AI-Powered Innovation Workshops with Alexander Preis

Course Lab - Episode 80 AI-Powered Innovation Workshops (Alexander Preis) Abe Crystal: It wasn't that long ago that online courses themselves were that experimental thing that you had to kind of push yourself to experiment with and try things out, even though it was difficult. And so now that online courses are more mature, it's time for people who want to stay on the leading edge to start experimenting with what is coming next. Ari Iny: Today we welcome Alexander Preis to the show. Alexander is an educator and coach as well as the founder of Pacelayer4X Technologies. Thanks for joining us today, Alexander. Alexander Preis: Hello. Ari: So to kick us off, could you give us a 30,000 foot view of yourself and how you've come to the course building world? Alex: You might hear it from my accent. I'm born and raised in Germany. I'm an engineer from trade. And I worked 20 years in the aerospace and the railway sector before becoming an independent consultant. We deliver coaching and technology advisory for engineering firms, mostly in the field of technical innovation. So we help engineering teams to build better products and to be more innovative with their upcoming products. That brought me to the Course Builders Lab, because we can leverage the courses to coach and educate our clients. Ari: Can you tell us a little bit more about what you teach? Alex: We are in the B2B business. Typically, we have clients coming with the mandate that they want to be innovative on their next product line, but they don't really know how. Our role is really to get the creativity out of the brain and bring the concepts to life. Our niche really is on technical innovation or invention. This is really structured problem solving, reframing the problems, doing deep dive root cause analysis, analyzing technology trends. You need to find the exact timing when your engineering team should start engaging with a technology. And when it's too early, because you don't want to be wasting your time, but you also don't want to come too late. Abe: Do you have an example or a mini case study? Alex: Everyone is talking about generative AI. Is that now a technology that you should already implement in your invention process? We advise embrace the technology, it's not yet there to be reliably implemented in the organization. But all the signs speak that within a matter of months, the technical problems and the hallucination will be solved. So right now we are already engaging with clients, helping them prepare to get on the train. Ari: How do you think about the threshold to implement a new technology? Alex: We have to differentiate whether the technology will be used in a product like a machine, a train, a plane, or a car. There we have a concept called Technology Readiness Level, TRL level, normally from zero to 10. Now in terms of teaching, it's a bit different because there's no safety involved. The hallucination can be a bug if you have it in an engineering system that should give you reliable results. But if you use it in an innovation class like we use it, it's a feature. Because hallucination, you can reframe — that's creativity, that's out of the box thinking. We really ramp up the creativity or the hallucination factor. And we let it generate ideas. And that is sometimes really like a gem in this hallucination. So hallucination becomes, in a brainstorming exercise supported by AI, a feature. We are piloting right now a series of what we call innovation dialogues. These are a series of different AI-infused conversations that an innovator can use. One of these conversations is a crazy out of the box thinking conversation. And you trigger the model with your initial idea, and it's building out new ideas based on that. Abe: For people listening who are creating their own courses, any suggestions in terms of how they should think about and start using AI? Alex: From our own experience, starting June, July, we pivoted to really in-person workshops, because we need to observe people how they interact with generative AI. What we found is it's hindering the group thinking process because two or three people that are tagged with using generative AI, they're taken out of the conversation, they're staring at the screen, and it destroys the team dynamic. Believe it or not, we had the rule: no AI allowed in the room. And it was an AI-infused innovation workshop. Because we found that people stopped thinking. So think first, AI second. Observe your clients or your students exactly how they use the technology and find out where they struggle. In a one-to-one interaction, GPT is fine. In a group interaction, you need to really moderate it. Then we had this overwhelm factor. It's relatively simple: just tell the model to slow down and reason step by step. You get two benefits. First benefit is for the human user, you avoid the overload. Second benefit is for the AI model, you get better results if you ask the model to engage in a step by step reasoning approach. For the course creator, the way we use it is basically you have an existing body of knowledge. You pre-train the model with this methodology. And then in the conversation, it takes you through the different steps. Your knowledge is your secret sauce as a course creator. You can configure a conversation that is helping your clients translate your generic knowledge into their context. And that is where we see the power of these AI-infused conversations. Abe: All right, it's time for the debrief. Ari: I think one thing that stood out to me is that idea of essentially evaluating ideas and not just assuming something fits. Even as an entrepreneur and course builder, you need to be going through a process of: yes, this is really cool. But how does it actually fit in? How will it work here? Does it actually help? Abe: There really is an important role for experimentation. It wasn't that long ago that online courses themselves were that experimental thing that you had to push yourself to experiment with, even though there were a lot of rough edges at first. Now that online courses are more mature, it's time for people who want to stay on the leading edge to start experimenting with what is coming next. People who get comfortable experimenting with it earlier will be in a better position to ride that wave. Abe: Alex Preis is the founder of Pacelayer4X Technologies. To learn more about him and all he's got to offer, head on over to p4x.ai.