How Should You Use AI Today? With Village Labs' Bradford Church

A better way to use the tools to your advantage

Bradford is the Co-Founder and CPO at Village Labs. He's a seasoned entrepreneur and has led product teams in tech for almost a decade, including at Uber. His most recent startup prior to Village was The Routing Company, a transit tech company, where he was CPO and remains a close advisor. He believes in the transformational power of transit, technology, and bourbon.

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Episode overview:

• Bradford Church, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Village Labs, shares his journey in the AI space and his "oh sh-t" moment when he realized AI's potential to fundamentally change how businesses operate.

• Part 1 of our conversation explores how normal professionals should be using AI today, with Bradford emphasizing the importance of experimentation to find where AI adds value.

  • Bradford discusses the future of AI in the workplace, including the concept of anticipatory AI that predicts user needs before they arise, potentially replacing traditional search and chat interfaces.

• Part 2 delves into the ethical considerations and potential societal impacts of AI, and the need for a vision of how AI should benefit humanity.

  • The conversation concludes with both us ruminating on the future of human-AI interaction, including the possibility of AI becoming a significant part of our social circles and daily decision-making processes.
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🧠 Big Question:

How should you be using AI to make your life better today?

• So much of the AI conjecture is about where things are going (and what we should be afraid of). Surprisingly little of the coverage I see is dedicated to how normal working professionals can be using AI today to improve their lives.

  • Bradford contends that anybody who uses a computer regularly for work can find $20 worth of monthly value from AI products. He recommends buying either ChatGPT Plus or Claude's latest Anthropic model.

  • I happen to pay for both because I enjoy comparing their latest functionalities when one has a new release - but I definitely think you could get away with just picking one. Claude seems to be a better writer, ChatGPT is more analytical.

Some specific work use cases we share:

• I talk about dictating notes via voice memo, then getting them transcribed and having AI make all my to-do lists and write first drafts that don't require precision.

  • This has transformed a lot of the times when I used to consume podcasts into times I’m productively creating.

  • In full transparency, I'm actually dictating this on an early morning run through Piedmont Park (which is one way to make sure you keep a conversational pace.)

• I like to think of AI as a prosthesis for thinking and a risk-free brainstorming partner.

  • If I'm creating anything subjective (lately it's been a hiring plan and a bonus structure for an employee, a few different training workshops, member packet information for The Little Gym), I'll either make that and then ask AI to improve it, or suggest three or four different ways to think about it.

• Bradford's contexts are a little bit more analytical. He thinks about scraping data from PDFs and making them into Excel files, coding assistants and translation use cases.

Non-work use cases:

• Just a lightning round of quick use cases things I've asked ChatGPT about lately include recipe suggestions and cooking temperatures for meat, parenting suggestions and role plays (the moth is not scary enough to come into our room at night!), even creative workout suggestions if I'm feeling stagnant.

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💡 Bold Idea:

Village Labs wants to automate your company's progress report meeting

• If you've ever worked for a company, you have likely experienced the rhythm of preparing for internal status meetings.

  • At best, this is a somewhat tedious process of consolidation and progress sharing. At worst, it can be a major time suck and something that requires playing politics and continuous self-promotion.

• Village Labs has built a tool that can scan all of the document creation across your company and aggregate those into memos that provide real-time updates to management.

  • This saves teams dozens of hours each week, letting them be more productive, advancing the ball on their priorities rather than just sharing statuses.

• There are certainly challenges to this which Bradford and I discuss, namely that some status update writing is crucial for thinking through how to do good work. And then there's also enduring "big brother" concerns, but largely the advances it promises in productivity and time saving are enticing.

• I love the old management adage, "if someone can do something 80% as well as me, I delegate it 100% of the time." The list of what a machine can do 80% as well as me is going to continue to grow in a way that I can spend more of my energy where I add differentiated value.

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🎯 Better Living

AI can help nudge us towards becoming the person we want to be

• Bradford and I got into into some deeper social & spiritual waters in the latter half of the podcast - for instance, I asked him if our kids will have AI friends?

  • It feels inevitable. And there are lots of offshoot questions. How do those get trained? And on what value sets?

• If we have an endlessly available understanding, empathetic, personalized AI programs to talk to, we're likely going to spend a lot of time with it. And you know the saying, "you are the sum total of the five people you spend the most time with." AI will very likely be among our five influencers.

  • So the question becomes: what do we want to be shaped and formed into? Do we want to become more loving, patient, rested, compassionate, present?

  • If so, AI will deliberately help us do that. But if we're relatively unintentional and willing to cede our attention (and dollars) to programs that either make us work harder and/or compete for us to passively consume them, then we're at risk of arriving in a much worse place

  I suppose if I'm honest, a major aim of this podcast is to help form me and the people listening in a positive way that will help us shape a better future. Let’s go there together.

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Questions for reflection:

• What are you using AI for today that improves your productivity? Please share!

• How do you envision AI shaping your personal growth in the future?

Once again, please find the episode linked here: