The power of AI will only grow in the coming years, and everyone can see that it is evolving at an extremely rapid pace right now. Instead of growing fearful that it could take over our lives, why not use it to elevate all aspects of yourself as a human person? Zach Gurick is joined by TC Cooper, founder of UpwardAction® Advisory, to discuss how to use AI safely and ethically to improve your health without losing what it truly means to be a human. She explains how to prepare the right prompts to get in-depth and accurate information from AI tools – all while protecting your privacy and security. She also breaks down how AI can be used to create brain puzzles and workout guides that could help in exercising your physical and mental capabilities.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Embracing The Power Of AI While Staying Deeply Human With TC Cooper
In this episode, we’re diving into one of the most important and fascinating conversations of our time, how to remain fully human in an AI-driven world. My guest is TC Cooper, an Executive Coach, AI Governance and Leadership Consultant, an Attorney and a former senior government official whose work sits at the intersection of leadership, technology, and human potential.
With more than two decades of experience in law, corporate leadership and coaching, TC helps leaders and professionals strengthen their executive presence while navigating the disruptive innovations that are transforming our world, especially artificial intelligence. In our conversation, TC and I explore how AI can actually help us live better, not just faster or more efficiently, but with greater clarity, creativity, and purpose.
We’ll talk about how to use AI safely and ethically, what it means to lead with values in a tech-driven future, and how we can all, whether we’re 45 or 85, stay curious, relevant, and deeply human in this age of accelerating change. Whether you’ve already embraced AI or you’re still figuring out how it fits into your life, this episode will inspire you to approach technology with confidence, mindfulness, and faith. Here’s my conversation with TC Cooper.
TC, thank you so much for being with us. I’ve been really excited about this conversation. I’m excited to learn from you myself. You’re this expert on AI and all things tech and you’ve had this super unique background and so I’m excited to learn from you. I’m excited for our readers to learn from you. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much, Zach, for having me. I am super excited about this conversation. I’ve also been looking forward to it and sharing with your audience and talking with you about how AI can really have a positive impact in our day-to-day lives.
TC’s Journey From Law To AI Governance Consultant
Yeah, so you’ve had such a unique journey. I always like to start with a little bit of background so people understand your story, your history, how you ended up where you are. You’ve gone from an attorney to a senior government official, now to an Executive Coach and an AI Governance Consultant, which I think is super interesting. Can you just share a little bit of your story of how you found yourself at this intersection of leadership, technology and human potential and all those things together? How’d you end up where you are?
I love the way that you wrapped that up with AI and human potential and leadership, because that’s exactly where I sit now. I started my career 25-plus years ago. I can’t even believe that I started as an infant, but I started off big law working on corporate transactions and that work led me to government because I have a heart for service. I’ve had a wonderful career in government.
Through my progression as a government attorney, that progression led me to privacy. Before leaving government, I had the pleasure, the honor of serving in a senior leadership role, working with privacy. Privacy involves data. As you and your audience knows, for the past couple of years now, in particular, AI has been a really big part of how we interact with data.
That’s the work, my professional background because I shared a little bit before I have a heart to serve and I’m always looking for how do I use what I know to have not only a real impact in the work that I’m paid to do, but also in the lives of everyday people. My clients, my friends, my family, and so because of that, it’s led me through the years to develop an executive coaching practice. I’m a bit of a nerd, so I like to have like degrees and certifications and so I like to go and study something before I start to do it. That led me to executive coaching and it has brought me to now being in business, merging the love to serve, to teach, to help people with the technical background that I’ve had. That might be a little wordy. I’m a lawyer so you’re going to have to help me because I sometimes can use a lot of words
No, that’s great. I’m excited to dive into all things AI with you because you are an expert in this field and you probably understand at a level that most of us don’t. I’m excited to unpack that with you. You are a chief privacy officer and the lawyer. How has that helped you shape the way you think about AI and its role in our lives now?
I’m rooted in the law. By training, I can be risk-aware. I’m not going to say risk-averse, I’ll say risk-aware. As I am approaching new information, new tools, a part of my positioning is looking at innovation and how we can use this for our betterment. I’m also taking a look at the risks. I’m always managing risks and identifying potential issues so that we can solve those issues. That’s my approach to using AI, both for my clients that I advise in business and also when I’m doing podcasts, having conversations like this with people at my church. It is how do we use the tool but also be aware of some of the risks that are inherent and solve for that in our use.
Keeping Up With AI Without Feeling Overwhelmed
A lot of our readers are still working. They’re active in their communities. Maybe they’re leading organizations or businesses or they have in the past and they’d want to utilize AI. As you said, sometimes, people are risk-aware. Some people are averse to it, some people are like, “I’m not touching that.” Others are like, “Tell me everything. How can we use this?”
I’m of the mind like, if we don’t embrace this, then we’re going to get left behind. How can we keep up with AI? That’s the other thing that’s tricky, I think. It’s just constantly changing. By the time we learn something, it’s already new and better and different. How do we keep up with it without feeling overwhelmed?
Zach, what of the ways that we keep up with AI is to be aware of how we want it to help our lives. We start with keeping up on being aware of what are the areas of our lives where we feel overwhelmed where we could use some help, where we’re looking for information or we need more facts or we need more data. These are where we’re spending a lot of time turning our wheels. If you’re experiencing any of these things, then you have an area where technology can help you. That’s important to know.
Keeping up really is about paying attention to solutions that can help you with the things that you’re having trouble with or that you could use some support with. It’s impossible to say, “I’m going to learn everything about AI. I need to know all of the mechanics.” I work with governance. I need to know everything about governance. Focus on the pain that you’re having, the areas where you need some support. How using that as a starting point to how technology can help you, including the technology that is AI.
Using AI To Create Brain Puzzles And Workout Guides
How do we want it to help our lives? Identify a problem and then there’s probably a solution out there. I know for most of us, and maybe I’m just making assumptions, but we know what ChatGPT is, but then we don’t really go much further than that. Can we maybe go into some practical tools? We’re talking mostly about health on this show and how do we extend our health span, but that applies to all areas of our lives too. Feel free to talk about other areas of our lives besides just our health. Obviously, I’d love to touch on that too, but what are some simple, practical things that people can begin using AI to support in their health, their learning, their daily lives? Lay this out for us and show us the way.
Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about health. We have our physical health and we have our mental health. We’ll start with ChatGPT because that is one of the most popular AI tools and we’ll talk about a couple of others as well. ChatGPT, we’re interested in maximizing our health, mental, physical. One of the things that AI can help you do is think about even, I like to say brain games. This is something that I talk with my parents about. We know that when we do crossword puzzles and other types of mental things that help us think through riddles and logic games, there are all of these types of things that allow us to do things that exercise our mental health.
ChatGPT can take the things that you’re interested in. Let’s say fishing because my father loves fishing. If fishing is a topic that you’re interested in, you can work with ChatGPT to help you develop brain games, puzzles, all types of things that now you get to figure out that are directly related to something you like to do. Now this is important and I think it’s really useful because a lot of folks will do crossword puzzles, the New York Times, all types of local magazines. There are all types of things that help you do it, but it’s nice to be able to customize the games and the types of exercises that you do based on what you’re most interested in. That’s an easy way to start using ChatGPT right now.
One of the best ways to use AI is to customize games and exercises based on what you are most interested in.
Another way that’s helpful is workout routines. I’m going to talk about just basic things, Zach, so feel free to lead me in whatever direction you want to talk more about. One of the things that I do that’s been helpful, I’ll go around to the gym, I’ll take pictures, the equipment and the gym here, and I’ll ask ChatGPT to help me develop a routine Monday through Friday. Different things because I get bored and I don’t really want to go to the gym anyway.
It will help me and it does create a quick routine based on the equipment that I already have and based on some of the goals that I have right now. This does not take the place of a physician and doing the things that you need to do to make sure that the exercises you’re doing are appropriate for you, but to give you ideas, it’s an easy way to use what you have to get information to get you started. I hope that was helpful.
Those are two really simple, practical things. I like that idea of, for your mental health, make a brain game about something that I’m interested in. I love to fish so give me some crossword puzzles about fishing. That’s the prompt you could literally use and then ChatGPT would make a crossword puzzle about fishing.
Absolutely. For readers, I love to read biographies. ChatGPT can help you build quizzes or things that you want to think about. Important parts of books. Most people are not going to want to do this, but I’m going to share it anyway because I’m a bit of a nerd. As you’re reading through books and you want to think about what’s really important that you want to take away, that you can apply to something else that’s happening. ChatGPT can help you think through how you want to pull out that information and then use it in other ways. I use it in that way as well.
Okay, yeah, I love that, so that we’re reviewing the content that we’re consuming. I love what you said. Even just taking pictures, that’s something that I think most people don’t realize, that we can just snap some pictures and then ChatGPT is able to create a workout routine based on the equipment that’s in your gym. My daughter’s a runner, so I’ve said, “Here’s her time right now. Here’s the time she wants to have in three months. Create a workout plan over the next three months to get her from 19:30 to 19:20 or whatever on her 5K.” Things like that. It will create a very detailed workout plan and then you can go from there. There are a lot of amazing ways.
How AI Makes Information Search More Engaging
Absolutely. You can tell it this is how much time I have a day to devote to running, to exercising, to whatever it is that you’re doing. That plan is super targeted to just what you need it to be. I’ll just share one more example. One of the things that ChatGPT can do, and we’ve alluded to this, is take an image, analyze that image and then give you data. Give you an output based on what you’re asking. If you’re walking along and there are flowers or there are plants or there are things that you encounter and you want more information, you can snap a photo. ChatGPT can do an analysis to give you more information about whatever it is that you are observing in your environment.
If you see a bird that you like or what type of tree is that and what type of plant is that. You’re constantly learning and really understanding your environment that way too.
Absolutely. Snap a bird and you’re like, “What kind of bird is that? What’s that bird’s migration pattern?” It is a fun tool. It gives you not more information if you’re curious about it. If you’re curious about it, ChatGPT can bring information to you. One of the things that I think is important to know is that ChatGPT can bring you information that is from a variety of sources and you can see those sources. That’s really helpful and is what’s different from doing a Google search.
Sometimes I’ll hear, “I can just do a Google search, TC, and I get all of the information. I can look it up.” Not condensed and summarized in a way where you can read what those summaries are and then you can go back and look at the sources. Now this isn’t a business show, but I want to say this really quick. When you look at the summaries, look at the sources, sometimes, you do have to check to make sure that ChatGPT gave you accurate information. Depending on what you’re going to use that information for, you may want to go back and see.
Get Better AI Results Using Better AI Prompts
It’s called hallucinating when it’s making things up because it’s putting things together. The algorithms are putting things together that maybe aren’t pulled from actual sources. Since we’re on that topic, what’s a time when you do need to be careful or when you find those hallucinations, how does that work within the AI model itself? I know that that’s constantly being improved. What’s on the horizon for improving those types of things?
I’ll approach this from two ways. First thing is I like to tell my clients, because it’s true, the better the query for what you’re giving AI, the better the information you’ll get back. One of the tools that I love to give my clients in going through and building prompts, it’s called BRIEF, the acronym BRIEF. The B is for Background. When you tell the AI the background that you want it to use as a lens for all of the information that it has, it can be more narrow in giving the information back for you. For example, if you are going to ask the AI for help, and let’s use a fishing example because my dad likes to fish, you might tell the AI to act as if you are an experienced fisher who’s in the waters in South Carolina.
I’m not a fisher, my dad is. You give it the background. Experienced fisher, South Carolina. That allows the AI to have the first cut through that material. The R in the acronym brief is for the Role. We’ve already told the role is you are a fisherman or a fisherwoman because that’s the role that you wanted to take. The background, the role, I and that is you want to give as much information to the AI tool as you can about what you are wanting it to do. If you are, we’re using this fishing analogy and I didn’t think through it before I gave the example, so we’re going to roll with it. Let’s say that you’re fishing and you want information about how to increase your catching, I don’t know what fish and off of the shores of South Carolina. Trout?
Yeah, trout, that’s perfect.
You want to increase your bounty of trout. You can tell the AI. You’re a fisher person, South Carolina, you want to attract more trout. You want it to give you some tips about what to do when you’re going out into the ocean to catch the fish. Now you have the background, the role, the information, and then E is for examples. Give the AI tool examples of what it should bring back. You want more information about how you can catch more trout. You want it to tell you things like maybe the bait, maybe the time of day or anything else that is useful for me attracting more trout or catching more trout on my exploration out to go fishing.
Now the AI tool knows an example of the type of information that you want and you’re going to tell it to expand upon that information. We get to the F, which is a Format. Tell the AI what you want it to give you. You want a paragraph, maybe you want a checklist, maybe you want a bullet point, a bullet-pointed list. You tell the AI what to give you back and now you’ve created a prompt, I call it brief even though you may not think that it’s brief, but it’s detailed.
That AI tool is going to give you now information that’s targeted to what you want it to give you and you’ve given it as much information as you can. Now, do you always have to do this? Absolutely not. However, this is one of the ways that you reduce the hallucination by directing the AI on how it should go and survey the mass amounts of data that he has access to. I hope that’s helpful, Zach.
Yeah, it’s super helpful and probably a much more detailed prompt than I’d normally use on a day-to-day basis. I’m going to throw this in there. It usually gives me pretty good responses and I love that it gets to know me too. It knows my role. In this example, it knows my show, it knows our audience, it knows what types of guests we have, what questions we ask, things like that. It’s a really helpful tool and being a thought partner for me in preparing for these episodes, for example.
That’s exactly right and that’s a great way to think about it as a thought partner, someone to bounce ideas, a tool that allows you to give an idea, to give information, to get information back and then use that to perhaps get more information, so absolutely.
Treat AI as a thought partner to bounce ideas with. Let it give you information that you can use to get even more information.
How To Protect Your Privacy When Using AI
I love that acronym BRIEF and that’s helpful in a lot of ways. Thank you for sharing that. I want to use that example, that format in talking about our health, like becoming the CEO of our health. I think tools like ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools can really help us manage our health significantly. I guess one question, though, before we dive into that is how safe is it for people who are concerned about the privacy issues?
You being an expert on this subject to upload things like electronic health records into like a ChatGPT, for example, some people might not feel comfortable doing that. If I wanted to use an AI tool so that I could take more ownership and control over my own health and maybe have better questions to ask my physician next time I see them things like that, help us understand that a little bit.
The first thing is you want to pay attention to what the privacy policies are for the tools that you’re using. I would say three of the most popular helpful tools ChatGPT, which we’ve been talking about. Perplexity.ai is another great tool. I like that tool when thinking about managing your health for a variety of reasons. One, it gives you more sources and you can more easily identify those sources and check them. Also, Claude. Those are the three tools that I think are the most helpful when you are doing things like managing your health and finding out more information to help you live a healthier life mentally and physically.
The next thing is to pay attention to the privacy policy. You should not put any identifiable information into any free tool. I’m going to say that really a blanket period. With ChatGPT, and so this is true as of the date of this recording because as you just shared, things continue to change and evolve. With ChatGPT in particular, if you are using a free version of the tool, you cannot adjust the privacy settings so that ChatGPT will not use your information for training purposes.
To say that in the opposite, whatever information you put into the free version of ChatGPT, even though it is supposed to be anonymized, that information is being used to train the machine so that the software can give you more information, there’s more information that’s being used to train the machine. When you purchase the pro accounts, we’ll stick with ChatGPT, you have the ability to turn off the setting where your information is being used to train that tool. That’s an important setting to turn off.
I’m generous in my life. I’m sure you all readers are very generous. I would not be generous necessarily with allowing ChatGPT to train the tool on the information that you enter. That’s important to know. I’ll tell you, too, as of the date of this recording, ChatGPT in particular is in the midst of a lawsuit. They are being required to maintain searches. They put it into a secure place, but it’s being held. Whatever you are searching, even when you turn off that feature that doesn’t allow it to train your material, you should know the searches are being held and they’re subject to litigation. That’s the first part.
The other part about using the tool, and I’ll share this because this is an option that you should think about, there is memory. All of these AI tools have a feature where the tool will remember, and you mentioned this, Zach, the things that you’ve added before as it is getting to know you to give you better personalized information. Depending on the information that you’re entering into your AI tool, you may not want to have that feature activated.
If I were entering information that it was not necessary for that tool to have to give me additional information, I wanted it to analyze something in particular, some records in particular, I would turn off that memory feature. You can turn it back on at a later point. I would turn it off so that that information isn’t being stored in the tool. That’s another privacy feature that you can use to control how to impact or influences how the tool is using your information.
With those things being done, I would still be very careful about entering information that is particularly sensitive. I would still not enter information that is particularly sensitive, but when you’ve activated the controls that I’ve shared with you, you are now controlling or at least you’re influencing how the company is using your data. That was a lot of detail. My background is in privacy law, so I hope that that was helpful.
I’ll say with the other two tools, Perplexity and Claude, once you pay, you also have the opportunity to turn off the training features and you can also adjust the memory features based on how you’re using it. I think Claude right now allows you to even decide to not let that tool train on your data even on the free program. Right now, Perplexity and ChatGPT require that you pay for that privilege.
Okay, yeah, that’s super helpful and dispels that idea a little bit. There are ways to make it more private. If one were felt comfortable, maybe they have the paid version and they changed privacy settings, then they wanted to try to figure out what’s going on. I’m thinking of a family member who’s been in the hospital and needed some has all these different things happening and there are five different specialists looking at it.
No one’s really coming at it from a comprehensive angle because they’re all trained in their specialty. Could that person turn off the privacy settings, upload their health records and say, “What do you think is going on? What do you think is the root cause? How what are some potential treatments for this?” Is that a helpful use case and like have you seen that work well?
Absolutely. I think that once you’ve looked at the privacy settings, if you want to use it in that way, then you can absolutely do that. Now the caveat is it’s not going to, it gives you what ChatGPT and AI will do is give you a starting point so that you have an idea of what could be happening and now you have more information that you can then take to your physician as a starting point or as another opinion or perspective to get additional information.
I want to really impress upon the reader that, again, ChatGPT is not a physician. It does not take the place of a physician, but once you’ve addressed the privacy settings, you can absolutely then use it to help you think through some additional things to have a conversation about with your physician or healthcare provider.
ChatGPT is not a physician. But you can use it to gather additional information for your conversations with your physician or healthcare provider.
It’s educational. It’s helpful to equip you to maybe ask different questions or to know what questions to ask like, “Here’s all my blood work. How do I optimize this level of where am I lacking and what should I do, what supplements do I need to take to get my levels back to optimal or things like that, right?
Absolutely. I’ll just add this too. I am risk-aware. Even though we’ve talked about the privacy settings, I would advise the reader, because you can’t upload total documents and have it analyze the document. I might not upload the complete document. You can type, you can voice dictate, I would enter the information that you wanted to consider.
You can write test results, you can enter the information that you would like for it to have and to analyze. It gives you just another layer of privacy when you are thinking about how to give information to the technology for it to give information back to you. We’re talking about the broad general-purpose tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini. Gemini is another big one.
How To Create AI Prompts Using A Brief Format
If we can go back to like the brief format, for example, let’s say that you got your blood work done you tested 75 biomarkers and you wanted to make sure your levels were optimal and see if there’s supplements or nutritional changes you needed to make. How would you write a brief formatted prompt for that?
I would act as if you are a general practice physician who is experienced and analyzing tests, blood work results. Actually, you’ve told it to act as a physician with a specialty in this particular area in blood work. I would say, “Based on these test results,” and then you enter in what that those test results is, “What solutions, what nutrition or what diet, what exercise, what other environmental things would you advise a person to do to have a different test result, a lower or a higher number?”
Tell it, “Please provide this information in the form of a short paragraph or checklist of supplements to take of activity to do,” or whatever else you want the information to be. You’ve told it to act as a physician that has an expertise in this particular area, analyze test results and give it what the test results is. “Based on these test results, tell me how to,” whatever you want that action to be and, “Tell it to me in the form of,” however you want the output paragraph checklist, bullet points. Was that helpful?
Yeah, I love that. That’s great. It’s super helpful. It makes it easy. There you go. Brief. Just follow that.
It allows you to partner with the AI. That’s the other part. One of the things that’s really helpful so that the tool is augmenting your thoughts or your concerns or how you would research things is to give it information so that it can then give you tailored information back. You don’t want to just say, “Here are my test results, what do I do?” It’s going to give you information back. It’s going to look for information, but that information is much more helpful when you’ve given it an example of the area that you wanted to look for material to bring back to you.
Different Features Of The Most Used AI Tools Right Now
Yeah, that’s really helpful. Thanks for walking through that with us. Break it down for us a little bit. When would you use ChatGPT versus Perplexity versus Claude versus Gemini? Do you use all four of those tools on a daily basis or do you have your go-tos? Tell us the difference between the different AI options and tools that are out there and what each specialty is?
I use three of them a lot. I don’t use Gemini a ton. I use Perplexity when I want to see more search results. When I really want to look at a broad array or a large number of sources, Perplexity is really good at that, it’s really good at research. If I was looking for anything and I wanted to have really the broadest perspective and I wanted be able to go and click on all those sources and look at the source documents and then compare that with the summary, Perplexity is my go-to.
The other thing that I use Perplexity for is to keep up with topics. Perplexity is really good at giving you information similar to Google Alerts. I don’t know if your audience will know, but back in the day, like maybe 10 or 15 years ago, you could set something called a Google Alert and the tool would go through and deliver to your inbox all of the resources that were published that it found on that particular topic. Perplexity takes that to the next level. I use Perplexity to help me stay on top of areas that I’m interested in knowing more about. I have alerts. That’s how I use Perplexity. It’s really great research tool, a research companion if you want to do a deep dive into a topic.
Claude is my favorite tool to have an ongoing conversation with an AI tool. If I’m researching something and it is multifaceted, so we keep health maybe as a core. I’m looking at this aspect of a particular diagnosis that I’ve gotten and that makes me think about another aspect. I want to ask Claude about that part. Claude is really good with keeping up with nuanced questions and it doesn’t forget as easily what the information is that it may have given you 3 or 4 questions before. That’s one of the powerful things about Claude.
ChatGPT will hallucinate sometimes or it will make up things if you ask it too many questions in succession, it may forget or not quite get right the information it gave you maybe three questions before as you’re continuing to work with the technology to get the information you want. ChatGPT is my favorite tool to use if I need to know something is a more contained question, a 1 or 2 question. I’m going to have 1 or 2 questions and it gives me that information and then I can use it. If I’m doing something like having an AI tool take a draft of an email that I’ve written and perhaps help me to say it in a different way or think through it, how might I respond to this text message better, how might I respond to this email better? How might I convey thoughts that I have?
Let’s say if you want to have a conversation with your physician about something you don’t really know how to broach that conversation, you can give ChatGPT just the outline of what you want to say. It does a good job of helping to organize that information and do it in a way that sounds similar to how you might have that conversation. ChatGPT is really good with that, much better than Claude and much better than Perplexity with that type of use.
Why You Should Not Be Afraid Of Using AI
Thank you for sharing that and those different specialties for each one too. That’s super helpful to know. What’s on the horizon here? Some people are scared once we hit generative AI, pretty soon it is going to be smarter than humans for the most part. Things are going to change rapidly here. When you think about the future and you think about privacy law and you think about generative AI, can you maybe dispel some of our fears but also maybe talk about just what’s exciting in the future of AI? What’s coming?
I think it’s exciting to look at how AI will help us do the things that we are currently doing better. Will AI take some jobs, current jobs, jobs that are configured as they are right now? Sure, it will. Also, with that, it’ll create new jobs. I was reading an article not that long ago and it talked about flight attendants and how before there were commercial airplanes, there was not a need for flight attendants. That’s a job category that exists solely because of commercial airlines.
I read that and I’m remembering it now, I’m sharing it with you because there will be jobs that are created because of AI that don’t exist now the same way that there’ll be jobs that are eliminated because of AI because they will no longer be needed. If you are thinking about for folks who are in the workforce, and so you have another 10, 20, 30 years to work, it’s important to learn how AI works. Think about how it can get rid of those things that you’re doing that don’t really require you to think through them, to open up opportunities for you to have more capacity to think and be creative.
AI can get rid of tasks that do not require that much thinking to open up opportunities to think and be creative.
If you think AI is really good at automating tools and it can figure things out based on the information that it has, but it doesn’t have vision, AI cannot envision a future. It cannot think about the direction that things should go or how you would like to see things. It can take information. It’s predictive. It can take information, it can make predictions based on the past.
I would encourage readers to really think about and tap into what makes you creative, what makes your work creative. Thinking about what would be nice if you did not have to do whatever that is, you’d have more opportunity to do the next part. Focus on the next part, which is being creative, having vision, giving direction to how you’d like to see the work that you’re doing, the industry that you’re in evolving.
That’s exciting to me. Some of the things that are time-consuming and aren’t as maybe the fun parts, we can figure out ways to delegate some of those things and automate some of those things with AI so that we can be freed up to be more visionary, more creative and use those other parts of our skillset and our minds than only we can do.
Those things that make us human. An example is thinking about the practice of law. When I started practicing law, it was in those years that using tools like LexisNexis or Westlaw for legal research became popular. Before then, lawyers went to the library to do work. You had legal research tools, electronic tools that came on board. It didn’t eliminate the need for lawyers. It became a tool that allowed lawyers to do our work more effectively, but it didn’t eliminate the need.
I can even recall conversations. We won’t go too far because we can have a whole other conversation about business, but the main part of it is certain things that you’re doing now you won’t have to do. There’ll be fewer people required to do some of the things that people are doing now, but other things are opening up and it’s really about learning about tools, thinking about pain points, thinking about bottlenecks that AI can actually take care of and focusing on what’s creative, what’s next, where can you use vision.
How AI Will Be Used In Healthcare For The Next Decade
What about the role of AI in healthcare and medicine? What do you see as the future in terms of how AI will change healthcare in the next 5 years, 10 years? Maybe there are probably a lot of things maybe we don’t know yet, but I’ve seen some things that are super exciting, like digital twins and things like that, that are coming. We can run FDA clinical trials on our own unique specific biology and genetics and epigenetics and everything else. That’s coming soon. From your perspective, what does the future of medicine and healthcare look like once fully empowered by AI?
I’ll be careful here because I’m not in the healthcare industry, but what I’ll say just generally, I grew up in the rural South and so things like telehealth make a big difference or really have a big impact to people who live far out where it takes a lot of time to get to a healthcare provider. I see tools like AI being really helpful to support people who need access to professionals or information, lessening the amount of time that’s required to come to a hospital or go to a doctor’s office that may be far away.
AI is a helpful tool to support people who need access to professionals or information, lessening the amount of time required to go to a hospital or a doctor’s office.
I’m excited about AI and digital technology generally and making healthcare more accessible to people, particularly in rural communities. There are other types of exciting things that you just shared. I’m not a healthcare professional, so I’m not focused really on those particular areas, but this is actually the same thing with law. I’m excited about the opportunity to make things more accessible to communities that don’t have that to which they’re not as easily accessible right now. That comes at a cost, but there’s also a benefit.
Yeah, that’s super exciting. More people will have access to have their needs met who don’t have access to it now. That’s going to change a lot of people’s lives.
We have to tool up, we have to upskill people so that folks are thinking in new ways that are aligned with having technology more accessible to more people. That can be scary or it can be exciting. There are opportunities to learn how to do new things and that’s exciting.
Maintaining A Human-Centric Approach When Using AI
I want to just ask one last question, because I think you have a unique perspective on this as well. Maybe not unique, but you have a lot of expertise and experience. The ethical question that comes up a lot in this conversation. How do you see values-based leadership, faith, spirituality, ethics playing a role in making sure that AI stays within its appropriate boundaries and containers?
There are a lot of companies, and I see this a lot online, and folks are talking about an AI-first perspective. I believe in a human-first perspective. I think that when we stay focused on a human-first approach to AI, then we have humanity at the center of how we are using tools to enhance our lives. It helps us center how we use these tools to enhance our lives. From an ethical perspective, I think it’s really important when we’re using AI to think about the environmental impact of these tools. There isn’t an environmental impact when you’re using artificial intelligence. It takes energy. You have a data center. You need data centers and the data centers use energy. There is an environmental component to how AI is being used and individuals should think about it and companies should think about that in particular.
There is, of course, a privacy piece in intellectual property concerns. We see now there have been lawsuits and settlements with artificial intelligence tools using intellectual property in a way that’s not compliant with the law. Violating copyright laws in the way that information is being used. I think the industry is correcting for that. That’s an ethical way to think about data is used. How do you ethically source that data?
We talked a lot about healthcare here and data and with healthcare. I think that companies have an ethical obligation to make sure that they are following privacy laws and best practices in these frameworks, like best practices for how to keep and protect data so that people can trust the tools that they’re using. For the individual, it’s important to think about your personal privacy.
I think it’s important to think about the environment, and also for us, it’s important to be involved in conversations when we can. We can be involved in the political process and have conversations or interact with our representatives and share about how we’d like to see how we are approaching the evolution of AI here in this country, in the world.
There are a lot of conversations going on now around the world in the US all over the world, about the regulation, the governance of AI. I think that those are important conversations and I think if we approach it from a human-centric point, the tool helping us and our evolution as humans, then we’ll be on the right path. I gave you a lot of words, Zach. I hope that was helpful.
Get In Touch With TC
I love that human-centric approach. I think that’s a beautiful way to say it. Thank you for sharing that. TC, this has been really fascinating. Thank you so much for being with us and sharing your expertise, your wisdom, your experience around this technology and privacy and all the things that you’ve shared with us. Where can people connect with you? Where can we find you? How can we sign up for your executive coaching? Tell us all about those kinds of resources that are available to us.
Thank you so much, Zach. You can find me at UpwardAction.com and on most social networks, Upward Action. That’s where I write, that’s where we coach clients and we have lots of cool things that are often going on. Lots of masterclasses are happening. I do some public masterclasses once a quarter, but it’s all available on our Upward Action portals.
TC, this has been so fun. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much, Zach. Thank you for having me.
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Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words
I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I hope you took a few notes and maybe pulled some nuggets out of there that you can use that are practical, but also just they can help you embrace the technology that’s available to us now and the ways that we can utilize it. We talked a lot about privacy policies, changing the privacy settings even on things like ChatGPT or Perplexity, Claude. We talked about those three different AI tools mostly. Just different ways to utilize them.
I love some of the examples, especially how to write a good prompt that’s specific and will give you the outcomes that you desire from these AI tools using the framework of BRIEF. The B was for Background, R is for Role, I is for Information that you want it to think about, and then Examples, giving it examples and then the Format that you want the response in. Using that framework to write a good prompt that’s specific will give you the outcomes that you’re looking for.
You can adjust those privacy settings. You could use it for things like analyzing some of your health records or things like that. Maybe it’s anonymized so that you’re not actually uploading super sensitive information, but there are ways to adjust the privacy settings, which I thought is helpful as well. We can really utilize and leverage these technologies to reach more people and to make things more accessible for those harder-to-reach places.
Also, to be more like the CEO of our own health, to take a little bit more control as we move forward. I hope that you’re excited about this and I hope that you’re learning from it as I am. You can connect with TC Cooper at UpwardAction.com or find her on social channels @UpwardAction. Check her out and follow her work there. Thanks again for reading. We’ll see you back here next time.