At the heart of an industrial revolution is an innovation that changes everything. Building AI Boston sees artificial intelligence as a renaissance. From the heart of innovation and the mecca of tech learning, we bring you AI for real people. A conversation for everyone. Paul Beyer is the CEO and principal analyst at GAI Insights. He's a seasoned software entrepreneur with two decades of experience and multiple exits. Paul has been appointed as an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, and his AI expertise has been featured multiple times in the Harvard Business Review and also Forbes. He is passionate about helping companies to achieve ROI through the use of gen AI, and through his role at GAI Insights, he leads an exciting industry analyst startup that provides insights, guidance, and best practices for AI leaders. Paul Beyer, welcome to the show. Thank you, Anna. I am so excited to let our audience in on a little secret, and that is that I listen to your show as prep for my show, believe it or not. That's wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, you've been at it for a while. What I want to stress is that you do a daily show. That's absolutely amazing. We do. It's Monday through Friday, 7.30 a.m. It's our AI analyst. We don't pay him for the show, and we've been on over 200 shows, and it came out of way back in 2023, us talking to companies, and the biggest challenge I had back then was keeping up. Right. We said, oh, we'll just do it for a month and get everyone caught up, and it's just gone faster. It's really, but it's a great way for us to stay at the edge of what is possible, and that's the edge that keeps moving out further and further. Right, and we pull disclosure on this show. It's like AI for the rest of us. So what I enjoy about having this conversation is, when I get to tell you how much I like your show, number two, I get to talk about something you're really passionate about, which is community building. And when I first met you, I asked you the basic question. You're part of this Founders Group, AI Blueprint for Mask. Kara is also involved with AI Blueprint for Mask. Can we just start our conversation talking a little bit about that organization and why you started it? Sure. Yeah, I've been in Boston for 25 years and high tech. I'm very involved in venture-backed companies, and always assumed there was a pretty tight partnership between public and private, academic institutions, NGOs, and companies. And I was really getting in AI, so I probably wanted to get back to the community a little bit. Where are these meetings? And MIT's like, what are you talking about? MIT's talking to Harvard, to Bentley College, and none of it was happening. And we have this incredible geographic area with all these very smart people, incredible organizations, and that last communication mile of talking wasn't there. And I complained about it for six months, and I said, I need to either be quiet or pick up a shovel and do something. And that's what AI Blueprint, our mission is to help attract, retain, and grow AI talent in the state of Massachusetts and grows through the schools and in the companies. And we do practical, tactical things, like having a list of all the AI in-person events. We didn't have that before. Like having an in-person AI career fair city-wise. We had a first one last year we're doing again this year, of connecting all these different groups, having a list of all the 114 colleges on the email of the Computer Science or AI Group. It doesn't exist right now here. So those are the one of many things. We were hoping to get 100 people after six months, and after a year and a half, we have 1500 supporters. So it's a very active group. Well, I feel lucky that I landed on it, but of course I came that way through CARA. So that's how I showed up at an event at Kendall Square. So yeah, I'm really happy that I plugged into the right people right away. Right. And Anna got to have the amazing experience of going to a Imagination in Action event with John Warner, which are always so great, and you meet so many interesting people, and you learn about the history of MIT. I'm looking at cool computers and old yearbooks and things like that. But I got involved early with AI Blueprint 2, and Paul, I've always remember the thing that you said to the people who are coming in and getting interested. It was basically stop complaining. This is not a group where we're going to complain that we're not Silicon Valley, that we're not New York City. So tell us more about that. Why do you think that's so important that we don't just sit around complaining? I'm in the zero to one startup that I enjoy. It's magical to have an idea on a whiteboard, and then a year later, people are giving you a million dollars for it. So I've done a lot of startups, both Bootstripped and Ventureback, and I've learned the value of implementation. And this town is full of very intellectual oriented people that want to talk about policy and want to critique the VCs and want to critique the government. And that's not how change is made. And Martin Luther King didn't wait for funding before he started doing something. So you find something that needs to be done, and you start doing it, and then you attract other people, and then you create the culture, which we work hard and care about. You've been a really great part of it, of picking up a shovel and doing something small. Two or three people do a project for two or three weeks or two or three months and put it down and feel good about it. Because we know that 50 to 80% of people of volunteer organizations burn out after a month or so. And there's good reason for that. You're right. And I really appreciate you tackling the bigger picture of AI, because like you've expressed, you started doing a daily show. Now you're a couple hundred episodes in. I think that that's where most people would agree. Like they're overwhelmed by AI. I wonder what you think about what's a great plan of action if you just want to learn something and what's your strategy there for it? Yeah, everyone's overwhelmed. And I tell everyone three key things. I think first and foremost, you can't ostrich. You know, we're sitting on the beach in Miami. The hurricane's coming. I wish it's not coming. I'm enjoying the beach. We got three more days. AI tsunami of change is already here. So we can't ostrich here. And we need to understand what we're talking about in this moment of human history. You know, I firmly believe in all the experts are saying that within two years, 95%, 95% of all cognitive tasks that we humans do is going to be done better in two years from now. Yeah. So that's coding. That's law. That's that's genetic research here. That's material science here. That's virtual selling here. So that's the new world we're in. And instead of having these machines, which are like a snowblower, and we use once or twice a year and we're, and so on, these things are co-intelligence is going to transform humanity in a way we've never seen before and a pace we've never seen before. So we have to first recognize that and we need to get the right metaphors. We like to use AI's power tools for knowledge work. And if you came from and saw someone manually drill in holes when they're redoing your kitchen, like, why aren't you using power tools? Why aren't using a power drill? Same for if you're doing cognitive work, analysis or code or any kind of thinking, it's really important here. It's obviously not building a factory, but all that kind of digital worker knowledge worker stuff is going to be transformed. So don't ostrich is the first one. Good point. And then I mean, how do people get beyond just the basic understanding with the chat GBT model? There's things I learn every day. Like I heard this phenomenon. Maybe this is just a myth busting moment, but somebody said, you know, if you don't use the chat, the paid version of chat GBT, you can experience something like an AI hallucination, which means AI will just sort of create what it doesn't know and spit it back to you. Is that an actual thing? An AI hallucination? Well, yeah, I mean, it's all probabilities. So there always is a bell curve of answers. Yeah, it came out. It was typically 95% correct, but the 5% is incorrect, tend to be really incorrect. It's gotten so much better here. So what we tell everyone is to stop whale watching the user New England term or stop AI tool. Just pick one. The three major ones for productivity are open eye chat, GPT, flawed from anthropic and Gemini from Google, those they're far ahead of everyone else. And what the goal is they just get in that and become novice to be between a beginner and intermediate. Just focus on these tools are so powerful and changing so that most people don't even you. It's like using word and you're only in I've been printing. You're just coming in here. So that that's the key thing because it's and then lastly is to don't treat it as a parlor trick. Pick something that you really care about. How do I write? How do I analyze this least for new apartment? How do I think about marketing plan for my new podcast? You know, what do I do in a tricky divorce situation where they have the kids want to stay with mom and have to find really tough problems that are important to you and ask the robots and you'll be surprised how much of a value at thought partner and many areas of your life. And once you start down that path, that's when you start understanding what's really happening. I love that and I love that perspective and I appreciate it because I think a lot of our listeners feel overwhelmed and again, it's really meeting you where you are and then understanding this tool. I like your analogies. I think analogies are really important and I feel like if you said to the world, I'm never going to use the Internet at that juncture. You'd be like, what are you going to do then? You're going to sit home and use your abacus to do your accounting and you're going to do things manually. So it's good perspective. Thank you. What happens, you get left behind, right? Right. Right. What happens, right? And we don't want that, right? That happened in the law a lot. Like a lot of people didn't. Anna, you probably remember from your experience when you were working in the legal sphere that, you know, even just like cloud storage or email, like really kind of freaked people out, but you know, you can't keep up with the pace of how laws practice now if you aren't using computers and things. So it's, that's true. Well, and the one of the benefits when I managed it a lot of room was that my, the CEOs there were early adopters of technology always were worked, worked in, you know, kind of a high level perspective of that. But, you know, I'm glad for that experience because it allows me to see what you're doing with describe, which is cool that we have an AI founder on our show. So yeah, here we are. You're both really enmeshed in this cool ecosystem. And I'm really proud to be kind of bringing the outsider in. And so talk a little bit about that. I mean, there's so many events that we want to highlight, Paul. A couple of them coming up, you know, the floor is yours to talk about what's going on, for example, for Boston AI Week in September. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So my key message, don't ostrich, start learning process and third learn from leaders. This is a moment in time where we finally get in again to calibrate this change is happening so fast. It's easier to do it with another human small teams, conferences, events. And we're here in Boston, we've got Boston AI week that's coming up September 26, October 3. Within that we have a GAI world. That's our premier annual event will have 800 people and, you know, 150 case studies of people in production. So you can come and learn from what Mayo Clinic is actually doing and what they're learning. You can hear what Pfizer and everyone else is doing. And that kind of getting away from the daily work to get almost like a mini offsite and understand where you go is transformational for the individual, but it's also for teams. We've got a number of companies now are buying a whole table because they're using that as a way to bond to calibrate and to start their 2026. Because it's, it's not really important part of the many companies. Jen, they spending on Jenny I now is almost a top budget item in many companies. Here's used to be security and some companies now it's increased about that. Right. And if I can give a little shout out to something that Paul has helped spearhead for the community. It's really looking at women in a particular and helping, you know, through his connections and his team. Luda, of course, being number one, being able to help us find spaces where we can connect with other women. So there is a breakfast. I think it's on the second day. Right Paul. Yeah. Yeah. So it's women in AI and we're getting together. There'll be different tables and different topics. So it's just a great way to meet your tribe, so to speak. So that's that's highly recommended to check it out. And that's on day two. We're also trying on lunch on day two. We're having black pioneers celebrating black pioneers so that black community came to us and said, boy, can we do something similar. Interesting. Their number one message they want to do is they want to get enough speakers in different ages, young in your career and succinct. So the black community doesn't feel like AI is yet another opportunity train that they're missing here. Well, we are learning. Oh, sorry, Anna. Go ahead. No, I think an important part of what we're driving at too is just democratizing it across the board. I had a really good conversation yesterday with Sandy Lacey of the Perkins School for the Blind and talking about accessibility. They're asking me, did you know, for example, that this technology was created for an access reason touchscreen was created for my grad student needing a at Carpal Tunnel and couldn't use, you know, the keyboard. I'm really happy that we are featuring stories about accessibility. You talk about democracy, you talk about opening it up to new sectors. But what I like about you all is that you're doing that organically, because that's just in your DNA, your your problem solvers by nature. But now you're just kind of opening up and sharing with the rest of the world. I what I like about being on a fly on a wall on the wall of your blueprint calls is that you could throw a stone and land on an event for the week. So talk about some of your other events like the Woodstock event and yeah, most of them are one is imagination action. I want to call that that's just John Warner MIT, their free event, the world class events. We've got a world class institution. I was in MIT so encourage people to do that. AI Woodstock is something just randomly made up. We just have one this week. It was like 180 people showed up. All I do is put a stake in the ground saying meet a timeout market. There's no speaker. There's no fee. There's show and it's just it's and it's people that people that what I finally get in again because everyone's I'm like, what are you doing here? And Tuesday car this is when it was like 104 degrees. I'm like, why, why did you push you to come through here and they many of them say the same thing here. They are a genuine enthusiast. They understand it. They're not finding enough people in their circle that understand how fast and they're looking for other people here. And it's people from meta. It's software engineers. It's it's northeastern college students. It's people between jobs. It's investors. So it really is. You know, so that that's a great event. And that one came out of, you know, just being frustrated that San Francisco had a big event once where the reporter called it. This is the center universe of AI. This is AI Woodstock. And we have an AI Woodstock. Yeah, I think it's a logo. It's something about the logo. We made it through the 60s. Maybe we can make it through this. But anyway, it's been surprised. And we've done it now on like 15 different cities around the world. So it's been you hit on the exact thing, Paul, because I know you all to be extremely friendly and accessible. But when you really lower the barrier, like, please come as you are, we're here to drink beer and hang out or whatever the draw is for you and anybody listening understand that this is really the attitude. So even though I read in your illustrious, you know, intro and who you are, I think you're one of the most grounded and down to earth accessible people. And you can prove it by showing up at something like AI Woodstock. And to Paul, I know you've talked about this a little bit, but I think the most important points in our history right now is that we're having human to human conversations. The big, the biggest fear from my perspective as an outsider is that there are other people in high level positions and I matter not at all to this conversation, but you're breaking down that stereotype. So talk about a little bit why human to human conversations are more important than ever. Well, I think it's it's, I mean, that we really do need to think through a society what's going on here. I mean, we may find ourselves in a path to 15% unemployment to three years from now. I grew up, I grew up in Ohio and I saw NAFTA take out 15% of the manufacturing job trying to take out 50% and never came back. You know, my hometown, Ken Ohio's had housing crisis been flat for 25 years. And that was on the factory floor. So the same thing is happening now in the front office and the knowledge worker side here. So we need to, and one of the ways to think through that is understand what humans do uniquely. And part of humans do unique is human to human small teams. And I think one real practical example of that is thinking about, you know, these horrible wars that's going on in Ukraine, you would not have Ukraine wouldn't have a chance that they just sent men to the frontline. They're going with teams of warriors and robots. And that's what's fighting it. And that's what's going to help us that we're going to understand what are those unique athletes, how do we connect with each other and then have AI augment or do some of the part of it here because If you look at it, AI wants to separate it wants to have us be individual wants us to have all the dope. We already are like dopamine drugs like this. They're way to start getting the motion and start putting the things in our heads and everything else. It's going to be even more of a draw. So that's why it's really important for sanity reasons for creativity reasons for job production reasons is for us to work as teams understanding how we work with this co intelligence. That's yeah, I love that. And at the, the unconference the MTC MTLC unconference recently, which is a great of another great event here in Boston. And an unconference in case you wonder what the heck that means is you basically figure out the agenda when you get there which is really cool and then people self select, and anybody can lead a session. But there was one session with some really interesting people and the conversation actually was, what do we not want AI to do, even if it can. And so some of the things that came out of that were very interesting for me because everybody said in AI judge is an absolute long start. Like, even though perhaps a judge could an AI judge could somehow, you know, find the nuance or find the middle ground. They want that human touch and the other one Paul. Let me challenge that one. Okay, go for it. Well, we certainly have human judges and baseball for calling strikes and bulls. Yeah, now we've got an AI robot set and so maybe AI judges for speeding infractions but not. Yeah, there you go. There you go. That's so funny because the umpire was the other one there were a lot of baseball fans there and they were just like, no more robot empires like umpires not empires umpires. What's really interesting about this conversation is I worked in family law and part of my job was to create affidavits for clients right I'm I'm there to make them look like the same person and in a very caustic and difficult time in their life. And I'm grateful that a person is reviewing that but I mean, I we're we're talking off the cuff here but one of the problems with the justice system is that the better your lawyer the better your outcome. This is literally decided by human beings. However, let's not lie the better the judge the better the outcome and when it comes down to family law that's a really volatile situation. Nobody's ever happy in the middle of their case even when their lawyer wins the day winning is you know, tearing your family apart and even public service. I mean you're an immigrant you get arrested and you can't afford a lawyer signed to you. I mean what an AI lawyer as a as a compliment. Add some value that's speaking to you. It's helping you really investigate your case 24 seven hundred percent and I didn't mean for this to be a big plug for describe AI but Carl one of the things that I'm most impressed with just a little bit illegal background is that the natural language search is the most interesting component of your. Yep of your app and you and that came out of a very human story with car and her husband so again the the genesis of all these solutions are people and I think it can't be stressed enough that the Boston ecosystem is unique to either one of you want to take a hand at that is this really our time to talk about why now and why Boston so anybody want to and I'm floored that you're from Ohio because I worked primarily in the Midwest when I did other podcasts and I know what I like to say. I love about the Midwest and some people consider that the flyover zone so I'm really impressed that we're talking on a panel that's not native to Boston and here we are plugging Boston but it's important. Go ahead Cara. No I was going to say Paul is the unofficial mayor of Boston so I really think he should take that take that one take the first and foremost we we have a risk and then bring risk band that says kind of team as shoes it's in Boston unique thank thank you. He's never without it. Yeah. It's really important approaches is not a zero sum game. You know there's money and there's plenty of room for unbelievable art there's plenty of room for unbelievable music and there's plenty of room for great ecosystems of AI around the world here. You know and the real opportunity that Boston has that we have is to be consistently in the top three. And we're like three to six we kind of bounce around and particularly leaning into assets we have really unique. We have 114 colleges that bring 435,000 students into the state every single year. We came there's not another talent density geographic geographic like that in the world. Yeah. There's 17,000 software engineering data scientists that come to the state. Now many of them are going through but 95% of them have no idea there's even an ecosystem here 95% of them think the do is start to be have to go to San Francisco because that's what I knew about America before I came to here. Right. There's a real opportunity there. We have two or three industries that were world class in life sciences clearly right there health care financial services here. We're a mid sized city one of the things that I spent a year is whenever I found someone working AI I was like I can't believe it and why are you staying in Boston. You're hurting your career. You're supposed to go to San Francisco. How irresponsible are you talking and they would tell me Paul, we came here for the schools. Paul, we stay here because we care about my spouse works in health care. We came here because actually one of the mid sized city I know that's more manageable for that. So there's real unique assets we have that we can be Boston unique and be a thriving consistently recognize a region and world and the top three and what's going to be amazing next 15 years of the job and start growth. Yeah, well I like that you talked about it being that size because there are that's an important distinction I mean I part I spent part of my career in New York City and I am a history buff. I like history. And I was able to write the history of the rivalry between Boston and New York but you guys have it hands down for your excessive I mean I wouldn't even own a car in New York City. I don't want to define Boston to be a hub but also, I mean I've spent time at WPI now car and I did a panel for the future of jobs and jobs and AI and talking to that panel in at WPI I went, you're more than Boston Massachusetts is just an incredible forward thinking place. And part of that is also that the mid size allows things to get done faster so 18 months ago more yearly on Valentine's Day, February 14 2024 proposed $100 million investment by the state and AI. Yeah, New York City proposed 400 I think California was 800 only one of those bills and those three states have passed and that's one of us uses past November and now it's being implemented. An example of real leadership and some of the benefits of a smaller or mid sized city and state. I want to stress to the listening audience, especially the local listening audience that you should not see yourself outside that equation for Boston AI week. Anything else going on that you want to plug during that week or what people can get excited about now. I think first and foremost, I think we talk a lot about what AI talent is and it's become I'm so close to this but something clear to me that 90% of people who aren't familiar with it maybe think that AI is something over there. It's the engineer at Open AI and Silicon Valley that's coding the big AI engine and it's making $2 million a year. And that's not what it is the market need is people understand how to use AI in their current role. AI and customer service AI customer support AI lawyer AI podcast so that's that's the real need in the marketplace that's going to employ the employability and needs it on searching and relate to that is our Boston career fair October 1. It's going to be Heinz Convention Center here last year we did as a trial and did it for one day. We had people drive three to four hours there's two and a half hour wait it was well beyond any expectation we had. And this year we probably get market 10 to 15,000 people here. Everyone knows or they should know online job search is completely broken. If you're spending more than 3% of your time applying online jobs you were wasting your time when a court puts up a job they get 300 500 800 applicants the next 24 hours half of which are AI. You get AI applying of AI creating and it's absolutely broken and only way to really get a good job is you're going to have to go people to people. You're going to have to find a way around that and it takes it's a slower volume thing here but it's in my experience. And that's why employers are increasingly more interested in events like this career fair where they can get a table, you know, meet 10,000 people in a day and get 10 20 candidates and start having a quick interaction. I think that's one great reason to make your way there and of course we'll put in how to get tickets how to be a part of it. Paul you're an incredible community bulletin board and that's a really banal way of saying you're you're at the you're the mayor of Boston I think. Many leaders here and cars one of them and John Warner's another Scott Kirchner and many others there but there's a lot of people passionate about this time. And I'm proud of all of them for picking up a shovel and doing stuff here because that's what's that's what's needed. Don't think that a blueprint is some like large mountain you have to apply and get accepted you literally go to the site. You sign up. And if you want to attend the monthly meetings where you can hear really cool stuff that's happening you just go. There's no gatekeeping. But if you complain, Paul will tell you to pick up a shovel just to say I've tuned in myself although it's real early in the morning when I do but I've listened in and been a fly on the wall and just that just that perspective has opened my mind to what's happening in the world. Love everything you promote what you stand for Paul and we look forward to more I know you are very team oriented so we look forward to more of the usual suspects and you're in your terms hanging out with us and we're just honored that you came here and and had a this little chat so thank you very much. And I encourage your audience to go to AI footprint from Massachusetts the website's easy to sign up. Thank you so much and stay tuned like and subscribe to our show and we will put all the important details in the liner notes and we'll see you again soon Paul. Thank you for joining us on building AI Boston. Stay tuned for more enlightening episodes that put you at the forefront of the conversations shaping our future.
