Adam Torres and Candice DeVille discuss AI.
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Show Notes:
What does unlocking human potential through AI mean? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Candice DeVille, CEO at AI Copilot, explore AI Copilot and what it takes to unlock human potential.
About Candice DeVille
Co-founder of two companies, Copilot Crew and AI Copilot, dedicated to helping businesses and teams thrive in the rapidly evolving fields of digital marketing and AI.
With over two decades of experience in marketing, media, and digital strategy, my work combines analysis, business intelligence, and artificial intelligence with creative design, content, and marketing communications. This unique blend enables her to create powerful connections between businesses and their customers.
Throughout my career, She worked with renowned brands like L’oreal, Mercedes, Panasonic, Samsung, Tourism Dubai, and National Gallery of Victoria, as well as scale-ups, SaaS companies, and SMEs across Australia and North America. This diverse portfolio has given her valuable insights into various industries and markets.
From an early age, She’s been passionate about pushing the boundaries of technology. This innate curiosity and drive led her to working in digital and video, automation and AI – now guiding businesses to explore and harness these powerful tools for transformative growth.
AI Copilot helps organisations navigate the AI realm, with AI strategy consulting, planning, implementation and integration, plus team training and development. They enable clients to understand the pros and cons, and properly use these technologies to their advantage.
As an advocate for diversity in technology, I’m a proud member and mentor for organisations including Women in AI, StartupBootcamp, RMIT, MIC, AUSCL and Pledge 1%.
She is also a seasoned speaker, workshop presenter and tv/radio/podcast guest, sharing her expertise on business strategy, AI, automation, ecommerce, digital marketing, sales, and starting and growing businesses.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest, I have Candice DeVille and she is CEO over at AI Copilot.
Candice, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. All right. So definitely we have a lot to talk about today. So AI has been on the, is a hot topic for everybody, whether you’re marketing your business owner, heck, whether you’re ordering food from Uber eats. I don’t know. You can’t get away from the AI conversation.
So excited to get into that with you and just to get us kicked off. We’ll start with our mission matters minute. So, Candice, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives. That’s what we do. Candice, what mission matters to you? For me, the core is being able to unlock human potential.
And that is both for business and staff, but also in personal life so that people can really tap into the things that they want to be able to do, but may have, you know, found themselves stopped before. How did you get into the, how did you get interested in AI? Like, where’d all that begin for you? Like, how’d that happen?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I was in the marketing space for a very long time in digital marketing. And of course, there’s a lot of AI and algorithms used in all that. And I was so, so interested in the technology behind it, particularly what it does with human behavior and how it understands what we do in those algorithms.
And so that was the path that led me into working in AI and working with it. Earlier technologies and now into generative AI. How long ago was that? I’m just like, roughly don’t, you don’t have to give me the exact year or date. Roughly about 10 years ago, I’d say. Getting into the machine learning side of things.
And I asked you that too, because , you know, we get a lot of newbie and nothing against anybody that’s just learning or starting out, but I just like to have some context for the conversation. Like you’re not, you didn’t just. Wake up and think, Hey, I’m going to get into AI last week, which again, no disrespect to anybody that did, by the way, like everybody’s got to work.
Everybody’s got to find their niche and their obsession. So I’m in for that. So maybe just to start the conversation here AI co pilot, like talk to me about the company and exactly what you do. Yeah, so I copilot is designed. It’s not a software. We’re actually a service business. And our goal is to work with medium and small enterprises to help them be educated on a I first understanding what that is consulting with their business to determine what Are they ready to start putting AI in?
And if so, where, how to determine what that is. And then also helping them build and implement those solutions. And that comes with not just the technology, but also the change management side of it. And working with people to make sure that the solutions that we’re doing are the ones that are going to work best for the entire company and the staff there.
You used this term earlier in your mission and talking about what your mission was, which was unlocking human potential. And I know as like, there’s, you know, people that are maybe pro AI against it, like in between some that don’t care. But I know that there is a segment that feel that, you know, AI is going to really not be all that good for like jobs and other things like that.
And then there’s another argument that says, you know, what, hey, us working with AI is going to be more productivity, more things. We can solve more problems like increase, you know, the quality of living for many, possibly billions of people on this planet. Like, so a lot of different arguments out there.
When you talk about unlocking human potential, what does that mean to you? I think it really comes down to the things that as an individual might be skills or abilities that have been hidden from us. So things that we can’t necessarily tap into, for example, you know, you may have great mental pictures of the art that you want to create, but you don’t necessarily have the skill level to do that.
Or maybe you love music and you’ve always wanted to try your hand at it, but perhaps you’re not great at any particular instrument. So there’s all sorts of things we can do there, even in terms of the workplace, being able to look at things that are outside the core job description that we may have had, or do at least one of the key areas that we’re working with is neurodivergence.
And trying to find different ways to help people unlock what’s inside and get that out into their their, their products, their, the way of working to be able to communicate better with other staff members and things that may have been a block for them before. I’m smiling ear to ear over here, and I know you can’t necessarily see it, but I’ll tell you why because when you think about this, I was just having this conversation and I think I agree with everything you said, by the way, and I think it also lets us play a little bit.
I have a buddy of mine. Oh, my gosh. His name is Matt. And I’m talking very serious guy. He’s like data analytics, like all this other stuff. So he’s always stressed out or working on some huge project. And I’m like, what are you up to, Matt? And he’s like, well, my computer is something blah, blah, blah, like long story short, he couldn’t do his normal function of obsessing over things.
Right. And I said, wow. So what are you doing then? Like, how are you handling this downtime? And he says, well, Adam, I’m working on a Star Wars Christmas country song. Right? How great is that? He sent it over to me and I was dying laughing and I’m like, oh my gosh, yes, I said, I said, it lets us play again, like to think about like what he, how he was able to create that and whatever he wanted to do.
Like, when you talk about unlocking human potential, like what he was able to create, what would he have had to do otherwise? He would have had to have an artist sing it, he would have had to have somebody compose music, you would have had to have like. All these other things. And instead, what do you do? He was able to do it himself and do it online and just create it and like, and have fun with it and it, and he just made it for himself and he made my day.
He enriched my life with laughter. If somebody’s listening to this and you want to hear it, like maybe put it in the comment section or something, and maybe I’ll get Matt to release it. We’ll share it with everybody. Oh, I don’t know if he wants to though. So we’ll see. But that’s the thing about AI to me.
It’s like we can play, we can do different things, we can, you know, figure out other ways to create and add value. Going back to kind of the business side and not the and let’s say not the Star Wars Christmas country music side, which I brought up, you did not. Going back to the business side, a lot of business owners and executives that listen to this.
How do businesses kind of go down that thought process of considering, like, are they ready to adopt, like, new solutions or processes or AI? Because it can be tricky. There’s so many things out there. Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely a tricky one for for businesses because there are so many conflicting viewpoints in the media we’re being bombarded with a lot of marketing for every tool that’s popping up overnight and you end up with a suite of 50 different apps that may be obsolete the next week.
So actually understanding where you are and where you want to go is the first part. And when we work with businesses, we’ve actually created an AI readiness playbook that will be available to your listeners as well. But it actually helps you work through the foundations of where does the business need to be in terms of things like data?
You know, how do you keep all of this? How organized are things? What are some of the frameworks that need to be in place for the business first to actually take good advantage of AI and understanding what that foundation is, and then also being able to have a basic understanding of what AI could do for the business.
You know, it’s really fantastic, but it’s not a magic Harry Potter one that, you know, you just turn on and it does everything. Yeah. How do you strike a balance in this? I know it’s going to be different from company to company, size of company, management, like employees, everything’s going to, obviously a lot of variables, but how do you balance this?
Like this concept of either what AI work, or it’s like, how does all this balance? Yeah, I think it really starts with taking small steps and for the leadership in the company to understand that that AI should be there to augment the workforce, not to replace them. Because if they go into trying to implement AI in the business with the mindset of let’s just cut costs, let’s just cut overhead and cut the number of people, you’re going to lose a lot of time.
of that knowledge base that is really required in order to effectively implement AI. And what we, what we talk about is having AI and human knowledge work side by side so that the AI can, in the first place, start freeing up some of that grunt, Work that repetitive work that you don’t really want your team to be doing.
And instead they become the subject matter experts that can guide the implementation of the AI can help with the training can improve that process and then free them up to do the, the knowledge work. Mm hmm. Yeah, I like that. And I think and this is something that I don’t hear much talking about, but it’s just one of my feelings is that I think it can increase the quality of like of living for many people that are out here working and maybe doing routines or tasks that aren’t where they’re not necessarily functioning in their highest Like I can think of some, some some processes that we had that were pretty like rote and routine in the past that were pretty manual.
You could think, and not even to bring AI into it, but if we just go far, far back, like what it was like to put a caption on a video once upon a time. That was drudgery. Wasn’t it? Like that was so, oh, and then having to edit it. Like having a second set of eyes and drudgery and editing it and this and that.
But now that the softwares are so cool. Good. I’m shocked sometimes at the words they catch in the proficiency and the few errors that come out on certain softwares. And you’re just like, wow, now that person no longer has to sit there and spend hours and hours on that. They can do something higher function.
They can edit video. They can do audio. They can go into more of the audio engineering. They can do a lot of different things. So I feel like the quality of living can be better too. What’s been your experience in this? I absolutely agree. I think, you know, definitely on the personal and lifestyle side, it can be increased a lot.
But when it comes to businesses and what people are able to do, if you’re taking away a lot of that mind numbing work and allowing people to then Be able to do what they love about their job. That’s going to increase the quality for them. But even the quality for your customers that you serve as a business can be dramatically increased both in terms of the customer service, the depth of service, the speed of service.
And one of my favorites is being able to communicate more effectively cross culturally. So if we take some of the things that we’ve had limits on, because perhaps we. Did not have someone in the business to, to translate that kind of information or be able to handle and, and really serve customers that have a different language base, we now have the opportunity to do some of these things and bring our offerings to a whole new market.
Should I be worried that my team has been talking about Adam AI and how they can feed all my Interviews into it and they can just create a nice little avatar of me and like I’m like, but wait No, I’m supposed to be able to do things. I like to do Right? Should I be worried Adam AI is coming to get me? I think I should.
I’m for it though. Look, I think those clones are fantastic to have, you know, often think I wish I could clone myself. It’s wonderful to have, but I guarantee it’s never going to have your sense of humor or your comedic timing. I don’t know. They put in 6, 000. I did this over 6, 000 interviews. Give it another 10 years.
I’ll be another 20, 000 up. I don’t know if I’m saying too many new things. No. You can retire early. I don’t have that much insight, Candice. Give me a break. No. Oh, that’s fun. So what, what type of clients do you work with, by the way? Like what kind of business, like sizes? I mean, is it size, industry? Like how do people get the most benefit out of working with with your company?
Well, we’re very much industry agnostic because these technologies can be applied to anything in any space. And even things that you wouldn’t necessarily think of, you know, if you’re a gardener, for example, there are still really great ways that we can apply AI in that kind of business. For us, mostly we work with companies that are sort of medium size, not for large.
Full enterprise size, because we really want to be working directly with, you know, the founders and the leadership team to help them then lead their company into that era because the change has to start from. And so that’s really important to us. But we also. I’m really focused on being able to provide a lot of education and resources to people who otherwise couldn’t get them.
So we have created a whole lot of free educational content that is accessible to anyone in the world. And we plan to continue doing that because we know that as these transitions start to take place in the workforce. Individuals are going to be looking to upskill and doing it in a way that is not too scary, you know, not to speak.
And so we try and make that as accessible as possible in plain English to help people through that. Amazing. Candice, how do people follow up? How do they learn more about AI Copilot? Yeah, if you just go to AICopilot. com, you’ll be able to get in contact with us from there, but you can also grab a copy of the AI Readiness Guide.
Playbook, which should be out in Amazon in about a month or two, but we’re going to give you that sneak peek. Awesome. For everybody listening, just so you know, we will put the links to the website, all that other good stuff in the show notes so that you can just click on it and head right on over and check out AI Copilot.
And speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe button and Candice really appreciate you. It’s taking some time for us. Thanks so much for coming on. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks Adam.