MKJ (00:01.016)

My goodness. CEO Mischief Makers, welcome back to the conversation with Ashley Gross. Ashley, I you ended that last conversation on such a brilliant statement that we’re going to dive right into that. But first off, you’re ready to dive into impact and innovation? Yeah. So just for anyone listening, if this is your first time listening to this podcast, this segment of the conversation impact is self -explanatory. Who are you impacting? Innovation typically isn’t.

Ashley Gross (00:14.897)

I’m ready.

MKJ (00:28.414)

And when we talk about innovation here we talk about we’re not talking about the Steve jobs in the Elon Musk’s of the world although they’re brilliant and wonderful and have an amazing job to do we all innovate every single day and the way we do that is we take our previous experience and the things that we’ve learned and our intuition and the things that excite us and our mission in life if we have such a thing we’re lucky enough to have such a thing and we use that to innovate what we’re currently facing and so.

Ashley, you ended our last conversation talking about the fact that you don’t strive to be an expert because you want to constantly learn and grow and you don’t want to just settle on the fact that, I’ve learned this and I’m done because that’s like death to me, right? You might as well just lay down. You’re done. No, you’re not. There’s many more things. So take us a little further in that. In your previous experience and your professional experience, how has your how have your decisions

Ashley Gross (01:10.96)

Yes.

MKJ (01:25.858)

and the things you pursue been impacted by the fact that you don’t want to be considered an expert, you want to actually learn and grow constantly. So kind of take me through that. What have you done?

Ashley Gross (01:35.825)

Yeah. OK, so I can actually take you way back. And I won’t stay at this age. But when I was younger, my mom used to take me and my three other siblings to Myrtle Beach every single year for like 10 years. Like we had the same routine, same week vacation, yada, yada, yada. And every single time we went, I don’t know if you did this or if it was just like, I hope they still do this. But when you go to those stores and you’re getting something like a token to remember the vacation, hermit crabs were like,

the bee’s knees, okay? So every year for 10 years, we would get hermit crabs. And if you know anything about hermit crabs, they grow out of their shells. So when you purchase them, you have to get multiple shells as they get bigger. And so as a kid, I know this sounds so funny, but I just thought like, how cool is that? Like you get to have this living being and you get to pick out its different shells so that as it grows, it like moves into a different shell. It like sheds itself, right? And becomes like bigger and different. And I always thought that was really, really cool.

And so for me, I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t just that experience. I think it was also being raised by a single mom and just seeing her have these many different hats and normalizing that and not having to stay in one bubble. But I think just in my career, I really, really wanted to pursue biology in college. And I was terrible. I was so bad at statistics. Like, I literally failed statistics. I’m not kidding. Like, it was an actual F on there to the point that my mom was like,

Can we pay someone to pass this for you? And I was like, mom, that’s illegal. You go to jail for that. So let’s just keep that thought in our heads and not say that again. But I wasn’t good at math, but I really loved biology. And so I was like, OK, what else can I do where there’s a formula, but I get to experiment, and I get to test hypotheses? And so naturally, marketing came up, because that’s really what marketing is. It’s half creative, and it’s science and math.

So I ended up finding someone who worked for Google. And I just begged and pleaded. And I was like, hey, I’ll be the coffee girl. I’ll be whatever you want me to be. But can I just shadow you for a little while? And so when I was in college, 18, I think 19 years old, I started going with my friend to her workplace. I didn’t have an official badge or anything. I just started showing up and bringing people coffee, networking. In between my college classes, I was just hanging out at Google.

MKJ (04:00.408)

So anyway, who can say that? Okay, listen to this. Who can say that, you know, I was going to college and kind of in between classes, I just hung out at Google. Okay, great. I just gotta say, okay, wow.

Ashley Gross (04:01.914)

Yeah

Ashley Gross (04:12.909)

It was one of those weird situations where was like someone in my network though, she was a couple years older than me. And I had no desire to like do things that people my age were doing because it just didn’t seem appealing to me. I was like, I want to make money. Like I don’t like I need to make money immediately. And so I started shadowing her and following her around and that led to an internship which led to an apprenticeship. so

MKJ (04:23.126)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ashley Gross (04:35.375)

You know, my career started off in corporations. And corporations are great. Like, I definitely recommend if you’re interested to go down that path. But my issue was they teach you how to do one thing really, really well. And for me, that was a limitation that I didn’t want to accept. So I started in product marketing. Then I went to JP Morgan for Demand Generation. And again, like, I was taught how to do one thing. But for me, I needed to know what

I was doing and how it impacted the next department and the next department so that I could be better at my job. I’ve always been like a full picture person. I don’t like to obsess over the little details. I like to zoom out. And so I was like, all right, I’m not learning as much as I need to be. So I went from corporations to startup work. So I went from being one of hundreds to one of like 10. And I was all of marketing. And I loved it. Like I embraced the chaos. I did it for like seven years.

And it was just like such a good, I mean, I learned way more in those seven years that I’ve ever learned in my life, just because I had to, you had to figure it out and putting myself in that vulnerable position where like, I knew I was capable. I knew I could do it. but like just having to be all and do all really helped me to know not only like how to market or how to write good copy, but like how writing the good copy affects the product and how the product affects the launch and this life cycle.

So I really think that that’s kind of been my life motto is like when I don’t like my shell anymore, I’m okay to move up. Even if it feels uncomfortable, I’m like, it’s time. And it comes in different forms. I wish somebody would have taught me this when I was younger, because I always grew up with this mentality of like, you should love what you do. And that is such a BS. Like you’re never gonna love everything that you do. It’s just not realistic. What I wish I would have been told is,

MKJ (06:20.817)

I know.

Ashley Gross (06:26.863)

Figure out what tasks you love doing and how much of those tasks you need to do to feel fulfilled on a weekly basis. That’s the information I wish I would have known. Because for me, that looks really, different, right? And so it was important for me to learn that about myself in order to feel vulnerable enough to make those moves. And by the way, if anyone’s listening and they’re worried about making a move, because I feel like the longer we stay in a role, the more comfortable we get and the harder it is to leave,

MKJ (06:36.771)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (06:55.505)

I just want to validate with some numbers. I intentionally would leave jobs every 2 and 1 to 3 years for more opportunities. Every single time I left, it was for a $50 ,000 raise. Every single time. That was something in the back of my head, again, like strategy, where I was like, if I’m going to do this, it needs to make sense monetarily and also experience wise. If you’re not earning or learning, it’s time to go.

MKJ (07:20.146)

my goodness so many things unpack there but let me let me just ask everyone listening that is a perfect example of innovation because everything from way back to the beginning of what you saw with your mom having to wear many different hats and the hermit crabs and the ability when you’re in a corporate that’s great and amazing opportunities but you had to be pigeonholed into one thing and and wearing that one hat it gets way too tight.

it gets uncomfortable, we need to switch hats. That’s just your personality and what you saw growing up that felt very comfortable. So you look now, now let’s transition that to what you’re doing now and how that sets you up perfectly to innovate AI use for enterprise and small businesses, both because you can wear the employee hat,

Ashley Gross (07:57.776)

Yes.

MKJ (08:14.594)

You can wear the board member hat. You can wear the senior executive hat. And you can now wear, because you’ve started your own business, the small business hat and the entrepreneur hat. And that right there is how you’re innovating your space. You’re bringing that previous experience and the way you look at the world to bear fruit for AI use in business. What a flip and amazing thing. So how are you doing that? What are you doing now?

Ashley Gross (08:22.779)

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

MKJ (08:42.7)

And how did you take that information and now start prompt community? Because that’s where you are now. But you’ve got a couple of it. You’ve got gettheprompt .com. You’ve got the prompt community. What’s the actual business and what do you do?

Ashley Gross (08:55.525)

Great questions. OK, so we just rebranded to you, which I’m really excited about. So we are now the AIWorkforceAlliance .com. And it encapsulates it a lot better, because from a marketing perspective, I should have known this, but prompting can also be a barrier, which I found to be. Because if you’re getting into AI, you don’t necessarily know about prompt engineering. And so it was holding people back from understanding what the mission was, which was the whole reason for a rebrand, which I think is so funny, because.

As a founder and a business owner now, if I don’t like something, I change it. And that’s kind of innovation. The backbone of innovation is curiosity. If you just stay curious and you don’t force yourself to have these black and white ideas, and you stay in this gray area and just kind of get comfortable knowing that maybe there’s not a right or wrong answer, and maybe it’s just flowing and ebbing in a certain way, and that’s OK, and it’s supposed to change, then it works really well. And so to answer your question,

I think really what people need to understand is if you think about it, your brain and how you think is just a subset of your experience. And so if you have never experienced AI and disruption in careers and taking on new technology, that’s OK. But you’re probably afraid. And that’s OK as well. But diagnosing that as lack of experience equals fear.

is the only thing that you need to accept, right? You’re afraid because you’ve never done it. And that’s totally fine. In order to get good at something, you just practice it over and over again. So all of my experiences leading up to this were, OK, if I wanted to start over in my career again, I would have to start an entry -level job and work my way up. And that sucks. And I don’t want to do that. And I don’t want everyone else to have to do that as well. I don’t know anybody that went to college and is using the career, like the certification that they got in college.

for their career now. I don’t know one person that has. And that’s totally normal. But my idea was, all right, let’s figure out a way to make this digestible so that regardless of what people want to do or where they’re coming from, they can look at AI as this tool that can amplify and enhance their values and their work. And so my work at AI Workforce Alliance is really just based on everyone comes into this community, they all have domain expertise, and it’s like, what do you want to do?

Ashley Gross (11:16.431)

And the community decides what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. So some of the courses are interactive. Some of them are prerecorded. I bring in other experts, right? I say experts loosely, but other instructors. And we all just have this hive mind approach of like, okay, I know AI and I know how to make it work for you, but I don’t know your domain expertise. And that’s where the community comes in. And so as I’m teaching them AI, they’re like, hey, I have HVAC experience and I can use this to automate this.

And it’s just this really cool concept whenever you have a community centric business where you’re going to have different opinions and perspectives come in and you’re all going to figure it out together. There’s not one thing that everyone has in common other than the fact that we are not going to be afraid of AI. We’re going to embrace and figure out how the heck to make this work for us. So what we do is we just go through every single week tutorials on how to use, you know, perplexity to increase your SEO without paying any money.

how to create a product framework, right? Using Jasper AI, just all of these little things where you see it in a startup, you have to be scrappy and you have to be fast to innovate and ideate. That’s this community is you come in in 30 minutes, we’re going to have something at the end of that 30 minutes and it’s going to be really cool and we’re going to iterate as we go, but we’re going to do it safely and there’s going to be guardrails and there’s going to be an intention in a framework. And that’s really it. It’s not anything more confusing.

I would say the other really cool part is just aligning with the employers. Like there’s a channel directly for employers so that if they don’t know how to figure this stuff out, they don’t have to worry about going to their board and feeling weird that they don’t know what they’re doing. They can just go into this channel with other employers that are figuring it out as well and share experiences. Because if you don’t know what you want, sometimes it helps knowing what you do want and vice versa. So just going in there and having this vulnerable open conversation with other employers of this is what I’m seeing, what are you seeing, how are you navigating this?

That’s a lot of AI. It’s a lot of communication and just questioning and feeling safe too, but people don’t feel safe too in their workforce. They need to leave the workforce to feel safe to have these conversations.

MKJ (13:11.522)

Yeah.

MKJ (13:16.812)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, because they’re supposed to be a domain expert in that in that workforce. And if they’re not that they feel vulnerable, that they might somebody else might take advantage of that. The company might not like that. Yeah, no, I get it. And I agree with you. Innovation really has to come from a place of curiosity. And the other thing that Peter Lasoske, I work with him in in another company. And we what he always says, he’s the CEO of that company. And he always says, what else is possible?

Ashley Gross (13:24.12)

Exactly.

Ashley Gross (13:27.961)

Exactly.

Yes.

Ashley Gross (13:49.136)

Yes.

MKJ (13:49.474)

So it’s sense of curiosity, but then asking, OK, here’s my framework. What else is possible? And that’s basically what you did way in the beginning. You said, what else is possible for me to be able to spend more time with my son and less time at work? What else is possible? That’s it. And if you start asking those kinds of questions, you can innovate anything. You can change anything within your power. Wow. So how are you looking at this world of AI?

Ashley Gross (13:58.0)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (14:02.309)

Yes.

MKJ (14:19.114)

and in through through this innovation lens, what are you finding as what else is possible?

Ashley Gross (14:26.705)

Great question. I love this question so much. So when I was looking at this community, I was thinking, OK, I am not the end all be all. I’m not this powerful force. I’m just an average person that said, I’m going to figure this out. So when I built the community, I thought, OK, there’s going to be a period of time where I have to teach all these courses because it’s not that widely known yet. We need to share knowledge. We need to get everyone on board and benchmark them. We opened on May 1. Now the students that have been with me since May 1,

are teaching these courses because they come in not knowing anything, they get up to speed, they figure out how to apply AI to their specific domains, and then they become teachers. Because what you’re not seeing on the market is people being able to get certified and then turn around and practice teaching in a safe environment and get feedback and then go try to get the promotion or the AI job role, right? We’re missing the element though of dialogue, of practice, and we’re not setting people up.

to succeed, we’re setting them up to fail because 90 % of AI implementation is internally aligning your stakeholders, being okay not knowing the right answer or maybe there isn’t a right answer and feeling safe enough to fail because not every pilot project is gonna make it off the ground. If you are so focused on succeeding that you’re not paying attention and experimenting, it’s not gonna last. These pilot projects are failing for a reason because they don’t have executive buy -in.

and employees and employers are not aligning on what’s actually possible. So as far as how I’m innovating, I’m literally turning the students into teachers so that they’re practicing in the same environment that they learn from. They still feel safe. They’re still making connections and friends. It runs without me. I’m not supposed to be the main focus. And it’s not. It’s not about me at all. It’s about them. And internally, now they’re getting certified, and they’re going into these rules and actually understanding what’s

what’s possible and what’s intentionally supposed to be gray and ambiguous and figuring it out before the market has even kept up with it. know, Gartner just put out a report lately, I think it was last week or the week before, and it said 30 % of enterprises are going to have to hire a chief AI officer by 2025. That number is going to change drastically. I’m not going to wait for them to figure it out and change it. I’m going to go ahead and prepare my students on how to go from being a generalist chief AI officer

Ashley Gross (16:48.825)

and learning AI to segmenting it in their verticals and with their domain expertise that they’re either coming from or they want to go into. So that by the time the market catches up, these people are already ready to go. And they’re not only ready to go, but they know how to teach, they know how to communicate, they know how to align. They have had time to focus on the skill sets that need to be enhanced, and they’re enhancing them and then applying AI to them.

I’m not waiting on the world to change, because honestly, that’s silly. I’m setting people up for success beforehand so that they can actually enjoy this, because they had, just like I did, they raised their hand at the opportunity to learn. They should be rewarded. That’s all it takes to be curious and innovate.