AI Lens
AI news, hot topics, advancements, and discussions about how AI is reshaping business and society.
Your focused view on the emerging hot topics in the Age of A.I.
AI Lens
Season 1 Episode 6: AI & Your Workforce- Jonathan Aberman from Hupside & Elizabeth Shea from Tree Fork Strategies
AI Lens brings your focused view on the emerging hot topics in the Age of AI!! We provide AI news, hot topics, advancements and discussions about how AI is reshaping business and society.
Season 1 Episode 6:
During the CES conference we are interviewing experts in the various AI areas to bring you amazing updates and discussions about hot topics in the world of AI. In today's businesses, there is some concern with how to implement AI as tools for their employees and have the workforce comfortable with using the technology to expand their capabilities. We interview Jonathan Aberman from Hupside and Elizabeth Sheu from Tree Fork Strategies to provide their expert advise on this emerging issue on implementing AI in the workforce for businesses along with some other fascinating insights in the fast moving world of AI.
Checkout www.Hupside.com for more information about Jonathan Aberman's work for businesses and their workforce in implementing AI.
#CES2026
#AI Workforce
#Hupside
#JonathanAberman
#ElizabethShea
#TreeForkStrategies
All right, we're here with AI Lens, and I just went to an amazing seminar all about AI in the workforce. It was so informative. We have Elizabeth Sheen, and we have Jonathan Eberman. And they were on the panel, incredible. And a lot of what was going on is how to, instead of your workforce being afraid of it, meaning AI, is orchestrating it, managing it, and how to get them used to it. So why don't we start, Jonathan? Tell us about your background, how you've gotten to this field, and what are your best tips for entrepreneurs right now with their workforce? You got an hour?
SPEAKER_00:So let's let's let's take that in pieces. So I've been involved in venture capital for about 25 years, and I've helped start a lot of software companies. And one of the things that I've been seeing for a while is the growing, growing competency of what we used to call machine learning. And I could see this trend developing where at the end of the day, as software got better and better with the tests, sooner or later we're going to face the fundamental issue of me, what do humans do? That software can. And all that's happened is large language models provided the first use case for machine learning that makes it appear like it's intelligent.
unknown:Right?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, the machine learning has been doing tests for a long time. It's just this particular flavor. But having said that, it's now exploded into a, you know, is the LLMs are able to do things that frankly are intimidating human legacy. And when I looked at it, I said, you know what? Somewhere we have to come up with a way to give people something to stand on to say, yeah, you know what? I add value, other than I'm a human and I'm in time with digging it. Not that digging it is not important because it is, but the problem is until recently, you are either a technologist or a humanist. You're an AI accelerationalist or you're a resistor. Actually, AI with technology is an unbelievable accelerative creativity. But in order to have a conversation, people have to have a place to stand. So I found this technology. While I was an investor, I found this technology that objectively shows how everybody uses their own desire for novelty to solve problems in a way that's distinctive to them. Why is that important? Because if I say to you, you have the ability to be original and you can be better at using it if you use AI, but you're a focal person, which is something that we nice your meaning. You're somebody who likes to get things done. If I say to you, use the tools, being like, What? What? Why should I use the tools? Well, because it'll do your job better. Right? But on the other hand, if you're somebody who's hyper creative and expanded, I say use the tools, you're gonna fit it well. You don't even be told twice, you're like, let's go. So instead of stigmatizing people by saying, you either know how to use it or you don't, you go into workforce, you say, look, I get it, you like to get things done. Here are five ways you can get things done. You like playing with tools, here are five things you can do. And then the people in the middle, the connectors done vendors, here's your role. And when I saw the technology, I realized that this would give people and organizations a place to stand. It's like, I I I've gotta I've gotta start this comfortable. So, how does this relate to entrepreneurship? I've learned over the years that people have two fundamental questions that we all have to deal with with. What do I do while I'm a human? Right? People get there different ways. I mean, spirituality is really important, reality up, and we all, why am I here? What do I do? For me, entrepreneurs, what I've seen is people are deeply religious, people are agnostic, non-faithful, whatever. What people all have in common is a belief that humans can make a difference. And what I find really interesting about entrepreneurial behavior is fundamentally people believe they can make a difference. And entrepreneurship, just the way people do it. So to me, when people say, Oh, follow your passion, that's nonsense advice, right? Because that doesn't give anybody advice. But if I tell them, look, if you want to have a life where autonomy is the most important thing that matters to you, you're already an entrepreneur. You just have to figure out how to get people to pay you so you can be autonomous.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And then AI pretty much democratizes the kind of information and knowledge that people need to make their dreams come true.
SPEAKER_00:I think so. If it they basically this, you know, when we find again, Elizabeth can speak this. You know, she's in the industry of, you know, of software, right? Creativity. She's, you know, that's public relations and Brandon. I mean, the company, my company Hubside, she in her collins name. I had a terrible name. I mean, I that was a good thing. I love it. I'd actually terrible name, and I thought it was really clever. I'd come up with I like it. I was gonna name the company after uh a medieval uh philosopher. And I was I was all in on this Which one? Oh, it doesn't matter. Thank you for not saying anyway. I was very proud of it. They were like, first of all, that's inside baseball. Secondarily, we're being a linguist. And by the way, we've read this guy's speeches and and writings, and do you know he was not a he was anti-woman? I'm like, what do you mean? So and like, didn't she just there? Didn't she read the monograph when he said that no woman could ever be a ruler? I was like, I kind of missed that. You're like never mind anyway. So but my point is that you know, she's in the industry of creativity, and that's what she what she what she does. And right, I mean, the whole that's that's how we came with this thing. You saw it from euphrism.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. Just the ability to say, what are we really trying to communicate here? And and human upside is where the hubs like comes from. Yeah. And so we have a whole branding team that went through that practice of trying to figure out who you're really trying to go after. What do you want to say? What are we trying to change? And you also want to be disruptive, and then you have to have a project. Exactly. But it worked. And so, and then from there, we basically, it's only been 10 months since you started the company. Yeah, that's true. And the product's just been announced about a month ago. But from there, it's about making sure that we're making this as relevant because people are having a harder time wrapping their head around it until they see it firsthand and you're able to actually take the challenge or or use the product so you can see how it does have an impact. But that's where we've and we've been working really together to figure out how to communicate the story, what it means, because people are it's new, it's all new, but it's innovation, it's innovation-based on this.
SPEAKER_02:Now, did you use AI in working on the branding? Absolutely. All right. What kinds of things did you use AI to do in the branding?
SPEAKER_01:So, to Johnson's point, everyone was a little bit different. Everyone brought a little different skill set to the process. And so we had some people use it for ideation, and then we would all talk when we were collaborating. I mean, you can come up with a million names using AI. We use different tools, you know, Claude and and uh ChatGPT and you know, Pip One, doesn't matter. But the point is that between that and the ability to say, what are we really trying to communicate, yeah, it's all about the prompts. But but some people were more inclined to use that, but you can't rely on it. You know, it still requires HubSide was not something that came out of a chat-chi. No. That was it was an evolution after we narrowed things down. So that's that's a process in and of itself.
SPEAKER_00:You know, it's funny. I I use AI a lot in the context of generating content that I use for different purposes. And it's so funny story, but at least I found it a very interesting moment. I uh for years have been a columnist in newspapers and I've written a lot, like a lot of publicly available, right? And so just for grins, about six months ago, I said the chat, I said, write column for me on this topic and the style of chat. And it did. And it was fascinating because it it used the same tactics I use, and but it was very interesting because it was good, but it wasn't it wasn't real. Follow me? Yeah. And so ultimately, don't tell my editor, but actually it's okay. Ultimately, I rewrote just about all of it, but it was a really good lattice. It saved me a couple hours. As recently as last weekend, I I wanted to do uh a white paper for a particular use case for the product. And because we trained our chat with all the content that we were creating, I was able to use prompts and basically generate a white paper draft that was consistent with other white papers. And then I was able to take that in a three or four hours pray crazy work on it that was differentiable, that was my voice, my content, our company content. But that would have taken me two or three days to do if I had done a scratch. And this is where I think it gets really dangerous with AI because what's happening is people use it for efficiency to generate that white paper, and they think, oh, this is great, get them done. It's good enough. But they do, they think it's good enough. And this is another part of the mission of the company is that what people aren't focusing on is that AI is the biggest homogenization ever, engine ever. And when you think it's novel, it's not. It's available to everybody else. And so you have an obligation to understand that no matter how original you think the output is, trust me, it's not as original as it'd be if you bear down.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And that's a secret sauce for careers. That's what our students need to be doing. That's what we need to be doing in the industry. And the people that do that well are gonna be employable and are gonna be successful, are gonna have great businesses and differentiate. And the people that are like, it's okay.
SPEAKER_01:And that's what some of these applications come into play, you know, recruiting and then missions to universities and then understanding IT transformation. How what role can I yeah play? And that's that's basically where we are now.
SPEAKER_02:Well, like when the writers guild went on strike, I thought to myself, why are you doing this? This is a huge tool for you guys.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it could be.
SPEAKER_02:It could be if they use it and they and they use their creativity to create something so much faster. Because what will happen otherwise if they hold the big studios hostage and say you can't use AI, independent filmmakers will roll right over them. And and but what can happen is they can create their best works ever in less time. And ultimately, what you were saying, if people just rely on AI for output, there will be no intellectual property. Initially, there might be some fighting. So like lawyers may flock to that field, but if people get lazy and all they do is let AI do their work, there will not be intellectual property. I mean, music, it's kind of already started in that direction.
SPEAKER_00:It's fine. I'm a songwriter, I'm I'm a musician. It is interesting. You know, you can you can use these AI generators to give a saw on the horn, but I'm sorry. There is something about the human mind creating that is different. Yeah, it's just different. But even if it's not different, different, at least it's unique. And and I think that one of the interesting things that's gonna play out in our society is I believe we're gonna see a major push towards offensive system. In fact, if uh if somebody's asking for advice now, say, look, I don't care what you do, you have to stand out. I would sooner have my kid be a really great plumber than a really, really lazy yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know. I I think that artwork, uh original artwork, original performance, original thought is gonna become the premium night. The biggest danger, I think, to our society is that if we don't really promote an economy that rewards individual greatness, and what reward is commoditization, we're gonna get as a society, we're gonna get poorer and poorer because people pay for special. People pay premium for special, special creates wealth. If we have a an economy that's based upon the same, then the Chinese are gonna kick a butt. It's not gonna be, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02:It's well, there was I I listened to a podcast that Elon Musk did with Joe Rogan on Halloween in 2025. And he said, sure, one outcome of AI could be the Terminator, it could also be a society of abundance with a huge GDP, which ends up in socialism. And he said it could be a mixture. He was saying possible, not saying it would be, and I had heard that before, which is very interesting. It depends on humanity and humanity's whether or not we're gonna be lazy and live in Wally World and roll around on our chairs and play video games, right? Absolutely, or whether or not we're gonna keep being productive and contribute and be creative and go for passions in life.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's up to us. It's up to us. But we need to bear in mind that what's happening right now is the way the technology is being deployed, they're being deployed in a similar business model with social media. True. Yes. And and you know, recently I uh made a speech, uh convocation speech for major university, and I told the professor, I said, we need to understand 40% of your students are addicted to social media, the popular stuff of time with one. And AI is designed to get you into a closed look. I asked the professors how many of you say, please, will you ask the AI to do something? And most of the raised no, they said, What? What? There's not a little woman or man inside the box. We don't have to be polite, but we're just we're we're lined up that way. So we're wired up to be informationally dependent. And that's the danger of a library, is that it's subductive. It's it basically is a joke on Phoenix and and it really is. And so we need, you know, if you're a podcast, definitely we need a sheet. So you understand at the end of the day, if you allow yourself to get seduced to this narrow doom of AI, you're not gonna be employable, you're not gonna generate differentiation, you're gonna have an unhappy life. Where you're gonna be trapped in a doo-woom. And God help me, I mean, maybe that would make me the Antichrist and you know Kiertuis' world because I'm sorry, it's anyway.
SPEAKER_02:It's it's really up to us. And people are terrified that they're gonna be unemployed, there won't be any jobs, we're gonna go through a major situation where humans just don't have a place.
SPEAKER_01:But that was all the fear and doom that that that's been coming out in the last year or so. Oh, right.
SPEAKER_02:If you watch the news, that's what you're you're gonna hear. But you know what? I I heard a statistic the other day that right before the Industrial Revolution, six out of ten Americans were farmers.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:Farmers. And I I don't I'm sorry, I don't know any blacksmiths, maybe a couple in Williamsburg. Yeah, right. We're all from Virginia, right?
SPEAKER_00:Right, right, right, right, right. Listen, the the analogy of the industrial revolution is very apt. You know, it's kind of funny that the just as an aside, the Pope, you know, chose his name. The current Pope chose his name because the last Pope that was his name was the Pope during the Industrial Revolution. He actually, if you watch closely, he has said that this is the biggest technological challenge to humanity since mechanization and the de-agriculturalization of society. And to your point, all these businesses grew out of mass deduction, right? All these different valued things, and to the point where the United States became a service. We don't build stuff here, we think stuff here. Right. And all of a sudden we've like, we've forgotten that. You know what I mean? We've like forgotten. And and the mission that we AFCO pursue through your podcast and hubside and elsewhere is to point out, you know what? People can and should get paid for differentiating, drive them that well, and they'll create wealth for themselves and wealth society. You can have true abundance. Alan Musk, socialism capitalists. I think that capitalism, if people have the ability to compete, is by far the best system. I agree. But yeah, plutocracy, where we use technology to take people's individuality away from them, is where we're dead, unless we empower them. And I don't live in that one.
SPEAKER_02:I don't either. And I think we can do that with AI.
SPEAKER_00:I do too.
SPEAKER_02:It's really so tell us about HubSide. Okay. So that so that people can have new tools to help them through this AI chain.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I definitely want you to go to hubside.com and check this out. HubSide is a company that has a infrastructure that lets individuals test or assess the people that work with them to understand their internal superpower. So that they, as the leader or the HR director or the educator, you say, all right, well, these people that I'm working with, they're going to attach to and work with AI in different ways. So now I can either test, I can either train them differently, I can put them together in teams to take advantage of how they can work together. If I get someone who's a focal person and bringing them with a connector to bring them along, if I got an expander, I can make an augmenter, marry up with them so they don't run off and do crazy stuff. It's an so if anybody's interested, the the tool is there for anybody to use. We're deployed it in the first instance for enterprise and education where you have a few of them, right? Because that's the quickest way to get out of the world. Eventually, over time, we'll have consumer app that people can use to test themselves. But for right now, other than when we make it available, like we're doing a national original intelligence week going CS. We've put a consumer app up the website just for this week. You know, you this week.
SPEAKER_02:We can, yes.
SPEAKER_00:And so but in the next six to 12 months, the way we're going to get into this is educational institutions, companies that have CEOs that care about their people that don't want to do AI transformation by do this or you fire them. You said do this and here's why. We think that that alone will make a major difference in society and be real business.
SPEAKER_02:That's fantastic. And we will put a, if it's okay with you, a link to the challenge.
SPEAKER_00:If you put it up before Friday, definitely. I mean, when are you linking it up? And the challenge will be live until uh Friday evening, and there'll be a different game every day. Awesome.
SPEAKER_02:Looking forward to it. Thank you both so much for joining us. This has been fantastic. And you are watching AI Lens. We are focusing on the future. Right.