Transcription

00:00:06 Introduction

Welcome. You're listening to Links at Bain and Gray, a catalogue of podcasts centred on all things business support in the workplace. Our aim is to bring you interesting and relevant content that will keep you up-to-date and thriving in your role.

00:00:20 Tray

Hello and welcome to Links. Today I am talking to Fiona Young, Chief Executive and Founder of Carve, an AI platform we're about to hear all about. Fiona, welcome and thank you for taking the time today to talk to me. Tell us, tell our listeners a little bit about your background and then we're going to go on to talk about how Carve came about but tell us what you were doing before Carve.

00:00:43 Fiona

Oh, thank you, Tray. Thanks for having me and sharing your platform with me.

00:00:46 Tray

You're very welcome.

00:00:48 Fiona

So I started my career as an EA. I worked for a VC founder here in London and fantastic experience there. And then I ended up shifting into an L&D role. And so I spent the last 12 years or so building really high-impact learning programmes. Primarily leadership development and I got obsessed with this idea of, “Why is it that EAs aren't invested in in the same ways that leaders are invested in through their organisations?”

And I, it sort of took me down this roundabout journey starting a couple of years ago now of thinking about how can I help EAs learn and grow and carve out their own progression path? And then it kind of got me into the AI world because I recognise that, you know, great leaders out there who have high performing assistants that I was talking to and my research all said, “Well, of course I want my EA to progress. Of course I want to help them move up in this role” but I kind of need them to do the day job. And how do you square that up so I recognised as AI really took over the world a couple of years ago with the launch of ChatGPT, this is the key to unlock capacity so that you can streamline the Dell admin, create more capacity for yourself, take on more of the strategic work and create that own career progression for yourself.

00:01:57 Tray

Sure. Right. And I was going to ask how the idea came to you, but you've kind of just said so working quite closely with that C-Suite leadership team, you saw kind of at first-hand how close those roles worked with their executives, and realised it needed an extension of of that leadership and development is what you're saying, isn't it? Yeah.

00:02:16 Fiona

Exactly. Yeah. And seeing, I guess the difference as well, which I'm sure you see in your work with clients of the what we might call the more traditional transactional assistant versus the more senior strategic assistant. And so recognising that you know, bridging the gap between those two types of roles, you know developing yourself into being more of a leader assistant, you might say.

00:02:38 Tray

Yep.

00:02:39 Fiona

Or, you know, a force multiplier that sort of a role you know is absolutely critical in order to grow within the role.

00:02:46 Tray

Yeah, I think, gosh, we've seen those roles at the very top end of organisations grow enormously in the last well, I was gonna say three to five years, but putting COVID in that makes probably five to seven years. So I I think you know what you're saying is a next extension, isn't it? It's going to be the next sort of chapter for how these roles evolve, which I do really want to ask you about.

But I want to ask you with all your knowledge on AI, you know, what is AI in terms of broad brush heading? And then I really want to dive into what it means in the Executive Assistant space?

00:03:19 Fiona

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'd say just to start off with to define what we're talking about, you know, AI, Artificial Intelligence are these of course systems and tools that are able to have human-like intelligence and do human-like tasks. And it's already all around us. So I think sometimes when we're talking about AI, it's useful to remember, like, even technology like you know, facial recognition on your phone, which you're probably using hundreds of times a day to unlock that phone or things like credit card fraud detection, you know your card gets frozen because you know you were travelling abroad and your your bank said, oh, that was a suspicious transaction. Those sorts of things that technology has obviously been around for decades or even spam filters - that's all AI.

But what's so interesting and what's really taken the world by storm these last couple of years is generative AI. So this is a specific type of AI that's all about generating new content. These are systems capable of creating, whether it's written content, images, audio, video from a simple set of instructions from a simple question or prompt. And so that's what's so interesting for us, because now all of a sudden at our fingertips with tools like large language models like ChatGPT, Copilot, you know, we're able to write whole reports or structure presentations or even just have a thought partner, a sparring partner, to get feedback on something that we've created.

And I think that's what really is a game changer now. And because of the advances that have allowed us to interact with these machine learning models in our human language.

00:04:50 Tray

Yeah.

00:04:50 Fiona

So previously, you know before a couple of years ago, you'd have to be a machine learning engineer to be able to interact with these systems and now it's available for all of us. And that's what's really incredible.

00:05:00 Tray

And and you know, I think you know, if you're someone who is quite tech curious, it's fascinating. And it's amazing what it can do and where it might lead us to. But there's a lot of reluctance and reticence around sort of AI, “No, I don't want that. Something scary and techy over there”, and it's amazing how actually, when you, you know, describe things that are already commonplace in our in our everyday lives. And I think it is that challenge in it cause ChatGPT obviously had a lot of press at the time it came out all, became more wider market, in terms of, “It's not a good thing. It's actually rewriting and we still need the sort of human touch and we still need to hear that sort of voice”. But of course, these things evolve very quickly once they're out in the market, don't they?

And it's amazing how we interpret them as is, is is the best sort of how we might use them to our best advantage in the workplace because it's how we use that information to do that sort of basic bits of legwork in my mind. It, drafts, you know, gives you a first draft on something you can finesse and tweak beautifully, perhaps, or whatever it might be.

00:05:55 Fiona

Yeah. And I think that's a great way to think of it is that it is, you know never, you'll never start from a blank sheet again. And often times that you know that blank sheet syndrome, right, is what stops us from from starting especially tasks or projects where we feel out of our depth if we're doing something for the first time, you think, “Oh my gosh, I don't know where to begin” and that's what I think is so powerful is getting that jolt forward from these tools. And of course, it's not going to be 100% perfect. Of course it's not going to be as creative and fabulous as something you created longhand. But the power of being able to, you know, get you from even zero to 80 and OK, you take it over the line with that extra 20%, but it still is saving, you know, for many, many, many tasks that EAs are doing in their daily and weekly workflows, they're saving hours and hours per week and overtime as you begin to use these tools more and more and shortcut more and more time, you're saving seriously, I mean, I'm talking shaving off a day per week, of time. By doing stuff, that, by the way, humans aren't adding any value with our humanness.

00:06:58 Tray

Yes.

00:06:59 Fiona

You know, it's things like processing expenses or even transport, you know, getting a meeting summary out of a transcript, it's like OK, it's not worth my time as a human. I'm better placed using my very human superpowers in other ways.

00:07:13 Tray

Do you find I've got a couple of questions on those points actually. So do you find that executives are quite accepting of their EA, using the various tools around AI?

00:07:22 Fiona

Yes, I think executives in general are kind of further ahead, I would say and oftentimes more open to AI than assistants. And then most people in organisations and I've seen data around this, actually that shows that executives in general are more interested and more open minded about AI.

And that doesn't mean they're any better at using it, by the way. But I think that in general, they tend to be more curious. I find that a lot of EAs I work with, even you know, the most, I work with some incredibly high performing, powerful senior Executive Assistants, brilliant people, all of them. And I have to say that often times as an EA and I I know this cause I've been there, we tend to be quite risk averse and that's of course because very important to have discretion in this role. And you know we know better than anyone how sensitive a lot of the data we're working with is and so of course, great high performing EAs, rightly so, are concerned about data privacy, and that is a major barrier and blocker to adoption to people leaning into this stuff.

00:08:25 Tray

I definitely know we've seen that ourselves, but I also think you know, next part of my question on some of that information you have was kind of where will it leave that day a week then? What, what would that Executive Assistant be doing? Because I think some of the reluctance we've seen probably not that recently, but a good sort of year or two ago, is more around, “What does it mean for my role?” You know? You know, “How's it going to change? Am I still gonna be able to do my job? Do I still have a job?” Those sorts of of questions that have definitely come up.

00:08:55 Fiona

Sure.

00:08:55 Tray

What do you see replacing that time in terms of the Executive Assistant role? And I suppose therefore, where is it, where is it going to lead to? How is it changing?

00:09:05 Fiona

Yeah, yeah, I think there's a few things I want to address in that. And I mean, the first is that I think this is both an evolution and a revolution. And what I mean by that is when you think about the role itself, you know, if you look backwards over the last 75 years at executive support, administrative, secretarial type roles, you know, they have changed massively beyond recognition. You know, my mum was an Executive Assistant working for a Venture Capitalist, actually in the 90s in Silicon Valley. And so even talking to her about how much that role changed over kind of 25 years, it's really incredible.

But you know, when you look backwards at that evolution every step of the way that evolution in the role has been driven by tech, advances in tech, whether that's, you know, word processors or photocopiers and fax machines, personal computing, the Internet, mobile cloud, you know, all of that has massively transformed this role and made it a lot more strategic and a lot less of what we would call the basic admin, so I think that on the one hand I do think AI will be the next step in that evolution. Yeah, and will absolutely add in even more of that strategic work and more of that sort of basic dull admin that no one likes to do anyway is going to fall away, so that's great news. You know, that's like, I oftentimes say like, gosh, I wish I were to right now with these tools at my fingertips because I could have shortcut so much of the stuff I really didn't like about the rollback then.

And but I think on the other hand we have to be honest about the data. You know, I think this is a revolution in the sense that absolutely AI is going to fundamentally reshape this role and absolutely there will be jobs lost to what extent is unclear. No one has a crystal ball, but certainly if you look at even the data from in the US, you know the US has the best data on this I've found for executive support roles because they've broken it out, you know, from basic administrative roles into sort of executive secretaries and assistants or something under the Bureau of Labour Statistics.

And they've predicted that, you know, in the 10 year period from 2022 to 2032, a full 20% of these roles will vanish, so it's one of the top 15 most vulnerable roles in America to automation, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. That's really sobering. But the picture is even worse when you look backwards because over the previous ten years just gone, there was a similar decline. So when you look over a 20 year period, we're seeing a full 35% of these roles just disappearing.

So what happens to those roles? If you ask me, and obviously I said no one has a crystal ball, you know, but if I had to put money on it, I would say, I think that the more transactional assistance, those roles will be the ones that disappear. Those roles will be the ones that are most vulnerable. So if you're spending the vast majority of your time managing a calendar, even a complex calendar, even doing strategic calendar management. If you're spending the vast majority of your time on things like emails, you know this sort of repeatable admin that is, that is the stuff that will be automated first. And so that is where I think folks will find themselves in a precarious position if they are not on the front foot really looking for proactively ways to be more strategic in supporting their executive in their org.

00:12:23 Tray

And I think I mean that's such an interesting point because whilst that might sound sort of quite alarmist to anyone who might be listening, it's just roles are changing in terms of how they branch out to accommodate some of that. So I think in terms of without being familiar with the Bureau of National Statistics in America’s stats, but typically here we're seeing what would be bucketed into those sort of roles has definitely gone down. But actually where the skill set from these people have evolved into a more Project Management role, or a true Business Assistant role, Chief of Staff roles which we're seeing much more of.

00:12:56 Fiona

Oh, absolutely.

00:12:57 Tray

So it’s, depends what's in the bucket, is what I'm trying to say in terms of kind of these rules are are evolving as you said earlier. And I think it's an interesting point for you know new people coming in and considering this because we're certainly seeing at Bain and Gray, a lot more graduates coming into roles than than any year sort of previously and and we do see a lot that come from the, the the colleges too and they're both having very, very clearly defined career paths to go to that are a tiny, bit more meaty than they used to be because of some of these admin tasks being done right at the bottom, the junior end and sort of and then sort of all the way through the careers, as you get up to the sort of senior level roles.

So it's interesting, isn't it, sort of how this dynamic will change? The number of these roles and the number of people sort of progressing, but actually it will give them more scope to do more using more of their soft skills.

00:13:44 Fiona

Of course. And that's what can't be automated, of course, are the very human skills, and that's what I'm interested in as well. Is, “So what are the skills that folks need to sharpen to become to bridge that gap and become the true strategic right hand?” And I agree with your point actually as well that OK, so say 20% of these roles disappear in 10 years, well actually, some of those people are moving into different versions of this role or the next level, whether that's, you know, in their organisation. So it could be a Chief of Staff type of role. So yes, they're vanishing. But you know, it's not that they're -

00:14:12 Tray

Yeah. They're being replaced, there's just something else that's sort of using the same skills.

00:14:24 Fiona

Yeah, exactly. They're they're moving into a slightly different role that is using the same skill set. So I completely agree with that. And yeah, and I think that there are so many interesting opportunities for folks to use AI as a superpower and actually as that, you know that skill, if you can master this and you can really throw yourself at this and streamline some of the admin you're doing, you can take on so much more of this high value work for your exec and for your organisation.

And you know you can make the case that a year from now, “Look at the shape of my role today. You know it's this big and a year ago it was just, you know, 60% of what it is today. So I deserve a pay rise. I deserve a promotion. I deserve to have senior in front of my title.” All those great things. So I think it's actually the best news ever.

I oftentimes say as well that you know, there's this saying, “Oh, AI is not going to take your job. You know, someone using AI will.” I don't think that actually really captures what the truth of the situation is. I think AI is not going to take your job, but it's going to fundamentally change it. It's going to change your job description and what you're doing day-to-day, week-to-week, and you know, the more you can be on the front foot with that, of saying to your exec or to your HR team, “Hey, with AI I think I'm going to be doing a lot less of this and I'm going to have some more capacity. How can I grow into more of a strategic role? Here are some things I'm I think I might be good at and that might be valuable for the organisation.” The more you can be on the front foot the safer you’ll be.

00:15:46 Tray

100% and obviously more in charge of your own career and all those sorts of things that come with that. What so I mean, as a sort of general point, what are you seeing has been adopted or is being adopted, most commonplace in the business support role, from sort of junior right the way through to the Executive Assistants?

00:16:02 Fiona

Definitely LLMs, so ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude are some of the top LLMs out there, and these are they're so adaptable, and they're also, they're most commonly adopted because it's what most people have access to right now and their organisations.

So organisations are, you know, a lot of organisations are still trying, scrambling, trying to figure out what is our AI policy? What if people have, you know, the ability to use? What is our risk tolerance? All these sort of big strategic questions, which basically becomes a barrier to bringing in new tools. So LLMs are where folks are are most often able to play. And so the way that you can use these is I mean it's fast. But just to give you a snapshot of some of the most common things that certainly I work with assistants on - is stuff like writing and editing and that could be anything from writing tricky emails or thank you notes or reports, drafting speeches, writing business briefings, you know, client team briefings.

It could be also when we talk about editing, it could be taking something like a really chunky, you know PDF report or slide deck presentation that your exec has created and transforming that into, whether it's learning content for the organisation or a summary you know bullet pointed list or even for minute taking. So taking whether that's snapshots of your own handwritten notes to transforming those into minutes or taking a full blown transcript, you know, audio transcript to text and then taking that, manipulating that into minutes, meeting summaries, action points and even follow up emails that you can draft, and leave in your exec’s and, you know, drafts for them to have a once over and send.

But you know, if you can imagine just how powerful that is, if you're capturing meetings, even if you're not in them, by the end of the day, you know, this is the potential I think of the tool, is at the end of the day you basically have drafted a sort of, a summary and action points from every critical external meeting your exec has been in ready and waiting for them in their drafts for them to have a once over at of course do the quality checks which is so important still and hit send on.

So that sort of, I'd say writing minutes is huge, but I think one where you know a lot of people you know don't see this as their first way of using ChatGPT is actually as a thought partner really as that second set of eyes to give you feedback as a sort of unbiased party. To you know, to look over something you've created, or if you have a problem, you know, say you're dealing with a tricky person in your organisation. You're not sure how to navigate that. Just having a conversation about it with someone who is, you know, unbiased, and doesn't have any skin in the game and can give you potentially different perspective, different way of looking at the situation. And that's incredibly powerful.

00:18:51 Tray

And I think just sorry, just to pick up on that point, that's a really interesting point for lots of, you know, our executives we're seeing, they're often often on their own. They're working in quite isolated roles with no one to sort of sound something off against or just check someone to have a second pair of eyes so that that's a, you know, really sort of salient point for a lot of people.

00:19:09 Fiona

Definitely. Definitely for execs and also for EAs, they're oftentimes also like an island you know in organisations and I think as well as you think about other things that are useful, certainly you know project planning, event planning, you know. So whether that's structuring really complex project plans and coming up with a comprehensive list of tasks. And then also helping you prioritise those tasks. You know if you're working on projects that span months or even years, it's a lot of work just planning the project. So having a you know, a tool that that does that or does the first draft of that for you is fantastic and things like processing expenses. So again you know you can just take snapshots of all of your receipts laid out on your desktop if you're not using a tool like Expensify, have all of that data scraped and pulled into a spreadsheet, even pulled into the format you're using, or even manipulate expenses so things like, “Could you take all of these expenses in this sheet and use, you know, the real time, you know, currency exchange rate and and convert these into pounds? Or could you look at all, look through all these expenses and look at this policy around expenses we have I've uploaded and flag anything that may be outside of the policy for me?”

00:20:20 Tray

Incredible, yeah. I need to look into that for our own Finance Manager. I think she’d be very happy with that!

00:20:26 Fiona

Yeah. I mean, these sorts of things where again you know, I guess the point I was making earlier, there's, like, there's no benefit, you know, for me as Fiona to be using my precious time on that sort of work, I am not adding value. I am not bringing my human skill into that. That is a very transactional kind of dull, admin-y thing.

I'd say a couple other ways that are useful are around translation and beyond, just like translate this phrase or translate this email, which the reason why LLMs are so great is because you can add context to those so you know, rather than just getting the dictionary, Google Translate version where you know you get one result back, you can say actually you know the context is this is a business email and it needs to be actually it's it's an event invite it needs to be fun and funny and informal.

00:21:11 Tray

So it's tailored. Yeah.

00:21:14 Fiona

And so you get the tailored version but, also for cultural nuances, so when you're working globally and you're thinking, gosh, you know, working with a very important client in Japan, and I know that they have very different norms at work than we do in the UK. So, what does my exec need to know going into this meeting? Are there any, you know, cultural norms to be aware of or, you know, even in the communication you have over email with that client. So, so that sort of again, it's a bit of a sounding board, but to help you navigate through, you know, across different cultures when you're working globally, so.

00:21:39 Tray

Great. Yeah. Great knowledge. What, if you know very little or think, you know, not sure what you do know, cause I think lots of people don't necessarily think front-of-mind some of the tools that might exist or be using currently are AI tools - how can you educate yourself? How can you find out what's the best thing to use out there?

00:21:56 Fiona

Yeah, I, well, there's certainly there's so much learning and content out there. I would actually say the best way to learn, and when we're talking about LLMs specifically, which I would always say if you're a beginner like that's the best place to start. I mean we could spend all day talking about the broader like tool stack because there's some incredible tools out there beyond LLMs.

But I think when it comes to LLMs, they're so easy to get going with, and I would always recommend, even if your company has said, you know you cannot access these tools or you know, we're trying to roll this out, but you know, you don't have access currently I would just get the ChatGPT app on your phone, get a free account, get signed up. You can also make sure that you're using it safely by going to privacy.openai.com and requesting they don't train on your data, so that's really critical, even if you're just using it in your personal life, why not use it more securely and then just start playing around with it, you know, and test it, even for stuff in your own personal life, ideas around “What should I cook this weekend with what I've got in my fridge?” Or actually “Help me come up with a workout. You know, I want a lower body weight training workout. Here's the equipment I've got.”

00:23:05 Tray

Yeah.

00:23:09 Fiona

So it’s really, try it out and test its limits with stuff in your personal life, because you'll soon find out what it's good at and what it's less good at, and work your way through. You know how you can use it for work stuff too, even if you don't have access to that yet.

And I would say I, you know, I am a big fan of really tailored and contextualised learning from my years working in L&D. It's absolutely critical to really get tailored learning to you in your role because that's so much more relevant and immediately useful. And so I would definitely recommend, I have a free guide to ChatGPT and other AI chat bots that's designed specifically for Executive Assistants, include sample prompts and all sorts of you know skills around prompting, which will bring your your outputs. The quality of outputs you get out of these tools to the next level.

00:23:54 Tray

Well, that brings me beautifully on to Carve and what it can do for the Executives Assistants. So just tell us a little bit about Carve and the business you've set up.

00:24:02 Fiona

Yeah. Well, we are on a mission to build really the next generation of AI powered Executive Assistants. So the idea is really giving AI skills to assistants, so that they can go further or go faster in their roles, support their execs more.

You know, and also watch their career thrive, you know, take their career to the next level and Carve out their own progression path, which is really what I'm passionate about and why I started this to begin with. And so we're doing that in a couple different ways. So primarily we have a course called Carve AI. This is actually the world's first AI chorus, built specifically for Executive Assistants -

00:24:38 Tray

Amazing.

00:24:38 Fiona

- which I launched summer of 2023. We've had several cohorts, just fantastic group of alumni and basically you know seven-week, cohort based learning and it's you know so you come together once a week with a group of of maximum 30 Executive Assistants from around the world primarily UK and US and and go through this journey of uncovering and discovering how can I really use these in my day-to-day? So it's not just to kind of passive going to learning sessions, there's a lot of doing.

00:25:09 Tray

Yeah.

00:25:10 Fiona

The doing is actually the most important part, so taking it back to your role, trying some things out, sharing with everyone else how it's going, swapping ideas and use cases and kind of stumbling your way along in order to build this AI tool stack and really build your skills as well, for AI prompting.

So that's the the main way and then also working with corporate. So I go into, you know teams and and train up teams with workshops and series of workshops. AI hackathons, all sorts of fun and exciting stuff that I do primarily face-to-face, but also through Zoom sessions as well. And again very tightly tailored and targeted for Executive Assistant teams.

00:25:46 Tray

Yeah. Brilliant. Fiona Young, thank you for talking to me today. That's been great hearing all about AI. Thanks for telling us about your business. Thanks very much.

00:25:50 Fiona

Thank you. Thanks for taking the time. Thanks Tray.