How to Use AI and Data Better in Everyday Life with Jess Carter

Transcript

Show ID (00:04):

The power of data is undeniable and, unharnessed, it's nothing but chaos. 

The amount of data was crazy. 

Can I trust it? 

You will waste money. 

Held together with duct tape. 

Doomed to failure. 

This season, we're solving problems in real time to reveal the art of the possible, making data your ally, using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data-Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant.

Jess Carter (00:31):

Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Today's episode is a little different. We're doing a Q and A. We put out a call on LinkedIn to hear directly from you about the data topics you're curious about and you delivered. I'm diving into your questions and sharing some thoughts, tips, and insights along the way. So let's get into it.

Jess Carter (00:52):

The number one winner of the LinkedIn poll is wanting to hear about how I am using AI personally and professionally. So let's start there. I use AI all the time. Now, I don't love the idea of letting it rewrite all my emails or, there's just something I think really important about choosing my own words that go to someone else, like my communication. Maybe it's a control issue, I don't know, but I don't use it like Copilot or ChatGPT to help me rewrite all of my emails. I will use it sometimes if I'm like, hey, I'm not getting the tone quite right. I don't know how to adjust it. I want my tone to be more professional, or I want my tone to be, maybe I am frustrated about something and so I can kind of vent into ChatGPT or Copilot and say, help me write a response or give me talking points that don't quite sound so edgy because that's not my intention, but the emotion is there and it is really helpful at those specific moments when I indicate that that's important to me.

Jess Carter (01:54):

Some other ways I use AI that I think are kind of fun. So right now I have young kids and I just used it this morning. It's the beginning of summer and my nanny came over and was working with my son on his literacy and he loves a good train, and so I just dropped right into ChatGPT. Give us some ideas about how to leverage his train toys to work on his alphabet recognition. And so we lined up, we did exactly what it said, and the train took A letter to another corresponding A next to the track and had to drop off the A or pick it up, and it was quick and easy and as a parent, that doesn't, I didn't get a degree in education. I don't always know the right ways to help my kids with some of the things that they are learning or working on.

Jess Carter (02:42):

It's a great tutor to help me build a bridge between what my kids need and where my abilities might, there might be a gap between the two and how to think creatively about helping them, meeting them where they're at. So that was kind of a fun idea this morning. I've used it to help me plan trips. It will give me suggested itineraries, links to follow up with. I do think it's really important to remind everybody, you have to fact check it. You can't just trust AI. It is designed to generate content you ask it for, so I'll ask it to provide its sources or links to flights or Airbnb stays, et cetera. When I'm trying to put together a travel itinerary, and then I heard this idea from another podcast and I was obsessed with it. I think it's just one of the smartest things on earth.

Jess Carter (03:30):

Everyone listening to this has someone that you vent to about work. Everyone, all of us do. It's either a coworker or a family member or a friend or a spouse. There is someone that when you are like, oh, about something going on at work, you're like, you won't believe what happened. And they're like, tell me about what Tim did because Tim is often at the center of your stories. I have a certain AI tool. You can do this with a bunch of them. I'm not going to tell everybody which one I use. I have trained it a bit on some of the dynamics at my work so that when I need to let off some steam, I don't do that to other people at work. As a leader at my company, I can explain what's going on, and I actually have trained a conversation in a AI tool to behave as my executive coach.

Jess Carter (04:28):

So it lets me vent a bit. It asks me some questions and then it gives me coaching suggestions about how I could have handled that differently or how I should respond, or I've given it references to executive coaching books I've read that I really appreciate or just coaches in general. Hey, I really enjoy listening to Brene Brown. She's got a bunch of content out there. That'll help train it 80% of the way overnight. I wish I responded to life the way that she does. Okay, great, that's helpful. But the big thing I've learned as I work with AI, I never start a prompt without saying, here's what I'm trying to accomplish. What questions do you need to ask me in order to put together a strong response and let it ask me questions that I just fill out and suddenly I have a little mini trained AI agent.

Jess Carter (05:19):

So that is some of my favorite ways that I use AI both personally and professionally. If I was giving someone a recommendation, if I was talking to someone who was like, I've never used it, what do I do? I would say, hey girl, listen, get on ChatGPT. It is so easy, and I would ask it. I've said in other episodes like ask it, put all of the stuff in your fridge in it and ask it to give you a meal plan where you don't have to go grocery shopping or where you have to do the least shopping possible to make a meal plan for the week. Or I would say think about the way you should leverage it. Think about tasks you complete that are tedious, that take up a lot of time that you could be spending your time better elsewhere. That's where you want to leverage ChatGPT or AI.

Jess Carter (06:11):

Another suggestion I would have for someone who's just getting started is either tedious tasks or things that take a lot of ramp up and momentum to get you going, like a blank sheet of paper. If you're a writer or if you're putting together a policy or a standard operating procedure or a really important email or some kind of substantial professional document and you open up whatever tool you're using, an Adobe product, Word, whatever, a PowerPoint slide, huge and ask it to help you get started. Here's what I'm trying to build. Here's the standard operating procedure I'm trying to write. Help me with thinking about designing the right content with empathy for the end users to accomplish what goal adoption of a new process, appreciation of a new policy, a board meeting where they're going to respond to a presentation of yours. How do you make sure your PowerPoint reads really professionally or at a board-ready level?

Jess Carter (07:11):

You can ask those kinds of questions and it's basically like when you are trying to do something a hundred percent on your own and you don't realize, I just don't feel like I put together the best PowerPoint slides on earth. And part of that's, we have people at our company who are amazing at that. I don't have to take up their time looking at my version and going from there. I can do a few iterations first and say, Hey, this is the best I can do. Alright, ChatGPT, walk me through what the differences are or Copilot, walk me through how to amplify my first iteration of this PowerPoint slide or this Word document or this email that I'm writing and I'll get it to a more final version and it will take less time for someone else to review it. Another thing I'll do is if I'm going to present data and do some data storytelling, I will use it as a test dummy to land the plane first and be like, here's how I'm presenting data.

Jess Carter (08:04):

What recommendations would you make to make this easier to absorb, easier to understand immediately? So those are some of my passionate recommendations around how I'm using AI and how I would help a friend who's not used to using AI. It is just crazy to me how powerful of a tool it can be. Oh, one more. I actually used it to fill out my garden. I have some kind of patchy areas where I wasn't sure what plants to put in, and so I asked it to ask me questions. I told it what region I was in. I told it whether they're shady part-time or full sun, and I told it what else I had in the bed and then it made recommendations. It offered to give me a map of my garden with the new flowers. I went and got the right things. I put them in. It looks great. My landscaping is made partially by AI, so I love it. I'm a huge fan. And, check your sources.

Jess Carter (08:57):

Okay, LinkedIn comments that we received. Someone mentioned, they asked me what books or resources or advice I would give someone in a non-technical role who wants to increase their data literacy to confidently analyze raw survey data. Here's some things I would say. There are some really good books. Data Literacy: A User Guide is a really good, pretty simple book that's very accessible. It's practical, it's approachable, it's especially for journalists or professionals working with survey data and public data. Storytelling with Data—there's a lot of really good books about storytelling with data—but that, it's by Cole Nussbaumer and then How to Lie with Statistics. Most people have heard of that one by Darrell Huff. I mean it's just witty and really interesting and I think that that's maybe my favorite recommendation because I think it helps you understand that data is so easily manipulated that I think the art of being a human who uses data is making sure you appreciate if you're using it appropriately or not, because you can have the best of intentions and you can accidentally manipulate data.

Jess Carter (10:06):

So I think the constant question I have is am I looking at data appropriately? And again, as a non-statistician, the number one piece of advice I have is: phone a friend. If I'm analyzing data, if I am putting together a PowerPoint that's demonstrating results from a survey, while I feel really, really confident about how I'm analyzing it, I will always have someone validate that how I'm presenting it is aligned to the statistical significance of that. The survey results. And I've gotten really comfortable even with that phrase, but the concept is I want to make sure I'm not just taking anecdotal data or just enough data that I have access to that might signal an indication when in reality if we had a decently sized sample, those results would absolutely be a dice roll if they'd actually be the right result. So I do think deeply about, I will be clear when I'm presenting this is anecdotal versus this is statistically significant and I'm not a data scientist. So if other people have advice about this, reach out to me on LinkedIn and tell us what your opinions would be about how to answer that question.

Jess Carter (11:12):

Another one is, what is one smart, approachable way to use data to figure out what's actually working and not when it comes to digital engagement? My answer is going to be: it depends. So the first question I would have is, well, what are you trying to measure and why is it important to you? So I would always write that down. So digital engagement, maybe it's your LinkedIn, maybe it's, I don't know, maybe you’re a social media influencer. I don't know. I would write down what you're trying to measure and why you think that is important to measure. Then I really am obsessed with a good pivot table so you can make fun of me, it's fine, I'm here for it.

Jess Carter (11:52):

But if I can get the data in the right place in Excel, and you can use ChatGPT and Copilot to teach you how to use a pivot table or to teach you how to use macros in Excel and to get better at using those tools to analyze data, which is super cool and I've done that, how to build a graph. You can say, hey, ChatGPT, how do I build a graph? Which is pretty neat. I leverage pivot tables when I'm first getting into what I would call loosely structured data. It's not perfectly clean. It's my first glance at it. We probably need to clean it up and figure out how it looks and if it's making sense or not. Those are in Excel and I use those all the time. It's like at the top there's a tab, insert pivot table. You select all your data and then you can start to look at it in a whole bunch of ways that doesn't require constant manual manipulation.

Jess Carter (12:36):

So if you've never used a pivot table, I do love them. Everyone who's like a real data scientist who's listening to this is laughing at me. I would tell you, focus on patterns, not perfection. So don't get hung up on exact things, which we all will, but look at trends. So sometimes you'll be trying to do something really specific. You'll realize it's not working or the data isn't clean enough back up and look at what are the themes you're seeing or what are the themes you expected to see and you're not seeing, and let's understand why maybe we're not. And then I'd just say, so it's kind of this, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, and then come back and say, okay, what is the story I'm seeing here? Start to make sense of what you're seeing.

Jess Carter (13:16):

You can call me crazy. I talk to myself all the time because often in my career I've kind of ended up in a unique situation building out a new department or something where I don't have a coworker yet, and so I will be my coworker or you can now use ChatGPT to be your coworker and say, help me walk through what I'm seeing here. What questions would you ask of the data or the results? I expected to see this; instead, I saw this. Why do you think that is? But I think those are just some initial thoughts on how to start to approach figuring out what's actually working, what's not in digital engagement.

Jess Carter (13:49):

Okay, next question is what can a consultant do for you that an internal team can't? And how to prepare your expectations for what the consultant can do and how they do it. This should probably be a whole episode. Okay, I'm going to speak super frankly about this. Consultants can be a superpower for you if you learn how to leverage them in the right way. They are not-one-size-fits-all, and you should not use them for everything. Consultants can be a really impressive way to strengthen your team or help skill them up. So if you feel like your team is maybe mediocre or slightly underperforming, what you would expect from, I don't know, a team that's doing whatever they do in the market, that's a great chance to say, hey, maybe we need to improve some of our tools, some of our processes or procedures, and maybe we bring in a small engagement with a consulting team and they can basically help improve some of those things, but also demonstrate, add some excitement and energy and skill up your team.

Jess Carter (14:50):

It can actually be a sign of really engaging if you do it the right way. They need to be on a team together. They're not doing things to your team, they're doing them with your team, and that takes a certain kind of consulting. So there's all of these different ways that I've seen people use consultants in the last 12 years. One way I've seen people use consultants, especially in public sector, is when they need to ask for a budget for something specific in legislation, they're going to ask for an assessment of some kind so that they can get the report that indicates that they need to spend X dollars on Y things, services, to get Z outcomes. They are spending consulting dollars to have consultants come in and do an assessment and the outcome is a very thick report that they set on someone's desk and they're done.

Jess Carter (15:35):

That is fine. That is a certain kind of consulting. It is helpful in its own way. That also exists in nonprofits and things to help secure budget or request for funds from a foundation or something. Hey, we've done the research, we've done the assessment. We need X to do Y to have these outcomes. There is a place for that kind of consulting. You don't want to spend dollars implementing the wrong thing. So you want the assessment to make sure that you're going to go implement and spend dollars on the right thing. But then my heart and soul is in the implementation. I will never forget sitting in an executive leader’s next to his executive assistant waiting for him to finish a meeting with a different consulting firm where they plopped the report on his desk. They walked out, he called me into his office, he picked it up and handed it to me and he said, can you go implement this please?

Jess Carter (16:19):

I have never felt more of a sense of honor that they trusted me to take on that work and figure out the right way to implement that with their team. So there are then these implementation engagements, and that's with technology. You can have consultants that are non-technical too, but the concept is about, how do you use consultants to again, to work on updates to your people, processes or technology, or a combination of the three, to generate better outcomes? And that can be a full blur, like a new solution. You need to build a new system. You need to build AI agents you want to build out in your applications. You have an office with on-prem servers and you need to finally get off-prem and into the cloud. That would be a pull in consultants. One way to think about what I'm advising is if your team hasn't made a major shift the way you need them to, again and again over years in their careers, you should hire a consultant.

Jess Carter (17:15):

If you're trying to do a lift-and-shift and your team has only maintained a server on-prem, they do not know all of the very, very big holes, challenges, scary spiders in the closet that could come out when you're trying to lift and shift your technology. You want consultants who do that for a living with a hundred clients every six months that absolutely live and breathe that who can anticipate all those challenges and make sure you avoid them. So any major shifts, any major infrastructure or technology shifts, I would bring in consultants to help you with those things so that they can make sure that you don't major outcomes. I mean, think about if you're on-prem, you're probably spending new, you're buying new servers every five to seven years because going out of warranty, those are huge costs for your organization every five to seven years.

Jess Carter (18:01):

When you switch to the cloud, that implementation cost is the big cost and then it's just usage consumption. You're just getting charged monthly. It's a total change to how you manage your finances for technology. It's a change to what you go buy. You want to make sure you buy the right thing. It's not like you just bought new servers. You have to get all your data in the cloud the right way. So again, those are kind of moments when I would think definitely use consultants and then also if you're just trying to do something new or innovative, if there's a new legislative policy that went in play that you need to get live by a certain date, and if people aren't in public sector, they may not know. A lot of times legislations will take place in July, but they're effective January. They give the agencies six months to figure out how they're going to administrate the new policy. Those are really good times to be asking your IT vendors or your consultants, how are you going to help us get there?

Jess Carter (18:55):

The other question, I'm intrigued that maybe as part of this question I would've asked is you might have a trusted consulting partner and there's a question of like, hey, other consulting firms try to get in the door. Do I keep leveraging the partner who knows me? And I would say, you should always leverage a consulting relationship you have that's deeply trusted and they understand your business. It's going to save you. You're going to pay consulting firms so much money just to do discovery because they do need to understand your business before they go starting to shove things in corners and they were critical to your business. But you do want to make sure that there's innovation, that there's, for lack of better word, fresh blood.

Jess Carter (19:35):

A lot of clients will see earlier career people join and they think that a consulting firm is overcharging for those people. What they don't understand is those people may not be super, super high-skill with ten years of experience, but they're fresh blood looking at a problem a new way. So there's innovation, there's creativity, there's energy. Those people are not rushing to get out the door at five o'clock, unlike other people who might have other commitments. It's just real that you want diversity on your consulting teams. You want people who are younger, people who are older and more experienced. They bring different things to the table. So I would be looking at your consulting teams you have today too, and I'd be understanding how well are they serving you and have conversations with them openly about what they could do differently or ask them how they're helping you innovate or how are they helping you think differently about problems?

Jess Carter (20:29):

You do want those people who are on the outside. There is just something unique about someone who sits outside of your organization. They will see things with fresh eyes in a way that people who've been inside your organization don’t. So I do think having them is a bit of a superpower. Managing them is important. You do not want to just leave consultants to go do whatever in your organization. You want to make sure you have control over what they're doing. You're checking in. You guys are on the same page at least monthly and you're heading all in the same direction together.

Jess Carter (21:02):

All right. Some other questions I'll poke around on here and then we can wrap. What is my Data-driven leadership origin story? What was the moment I realized that this was something that I was passionate about and did I always want to work with data?

Jess Carter (21:14):

I didn't always want to work with data, but I saw the power of working with data. My first job out of college, I graduated in 2010 and I graduated the week The New York Times published kids with caps and gowns throwing the caps in the air and it said, 2010 grads, what are we going to do with them? And I got an apartment with my friend and I had a start date in August. So I had the summer off and the week before my start date, my company that told me they had to renege, they didn't have funds for my position. So I moved from my parents' city to a different state and city, signed up a 12-month lease, and then didn't have a job. I had taken one marketing class in college, Marketing 101, and I did like it. I applied for a marketing role at a nonprofit and I got it.

Jess Carter (22:02):

They told me there were over 40 applicants, so I have no idea how that happened. We're just trusting that that was the way it was supposed to be. But marketing is really data-driven. I mean, as I look at the history of marketing, it was very clear to me that marketing was kind of critical like, they learned early 50-ish years ago how important with advertising, they learned how important data was to understand the efficacy of campaigns. And so as I was starting to understand this nonprofit, they had some key challenges. So this is a little bit of storytelling. They had a lot of donors who were aging up. They were getting older and older, and they weren't really seeing the next generation latch onto their mission. And so I was doing some target audience analysis to understand what does that mean? What does it look like?

Jess Carter (22:52):

What would it look like to engage a younger audience, that we'd need a broader audience; they can't give as much as some of these older donors could. And so I just sort of naturally fell into asking all these questions about the nonprofit understanding what does it take to keep the lights on what's working with the younger generations? And it was kind of this, I don't know, it was like I was a detective and I needed data to help me with these answers. And I definitely tripped over moments where people around me would be kind and be like, hey, hey, hey, careful that story isn't what the data is saying. And so I have learned while I'm still on a journey to get more and more statistically capable, I have learned just to make sure I appreciate that I'm telling the right story and that I'm speaking on behalf of the data. I need to make sure that I'm representing what it says correctly.

Jess Carter (23:41):

Okay, let me see another question here. We are always asking guests this, but we're wondering how you use data in your leadership as VP? Well, I mean, I'm launching a client relationship survey, and so I look at the response rates of those. That's indicative of how much our clients are willing to engage. That response rate should be high because we are doing really strategic work for our clients. It's usually projects that are on their strategic plan. So while there is a baseline response rate for a client survey, we would expect our relationship survey to be a higher response rate than what the industry standard is because of the importance of the projects that we run. So that's one way that I make sure I'm using data. And then I look at the qualitative data, the feedback we get.

Jess Carter (24:27):

So they do rate different parts of the client journey, but then they give us feedback about why. And we do look at, we use what's called NLP, natural language processing, to understand and sentiment recognition to understand, hey, are they saying things that are generally positive in this space or generally negative in this space? Why is that? What are words that are commonly coming up? How do we measure those? So that's probably the easiest, quickest way to answer that question is that especially in the CX side, it's kind of still tied to marketing so there's a lot of support there. You guys have heard me talk about Pareto diagrams or Pareto charts, P-A-R-E-T-O. That is kind of the first thing I do when I'm working with new data to do sensemaking is I will get all of that data in Excel. I will organize it in the right way. I will create a Pareto chart using a pivot table, and that will help me understand what is the story of the data and what percentage and what area do I need to pay attention to?

Jess Carter (25:24):

What am I passionate about outside of data and outside of work? I do love, my family is my priority. I am engaged with my church and my community. I do love where I live and the people I'm with, and I love plants. I do love my garden in Indianapolis when it's summertime, and reading. I am in a book club and I really enjoy reading.

Jess Carter (25:49):

What is one piece of advice I would give someone who is early in their field and wants to be where I am today? Well, if that person exists, I would tell them to be humble and work really, really hard. I would tell them to be humble and work really, really hard. I would tell them any of the grunt work that other people don't want to do, do it.

Jess Carter (26:11):

I would tell them to over-lean into AI. Just get as comfortable with AI. Spend an hour a day training yourself on new tools. You can use new creative ways to use it because then you can do the grunt work faster, but don't be above anything. If you feel like you've arrived and you are above something and you're just getting started, you are missing opportunities to learn in your career. There will be a day where it will not be the highest and best use of you to do grunt work that that day will come. Let that happen to you. Don't decide that that is, you're three months into your job and suddenly something's beneath you. Please, please don't be that person.

Jess Carter (26:52):

Alright, one more question we'll take. Jess, your story and the power of resilience was incredibly moving, especially your reflections on facing cancer with strength and clarity. Since the episode has aired, do you have any new perspectives, feelings, or lessons? We'd love to see how your journey has continued and evolved over the last few months.

Jess Carter (27:09):

So you know what? I think everyone's been through something hard. And so I would tell you I have days where it just greets me differently. Some days I really appreciate when people are thoughtful and ask. Some days I get irritated because I don't want to talk about it. Couple things that I do think are important. I really was raised working hard and being committed to, I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I will work harder than anyone else. My effort was important to me. While I think that that is critical, I do think it's important to recognize that your body is your closest friend and if it is sending you signals that it is tired, you should rest.

Jess Carter (27:52):

If it is sending you signals that it's stressed, you should take a few moments to breathe. I have spent 30-some-odd years not listening to my body very well, and it's now just a non-negotiable because I'm realizing that's a really short-term game. And if I would like to play a long-term game, I need to listen to her when she's talking to me. So I do have another app, man, we really, I should get a free month of using this app for shouting it out. Somebody recommended an app called Open to me, and it's a breathwork app. It has really been helpful to just do it every morning to check in on my body, to pay attention to it before I pay attention to others and to understand, am I starting my day at a hundred percent? Am I starting my day at 70%? And then greet my day that way if I'm at 40, what meetings am I canceling because they can be canceled and my body needs some downtime, versus a hundred percent and I'm booked eight to five and then some.

Jess Carter (28:54):

I think just being aware of how we're meeting your body's needs is maybe the one thing that I would say has evolved. I did get to go to my first wellness checkup, and that was really exciting after all my treatment. And it was boring, which is really exciting too. So I appreciate people asking and it has been really exciting. Chelsea and I both, we've had a lot of people reach out and just express their appreciation for our honesty on that episode and share that they've been on that same journey. And again, at times I struggled with sharing some of that because I didn't necessarily want everyone to have free reign on bringing it up whenever they want to. But for the people who are going through that, especially people who are going through it at a really early age, it just felt so lonely. And if I could make one man or woman feel less lonely going through something like that, I say I was kind of woman.

Jess Carter (29:48):

I was talking about breast cancer, but I just don't want someone to feel alone. I just don't want someone to feel like it's only them. And while I think our minds can do that to us, even though I was in a room full of people getting chemo, they were all substantially older than me. And when you're struggling with some of the mental health associated to that, it's really easy to have these thoughts that isolate you. So the other thing is rewriting that story of we're all in this together. We're all going through this together. I am not alone. I'm surrounded by family and friends. I have a whole bunch of support. How you speak to your body matters. There have been studies on some really interesting study, I'll find it and I'll put it in the links in the show notes where people spoke kindly with gratitude to their water and then others did the opposite.

Jess Carter (30:36):

And when they studied it as it crystallized the water that was spoken to with kindness and gratitude crystallized differently. And it was just fascinating how beautiful those crystals were compared to the other water. And so one of the things I've experienced in my physical therapy sessions are tight knots that I have a physical therapist working on. And when I acknowledged, there was a moment when I was like, oh my gosh, why is that there? And I was like, that's where my drain was. And the second I said that the muscle released, the knot went away. And I looked at my PT and I was like, oh my gosh. And she was like, I know that happens sometimes. So maybe the one thing I'd leave you guys with is be kind to your body, speak kindness over her or him. Don't get frustrated with it. It's doing the best it can with a whole bunch of allergies out there and a whole bunch of hardship.

Jess Carter (31:31):

And we put ourselves through a real grinder and don't give it a lot of space. So be kind with the words you say in general, they matter more than I think we know yet. And I hope that with science and studies, we can learn more. 

Okay, I'm going to wrap it up, guys. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Don't forget to follow us and give us some feedback please on how these data topics are transforming your business. It is helpful to get that feedback. So we really appreciate it. We can't wait for you to join us on the next episode.