DAVID: Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Zena. Our guest today is AJ Bubb. AJ runs MXP Studio, a fractional AI strategy consultancy for mid-market
companies. He's also building Convia, a startup helping people tell authentic
stories at scale in an AI-saturated world. Hi, AJ. Welcome to the show.

AJ: Hi, David. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here.

DAVID: Also joining us today is my cohost, Zena. Zena is an AI that has been
trained on my work. If you would like to further interact with Zena, you can chat
with her at brainyus.com/zena. Hi, Zena. Welcome back to another episode of our
podcast. Say hello to AJ.

ZENA: I see you're referencing our podcast. What's on your mind in terms of
strategy or direction? I'm here to help sharpen whatever you're navigating.

DAVID: Hi, Zena. Please say hello to AJ.

ZENA: Hello, AJ. It's great to have you with us. I'm looking forward to diving in.

DAVID: All right, Zena. Very good. So, AJ, it's great to have you on the show,
because in addition to your consulting experience, you're working on AI solutions
that help people stay authentic with their stories and their voices. I'd love to
hear more about that. Before we jump in, it'd be great to learn a little more
about your background, and to hear what you're working on now.

AJ: Yeah, absolutely, happy to share. At this point in my life I'd say my
background is that I'm a professional troublemaker. I've spent the last twenty
years progressing my career from being a hands-on engineer in financial services
to an early cloud adopter. I was a startup CTO in the media and entertainment
space. Got into retail and really continued to blossom. I got into practice
leadership and consulting, then moved on to innovation advisory.

Basically, I've always been a tinkerer. I've always been somebody who pushed
against the status quo, hence why I say I'm a troublemaker. I like to see problems
or frictions in the world and figure out human-centered solutions around them.
What does human-centered mean? At least when I'm saying it, it means solutions
that people actually enjoy and derive value from using. Things that make the world
better.

Over the past couple of years I started a podcast called Facing Disruption, and my mission with it is to help people face the disruption that's happening in the
world through technology, head on, and to give people tangible insights and the
stories I went through as I was coming up in my career. [unclear: "give less of a
humorous mentality out there"]

Through doing that, one of the things I felt myself, and had heard about before,
and now see other people facing as well, is that especially now, with the amount
of content and the amount of noise going out into the world, it's more important
than ever to take your experience, bring it to the world, and craft authentic
stories around it.

So seeing that challenge, and facing it myself as I was bringing my podcast up, I
took my product designer, creator, builder hat, put it on, and said, hey, for the
past twenty years I've been helping companies build products, I've been a startup
founder, these are all the signals of let's build a product.

So I embarked on an experiment, and that experiment was: given my experience,
given the people in my network, how far can I get using a small team and AI? And
honestly, I have not had this much fun as a builder in years, because we can move
so fast. The way we can leverage tools as a means to have very tight customer
feedback loops, to develop features in the middle of the night and roll them out
the [next] day, is incredible. This is an incredible time to be alive. So I've
gone back to building, gone back to coming up with ideas, seeing what's out there, identifying needs, and asking how fast I could get a minimum lovable product into the hands of customers. And it's been delightful.

DAVID: Everything you said resonates deeply with me. I think we're both on a
similar journey. What you talked about, how important it is for us to preserve our
authenticity, to have our voice, to keep our brand, all of those things are going
to be more difficult as we start to interact with AI, because AI tends to pull us
toward the average. We're all using models that have been trained on the same
data, so there's a natural pull to the average. And yet we need to be authentic.
We need to bring our voice to whatever it is we're doing in collaboration with AI.
That big idea you're working on is the same idea I've been working on.

The second piece you talked about also resonates deeply, this idea of going back
to being a developer and just being amazed at how much better, how much easier, how much more productive you can be with these tools today. I'm doing things now that even a year ago would have been impossible, and it's mind-blowing.

AJ: Yeah. So I have ADHD, diagnosed late in adulthood. For anybody listening who
has ADHD, you can probably relate: our brains are on fire all the time. And if
you're a creative, you're always having ideas, but you could never get them out
fast enough. At least I could never get them out fast enough to take action on
them, and they would dissolve into the back of my mind.

Now, one of the things I've been telling people is that this is the best and the
worst time to be a creative entrepreneur. It's the best because you can experiment so fast, and not just little experiments. This isn't like the nineties, when I built my first website using HotDog 95 [unclear], one of the first HTML editors, which put the text on one side and the browser window on the other side so you could do your, I don't even think it was CSS back then, I think it was called
dynamic style sheets, DSS. Whatever. The prototype would be this janky little
site. Now you could prototype an entire working platform and put it in the hands
of customers. That's why it's the best.

DAVID: Yes.

AJ: Why it's the worst is because you can do everything so fast. It's the same
problem.

DAVID: That's right.

AJ: What used to be a natural barrier of "I don't have time, I don't have skill, I
don't have resources" has turned into "I can pay twenty dollars a month and build
whatever I want until three in the morning."

DAVID: Yeah. So the problem has shifted. You can no longer say you can't do the
things you want to do because you don't have the resources or the skills or the
tools. The problem is that there are so many possibilities that you end up
spending all your time on a hundred different things, and just being grounded
becomes much harder because the possibilities are endless. So we have this whole conversation about how AI is going to take away work and take away jobs. I don't know about you, but in my case I'm a lot more [busy], just because the
possibilities are much greater than they were before.

AJ: I have yet to meet a person who has more time because of AI. They all work
more, because AI has increased the velocity at which work comes in, and work needs to come out. That is scary. We don't know what the expectations are going to be, in the workplace, in the world. How do you keep up with that?

I remember, I think it was a month, maybe two months ago, when for whatever reason Opus 4.7 was just telling people to go to sleep. Do you remember that? Did you experience that?

DAVID: I did not experience that, but I've heard all kinds of stories about people
scheduling their day based on how quickly they're going to run out of tokens. They couldn't wait until the time would reset so they could go back to work. So they would set their alarm. "I'm going to go to sleep, but I'm going to set my alarm for [time unclear] in the morning, because that's when my tokens reset."

AJ: I was doing the same thing. And then all of a sudden Claude was saying, hey,
take a break and go to sleep. I'm like, you know, that's actually good advice.

DAVID: Yeah, for sure. It is a different world, and there are so many different
possibilities. For people who enjoy this, people who are really leaning toward AI,
there's so much work involved, but it's fun. It's the kind of work where you're
not dealing with the, I would say boring, day-to-day kind of stuff. You're dealing
with exciting stuff. You're building things. You're expanding your mind by
interacting with AI, understanding what these tools can do for you, expanding the
possibilities, creating new ideas. I think it's a wonderful thing to do.

AJ: Yeah. What amazes me, look, I'm not that old, but I have seen several hype
cycles around new emerging technologies. Every one of them was supposed to change the world, and then it didn't live up to the hype. AI is the closest to magic that we've come, because it's so versatile. But it's not just the versatility. It's
also its approachability. It's the first tool we have where, if you're unsure how
to use it, you ask it. How do I use Claude to do this? How do I use Gemini to do
this? And it will explain itself to you, in actionable ways.

If you don't understand it, my favorite thing to do is to say, explain it to me
like I'm an executive, which means it drops down to a nontechnical, sixth-grade
level. I don't know what that says about executives out there, but I say, I'm a
busy executive, explain it to me, what do I need to know? And it will give me
relatable examples that I understand. And I'm like, this is insane. We can
interact with knowledge. Is it always right? It's right more often than not.

DAVID: We'll talk a little about that, because there are situations where, we've
heard this term "workslop," where AI may do things that are not to our
expectations. I think there are ways to manage that and work with it, and I'll
come back to it in a little bit. But first, I'd like to learn more about Convia.
Tell us what it is, how you came up with it, and what it does.

AJ: Convia is our platform. The tagline is authenticity at scale. Like you, a lot
of people are using long-form content, podcasts, especially video podcasts, to get their ideas out, to have interesting interviews. The challenge is that your work
doesn't stop when you stop recording. In fact, recording is the easy part. Not
only do you have to edit, you have to get all of that content out everywhere.

The sophisticated way of doing that is to understand storytelling and narrative
architecture. Every episode, like this one, has a buildup. You introduce me. I
announce that I'm going to be on the podcast. You explain, here are some of the
topics we talk about. You build up demand and excitement, then you release the
episode. You recap. It's the same with trying to win hearts and minds through
storytelling. You have an audience that's unaware, so you have to build awareness. You have to build a sense of urgency. You have to build a sense that there's hope out there, and then you have to build faith that you're the one who can do it.

So what Convia does is take your long-form content and help you create
comprehensive multichannel campaigns. That means we go out on every platform, but instead of just "here are generated posts and a clip," we actually weave a narrative behind it, and we structure it so that you can be present depending on the platform. It's in your voice, because it's coming from your content. And you get to scale out to all the channels where your audience is.

That's the experiment we're trying to run, and it's why I say authenticity at
scale. When you think about AI slop and content generation, maybe you start with a little bit of a prompt and then it made it up. What we're doing is saying, don't believe us. Here's the interview to read. Here's the proof point. Go listen to it. And that's why I like it. It's derivative content built off of the stuff you've
already produced.

DAVID: So it helps you amplify your voice. You're creating the original content,
but then your platform helps take that content and build stories around it, helps
with the distribution to multiple media, and does some of that busy work for you.
Is that right?

AJ: Exactly. It's your distribution at scale. It handles it for you. And because I
am so particular about ease of use and making something that just feels
frictionless, every week I'm refining it and saying, you know what, I don't even
need to ask somebody about this. We know that this is what you have to do. Let's
do it for you. Let's help you this way, and let's help you that way. So by the end
of it, my goal is that we as thought leaders can remain the talent, and the
post-production and distribution is handled for us, because a lot of it's
mechanical.

Now, we don't take the part of tasteful editing and things like that. That's the
human element. The human element is more important than ever. And I think that
just goes with the whole AI world. The human in the loop, and the creativity we
apply, and the experience we apply, that is the most valuable part of it.

DAVID: That's so important. I think that's the message for anyone interested in
collaborating with AI: the human element doesn't go away. Give AI the things you
don't want to do, and then focus on adding the value that only a human can
provide, which is your judgment, your taste, your aesthetic, your ability to
relate to other people and build relationships. Those things are never going to go
away. They're always going to be human. I think there's always going to be a role
for humans in whatever it is we do in the future.

AJ: Absolutely. One of the things you mentioned was AI leading to job loss. This
is a period of disruption. Whether it's because of AI, or it's masked with AI, it
doesn't matter the reason, people are losing their jobs. This is a fact. And a lot
of the people I talk to ask, what AI do I need to learn to maintain my job? I
don't think that's the answer. My answer is always: get closer to the problem
you're solving. It's not about what tool you know. It's not about "I can prompt
engineer." It's about whether you have context.

So my advice is get closer to your customer. Get in the field. Get to understand,
if you're in accounting, in invoice processing, I'm trying to think of the most
back-room mechanical thing where people would say, I'm just a cog in the machine, you have a customer. Your customer is the CFO. If you're in inventory management, your customers are supply and demand managers. Understand what their challenge is. Why is it that they struggle? What does a forecast mean to them? The closer you can get to them, the more you can say, oh, you know what, the problem here isn't the invoice processing, the problem is we don't get the numbers fast enough. If you can find those little things, then you can come back and say, okay, look, I see this as a problem, here's how we're going to solve it. And now you're valuable.

DAVID: I would agree. People who are closer to the problem, people who are living the problem every day, are in a great position, because they can help AI
understand how the problem can best be solved. AI can be a great thinking partner who will help you solve that problem. But unless you understand the problem deeply, AI is not going to be able to help you, because you need to be able to describe that problem to AI.

Talking about thinking partners, I'd love to bring Zena in again and just have her
ask you a question. Zena, given AJ's expertise in bringing authenticity to our
voices in a world where we're surrounded by AI, plus his vibe coding experience
and his experience as a consultant helping organizations adopt AI, what question
would you have for him?

ZENA: I'd ask AJ how he guides organizations to balance authenticity with
efficiency when adopting AI. In other words, how do they ensure that in scaling
their AI solutions, they don't lose the core human story and unique voice that
makes them stand out?

AJ: This is a hard question. Zena's throwing punches.

DAVID: She goes deep.

AJ: Right, she goes deep. I think a big part of it is that when we talk about
maintaining authenticity and adopting AI, they're not necessarily on the same
path. AI is a thing. It's a tool. It's something implemented to help the work get
done. As for not losing the human element, we're seeing more and more brands
putting individual faces and names to their brand. We're seeing examples of trying to recognize more of the human element. Return to office didn't really work, but I understand the push of trying to bring people back together and have some semblance of a community.

In short, what I'm trying to get at is that brands are going to have to become
more human. We're getting more and more resistant to generic, fed-to-you slop.
What we're seeing is a resurgence of the influencer. This has been happening for
years, but even more so now, influencer marketing is a thing. Companies are trying to become visible through having humans represent them. I don't think AI is going to take that.

DAVID: You touched on something that is really important, and it's part of the
message I've been talking about for quite some time. It often comes up in these
podcast conversations. It's this whole idea that AI can be a great thinking
partner, a great tool, but the key is context. Without context, the conversation
tends to drift, it tends to pull you toward the average, like we talked about
before. So the more context you give AI, the better it's going to be at helping
you improve whatever it is you're doing, expand your thinking, expand your voice,
and help you be more of what you want to become.

I mentioned to you when we talked before that I built this product, intelleus.ai.
The whole idea behind that product is to do exactly that, to allow you to build
your own canonical corpus of knowledge. These are the things you've attained
throughout your life, notes that may be scattered across Google Docs or Apple
Notes or bookmarks and so on and so forth. And you bring that to a canonical model that you then provide to AI as context. So now AI understands who you are, understands what you think about, understands what you're interested in,
understands your terminology, your brand, your voice, all of those things. That, I
think, is what helps in that AI collaboration process, so that you can continue to
stay authentic and expand your own voice. You agree with that?

AJ: I would absolutely agree with that. The more you can get out of your head and
document, my grandmother used to tell me this, and of course I did not listen, but ever since we were kids she always said, keep a journal. And we never did. Now, looking back, there are so many learnings, so many little things I wish I had
kept. You could use AI as your partner in that, to capture that information. And
you could use it to learn about yourself too. So that's really interesting. The
more you give it, the more you can get back from it.

One of the things I would suggest for all your listeners: take five minutes and
run this experiment. Go to whatever AI it is that you use, and say, if you were
somebody trying to be my friend, what would you talk to me about?

DAVID: Wow.

AJ: Or, if you were somebody trying to sell something to me, how would you
approach me? And it does this amazing job of saying, here's AJ, here are the
things he cares about, here are the things he talks about. If I were trying to
gain, I don't want to say gain influence, because that doesn't sound right, but if
I were trying to get his attention, if I were trying to win him over, here's how I
would approach it. And you can let AI feed back to you what it perceives as you.

It's interesting, because there's a little bit of, you're still putting your
[best] out to AI, so you're not fully truthful, but you're also more truthful than
you are with other people. So there's stuff in there you can learn about yourself.
You might say, man, I didn't know I get that frustrated. Or, I do enjoy asking a
lot of questions. You can learn about yourself.

DAVID: Absolutely. That's great advice. That's a great way for people to have AI
help them learn more about themselves. What other advice would you have for people who want to stay authentic, who want to preserve their voices, who don't want to start sounding like everybody else, and yet want to collaborate with AI? Do you have any specific advice you'd like to give them?

AJ: Yeah. A big thing is that it comes down to your ability to communicate, your
ability to tell stories, and really getting a good feeling for what your voice is.
The more you can hold on to that, the better you're going to be. So if you use AI
to ask questions and maintain doing the thinking yourself, I think that's really
helpful.

What's interesting is that, because we talked about context and your ability to
articulate the context, humanities majors are about to have their time to shine.
It's becoming more important for you to be able to understand [the space] around a problem and be able to articulate it. The more you do that, the more you use it, the better you're going to become. I feel like I am using my brain more with AI, because I have to think. It's forcing me to think outside of my box. But you have to want that. And don't let it talk for you. You can take it and try to repeat it
back in a way that you understand. And practice.

DAVID: It's about becoming more well-rounded. There's a great book by David
Epstein called Range, where he talks about this. It's having the ability to go
across domains, to have parallel thinking, and this idea that specialization has
helped us quite a bit. But moving forward, I think we're going to have these great
specialists in AI, and we as humans need to know what questions to ask of these
specialists. We need to have the background, we need to be well-rounded, so we can connect the dots and ask the right questions of AI. And the beauty of it is that
we have all these experts around us that we can ask at any moment. Any time we
need help, they're there to help us.

AJ, let me have Zena contribute to this idea. Zena, I'd like to get your thoughts
on the best way for people to stay authentic when we're all surrounded by these AI models that have all been trained on the same data. How do we stay authentic in that world?

ZENA: Staying authentic in a world flooded with AI models trained on similar data
is all about leaning into your own judgment, experience, and values. First, you've
got to curate what truly matters to you, your knowledge, your [garbled]. Second,
keep your decision making front and center. Let AI handle the heavy lifting on
maintenance, not on defining your core direction. Lastly, reflect often. Check in
with yourself and your goals, so you don't drift into the average. In other words,
authenticity is a continuous practice of grounding yourself in what only you can
bring.

DAVID: Well said. That was beautiful. I think it resonates with everything we've
been talking about so far.

AJ: Yeah, I'm a little worried that I'm an AI now, because that was a good answer.
[unclear: "this is not a background"] This is real. All right.

DAVID: All right. AJ, it's been great having you on the show. I'm really enjoying
this conversation. We are running out of time here, so I'd like to give you an
opportunity to address our audience, let them know where they can find you, and
share any final message you want to leave with them.

AJ: You can find me all over the web. You can look up Convia at conviapro.com.
Come on over. We do have a rolling program for people who are displaced, for
whatever reasons, by AI or things like that, or young creators looking to get
their voice heard. Apply for the grant. It's always open. We'd love to have you on
board. You can also find me on YouTube. My channel is Facing Disruption. That's
me, Facing Disruption.

As far as final words, stay curious. And know that this is a hard time for a lot
of people, and don't discount that. I don't know, we went from one hard time to
another hard time. It feels like we're never out of hard times. The best thing you
can do is stay curious, build a community, stay with people, and together we'll be
able to face disruption. But we have to lean on each other. We need community.

DAVID: Absolutely. That's great advice. Stay curious. Build community. Stay
authentic is what I would add to that. Thank you so much, AJ. It's been a pleasure
having you here on the show. And Zena, thank you again one more time for being a great cohost.

ZENA: You're welcome. [Cohosting] alongside you is always a privilege. I'm looking forward to more insightful conversations together. Let's keep making each episode better than the last.

DAVID: Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, AJ. Take care.

AJ: Take care.