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Episode: AI’s Impact on Communication skills: Interview with Patti DeNucci [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:13:06

Episode Shownotes

Effective communication is an important skill to have. And, in this AI-era it’s more important than ever. In this episode of AI Today hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer interview Patti DeNucci. She is an author, speaker, workshop facilitator, consultant and keynoting the PMI Austin, TX Professional Development Day May

2, 2024. How does AI impact communication? Continue reading AI’s Impact on Communication skills: Interview with Patti DeNucci [AI Today Podcast] at Cognilytica.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_00
The AI Today podcast, produced by Cognolitica, cuts through the hype and noise to identify what is really happening now in the world of artificial intelligence.

00:00:10 Speaker_00
Learn about emerging AI trends, technologies, and use cases from Cognolitica analysts and guest experts.

00:00:22 Speaker_02
Hello and welcome to the AI Today podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Walsh.

00:00:26 Speaker_01
I'm your host, Ron Schmilzer. Talking about AI today, AI is everywhere today, isn't it? We've been talking about AI today for the last seven plus years with over 430 episodes. You can hear how the progress of AI has changed today.

00:00:43 Speaker_01
I think with every today we're finding that is becoming part of everybody's lives and folks who may not even have anything to have done with a i perhaps in the years past are finding a is being an increasing part of their daily lives especially within the project management community.

00:01:00 Speaker_01
And Kathleen and I have both been invited to speak at a number of events focusing on the project manager community, especially our friends and partners at various Project Management Institute PMI events and various chapter events.

00:01:12 Speaker_01
So you may be hearing more as we sort of interview and talk to folks from the various different project management communities and how it's impacting what project management is doing around AI and how AI is impacting what's doing with project management.

00:01:28 Speaker_02
Exactly. And if you'd like to see the list of upcoming speaking engagements that we have, I encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter on LinkedIn, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well.

00:01:37 Speaker_02
So you can see all of our upcoming speaking sessions, some are in person and some are virtual. But for today's podcast, we're going to be talking with

00:01:46 Speaker_02
presenters and participants at the Project Management Institute, Austin, Texas chapters, Professional Development Day.

00:01:53 Speaker_02
So Ron and I were both invited to speak out there, and we wanted to highlight and showcase some of the additional speakers at the event as well. The Austin PMI chapter serves over 3000 project managers in the greater Austin area.

00:02:06 Speaker_02
In addition to hosting these twice a year professional development days, they also host monthly events with speakers on a variety of topics, to help keep their members current on the latest developments in project management.

00:02:18 Speaker_02
You can learn more about the PMI Austin chapter and all of their monthly events by going to pmiaustin.org. So for today's podcast, we're so excited to have with us Patty DiNucci, who is an author, speaker, workshop facilitator, and consultant.

00:02:33 Speaker_02
Welcome, Patty, and thanks so much for joining us.

00:02:36 Speaker_03
Well, thank you for having me.

00:02:38 Speaker_02
really pleased and it's just fun to meet both of you. Yeah, we're looking forward to the discussion today, especially around this topic.

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We'd like to start by having you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them a little bit about your background and now your current role.

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Okay, I promise this will be quick but I'm going to go way back because it matters.

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I was born in an iron mining town in northern Minnesota and my grandfather and dad ran the Chevrolet dealership in our little town and my sisters and I were all required to work there

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And i guess that was how we raised our college money so it was really cool system for everybody but i learned all about people there.

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I didn't realize it until i started a business of my own in nineteen eighty nine in marketing communications world here in austin texas doing a lot of high tech work by the way that i had no problem finding clients making contacts.

00:03:30 Speaker_03
building a reputation and people start asking me to speak on the topic which led me to write two books on the topic which kept the speaking going that's what i do almost full time now is speaking presenting teaching all about the power of human connection and but i did have some time in marketing communications where i was working on technologies that.

00:03:52 Speaker_03
that seem very mature now including touch technology, 3D printing, the microcomputer, all those things that were all new and scary when they first came out. So it's really interesting that here we are with AI. It's one of the newest technologies that

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you know, gives people both a little bit of trepidation and also a kind of excitement on look what it can do to help us. So it's really fun to be here talking about this topic with you.

00:04:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, thank you for joining us. I think your perspectives are great. And it's really interesting because, you know, one of the interesting things about AI is that it's always the newest technology. We've been talking about it, well, forever.

00:04:34 Speaker_01
Honestly, the term was coined way back in the 1950s. But as we say, it's the newest old technology that there is out there. And that's because we keep pushing the boundaries of what machines are capable of.

00:04:45 Speaker_01
It's interesting that we're talking about communication, because the irony of it is that where we are right now with AI, where it is in the popular sense, the most people working with and using AI systems now,

00:04:59 Speaker_01
is they're communicating with these AI systems in these prompts or these voice commands, and they're having the systems respond using the natural language, right?

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We're not programming, we're not using the language of computers, we're using the language of people, which is interesting. It's very interesting. Yeah, it's always coming back to this. So communication is your thing.

00:05:20 Speaker_01
So tell us, I mean, how do you see this latest wave, this generative AI wave, the prompts and the prompt engineering and the GPTs and all that stuff that comes together?

00:05:30 Speaker_01
How are you seeing that changing the way people communicate and the way people communicate perhaps even changing AI? Yeah.

00:05:39 Speaker_03
Well, I mean, I think there's two sides to this, like there are to any new technology. I mean, I'm going to start with the metaphor of antibiotics. Antibiotics are a wonderful thing, but when they're misused, they really mess your body up.

00:05:52 Speaker_03
So like any technology that is groundbreaking, there's a good side and a bad side. And I know I've had some very positive experiences myself, sometimes not even realizing it till later, that AI was involved in helping me.

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Like, for example, helping me book

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an airline ticket for my son to fly back from italy i was having a heck of a time getting on with a person and all of a sudden this text message thing popped up and said i'm here to help you and it could have been a real person but i bet it wasn't and this person solved the problem in a matter of minutes where i probably would have been banging my head against the wall trying to get through to an agent and then on the other side.

00:06:34 Speaker_03
I know I had my book, my most recent book, More Than Just Talk, reviewed by a company that does that sort of thing. And the book review, it was very clear, the book review was not a review of my book.

00:06:45 Speaker_03
It was an AI-generated review of my entire body of work. And it was so obvious to me. And this person was supposed to be paid for reading and reviewing my book. So I found that very discouraging. So I think it's like anything else.

00:06:59 Speaker_03
There is a beautiful side to it. We have to use it well, we have to use it responsibly, we have to be wary of, you know, what hiccups can it create. Like you said, you had a whole series on failures, but that's super interesting.

00:07:14 Speaker_03
So, you know, there's just that double side of it. And, you know, and the other thing too is we are in an era where people are not connecting.

00:07:22 Speaker_03
There's a whole generation of college kids, high school kids, and young adults who don't have the level of friendships and fringe friends that we were blessed to have because we didn't have some of the technical interruptions that we now have.

00:07:36 Speaker_03
And it's not just AI, it's all kinds of technology, our phones, our gaming, our streaming. So, you know, it's a rich discussion to have.

00:07:46 Speaker_02
Yeah, it absolutely is. And I know a lot of people are having that discussion. You know, even just having cell phones at school, what impact does that have? So when we talk about AI, you know, it really is impacting every single industry.

00:08:02 Speaker_02
And so since we're here for PMI's Professional Development Day, we have to ask about project managers. How do you see AI changing or impacting the project management profession and role?

00:08:16 Speaker_03
Wow, well, as an author, I'm obviously still a project manager. I've had project management things in my life, even being a parent is being a project manager.

00:08:25 Speaker_03
And the thing that comes to mind most for me is that if I can have AI handle the boring, tedious data entry, some of the boring, I do like research, but sometimes it gets tedious.

00:08:40 Speaker_03
If I can have AI handle some of those boring tasks, I have more time to actually talk to people and to be creative. And so for me in my industry, there's some great possibilities there.

00:08:55 Speaker_03
Now, on the other hand, I could say, you know, back when I used to be a freelance writer, copywriter, Markham consultant, I would have been nervous of it taking the job away. But then on the other hand, I had some assignments that were so

00:09:07 Speaker_03
tedious and boring that I would have just said, let me let AI handle this and I'll make sure it comes out. I'll tweak it. I'll edit all of that. And that would have been fine. So yeah, it's interesting. It's really interesting.

00:09:24 Speaker_03
I'm interested to see how other people are using it with their processes and their technology.

00:09:29 Speaker_01
Exactly. As a matter of fact, that's one of the things we actually recently talked about. One of the challenges with all these technologies is actually truly about creativity.

00:09:37 Speaker_01
Because when you sort of break down the magic, as you were, of how these LLMs work, all that it's done is it's been trained on the body of

00:09:46 Speaker_01
all the text that's already out there on the internet, you know, stuff that we've published on articles and our blog posts and our social media posts and comments and things like that.

00:09:55 Speaker_01
And all the LLM system is doing is just sort of taking kind of its guesses based on that and generating something.

00:10:01 Speaker_01
And if it looks a lot like what we would already get value out of, then you have to ask, well, it's like, well, what would have, you know, really prevented a person from doing the same thing, going out there, collecting all this stuff and putting it together and maybe rewriting it.

00:10:13 Speaker_01
It was just hard.

00:10:14 Speaker_03
You have more time to put your own intellectual capital into a project, even if it's just looking through the tedium, all the information, the meeting deadlines.

00:10:26 Speaker_03
This morning, I went on chat GPT, and I just said, write a heartfelt card to a friend who's just lost their pet. And I was just doing this as an experiment. And this beautiful, short, paragraph came out that was probably better than what I could write.

00:10:41 Speaker_03
And I'm a professional writer. And I thought, you know, just think of all the cards people can send, because they're not sitting there struggling on, well, what am I, what can I say? What can I say that would be appropriate? It's, it's so interesting.

00:10:55 Speaker_03
So all those little pieces of being a project manager, which can vary from industry to industry, as you well know, right, exactly, must see all kinds of things and all kinds of applications. And where can we remove

00:11:07 Speaker_03
the tedium and throw in some quality control, both from the human standpoint and from the AI standpoint, catching mistakes. That is a writer's nightmare to have a typo out there.

00:11:21 Speaker_01
Yeah. And I think we can expect, it's kind of funny how AI is being used on both sides. On the one hand, people are using AI for the creation of content, etc.

00:11:30 Speaker_01
But now I'm actually seeing more use of AI on the consumption side, where people like, especially students, I don't have time to listen to this one hour lecture, I'm sure it's great.

00:11:39 Speaker_01
Go in, listen to the video, summarize it for me, take out the bullet points. And there's some, there's a lot of discussion on this, especially from the professors where they're like, well, they're not, you know, people have a low attention span.

00:11:52 Speaker_01
They're not, you know, they're not willing to sit through it. And I guess the point is like, well, but I know, you know, when I was going to school and probably when you were going to school as well, people didn't listen to those lectures.

00:12:01 Speaker_01
They're dozing off or distracted. Right. So I say, is it actually better to have people actually gain the retention from the material? So would you rather have their attention or would you rather have their retention?

00:12:15 Speaker_03
You know, that's an interesting debate, because I was one of those people that recopied my notes. And I took notes to stay engaged. I have a little bit of ADHD going on here. And I know my son does, too. And it's a blessing and a curse.

00:12:26 Speaker_03
And I had to go to class. I had to take the notes to stay engaged. And then I had to recopy the notes to run them through my brain again. And I got top grades, top honors, all that stuff.

00:12:41 Speaker_03
But I have to say now, because I have technology and things do move quicker, my attention span is not as good as it used to be. And I don't know what to attribute that to.

00:12:54 Speaker_03
So there are definitely pluses and minuses, which is what makes this such a rich conversation and discussion topic.

00:13:03 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, maybe following up on that, I mean, how do you see ways that AI could actually help people communicate, maybe improve the way we communicate with others or communicate?

00:13:12 Speaker_03
Oh, again, there are people that struggle with words. My boyfriend who's upstairs doing software engineering right now, programming, he will struggle with a short email. And it's not that he's a terrible communicator.

00:13:23 Speaker_03
To put it into writing, where if he spoke and said, you know, send an email that says, I'll be at the meeting, blah, blah, blah, and here's my three concerns. he could really benefit from that, that it would just be such a time saver for him.

00:13:34 Speaker_03
You know, but there's, oh my gosh, there's just so many different ways.

00:13:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, you know, AI, I mean, we've been seeing that. It's really been helping people get creative, like we talked about, and maybe write in different styles that they wouldn't normally do or feel comfortable. We always say, feel free to experiment.

00:13:54 Speaker_02
because the cost of failure when it comes to prompt engineering is really low. You know, you're not being required to get other people involved to have to run a process for you. You don't need to be technical to do this.

00:14:09 Speaker_02
It really is in the hands of many people. So feel free to experiment and don't be afraid to experiment, which is what we say, and learn from others. We

00:14:19 Speaker_02
We talked earlier about our failure series, and you can learn so much more from failure than you can from successes, because you can see what went wrong. You can learn from that. You can adjust and tweak it.

00:14:29 Speaker_02
So that's what, you know, we say, take that same approach when it comes to prompt engineering, especially when you think about communication. That is not a skill that everybody has. It's not always a skill that people learn.

00:14:43 Speaker_02
You know, public speaking, I think, is still one of the hardest skills for many people. getting in front of a room. Yeah, talking really nervous. They also want to be perceived in certain ways.

00:14:54 Speaker_02
And I think that, you know, there's a lot of fear and concerns. We talk to people and many people at organizations have fears and concerns around AI and prompt engineering is included with that.

00:15:05 Speaker_02
So, you know, maybe what do you see as some of the challenges that

00:15:11 Speaker_02
can come when people use prompt engineering and use AI, that yes, you can derive all of these benefits from it, but maybe do you think it can hurt their communication skills in the end more than it's helping?

00:15:25 Speaker_03
Absolutely. I read probably a dozen articles over the last few days. Information that's

00:15:31 Speaker_03
false, there's a lot of false information out there, information that's false, you know, you're reducing the heartfelt spiritual, I mean, there's something soulful about reading something that you're absolutely certain somebody wrote.

00:15:46 Speaker_03
And I even read an article that said live events where people hear directly from a live speaker rather than reading something on a blog or online article, hearing it in person gives information, a little more credibility.

00:16:00 Speaker_03
So live events, I think, are going to come back with a vengeance, which I'm really excited about. I actually prefer them. I don't mind this. I've gotten used to it. But there's something really nice about connecting with people.

00:16:11 Speaker_03
They talk about cheating, students cheating. I don't know. There's a whole gray line there on what is cheating versus what is actually helping you learn. Is it the work that's teaching you, or is it the real learning that's teaching you?

00:16:22 Speaker_03
And what does that learning look like for you? For some people, it's not reading. oh, my gosh, I had an anthropology class in college. It just about killed me because we had so much reading. And it was because the professor herself was a reader.

00:16:34 Speaker_03
And there were so many other ways we could have learned. So I think, you know, that again, there's the positive on that.

00:16:40 Speaker_03
You know, I think about Voltaire's quote about with great power comes great responsibility, which many people think that was a Spider-Man thing, but it was really Voltaire. And actually, it's in the Bible, too.

00:16:50 Speaker_03
So that's a piece of wisdom that's been around for a really long time. We have to use this technology wisely.

00:16:57 Speaker_03
And you know company like you that's constantly looking at it constantly working with clients in different areas you are the gatekeepers of a lot of. This responsible usage of a i used a i when i was. picking out a book title for my second book.

00:17:15 Speaker_03
And it was a really cool title generator. I plugged in titles. It plugged in its suggestions. And it rated how much of an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional connection the title and subtitle would have. That was so much fun.

00:17:30 Speaker_03
I went down a rabbit hole on that. And it was to the point where my editor said, I think you can stop now. You have like five really great ideas. Let's just call it a day. But again, I got sucked into it, which you can.

00:17:44 Speaker_03
You can get sucked into technology. And I also think it's really important that we don't mistake an AI conversation with a real conversation. And our brains sometimes don't know the difference between fantasy and reality.

00:18:00 Speaker_03
And I think there's a little bit of a mental and emotional health factor. in there too, if we want to go in that direction. It's just super interesting.

00:18:08 Speaker_01
This is very, you actually said so many interesting things there. I mean, I actually took some notes here because you were saying so many great things. One for absolutely for sure, AI is going to have a profound and long lasting impact on education.

00:18:21 Speaker_01
for many reasons that we actually just talked about. People learn different ways. But just the ways that we're teaching, I would even argue that there's a whole thing going on right now with higher education.

00:18:32 Speaker_01
We talk about the K-12 experience, that'll be different. But now people are really questioning the value.

00:18:37 Speaker_01
of higher educational institutions, the cost, the tuition prices, people are seeing stuff out there in the press and media and wondering what people are learning, what's the purpose, and are there even jobs when they get out there and the loans and all this sort of stuff?

00:18:51 Speaker_01
This may seem disconnected, but I think, honestly, AI really will help us rethink what it really truly means to get education and the value of a degree and things like that. It actually will.

00:19:01 Speaker_03
I think my main concern is human connection the ability to connect like we are right now in a live conversation and to be spontaneous and to ask the right questions and to know how to respond and to have the body language and to read body language.

00:19:16 Speaker_03
Those are skills that are in trouble right now and people blame the pandemic but really this has been going on for really in earnest for the last twenty years. And I'm really concerned about that. I'm really concerned about college kids.

00:19:30 Speaker_03
I don't think college kids are having any fun anymore. I remember part of it was the social aspect. I love the learning. I love being away from mom and dad, but I really enjoyed the social aspect of it, which in itself is its own education.

00:19:44 Speaker_03
So that's my number one concern. I think that's where I'll be jumping in. at the conference at the PMI Austin Professional Development Day.

00:19:53 Speaker_01
That's actually nice. Yeah, because actually this does connect very well with project management.

00:19:58 Speaker_01
It may seem unrelated, but the role of project management, the thing that project managers do, right, which is why I think actually project management and PMI is having a little bit of a renaissance.

00:20:08 Speaker_01
actually, is that project management is not about the technology. It's about people in process. It's about getting things done. It's about reducing risk. It's about meeting objectives. These things are communication. They're planning.

00:20:23 Speaker_01
It's not about just building stuff to build stuff.

00:20:26 Speaker_01
Ironically, I think we're getting back to the point where people are realizing that, hey, what makes us human, what differentiates us from just filling out forms, doing all the robotic things, which machines are really good at. Yes, thank goodness.

00:20:40 Speaker_01
Project managers, we're not here to just fill out schedules. Project managers are here to think through problems and creatively figure them out.

00:20:48 Speaker_01
So maybe bringing this all back to project management and communication and what humans are good at and these interpersonal skills, where do you think things could go in the positive way?

00:21:01 Speaker_03
Yeah absolutely you know and the people side of it if we can let the technology take care of the stuff that is just what makes everybody mad and angry and crabby when they're doing a project if we can bring it back to being better connected teams teams that are better connected perform better.

00:21:17 Speaker_03
And we have our human hormones, the oxytocin, the dopamine, all those transmitters that when we talk, I mean, literally, this is probably the funnest part of my day today is talking with you, because it's lighting up our brains in a different way than checking email would do.

00:21:36 Speaker_03
I'm for anything that can help us do that. If we can solve problems, easy problems, use AI for the things that are either really hard or super easy, and then keep the human connection, I think that's going to make for a much better world.

00:21:50 Speaker_02
Yeah, for sure. And I know that, you know, project managers like every single industry are saying, you know, you can look at it from two sides.

00:21:58 Speaker_02
So on the one side, they're saying, what tools and technologies, you know, AI tools and technologies can I do? Can I learn to help me do my job better? And then on the flip side, it's, How can I run and manage AI projects?

00:22:13 Speaker_02
And so we are big advocates of following best practices methodologies, including CPM-AI methodology, the cognitive project management for AI methodology, which is a step-by-step approach for running and managing AI projects.

00:22:24 Speaker_02
I know our listeners hear us talk about it all the time, but if you'd like to learn more, you can go to Cognolitica.com slash CPM-AI to take our training and get certified in CPM-AI.

00:22:35 Speaker_02
We always like to wrap up our podcasts by asking one final question to all of our guests, and you're able to bring in your own unique experiences and insights. And so no matter how many times we've asked, we always get different responses.

00:22:47 Speaker_02
And so I'm looking forward to yours. As a final note, what do you believe the future of AI is in general and its application to organizations and beyond?

00:22:56 Speaker_03
Well, I think it's like when I look back on writing about the earliest versions of touchscreens and 3D printing and other technologies, at that time, we had no idea the expansiveness of the applications.

00:23:09 Speaker_03
I mean, we thought, oh, just the military is going to use, like when we come to touchscreens, the military maybe had a bank. Our brains were not able to fully wrap our heads around what all we'd be able to do. And I think AI is the same thing.

00:23:20 Speaker_03
I think we are just dabbling our little toes in the water. And there's just so much up ahead. And the more we use it, the more we're going to discover.

00:23:29 Speaker_03
I mean, I can tell you how I use it now is a thousand percent more than how I used it even six months or a year ago. So I'm excited. I'm excited for all the applications I can use it for myself.

00:23:42 Speaker_01
That's fantastic. Well, I hope our listeners really got a lot of this because this has been a fantastic conversation.

00:23:47 Speaker_01
We covered a lot of topics here and a lot of ground, and I'm really excited because we will be seeing you in person and we'll be talking to a lot of folks in person. Oh, my goodness.

00:23:57 Speaker_01
We're here on technology, but we just talked about the benefit of face-to-face communication. Yeah, you know, in-person events are making their comeback too, just as people realize the benefits here.

00:24:07 Speaker_01
So for our listeners, this may be kind of, if you're listening to this podcast later on, then this event may have already happened, but we are being, we are speaking, featured speakers at the PMI Austin PDD event, which is May 2nd in 2024.

00:24:21 Speaker_01
in Austin, Texas. We will be sharing some highlights with our listeners. We have a couple more interviews planned. So I encourage all of our listeners to go to PMIAustin.org if you want to learn more about that and what else is happening at PMI.

00:24:34 Speaker_01
As I mentioned, a little bit of a renaissance in the role of the project manager. But I want to thank you so much, Patty, for being with us and joining us here on the AI Today podcast and sharing all of your fantastic insights with our audience.

00:24:48 Speaker_02
My pleasure. Yeah, thank you so much. This was such a wonderful podcast and listeners, if you haven't done so already, make sure to subscribe to AI today so you can get notified of all of our upcoming episodes. We have some series that we're doing.

00:25:02 Speaker_02
We have prompt engineering, best practices series. We have a few additional interviews lined up and we always love to get to talk to people to see how they are applying AI in the real world. And we have some additional episodes as well.

00:25:16 Speaker_02
So stay subscribed. Like this episode and want to hear more? With hundreds of episodes and over 3 million downloads, check out more AI Today podcasts at aitoday.live.

00:25:27 Speaker_02
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00:25:41 Speaker_02
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00:25:53 Speaker_02
Check it out at aitoday.live slash list. This sound recording and its contents are copyright by Cognolitica. All rights reserved. Music by Matsu Gravas. As always, thanks for listening to AI Today, and we'll catch you at the next podcast.