Thriving in the AI Era: A Guide to Future-Proofing Your Career — Michael Walker | Why AI Gives Professionals a Competitive Edge, How AI Drives Creativity and Innovation, AI Examples Improving Ecommerce Productivity, Why You Need AI Agents (#341)

In this episode of the podcast, we explore practical tips for learning to work alongside AI, a crucial skill in today's rapidly evolving landscape.

Joining me on the show today is Michael Walker, the Chief Marketing Officer at smythos.com.

He shares insights on integrating AI into various workflows and enhancing productivity. Join us as we delve into strategies that empower professionals to thrive in an AI-driven environment.

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• Why AI is changing organizations by streamlining efficiency and increasing revenue
• How AI frees up individuals to be more creative and innovative
• What valuable skills are needed in an AI-driven world, including problem-solving
• How AI assistants can tackle complex business problems as a unified system
• Why learning AI assistant building is crucial for professionals in 2025
• What examples show AI agents improving productivity in ecommerce
• What the process looks like for implementing AI agents in business
• How embracing AI helps professionals harness its power advantageously

Links & Resources

Website: https://smythos.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelwalkerii/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/smythos/

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://t.ly/lqUkW

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Transcript

Welcome to the eCommerce Coffee Break podcast. We discuss why practical tips for learning to work alongside AI. Joining me on the show is Michael Walker, Chief Marketing Officer at smythos.com. So let's dive into it. 

This is the eCommerce Coffee Break. A top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants.

And business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e-commerce world with your host Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome. Welcome to the show. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of the e-Commerce Coffee Break podcast.

Today we wanna talk about ai. specifically about practical tips for learning on how to work alongside AI. Now, AI is around for about two years now for the public when ChatGPT came into place, and a lot of industries, specifically marketing, have adopted very quickly, but AI is going deeper and deeper into industries and might change quite a bit when you're working in your job.

To discuss this, I have Michael Walker with me. He's the chief marketing officer of SmythOS. Michael is an AI leader specializing in AI agents orchestration. Or that is, we will dive into in a second. With a strong foundation in AI driven marketing and a passion for disruptive innovation, Michael focus on driving the company's mission to revolutionize AI development and deployment.

So let's welcome Michael to the show. Hi, Michael, how are you today? 

Um, good Clause. Thank you so much for having me. 

Michael, AI, big topic for two years now. Can you explain to me how AI is currently changing the workplace? 

Yeah, it's, um, almost a faster answer to explain how it isn't right. Um, I think there's two ways to look at it.

One is the organizational level and one is the individual level. So on the individual level, for example, I'm a chief marketing officer at Smith OS, and before that I ran, uh, multiple agencies. So I've, I've been in marketing for a really long time and I can't think of a day over the last two years that I haven't.

Use AI in some form or fashion, whether it's, uh, getting something started, right? As marketers, sometimes the hardest part is getting the first couple words onto the page. AI is a great companion to help you get started, right? And help you brainstorm and, and think. So I think number one is at the individual level.

Each one of us as humans are really freed up to be more creative and think in ways that we haven't thought before and challenge ourselves in different ways. And then of course, there's the organizational level where companies can streamline their efficiency, help increase their revenue potential and their profitability.

Um, and really just accomplish more with less and reach new levels of scale. So, uh, whether it's HR to compliance and legal to marketing and sales, every facet of an organization is, uh, being improved and elevated day by day with, uh, with artificial intelligence. 

What are some common myths about AI and job security that you came across?

Because obviously people saying AI are taking jobs away and so on so forth. Is there any truth in there or what's your point of view? 

That, that, that's the number one myth. Like, hey, AI is gonna take my job, right? Or I'm nervous about losing my job to AI. Look, the world has gone through this iteration many times before, right?

There was the industrial revolution, then the dot com boom, uh, then automation in, you know, factories and things like that. And there's really, uh, I studied economics in university, so I tend to look at things through that sort of lens. And anytime you go through a disruption. Uh, in the workplace, you have two things that sort of happen.

Number one is this new technology or emerging technology comes in and streamlines and optimizes processes and procedures that already exist. In that, in the very beginning, there is a lot of turmoil, uh, in shifting of personnel and people to make sure that our new augmented solutions work with what already exists.

But then on the back end of that, like we see time and time again, there are exponentially more jobs created to manage and leverage and stay on top of this new technology. And AI is no different. As AI becomes more prominent in the workplace, you need engineers, you need, uh, AI compliance professionals, you need prompt engineers, like you need the human creative mind to really shape and cultivate that, uh, that technology.

So to me, the biggest myth is that we should all be terrified of AI taking our jobs. And that's not the case, right? It's here to, uh, Help augment each of us as individuals and professionals so that we can do more in a day than we were able to do before AI. 

No, I agree with ai. Definitely can unlock productivity and see AI as a assistant or as a helper than being a competitor on that.

What do you think is the most valuable skill people should learn to thrive in a AI world? 

Yeah, there are some technical skills for sure, but I, I would almost start and say as AI becomes. more adopted into the day to day of the professional life. Soft skills are going to be where people can really shine, right?

Things like problem solving and critical thinking, that helps you utilize AI in different ways than maybe you initially thought. That's going to be really important. And then there's the entire creative side. The thing humans will always have over artificial intelligence is our day to day experience, the culmination of all those experience and everything that we've learned, and we're able to create stories, right?

Like we're great storytellers and we're creative beings. I think that as AI. We're going to be freed up from the mundane repetitive tasks to focus more on the creative side of business and personal relationships and all of that. So soft skills is definitely number one. Um, number two, though, is things like agent building.

Right. Do you understand what an AI agent is? Do you understand how that could be implemented and help your business or your organization? Uh, and then orchestrating those agents together. AI orchestration just means I could have a series of agents, let's say in marketing, for example, I can have one agent that's trained on keyword research, another one that's trained on product descriptions, another ones that's trained on, um, SEO publication and distribution.

And orchestration is bringing. All of those agents together so that they can tackle problems as one unit. So just like a team you put together to tackle an objective, you can do the same thing with agents. So being able to understand how AI orchestration works and how to match agents together is another really incredible skill that people, people can have moving into 2025, which some are calling the year of, uh, of AI agents.

I wanted to have a little bit more What you do, you work with agents, you create agents, um, can you share some real world examples on how these agents can improve productivity, solve problems? How do I create an agent? First of all. 

Yeah, absolutely. From the productivity side, AI is really, really good. At optimizing and systemizing anything that's repetitive.

So let's say in your day to day, again, I'm a, uh, a marketer. So I'll speak to the marketing side. If there are certain things I have to do on a regular basis, like let's say content, calendars, uh, product descriptions, website updates, I can train an agent to look for and analyze and think about all of the things that I spend my time doing on a day to day.

Okay. So if I know that every month I have a whole list of new products that are going to be published onto my site, I can have, I can train the AI to not only understand what those products are, but who is the target market for each one. Analyze what listing descriptions have been successful in the past.

Is it 20 words or is it 60 words? Uh, is it emotional language or is it rational language? And then over time that, that AI agent that I build is going to understand what works the best, what has the highest conversion rates, And then it can take over writing all the product descriptions for me. That's just one example in, in the e commerce world.

And then agents, agents are, uh, you can build these in a multiple different ways today. Probably the most common is in chat GPT. They have what's called custom GPTs, where you can go in and say, Here's what I want you to be able to do. That's a very kind of basic level agent. What we do at Smith OS is we have an operating system that allows you to combine all of your software and all of your web applications with any AI tools or large language models.

So you can combine OpenAI Chats GPT with Anthropic Cloud and you can pair that with your CRM or your Shopify or your CMS and all of these different tools can be AI powered and work together to achieve an outcome. That is an AI agent. Right? It's a collection of different large language models and tools that work together in a singular workflow to accomplish a desired outcome.

Hey, Claus here. Just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, sign up for our free newsletter and become a Smarter Shopify Merchant in just seven minutes per week. We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you stay on top of your e commerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends.

Every Thursday in your inbox, 100 percent free. Join now at newsletter. ecommercecoffeebreak. com. That is newsletter. ecommercecoffeebreak. com. And now back to the show. Very interesting. So basically if you're in a corporate environment and you have your corporate data and your tech stack, whatever you're using your CMS, you can bring all this together with an agent.

Now let's dive a little bit more on the technical side of things. Um, How do I create an agent or how do you help in creating agents? Is that a software development process? How long does it take? Give me a bit of an insight. 

Yeah. So there's a multiple ways to do it. The first one is, um, we at SmithOS have created, uh, what's called SmithOS Academy.

It's completely free and it takes anybody who's interested in, in building agents from the very start, which is the introductory level of knowledge. What is an agent? Uh, how do they work? What are the basic frameworks? How to think about it and solve problems from a agentic AI standpoint. And then we also have an AI agent in house.

engineer certification. So it will teach you how to build an AI agent from scratch. And the best part is Smith OS is entirely no code. So you don't have to be a developer or a software engineer. It's all drag and drop. So, uh, if anyone wants to start building them on their own, that would be the first place I would start.

Go to Smith OS Academy, go through those programs again, entirely free. Number two is, uh, you're going to see, and we already have seen with the, um, the deal between McKinsey and. Open AI, right? I think it was like a 30 million deal for one year or something, but consulting companies are all going to be entering the AI space, selling their consulting services.

So what I recommend is if you are an e commerce company or a marketing agency or something, Try to get ahead of that wave, right? So A, learn what AI agents are, learn how to build them and put them together, and then if you're looking for help getting started, at SmithOS we have what we call a concierge team, who will help you think through the problems that you're facing, how can you solve those with agents, we'll help you build a proof of concept, and then we'll train your team on how to manage that agent, build on top of it, and build other agents, so it's, it's really easy to, to get started.

Let's talk a little bit about, um, the career opportunities. You mentioned a couple of things like prompt engineer and stuff like that. What else might be a bit difficult to tell from the glass bowl, but what do you think is coming up, um, in the near future on potential new job descriptions? 

Yeah, I think you're already seeing right now at larger organizations, there's some sort of head of AI.

So at very big organizations, you might see what's called CAIOs, Chief AI Officers. You also have kind of the, the head of AI or head of AI innovation. So in the corporate setting, you're going to see a lot of leadership positions, just like your typical Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Sales Officer, Revenue Officer.

You're going to see these, these AI officers and their entire job is going to be. How do we adopt and deploy AI across organizations on a much more broad level? Um, AI engineers are going to be probably one of the most in demand job roles for at least the next three to five years. But the beauty of that is it doesn't have to be your traditional engineers, right?

Where, you know, a language or a handful of languages and you're a developer. Instead, it's about learning the technologies that are out there to build that. Those engineers, I think, are going to transition more to agent builders, right? So, um, Gartner did a study that by 2030, they expect there to be about at least a one to one ratio of employees to agents within companies.

Meaning companies are going to have as many AI agents as they do people working for their organizations. Somebody's going to have to be able to manage those agents, how to build them, How to make them fit together and orchestrate them, uh, how to maintain them. That's going to be a role for AI agent engineers.

And I think that's a massive opportunity for everybody. 

You mentioned that McKinsey is already, um, having a partnership with chat GPT and there's big money in there. Can you share some insights or just some examples of clients you worked with and what kind of results they saw in productivity? I don't know, in savings and so on.

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the companies we started with very early on, uh, is a company called Halo. Um, they are, uh, they create dog collars. So they are, uh, it's like an e fence for, for dogs. Um, they had a pretty similar to any, um, consumer goods company. They had a lot of, let's call it, Inflation or possibly even waste between the time somebody orders all the way through to customer service.

So order tracking, shipping and logistics, uh, customer service inquiries coming in. That is like a tailor made use case for early stage AI, right? Because you can analyze your databases with an agent to understand, Okay, Clause ordered. This skew on this date. Here's where it is in the process. Here's the information that we have.

And then it's really easy for AI to then have one to one customer service conversations on the back end of that. What that does is it allows you to obviously reduce costs. on the customer service side. So you could eliminate your outsourced or overseas call centers, uh, or having a overly inflated customer service department.

Now you can have a series of these customer service agents that are then managed by maybe a handful of customer success managers. That's, that's one instance that we've seen AI really bring a pretty heavy ROI up front. 

I think it's a really good example. How long does the typical onboarding process take when they want that directly with you?

You said you provide a lot of info out there for free. People can basically train themselves, but if they want to work with you and shorten the way to get started, what's the onboarding process? 

Yeah, the timeline is pretty subjective, right? It depends on the problem you're solving and the type of agent or agents that you'd like to build.

But typically the process is, uh, we first really get to understand what somebody's business look like. Like, what is your problems that you're really solving? Um, how can these be solved in the best way? Where does AI kind of fit into that, uh, conversation? And then we develop what's called a proof of concept.

So we'll create like an MVP version of an agent. Let's say it's a customer success agent. Uh, we'll make sure it's integrated with all of your other existing tech stack and, uh, different tools you're using. Then we'll make sure it's trained on all the context documentation of your company. That could be brand guidelines and messaging.

It can be, uh, you know, your data from your order systems or inventory management, whatever that might be. And then we'll test it at a small scale internally, right? We'll run tests for, you know, your typical software, uh, Q and A process. Then once there's success there, we go through a kind of a staged rollout.

We'll roll it out instead of going from zero to a hundred, roll it out in kind of phases, right, just to make sure that all the bugs are ironed out and everything. That's what a typical process looks like. You could expect that to take anywhere from three to four weeks, all the way up to, you know, three to four months, again, depending on how complex the agent is that we're building.

Yeah. I think it's definitely faster than training a new employee on the job. I think so. I would agree. You're safe there already. On that, how does your pricing structure work? 

So on the platform side, because again, Smithless is a SaaS. organization at its heart, um, it's all consumption based, right? So we have different levels of, um, subscriptions depending on, you know, what kind of features that, that you want, but you only pay for what you use.

So you can go into our agent studio and build agents and that doesn't cost anything. Once you deploy them, uh, it works on a consumption model, very similar to Zapier. We operate on what we call tasks. So the number of tasks you use in a given month is, is what you're charged. And then on the services side, again, it really depends on what we're working on, but it starts at, you know, as low as 500 per month, uh, for maintenance and to maintain the agents and make sure that they have optimal uptime and integrations and everything.

And then it can go up from there based on the level of consulting services that someone's looking for. 

Okay. That's very straightforward. Before our coffee break comes to an end today, Michael, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? 

Um, you know, I would just say, I like to say this on every interview and podcast I do, because I think it's really important is I know that for many people, AI can be a very scary thought, especially if you have spent your career in areas like copywriting or customer service, these are the areas that kind of have seen the most adoption first, but there's really nothing to be wary of.

Right? I think AI sitting in a room on its own is not very useful. AI, at least not yet, right? Once we reach super intelligence, then maybe it's an entire different conversation, but AI is only useful to us today when it has really intelligent and passionate people behind it. Telling it what to do, what to focus on, like when to zig rather than zag, that sort of thing.

So as long as you can stay on top of. What it is, what it can do, how it works. You don't need the technical expertise. You just really need the educational and basic literacy. As long as everyone does that, then they can harness the power of AI to their own advantage. And it's not something that they need to be nervous about.

And I just want everybody to really hear that because I think there are other companies and individuals out there who make it seem like this is. It's the end of the world and you know, this is a scary thing and it doesn't have to be that way. So rather than fear it, really embrace it and let it do things for you that we couldn't do otherwise.

Yeah. You mentioned earlier on, there were a couple of industrial revolutions or revolutions over time where people have to adapt and certain jobs will change. New jobs come up and I'm a hundred percent with you. Um, I'm using chat GPT thin state number one and all the other tools that came up with them and it helps me in my marketing so much.

And I see them as agents, as team members. And I think that's the right word and the right perspective on it. Where can people find out more about you guys? 

You just go to smythos. com, that's S M Y T H O S dot com. And from there you can find our academy resources that are all completely free that could help maybe somebody take their first step into, into learning more about it.

We have tons of blog posts and educational content that, uh, that we promote and you can also get started on the platform entirely for free. So that's smythos. com with a Y, S M Y T H O S dot com. 

Excellent. I will put the links in the show notes, then you just one click away and people can find you easily.

Michael, thanks so much for your time today. I think that was a really good overview and a good reason not to be scared about AI and just using it in your job as some added benefit. Thanks so much for your time. 

Thank you, Claus. I appreciate it. 

Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the e commerce Coffee Break podcast.

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