then you start

to find that they'll say things like, ⁓ hang on a minute. does that mean that in that next board meeting, I don't have to sit and make notes? I can actually listen and then I can have a note taker. Oh! and then with those notes, I can actually write the report. And then it's like, you can see like,

the light bulb going off in their brain of, ⁓ right, okay, so all that admin stuff I hated doing. The other day I was training a member of a national charity business development manager and he openly said to me, I hate writing proposals, Corinne. He said, they take me hours because I hate them and I said, I absolutely hear you because I'm exactly the same. know, a lot of business development people, we love the meetings, we love the chat, but we don't want to write the proposal.

at the end of it. So we built an AI assistant so that he's got a proposal template. He can just put the meeting notes in. It does a really good first draft. He can edit it, tweak it. But once you can train your AI assistant, technically they can do that all the way through without very much human intervention as long as you've given it the structure to start with. So I think it's showing them that powerful

journey they can go on.

John Bennett (33:17)

And have you ever been surprised? So you're in these sessions with the sceptical people and they're kind of brainstorming with each other. How many times or how often have you kind of had they've come up with an idea and you've gone ooh that's a new idea for me as well.

Corinne (33:31)

all the time, yeah. It happens pretty much every time I train because you only know what you know, right? You know, I know my business and you know people's organisations on a surface level, but yeah, the stuff that they come up with in terms of the solutions to the problem is amazing. And that's really...

That's really the nub of it for me is we need to come up with the problems to solve in the first place. If we're not rooting it in that, there's no point saying, I want to learn how to use Google AI Studio and create brilliant videos. Well, why? Let's take a step back. What is it that requires video creation in your organisation? Have you got a problem with your video creation processes? Then that's when the AI comes in. For everybody now,

There isn't really much that it can't solve. That's one of the challenges really. It can solve nearly everything now that you throw at it. It just might require different levels of technological know-how to realise it.

John Bennett (34:43)

That's really interesting that, what is the problem that we're trying to solve? rather than what can we do with this thing? Yeah, what actually is, yeah, what is it that...

Corinne (34:46)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah and of course

you know I spoke to an FD of a large family-owned business up here and he said look it's all very well.

You saying that we can help our people to be more productive in their day-to-day. might be nice for them They can go and have more of a tea break. But how is actually helping our organisation? You know, where's the ROI? So, you know, they're looking at things like how can it help us with growth? How can it help us with innovation? How can it help? You know Increase our profit margins. That's what they're that's what the leaders are what are focused on and so you've got this

kind of almost two-tier like okay we want to build the capability of the team but also needs to work for the company.

John Bennett (35:44)

So once AI settles down and you've kind of had your groups in and a couple of ideas and you get past that kind of first stage of everybody getting used to using it,

What's the kind of main things that people are using it for in your organisations?

Corinne (36:01)

Well there's a whole range of things, I think it depends on the type of business it is, So, you know, if you're a manufacturing company then a lot of the focus tends to be on how can it increase our

efficiency in our operations, in our day to day. And for a lot of factories now, they've already got enormous amounts of automation anyway. And then thinking about, also, how can it support us in the back office? And one of the biggest challenges, particularly with SMEs, as we know, ⁓ and charities and social enterprises, is that they're incredibly time poor. So really, for them, a win is in terms of freeing up their time.

time and efficiency. So I worked recently with a charity pro bono and I just helped them build a project in ChatGPT to help them with funding applications and it sped up their time to submit an application by sort of 10 times. So they're able to send out double, triple the amount of applications that they were and now they're getting more funding in. So for them it's sort of directly impacting on the money that they can raise and it means that the people that

are working in the service delivery are focusing more on that and less on the admin side. So I think there's a big driver for companies, whether you're a charity, a social enterprise, a manufacturing business, to sort of help with that administrative layer particularly. And it is one of the quickest wins because you can do that relatively easily. The automation side of things, and in the manufacturing facility, that's going to require specialist

knowledge and AI implementation engineers. that's more of a long-term project. But certainly removing that admin layer. And then I think also on the sales and marketing side, I think it's very much speeding up and helping companies to create better, more content. I I'm very much on the side of better content, not more.

But actually, it's like having an expert marketing consultant by your side. So I'm currently working with an organisation up here in Murray that just gone through a rebrand. And so what they want to do is create a whole range of AI assistants to support them as they launch their new brand. So we're going to be creating social media assistant, a blog writer, a content creation calendar. We're to be doing all of those things using AI.

So I think that most marketing departments now will be sort of rooted in it. And then on the sales side...

The most time consuming things with sales as I said are proposal writing and understanding what went on in the meeting. But actually I think from a capability point of view from the sales side, it is probably more powerful in terms of you understanding your buyer better and being able to have a better relationship with them. So I recently just wrote a guide about how to use AI as your sales coach because actually

it will help you to move that deal forward, will help you to skip a few steps in terms of where you might want to get to because it...

Human beings were very emotional and I think sales is a very emotional thing. So if you remove the emotion out of it It's really good at guiding you and showing you where you know where you might not have done your qualification process quite well enough or your discovery And then it will advise you on what to do next. So When I work with sales teams, I'm sort of helping them on on all of those aspects not just a sort of admin side So yeah, I mean the sky's the limit really it's it's

You've got operations and HR that want to use, for example, what you can do in something like HeyGen, which is create an avatar, a company avatar. And so they've got somebody who's training people on or doing onboarding, but it's not a person, it's an AI generated trainer. It's just incredible what you can do.

John Bennett (40:15)

Have you had much luck with

Hey Gen? I tried to create a Hey Gen of me last week and then I used ElevenLabs to try and create my voice and it's not quite there. I don't know if it's because I've not given it enough source material or if the tech is not there yet. But how have you found that?

Corinne (40:28)

Yeah.

Yeah, I found it pretty good when I used it a few months ago. But I think, with all this tech, sometimes it's just...

having the time and patience to sort of sit down and use it properly. And the other thing we've got to bear in mind as well with all these tools is that the free version tends to be the not so good version. And in the free version, you are the product, not the other way around. my advice always to businesses and organisations that are looking to adopt AI is be really careful with any free tools that you use because you don't know what they're doing with your data. You don't know what they do with your face. But as soon as you start paying

something then you've got some, there's a contract there.

and you can interrogate their security and all the rest of it to make sure that it's meeting with your criteria and GDPR and everything like that. So I think sometimes these guys want to make money, don't they? These AI tool providers. And so they're going to give us a kind of MVP version of the product maybe, but it's only when you invest in it that you actually get the proper one.

John Bennett (41:41)

Yeah, that's I like that. You know be careful with the free version because you're the product. That's interesting take. like that. What do you think is kind of like the most boring uses of AI that are making the biggest differences?

Corinne (41:47)

Yeah, yeah.

I mean for me it would be things like writing contracts and service agreements. I find that, you know, I've got a template, there's no reason why it should take me an hour, for some reason it does because I'm not an admin heavy kind of person so all that mundane stuff. Anything that can be templated basically. One of the things that I've noticed that AI, it helps you level up in and I think this is where a lot of organisations are struggling right now, I really think this.

is that as humans we've created easy shortcuts to things or we've done something in a certain way for so long we can't imagine doing it another way. When you start bringing AI into the mix you actually need to do it in a structured, processed way. You need to map your process and you need to work out what needs to happen when. And I think that's where a lot of organisations are struggling because they think, well...

I thought AI was magic and it can do this. And then you realise that you need to have maybe have built some templates, have workflows and mapped out your processes. And then when you've done those things and you've invested some time upfront.

then that process that did take you two or three hours is now taking you five minutes. But you do have to invest the time upfront to do it properly. So I spent a lot of time in this in the last six months to a year actually process mapping the things that I do on a regular basis. So I've got templates for all the client work and all the regular stuff that I have to do that did once take me hours, but because I just didn't think of it in that way.

I think that's requiring a different sort of mindset shift in people as they learn how to use AI properly.

John Bennett (43:47)

So we're saying there really that there's actually quite a lot of work to be done because we do things and we just know how they work and we don't follow through necessarily on a formal process, but actually to make it work in AI, we've got to formalise those processes and understand them.

Corinne (44:07)

we do because we have to give it the context.

We have to give it as much information as possible to get a good output. Otherwise you're not going to get anything that's rooted in who you are and what you do. ⁓ And the more structured and processed you can be with the AI tool that you're using, the better output you will get. So initially, you know, I was thinking, well, what's the point in training my AI assistant to write me a newsletter? Because it's going to take me

loads of time to do it upfront. But actually if you flip it on its head and you go, for this task I have now got an assistant so where do we need to start? So that's exactly how I started. I said, I want to create a newsletter. I want it to be templated. Where do we start? And together we built the template and then together we create the content and it brings me back. If I try and go off piste it'll say, well that's not in the template. So are you sure you want that to go in the newsletter? So actually using it as

as your assistant going through. So don't think you have to go off and do it all on your own, because you don't. If you need a template created, get it to help you create one.

John Bennett (45:16)

Yes, that's very true. And I've just asked you about the boring things that made the biggest difference. What about the other end of the scale? What about the things that people think are going to be transformative and huge that don't really kind of turn out that way?

Corinne (45:32)

Yeah, so I think things like sales is a good point really because there's been a lot of hype around, we can get AI to send out automated emails and look at buying signals and all of those things that can use all the data and but

I've watched the sort of evolution of that go on in the last five or six years and it started with sort of email automation, which is obviously still AI, it's just algorithmic. And I've sort of seen it come full circle. So a lot of those tools and platforms have sort of died a death really because...

people have realised that nobody wants to be spammed in their inbox and Google have put up the shutters anyway so you can't get to people. And it's sort of come back around the other way which is, okay we need to be a bit more human centred and strategic and targeted about the way that we do sales. So I think that that's a good example of how it's come back full circle and I suspect we will see other examples of that happening in the next few years where we thought

it might be the answer to, I don't know, the legal profession and then we'll come back and go, actually we really did need lawyers because they had the critical thinking that the AI doesn't have. And I think one of the things that most concerns me is that we are outsourcing our thinking and I know that I fall into that trap definitely. I think when you get so overexcited with using these tools and you think it can do it for you, but it can't. It cannot replace your critical thinking, it cannot replace the alchemy that

is you and your knowledge and your understanding of the world and how you want to serve basically. It cannot do that. And as soon as you start creeping into getting it to telling you what you should be doing, that's where you need to stop and really think, okay,

the human here and actually I might need it to enhance something, I might need it to give me another perspective, I might need it to help me to think about this in another way but actually the alchemy of what I just wrote there, that's the good bit and that's the human bit.

John Bennett (47:45)

How do you coach people to do that to kind of, you know, to know when they need to step in?

Corinne (47:53)

Yeah, so I think thinking with them about, you know, what process it is and then asking them, well, what part of that process do you think is your brain? You know, download your brain bit. Okay, so that download the brain bit, you might be able to, you know, do some of that. Let's, we can write some guidelines, we can do all of those things, we can get some templates done, but.

Let's have a look at the output together and then we look at the output and we can see that it's not

it's not quite what you would have written or exactly how you might want to say it. And so then you need to tweak it and turn it into your voice. The more you go with it to do that, then the more accurate it will become. I don't ever think, I think, you know, the agentic AI is great, but we've got to think about, well, at what point do we actually review those emails going out? At what point do we check that contract is correct? Because it can still hallucinate and make mistakes all the time.

as we know so yeah.

John Bennett (48:58)

Yeah,

yeah, mean that for me that is my biggest worry. One of my key things is human intent and human judgment and I'm all for the agentic stuff but I think we need to design it in a way where we still have those inflection points where we make sure that we're checking in it. It's gonna be really interesting to see how that whole thing sort of takes shape and how we can get the benefits of agentic behavior but keep our touch points in the loop.

Corinne (49:25)

Yeah, definitely.

John Bennett (49:28)

So how has AI changed? You mentioned a few things about how you use it your own work, but what's been the biggest thing for you in terms of how it's changed your own process?

Corinne (49:37)

I think that it's given me time back so I would say that I've probably got at least an extra day a week now in my working life thanks to the support of my AI assistants. I think that it's definitely helped me to become more structured and processed in the way that I work.

and I want to teach that to my clients. So a client will often come to me and say, I'm just using chat and I'll say, okay, well, actually, can we maybe think about putting that to a project? And that will then help you to organise a bit better. I think I've definitely become more structured and processed as a result. And I also think thinking slightly differently. So I love the fact that it's a great leveler. So for SMEs, for small,

businesses for charities, you've got the compute power of all the big tech companies at your fingertips. And so sometimes it's great just to think the sky's the limit here. What do want it to do for me today? And with something like the deep research function, you can get it to do...

an enormous project that you would have maybe got a PhD student to come in and do for you about your, I don't know, the growth of your organisation or you can create an incredible knowledge bank.

with all your past board papers in it and all your HR operational policies and then you can interrogate it and find out what you need to know. You can have an enormous contract from a new supplier and then you can drill down and find out what the changes are from the last time they sent you the contract. It's those kind of detailed nitty gritty tasks that are really difficult for us human beings to do because we can only keep so much in our brains at any one

time that an AI is super super skilled at so sometimes I'll just try and think right what sky's the limit what what do I need to know today and I'll get it to go and find out for me.

John Bennett (51:39)

Superb, absolutely superb.

So, Corinne one things we do is to take a question from a listener and chat it through. And the one we've got today, actually you touched on this a little bit already, so it's going be really interesting to get into. the question's from Ron, and Ron says...

What's the right way to use AI to scan the web for high quality B2B leads without ending up with broken links and poor data? I have issues when prospecting where it is good one day and then rubbish another. And the links it gives me don't work all the time.

Corinne (52:18)

Yes, interesting one. So I think this is one of those ones where the perception of AI might kind of outweigh its abilities. So there's quite a lot of guardrails around data for a start. So

quite a lot of data out there is gated. So LinkedIn, for example, you can't really scrape LinkedIn using an AI tool and ideally nor should you. So that's the reason why he's not getting the outputs that he wants because he's almost asking it to do something that it can't really do. We've got GDPR, we've got data regulations in the EU and the UK. So ideally for his data,

If he's talking about actual nitty-gritty customer data, whether that's phone numbers, email addresses, he needs to get that from a reputable data source. And there's lots of them online. You've got the likes of Clay that have got a lot of AI-powered enhancements, Apollo, or you can go to someone like Market Location, are a of data provider that verify data through the phone.

So that's kind of part of the question answered. You're probably asking it to do something it can't do.

What it can do, which I think is probably arguably more powerful, is that your data is almost the last piece of the puzzle, isn't it? What you first need to know is, who are you selling to and why? And so what I find AI really powerful for, and you could use something like Perplexity for this, because it's a really good web search engine tool, is that if you have ⁓ an ideal customer in mind and you have some criteria, so let's say, you know, I'm an AI trainer, I want to

to reach out to SMEs in Murray who've got a turnover between five to ten million in the food and drink industry, I want them to have a manufacturing base in the region, I want them to have office based staff, etc. etc. and you give it criteria and you might give it an example and you say actually I want it to be the same as Pringle shortbread or whatever.

Then an AI tool is fantastic at doing all of that research for you and coming up with a really good potential target list of maybe 15 to 20 organisations. And I think that's the bit that people forget that AI is really good at from a sales point of view. So you know who you're trying to sell to. You might even have a couple of ideal customers in mind or customers that you've worked with before. So give it that criteria and get it to give you some suggestions. It's only going to give you the top line information.

it's going to give you the company name and maybe their address and head office email. But then you can take that information and go, right, actually out of those 15 it suggested, 10 are a really good fit. So now I'm going to go and get the data for those 10. Rather than wasting your time and getting data for 500 where half of it's rubbish anyway. So I would kind of it on its head and use it as your... customer research tool, your buyer research tool first and then use a proper data provider to actually get to the data. Does that help? Do think that will help?

John Bennett (55:31)

Yeah, I think that's that's really good. So it's about this whole concept, isn't it of

working out what parts of the process AI can do and what it can't do. And I think you're saying there, actually use it for coming up with ideas of people that you could target and actually give you a list. And then then you go and do the human part of working out what do I want to target that person? If I do get the get the contact details and so on. And I think earlier you were talking about how you use it for proposals, you use it for sales coaching. So then dipping back into the AI to kind of do that stage and just really trying to work out and I guess it comes back to as well what you talked about mapping out the process so actually this is a bit the AI is good at this is a bit it can't do and then this is bit it can do really get that clear understanding of a map of the process and where it can help and where it can't.

Corinne (56:23)

Yes.

Exactly. And if you're struggling at any point, then you can try it out. if, for example, you struggle writing a decent sales email, AI is actually pretty good at that.

as a starter for 10. So if you had those 10 and you've got their email addresses and you've given the AI a load of context, this is who we are, this is what we do, this is what we sell, write me a short introductory email, I would like to ask for a 10 minute conversation, it will do a really decent first stab at that for you. So somebody that is a founder led business owner, if you struggle with that sort of thing, then you can get it to do that.

Or you can take it to its other degree and you can provide it with loads of your customer data and say, write me an ideal customer profile. Who do I sell to? Give me a profile so that we then got one that we can use when we write blog content or when we want to find our next 50 leads. So you can use it for all of those kind of supplementary bits.

John Bennett (57:25)

I really like that. It's working out the bits it can do rather than assuming it can do it all and giving it the context. So a couple of times you mentioned things like the sales coach and you have a guide on that. So ⁓ how would people get hold of that?

Corinne (57:32)

Well, exactly, exactly. Yeah.

Yes.

Yes, so I sent out a bi-weekly newsletter called AI That Works For You. It's on the top of my LinkedIn profile.

It's also on the bottom of our website, which is ethical-sales.co.uk. So you can sign up any time and I write free guides literally probably twice a month. And I try and route it in practical day-to-day applications that an average SME or social enterprise or charity would come up against. So I try and make it as non-technical as possible and as accessible as possible for everyone. So everyone's welcome to

sign up.

John Bennett (58:26)

Brilliant,

I'll put a link to that in the show description. Superb. So I guess one question to wrap up then. ⁓ What's the one thing that you hope AI will never be able to do?

Corinne (58:29)

I don't think yet.

Yeah, so I think I probably mentioned it before, I don't want it to think for us. I don't want it to make those big decisions in the world without human intervention. I think that would be very dangerous. So I'm very much on the side of trying to put those guardrails up and think about how we control it before some...

Yeah, before some damage is done. And I think we're seeing that on a reasonably micro level at the moment, but I suspect in the next year or so there'll be a very high profile case which will involve a rogue AI data breach or an agentic failure that will maybe, I'm hoping won't do too much damage and will make us rethink.

how we can control it better in the future. That's my biggest concern, I think. Yeah.

John Bennett (59:36)

Yeah.

Now I had said that was a question to wrap up on, I don't think we can end on a note like that. So what's the one thing then that you hope it will be able to do? If you had your kind of, I wish it could do this one thing and it could do it really well, what would that be?

Corinne (59:42)

Sorry.

I've got quite a good one for you and that is build decent presentations.

So I've still yet to find an AI tool out there that can actually take your brand guidelines and turn it into something that looks good. They all say they can do it. You've got Create and Co-pilot, you've got Google AI Studio, all of them. But I've not actually found one that doesn't require you to drag and drop and move and type. And obviously, as a curriculum creator, I'm doing quite

lot of that, and my team are doing a lot of that, so I'd really like it if that could up its game a little bit. It seems to me it should be possible, and if anybody knows a good tool that they've used I'd be very welcome to have some recommendations, but I've not found it yet.

John Bennett (1:00:45)

Brilliant, yep, that sounds a good one to me. Being able to do good presentations. Okay, well hopefully, hopefully there might be a tool out there that somebody knows about and they can let you know. Well that's been brilliant Corinne. I've really enjoyed chatting to you and learnt a lot there and really enjoyed it. So thank you for your time.

Corinne (1:00:49)

Yes.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me, John. It's been great. Thank you.

John Bennett (1:01:06)

You're welcome. Thank you.