267: The Role of Tech in Your Business 

Michele Williams: Hello, my name is Michele and you're listening to Profit is a Choice.  On the podcast today is Jen McFarland founder of Marit Digital. Jen partners with small businesses and teams as they plan, assess, and improve the digital solutions that help them succeed. She helps with implementing AI to setting up web hosting and digital experience design. Today’s topic is all about tech. 

Every day, empowered entrepreneurs are taking ownership of their company financial health and enjoying the rewards of reduced stress and more creativity. With my background as a financial software developer, owner of multiple businesses in the interior design industry, educator, and speaker, I coach women in the interior design industry to increase their profits, regain ownership of their bottom line, and to have fun again in their business. Welcome to Profit is a Choice. Hi Jen, welcome to the podcast.

Jen McFarland: Thank you so much, Michele. I appreciate you having me.

Michele Williams: My pleasure. So, Jen, usually what I love to do is start by having people share a little bit about their background and, you know, some of their experiences that brought them to the place that they are right now with the business that they have today. Can you share a little bit of your story with our listeners?

Jen McFarland: Sure. Yeah. I came to entrepreneurship pretty late. It feels like I spent, almost 20 years working in higher ed. So, I started working at the help desk when I was an undergraduate at NC State and then eventually got a job working in Central IT at the university. And I spent a very long time there, doing all kinds of different tasks. Eventually, I kind of focused on leading the web team. So, it was an organization that helped, or a group within Central IT that helped all the different departments and organizations within NC State with their website needs, and then I did a couple of other jobs at Central IT over the years, but eventually, I decided to go ahead and kind of move on from the university. That was a tough pick. There's a lot of folks who spend their whole lives working at the university and it's a great institution. So it was a bit of a challenge leaving, but I wound up working for almost a year at a fully remote digital agency called Ten Up, which is a really outstanding agency, but eventually I felt like I needed to, have a little bit more flexibility than I was able to have. My kids were getting into kindergarten and so that actually, if you'd asked me before I had children, I would have said that it would take more work when they were born. But the truth is there's a lot more involved once they get to be like five or six and you're talking about camps and school, and it was becoming a challenge to stay on top of that. Having my own business was something that offered the flexibility to solve those problems while also giving me kind of the experiences that I was looking for that I had maybe felt like I was missing some at the digital agency and wanted to find my own space and my own community. It's been almost two years. It'll be two years next month, so I was well past 40 by the time I started my own business, but I really like it.

Michele Williams: And so how did you start to define what you wanted your business to offer and to provide?

Jen McFarland: Yeah, that's a great question, especially for me, because I feel like it's very much still evolving. I had some clear expectations, I would say when I started my business that I had a lot that I was going to offer, but that it would naturally hone itself into a particular industry or a particular set of services that my customers, were most anxious to utilize. And it hasn't gone that way at all. I think part of that is sort of my values for my company are quality, empathy, and partnership. And I think that's kind of led me into a place where I'm working to really understand what my customers need and try to provide it and be a partner. What I've kind of evolved into being is almost this fractional technology support person, this fractional technology officer for some of these small businesses that need a range of support, both tactical and strategic. So having this vision for how technology should work for them, but then also helping them implement it. So, I've kind of wandered into this, almost a bigger and more nebulous area, but I think it's worked out. I find myself kind of doing more and more work for my clients. So quite a few of them are return clients, or we find that our scope really increases over time because there's a lot to it, and kind of the more you get into it, the more you find those sort of niche areas that need a little bit more attention.

Michele Williams: you know, it's interesting, we've been hearing and seeing a lot more lately about fractional. Right, that term fractional. We used to just say part-time, or we would say, you know, we had used other words, but fractional is a beautiful word that we can use. But if you think about it, we often get like, CFO is one we hear a lot about. CMO, COO, and CTO were just as important. You know, I have my own software company, and in that software company, my husband plays the role of CTO because he worked in IT, and he stayed in software development for 30-plus years and so that's the role that he plays over there, and it's so necessary. But even in our smaller businesses that are not as technology-focused, they're still technology-driven. I heard one time, Jen, that all of us are running a technology business. It's just, what is the product or service that you're using technology to sell? And I think that there's some truth to that. And, you know, it's hard, especially, I mean, look, I look at my age, I'm almost 60 years old, and there are plenty of people that if they did not learn computer skills when I learned computer skills, and if they didn't keep them up over all those years, they're struggling now. You know, there are many people that are like, I can't. This is going to sound terrible, but they struggle to hire people over 45 years old because they are not familiar with the technology and it's not as natural to learn it. There's almost an inherent fear of technology. It's just not as easy unless they have been doing it and keeping up with it and learning and keeping pace with what's happening. And tech changes so quickly, and it's so quickly that the minute you get out of it, it's already bypassed you. Like heck, half the time you can stay in it and it'll bypass you if you're not watching. So really, having this CTO or somebody that you can call to ask for help, I think is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant and the fact that you're talking strategy and tactics, it's true. You can't just give somebody who doesn't have a computer background a strategy and not help them have an idea of how to implement it, because they can't do it. Like, they won't do it. They don't have the time. It's the whole reason they're calling you. So being able to kind of offer here's the strategy of what we're doing, and tactically, here's how we're going to implement it, I think is a really smart move.

Jen McFarland: Thank you. Because. Yes, with respect to the tactics and just moving forward with the implementation is so overwhelming. Yes, because they're probably not familiar with how it works these days. Even if they used to have that expertise, it moves on very quickly. But also, because it's incredibly intimidating. That first step that you're taking is some of the riskiest steps where you're not sure what's going to happen, how it's going to look, what's going to come out of it. Having somebody, I think, who's available in case things go wrong, or to hold that hand for that first step, that's going to be something, I think, that's going to help a lot of companies that, like you say, this is not their priority. They have to use tech to do their job, and to implement their business. But if you're looking at hiring, probably, a full-time tech person is not necessarily the first thing you're trying to do. You're trying to hire your expertise. So, I do think, yes, that fractional, is almost a buzzword at this point, but I'm really happy with it because I think it really represents what I felt there was a need for when I was starting my business, which is, I specifically don't do marketing. Like, there are a lot of folks out there who help with marketing, but what I saw was a lot of need for some of the harder work of making those marketing tools work for you, which is engaging with the technology and bringing it into your daily life.

Michele Williams: I love that. You know, I do a strategic planning event for my team every year for all of my clients and my past clients. We get together in the Atlanta area, usually in September, and we start doing the work. Over the last two years, one of the things I asked them to do is to bring their tech stack. When I first started doing that, they didn't know, they'd not heard that term before. It was new to them. What is for any listeners, it's the stack of all the tech that you use. It's funny because it first started with things like their project management. Like they could easily tell their CRM or their project management, but by the time they were done, they realized it was their email, it was Canva, it was, their scheduling, it was their software, Calendly or Acuity. By the time they were done, the list of the tech that they needed to use including contracts, and everything for their business was so long. And then I had them put a dollar amount beside every bit of it so they could see the cost and the depth and the breadth of the tech in their business. And that's just a great exercise for any of our listeners. Just start with what are you already in. And then we sat down and looked at, what can we get rid of. Where do we have duplication of effort? Or you made a comment a minute ago about some of the scariest first steps are getting involved with tech for the first time, like a new program or a new whatever. I would say that's true, but in addition to that, it's not using it to its full potential. And then thinking that it's a tech issue versus usability because you haven't put forth the education. I think sometimes we just think it's going to be so intuitive; we don't give ourselves a chance to sit and really ask, how do I learn this? How do I engage with this technology in a way to get the outcome that I desire?

Jen McFarland: Yes. So, a few things there. One of the services that I offer is a technology audit, which sounds like, similar to what you do, where to start with, it's a form that is really the goal is trying to unearth all of those tools that you have. Because the other thing that I see is, as people are going through that, they're findinga lot of tools that they hadn't thought of. They're also finding a lot of tools that they don't use, that they pay for. Because a lot of times we see something shiny, we sign up for it. And then also, to your other point, I think uniquely to tech, a lot of times the sort of, the learning curve tends to be a little higher at the start, and it can be, like I said, really intimidating, a little overwhelming, and maybe that stops you from embracing the technology or like you said, from using it in all the ways that it was intended to be used. And so, then you wind up with maybe multiple tools that do the same thing, or that aren't talking to each other when they should be. So, there's a lot going on to kind of the strategy of the technology tools that you're using and making sure that they're integrated and that you're not using the wrong things and that you know, all the things that they do. It is a complicated process.

Michele Williams: It is. The beauty in this is the way that I come at it is, more from a financial perspective, time management and financially. And not that you don't look at those things with them, but you're also looking at it more from, like, I'm not sitting down, going to every company and going through all of their tech and saying, I might give a recommendation based on what I see, but that's not my area that I am really drilling down on for them. Whereas for you, you're taking the audit and drilling down from a different direction than what I'm drilling down. And so, I love the way they complement each other.  Because I'm looking at it more for what are we paying, how are we spending our money, and how are we hiring our people. Like how are we using tech as a tool? But more from, you know, the overall business versus some of what I can imagine that you would also do is, how can I help you onboard the right tech? How can I help you choose the right tech? And there is a process of choosing the right technology. In my first ten years, I worked for Dun and Bradstreet software and did financial software for them. And we would have to evaluate software packages, you know, for all, like for automation, for testing software or whatever. We're constantly going through those processes. There was no just shiny thing that you followed. You went through a very stated written process on how you would evaluate software. We had to identify the business need, we had to identify the budget, we had to identify the time to onboard it, we had to identify who all the users would be and just what it would connect in with how much space it needed at the time on our servers. Like there was just this long list, this needs assessment that we had to go through. And then we would test two or three different in class. Just like if you would go out to buy a car, right, you would usually drive multiples in class. We would go through that entire process. It was just a much bigger deal. Whereas these days are, oh, you want a month free? And we just like to click and get into a piece of something and don't even know what we're doing, give it zero attention or we go buy software because somebody else told us they used it and it solved a problem in their business. I was talking to a woman this week and her comment was, I've invested in a piece of software. I'm not happy with it. Two other people that I look up to said that they used it, but she never stopped to evaluate her own business needs against what the software does. And I'm sure that you see this and go through this over and over and over with people.

Jen McFarland: I think, yeah, like you say, people will sign up for it to try it out, don't necessarily get the benefit, forget about it. get automatically subscribed to it, right? So those are the things to find, but also just the process of organizing what you have and making sure that you've kept stock of all of it, and that nothing is overlapping anything. The other thing that I find in the tech audit is the places where there are gaps because there do tend to be, again, like I say, shiny tools, because those are the things that more people are talking about, more people are using. They know that they need a CRM. Maybe they've tried a couple of different project management tools, but then if you ask them what antivirus software they have or what password manager they have, they kind of freeze and say, well, I know that's important, but I really haven't had time to look into that, and it's not really my expertise. That's another place where I feel like, this is where you need that kind of sort of technology support. It also happens, unfortunately, that I have people coming to me after the fact, right after they've been hacked or after they've had a problem after their site has gone down. and that's the scenario you don't want to be in. So that's also where the technology audit can hopefully raise awareness for the things that are missing.

Michele Williams: I love that. You mentioned in your website and some other locations about having an iterative type of framework. Talk to me about that iteration that you bring to your work with technology.

Jen McFarland: Yeah, I mean, I think the technology audit is a good example of that. So, if someone isn't coming to me for something specific, a technology audit is part of a lot of the different services that I offer, because it gives you that sort of lay of the land, like that scope. and oftentimes doing the questionnaire that I have that goes with it unearths the things that people hadn't thought about and, or the things that they are most concerned about. Maybe it was something that they weren't even aware of. A lot of times part of that process is to say, well, what, which things are your priorities, you know, and which things are nice to have. When we come back for the next steps, there's always part, of whatever proposal or whatever recommendations I have are going to be. These are the things that are top of mind. These are key for you or your business, and that is something that kind of manifests itself in multiple ways. I supported a small business that does sort of consulting for culture and HR and businesses, and they were happily using Google Workspace, but they realized both before that, but also certainly in going through the technology audit that their customers were using Microsoft 365, almost like almost all of them, and it really made more sense for them to be in that space. That became the priority because you need to make that shift, and then that's going to impact other things that can maybe come in phase two or something like that. But identifying the key steps that you have to take and then putting those other things kind of in a proper order is important.

Michele Williams: I just switched my CRM and education software and everything at the beginning of this year, and we started planning for it in probably October of last year, documenting everything, documenting all the pieces of software, going through and investigating replacement software, and then making a decision, and then literally creating. It took us three months to get everything moved because we were coming from four or five systems into one, but it was like, let's get this done, cancel that software, let's get this done, cancel that software, let's get this done. And then we were creating months of overlap so that we could make sure we didn't miss anything in the process of all of it. And at the same time, I had a change in my staff, so I was working with old and new at the same time, you know, it was a lot. We had spreadsheets on spreadsheets on spreadsheets to keep up, and Asana tasks and projects that we were running just to keep up with all of the tiny, and we're still finding little things here and there that need attention. And we were expecting that. We got most of it done, but it's a lot. And we did have to go back and iteratively go through it again. We could not have taken the whole thing at one time. There was no way. It wasn't even feasible, nor was it possible without stopping work and saying, I'll be back in the next quarter. Like, there is just no other way around it. I think that's also encouraging though, Jen, because if we tend to think we've got to do it all at once, it will shut us down because it's so big and so overwhelming and so much. But I think if we can look at it and go, I can't get it all done at once, but I can get it all done. So now how do I stair step into where I need to be, knowing that maybe by June or September or December or whatever the timeframe is, we can hit these milestones and move forward, just like we can't go build a whole new business, brand new from scratch with breadth and depth. You can't do it with tech either.

Jen McFarland: I say this about websites, but I think it applies to all tech it's a living, breathing document. I mean, you can make an update on that site, but you can be sure it's going to need another update. It cannot just be a static thing or it's not going to work for you. so, it's the same with your tech. You have to reevaluate that from time to time. You have to make changes, you have to assess, go back and look and see what's working. I'm sure that you feel wonderful about having that project behind you, and chances are you're not going to go back and say, well, I'm paying this much less and it's going this much faster because it takes more time and energy to get some of that data. But I think you could also say, probably pretty confidently offhand, that things have improved, that having just a single source for this information so much better is a huge weight off your mind, and having it done and knowing that it's not something that you have to be concerned about. That kind of stress, I think you talked about this in one of your earlier, one of your last podcasts, just the stress, weighing on your mind of having to deal with that. You know, it's something that takes time and that you're willing to pay for help to get past. To have that load off your mind, to have somebody to help you with it, to know that you can reach out to someone and get some answers that is worth it.

Michele Williams: You know, it's so interesting that you say that because I won't save any money this year on my tech changes because I had to pay. No, I didn't have to. I chose to. I could have done it myself and driven myself crazy. I chose to pay to have somebody help me implement that new software. They knew it, they were faster at it, they had the time. It made sense. I paid multiple people to implement it for me at that point. I can keep serving my clients and they can serve me and the company by helping with tech. Totally worth it. It will pay for itself next year, but this year it's not. I mean, yeah, I saved a huge amount of money, but there was an investment to get it done. But when you're looking at tech and you're looking at any investment, it's not just what is the short term, but it's how quickly do I break even, and then where do I start to have the return on that investment. But I'll say this, even though financially, it's not yet going to be a return this year, timewise. So much easier. So much easier. We're not logging into two or three different systems. We pretty much have a system, and it connects to Stripe, and that is it, and we are done. I don't have to pay for all of these independent things, because I was paying for a lot of other people to make sure that this. This site didn't get hacked, that talked to this site, that didn't get hacked, that talked to this site, that didn't get hacked. And, you know, they're all on different platforms and are they updated, the way that it was just mind-boggling. And so even from a time and a joy at doing the work, I don't feel like, oh, I don't want to have to go do that. It's like, oh, I really like to jump in and figure that one out because it's pretty straightforward, you know, and I think there is something to being able to engage with the technology in a way that actually makes you feel empowered. I think that is super important when we're looking at tech is it empowering us to do the next things. I mean, even with Metrique, the software that we have, our big thing when we created it was that we wanted it to be sticky, meaning, I didn't want it to be something that people go in once a month, and they never look at again. I want it to be something that actually helps solve the problems that they're having day in and day out around financial questions or financial decisions that they need to make that they don't have anything else to solve other than to feel like, I got to go sit down and build three spreadsheets to figure that out. I'd like for them to be able to say, let's go in Metrique and get that answer solved, but it's only as good as people go in and use it or try it, or put their data in or learn it, like, it can't solve and use data that it doesn't have. And so that's a reminder for us on both sides. We have to engage with it, but it's got to be something that we feel empowers us to be able to do the rest of our jobs really well.

Jen McFarland: Yeah, I love what you said. The value of joy is extremely underestimated, but, yeah, you can't put a dollar value on that. But it's invaluable. Something that makes you enjoy working with it and want to come back to it.

Michele Williams: That's right. That's right. So, Jen, these days we're seeing a big influx of AI, and you just about can't be in tech and not have that come across your desk, come across your computer, or be a topic of discussion. I would love to just get your thoughts on this, I mean, there are so many thoughts we could have a whole podcast just on that, I'm sure. Yeah, I'd be curious to hear, to hear what you think about AI and what are some safe ways to start engaging with it in our business, because I think there can be a nefarious side to that AI, like, there can be, most people are good, but there are some really bad eggs out there and they can be used in a really bad way. It can be used in a scammy way. I mean, you know, there's a power there, but I think we've got to temper it and be so very careful. I'd love to just hear, but you've probably done ten times more research than I have on that, but share with us all of your AI thoughts.

Jen McFarland: I mean, I'm so fortunate in some ways that I started my business when I did because it was shortly before, it was about six or eight months before Chat GPT came out, and that really was a jumping-off point for AI for so many people and more to that point, for so many businesses. From what I can tell, I've tried to do a fair bit of research, both out there in the world that people, you know, larger than me are doing, but also my own research and it seems like we are hearing about it a lot, but there's not necessarily a whole lot of people that are necessarily engaging it. I really want, this is a good example of something that I think people are intimidated about, especially small business owners, and I really want to try to encourage people to feel confident to get into this. So, I'm glad we're talking about it. I think one of the key ways that people can get into it for themselves is really just to start by doing the simple stuff, like engaging in it, where it is, as it's in front of you. AI stuff is going to pop up all the time. You're going to do a search in Google, you're going to start to get the AI answers. Maybe you take it to the next step and use a more dedicated tool like Perplexity, which is basically a search tool for AI. I love Perplexity and I strongly encourage you to check that out. Maybe you try that instead of Google and see what kind of responses you get there. Those are the easy things. Move into the places where again, AI is already integrated. If you're using Canva, you can prompt to create a new image just by typing it in. See what you get out of Canva. Same sort of thing. Maybe you're using Photoshop which has some other tools that you can prompt. So just take the leap to start with by using it where you are and what you're doing. Then once you feel comfortable with that, or if you want to try and push a little further, I would say look for some tools that are a little bit more dedicated to AI in providing extra value. One of the things that I'm a big fan of that I've been using, I haven’t for a long time already, over a year I think, is tools that will join your meetings and provide a transcript or record it, so that you can go back and listen. There are two big players in this area, and that is Otter and Fireflies, and I've used both of them. I like them both very much. So, I'm not going to give you a specific one to go for, but I would just say research what they do because they are a little distinct. And these will join your meetings and collect the information. They'll even join meetings that you are not in, assuming that the owner of the meeting approves it. So, it's possible early on when I was using this, it joined a meeting for me, and I was able to go back and read the transcript of a meeting that I missed. It will, if somebody shares their screen, take snapshots, at least in Otter, of what was shared on the screen. So, you can go back and see what you missed. And beyond that, you can go back, you're working on a project, you know that there's a specific timeline, you can't remember the details. Maybe there was, you know, some sort of reference in there that was critically important, and you didn't have notes on that. Using these tools frees you up from having to take all those details because you have a place that you can go back to and reference that information. and then you can engage more in the meeting, you can talk more directly with your client or the person that you're working with. It’s really just leaving the AI to do what the AI does best, which is kind of listen and track and record that information. And then the next step, I would say is as you start to get comfortable with the different ways that it can be integrated, just try to make it a habit. This is one of those things that I think that kind of gets in the way for people is just, they'll try it once, but then they aren't sure how to use it routinely. They aren't sure. And using it routinely is what's going to incite other use cases for you and it's going to make you think about other things that you can try. So, there are phases that you can start to get into to put it in front of you so that you remember to use it so that you're trying it for more things. So that when you find yourself with a task that you're like, oh, I hate doing this. You know, maybe somewhere there's a spark that starts to come up that says, oh, you hate doing this, can the AI do it for you? I think one of the best examples is a colleague who was like, I use AI to help me when I have to give bad news or say something that I don't want to say. And the AI is really good at, like taking the emotion out of it, coming up with the key points that I need to use and I can, you know, put that in the email or have those notes in front of me in that conversation that's a challenge, and get through it, with a little bit more grace.

Michele Williams: Yeah, I think, you know, back with the AI, good and bad, you know, you also have to be really careful with which AI tools you use, in my opinion, because they're listening, which means they know. And when we're feeding it information, it's not just using that information but most of them are not just using that information for us. They now have that information to use for somebody else who's trying to do something. So, if you've got trade secrets and you've got your secret sauce, I wouldn't be putting that in it. Don't be dropping that into AI unless you want everybody else to pick it up. You have to be seriously careful, I think, about how you do that, more generic. Like we’ve used AI sometimes when we're trying to get SEO keywords and meta tags and things like that. Like, here are the keywords. How do we write a description? This is what it would say. And here are some keywords stuff that we're putting out on the Internet. That's going to be out there anyway, that we, you know what I mean? It's, it's not anything that is super confidential. But if you've got more confidential internal documents and things, I would, personally, this is just me, I would hesitate to drop those into an AI engine that I didn't fully understand how all of that was being used because I could sit down and say tell me what so and so would do with this, and it could come back and tell you. So, I do think we have to be super, super careful. You know, even a lot of the websites we have now have the chats at the bottom right corner where you can ask questions and it's not all humans. It's answering you until it hits a certain point. Kind of like automated software when you start to use the telephone to call, and it would, you know, you would drop through the automation. So, you're right, it's in front of us everywhere and we don't need to necessarily be afraid of it, but we do have to do our due diligence for where we want to interact.

Jen McFarland: yeah, and I would, I would say part of that is, you know, AI has been around since before Chat GPT and this is something that we often overlook. So, it was already part of Google searches, like that data was already being collected, it's already, it was scanning, the Internet and pulling that content in. So, if you have information that's proprietary information on your website, which you shouldn't anyway, but be sure that's the kind of thing that's already been scraped by an AI. And to that point, this is another sort of thing that I've done more training on and talking to potential clients about is that you need to make sure that you are protecting your website from being indexed by Google, but also from being searched by an AI, if that's something that you don't want your site to be scraped by an AI. But we have to remember that we've also been talking to Alexa and Siri for the last however many years, and all of that is stuff that is going into that larger body of data. So, it's something to be thinking about all the time. One of the things I will say with that is there is going to come a time very quickly where you are paying for AI, whether you want to use AI or not. It's integrated into a lot of the tools we use and even though we haven’t necessarily seen price increases in our technology tools because of those AI features, that's coming. Likewise, the research that's been done on this is that Chat GPT four or GPT four, and the more evolved versions of GPT are vastly better than 3.5 or the free versions. And those are the ones that are going to give you the option to keep your data private. So, it's already past time where when you're talking about investment in tech and budgeting for tech, AI needs to be a line item, and it needs to be something that you're thinking about bringing into your stack.

Michele Williams: Don't disagree with that at all. I don't know a lot of them because I don't do, I don't currently do any interior design for other people, but I know there are a lot of interior design-specific AI programs out there. There are a couple of people who teach some of the AI classes within the interior design industry that you can certainly go in, you can either start from scratch or they can put in a picture and say add this, add that. I sometimes see, I don't remember, I think it might be on Twitter, somebody will say, here's a picture. Can you remove the guy in the back left? Or can you put me in a tropical location because I really need it, or make me look more like a business headshot? They're using AI tools to go in and manipulate these photos. and I'll say this with AI as well. So, number one, there are good use cases for that. Like you were saying, there are really great opportunities, almost like using it as a rendering tool. You know, we have a kitchen. We're going to put this kind of hood up or use this or change the color. There are ways that we can use it, that we can get fast input and answers so that we can make the next decisions in front of us. But we also are going to need to be very careful and how we trust the data that we are reading, seeing, and watching. Somebody who wanted to be my Facebook friend. This was a year ago and when I looked at it, it was a woman that was almost too beautiful for words. Like, you know what I mean? Like, oh, yeah, I can appreciate a beautiful woman, right? I see many beautiful women.

Jen McFarland: Yeah.

Michele Williams: But this woman was almost what you would say, it was off-putting.

Jen McFarland: Yeah.

Michele Williams: Right?

Jen McFarland: I know what you mean.

Michele Williams: Yeah, it was like something, all right. So, then I looked at it, and it was, they were an interior designer, and they had started being friends with people in the interior design industry, and they had hit me up with a friend request. Well, the minute I looked at it, all of my warning bells started going off.

Jen McFarland: Good.

Michele Williams: This is entirely to be something that feels weirdly odd about this picture. So, I'm, like, zooming in on my phone, got the funkiest teeth. It's kind of like people that get like six fingers. It's almost like, you know how your two front teeth are a little bit bigger than the rest? All of hers were the same size. It almost looked like a lizard where every tooth was on the same side. And I was like, that's the problem. This is not a real person. There is no real person that would smile that big if their teeth looked like that. That's not real. And then I went from picture to picture, and I could almost see, like, where it got shadowy and fuzzy, like, you know, the tells that you now know. So, I talked to a couple of my friends, and I said, I see you're friends with this person, do you know them? And they're like, no, we don't know them. I said, pull up her picture. They pull it up on Facebook. I said, you know, dial into that, look in, and they're like, oh, my goodness, what is that? I'm like, that is not a real person you just are friends with not a real person. But I say that because it's going to be easy to be scammed if we're not careful. There are so many scams going around right now. And so, there is an awesome part of it, but there's another part where we really just need to be able to look and know the challenge and, to your point, Jen, it's going to get better and better, which means it's going to be harder and harder to decipher what's AI and what is not. I had heard that, and you may know this I don't know, that if we're putting out things that are large-scale AI-driven or AI-written, that we really need to acknowledge that it is supported or done or powered by AI. I don't know if people will necessarily go that route to do it. They would really like to take credit for doing it but, you know, they're running these things like your higher ed. I think it was turnitin.com, right? You know, the "Turn It In" where people would have to turn in their papers, and it would check to see and they are catching people left and right with all types of plagiarism and all kinds of problems with AI use right now. through things like that.

Jen McFarland: Yeah. Oh, boy. Lots there. yeah. So of course, when the first GPT came out in November of 2022, I think one of the first things was that students started writing papers with it and then turning them in. The next wave that followed up was a bunch of websites that checked that information to see if it was AI-generated. Then the follow-up to that was an AI tool that was better than the checker. Then the follow-up to that was the checker that was better than the AI tool that was. Yeah, yeah.

Michele Williams: Talking about iterative.

Jen McFarland: Yes, exactly. The truth is, I do not think that there is a tool out there that is good enough to actually be able to confidently say if something is AI-generated at this point. The tools have gotten too good, and the other thing I'll say with that is that the risk of accusing someone of generating something with AI when they really wrote it is also significantly negative. So, there's going to be negative circumstances for sure. I want to go back and highlight the moment where you were like your warning bells rang because that is what we need. In fact, when I think about my daughter, who's seven, by the time she gets to high school, it's not that she won't know how to write an article, but I'm sure that she'll be writing an article with the help of AI, whether for research or helping to clean up paragraphs or whatever else. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to be focusing on the pieces that support that kind of existence. Those warning bells, being, smart and reading through the information and assessing it, and critical thinking skills which have maybe fallen by the wayside a little bit, are more important than ever in the age of AI. So those are the pieces I think that we need to be paying attention to. To the point of images, one of the biggest use cases I have for AI is generating images. AI is getting, again, like you say, better and better at that. If I want to do something custom or a logo, I'm going to pay somebody to do that for sure. But if I'm looking for a filler image for a header of a blog post or, or something like that, a lot of times what you're going to be able to get from an AI tool is going to really be able to match the exact circumstance in a way that you're not going to even be able to find an image even if you paid for it in a lot of cases.

Michele Williams: That's right. extremely custom.

Jen McFarland: Yeah, extremely custom. And you can be more conscious of diverse representation. I completely agree that a lot of what you get back is almost alarming and it's perfection, but you can know prompt to work around that kind of stuff. And then you get really great images where you don't have to worry that the faces of a person and did you get, you know, a signature to say that it's okay for you to use that picture. It can be the kind of detailed scenario that you want to express in that graphic. So that is a huge use case that I've used for, not all my images, but it's a strong way. And I think a lot of people don't think about that necessarily with AI, but it's a really, really solid use case.

Michele Williams: Yeah, I would, I would agree for sure. I think just awareness is the whole thing. Right. When's the right time to use it? How are we using it? If somebody asks us, I think there's, an honesty and an integrity conversation of, yeah, we, we work with AI, not, I did all this by myself with pen and paper. It doesn't mean we got necessarily run out there and tell it, but I just think we have to be honest. I don't know. Well, I'm not a, like, if somebody were to write a whole dang book using AI.

Jen McFarland: Oh, sure, yeah.

Michele Williams: Right.

Jen McFarland: So, and I mean, it's not so good that you're not going to be able to tell, right?

Michele Williams: That's right, that's right. But for example, there's an amazing company that does renderings that are so lifelike, they almost, it's hard to tell it's a rendering, but if somebody were to ask, they would be clear that that was a render. Like, they wouldn't lie and try to pass it off as a photo. Now, if you took it as a photo when you first looked at it, that's on you. But they're not going to not admit that it's rendering when it is a rendering. That's what I'm saying. So, we hope that it would rise to the occasion that it would look really great and not look funky on our website. I mean, we wouldn't use it if it did all that. But, you know, if we had to stand up in a court of law and, like, talk about the provenance of that photo, we could admit that it was a rendering or AI-generated or whatever.

Jen McFarland: Well, and I believe it was just in this past year that the Nobel Prize, or the Pulitzer, is it? No, I think it was Nobel came out with this. I'd have to go back and double-check. That said, it's fine if you use AI to support some of your work, but you have to tell us how you used it.

Michele Williams: That's the point. Yes.

Jen McFarland: Right. Yeah. And to that point, too, I would say, like, you know, talking about it for education or really any scenario, I will work with a client, and I will use AI to support writing for them. If we've had this conversation and we know that we're doing it and there's intent behind it, it's never going to be the final product. It's always going to get revisions from me. But any assignment, any project from a client, I think it's something that more and more needs to become part of the conversation, either upfront it's always okay if you use AI, it's never okay if you use AI, or we need to talk about it for each scenario because it needs. Those parameters have to be set.

Michele Williams: That's exactly the same point that I was making. I mean, we've had that conversation in my business. What are we using, and where are we using? How do we use it? Where do I not want to use it? What do I not want to put into it? What am I willing to put into it, at least because it's still the wild, wild west? It is really the wild, wild west. No doubt about that. So, Jen, tell me this. What is your ideal client that would call you? So, if somebody's listening to this podcast and they're thinking,  I wonder if I would be an ideal client to work with her. I wonder if she would be like, you're too big, you're too small, you have too much tech, not enough tech. I only like to work with this piece of tech. You know what I mean? There are all kinds of questions that go through our minds when we hear these conversations, or this is all so new to me. What is it, though, that when they call you you get really jazzed about thinking about the difference that you could make for them and their business.

Jen McFarland: Yeah, that's a great question. So, most of the people that I work with are solopreneurs or small businesses with somewhere between like three or five to maybe 30 or 50 people. So again, it's still in a place where you don't necessarily have a dedicated person for that tech piece. and oftentimes what brings them to me is to start with a big problem. So, sometimes that has to do with their website. I do a lot of web work for clients, but it tends to be, again, not in the marketing, but more in the functionality improvements kind of thing. So, it's a case of, we have this website, but it's not mobile friendly. We have this website, but the color contrast is a disaster. The brand is not coming across, it's difficult for people to use. We have this website, but it was done in 1997, and it's not up to web standards or compliant. It's not accessible or something like that, or I need to have this custom post type. I need to have this separate section of my content that people can search on, or people can buy things from, or people get documentation from. So, a lot of times where I'm working is kind of taking the aspect of growing organically, where they've kind of solved that problem as it's come up, maybe with more and more pages in their site or resources in another tool that you're pointing people to, and you want to try to bring those together or make them function more holistically. Those projects are really exciting because I always feel like you're improving efficiency. Hopefully, you're saving money and time, but you're also making that organization feel better about how they are conveying their messages and conveying their most important content to their customers. So, it's really empowering for the users and the business and then also the clients. Those are, I think, the ones that get me excited.

Michele Williams: Yeah, that's fun. That's fun. And then the audit is that something that you do as part of the onboarding process when you start working with a client?

Jen McFarland: So, I have a separate onboarding form that is just for us to make sure that we're working together in the best ways possible. The audit does not go with all of the services. Again, most of the time people come to me with a specific project, but the audit is something that I would strongly encourage for anybody who knows that they need help and needs to understand the lay of the land. Like, I feel like there's probably not as many people self-selecting to go through the audit as they should. But I understand that it's hard to go down that road. But I think in a lot of cases, the audit will pay for itself just in finding the tools that you're not using or streamlining a few processes, even if you don't go into a larger project. With me down the line, a lot of times, almost with every client when I'm doing this, what winds up happening I genuinely can't tell, it's at least four or five of my clients who have a to-do item of having a security assessment and or a password manager implemented that's like, on their radar to do before we're done with our project, because that's always something that the clients aren't doing. Most recently, it's kind of been another place where there's been an uptick in cookie consent for websites. That feels like picking up across the board, but that's another place where folks have had those for a long time. The legislature is now talking a little more about privacy and implementing some sort of actual privacy regulation, similar to what California, Virginia, and some other states have. So, at that point, there's more of a need, more of an expectation that you're covering the privacy of your users, particularly for your website. So, the cookie consent is something that's more and more rising to people's radar. There's always something going on in tech. Earlier this year, in Washington, people who were sending bulk mail, Google and Yahoo came out with some new rules about that and there were lots of people who, came to me and were like, I have no idea what this means. Please, please help.

Michele Williams: That one wasn't. That was a headache for some of us. It was a headache because it wasn't as easy and straightforward as it was made out that it was going to be.

Jen McFarland: Yeah, well, and I mean, you don't know. Someone goes in and edits their DNS records or changes their DMARC, you know, once every five years, maybe. So, of course, it's something that you don't have the expertise on.

Michele Williams: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, Jen, where are you hanging out? Tell us where you're hanging out so people can find you if they want to talk.

Jen McFarland: Yeah. So, I will say if the AI stuff intrigued you, my colleague Sarah Eganmorne and I, she works at NC State and she and I do a monthly AI cafe where we talk about an article that has come out recently about AI and we just sort of chat over lunch. I think our next one is actually tomorrow. and we're going to be talking about AI agents, which are sort of tools that you can program to do multiple things for you in the AI. don't let that sound intimidating or scare you. You can read the article, but it's a very casual conversation and we're happy to talk about all kinds of different topics. So that's something that we run through LinkedIn. So, if you just do a search for AI Cafe, you can come and chat with us there. I also offer classes almost every month, they're always in person, but sometimes they're also online on a variety of topics from just the basics of AI to implementing AI in your daily life, talking about SEO. There's all kinds of privacy, I have a security and privacy class so you can watch those on my website or sign up when I'm offering them online. I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter to find out what's going on and get some of these tips and tricks.

Michele Williams: Awesome, and your website is maritdigital.com, right? We'll have all that in the show notes as well. Well Jen, thank you so much. It's been such a great conversation and one that I'm sure we'll probably get to iterate on and revisit over and over again. But thank you for bringing it to the forefront today.

Jen McFarland: I really appreciate you having me. It's been a great talk.

Michele Williams: You're welcome. Thanks, Jen, thank you so much for the conversation today. Make sure you check out the AI Cafe on LinkedIn and Jen's website at Marit Digital.

Learning to view your company both strategically and tactically can make a huge difference. If you need help, it's good to ask. I know I ask for help in areas that are not in my wheelhouse. So please, if you can, give yourself that same gift. If you need tech help, give Jen a call. If you need help with your business or your financial strategy, give us a call. You can do that by going to scarletthreadconsulting.com and signing up for a discovery call.

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