We React to AI as a Teammate (OpenAI, Google Announcements)

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Zakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. We're continuing our series on Team Dynamics. I'm Stephen Zakach here with Tullio Siragusa.
In the past episodes, we've gone over negative and positive personas in Team Dynamics. We've covered a playbook for peak team performance. Now, there's another member of the team that people are going to have to wrap their heads around, and that's AI.
Just this week, as we record this, Google showed off an upcoming feature called AI Teammates, agents that can answer questions on your emails, your meetings, and other data within that Google workspace. And Microsoft is going to have the equivalent at some point as well. They already got that integrated. So OpenAI also showed off something which we're going to get our reaction to in a second. So when we talk about these team dynamics, we want to be on the leading edge and talk about AI as a teammate.
So I don't know how many of you are knee-deep in the AI development like I am, but I'm telling you, it's coming. It sounds like a joke with having AI as a teammate, but the latest tech that's dropped this week, AI is just becoming more and more lifelike and more engaging, more humanish. We're still aren't quite there yet, but it's becoming more and more trained on us to be more like us. I want to get a reaction to an AI video, but first, Tullio, do you use AI weekly, daily? How often do you use AI right now?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:57)
So I will argue that AI as a teammate is already here. The difference is it's not interacting in a meeting with us, right? It's kind of like we work with this teammate, but they stay in the background. They're like a little secret weapon in the background.
I use AI regularly now. I have fully integrated into everything I do because it allows me to be more efficient, more accurate, and allows me to do a lot more in a shorter period of time.
In fact, I wouldn't be able to effectively do what I do as a fractional executive, producing the equivalent of a full-time executive without AI. So if I do an analysis or if I'm looking at research information or trying to make some decision or I need to look at market data, I'm able to triangulate things that would have taken sometimes days, if not weeks very quickly. I wouldn't say in seconds, there's a lot of prompting and a lot of work to get the outcome you want, but definitely within hours, I can get a lot done that would normally have taken a lot longer.
And so it's just an effective tool. I have it even on my mobile phone, so I speak into it and I'll say, how's the best way that I can say this or I want to organize my thoughts, and I might have a bunch of ideas that I want to organize into a message. So historically, I would have done like my mapping for things like this to prepare how to communicate something really intricate and complicated in a simple way. But now it's like you just give it your thoughts. Here's what I want to convey. I want you to convey it in a very simple, empathetic way and it captures it. And then I could work with that. So to me, I already have a teammate that I use daily, that I work with daily. I wish it was more interactive, in fact, because I've kind of embraced partnering with AI as a way to be more effective. What I do day in and day out.

**Stephen Zakach** (3:53)
Yeah, I think like last year, early last year, I don't know, January, February, generative AI just kind of took off. And I think for a lot of people, they kind of had to retrain how they go about stuff and develop this new muscle that they hadn't quite used before to lean on AI for some things that they weren't possible before. So this is like, this is a big transition. And I don't know, you know, everyone's heard about AI, this and that, and they're probably getting sick of it. But I'm just telling you, just wait. So remember when we were going from like a flip phone to the smartphone? That was a pretty big transition.
That changed behaviors, you know, in your life, in so many different ways. Generative AI is kind of like that transition, but I think actually it will probably end up being similar to that transition from the pre-internet to the internet, for those of us old enough to remember that. Just this massive change in everything. And people probably aren't aware that's what's coming.