Mike Todasco is a former Senior Director of Innovation at PayPal and current Visiting Fellow at San Diego State University.
In this episode of The Leader Assistant Podcast, Mike talks about the AI landscape, and how executive assistants can leverage AI to enhance their role, boost efficiency, and future-proof their careers.
LEADERSHIP QUOTE
Leadership is taking people to a place they would not have gone to without you. If you see a parade going down the street and run up in front of it, they’re not actually following you.
– Nathan Myhrvold
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ABOUT MIKE
Mike Todasco is a former Senior Director of Innovation at PayPal and a current Visiting Fellow at the James Silberrad Brown Center for Artificial Intelligence at SDSU. With over 100 patents to his name, Mike played a key role in fostering a culture of innovation across PayPal’s 20,000+ employees.
A recognized expert in AI and innovation, he explores how AI can enhance creativity and revolutionize business processes and personal tasks. Passionate about democratizing advanced technology, Mike advocates for enabling innovation without requiring deep technical expertise. He frequently shares his insights on AI’s impact on innovation, decision-making, and cognition through articles on Medium and LinkedIn.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mike Todasco [0:00 – 0:29]: Hi, I’m Mike Tadasco and this episode’s leadership quote is from Nathan Miravolt. Leadership is taking people to a place they would not have gone without you. If you see a parade going down the street and run up in front of it, they’re not actually following you. The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident. Game changing Leader assist.
Jeremy Burrows [0:32 – 1:08]: Foreign. Hey, friends, welcome to the Leader Assistant Podcast. It’s your host, Jeremy Burrows, and it’s episode 329. You can check out the show notes for this episode@leaderassistant.com 329leader assistant.com 329 and I’m very excited today to be speaking with Mike Tadasco. Mike is a former senior Director of innovation at PayPal and and current visiting fellow at San Diego State University. I think I got that right, Mike.
Mike Todasco [1:08 – 1:11]: Yeah, you got it, you got it.
Jeremy Burrows [1:11 – 1:14]: What part of the world are you joining from today?
Mike Todasco [1:14 – 1:17]: I am in Silicon Valley right now in California.
Jeremy Burrows [1:18 – 1:20]: Gotcha. Gotcha. And what’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not working?
Mike Todasco [1:21 – 1:40]: Oh, when I’m not working, I love many different types of fitness. I love walking. I just love being outdoors, love fresh air. Um, it’s springtime here where we’re at right now. And I love just kind of flowers blooming and everything and all that. So I love just to be out.
Jeremy Burrows [1:40 – 1:48]: Nice, nice. And do you have any. Tell us a little bit more about, like, personally, do you have any pets or kids or both?
Mike Todasco [1:49 – 2:00]: No pets. We tried the pet thing. That didn’t work. Two kids that are a handful. I live with my wife and two kids. Kids are 13 and 11 years old.
Jeremy Burrows [2:00 – 2:02]: Nice. The same ages as my two boys.
Mike Todasco [2:03 – 2:05]: Oh, no way. No way. Yeah, I got an older boy, younger girl.
Jeremy Burrows [2:06 – 2:10]: Okay, awesome. It’s good age. Good age. It is.
Mike Todasco [2:10 – 2:14]: But even the 11 year old I consider to be a teenager now, I will say.
Jeremy Burrows [2:14 – 2:36]: Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Well, we’re excited to be speaking with you about how assistants can leverage AI, about maybe how AI is reshaping executive support. But first, tell us a little bit about your career and your journey and how you ended up at PayPal Cal, and kind of what your role was there. And then we’ll kind of dive into it.
Mike Todasco [2:37 – 4:12]: Yeah, I started my career in finance and accounting. I was working for GE way back in the olden days when it was the most valuable company in the world. I moved to a paper company like Dunder Mifflin Style Paper and so forth and did that for many years. And that was actually the first time I ever had an ea, in fact was there. I was still pretty early in my career and she was awesome. I loved working with her and started my own business that failed. And when I’m like, okay, this isn’t going where I want it to go, that’s when I have opportunity to join PayPal. PayPal was a rebound job that I was going to be at for a year, and I wound up being there for over 11 years. It was an amazing time at the company. There was tons of growth. Like mobile was just kind of starting. I ended my last five years running innovation globally for the company, which was a super cool experience to do that. A lot of fun. I used to say every Sunday night I was super excited to go to work every the next day. I mean, I just loved it. But 2022 was like, okay, been doing this for a while, need to do something else. Took the summer off. Was playing with a lot of AI stuff in my free time that summer. Was kind of bothered that no one was really talking about AI in the summer of 2022, even though, like, there was just amazing things out there. So that’s when I just started writing about it. Then I got connected to the AI center in San Diego State at that time. So I continued to write, teach, mentor, and do whatever I can do to help people in this grand change that we’re all going through as a society.
Jeremy Burrows [4:13 – 4:27]: Nice, nice. So what does the Director of innovation@paypal. That was so exciting. What were you doing that was so exciting that you’re like, every Sunday you’re like, I can’t wait to go to work.
Mike Todasco [4:27 – 5:43]: Yeah. So phase one of it, like that function was actually part of legal, which is really weird. Like, innovation is part of legal. How the heck does that happen? It was about rebuilding our patent portfolio. I was actually really good at filing patents, just frankly brainstorming, coming up with new ideas. And I just loved and was like, like enthralled by the process. And so it was something I very much raised my hand for. I was like, oh, okay, let me. I would love to just do this at scale across the company and what that evolved into. Eventually moved out of legal into technology. I think first and foremost, it was just building a culture of innovation and frankly, even permeating an existing culture of innovation that PayPal that we had a strong belief that everyone can innovate. Like, it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter what your function is in a company. It doesn’t matter what your background is. It’s something that we, as humans, we do as part of our species, and we all have it in us. And frankly, it was my job and the job of other leaders in PayPal to build a culture, to build an environment where people can take chances, where they can try new things, where they can explore and so forth, and really have that innovation come forth.
Jeremy Burrows [5:44 – 5:54]: Nice. That does. That does sound fun. Even though the legal word threw me off for a second, the legal is usually not so fun. But it was weird.
Mike Todasco [5:54 – 6:11]: So I was on the intellectual property team to start. And I mean, so I wasn’t an attorney, and I also wasn’t an engineer. So it was very strange talking to some people, like, wait, you’re in legal, but you’re doing innovation? Like, how the heck does this work? But it all worked out in the end.
Jeremy Burrows [6:11 – 6:18]: Nice. Nice. And then what does visiting fellow mean for. For your current deal at San Diego State?
Mike Todasco [6:18 – 7:06]: Yeah. Yeah, Jeremy, it’s a good. It’s a good question. It kind of means whatever it wants. Like, to be completely honest. Like, as long as it’s doing things to promote what the university is doing, to help out with a lab, to help out with, you know, the things that we’re doing. So, frankly, I do podcasts like this. I will do a lot of writing about AI. Ultimately, it’s just. It’s just help people out in that world. So I have a lot of flexibility. I’ll teach classes here and there, like, as they come up, a lot of seminar classes I’ll teach and things like that. Also, it’s. It’s without having to worry about a lot of the bureaucracy that comes with working at a large university, which I really like because I’m not good in bureaucracy. But it’s like all the stuff I do, like, the mentoring, the teaching, things like that.
Jeremy Burrows [7:06 – 7:45]: Nice. Awesome. Well, before I dive in specifically to how executives can leverage AI or executive assistants, specifically can leverage AI, tell us a little bit about. You mentioned one of your assistants in the past, but tell us a little about your experience with assistance and how have you seen the value. And of course, this podcast is called the Leader Assistant. So I’m all about assistants seeing themselves as leaders, no matter what their title is. What. What experiences have you had working with assistants, and how have you seen and benefited from working with them and the value they bring?
Mike Todasco [7:46 – 12:01]: Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first time I had an EA would have been in 2004, I want to say. And so I would have been 27 at the time, which would have been. And it was weird. This is when I was in the paper industry and paper is a lot of old people in that industry, like the young end of the spectrum, spectrum just across the board. And I, and so it was a little bit strange and unusual and almost like off putting to have like an ea. But she, she took really good care of me. Like, honestly, like, like, like I, I remember to this day, you know, like one of the things that she, she would just always thinking three steps ahead of, you know, whatever with like helping me with travel plans, which was a big thing, you know, 20 plus years ago to, to help with and you know, and then the expense reporting and all these other bureaucra and just kind of to lighten the load with that. Like that was a big thing for me and just my gosh, so appreciative. But I was so young in my career, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t even, I didn’t even know what I was doing myself, let alone to help, you know, manage somebody or anything like that. And I think as I got to be more mature in my career, I started to identify like where the real value can be, where EAs come in and let me actually even talk about somebody who wasn’t an, for me specifically, but who was an EA at PayPal. And we would have this thing called an innovation tournament every year. It’s just something we created like out of the blue. And this was a way where we would have leaders put forth problem statements and we would have people from across the business submit ideas. It was literally like 140 character length idea. It was like tweet length at the time. So keeping it short, keeping it simple, like, hey, this is a problem, like what would you do to solve it? And then at each phase of the innovation tournament, they would build out their ideas more and more and eventually bring other people onto their teams, so on and so forth. And this one I remember we got to the round of like, I think it was the round of eight and one of the people, you know, it’s mostly engineers and designers as you could, you know, imagine for these kind of things. One of them was an EA that was like got to that round. And that to me was so exciting to have that, to have that different diverse background, to have somebody who is seeing their job, who is talking to all these people, who is just knowing the opportunity out there and seeing a chance to like really apply herself in some new and unique way. Because look, most engineers, most designers, most people, typical, didn’t participate in that Tournament, even though we had thousands that did, most did not. And, you know, I think there’s definitely a stereotype which we always tried to overcome within the company that’s, well, you know, certain people are just there to do their job and, well, maybe EAs specifically, you’re just there to serve the people on your team, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, and that’s something that was, like, ingrained and something that we’re trying to move out of the culture, but it really took kind of trailblazers like this to just say, like, okay, I’m gonna do this on my own. Like, my idea is just good as anyone. And these were all blind submissions and so forth. We didn’t know who the people were even submitting. This would be at various stages, and it would just. It was just a real testament to see, you know, somebody who’s like, look, my ideas are valuable. I am. I’m this. And there is, like, so much more that I can bring forth to the company and ways to really add value. And that’s one thing that always stood out for me. And, like, what we were really to achieve at our company, like, the best we, again, we are all creative, we are all innovative. If you’re watching or listening to this right now and believe that you’re not, you’re wrong. I would just, like, say it flat out. Like, you have this. Like, it is part of who we are. It’s just, have you really, like, you know, have you been kind of given the environment to allow that to unleash out there? And so, like, that’s one thing I will say to everybody.
Jeremy Burrows [12:02 – 12:27]: Yeah. Awesome. Well, let’s dive in then. On AI so what is your maybe two minutes on AI? Like, what if you meet somebody in an elevator and they hear you’re an AI person? What’s kind of from floor 2 to floor 17? What are you telling them about AI? What are you encouraging them to do in regards to AI?
Mike Todasco [12:28 – 15:00]: Yeah, look, I first say congratulations. You’re living at probably the most exciting time in human history, like, as far as technology. So you. You kind of lucked out there what you can do with ChatGPT or Claude or any of these other large language models today. And what you can access for free or for, you know, 20 bucks a month tops, is something that’s probably four or five years ago. Businesses would have paid millions of dollars to be able to give, like, some semblance of this to their employees. Like, we. This is hedonic adaptation. This is us saying, like, oh, yeah, well, it’s not that great. Like, no, these. If you really take a step back, say like what if you could like Transport back to 2020 and have these tools? It is amazing what you can do. Now. What is it that you can do with these tools? The first thing, they have infinite capabilities and sometimes with infinite capabilities, we freeze. We don’t actually know what to do with it because when you can do anything and everything with them, we don’t know what to do. So we do nothing. And what people need to do is they just need to go into these tools and try see the tasks that you are doing that might be a little bit repetitive. That might be whatever it is, like a great example. Just yesterday we were talking about my daughter. She is signing up for. She’s doing like musical theater. She has all of these sessions and so forth that she has and they gave us like a three page printout and she’s only in these certain ones or whatever. Okay, so we could go through that. We could add these manually to the calendar, blah, blah, blah. Or we can just take an AI, take a picture of those three pages and say, hey, wherever you see this cast, go ahead, put that into a spreadsheet and then have another AI and basically say, okay, take everything you have in the spreadsheet, add it to calendar invites with the description of it on there and you would probably be able to take something that would have been a task that would take, good God, probably like 60 minutes, 90 minutes or something like that to something that would took three or four minutes to actually do that. And those. And that’s just one example literally from last night of how you can use these tools. And they are tools. They are not here to take your job, they’re not here to take over our society, anything like that. These are tools that human created to a. To be able to make you and what you do way, way, way more efficient and effective.
Jeremy Burrows [15:03 – 15:07]: ELEVATOR DINGS we’re on floor 17. Good, good summary. Thanks for doing that.
Mike Todasco [15:08 – 15:09]: That was two minutes.
Jeremy Burrows [15:09 – 15:58]: Yeah, so, okay, so that’s awesome. And are there other maybe specific examples or specifically as it relates to executive assistance and executive support, practical examples or strategies from your real world experiences from your time at PayPal or whatnot? I think what you said was spot on when it comes to assistance. There’s infinite possibilities. But where do I start? And it’s like that, that decision fatigue in a way, like, hey, I’m just going to sit here and stress about what I should do with this tool versus okay, I’m just going to go do something with it.
Mike Todasco [15:59 – 19:11]: Yeah, no, I think that’s right, Jeremy. And the first thing that I always do, if I was an EA and I just kind of frozen, I don’t know what to do. I’ve heard about ChatGPT. I tried it once. It didn’t seem to do what I wanted to do. That was a year ago. I don’t know what to do. Step one is I would actually use it in your personal life because, like, that is the place where you’re going to be able to see the biggest impact. You don’t have to worry about, oh, is it approved in our company or whatever? Like, literally just like, take it one weekend, use it for home, use it to talk to it back and forth in the car ride that you have going to work. I use it to quiz my kids on a test that they’re going to have as they’re going to school and say like, hey, daughter’s in fifth grade, she’s got a US History test. Can you actually quiz her on the Revolutionary War and make questions, you know, more difficult if she gets them right, less difficult if she gets them wrong? Go ahead and like, and it’ll start doing that. Or, or you could even just talk to it about, hey, I’m, you know, planning a big event that we have coming up and this could be for work or for home. Like, I want you to help think me think through this. Can we make like a project plan for this and use the. Because you could talk the inputs, you could, you could throw PDFs in there, you could throw Excel files in there, you could use your voice to talk back and forth with this. You could use text. There’s so many different ways. It’s known as being multimodal, where you can talk to these devices. But I would use it personally, use it to plan a weekend getaway, use it to plan your meals. And this is one thing we do in the Tedasco household all the time. I got four people who have very different eating preferences. The AI knows all these because I’ve told ChatGPT, hey, this is what we like to eat in the household. This is what we don’t like to eat. Find the intersection of those things. And also I’m lazy and I’m a bad cook. So, like, find the intersection. And then I’ll, like, sometimes be at the store, it says like, hey, pulled, pulled turkey or pulled chicken is on sale. What can I make with that tonight? And it’ll actually say something to me on that. And I’ll literally be doing this in the grocery store, they’ll give me a list and I’ll buy everything. And you know, I’ve, I’ve run into circumstances where like, I remember once it asked me to put sake in there. Japanese sake was part of the recipe. I live in Silicon Valley. Like, you go to a grocery store where they have sake, there’s like 50 different things. I have no idea what it is. So I literally just held the phone up, I’m like, hey, given the recipe, which one of these? I just took a picture and I was like, oh, use that one over there, like. And I’m like, okay, cool. Thank you. That’s the kind of things that these can do. So, so step one, use it in your personal life, whatever it might be. And again, if you don’t know where or how to use it, ask it. That’s the great thing about this. Just tell it a little bit about yourself, tell a little bit about like how you want to fix it and ask it. You need to play with these things for probably 4, 5, 6 hours before you kind of figure out like, oh my God, it can do this, this and this really well. And it doesn’t do this and this as well. Well, yet, like that will all change over time.
Jeremy Burrows [19:11 – 19:11]: Right.
Mike Todasco [19:11 – 19:16]: But once you start to figure that out, you’re going to be able to really easily be able to apply that to work.
Jeremy Burrows [19:17 – 19:35]: Nice. Interesting. So let’s say, okay, so that’s, those are a couple examples of how you use it personally, how transfer that into, you know, maybe when you’re at PayPal or just for your work right now. What are some practical examples of how you’ve used it in the work?
Mike Todasco [19:35 – 22:39]: Yeah, so what I would say is if you’re an ea, do it and maybe you’ve done this, maybe you have a good sense, but like do a time audit. Like where do you actually spend your time? There are things that can track your computer that can do this. There’s pieces of software you can load on or whatever. You can even just track it, keep a journal. How much of your time is email calendaring, travel related, building decks, doing other strategic discussions, note taking, whatever it might be, and find out where the opportunity is in that and just to hit on a couple of those. And look, there are infinite possibilities and things that an EA will and can do. And also I think the opportunity there is where is the most value add for you. So for meetings and note taking and project plans and all that other kind of stuff, there are tools out there like otter, like fireflies, that zoom and teams have Even built this into their applications where it will take really good meeting notes in there already. It will capture those, it will give action items on that and it can even do follow ups. Now, is it going to be perfect? No, it’s never going to be perfect. That’s why you always want a human in the loop on these. You want somebody to just kind of look at it and say, oh, okay, actually it’s more important. Or this is somebody else’s responsibility. Got that wrong. And you could track these things. You could even take all of the meetings that are key and pivotal. You could put these into a tool like Google’s Notebook lm, which is known as retrieval, augmented generation, which is a fancy word type of AI that basically says, hey, just drop a bunch of documents in there and it will only reference those documents. So you can have one of these set up in Google where it has like literally every meeting that you had over the year and you can query that like, hey, back in February, did somebody say this? Or who is the person supposed to do this? And that’s all at your fingertips. Yeah. Most people in the companies that you probably are working with today don’t even know that this is possible. It’s like truly giving you superpowers to whatever it might be. And there’s different tools for all this. Like if you’re in email all the time, Superhuman is probably one of the tools I would recommend. It’s probably like 30 bucks a month for Superhuman, but it is a tool that heavy emailers use all the time. And it’s AI generated. It helps you write in your own voice. It does all of these things, helps you just manage and navigate yours and other people’s inboxes as part of that. So given that time, audits and where the opportunities are for you to do well. Okay, I wish I was doing more of this this and I wish I was doing less of this. Look at the things where you wish you were doing less of and use the AI as a tool to help you out with that.
Jeremy Burrows [22:40 – 23:26]: Awesome. Love it. That’s my philosophy too, is like listen. Find those painful, manual, repetitive processes and tasks that you’re doing and start there and you can evolve. And speaking of Notebook L, is it Notebook LM or Notebook Notebook LM? Yeah. Yeah. So I use that episode 300 LeaderAssistant.com300 if you guys want to listen to it. But I wrote a blog post celebrating 300 episodes and what I’ve learned producing 300 episodes. And I put that blog post into Notebook LM and it produced an NPR like, podcast kind of dialogue. And so I ended up posting that as episode 300. So anyway, that was kind of fun on.
Mike Todasco [23:26 – 24:52]: It’s awesome, Jeremy. I mean, you know, I was actually working on something recently using Notebook lm and it was HR related and kind of related to the benefits changes over the year. And, you know, often like November comes around, you get this thing of like, oh, what are all the things that happen? What are the changes and benefits and so forth. If you have that in a PDF or even just kind of the old benefits documents and the new one, you could throw those in Notebook LM and say, hey, can you create a podcast that I could share with others inside the company that’s going to talk about some of, like, the major benefits changes we saw this year? And again, you want to double check that before you send that to 10,000 people. But, like, it is really darn good and just another way for us to consume information. I use it personally all the time. If, if I have like a. A long scientific paper. Like, I don’t want to read this thing. Like, I don’t need to read this whole thing. If I. As long as I get the gist, I’m okay. I’ll probably read the abstract, put the rest of it in there, and then it will just explain it to me in a podcast format in 10 minutes. And I have a pretty good sense of what it is. It’s never going to be as good as actually reading that, but we all have more things to read than we have time. And so that’s why using tools like this could be super helpful for you and also for you to help others within your organizations.
Jeremy Burrows [24:54 – 25:23]: Love it. Love it. That’s great. So the big kind of elephant in the room, though is that I get this all the time from assistance, which is good because they need to be on top of this, but security and. Well, I can’t use it because our company IT protocols don’t allow us to use that tool. Or we only have Microsoft Copilot and it’s not as good as Claude or it’s not. And obviously you worked at PayPal and Social Security was a big issue.
Mike Todasco [25:23 – 25:24]: Yeah, yeah, A lot of security.
Jeremy Burrows [25:25 – 25:43]: So what do you recommend when maybe we find a tool that could do something that could really save a lot of time, but we either can’t use it or we have to try to present that business case to be able to get it through the security vendor protocol.
Mike Todasco [25:43 – 29:22]: Yeah, great question. And one everybody needs to take seriously. You know, like if. Let’s Just imagine your workplace didn’t have its own email clients that you could send documents to other people. And they were basically saying, well, you also shouldn’t use your personal email. Well, in 2025, that doesn’t cut it. Every company has to have their own internal email as part of that. We’re going to get there very soon with these tools because they’re just going to be how business is being done. But in the meantime, you do got to follow the rules of the company. And you know, just as you wouldn’t want to like just, okay, my company doesn’t allow me to Send files over 20 megabytes, so I’m going to just use my Gmail to send all this customer information over. Like, no, you don’t do that. Everyone knows that. Use similar thing here. You just wouldn’t do that. Yeah, but that said, the good thing with all of these products is that all these companies, I mean they’re basically made by like Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Odds are your company’s probably already using them as a cloud provider for your data storage or something like that. So there are ways to be able to add these products fairly easily. What I would. So if you have, you know, so say you want to use Claude for something, but your company, you know, only allows Chat GPT, do you know what, just use chat GPT, it’s good enough. Like, yeah, maybe in certain things Claude is 10% better. But you know what, just use the product that you have. Maybe you can make a case for that. But like whatever you’re using, if they have access to something, it’s good enough. If you don’t have access to anything though, well, here’s what I would do. I would use some public data to really make a case for it. Say you are part of a finance team and you’re helping with some financial analysis or something like that. Just Google a public data set, like something huge, go to the BLS or something like that and just download just a big chunk of data and just then throw it in the cloud, throw it in a GPT, throw it into whatever and have it run something similar to what you want to run and then just show people, like hopefully you’re supporting somebody who may have some pull and know others in the organization. One thing with easier, like a good effective EA knows the right people, right? The right decision makers in the company. Just use this as an example. Say, hey, I know there’s some people on the finance team who are doing a similar analysis. It’s taking them like five, six hours to do this. I just did this in five minutes. Don’t you think, like, for $20 a month, like, we could like be doing this to save a lot of time and effort and like use that as an example and do it yourself. I mean, again, just say, hey, I was able to do this. I was able to create this really co thing. Imagine if like we actually empowered not only myself but others in the company to do that. Are we going to have a lot of savings there? Aren’t we going to be able to do a lot more as a company, be a lot more effective and so forth? And that’s like how I would present it. It’s, you know, again, I think if we Talk again in 2027, that’s not going to be a concern because this is just going to be everywhere in every company. But until all these other companies catch up. You watching this? Who wants to use these tools? Almost kind of, kind of put your hand up and just say, hey, this is kind of crazy. We’re not using this. Like, like, here’s why. And you have to kind of put yourself out there to do that. But in the right kind of organization, that’s recognized too.
Jeremy Burrows [29:23 – 29:23]: Right?
Mike Todasco [29:23 – 29:33]: Like, I know if somebody said that at PayPal, it would have been like, whoa, this person’s really ahead of the game here. And that’s like, that would be commended, of course. And so hopefully you’re in the right company that will do something like that.
Jeremy Burrows [29:33 – 30:30]: That. Nice. Awesome. Well, this has been great, Mike, thank you so much. This is super helpful. I kind of want to wrap up with the. You, you alluded to this earlier about how these are tools, they’re not coming for our job. But there is a lot of narrative out there about, you know, well, you know, these companies are laying off these people and they’re, or they’re, they’re announcing that AI has helped them be, you know, 40% more productive without hiring anybody. And all these different things about the whole, it’s never going to go away, I don’t think. But that debate of, you know, is AI going to take my job as an assistant? Specifically for those listening who are still wrestling with this and concerned about, you know, and then there’s people that say, well, AI isn’t going to take your job. It’s people who are using AI are going to take your job. So what’s your whole thought process on all that and maybe specifically as it relates to systems?
Mike Todasco [30:30 – 33:52]: Yeah, I mean, I’ve written a lot about this. I wrote a three part series last year on this and Just kind of the history of big technological disruptions. So I’ve written and thought a lot about it. Let’s just say your job, for example, is taking receipts, scanning those, itemizing those and putting them into concur. And that’s all you do for eight hours a day. And, and that’s, that’s, that’s it. Like you were probably not going to have a job in six months. Like, that’s just the honest, hard truth. Most people have a job that is a whole. And the reason being is because like AI can even do that now. I mean, like that is, that is not hard. It would take, you know, I could probably build a program within 15 minutes that would be able to do something like that. Yeah, most jobs are a series of tasks where you, yeah, you might have that, but you also have that. And you have the relationships you have with other people within the organ and you have the strategic side and you have real insights into these other. Like there’s all these different things in your job. And what I would do is I would say if people are thinking about that, think about what are the things that are going to be like the example I gave right there, that really are automatable and automate it yourself, honestly, like do that so that you can free up more time for the more creative things, the more strategic things, the more value added things. Like if you had infinite time at your company, what is it that you think you would want to do? And what is it, do you think that the person who is above you would want you to do? Ask those kind of questions and you will start to see like, oh, okay, well there’s actually a lot more that I can do. There’s, you know, I’d rather just automate all of these tactical things and focus more on these things that are a little bit more value added or work on other projects or start on other things or whatever it might be. That’s where the opportunity lies. And so I want to be clear, will people be disrupted? Will people lose jobs? Absolutely. Like AI is going to take jobs. It has done that and so forth. But the Internet has taken jobs like any technological disruption has done that. What it does for more jobs is it completely transforms them and changes them so that the tasks that you are doing are com today are completely different than the tasks you had in the past. So as long as you’re flexible, as long as you see a bigger vision, and as long as you kind of automate the things that should be automated using an AI and focus on more of the human, the more strategic stuff. That’s when you’re going to be in a good place. And as long as you, your boss, your organization are all aligned on that, I think you’re going to be okay. And if there’s a gap there, if it’s like, well no, you’re just here to scan receipts and to type them into concur, then I would be more concerned and frankly, I would then learn a whole bunch of AI skills and find an opportunity to bring those skills to a company that is going to really value it. Because again, it is a superpower. Today. Not everybody knows how to do all the stuff that I’ve been talking about, but if you take the time within a few hours you can really get this down.
Jeremy Burrows [33:55 – 34:07]: Love it. Well said Mike, and thanks again for your time. I’m excited to share this with the world. And for those listening, where’s the best place for them to reach out or say hi or connect or read the writing you mentioned too?
Mike Todasco [34:08 – 34:21]: Yeah, no Jeremy, thanks for having me. The best place is probably LinkedIn. Just Mike Tadasco on LinkedIn. That’s where I put all my writings. And if people want to direct message me to chat about any of this stuff or if you got any questions, reach out to me there.
Jeremy Burrows [34:22 – 34:37]: Perfect. I’ll put that in the show notes@leaderassistant.com 329 and yeah, thanks again for being on and best of luck to you and your family and we’ll keep trying to innovate and embrace AI.
Mike Todasco [34:37 – 34:59]: Thanks Jeremy. Thanks for having me.
