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The Future of Creativity: Pete Sena on AI and Branding
Pete Sena records himself working, then asks an AI for 10 things he can automate. His approach to prompts, agents, and getting a fearful team to try AI.
Pete Sena turns on Loom while he works and talks out loud about what he is doing. Then he hands the transcript to an AI with one ask: "tell me 10 things that I can easily automate to save me time."
Pete is a creative strategist and the founder of Digital Surgeons, which he started out of his dorm room. He also runs The Resonance, a venture studio for early stage SaaS founders. He calls himself "obsessed with creative productivity," and the Loom trick is a good example of what that looks like day to day.
Record the work, then ask
His rule is simple: "Anything you do more than once can be accelerated or automated."
He sorts his day into shallow thinking tasks and deep thinking tasks. The shallow pile is where automation starts. For the Loom review, he said OpenAI or Gemini are two of the better tools for that use case.
From there he scripts it. He builds agents with knowledge (your documents, your meeting transcripts) and tools (web search, weather, and tools he has built himself, like an image generator).
The input decides the output
Pete talks about the input-output loop. In his words, "the way you frame the question, the way you frame the context, the way you frame the ask, ultimately dictates what you might be able to get back."
His bedtime story example makes it concrete. If you say "write me a children's story," he said, "it's going to go where it wants to go." So he gets specific. A relaxing story that ends with a lesson, in the likeness of Dr. Seuss, for his three-year-old son, who likes tow trucks, cars, and playing at the park. And it has to take no longer than two minutes read aloud, "because otherwise I want more stories."
His shorthand for all of it: "garbage in garbage out."
The same habit pays off at work. "I'll have an idea at two in the morning when I can't sleep and I would never dare message a team member of mine," he said. He talks it through with his AI instead, and by the time his team wakes up, "I can have a fully articulated brief ready to go for them."
I told him about opening my pantry, babbling about everything I could see, and asking for three dinner recipes. I ended up making a mushroom risotto I never would have tried. Pete one-upped me: ChatGPT can now look through your camera and tell you what it sees. He also shares his screen with Gemini when he is learning new software, because "all the software manuals suck."
You have to taste to taste
Pete stays current by experimenting with every tool he can and pushing them past what they were designed to do. He carves out time in his day or his week for it, reads newsletters, and gets his hands in the tools. He is also blunt about titles: "anybody who says they're an expert is full of crap."
His message to executives was direct. "Even if you're a CEO listening to this, don't just relegate and delegate this to your staff."
I added my own push on the call. Pay the twenty dollars for one of these tools. The paid version versus the free version is night and day.
Agents need a human in the loop
Pete thinks agentic AI is ready in some industries. One company told him they were seeing about a 22 percent increase in EBITDA, four or five months after his engagement with them wrapped.
Healthcare is a different story. There, a 1 percent error rate could mean millions of lives. His answer is a human in the loop: a defined problem space, a set trigger or schedule, and someone validating that the AI is not hallucinating. As he put it, "the devil's in the eval."
Fear is the blocker
When Pete runs AI readiness assessments, one of the most common reasons programs stall is that "people are afraid if they use the AI, they will lose their job."
That fear is not coming from nowhere. Pete told me about a partner at a large firm who said he "needs one tenth of the amount of associates each year now because of tools like Harvey."
His fix is education, and meeting people where they are. He also said "people don't know what's possible until they see what's possible." So leaders have to "create a safe space for failure, create a safe space for experimentation," and then show the team what good looks like.
What to do this week
- Record one work session. Turn on Loom for an hour, run the transcript through an AI, and ask for 10 things you could automate.
- Rewrite one vague prompt. Add the audience, the style, the length and the output format. Compare it to what you got before.
- Put time on your own calendar. Do not hand this to your staff. Pay for one tool and use it on real work.
- Add a human check to every agent. Decide who reviews the output and how you will know it is wrong.
- Write the one-page rollout. Pete's version, straight from the episode: "Here's how we are using them today. Here's how we suggest trying them. Do this, don't do this. Here's some examples. Here's some guardrails. There's a policy and then go."
Be like water
Pete closed the leadership segment with this: "if data is the new oil, AI is the new water. And I encourage people to be like water."
The full conversation is on AI with Bry. You can find more from Pete at petesena.com and connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter/X.
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Episode's Transcript
Please understand that a transcription service provided the transcript below. It undoubtedly contains errors that invariably take place in voice transcriptions.
Bryan (00:00.953)
Hey everybody, welcome back to AI with Bryan, the podcast where we are exploring how to learn, leverage and lead with artificial intelligence. I am your host, Bryan Dennstedt. Thanks for being here. Today we are diving into the transformative power of AI in the realm of creativity and business growth. Our guest is Pete Sena. He is a serial entrepreneur. He's a creative strategist and founder of Digital Surgeons.
Pete has been at the forefront of blending design, technology, and AI to help brands craft compelling narratives and drive demand. From launching digital surgeons from his dorm room to advising Fortune 500 companies, Pete's journey is a testament to the fusion of creativity and innovation. He's also the mind behind The Resonance, a venture studio for early stage SaaS founders, and DistricT, a co-working ecosystem fostering entrepreneurial growth.
Pete's mission is clear. Help founders and brand leaders design demand by connecting story, strategy, and systems. And you can learn all about Pete and his work at petesena.com. And welcome to the show, Pete. Thanks for being here.
Pete Sena @petesena (01:15.534)
Thanks, Bryan, appreciate that. Whoever wrote that, I appreciate the kind words. I guess I've been up to a lot in the past 20 something years now, haven't I?
Bryan (01:17.101)
That is an imp...
Bryan (01:23.649)
I was going say that is as an impressive intro. Congrats. But help people out just so. And we'll do this at the end too. But how do you spell Pete Cena where they can find out more?
Pete Sena @petesena (01:33.304)
Yeah, so fun fact, so it's Pete Sena, but most people don't know that. No worries at all. It's S-E-N-A, so P-E-T-E-S-E-N-A.com. That's my personal website, and it kind of jumps off to all of my companies from there. I am not related to John Cena with a C, the wrestler, but I like to think that I might be able to body slam him on a good day.
Bryan (01:36.403)
Sorry.
Bryan (01:56.041)
Nice. There you go. Well, apologies for the last name. I've got a tricky one too. So, but again, thanks. That's right. Exactly. Well, again, Pete, thanks for being here. I want to dive straight into like the learn segment. So let's start with that. Your extensive experience is, is overwhelming to me at times. So what is new or surprising in the age of AI that you've learned recently?
Pete Sena @petesena (02:00.492)
I wouldn't even try your last name. I'm just like, hey, Bryan, what's up? I just keep it.
Pete Sena @petesena (02:26.67)
think the way I'd answer that question most directly is the pace of change is unlike anything I've ever seen. And to unpack that a little bit, what I would say is since large language models and the kind of big onset of generative AI, obviously made famous by OpenAI when they first launched ChatGPT back in, I believe, 2022, it's insane to believe that just in a couple of years, the entire world has changed, you know, to the fact where like I'll be in an Uber and, you know,
the Uber drivers using ChatGPT while driving the car. And I mean that to say like, everyone has reached this point of ubiquity where they're being exposed to these tools on a regular basis. And it's fundamentally shifting and transforming how people live and conduct their lives personally and professionally, all the above.
Bryan (03:16.841)
Absolutely. mean, I think people that have been resistant to it probably don't even realize that they're secretly using it when they do certain activities around here. When you use Yelp or Uber for that matter, there's some AI helping behind the scenes at this point. That's for sure. I know you're so deep into this creative process too. Can you help unpack for us a little bit around, you know, the creative process with regards to AI and what you're seeing in that space too?
Pete Sena @petesena (03:43.128)
Yeah, absolutely. So just for those that I haven't had the pleasure to meet, which is probably most people on this podcast, what I would say is I'm obsessed with creative productivity. So the angle that I come at when using these tools is I like to think of this as an army of experts that I can tap into. For most of you that you're probably using ChatGPT or maybe Google Gemini or Clawd Anthropic on a daily basis. And if you're not,
Highly recommend starting to explore those tools. But what I would say to Bryan's question is really when I think about how to solve any problem, I think it all comes down to like this idea of the IO loop or the input output loop, right? Which is what you put into the AI, you know, the way you frame the question, the way you frame the context, the way you frame the ask, ultimately dictates what you might be able to get back. And what I think is really interesting now with all of these tools is you can use them to generate text, images, videos, you know, so many different things.
Um, so at the end of the day, the way that I approach creativity is by just connecting things, right? My, one of my favorite ever quotes on, on it comes from Steve Jobs, of course, famous founder of Apple, where he says, you know, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So I think that's a really good thing to remember because a lot of these large language models, um, even though many of them now can access the internet with, their tool calling, um,
the knowledge that's in them is the knowledge that's in them at the point of training and post-training. So they do make mistakes, they do hallucinate. I tell people all the time that ChatGPT and large language models are basically clippy on steroids for those of us that have ever seen Microsoft's Clippy where he tries to predict the next word. So yeah, I hope that answers the question.
Bryan (05:28.907)
No, yeah, it totally does. And I'm just curious, like, I feel like you and I are on the bleeding edge of this AI wave that we're riding on. You know, how are you staying up to date with the rapid advancements in AI and design and those kinds of things?
Pete Sena @petesena (05:44.462)
Yeah, I mean, one of things I say to people a lot, Bryan, is, you know, how do you acquire taste? You have to taste to taste, is what I always tell people. And I think the answer to your question, the way that I'm staying on top of these things is experimenting with all of the tools and really pushing them beyond what I think many of them were designed to do. And, you know, asking the AI just different types of questions or different type of results or different types of...
Quests, think, is yielding some new edge cases. And I love just using creativity with these tools to kind of push it. To be more specific, I use this as my business coach, as my life coach, as a way to come up with date ideas or things to do with my toddler, as much as I'm using it to help write statements of work or any of the things that we do as business professionals. So yeah, that's how I find myself using these tools on a regular basis.
You know, I think anybody who says they're an expert is full of crap. But what I would say is I consider myself to be, you know, pretty on the, on the know in terms of the latest, greatest. And I, I think the, the really tactical answer to the question would be, I just carve out time in my day or carve out time in my week to make sure that I'm staying abreast of these things. And that might look like reading newsletters on the topic. That might look like just getting my hands on being in the tools. But I would, what I would implore everyone, I know you deal with a lot of executives.
is even if you're an executive, even if you're a CEO listening to this, don't just relegate and delegate this to your staff. Like I highly recommend like dive in, spend some time in these tools. You'd be surprised how it might spark some new ideas to really carry your vision forward.
Bryan (07:27.961)
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Very, very well said. I have to have to add for those of you that are still might be resistant. Pay the twenty dollars for one of these tools because the twenty dollar version versus the free version is night and day. But I absolutely love it. And I think, you know, you have an amazing newsletter as well that you put published with some of the gems that you find each week as well. Right. And you can get that on your website. I know I've subscribed to it and I've learned a couple of things. So I appreciate your newsletter on that.
Pete Sena @petesena (07:49.592)
Thank you. Adieu.
Pete Sena @petesena (07:56.45)
My pleasure, yeah, I know. And for anybody that does check that out, it's on petecenta.com. It's a free newsletter and again, I respond to every email. So if you actually respond to the message you get from me, that doesn't just go to a robot, though I do have some AI agents that kind of help me with things, but I read every email and I will respond to every email. So if you have questions or those kinds of things, feel free to reach out. But yeah, mean, thank you for mentioning that, Bryan. I really, I like to treat it like a scientist in a laboratory.
Right? For me, my newsletter is sort of like, I have questions, I have ideas and I lean into them. You know, a great example of that is just a weeks ago, I had a colleague of mine saying, you know, he only uses AI for business. So I really quickly built an app that I demoed for him and I featured in my last newsletter edition, which you might've seen where it's like, okay, describe who you are and I'll have an AI generate personal ideas for you to make your life more fun and better. So that's just a perfect example of like how these tools can really
enrich our lives. And, you know, there's really two narratives going around the eye, right? One, it's going to take over the world and lose all of our jobs. And then the other, it's, you know, it's going to really 10x or 100x, you know, what's possible in the work that we do. So as a knowledge worker myself, and someone who has been a knowledge worker for 20 plus years, I am equally as excited as I am terrified about what these tools mean for the future.
Bryan (09:19.353)
Same here, same here. And I have to say, if you have not used the AI in your personal life, please start. Because like just open the pan. I did it just the other day. I opened the pantry. I babbled about all the stuff I could see. And I said, I don't know what to make for dinner. Please come up with three recipes for me. And it sped out one. And I made this beautiful mushroom risotto. I would have never made it if I hadn't.
Pete Sena @petesena (09:43.438)
Let me give you a better idea, Bryan. So what you can actually do now is if you open ChatGPT and you're on their newest model and you click on the bottom, you can actually click on a button and it actually has video and video capability where it can see things now. And you can say like, what do you see in the video right now?
Bryan (10:00.873)
Nice. Just take a picture of my pantry.
Pete Sena @petesena (10:09.388)
and it'll basically tell you out loud what it sees and whatever. So rather than just babbling and prompting, what this is referring to, folks, is something called multimodal AIs, which basically means that it's not just text, it can also see image, it can also see video. So what that essentially means is that the machines are getting closer to having five senses like we have as humans. So I love that functionality. Google recently released something where you can stream your screen.
Bryan (10:14.776)
Yeah.
Bryan (10:29.687)
Yeah.
Pete Sena @petesena (10:36.558)
So one of the things that I use a lot is if I'm using a new software and I'm like, well, you know, let's be honest, right, Bryan, like all the software manuals suck, right? So typically the old world, we'd just go Google something. Now I just turn on, know, Gemini, I share my screen and say, hey, how do I do this? And it just tells me. So it's really powerful.
Bryan (10:43.703)
That's right, that's right.
Bryan (10:52.579)
That's right. You have to check that one out too if you haven't played with that one people. So awesome, awesome ideas there for sure. I want to move on to the leverage segment here. So how are we actually taking all these cool things that we've been talking about and apply them to enhance our storytelling, our brand and drive the demand into our businesses? Can you give us a couple of examples of how you're actually leveraging these tools into some of the stuff you're working on?
Pete Sena @petesena (11:20.45)
Yeah, absolutely, would love to. So when I think about AI and how to leverage it most, I think what it comes down to is every business at the end of the day, there's a few ways to grow the business, right? You can grow the revenue, you can grow the profit, the margin. So you can grow the top and grow the bottom, grow the middle. I'm a big believer in 10X leverage. Like how do I get more leverage, know, more with less essentially. So one of the things that I'm a huge fan of doing
is when I'm working, I'll often turn on Loom, which is just a screen recording software if you're not familiar with it. I know you are, course, Bryan, but I'll just turn that on and I'll be speaking out loud while I'm working. And what I'll then do is I'll take the transcript from the Loom video or the video itself and I'll run it through some of the AIs that I use. And you can use just about any AI. In this case, think OpenAI or Gemini is probably two of the better ones for this particular use case. And I'll basically say, hey, I just did a bunch of work. Can you help me?
tell me 10 things that I can easily automate to save me time. And I'll ask the AI to tell me how to help me. And it does a really good job with doing that. A lot of times what I'm a big fan of is like to create leverage back to the sort of, you know, part of the section here in the podcast is, you know, I think it really comes down to you. Anything you do more than once can be accelerated or automated. And I think the way that you start by doing that is just being really mindful of.
What are the sort of shallow thinking tasks that you do on a daily basis? What are the deep thinking tasks do you do on a daily basis? So that's typically how I approach those things. And I quite literally am using these tools in every aspect of my life. And what we've described today, thus far, folks, is really how to use prompting and the LLMs or large-sized managed to come back and give you information. But what people like Bryan and I are doing is we're actually scripting these things, right? We're actually creating, you know,
multi-use agents that essentially have knowledge and they have tools. So knowledge would just be like, think about like all your documents, think about all your meeting transcripts, right? Tools would be like, I have the ability to call the internet tool, I have the ability to call the weather tool, which are the more kind of popular ones. But I also have a bunch of tools that I've built like the image generator tool. You most recently, one of my products that one of my company zones is a tool to help creatives.
Pete Sena @petesena (13:40.078)
generate visuals and designs, right? So something that would normally be, you know, a six-figure employee is now being relegated to the AI at the same quality of taste. And again, all that comes down to by just iterating with these tools and experimenting to say, you know, what if I tried this or what if I tried that? So what I would say the best thing to do is, you know, again, you've got to taste the taste.
Bryan (14:03.917)
Yeah, absolutely. I love that because you get into help people. I'd be curious on your perspective of, like you said, leveraging the GPTs to ask some questions and get some answers versus the AI automation workflows, leveraging the makes, the NANs, those kinds of tools versus going into that almost full agentic, like you're the orchestrator, go do whatever you need to do to get me the right answer.
do you see those use cases are? I feel like agentic is here, but not quite ready for prime time. Just give us some of your thoughts on those three.
Pete Sena @petesena (14:42.808)
Yeah, so for those that aren't as familiar, so agentic is really just refers to an AI's ability to make decisions automatically. So it has agency, it has its own sort of ability to take action based on a system prompt that you provide to it, based on some parameters or some guardrails. What I would say, Bryan, is I do, you know, we're seeing tremendous improvements. You know, I had a company report back to me the other day that
We wrapped up an engagement for them about four or five months ago and they're seeing like a 22 % increase in EBITDA. So I do think agentic AIs in some industries are primetime ready. They're not quite ready for things like healthcare and that sort of thing yet because a 1 % error rate on something could be millions of lives in some cases. But what I do believe is a really possible thing to do is something called a human in a loop, which is where you can...
create a defined problem space of something the AI is trying to do and create a frequency for how often it's going to solve that, whether it's when this thing happens, do this thing, or whether it's based every day at 12 PM, do this thing. Those are more trigger-based workflows or automation-based workflows. And again, you named a couple of platforms that do that. If we started naming them now, we'd be here for five hours. But what I would say is human loops are a really important thing. So when you're running an agentic workflow,
Bryan (16:02.169)
That's for sure
Pete Sena @petesena (16:08.502)
it's always important to validate and make sure that the AI is not hallucinating. And hallucination, if you're not familiar with it, is basically, because the large language model is essentially a glorified spreadsheet on steroids, you know, with vectorized information, it's going and trying to fish the needle from the haystack in some cases. And what that basically means is it's going to return the wrong data sometimes. It'd be like if you looked at the wrong row because you're staring at your screen for too long, right? And it makes stuff up. So that's what's called hallucination.
And as Bryan mentioned, in a lot of cases, what I always tell people is the devil's in the eval, right? The evaluations that you set up, the traces that you set up if you're running production applications is a really important thing because if you don't get those right, safety can go out the window, alignment can go out the window. And again, depending on how mission critical your solutions are, there's a limit to, I think, the current state of the art where it's at today. But I do believe that any process...
can definitely be improved or enriched with using these HEPTA tools in the workflow. And I'm specifically referring to generative AI in the context of today's conversation, but obviously machine learning has been with us for 30 years at this point.
Bryan (17:23.905)
Yeah, yeah. it's in its but now it's in the masses of anybody that wants it for 20 bucks a month or for free for that matter. So I'm curious your your balance on this this leveraging component of.
you know, authentic storytelling from our heart, from our memory and, from the human perspective versus the AI generated content, which can do so well. Like I know I've used AI to help me tell bedtime stories to my kids and it's phenomenal, but it uncertain. You know, I'm not a creative person. I don't think, I mean, we all are to a degree, but you know, like, how do you find that balance between all of the stuff that's in these vector databases has been generated by the humans in the past?
We're trying to figure out how do we still give them their rights, their ownership, some tithing for their original thoughts as we feed it into the AI and they remix it on us, et cetera. Like there's some balance between human and AI. Where do you see that falling?
Pete Sena @petesena (18:24.908)
Well, how much time we got? It is indeed, and I'd be happy to come back for it. What I would say, Bryan, is everything's a remix, no matter how you look at it, right? If you were to turn on the Billboard Top 100 on Spotify or Apple Music today, you're gonna hear melodies, you're gonna hear patterns, you're gonna hear remixes, samples of things that have been around for 50 plus years, right?
Bryan (18:26.393)
That's a whole separate episode probably.
Pete Sena @petesena (18:53.99)
And the same way that the painter hated the photographer and the photographer is hating the Instagrammer and the Instagrammer is hating the LLM because it's just generating images for them. That I think is sort of a fight not worth fighting. And also it's not my fight to fight. So I think that that's an area that I do think policymakers and experts in that field, think I...
It's gonna be an interesting field day for them over the next few years. From my vantage point, I believe that what the future with these technologies in our lives creates is the ability for all of us to be a tastemaker. And you mentioned bedtime stories. I use it for bedtime stories all the time. I generate entire videos with narrative tracks and everything for my son. And what I've experimented with is all kinds of different voices and tones from Dr. Seuss to different popular...
Bryan (19:24.184)
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Sena @petesena (19:51.982)
children's book authors and that sort of thing and learning authors. I find the exercise of the creative remix to be really inspiring because while a lot of the AI generated content, you know, can be ASLOP in some cases, which is what people refer to as like crappy AI generated content. I also believe that there is tremendously good things that can come from these remixes. So
Bryan (20:01.878)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Sena @petesena (20:18.21)
You know, what I tell people a lot is garbage in garbage out. So, you know, if you say write me a children's story, it's going to go where it wants to go. And it's like playing roulette at the slot, you know, at the casino or slot machine. Right. But if you get really specific, right, I'm looking for a two minute. Yeah, I'm looking for a relaxing story that ends with a lesson in the likeness of Dr. Seuss for my three year old son. His interests are tow trucks, cars.
Bryan (20:27.863)
Yeah, for sure.
Pete Sena @petesena (20:48.289)
and playing at the park, generate the story, make sure that the script, when read out loud at normal speed, will take no longer than two minutes, because otherwise I want more stories. That, as an example, is just better prompting, right? And that taste of me saying, hey, my taste is Dr. Seuss, your taste might be, you know, another child book author. That's where I think there's something really interesting. And...
Bryan (21:02.039)
Yeah.
Pete Sena @petesena (21:14.092)
That's where I think we're sort of entering this era. You some people are calling vibe coding or vibe marketing. There's a lot of memes going around about that. But, but yeah, I I, I find this to be as a creative. It's a new unchartered territory where we have access to the world's knowledge at our fingertips, at the speed of internet. And it's really powerful. You know, I'll have an idea at two in the morning when I can't sleep and I would never dare message a team member of mine.
Bryan (21:29.783)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Sena @petesena (21:44.07)
Though I do have some folks that are all over the world in different time zones, but you know, I can sit there and dialogue with my AI and then in the morning when my team wakes up, I can have a fully articulated brief ready to go for them. That's highly curated and inactionable. That was never possible. Even just two years ago, it just wasn't possible. And I think that to me is what I'm most excited about is how it can transform our lives and our businesses. And it's where I'm spending most of my time these days.
Bryan (21:55.673)
That's right.
Bryan (22:14.229)
I love it. love it. think the key, the key for me is it goes back to what you were saying in the beginning, right? When we get to true multimodal, you know what I mean? Like the you and I walk into the kids bedroom and it doesn't have that awareness that, hey, we got to get these kids to bed. Hey, I already know he's got his tow truck pajamas on or whatever it is. And we have to, you know, make the story about the tow trucks, et cetera. You know what mean? So if, if the AI could see everything, smell everything, you know, all those other things.
it would craft the great story, until then we have to give it a really strong prompt. And we're gonna keep the lawyers pretty busy for the next few years. So I think you're spot on with that one too. Hey, moving on to.
Pete Sena @petesena (22:53.454)
But on the flip side, I'll offer something up to if you are a lawyer listening to this conversation and now or in the future, you you look at how the legal era is being disrupted. I was just with an &A partner at a large prominent firm that I do a lot of business with and he said to me he needs one tenth of the amount of associates each year now because of tools like Harvey and different tools that are really automating the space. So, you know, yes, there will be a lot of policymakers and legal makers required, but I think
Bryan (22:58.584)
Mm-hmm.
Bryan (23:16.579)
Yeah. Yeah.
Pete Sena @petesena (23:23.982)
What is very interesting is that we now have the ability for 20 bucks a month, if we know how to command it, to get a thousand dollar an hour attorney at our fingertips 24 seven three 65. And let's be clear, this is not legal advice. I'm not describing this, please. But what I'm saying is that would have never been possible. And I have a lot of friends who have used ChatGPT to or tools like it to
Bryan (23:42.297)
Yes.
Bryan (23:47.939)
That's right.
Pete Sena @petesena (23:54.018)
help them navigate, negotiate contracts and, you know, loopholes and things of that sort. So it's brave new world.
Bryan (24:00.759)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, pivoting over to the last segment here is the leading segment, which is, think, one that you excel at for sure. You know, how do we guide others in this AI space? How are you meant to how do you mentor creative leaders to effectively integrate AI and all components of their strategies? Help us unpack the leadership.
Pete Sena @petesena (24:24.45)
I think the leadership principles, great leadership is great leadership. And we can see that a lot of the same patterns are emerging if we look at leadership over the past 100 years, right? What I would say is great leadership is about modeling the right behaviors. And I think when it comes to leading in the space of AI, the single greatest way to be able to lead is to create a safe space for failure, create a safe space for experimentation, and to make sure that you and your teams
have the space, have the environment to be able to explore some of these things. Because my favorite example is people said that AI would never be able to generate images. And there was that really funny meme with the Will Smith eating spaghetti that went around a couple of years ago. And now if you were to use Google Veo, which just came out a couple of weeks ago, the newest version, you can generate, using whether it's Veo or Runway or Luma, you can generate
picture perfect videos that are almost indistinguishable from AI versus reality. So I think that that is a important
Pete Sena @petesena (25:38.636)
Boundary but also at the same time I think waypoint for us to look at as leaders and again it gets back to the core thing which is to lead we must lead and in order to do that I think it comes back to the principles of leadership and You those things now are being accelerated because they are
Bryan (25:55.287)
Yeah, absolutely. And like how, you know, you're in some of these mentorship roles with some of the places that you work with and stuff. How do you approach coaching people that may be skeptical about AI and its role in our place or vice versa? How do you have you seen a success story or two, you know, where AI was used and it really granted, like I think you've already given a couple of good examples of some of those outcomes because of it.
You have an anecdote there?
Pete Sena @petesena (26:23.682)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's a number that come to mind. The few that come to mind is just, I've read a bunch of Reddit threads of people who discovered major life-threatening illnesses or life-threatening things. And because of ChatGPT, we're able to diagnose their problem and get medical attention. So those things are pretty rampant on the internet. Those are obviously some of the more scroll-stopping things with those stories. But what I would say is,
Bryan (26:51.608)
Yeah.
Pete Sena @petesena (26:54.81)
it, whether it's AI or any other type of human progress or human advancement, you you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. You can't motivate someone who's not motivated themselves. So I think what we can do is we can set up the conditions of entry. we can ask questions, we can model and demonstrate possibilities, and, the right behaviors that we're, trying to seek in, in terms of how we do it. But at the end of the day,
if someone fundamentally doesn't want that for themselves, you know, like any, like anything, whether it's, you know, trying to get someone to eat better so that they can be more healthy or, or trying to get someone to use the next AI so that they can, you know, help themselves accelerate. And I'll tell you just a quick anecdote here that kind of builds on it. So I go into organizations a lot and I meet people where they're at and whether it's CEOs or interns and everywhere in between, I teach people and you brought me in recently for something with one of your customers. And, you know, I help people.
leverage these tools, the tools that they already pay for, the tools that they haven't paid for yet, and use it to drive business outcomes. And a really good example is, and I find this happening all the time, is people don't know what's possible until they see what's possible in a lot of cases. And the thing that I see a lot, we often will go out, we'll do an AI readiness assessment, we have a survey that we complete. Ironically, one of the...
most common things that we see as to why programs fail and they don't get adopted is because people are afraid if they use the AI, they will lose their job. Now I find that so intriguing because in a lot of ways, if you're not up on top of AI, know, an AI is like a job, like someone using AI is, right? But what I think is so fascinating about that is that gets back to education, being able to meet people where they're at and say, look, here are some of the tools that we're going to be rolling out.
Bryan (28:24.857)
Mm.
Bryan (28:31.321)
You're going to lose your job.
Pete Sena @petesena (28:44.386)
Here's how we are using them today. Here's how we suggest trying them. Do this, don't do this. Here's some examples. Here's some guardrails. There's a policy and then go. And I think that the blocker in a lot of cases is fear. know, fear of being replaced, fear of ridicule, shame, et cetera. And that's like any behavior. But what I would say is I tell people all the time, if data is the new oil,
AI is the new water. And I encourage people to be like water.
Bryan (29:19.693)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. This has been so enlightening, Pete. I really appreciate you taking some time out to speak with us today. Hit us one more time. What are some great ways for the people listening to get in touch and reach out and learn more?
Pete Sena @petesena (29:34.818)
Yeah, so I think we mentioned earlier, but my personal website is just Pete Sena. That's Pete S E N A dot com. I'm not seen to the wrestler and on that website, my free newsletters on there, my my different handles are on there and I'm pretty much at Pete Senna on just about every channel for the most part. You could look me up on LinkedIn. I post a lot on Twitter X, but I'd say Twitter and LinkedIn. Then my newsletter are probably the best ways to reach me. And then, you know, obviously
I would love to hear how you folks are using AI and what was most actionable or useful for you today.
Bryan (30:11.609)
It's awesome. Thank you again for sharing some awesome insights with us, about the AI landscape and creativity. You have an invaluable collection of knowledge locked in your head, so I encourage everybody to reach out and lean on you as they're embarking on your AI journey. So to our listeners out there, if you found this episode enlightening, please subscribe to AI with Bry. Leave a review. Share it with some colleagues that are interested in the future of AI and creative innovation.
Pete Sena @petesena (30:25.688)
Thank you so much.
Bryan (30:42.795)
Sena as well. You can connect with Pete once again on his website and follow his thought leaderships on LinkedIn as well. Until next time everybody, I'm Bryan Dennstedt, reminding you to learn, leverage and lead with AI. Thanks again.