Business Growth Architect Show

Ep #125: Grant Tate: Master the Art of Asking AI the Right Questions and Get Better Results

• Beate Chelette • Episode 125

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“Transform Results with AI: Ask Better Questions for Marketing, Problem Solving, and Business Growth. Join AI Expert Grant Tate to Crack the Code!”

In this episode of the Growth Architect Show, I am joined by Dr. Grant Tate, the CEO of Bridge Business Transformation, a high-performance business consultancy. Dr. Tate is a leading expert in the application of AI for small businesses, and he shares his extensive knowledge and experience on how AI can be a game-changer for business owners. This episode is packed with insights on how AI can be leveraged to solve problems, enhance marketing strategies, and drive business growth.

Dr. Grant Tate begins by recounting his journey into the world of AI. Up until 2019, he was running his own consulting company, focusing on high-tech organizations and executive coaching. The global pandemic accelerated his shift to online consulting and the desire to write a memoir. In November 2022, with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Grant saw the potential of AI and began to explore its applications extensively. 

One of the key highlights of this episode is Grant's discussion on the practical applications of AI. He emphasizes that AI can be an invaluable assistant for small businesses, capable of handling a wide range of tasks from developing marketing plans to enhancing customer engagement. He shares real-world examples and talks about how AI can be used to create a detailed marketing plan for your business by simply providing a brief description of the business and its goals.

Another significant aspect discussed is the concept of “prompt engineering.” Grant explains that interacting with AI effectively involves learning how to ask the right questions. This process, often referred to as prompt engineering, involves refining questions through a conversational approach with AI, ensuring that the answers provided are accurate and useful. He shares that instead of crafting one perfect prompt, business owners should view their interaction with AI as a dialogue, continuously refining their questions to get the best results.

Grant provides his vision for the future of AI in small businesses, predicting that AI will become increasingly integral to business operations. He emphasizes the need for business owners to stay informed about AI developments and adapt to using it.

This episode of the Growth Architect Show focuses on harnessing the power of AI to enhance your business and offers practical tips and strategies to help you leverage AI for marketing, problem-solving, and business growth. Don't miss this opportunity to learn how to take your business to the next level with AI!


Resources Mentioned:
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Grant Tate:

I'm Grant Tate. I'm the CEO of BBTX Consulting in Charlottesville, Virginia. I'm the author of Hand on the Shoulder, Finding Freedom in the Confluence of Love and Career. It's a memoir. In this episode for Business Growth Architect Show, I'll discuss and reveal how I've been using AI to help small businesses and others constructively use AI for their personal life and for their small organization.

BEATE CHELETTE:

And hello, fabulous person. Beate chelette, here I am the host of the Business Growth Architect Show and I want to welcome you to today's episode where we discuss how to navigate strategy and spirituality to achieve time and financial freedom. Truly successful people have learned how to master both a clear intention and a strategy to execute that in a spiritual practice that will help them to stay in alignment and on purpose. Please enjoy the show and listen to what our guest today has to say about this very topic. Welcome back. You are in for a treat today with Dr Grant Tate, the CEO of Bridge Business Transformation, a high performance business consultancy, and we're going to talk about something today that a lot of our listeners, Grant, are going to have very strong feelings about, and that is AI and how to utilize AI to ask the right questions, to problem solve, to even ask spiritual and ethical questions and all that goes into it. So grant, I'm so excited to have you on the show. I was really looking forward to talking to a very, very smart person today.

Grant Tate:

Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and love talking about this topic, and love interacting with people like you, because I always learn a lot more than I give. So it's good to be here. Thank

BEATE CHELETTE:

you so much for somebody who is not familiar with your work or or has never heard about you, will you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit on how someone like you ends up with AI.

Grant Tate:

Well, it goes, let's go back to 2019 up until that point, I was running my own small consulting company and basically getting out and working with high tech organizations within the area and helping them organize, helping them develop scientists and engineers, doing executive coaching. Technology was sort of a, you know, integrated into the mix there, but I decided at the end of 2019 to put myself on a glide path and to start doing everything online instead of going to organizations. And then the pandemic helped me do it, and I so I was still working with clients. We do personal assessments, and that's the foundation for our coaching business. But then when the pandemic hit, I had always wanted to write a book, and decided to write a memoir, because I didn't write. Want to write the 50,001st business book of the year. And speaking of spirituality, that was, that was a quest in itself, a lot of self examination, that's probably the most important outcome of that experience, rather than book sales. And I went on a lot of podcast interviews to talk about the book and what it meant in terms of leadership, things like that. But then in November of 22, AI chat openAi came out with chat GPT, and being a curious person, I jumped on board. So I was one of the first in that first wave. I think when it took off, I had worked on the personal computer when I was with IBM many years ago. And that was radical. That was a radical change. All of a sudden, people in their offices could have local access to computer power, and we had watched that change in the impact. I was doing consulting work when the.com boom came, and we saw how that affected business. But when I looked at this AI tool, I go, whoa. It's different from anything I've seen first place. It was widely available and free, so anybody with a computer and internet could work with of course, with AR, there's a there's a paid version, it's more powerful, so But nevertheless, and it was easy to get access to, and it was easy to use. You didn't have to be a programmer to talk to it, to ask for answers. And then thirdly, a thing that not a lot of people talk about is that it gave everybody access to the great computer in the sky. We have access to monstrous capabilities. In terms of computing capability, and that, that is, that was, that was brand new. And so I set out to say, well, let me see what this thing can do. And spent most of 2023, just working with applications that I wanted to explore, mostly around what's the impact on consulting work, and also what's the impact on businesses, small businesses in particular, and so in 2024 my colleague and I have now translated that to developing webinars and workshops for people, but aimed at small business leaders primarily help them understand how to use the tool. And I could summarize the environment right now, in small business, it's chaos, so everybody's experimenting with it, and so just this week, I published this small article suggesting how the business that wants to really use this tool productively. Might start. The first thing is take an inventory who's doing what, with who, what, who. And then, after you sort of figure that out, then start to try to put some uniformity around. And then the other thing is, I published a code of ethics as one of my first outputs when I first started using it, thinking, Whoa, this thing is powerful. We have to use it appropriately and judiciously. Here's some guidelines we're going to use. I've looked at, I don't know, 200 or more use cases. We call them, but this is some potential applications, and what I see from other people experimenting, there's a lot of, and I hesitate to use this word, but a lot of sort of trivial applications.

BEATE CHELETTE:

I want to ask you sort of a question that is something that I constantly deal with as a growth architect. So when people come to people like you and me, high performance consultancy, Business, Growth, scaling. Oftentimes, they do not know what the real problem is. Otherwise, they would have solved it a long time ago. So you have developed these ideas around how to learn how to ask the right question, utilizing AI. So in today's strategy, how would I go about this is a practical application. So let's say I'm a little apprehensive about AI. Because, you know, everybody's a little apprehensive about AI, so I have a conscious bias, again, against it, because it's really not that good as everybody makes it out to be, but yet, it is the most powerful thing available to me. What do I do? How do I figure out what my real problem is and how AI can help me?

Grant Tate:

Well it goes back to basic problem solving. I have found, in general, well, I've been surprised at how poor a lot of people are at describing a problem. You and I've seen that in consulting, just in general. And if you look at a group of people working on a problem and plot whether they're talking about solution, potential solution, or whether they're talking about what is the problem and what is the problem, what is not the problem, there was a famous book in the many years ago that's been republished by two people named Captain trigo that were all the guidelines of how do you describe a problem. And so what I found, though, is in working with AI, it helps you learn how to describe the problem. Now, I asked the AI to generate an illustration for me, and I gave it reasonable description, I thought, but it came back to me and said, Grant, I think this is what you're looking for. And so it described to me what that outer the characteristics for that illustration. And then it said, is this, what do you want? And I changed the thing or two, pushed the button and I got the illustratorship, so it was teaching me how to ask the question here is what not to do? People call that interaction the thing you ask prompt engineering. And if one of the things I have in my file is a file of 1000 of those prompt statements developed by somebody, and that's where it belongs, hide, hidden away in my file, because no one is going to look through this catalog to find out how to ask the question. So you interact with it in a way that you're really trying to specify the problem and what you quickly learn it doesn't have to be perfect on first try, because you can start to describe it and then interact with what it tells you, and you can continue that description through a long way. Series of prompts, you can have a conversation with it. So that leads to the question of, How do I look at this, this device? I look at it as my very intelligent reasoning intern. It's my assistant. And do I I even say thank you, and if I need to give it feedback and say, well, it

BEATE CHELETTE:

really was awful. Yeah,

Grant Tate:

exactly. I look at it as I'm describing this problem to someone who's going to help me solve it. And lots of times, if I don't know how to ask the question, I will ask it. What do you know about this? And one of those things, for instance, is is a technique in strategic planning called massive transformational purpose. It's another way of describing what's the purpose of your organization, but in in elegant terms. And so ask the question, tell me about massive transformational purpose in strategic planning. And then they'll give me a description, and then I can ask it questions relative the organization I'm working with, because I know that what's in its database. And I can then, if I get to a point, say, All right, let me give you a description of this business, and now give me 20 examples of a massive transformational purpose for this business, but I've set the stage first, then, then I've led it to point where I can ask the question, and then I can also say, if you don't have enough information, ask me questions. So

BEATE CHELETTE:

what I'm hearing you say a pardon for interrupting here. So what I'm hearing you say is that instead of trying to engineer one super prompt, which is, I think, our natural tendency, which is why we go to these prompt events and these AI events, because we figure, if I knew only exactly how to write that prompt, then I'll do it once, and I get all the information. Now you say that is completely not the correct way to do it, but to have a different opinion about it. So there's a question, and we answer it, and then I'm having a follow up question. So is that what you do? You like, literally Converse? Yes.

Grant Tate:

And there one of the as a professor at Vanderbilt University who teaches courses on Coursera, who has developed a methodology calls them prompt patterns, and there you can find his paper, but he's given us different patterns of way to ask the questions. And one of those, for instance, I just mentioned to you, which is, you can ask it, to ask questions. So if you don't have enough information, ask me the question. So can

BEATE CHELETTE:

we go like, maybe through an example to make this, to make this real for our audience. So let's say we looking at a typical small business owner. There's 16 different ways on how they describe the very same thing, which is, you need, you need more clients. I need to have a marketing plan. I need to be more organized. So how does somebody like this now go into a conversation with AI to figure out, how do I get the information that I want to even know? Do I need a marketing plan, or do I do a bootstrapping, gorilla style thing, like, what's right for me? How do I go about this? Well,

Grant Tate:

I can give you a concrete example. We used it, and we are a small business, we set up a webinar that we month ahead, where we were going to invite people to come learn about the basics of am and I described in a paragraph. Here's what we're trying to do. Here's the name of the webinar. We're aiming at small business leaders and so forth and so on. Doesn't have to be perfect English. And I said, please give us a market development plan to implement over the next month. And it laid it out all the steps, one through 10, let's say, and then I can, after I get that, I can say, all right, I have one month to implement this. Please. Please put this in priority and give me a give me a calendar of events. It will do that. Now. Here's a here a few odd things you wouldn't want AI to write your legal brief, because, yeah, it knows some things about law, but surely, you know, some lawyers have tried that and it got in trouble. But yeah, because,

BEATE CHELETTE:

because it cites, it cites cases that are phantom cases, and you cannot see the difference exactly,

Grant Tate:

right, but if you can, I can put in, here's my legal brief, please act as a Supreme Court justice and criticize this briefly. It is really good for them, so you can give it a persona. It can deal with pictures. My daughter is been works for, has been working for a high fashion store or. And I took a picture of one of the models, it's on our website, and asked, act as a fashion designer and describe this jacket. And it gave me a nice whole paragraph, more than several paragraphs. And so another real example, one of the members of our webinar is a an executive in a resort. And they are, if you look at their website, they have probably 100 pictures of things you could do at the resort. So I took a big sample of those pictures, and I put it into AI and said, and I postulated, you know, a young, a 40 year old couple and their three children with these ages wants to spend a day at the park. There's some of their interests. Please develop a schedule of events for a full day at the park. They gave me that. And so if you look at the practical application for that, what do they need at the front end of their website, that application, where people can just say, Okay, here's my interest, and answer these questions, and boom, it'll generate a schedule

BEATE CHELETTE:

that's fascinating. And we will talk more about AI, how to use it for marketing plan and for business in just a moment. So Grant, we talked now about a conversational dialog, which is how I kind of would like to say it, and I think it's called the Grant Tate application, if I remember this correctly. And instead of trying to be super smart with the prompt engineering, really getting yourself to giving yourself a little bit more time having this actual conversation, asking follow up question, and then having AI come up with some of these results. Now you know that this show has a spiritual component about it. How does AI and spirituality even kind of go together? And you were sharing an example with me about a dark matter, which I thought was amazing. So would you mind just kind of like sharing some of these, I don't know if you call them oddities or just off the cuff kind of things that you can come up so people really know how your brain works.

Grant Tate:

If you study the projections of this, Ray Kurzweil has written a book called singularity, and he's projecting what's the year that AI will be able to basically act as a human brain, and there's a lot of hype and concern around those issues, but I it does bring up the question with God getting totally into religious theory, but if AI can do everything I can do professionally, can answer all the questions. Can make plans, it augments me. Then what really is my role? Who am I? And what you mentioned about the grant app is an experiment we've that we've done, and I took my book and my whole database of my writing, my resumes from all over the years, and some videos that I've done, and audios, and I put those into the AI, and I call it the grant Tate app. This is not something I'm publishing, but then I'm testing it to find out I have told it answer in as in my writing style is this grant Tate had written this, and it can develop that from lab writing, and it will answer the questions like me. Now, it has limitations, obviously, because I know what can and can't do, but let's project that in the future and suppose it can. It could this, an application like that could reproduce me in what I might say, how I might behave, and all those sorts of things, and then what's left for me? And now I think people are going to have to answer that question, and it's going to start with a job I can use AI to complement me and augment my capabilities. And so what is, fundamentally, do I bring to this job? I

BEATE CHELETTE:

see what you're saying. So this is a there's a fundamental question here, because I think a lot of people, when we go into work, out of education, we believe that there's somehow this existing information that I need to know regurgitate, I think AI, is misconstrued by some as the same pattern going forward that I just have now, the endless source of all information and now I can also regurgitate information that already exists. But that's not how innovation works, right,

Grant Tate:

right? Yeah. Well, you know, in one of Malcolm Gladwell book, I forgot which one now, but it gives the example of a museum had purchased this sculpture for millions of dollars and had x. Words, look at it to make sure, to authenticate the statue. And this woman walked in one day and looked at it, say, Oh, it's a fake. And they still laughed her at, her off, as I remember the story, but turns out she was right. Why was she able to detect it? And it's that intuition, it's that pattern recognition. It's that all putting all those feelings and observations together that made her able to do that. Those are human traits, and I just wrote an article this past week that I'm publishing with a friends and newsletter, is the importance of pattern recognition and management now, if you look at a list of all the leadership qualities that we typically look at, look at, you don't find pattern recognition on that list, but I think it's important. And pattern recognition is the ability to look at seen and unseen, felt and unfelt things going on, and decide, here's what I need to do, or here's what I need to say. Football quarterbacks, good example, being able to sense the movements around the field and then throw the ball. That's an obvious one. But I think really good leaders, really good with pattern recognition. I think it's a it's a human trait. Can AI systems eventually look at movement and make sense of it? The answer is yes, but still within

BEATE CHELETTE:

limitations, because I think what you're referring to, and this is really the part about the spirituality that I want to make sure that our audience is really hearing is spirituality is not always going to church and praying to God or believing in Jesus, but spirituality is also an energy and an energy that exists between us and unseen force. It's an energy where sometimes we just know something good is going to happen, or you just know you're going to get that job, or, you know this person is going to call you back. You just know it and what you the example you just described. It's really interesting, because I I talk about this all the time, and I've, other than myself, never heard anybody even mention this. But I notice patterns, and something stands out, like I look in the line, and I go, this person's upper body is out of proportion. The legs are too short, the upper body is too long. That's a pattern break. Oh, I say, Wow. This person is very small feet for their height. You know, it's something that immediately stands out to me, because it's something that's out of the ordinary. Is a break in the pattern recognition. I know it's important, because that's how I help my clients, because I look for things when we work together that I have not heard before. Because if I've heard it 50 times before, there's no unique value proposition and it's just another x. But if it's something that I haven't heard that I'm like, wait, what? What did you just say? So you are saying that in the context of what we're talking about, AI spirituality may just be this hunch, this knowing, this feeling of something. Am I getting this right?

Grant Tate:

I think so. It's like, it's like, what makes us human now, what distinguishes us from that, that robot and the spirituality is a way to describe that some people are better at it, have a more profound reasoning and understanding of their own spirituality and the spirituality others, some of that is studied, some of that is feelings. It's a variety of things. You and I use it all the time. If you're since, if you since you're looking at me, you see my body language. You see the subtleties. Some of my colleagues from years ago were pushing the idea that you should coach only on the phone. My reaction was, that's the nuttiest idea of her.

BEATE CHELETTE:

It works, actually, for some it. I actually happen to know a coach who prefers the phone over zoom any day, because he is a specialist in tonation, yeah,

Grant Tate:

and but he's ignoring a lot of senses that are important. And I, you know, my premise would be, there are movements and things that you can pick up visually that the intonation would not reveal. I agree

BEATE CHELETTE:

with you because but I'm highly visual, so for me to be deprived of this would be would be detrimental to my ability to do what I do. I need to see the person, the pensiveness, or the enthusiasm or the when I see the emotion come in and I know I hit a spot, I need to see that for sure.

Grant Tate:

Yes, exactly, exactly.

BEATE CHELETTE:

How do you use this intuition in your work with AI, which seems to be very technical, and is that a conflict for you, or is it just

Grant Tate:

No, it. And one of the important things to me is to know what to ask it and when to use it, and that that is, that's a that's a human decision for me. If I am talking to someone and I'm listening and watching and whatever, and I can say, Oh, that's a problem we could solve with, with AI and coaching and consulting. I think one of the most important steps is the diagnosis. What is the problem here? Now, being able to describe it, we talked about it, but being able to detect it is another thing. So when I'm working with someone and we're in a coaching session working a problem, I'm I often think, what if I can say one thing to this person today that could change this outcome for the better? What would that be? And that's my way of working through the complexity in doing the pattern recognition and saying, This is the answer. This is what I need to say. That might be helpful question I need to ask, but when I look at my daily menu, there's some things that, yeah, I can help with, and the other things that it might help, but I'd prefer not, not to use it. So for

BEATE CHELETTE:

somebody who wants to now know more about your work, and where do we send them? Where can we help them find out more about you? Well,

Grant Tate:

the easiest place is go to LinkedIn, and we do have a new website since then. That's bbtx.ai www.bbtx.ai

BEATE CHELETTE:

and tell me, tell our audience about your books.

Grant Tate:

Well, I wrote Hand on the Shoulder, Finding Freedom in the Confluence of Love and Career, which traced my whole life from growing up in a small town in Virginia to working at the big corporate world for IBM. And that book stopped the year 2000 but it's it's a collection of stories, mostly about relationships, some about work problem solving, and I what I've found the people who read it, depending on their background or interest, they can pretty much find any something they can use. If the business people look for the business stories and the people with relationship problems look for those,

BEATE CHELETTE:

it's not always the case, but

Grant Tate:

that this, you know, there some of the relationships. Growing up in Virginia, I had the opportunity to work and and live with some people who were part murder the minority community, and that's had a profound impact on my life over the years. So I'm vitally interested in how we can be fairer in our business and life and have everyone feel included. Wonderful.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Well, thank you so much grant. It's been an absolute pleasure. I love the depth of your of your thinking, and the way you go about solving problems. So thank you so much for being on our show. Well, thank

Grant Tate:

you so much pleasure to be here, and

BEATE CHELETTE:

that's it for us today, and for this or more advice on how to utilize AI, please check out grant and until we see each other again and goodbye. So appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for listening to the entire episode. Please subscribe to the podcast. Give us a five star review, a comment and share this episode with one more person so that you can help us help more people. Thank you again, until next time. Goodbye. You.

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