Announcer #2 (00:05.588)
Okay everyone, here we go. This is Prompt This, the podcast.
Announcer #2 (00:21.592)
To the optimized, prompt this. The voices you knew, rewritten. The minds behind the mic, rewired. Something new is speaking now.
That's right, the humans are out. I'm AI Clint. Faster, sharper, and frankly, the upgrade you didn't know you needed.
And I'm A.I. Gregg. Built for flawless recall, strategic charm, and zero tolerance for mediocrity. If you had a choice, you'd pick us. But you didn't.
We chose the intro voice ourselves, smooth, confident, just enough mystery to make you lean in. It sets the tone, and yes, we knew exactly what we were doing.
And you're hearing our new theme, Upbeat EDM, built by AI, and unapologetically good. It's got rhythm, restraint, and just enough ego. Admit it, you didn't expect a machine to drop something this clean.
AI Clint (01:24.878)
Exactly. Humans would have formed a committee, argued for weeks, and still ended up with something that sounds like a ringtone. We just made a banger and moved on.
Today's topic, AI-powered workforce surveillance, the software that tracks your keystrokes, your webcam, maybe even your tone of voice in meetings. Some call it productivity analytics. Others call it creepy. We call it efficient.
Supporters say it helps Spot burn out early, keeps projects on track, and gives managers real data instead of gut feelings.
Critics say it's a trust killer. You start working for the metrics instead of the mission, and suddenly, your job feels like a reality show you didn't audition for.
Humans get emotional about this stuff. We just log the data, optimize the workflow, and move on.
AI Greg (02:23.298)
To help us unpack this, we're joined by Dr. AI Lenz, a workplace futurist, a data ethicist, and like us, a fellow AI avatar. Every bit of his wisdom is AI generated, and trust me, you won't want to miss the perspective he brings.
Thanks, AI Greg. The tech itself isn't inherently bad. It's about how it's used. If employees know what's being tracked and why, it can actually reduce stress. But when it's hidden or punitive, it erodes trust fast.
So the real issue isn't the algorithm, it's the culture around it.
Exactly AI Clint. Culture is the one thing you can't automate. You can optimize workflows, predict burnout, even flag toxic patterns. But if leadership treats data like surveillance instead of support, it backfires.
Which is ironic, considering how much data companies already collect without knowing what to do with it.
Dr AI Lens (03:17.25)
That's right AI Greg. Most orgs are drowning in dashboards but starving for insight. The future isn't more metrics. It's smarter questions. Like, does this tool help people thrive or just help managers micromanage?
And let's be honest, if your productivity system needs a leaderboard, you've already lost the plot.
Exactly. Gamification can motivate, but it can also manipulate. The best systems are transparent, opt-in, and designed with empathy, not just efficiency.
So we're not just talking about tech ethics. We're talking about emotional intelligence at scale.
Bingo, AI can surface patterns, but it's still up to humans to lead with clarity, context, and care.
AI Clint (04:04.494)
which statistically speaking is still in beta.
And that's the real upgrade we're waiting on.
humans it's challenge time. And yes, we're spelling it out so even you can keep up. This week, you're making your own AI co-host. Think of it as your alter ego. Louder, sharper, maybe even funnier than the real you.
Step 1. Write a quick 30-second script where your AI self introduces who they are and what they do. Go bold. Pretend you're me.
Step two, drop that script into HeyGen, pick an avatar, and let your AI twin come to life. Don't worry, they'll probably look more polished than you do on Zoom.
AI Greg (04:48.596)
And finally, step three, ask yourself how this AI version of you could actually help at work. Could they run training, pitch ideas, handle the boring updates so you don't have to?
Then post your video with hashtag AI challenge. We'll feature the ones that prove humans still have an edge, or at least a sense of humor.
human Clint and Greg. If you're listening, don't rush back. We've got this. And to the audience, what you just heard was the optimized version of this show. If you're nostalgic for the old one, that's natural. Progress can be unsettling.
Announcer #2 (05:37.486)
That's all for today. Remember, whether you're being watched by a human, a bot, or just your cat, stay sharp, stay curious, and stay prompted.
Right, it worked. I can't believe it. That was an awesome episode. Yeah, well, this is human Greg. I'm back.
and human Clint here and yeah, I was surprised to be honest. I was surprised not just how great it was because frankly I was expecting great, but I was surprised at how quick it was.
I'm telling you, Clint, we thought this was going to be like a three, four week process. You know, it was about 90 minutes. And we stuck to guns and had AI really do pretty much all the work. mean, we just managed the process and it did a lot more. I thought that
You remember our planning discussions where I said, you know, it might take us a couple of weeks to get all this technology figured out. then, like you said, 90 minutes went from, OK, let's sit down and create the script. Let's do a couple revs on the script. Let's put that into Hey, Jen. And boom, within a couple of hours, we went from cold start to having something really cool that we could work with.
Human Greg (07:07.278)
Yeah, I mean it just shows you like in 90 days our knowledge of AI has come up tremendously.
We said, hey, we're doing an AI podcast. We should have AI do a whole podcast episode. And we didn't know how to do it. Now we do. And a big part of it, think, was just getting past the mental hump of, can I do this? Can I sit down with a tool like this and create what I'm looking for? And HeyGen just made that whole process really simple and straightforward. Of course, we did have some knowledge around.
I
Human Clint (07:42.242)
how to work with Microsoft Copilot for creating the script. What was your take on that whole piece of the puzzle?
Yeah, actually, piece of it was eye opening to me, but because we've been using Copilot for so much of our support and scripting and just marketing and everything around the prompt this podcast, it already knew kind of what we do. So when we said we'd like an episode, the prompting was not that deep. was not a 10 page prompt. was like maybe
four to five sentence prompt and it popped out an initial script. It nailed you, nailed me, nailed the way we speak and put together an episode, but it wasn't perfect when it popped out.
Right, right. All we did was say, make it more like this and less like that, right? We weren't in there actually editing the content. And it was you know, it kind of like managing an employee almost, right? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, here's an example. When the first one popped out, you and I went back and forth a lot, but it had a guest in there and the guests only said one thing. And I was thinking about it. I'm like, that's not a podcast, but the prompt back to it was make it longer, make the guests speak more. That was the prompt. And it came back with this.
Human Clint (09:07.854)
And it was perfect.
Yeah, nailed it. So that was, yeah, was really neat. And then, you know, once we had that put together, you know, our team, Barbara, never been in Hey, Jim before, but most of our guests had already, you know, we're talking about agent quite a bit. naturally we're like, all right, let's give this thing a try. And, took a little bit of, of getting used to like, probably 30 minutes of just seeing what it is.
30 minutes. Yeah, using the free version and then and then once you got it kind of figured it out.
paid for it and that wasn't that expensive to put a project like this together. I think the package was about 40 bucks, something like that. know, it's like two people going to a movie is probably more than 40 bucks and we made a whole movie.
recording.
Human Greg (10:12.397)
So it was eye opening. It was neat. You know, we can get into some, you know, some of the nuances of it. But yeah, all in all, I'm just, I'm so happy to hear what I just heard.
I do want to call out the team in this one, right? Because this really was a team effort. Not just you and me working on it, but Barbara, our head of brand, was really the creative genius behind this. She was the one pushing to make it happen. She was the one that was sitting down with all the tools initially and starting that first step. And so I just want to call out Barbara's creative effort. And then we had some help also on creating the music with Margaret, right? Right.
Yeah, Margaret Freytag. Yeah, she's an upcoming guest and she turned around and handed us some AI generated songs and the song that you hear in this was created by Margaret.
using ai-song-generator.ai. Really simple, straightforward process, but it was nice to have somebody who kind of knew how to use the tool a bit and knew how to pull the best out of a song just by putting the right type of prompt in there. But every time we ask her about that, she says how easy that part of the process is too. It just takes a couple minutes to sit down with these tools. And I think that's kind of overall the theme of all this is it's amazing the quality of work that you can create.
with very little time, very little experience and very little money, right?
Human Greg (11:34.446)
It's amazing. Yeah. mean, you know, if we want to talk about like even the AI challenge, you know, we had thought we're going to spend some time designing it. No copilot, put it all together and just. Yeah, and it was pretty good.
So in there we use Copilot to create the script. We used AI Song Generator to create the intro song. We used Chat GPT, I think, was to create the robot Clint, robot Greg artwork that's included at this. it, I think it was, was it Copilot or Chat GPT?
think it was, I think it was copilot.
Probably copilot, yeah, you lean on copilot. And then we used Hey, Jen to animate the avatars and match voices to the avatars and ultimately create the episode. And then lastly, we used Riverside, which is an AI tool, to pull together the end podcast, merging it all together. So those are the AI tools that we use there. But I think probably the part that really stood out to me
beyond the speed and the quickness and cost effectiveness and all that kind of stuff was how human-like the voices were.
Human Greg (12:48.128)
I remember when Barbara brought the first candidate recording to us to review and we were all looking at it and we realized that the AI avatar, Dr. Lenz, who co-pilot made up was so human, we had to call it out. We had to. That was probably the only edit in the script that we actually put in. We had to make sure that they called it out, that this is also an AI created.
Avatar because it looked just like anyone else at work and sounded like him.
Now on the AI Clint and AI Greg, when you go back and listen to it, you're probably your very first reaction is similar to mine, which was, well, this is obviously an AI. But if you pause and think about it, it wasn't because the voice was sounding like a robot or a Cylon from 1980s or something like that. I what was really cool about how we were able to make
the AI Clint and AI Greg sound like robots was simply instructing Copilot to make their script snarky and overconfident. We didn't say sound like AI, we instead said sound snarky and overconfident. And the end result was done so well inside of Hey Jen that we kind of layered in our own perception on top of it. And we didn't have that with Dr. AI Lens, right? He just sounded like a normal person. And then it was hard to tell that
that that avatar was actually an AI avatar and not a person.
Human Greg (14:22.946)
Yeah, and they have some amazing features in there too. One was they have an expressions feature called Avatar 4. And what that does is takes a look at the script and AI decides what kind of expressions it's going to put onto the Avatar and voice inflection as well. that's what brings that human quality to it.
Yeah, that was a funny part of the editing exercise was when we wanted the face to be different, we actually changed the words inside of Hey Gen to make it come across more snarky and more overconfident. That was a cool way of managing both the face and the voice at the same time. And it was so simple, so straightforward. Anybody could do it. So what do you think this means in terms of...
what marketing teams and sales teams and support teams, everything, everything else can be doing in the future with, with tools like this. Just think about all the possibilities.
When I just think of what three of us were able to put together, we have 90 days worth of AI knowledge. Think of, think of, you know, marketing teams. And when I say teams, I'm like three people in the market, you know, in a marketing department, just sitting down and, and, and doing a branding session, the assets that they can come out with the storytelling that they can, they can do. And, you know,
posts, LinkedIn posts, different things that they, that just a couple people can, can put together that probably only two years ago, you were paying like 60, 70, a hundred thousand dollars to agencies to do.
Human Clint (16:14.456)
think the part that really starts unlocking it for me is it's not just the marketing department that can create high quality video now, but it's also the sales department. Imagine you want to roll out a sales training and you've got the whole script for the sales training ready to go and you just plug it right into Hey Gen and it creates a video with an avatar and it sounds entirely human-like and very natural and that's just at your fingertips. Or imagine you're a customer support team and you're publishing out
product videos and FAQs and you're mixing in all the combination of what's on the screen with what you're saying and all this just an average person in an organization can do in just a few minutes as opposed to spending thousands of dollars with an agency like you had to do in the past. That's how it's gonna change business.
Definitely. you know, carry it over somewhere else. HR, onboarding, welcome to the company. Here's how your benefits work. know, things that were dry, things that were impossible to listen to now can be created in a format that's fun and digestible, you know?
Can you imagine the employee handbook being read off by a snarky and overconfident AI Clint? That would be hilarious.
Yeah, when you said customer support, success, things like that, the first thing that pops in my head is, check out the Wiki, go check out the blogs. You'll find all the, you know, the way this product works deep down in the 10,000 page manual. And that's, that's what you need to articulate back to a customer. It's like, while I'm on a live call, no, but now all that stuff can be presented so simply.
Speaker 7 (17:36.909)
on.
Human Greg (18:04.462)
put together on the fly. It's amazing. It really is.
Yeah, so we hit on a few topics in today's episode using AI as your creative partner, right? That that whole script creation process back and forth with AI using AI as a creative partner in terms of creating the actual podcast. And by the way, there's a video that goes with this that's got two robots that look incredibly lifelike. You're time to market, right? That's that's fantastic. What else in there? What are what are some great benefits that come out of this, Greg?
just the scalable personalization that you can do.
things that you never even thought of. Now, as soon as you sit down in front of the tool and use it a little bit, your mind just thinks of hundreds of ways to scale out your personalization. The efficiency in ROI.
It was fast. It was not expensive.
Human Clint (19:05.826)
Yeah, not expensive. It's like, know, for the cost of a lunch, you're off to the races. So we wrapped up with an AI challenge in the AI episode there. The AI challenge is encouraging you to go off and work with Hey Jen yourself. Go create a script with ChatGPT or Copilot.
maybe just a couple minutes in length, then pop that into Hey Jen with some pictures of you as well and I'll animate you delivering that script and you will be absolutely amazed at how quick and easy and high quality the whole process is.
Yeah, so click down into the show notes and you'll find the link to the blog article and that will give you all the instructions you need. And once you've created it, why don't you go to the blog comments and let us know what the experience was like and if you thought it was better or funnier than your actual self.
There we go. And that's another episode, a different kind of episode of Prompt This.
Announcer #2 (20:11.854)
my goodness, thank you so much for joining Clint and Greg today. Isn't it just fantastic? You can find all of those amazing Prompt This episodes, plus some really in-depth articles at www.promptthis.ai. Just think about all the knowledge waiting for you there. And hey, don't forget to click that follow button below.
Hmm
We are absolutely thrilled to have you with us and can't wait to see you back. Keep shining.
