 Welcome to all of you. I want to say good morning and good afternoon wherever you might be streaming in and joining us today. Thrilled to have you here for another episode of the nonprofit show. Today we have with us Joshua Pesquet with Roundtable Technology and Joshua is here to talk to us about AI, artificial intelligence. So stay with us before we dive deep into this conversation with Joshua. We want to remind you who we are. So hello to Julia Patrick, CEO of the American nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group. And you know we are always so thrilled to have the continued support from our amazing sponsors. You can see our newest one right there in the middle for those of you watching, but I'll give a shout out of course to be generous as our newest sponsor. Thank you so very much. And also of course to Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy, fundraising Academy at National University, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader, and myself nonprofit nerd. We are thrilled to be here thrilled again to see this support growing in and around our community support you and your mission. So if you missed any of our 600 plus episodes, you know where to find us. That would be Roku YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo. There are so many archives for you to access at any time 24 seven. So if you wake up in the middle of the night, something, you know, startled you probably a challenge that you're facing within your nonprofit, you can go ahead and, you know, get some resources there, as well as podcasts. So if you're a podcast listener like I am, you can go ahead and queue up the nonprofit show wherever you stream your podcast. Well, Joshua, you've been waiting so patiently and we know you've got a fun filled calendar day so we don't want to keep you too very long, but we definitely want to dive deep. And again, welcome Joshua Pesquet, professional services, cybersecurity with round table technology. Welcome to you. Thank you so much. It is an absolute pleasure to be here on your show. We are really excited. I mean, cybersecurity, that's a hair on fire moment for us. We talk about it, you know, at more and more, and it comes at us for from many different places. And so before we get into AI, which I'm just fascinated by this conversation. Share with us what round table technology does. Sure. What's referred to as a managed services provider, which if you're not familiar with that term, essentially a technology provider to nonprofit organizations. So if you have a nonprofit, you know, with 510 or 25 staff, you may not have an IT person so we might handle all of your technology and strategy. If you're 100 or 200, maybe you have some internal IT resources, but they need some help. And so we can provide that help or again be your full IT provider. And then if you're 500 or 1000 staff or larger than that, maybe you want some strategic help. Maybe you're a COO or a CFO that got settled with managing the technology team. If you're not really a technology person, so you're like, I don't know if they're good or they're, you know, then we can help with that as well. And so that's we kind of fit into all those little spots. Amazing. Thank you. That's great. And I love that you can work with a nonprofit where they are at that point in time. That's super cool. I think that's critical in the nonprofit space to kind of understand, you know, they can't do the things that, you know, wealthy for-profits can do in terms of just, you know, fitting into the round hole every time. So you've got to try to meet them where they are for sure. And one last question about roundtable technology. I'm assuming you can really go with a nonprofit wherever they might be in North America or just the US or you're, you know. We work with organizations with international presence, quite a few actually. We're, we have operations in a few different metro areas. So we're in Maine, we're in New York City and the New York metro area. We're in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We have a lot of personnel in those locations. But we do serve organizations all over the country and in fact all over the world. Awesome. And I apologize if I'm perspiring as we talked about before. I'm sort of stuck in a car and a little bit of heat. So I got the AC going but it was a little warm here. No, you would have never known for those of you joining us that were with us in the green room chatter. Joshua is actually joining us outside the State Fair of Minnesota. That's correct. Yep. Minnesota and he's on his last day of vacation and he's going to jump in or jump out of the car and run in and find some great fair food with the rest of his family as soon as this is done. But before we let you go, what the heck AI and nonprofits, for-profits, what's up with this? Everything, sure. Well, I wanted to start this with a sort of riddle and you may have heard it before, but and follow me with where I'm going, but we'll, and if you haven't heard this, that's okay. But so imagine you've got a lake and it's totally clear and then on day one, one lily pad appears. Okay, and we're going to say that this lily pad doubles every day. So day two, I've got two lily pads, day three, I've got four lily pads, and by day 30, okay, the entire lake is covered in lily pads. So the first part of the riddle, which you may know the answer to is on what day is the lake half full of lily pads? Don't know the answer. You know, we're short for time. So just give us the answer. Sure. So it's the 29th day, because of course, if it's doubling every day, then it will be half full the day before it's completely full. Okay. The harder question, and I'll just give the answer is what day is the lake 1% covered in lily pads? Okay, and that's actually the 24th day, which I think is very nonintuitive. And the reason I'm going into this is the idea of AI and the way it's impacting us is something that is not intuitive to a lot of people because it's following an exponential growth. And we're used to linear growth, which kind of goes, you know, maybe it dips, but it goes in a linear line. Exponential growth, if you imagine yourself on this lake, right, and you're kind of not noticing any lily pads, not noticing any little pads. On day 24, right after lily pads have been growing for 24 or 30 days, you're like, Oh, there's a handful of lily pads over there. Six days later, it's entirely full. I'm going to propose that we may be at a moment like that with AI, where for 10 years for 20 years for 30 years, we've been hearing AI is going to have this impact. AI is going to change our lives. AI is going to do all this. And it's this slow growth. Wow. And we might be right at this point where it's going to shoot up like day 24 on that lake that's going to be covered in lily pads in 30 days. And so the rest of this we'll talk about, as we talk about these things, I want people to kind of, if you felt like it's been hyped, it may still be, it may still be a few more years or even a decade before we really see big impacts. But I just want to warn people that exponential growth, like what we're seeing in AI is not intuitive to humans in terms of how fast it makes an impact. Yeah, I'll say I'm really bad at riddles. But I love that analogy and the story that you shared because it has definitely overcome us. I was at the AFP icon conference in Las Vegas this year and technology Joshua was like, covered it was the lily pads of the lake in the conference. All I saw really was technology and artificial intelligence AI really was, you know, surfacing up so I appreciate that and I'm certainly starting to see the lily pads and I'm I'm rowing and there's a lily pad every place, every place I row for sure. Yeah. Wow. I mean, first of all, that's like the hair on fire moment. And I love that you started out this conversation that way, because for me what you just said makes it real, and makes it that shocking thing that you said is that you don't see any change and then all of a sudden it's on us. Yep. So, one of those things that you are going to bring up or talk to us is about blogging with AI. And what is this and what is specifically Jasper? Sure. Well, Jasper is one company that's really using a technology that's referred to as GPT three. Okay, and well, there's a lot to unpack here but there's a company that was formed called open AI, I think around 10 years ago by, you know, a bunch of smarty pants and they are a number of different projects is another one that we'll probably talk about the may have heard about called doll II. And these are learning networks. All right, that they feed huge amounts of data. And then GPT three specifically is a language processing engine. The three is because it's the third generation of this, and to go back to our kind of lily pad exponential growth. It's been all of I want to say four or five years since GPT one came out. And each iteration which are taking on average about one and a half to two years are orders of magnitude, more powerful than the previous one. So GPT one people were kind of like, Oh, that's interesting. It can write some sentences and they're kind of, you know, almost good grammar GPT two they were like, Oh, that's pretty cool. It can really write full on sentences and write stories and write a little bit of simple code. And GPT three came out, you know, about a year and a half ago, and people were, Wow, I cannot tell the difference between content written by GPT three versus a human. And there's something that you may have heard of called the Turing test, where which is basically can I have a human being in a, you know, chat or in a computer and can human tell the difference. So many respects were there now, right, if I allow a human to ask questions and in plain language of a human and that human types and answers and GPT three types and answers. Most humans can't really tell the difference between who's answering at this point. And so Jasper is a tool that round table has been using now for many months to write content. And many organizations are doing this, and it allows you to take what might have been four hours of my time or one of my colleagues time to write a cybersecurity article, whereas now our marketing manager whose name is Justin funnily enough so Justin and Jasper work together, right. I kind of showed Justin how Jasper worked and how to generate articles in the process that I was using, he will now generate with Jasper in the span of half an hour. You know, a 1000 page article on let's say, you know, the latest phishing scams, he'll send it to me, I'll review it in 10 minutes, and that goes out, and that previously would have been maybe four hours of my work to write that blog post for our marketing person. So when we talk about this content generation like a lot of organizations are using this to generate content. Today, a lot of the content you're seeing is in fact written by some combination of an AI like just Jasper or other companies that are leveraging GPT three to provide writing tools copy dot AI is another one writer RYTR is another, they all are basically using that GPT engine and then charging you a fee to provide you with an interface so that you don't have to be a programmer to use it. I was going to ask about that investment like what are we talking by way of dollars because if we're saving four hours of a professional's time, but we're trading that for an AI. What does that equate to in savings. Well, it's, you know, horrifically expensive. It's $20 a month for Jasper dot AI to write 100,000 words. And I won't tell you what hourly rate round table puts me out but let's just say that I think the time we're saving is very good return on investment for round table. For sure. You're a little more than 20. And the quality of these articles is, is you know, I would still argue that that given four hours I could write an article that's maybe 20, 25% better than what Justin and Jasper are putting out. But that's today. Yeah, that's now for is do any time now. So it's even going to be more. Let me ask you this, we talked so much about SEO work and understanding how we need to be there with our websites. When when Google spidering, you know, our website or looking through things, can they discern that this is something that's been crafted through AI versus Josh. This is the million billion, maybe even trillion dollar question that people are wondering about Google is saying they want to work to have the SEO prefer human generated content. What I haven't heard anyone from Google or anywhere else say is how they will possibly do that. When humans can't tell the difference between human generated content and AI, I'm not sure how Google is going to tell the difference. And why also if if Google's job is to put out put up front what is the best content right if I'm searching for what's the best live nonprofit television show that goes four times a week right five times a week five times a week sorry, you know, whether you know that's the non if some AI generated show is actually a providing better content somehow, why wouldn't Google put that forward right over the humans if that really was the better content if you're the better content, then it should continue to prefer you so we'll see where that where that lands. But it is, it's not clear to me nor have I heard anybody make a coherent technology technological argument, how, you know, things will be able to tell there is, there are ways to tell things like deep fakes photo editing, you know, there are there are techniques you can use to try to tease those things apart and say this video seems deep faked here's some reasons, text is pretty. I don't know how you decide if something's written by human written by man. But what I hear you saying is it seems to me that there is some sort like with Justin, you know, you're talking about your, your partner in crime, so to speak, I'm going to flush out some things and add some nuance or phraseology right it's not just like a. Okay, I looked at it go there's some sort of human engagement at this point right. Absolutely. And, and I think this is, you know, as has always been the case with technology going all the way back to, you know, john Henry was a steel driving man and scheme engines and, you know, and cars replacing people immediately go all the jobs are going to go away and somehow, you know, new jobs emerge, and you know, the three of us are all doing jobs that didn't exist when we were in school. And you know that that's fine right and we've adjusted and we figured it out we're on technology that didn't, you know, we're talking to each other and technology that didn't exist. None of the companies behind you with the exception and maybe two or three existed. So the changes occur what I would say right now. The skill that I would encourage your audience to be exploring is how do I use these tools and become skilled at feeding the prompts into a an AI content generating tool, whether it's an image generator or a text generator that produces content of the greatest value and quality. So what Justin is doing right is leveraging AI tools out of HubSpot never to figure out what is the SEO terms what are the folks that are in our target market searching for and maybe it's they're searching for phishing attacks right you know cyber security, whatever it is, he then will go say okay let's come up with an article maybe he'll run those by me I'll say here's five articles what do you think that that all look good from an SEO standpoint. What feels the most relevant to you Josh I'll say I like these two. He'll come back with the article. I make a few edits, and that collaboration between Justin, our marketing manager, Jasper our AI collaborator and me. Subject matter experts, so to speak. That allows us to really, really quickly produce a lot of what we think is really good quality content, you know at a high level. I have to ask, how are we going to keep up with this we in particular the nonprofit sector because, you know, there's so many small nonprofits and how we define small is different. But I'm thinking there's so many viewers and listeners they're going, I don't have a Justin I certainly don't have a Jasper like, you know, I really just know R2D2 and that was in a movie so that's that's what I know my title is actually three CPO so I love that so yeah how will this impact to the sector. I mean, that's who knows right. They're going to be the only thing going back to the lead pad examples I think the impacts will be huge and already are huge I think the things that I would that I would encourage people to look at when you think of the small nonprofits that you were just talking about right. You can have a Jasper you can have a writer you can have a copy AI because these are not expensive tools right and now you have the ability to generate content in the same way. Right and at the same pace and scale that enterprise and this is what where I think nonprofits fear technology sometimes and fear the changes of it. When in fact, a lot of these changes really democratize powerful technologies that become available to everyone and social media for all of its ills, right, provided platforms for nonprofits that were the same platforms that Fortune 500 companies are using. And if they can produce a compelling message and create an audience and they have every bit as much leverage as a massive corporation so I would encourage people to learn how to use these tools. I also think nonprofits are uniquely situated to really dig into the ethics of these tools particularly when we start getting I mean content generation has its own ethic, you know, ethics around it. We start getting into using AI for something called 88. Automated decision process ADP right automated decision processes are automated decision systems where we want to evaluate who's available for low income mortgages. We can only evaluate so many applications in a month so that that's a limiter on our ability to provide mortgages to needy families. Well if we can create an automated system maybe we can 10x 20x the number of mortgages we can put out. However, right, these data sets that are being used to create these automated data systems. I think that's going to affect them all the biases and systematic prejudice that came from the data it was there so you know if there was redlining going on in the data that we use to divine that then we're going to have an AI that's going to continue redlining which is obviously horrible and a lot of for profits and corporations are kind of moving fast and breaking things. And I think nonprofits have a real place to say, hey, we want to use this stuff but we want to use it ethically and we want to point out where others are using it in ways that aren't ethical. Right, and and really try to dig into that because I think there's a lot of mess that can happen with AI. But also a lot of wonderful wonderful things that could happen. My first thought is that cybersecurity so integrating AI at all and even in a much larger way Josh like how can we protect our cybersecurity knowing that usually for small shops medium shops you know the person that's doing it and the technology is simply the person that knows where to plug in the right cord, right so like, how are we going to manage cybersecurity and the potential risk of that. So I would say the upshot there is that you know there are some really as someone who lives and works in the cybersecurity world and with a lot of people who have very significant threat models so you know human rights journalists working internationally, activists working internationally so people that are being, you know under surveillance from nation states and have really legitimate threats. I can say from those folks to you know the community theater, you know in Oklahoma. There are really basics and fundamentals that are still incredibly effective. And these are simple things like training your staff and there's lots of free materials we offer. Every year something called the best free one hour cybersecurity awareness training ever sounds like a mouthful. Our seventh annual is coming up this January it's free for everybody we actually give away money at the training. And we try to make it really fun and entertaining. That's a really simple free thing you can do also things like multi factor authentication so making sure that for all of your critical accounts. I've heard a million times I'm here to say it is really critical and at this point, your insurers aren't going to ensure you if you don't have those things in place. So that becomes really important. But those two things just making sure that you're securing the accounts, you know that people log in with making sure you're training your staff and then I would say the last one is just, you know, this little annoying update to get on your phone and everything, run them. As soon as you get them. That is that is these are simple, mostly free things that you can do that really improve your cyber security posture tremendous amount. Oh my gosh, I have learned so much. I'm overwhelmed, but I am also really glad to know that round table is here in our community communities plural, right. And to know that there's so many smarty pants like yourself, Josh that can help us. I'm not as smart at the things that I do. I think the beauty of the nonprofit sector and you know it's everybody's smart at their job and I view my job is, you know, taking the stuff that feels overwhelming to you, and trying to help you with that so that you can do the stuff you're great at right. I agree. That's why I call myself the nonprofit nerd like, you know if we're talking it and cybersecurity I don't know if you notice but my eyes might have glazed over just a tiny bit. Just because these are like, these are things that I, I am not, you know, truly aware of and Julie I'm curious from you like you said here on fire, you know, a couple of times but this is some serious conversation and I, I think we're going to need a lot more of this. I think we are to I want to make sure, Josh, I know that there's there's a chance that we might lose you shortly. I think my batteries holding up. I'm just going to wipe a little sweat off the brow here. Okay, yeah, no, no, it's all good. We've even made you sweat. That's like intense. Right. Hey, you know, Joshua Peske professional services, cybersecurity, roundtable technology. Yeah, you've really given me some new things to think about. I think one of the lessons learned for me today was how quickly things can change how change can sneak up on us. I think that's your lily pad piece. I'm going to forever hold that in my heart because that goes with a lot of things. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that. That was genius. And the other piece of it is, and Jared, I don't know if you heard this, but Joshua was like, you know, a lot of times we fear change and we think that technology specifically is going to erupt our labor market and what who and what we need. But ultimately it actually challenges us to bring in more people. And so I thought that was really interesting because we worry about that a lot in the nonprofit sector. You know, who's going to do this work and where are we going to find these people? So I thought that was a really interesting piece of the discussion. I just want to say like I really encourage folks to not fear technology or think of technology as replacing work, but think of it as a collaborator. Like we talk about Jasper now as a collaborator as though the tool was kind of a colleague or an employee of ours. And in all the ways that that's true in terms of the ethics of it of needing to, you know, monitor the behavior and the outputs of that collaborator. But if you think of these as collaborators that can bring huge amounts of value to your organization if you know how to work with that. Right. I love that. And thank you for sharing that. And I also, I'm also surprised that you've used the word ethics probably four or five times in this conversation. Not in a negative way, but like bringing this back to saying, yeah, there's some things to think about. Yeah, as a best practice. Yeah. When I when I think of that really bad knife and some of the things that I'm seeing, you know, I'm, I'm simultaneously really excited and really afraid, because this is, I think in in a lot of different ways the most powerful technology that humans have. Encountered. And if, you know, there's the potential to change our world and really beautiful and incredible ways and there's of course the potential for outcomes that we don't want. And the nonprofits are situated in that way to keep an eye on that and really try to as much as they can put a hand on the scale and hope that it works out in humans favor. Joshua, please join us again. I really appreciate and just want to honor the fact that you made this conversation. Very like doable, you know, again for someone that this isn't my my native language I really appreciate it and you helped me understand the importance of the focus on this so I really do hope that you will come back. Maybe bring Jasper next time. Absolutely. We could do a live demo we can write an article we can create some images we can even make a video, you know, that would be super cool. That would be super cool but just so you know, Jarrett ransom the nonprofit nerd and myself Julia Patrick we are sentient people. We are here. Real people. Yeah, we have for now we can. I'm just to robot the perspiration is just to fake you out make you think of that's right. We make our guests squirm. Hey, this has been fabulous and I agree with Jarrett man we got to get you back on because I know today I'm going to have just a lot more questions that kind of filter in through my day about things that you said. And that's one of the wonderful things about the nonprofit show. It always leaves me and I know Jarrett you and I've talked about this it leaves us thinking and how powerful is that. And again, the power of that thought comes to all of us with our partnerships for their sponsors. So we want to make sure as we end our time with Joshua today to remind everyone that Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy staffing boutique. Fundraising Academy at National University your part time controller and our new sponsor be generous along with nonprofit nerd. They're here every day and they help us have these conversations, which is super cool. So we want to say thank you very, very much. We also want to say as especially Joshua you need to hear this because you're going to go in and eat fair food. We end every episode with this mantra. Stay well so you can do well today. It has a culinary reference. I'm going to be very unwell in about four hours. Too much fried food on a stick, but but that's okay. It's what I'm signing up for with my kids. Enjoy it to the max. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for the work you both do. It's really terrific. Thank you. Hey, it's been wonderful again. Stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow everyone.