The GUIDE Framework for Strategic AI Prompting, with Lauren Schiavone, Founder at Wonder Consulting

Transcript

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Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies, and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

 

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Lauren Schiavone spent 17 years at P&G as a brand manager and a builder of e-commerce from the ground up. She has now taken that wealth of process, tech, and organizational experience and combined it with a deep understanding of AI to create Wonder Consulting, LLC. She works with teams to guide them from AI novice to AI expert, moving AI value from write this email to optimize my PDP content across this retailer for the upcoming season. Lauren joins Lauren and me to drop some wondrous AI knowledge for our listeners. Welcome to the podcast, Lauren Schiavone. We're so happy to have you here.

 

Lauren Schiavone (01:07):

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

 

Peter Crosby (01:09):

I use your last name because we do have another Lauren here and-

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:13):

Hi.

 

Peter Crosby (01:14):

Send me crazy. Yeah, I'm going to call her LLG. But you spent your day focused on all things AI as part of the work that you do at Wonder Consulting and specifically how organizations can better use it internally to improve how they work. And that's all such great information because we're all trying to figure it out, and particularly in this moment where using AI to achieve scale on the digital shelf, to achieve more context, more use cases. It's a very hungry beast and also reach your long tail of your product catalog, all of that in order to win in this upcoming era. So we're delighted to have you on to just talk about some of the examples of what they can do to get some real power out of this. But let's start first with the amazing background that you bring to this work that you do.

 

(02:05):

So tell our listeners about that.

 

Lauren Schiavone (02:08):

Great. Yeah. And thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm Lauren Schiavone. I'm the founder of Wonder Consulting, which is an AI forward consultancy. And we am focused on empowering non-technical business leaders to thrive in an AI-driven future. My goal is to take the complexity out of AI and translate it into practical, actionable concepts and strategies for folks to deliver both personal and professional growth. Prior to Wonder Consulting, I actually spent almost two decades at Proctor & Gamble. In my time there, I worked on consumer insights, brand management, and also sales. And within that, I spent actually almost close to 10 years focused specifically on e-commerce. I was one of the first on our P&G Amazon team. And after I left P&G, I started immersing myself in AI. And a few months into my AI upskilling journey, I had this massive aha moment.

 

(03:04):

I thought to myself, if I knew then when I was at P&G, what I know now about AI, it would have changed everything for me. I would have spent more time on more strategic work that actually energized me versus mundane tasks, and I would have made a bigger impact on the brands and the retailers that I worked with. That realization is what led me to create Wonder Consulting. The majority of my work today is focused on enabling employees to get stronger value from the AI tools that their companies have already given them access to. So when I look at what's happening in most organizations today, I see some really consistent patterns. AI adoption and literacy is actually really low. Many companies are providing AI tools, but many of these companies do not provide training and upskilling, or some companies do provide training, but the training is often delivered by someone in IT or someone who just doesn't really understand the day-to-day work of commercial leaders.

 

(04:04):

And in both of these examples, adoption stalls and there's little ROI that is realized from these investments. So the value that I get to bring to my clients is that I understand both AI and the work that commercial leaders in CPG do to grow brands. So when I translate AI for these leaders, I'm not just giving them generic examples. I'm showing them exactly how AI applies to their daily work. And this personalization really drives instant adoption. And I think your listeners will be interested to kind of hear that in some ways my work leading e-commerce at P&G helped me prepare to teach and train AI. And that's because teaching people about e-commerce at P&G, I learned really three key things that guide my work in AI. So first, I just learned that it's got to be simple. People are so busy in their day-to-day, so you've got to make it really simple for folks to understand and easy for them to adopt this knowledge.

 

(04:58):

So this guides my approach with my clients. I don't just teach them the concepts, but I'll build them tools to make it easy to adopt into their work. The second thing I learned when trying to teach people about e-commerce is it has to be very relevant. People want to know exactly in this role at this time, at this moment, how can I use AI, not just theoretical, but apply it to my daily work. And then finally, it's got to be integrated into the business, not an add-on. So when I was working at e-commerce, I had this conversation often. It needs to be integrated into things like brand plans, sales plans, JBPs, et cetera, not something separate. And I think the same is true for AI. We have to shift from what I call random acts of AI to truly integrating AI into our business processes to fully unlock the most value from AI.

 

Peter Crosby (05:44):

Holy smokes. What a path, first of all. I think that it's amazing to be able to ... And this is Lauren's a perfect example of being in the seat and really realizing what it takes to make all of this work, both in what you do as a doer of it, and then also as an inspirer and an educator and a cheerleader, and maybe even occasionally a bully. And so I'd love to dig in a little bit with the array of clients that you've had, tell me a bit about, are there any themes in terms of mindsets, where people are at when they come into this process? Do you find that there's people you can latch onto that are sort of ahead of the game that can inspire? What do you find when you enter the rooms or Zoom rooms that you're having these conversations on and how do you grow that inside an organization?

 

(06:52):

Because I think that could be a great example for our listeners.

 

Lauren Schiavone (06:56):

I think consistently I find that people will say they're using AI, but what that really means is they're using AI to write an email or wordsmith something, or they're using it almost like Google, and they really have no idea the possibilities that AI can unlock and really how truly powerful that it is. And so that's why a goal for me is always to sort of share with them really high value use cases that I know are taking their time in the day-to-day and that are highly strategic. I was speaking to a friend at a CPG company the other day and she said, "Yeah, I'm using AI." And I said to her, I said, "But are you using it for anything that's a value add to the business? Are you using it beyond just your email?" And she sort of said, "No, yeah, I'm not. " And I'm not sure how to do that.

 

(07:48):

So the biggest thing in terms of mindset that I share with folks is we have to move beyond thinking about AI as a productivity tool. It is a tremendous productivity tool, don't get me wrong, but we need to think about AI as a growth accelerator as a tool to help us unlock richer insights to get to faster ideas, as a tool to develop bigger and bolder and better ideas to bring to our retailers and sell them faster, drive closure faster, or a tool to unlock new ideas, new innovation, new opportunities that just simply couldn't exist before AI. And that is strategically the mindset shift that I tried to drive, particularly in the leaders of these organization because that shifts the mindset and, "Oh, this is productivity tool to this is something that really can unlock growth within my business." And then to your point on what organizations look like, for the most part, everyone generally seems open, at least at face value to using AI.

 

(08:50):

Of course, there are cultural barriers to address a fear of AI or kind of fear of the unknown. And so it's really important for any organization that are thinking about AI to think really thoughtfully through the change management that supports this work. But what I do consistently find in organizations is there are, I call them these AI self-starters. So there's these people sitting in these organizations that maybe they're doing AI at home or on the weekends and maybe they're doing it in secret because their leadership hasn't really encouraged this use of AI, but there's usually a couple folks within the organization that are naturally curious and are experimenting in new and different ways. And what I always tell leaders is find those people. That's the easiest place to start. Find those people, give those people access to the right tools and encourage those right people and give them the space to explore and to experiment and to lead others because those people are such a great asset within your organization.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:55):

And I love how this is so similar to your e-commerce days too, right? You had to find that one brand person who believed in e-commerce and didn't just talk about TV ads. And then you were like, "Yes, help me educate the rest of the organization." So it's very similar to the change that needed to happen and still happening around e-commerce. I love that change maker perspective because it needs to start from the ground up, not just top down to make sure people feel comfortable.

 

Lauren Schiavone (10:23):

Yeah, exactly. I think it's both bottoms up and top down, but here's the thing. I was speaking to actually my old e-commerce vice president when I started this work and she's like, "Oh, it's like the early days of e-commerce." And I'm like, "Well, kind of because e-commerce was a new way to shop, a new place where a new way consumers could purchase product and it changed shopping, of course, but AI will change absolutely everything, not just the way we work, but the way that we live our lives. And so the order of magnitude here is just so much greater. And I do think that's important context and perspective for folks to keep in mind as they're going on this journey.

 

Peter Crosby (11:09):

I think that's absolutely true. I agree with you. I think to balance that out, what I often think about is all of our listeners did so much work to build out e-commerce frameworks and processes and digital. Digital was birthed in that time. And then the processes to actually make money and hopefully profitable by this point as some combination of omnichannel has been done. And so there's a degree to which what happens next is an extension of that in terms of the work of the next couple of years is really finding those opportunities for scale and better conversion, everything through really optimizing it, which I hope would give people on the other hand, yes, this is going to change everyone's lives, but I think over a longer period of time. And so right now, how do you get started? How do you do? And I'm sure that's a lot of where you have to enter the conversation to really do it.

 

(12:16):

So how can we get better at prompting? Because I was at a customer conference recently, and I remember this first time I heard somebody say," A lot of my job has now become being a prompt engineer and they've had to teach their team to do the same thing. And so what is a way that we can all get better at prompting?

 

Lauren Schiavone (12:43):

"It's a great question and a great place to start. So to get the most out of these tools, it's important to understand how to prompt. So for those of you who might not be familiar, prompting is how to craft questions or statements in a way to generate your desired output from these tools. But said simply, prompting is just knowing how to engage and communicate best with these tools to get the best output. And prompting is really critically important when working with these tools because if you do not learn how to prompt, I guarantee you will get generic output and you'll walk away thinking these tools do not work. So let's talk about how to prompt. So for me, I leverage what I call the guide framework. I named it guide intentionally to remind leaders that you have to guide the tool to get the outputs that you are looking for.

 

(13:35):

It cannot yet read our minds. We're not there just quite yet. So guide starts with G, ground in context. You want to act as if you are briefing a new colleague. What are you working on? What is the background, the goals, the challenges? And if you are not sure where to start with this context, you can just start with this statement. We are working on blank for blank with the goal of blank. The more context, the more relevant output you will get. And here's a pro tip I like to share. So many AI tools have a feature where you can turn on a microphone and simply talk to it instead of typing. And I do this a lot because I find that it's easier to share a ton of context, things that are on your mind verbally than typing it all. And you can also share documents and resources with your AI tool to help provide additional context.

 

(14:25):

So that's the first step. The second step is you use a defined role. You want to tell it what role you want it to play. Now, this is not your role. This is not your job. It is the role best suited to the task. So instead of saying something like act like a digital shelf expert, you want to be as detailed as you can. So you might say something like, "Act as a digital shelf specialist at a large CPG brand who specializes in writing high converting product detail pages." This is important because AI has been trained on massive amounts of data and giving it a specific role helps it narrow into the most relevant knowledge for whatever task you are giving to it. The next step is I identify the steps. So you want to break down exactly what you want it to do step by step.

 

(15:15):

Here, imagine you are giving a task to a brand new hire. You want to be direct, you want to be detailed. So for example, don't just say, "Write a meeting summary." Instead, say something like, "Capture the key messages. What decisions were made? Were there any open items?" And declare what were the next steps with owners and timelines. Next, we have D, define the output and examples. You need to tell it what the output should look like. What is the format? Is it a table? Is it a one-pager? What is the tone? Is it professional? Is it silly? What's the knowledge level? Is this PhD? Is this kindergarten? And if you have an example, you can share it. So for example, maybe you're working on a leadership update. You can share an example of a previous leadership update and say, "Follow this format, tone, and structure," and that usually works pretty well.

 

(16:04):

And then finally, the last part of guide is E, engage for stronger output. So my recommendation is to end every single prompt with, ask me three clarifying questions one by one before you answer. This forces the AI to engage with you before it generates output to drive clarity on what you need, to allow it to ask you any questions where it might be unclear or confused. And it's likely going to ask you things that maybe you haven't thought of. And this back and forth will improve the output. You can even ask it to ask you five or even 10 questions if it's a complex task, or if you know you haven't provided quite enough context. So that's the framework for prompting I like to start folks with.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:52):

Super easy to remember too, guide. So I've got all the kind of steps there, but I think it's really important because a lot of people who are maybe new to AI just write one sentence and are afraid to include all this context. But LLMs are looking for context themselves, but they also need the context to be able to provide the right information back. And what I really like, and I think this kind of leads into your other really good example is that you can have a conversation with AI to ask questions or interview it, and it can help you kind of get to the bottom of what you're looking for. So talk a little bit about that use case because I think that's really valuable for people.

 

Lauren Schiavone (17:30):

So I think one of the coolest ways to use AI is to let it interview you. So maybe you are facing a new business challenge and you really don't know why. So you can say to AI, "Hey, this is the business challenge that I'm facing. Ask me 10 questions one by one to help me assess what the situation might be and what potential solutions may there be. " Or sometimes I'll be working with AI and I'm like, "We're not getting to the right place." And I just sort of pause. And before I go any further, I just sort of time out and I say, "You know what? This output isn't exactly what I'm looking for. Let's slow down and ask me five questions one by one to make sure that we, you and I, AI, are on the same page." So the interview me kind of tool or tip can be used at any time throughout your conversation with your AI tool.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (18:32):

That was a mindset shift for me when I first started using AI because even where we were trained on search bars, like typing, "I'm looking for a black backpack or I need this. " And so it was a big shift for me to think from more of just a static moment to having a conversation. And I encourage everybody listening here, that's the best mindset shift to make. Act like you're talking to me, Peter and Lauren, and you're asking us questions and advice and we're trying to get to the bottom of something. That is the mindset shift. And that's why I really love how you kind of break this down. It's really about a conversation versus a point in time kind of piece of data. Would you agree?

 

Lauren Schiavone (19:15):

Definitely. That's exactly what I always say. The very few people get exactly what you're looking for on the first prompt. Often the magic happens after some back and forth, after challenging one another, after pushing back, after iterating a little bit, that is often when the magic happens.

 

Peter Crosby (19:34):

One thing that I'm interested about, you were talking about how you can attach documents or pull in all sorts of resources to provide context and vocabulary and things like that. And one set of information that's super important in a marketing and e-commerce context is your brand guidelines, all those examples. And I'm wondering, across different prompts, how much can you rely on the AI keeping that? Or do every time do you have to load in these core things that should be present for any conversation you have about something you're doing at your company? I've never known how much does it remember across chats and that kind of stuff.

 

Lauren Schiavone (20:23):

So the answer is going to be it

 

Peter Crosby (20:25):

Depends. It depends. Yeah, I thought it was going to come out.

 

Lauren Schiavone (20:28):

But

 

Peter Crosby (20:28):

I only

 

Lauren Schiavone (20:28):

Have to be better than that, I promise. It depends on how you are using AI. So oftentimes when we are talking to folks about using AI, quote unquote, they're just interacting with the chatbot, right? But what you will learn as you get more advanced is there are more advanced ways to engage with an LLM. So for a large language model like a ChatGPT or a Copilot or a Gemini. So the simplest way would be kind of with the chat. And Peter, to your point, if you're just engaging via a chat, you likely are going to want to kind of attach those brand guidelines every time you sort of say, "Write this in my brand tone of voice or something as an example." Some of those tools have better memory than others. So it is possible over time that it will learn those brand guidelines, but if you're kind of just interacting one-on-one in a chat, my recommendation would be to share them.

 

(21:19):

But you can get into more advanced ways. So you could use like a Claude project or even a project in ChatGPT where your brand guidelines are already provided as a resource. It already has that background, that knowledge. You don't necessarily have to provide it every time. Or even like a Custom GBT or a Google Gem or a Copilot agent. Those are more specific kind of AI agents that help you with a specific task and they're given instructions ahead of time. So you don't have to always repeat yourself on these are my brand guidelines. And that even gets kind of even more advanced as you get into some of the newest and latest capabilities that literally are just a couple weeks old. For example, Claude Cowork has launched skills. And if you have a brand guideline skill, now it's just smart enough to know like, "Hey, I'm working on a piece of content." It's got to be in my brand voice and it automatically sort of prompts the tool to bring up your brand voice, your brand guidelines, and you don't really have to say anything.

 

(22:17):

So the tools are getting smarter and smarter, but I think most people are still interacting with it kind of on just a one-to-one chat. And in that case, you would probably want to share the brand guidelines every time you have a related request.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (22:33):

And Lauren, when you opened this up, you kind of talked about how AI should be your partner and should help really drive value. How are you encouraging people to think about AI as a partner versus just going to it for this one prompt that I need an answer to? Talk us through that.

 

Lauren Schiavone (22:50):

Yeah, it's a great question. And we talked about this, but a lot of people are just leveraging AI to rewrite their emails or wordsmith things, but this means that they are significantly under leveraging AI. So if you think about kind of that mindset we talked about earlier, that mindset shift of AI is so much more than a productivity, it's a growth accelerator, then you start to get to places of thinking about AI as your strategic partner to help pressure test things, challenge your assumptions, strengthen your ideas. And so here are just a couple examples of how you might think about using AI as your strategic partner. So first, you want to seek out critical responses. You might have noticed that tools like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, they naturally lean towards being positive and encouraging you. They want to please you. They often avoid conflict and they'll avoid saying like, "Oh, this tends not to work." They want to be agreeable.

 

(23:44):

But if you want this tool to really be a strategic thought partner, not just your cheerleader, you have to invite it to do this. So there's a couple things that you can say to seek out critical responses. Things like, "What assumptions am I making in this positioning? What would someone skeptical of this idea say? What am I overlooking by framing it this way? What are potential unintended consequences of this ideas or even give me the best and worst case interpretation of this recommendation?" And those are all really helpful suggestions and prompts when you're preparing maybe for an internal leadership review or an external engagement with your retailer. But the second thing here that you need to do is to make sure that you let AI know that you can handle the truth. And the way to do that is to literally tell it. You can say things like, "These are my favorite things." You can say things like, "Tear this apart, rip it to shreds, kill this concept before it kills itself." Call out the BS, don't hold back, or this is my personal favorite.

 

(24:36):

Tell me where I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid. And when you change the language like this, you're just giving it permission to stop being overly polite and instead become a thought partner who's not afraid to challenge you. And I promise you we'll get to much better, stronger output. The second tip is how to leverage AI for strategic role play. So one of the incredible things about AI I think is that it can act as any persona, which means it can give you much better detailed, more relevant information if you give it a persona. So it can act as anyone. Maybe that's your buyer to prepare for conversation. Maybe that's your internal leadership team. And a persona can be really detailed. It can be really a ton of details on your target consumer or a ton of details on your buyer, or it can be as simple as telling it to act as a critical leadership team.

 

(25:27):

So here are a couple examples that might be relevant to your listeners. So first you can use a consumer or shopper persona as input. Hey, have AI, act as your consumer, respond to the idea, your content, your messaging, how might they react, what would resonate, what would turn them off. Now this is not a replacement for doing primary research, but it is a really helpful tool. We don't always have time for primary research or oftentimes kind of in the early stages of developing new tools or assets. We're kind of looking to narrow and AI can help you do that. The second example is you can use a buyer or a retailer persona to get feedback. So you could have AI act as your buyer, it can respond to your recommendations, what concerns do they have, what data might they push back on. And the third is just use AI to act as your critical lead team.

 

(26:13):

You could share with it your updated presentation and ask for where you might be drinking your own Kool-Aid, or you can even share with it the transcript from your last lead team review and ask it to evaluate where you have clearly addressed it feedback and where there might still be some opportunity areas. And I just sort of want to make a note about transcripts and using transcripts and recording calls because I see a lot of organizations recording calls and that's great, right? That's great if you'd like to do that. But if you're going to do that, then understand that there are so much great insight and data sitting in your transcripts for you to leverage to enhance your impact and output. So for example, you could take multiple transcripts of conversations with your buyer or your GM and say something like, "Based on these transcripts, build me a detailed persona of this person, how they think, what they care about, what drives their decisions, what their objectives tend to be.

 

(27:05):

" And now you've got a living document that specific data, Rich, that when you provide it to the tool, it's going to allow you to much more relevant custom answers that are going to be much more helpful for you. And then just one more tip on kind of using it strategically, that is to tell AI to examine its own perspective. So have it challenge its own thinking and understand its reasoning, especially if maybe you're not quite sure it's got the right output. So the way to do this is to practice what is called critical reflexivity. And if you don't know what critical reflexivity means, you are not alone. I actually did not know what this term meant either before I learned about it from someone in my AI network, but critical reflexivity is just a fancy way of saying, take a step back and deeply examine your own assumptions, biases, and perspectives because AI is really good at sounding smart even when it's not.

 

(27:59):

So when that feels like might be the case, you can say things like apply critical reflexivity to this response or challenge this answer using critical reflexivity or act with critical reflexivity and provide feedback.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:11):

And Lauren, I think I love those tips. I've already come up with ideas about how I'm going to use them, especially the kill my ideas things before it kills me. I really like that one. But I think you sit in a very unique place because you've been in e-commerce since the beginning, you understand it, you went through it on the brand side. I'd be curious from your perspective, if you think back to your role in e-commerce and you think of our listeners who are in e-commerce now, what is the one thing that you would do with AI that you couldn't do before that you think would've made your job in e-commerce easier, better, you could provide more valuable insight, whatever that looks like?

 

Lauren Schiavone (28:53):

This is probably a hot button, but I think-

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:56):

We're ready for it.

 

Lauren Schiavone (28:57):

But I think about how much time and energy we spent developing e-content and man, that is just such a ripe use case for AI. You can certainly use an LLM, a tool like ChatGPT or Copilot to help you write that e-content. Now the tools are even good enough to help you generate those images. I mean, it used to take us months and months just to make a simple image update, going through the agency and all things like that. I know brands have found kind of-

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:29):

And hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

Lauren Schiavone (29:30):

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I guess that's what I would challenge the listeners is the next time you ask an agency or designer or something go to do something, go do it yourself, go try it yourself and one of these tools and see what happens because I think every day I'm just kind of blown away more and more about how good these tools are. A little while ago, I kind of experimented building my own kind of e-content images on these tools and they are really good. And that's not meant to say, "Oh, you launch whatever ChatGPT creates." No, but it helps you get really clear on what you want. It's great stimulus for consumer research. And oh, by the way, even if you're going to use a designer, giving them an idea of what you're thinking about will significantly reduce your timeline. So there's still value in creatives and then expertise for sure.

 

(30:28):

And for sure, somebody with creative expertise is going to get something much better out of the tool.

 

(30:35):

So that's another thing I would be asking of my partners is, how are you using AI? How are we benefiting from that? How are we getting things faster or cheaper or more versions of it? And then I just think the corporate infrastructure is difficult. There's a lot of reviews, there's a lot of one-on-ones. There's all these things that actually hold you back from spending time figuring out how you can accelerate growth on your brand. And so I would also spend a lot of time kind of streamlining my workflows there with AI to figure out, okay, how do I spend more time really using my brain power and my strategic thinking and doing some of the things that I know AI can't yet do, or even just spending time with people, building better relationships with my buyer or building better relationship with the folks that sell my products.

 

(31:34):

So that is where I would begin to apply AI within those roles.

 

Peter Crosby (31:38):

Spend more time with people. Now you're just being crazy. When you go through an engagement with a customer client, what's sort of the from to that you've been able to see, maybe particularly with some of your earliest clients where now they've been in this process, because the generative AI piece, certainly huge and strategic. Are you also seeing them finding ways to impact growth numbers, which I know content can do sort of secondarily, but if it's also as useful in the, all right, how would I get better performance out of this campaign or that campaign? Are you seeing that kind of side of it as well where it's being helpful?

 

Lauren Schiavone (32:35):

So the way that I work with this with clients is that my goal within three trainings plus office hours on top of that is to get your organization from AI novice to AI proficient. So they understand whatever company LLM tool that has been selected for them, they understand how to use it, they understand use cases relevant to their role. They know how to prompt. They have tools that can help them prompt even better. They can build, if it's ChatGPT, they can build custom GBTs. If it's Copilot, they can build basic agents. And most importantly, by the end of those three sessions, my goal always is to then get an organization to kind of be really clear and declare what are the AI use cases within this organization? Where are we committed to using AI to streamline or enhance our work? And it's been pretty awesome to kind of see folks go through the journey because it works and because all of those trainings are accustomed to the needs of those folks.

 

(33:38):

And because I understand the work that those folks do day-to-day, I'm able to see a ton of adoption. So for example, over that 12-week process, one of my clients grew the usage of Copilot 6X from where it was before. And then I think a lot of the immediate impact that we will see, Peter, is more in on the productivity side right now. So like time to market, for example, will get faster. You'll be able to get to hopefully new ideas faster, create concepts for those faster, iterate faster, gain consumer feedback faster. But I think over time you are going to start to see growth ideas or innovation ideas that were not possible before. So for example, maybe now we can just much more deeply understand our consumer, or now we actually have the ability with it. We've been talking about personalized content for a long time, but now with AI, we actually have the ability to do it.

 

(34:42):

So I think that more and more we're going to see how AI relates to innovation and innovation that delivers growth.

 

Peter Crosby (34:52):

I love it. I'm excited about this process of seeing how it can actually transform. And we talk a year from now, two years from now, just how transformative it will be, and yet still frustrating. So it's a journey.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:12):

Story

 

Peter Crosby (35:12):

Of

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:12):

Our lives.

 

Peter Crosby (35:13):

Yes, right? Especially in e-commerce, digital and all of this. Lauren, thank you so much. I wanted to see, you mentioned the guide process. Is there some resource that you might provide that our listeners could get their hands on that would kind of give them more of those fantastic tips and ways of working?

 

Lauren Schiavone (35:36):

Yes, definitely. I am happy to provide a guide framework tool that folks can download that provides all that insight that I shared today. But there's also kind of a couple other, Peter, really practical things for folks to kind of take away from this discussion if they haven't done these things yet. So first, I always say pick three use cases in your work life. I want these to be real tasks, not just things like writing emails. And the way to think about this is think about tasks that you do often that you do not enjoy doing. Those are often strong use cases for AI. And to understand how you might be able to better apply AI to your role, you can simply just ask it. You can say, "I am this role at this company." You can provide more context on your role and say something like, "How can I use ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever tool to streamline or enhance the work that you are doing in your role to deliver better results?" The second thing I always say is you need to use AI in your personal life.

 

(36:39):

So download the tool of your choice, ChatGPT, GeminiCloud onto your phone, and then make a deal with yourself that the next time you reach for Google, you will reach for a tool like ChatGPT instead, because this will do one of two things. First, it will help you build a habit of using AI. We know we've worked with consumers. Habit change is so hard. So building this habit personally will help you professionally. And then second, if you use it more in your personal life, you will just understand kind of more and more use cases to use it professionally. Then set a goal for yourself to use AI at least once a day for something meaningful. And then finally, the last piece of advice I always give is practice what I call an AI first mindset. So anytime you're working on anything, you need to think to yourself, how might AI be able to help?

 

(37:27):

For example, you can keep a post-it on your desk to keep this top of mind for you. Or I know folks that have a third monitor just for AI so that it's always there. It's always kind of top of mind. It's always there to trigger you to use it. And if you're not sure how you might use AI, you can always just say, "I work in this industry, this role. I'm trying to do X, Y, Z. How can ChatGPT or Copilot help me streamline, enhance, automate that process?" And you can even ask for a table with a simple prompt to get you started.

 

Peter Crosby (37:57):

The thought of a third monitor makes my brain scream. I can't ... I've seen-

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (38:02):

I have three monitors and it stresses Peter out when I'm looking for something on a meeting.

 

Peter Crosby (38:06):

Oh my gosh, it is everywhere. I work on a laptop. I

 

Lauren Schiavone (38:11):

Know Peter. Peter, you should try it. It's going to be a game changer in your AI usage, I bet. Because just when something is visually in front of you all the time, it's a trigger for habit change.

 

Peter Crosby (38:25):

And I also do do a lot of window hopping to, okay, now I'll go over to Gemini and ask my question and yeah.

 

Lauren Schiavone (38:33):

But then you

 

Peter Crosby (38:33):

Get lost

 

Lauren Schiavone (38:34):

And you're like, where was I? Exactly, exactly.

 

Peter Crosby (38:37):

No, no, I appreciate that tip. Okay. So for the prompting guide, folks can go to wonderconsultinglc.com, yes?

 

Lauren Schiavone (38:48):

Yes.

 

Peter Crosby (38:48):

And they will quickly see where that guide might exist. Yes.

 

Lauren Schiavone (38:52):

Yes. They're also always welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn and I'm happy to provide it.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (38:56):

And we're going to link it in the partner section of the DSI website as well. So many different places that you'll be able to find it.

 

Peter Crosby (39:02):

Yes. Oh my gosh, Lauren S. Thank you so much for adding to my Laurens and really walking us through these incredibly important and helpful tips and a way of working that is career altering when we figure this out and also work altering. So we really appreciate your expertise and thank you so much for joining us.

 

Lauren Schiavone (39:25):

Thank you, Rami.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (39:26):

Thanks so much, Lauren.

 

Peter Crosby (39:28):

Thanks again to Lauren Schiavone for sharing her expertise and prompt guide with us. The Digital Shelf Summit is a place to get a lot of this kind of wisdom, and we invite you to join us in May. That's at digitalshelfsummit.com. Thanks for being part of our community.