Season 1 Finale! Recap, Retrospective, and What's Next at Your AI Roadmap with Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek

In the season finale of Your AI Roadmap podcast, host Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek reflects on the success of the first season, thanking the team and listeners for their support. The podcast has gained international traction, with listeners from 40 countries and 200+ cities. Throughout the season, episodes explored topics like multimodal AI, speech recognition, and emotional AI. Looking ahead, the next season will feature industry experts discussing cybersecurity, persona design, FinTech, and more. Additionally, the companion book Your AI Roadmap, focusing on AI, careers, and finances, will be released in January 2025.

In this episode, we talk about:
➡️ Introduction and Season One Recap
➡️ Companion Book Announcement
➡️ Preview of Season Two

It's true! Joan has a BOOK with Wiley, Jan 2025!
✨ AI, Careers, & Future-Proofing Your Income
🛒📚Pre-order here: https://yourairoadmap.com

Talk to us!
🌟 Season 1 Podcast Feedback Form: https://yourairoadmap.com/podcastfeedback
🌟 Season 2 Podcast Guest Nomination Form: https://yourairoadmap.com/podcastguest

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Season One Recap
• 6:35 Companion Book Announcement
• 18:51 Preview of Season Two

Transcript

0:00

Hi, my name is Joan Palmiter Bajorek. I'm on a mission to decrease fluffy hype and talk about the people actually building in AI. Anyone can build in AI, including you. Whether you're terrified or excited, there's been no better time than today to dive in. Now is the time to be curious and future -proof your career, and ultimately, your income. This podcast isn't about white dudes patting themselves on the back. This is about you and me. and all the paths into cool projects around the world. So what's next on Your AI Roadmap? Let's figure it out together. You ready? This is Your AI Roadmap, the podcast. Hello, hello, well, welcome to the season finale of season one. I'm so excited that this podcast got out there. I'm so glad people are in my DMs asking to be guests from all around the world. Super cool. I can't keep up with all the messages. So make sure to please, if you're interested in being a guest for future seasons, the form is at yourairoadmap .com slash podcast guest. And there's a little Google form, just like help us with some. keeping data organized, but let's review what has happened in season one. Honestly, I maybe have to start with thanking my team because this podcast almost didn't get released. I was recording episodes. I'm a very much DIY bootstrap kind of founder. And I was like, I can do this. Like, okay, we did our research, podcast is where it's at. We're gonna connect with the audience. And it almost didn't get out. and I was listening to another podcast about like most podcasts fail and I was like, darn it, I'm not gonna let this fail. And so I called up one of my best friends in the whole world begging her to help me. And that is our podcast host. no, I'm the podcast host, podcast producer. Yeah, that's the one, Maddy Apple. Thank you so much for taking my phone call, for not laughing in my face and for making this podcast happen. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Another person I have to thank, of course, is my executive assistant. You don't get to hear her voice on the regular, but she is the one orchestrating, doing the paperwork, making sure the guests come. They have their paperwork for our footnotes. Anyway, she is doing the clerical masterminding. That is Angelica Mae Abao. So thank you. Those are behind the scenes. We also have a designer that just got poached by Google. Props to our lovely designer, Sehyun Jeon who was on the team for a hot minute. and then got poached. So props to her. Okay, so now that we've talked about the team, I also wanna say when you release something into the wild, you think things are gonna happen and then some other things happen. It's also a founder thing. You put things out and then life happens. we had a lot of data on my LinkedIn, who's consuming posts, who's engaging, and a lot of it is people on the West Coast. So I'm based here in Seattle. lot of people in Seattle, in San Francisco, in LA, like very West Coast heavy tech and founder and investor demographic. So we were like, okay, if we drop that on LinkedIn, that's mostly who's gonna consume it, ta -da. Okay, this is not what happened. This is not what happened, folks. So as of today, when I'm recording this in September, 2024, over 700 downloads of this podcast have had downloads, none I've to, downloads. of different episodes and we've had how many episodes? guess season one has 16 episodes, depending on how count it with the trailer and bonuses and all that jazz. But we were shocked at how much downloading. I feel like we hit a nerve with our actual people building. No fluff, no hyping. What are you actually doing? How do we measure success? And talking about the builds and the projects. as well as talking about the career. How did you get there? How did you get your foot in the door? How did, you know, what did the educational things, how did that all pan out and some real answers from people? So that was super cool. Other stats, okay, like I said, we didn't know it was gonna be like that. Other things we didn't know that blew my mind is how international. I in theory know that... Are my audiences international? Maybe people organically finding this. If you are finding this organically, if you could just like leave us some notes, we'll leave in the show notes how to give more feedback to my team as well. like, okay, let me, I got these stats up. Of all time, we have people in 39 countries and 204 cities on all six continents. Mostly consumed by North America, but also South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania. Peeps are listening. I'll admit when I saw some of this data and my team was like surfacing the data, was like, wow, international, like go Joan. I was like, is it just my family? Like was a family member like traveling somewhere and just like listen to the episode? Like it's okay, you don't have to hurt my ego. And my podcast producer, Maddy was like, hey Joan, are they in Belarus? Were they traveling to these cool tiny cities? But like, I have a huge, huge, one of the sides of my family is Catholic. It's a very, very large Catholic family. Maddy's like, no offense, but like, this is beyond your family. Like, just by the way. was like, okay, okay. Like, thank you, family, for supporting. If there's some Palmiter Bajoreks listening out there, I am so grateful for you listening. Anyway, so we did not know it would be so internationally consumed. like literally on my socials, people were like, I can't wait to listen to it. Like based in some country, I was like, wait, what? Like who, what? It's really, I'm so grateful that we are aligned about the type of content we want to be consuming, who we want to be listening to, or like honestly, the plain language and inclusive like really validates that we have this podcast So. That is rad. Woohoo, international folks. Other things to talk about. so future teasers, reflection and growth. Yeah, you know, I love data. I thought I knew and now we know far better. And that's one of the things we're doing is to really work on plain language, which I've always cared about is like break down the jargon. What does that actually mean? We're really also working on knowing that our audience is far more international than we expected. That means also more multilingual than we expected and really working on making our titles inclusive, our footnotes and show notes more understandable to people with lots of different, if English is your second language, right? Having people from around the world be guests and so forth. We've got more international guests on season two. So that'll be coming forward. I feel a little weird. I know you're like listening to me, but like. I like speaking to another person. So excuse me as I face the cam on my podcast episode alone doing this season finale. So other things about this journey. Exclusive content, audience involvement. Yeah, I've been learning so much from all the information about people saying they love products, they don't love products, et cetera. Reflections and growth. I asked ChatGPT what to cover. Yes, I did indeed. on this episode. Let's talk a little about some of the things I learned and things that are still rolling in my head from episodes that we've recorded and then kind of give some exciting little nuggets about the season two that we've already been recording. We're almost done recording and kind of things we've learned. So across the season, so we've had guests from Google, we've had guests from Rev, Upwork, Adobe. Intuit, Microsoft, right? We've had some big companies, but people actually working on the actual projects. And we've also had people from startups of various sizes, super, super cool. I want to say so far, one of the best performing ones, and I think it's maybe related to the Google and maybe related to the multimodal AI. but Stefania Druga's episode thinking about LLMs. I like, I have mentioned this in other, in other conversations of like her data set is the internet. Mic drop. But really thinking about multimodal data sets, when we can leverage so much data, how do we think about privacy? How do we leverage it effectively? To what ends are we using it? If you haven't listened to that episode, check it out. Pretty rad episode. I talked with John Pasmore about BlackGPT, his Latimer.ai company, and really thinking about inclusive data sets. There was a really cool part of that one. about how we think about LLMs potentially advocating for people in medical settings, specifically around black female pain and thinking about maternal health and just opportunities for AI that is built in certain ways to advocate for people, kind of that humanness through the AI piece of the puzzle. We talked to Nicolle Merrill and thinking about products you may well use. MailChimp and TurboTax and her, like the chat features, like bubbling up, like learning predictive analytics, thinking about chat bots and so forth. Nicolle and I have known each other forever. I think we laughed through that whole episode. There's a bonus episode where I was interviewed by my CTO, Jennie. Hilarious. You cannot keep anything from this woman. Jennie says it to your face and I love how we talk through my own journey. as well as what I want to be building, the customers, how I think about success to varying degrees. And Jennie is a powerhouse and she thinks so creatively in ways about it doesn't have to be this way. It maybe has been this way previously. We don't have to lead by those examples and really questioning the norms and building the future. Jennie is a powerhouse and I'm so grateful to get to work with her. We spoke with my friend Rana about emotional AI, which it was so funny. I told a friend about this podcast and she's like, cool. And she like popped it up and she's like, emotion AI. I will be listening to that episode first. was like, is that how people consume the podcast? Like I thought it was super linear, but maybe people cherry pick a podcast episode that resonates with them. That one about Behavioral Signals is so cool, especially because he talks about they don't use the words. They don't use the words. They like use the acoustics to match people up and have dramatic return on investment for using their technology over at Behavioral Signals, really cool. My investment ViralMoment, Chelsie Hall talks to us about virality, about the money, the danger, Coca -Cola. She gives an example. about McDonald's and those milkshake things, going viral or like, know, virality, you can lose a lot of money. You can gain a lot of money related to Stanleys, that are now everywhere. But really thinking about short form video, the power of social media and these spikes along the way. I spoke with my friend Miguel Jete about speech recognition. Like Miguel and I nerded out about how you create speech recognition systems. How you think about building teams? He's so senior in our field. What a pleasure. We spoke with Stephanie Blocker of Microsoft and working how she thinks about Copilot. And more and more people are asking me about Copilot. And I've seen people use it and what they're ready to use it for and how they think about Microsoft's suite and privacy. Stephanie, she talks about how she's across how many of their different products. Like, whoa, Copilot has so much data. speaking of these Microsoft Googlers in our spheres. I spoke with Noelle Russell, who's so cool. We talked about generative AI and the opportunities for enterprise. I mean, she's worked at all these different companies, right? She's built these different things and it's really, really exciting to speak with her. She's a friend of mine. We've known each other for years, but that's a very hands -on interactive C -suite enterprise conversation. I spoke with Lauren from Upwork about And see, the thing is, I thought it was gonna be a lot more about the AI product things and work that she has been building there, but actually, it got more and more into company policies and upskilling and thinking about market differentiation. I mean, I ask literally the same questions to all our guests, if you haven't noticed, almost all the same questions, and how they answer and how they think about what kind of solutions are being built or navigating different parts of the journey. Hopefully you hear that across the season in these episodes. In another episode, I talked to my friend Peter about legal stuff. Okay, seriously, I think I already talked about this, maybe on socials, as well as the intro to that episode. I still don't think very much about lawyer stuff, thank goodness, lucky me. But really thinking about how AI and the law, and then he talked about like, you have to do best by your clients. And if you're not using AI, which can find incongruities in different pieces of paperwork or testimonies when you're on the stand, whatever. Anyway, you can look through those data sets as though you had 17 interns. And if you're not doing that for your client, maybe you're not doing best by your client and really thinking about the obligations that one has in the legal field, but also things just making up citations. Peter is a brilliant man, very kind, and gave some really great concrete examples. If you haven't listened to that episode, go back, check it out. Bobak talked to me about smart glasses, AR, and AI at Brilliant Labs. This may be our only wearable episode, or I think there's so much potential and cool stuff going on for AR, for smart glasses, kind of integrating AI and these conversational interactions into devices. We also got... I don't know they were trolling, but someone on my socials dropping a video being like, really, a lab's hard to use. And I watched this video of someone attempting to use these, and they were like, they're not perfect yet. And I was like, it's an MVP. It's the first version of the product. I think people are so hard on products, and we're just trying to get them to market. Like this podcast, we're just trying to get out there. Please, be a little bit kinder. Is our first product not perfect? Okay, but at least we got it out there. The person had the glasses in their hands. They were starting it up. They were testing different things. I mean, I want some. Send some Berlin Labs. I'm interested. No, but I think we have to make the innovations, for example, like I'm recording this from an iMac. To have an iMac, we needed to start with something smaller, right? Do remember those little iPods and the little thing? Like they were so dinky, right? and to actually have the laptop, two different versions of the iMac, to the fancy, beautiful iMac I have in front of me. Like that takes iterations, it takes time, especially with hardware. So please be nice. But also, such a philosophical conversation, I thought, with the CEO of Brilliant Labs. I spoke also with my friend Daniel Robbins about creativity at Adobe and really thinking responsibly about creator tools and the learning curve and how, I mean, Adobe has some of the nicest. tools out there and really thinking about video and how generative AI and creative tools is really gonna be changing in front of our eyes. Already is, but like if we're here right now, where are we gonna be in two years? Boggles the mind. So that conversation with Daniel, I spoke with Prem Kumar about Humanly's recruitment stuff and really being more human. And I love how in that episode, actually did it their headquarters, they invited me over, that he talked about Like people wanting more humanness, I guess it's called Humanly, the company's called Humanly right? More humanness in the recruitment cycle. That high volume recruitment, people were like, you never got back to me. Or like, why was I thrown out of the candidate pool? Or like, just being respectful and thoughtful to candidates and how people interact with that. It's so cool because there's such a power dynamic, right? The company and the individual. And I think it's really cool that he is building something that is for businesses, but also treats other humans better. And it comes from his experience thinking about recruitment tools at Microsoft and him like discovering this problem, like, excuse me, let's work on this. So props to him and his team. I got to speak with Gracie Ermi at that episode. Like, I guess you're seeing where my domain expertise is. Right? With the virality, with multimodal data sets, generative AI, speech recognition. That's where a lot of my background is honed and the projects I've done. And then you see like little edges, right? I'm like, ooh, like tell me more about the law. And then like, I'm like satellite data. Like in theory, I know that satellite data exists and I know they're like geospatial maps, right? But. normally on the day to day. I don't even know what tech conference is now. I'm like thinking about like how many tech conferences have I been invited to that have like geospatial satellite data components? Maybe like one touched on this. Like a founder was pitching at a startup, at a VC investor thing I was at. Like, okay, we're talking about like one in six years. Okay, so like, maybe that's the Seattle thing. If y 'all wanna write in and be like, we see tons of geospatial, stop it. Let me know. But this conversation, when I met Gracie at a panel we were at for GeekGirlCon, and I was like, that is some cool work she's doing. Hearing about the geospatial data, the size of the data sets, the fidelity of what they're seeing on the ground, climate change, preservation, and she talks about being a female machine learning. scientist, I believe it's her title, and being a computer scientist and the inclusive program that she went through. was like, wow, if the world has more programs like that, that's a world I want to be part of. Our last episode is with Megan Gray, who is just a visionary. I know we're speaking a lot of visionaries, but like, Megan knocks it out of the park. Like, dang. We talk about computer vision, we talk about being a founder. She has taken some really difficult life opportunities and translate them into phenomenal opportunities. Investors and banks begging and reaching out to her. These working with Fortune 100, Fortune 500 customers and things she can't tell us all about, but how she's thinking about data sets and leveraging different pieces of the puzzle. And I believe the automotive and medical space as well. I got chills. I think, I don't know if I cried or I felt the tears welling up, but like that episode. I think, yeah, I dare you to listen to that episode and not have emotional response because it is so phenomenal. did I mention she's a poker player? Yeah, okay, go listen to the episode. So across these, as I just mentioned about, you see my domain knowledge and the bounds thereof as of today. I loved learning from these domain experts. They are so talented in their domains. They're building in it. They're working in it. They're learning. They're leveraging their insights for their companies. and their projects. And I hope along the way that you've been learning and thinking about not only the projects, but the human behind it, right? These people who are literally working on Microsoft Copilot amongst others. Like, think, I hope you're thinking about what kind of teams are out there. Like, do I wanna be working in IAEI? Do I wanna be leveraging things? Are you like, Prim Camaro is like, ooh, I see this problem, I wanna attack it. Like, that's how I wanna go into this field. There are so many different ways and we're here. as an educational podcast, right? Like we're here to learn from these people who are awesome and working on cool projects. Future teasers of what's to come. So I have already been recording these episodes, I'm really, really jazzed. And the sad thing is like, I realized as we're going through like things I could do better and I'm like, we've already recorded in these episodes. Anyway, we're trying to get better, continuous improvement. We will have some friends from companies you definitely know. We've got one about cybersecurity. We've got one about persona design and kind of virtual reality and speaking to agents. We've got a guest about talking really about FinTech opportunities. Manufacturing, ooh, manufacturing. We've got one about health and food and multimodal data being leveraged. Like that one blew my mind of like, what does health mean in these contexts and all the rich data. She talks about like scrolling and like if you're getting enough sunlight and these are ways we can measure and think about your health in a very holistic sense. Anyway, don't want to give away too much. But those are examples of topics that we'll be covering in season two. Thank you everyone. Heartfelt thanks. Like I said, we did not expect this to be consumed in over 30 countries, But thinking about, we created this podcast because we saw the interest when we did reviews of my socials, what people wanted to consume, what they were consuming, practical, actionable, no fluff, plain language. resources, about AI, about the world, how things are changing in front of us. That's what people were consuming when we reviewed my content. And so making, like, I get to hang out with my friends. It's really cool. I see things at tech conferences. I'm having these conversations regardless of they're recorded or not. And this podcast is a really like codified way to have those conversations in a very structured way for you. Like we see this demand. I got plenty of friends and people in my network around who are excited to share their work, their stories, et cetera, with you all. And so this podcast is manifestation of this. And I'm so glad that it's striking a note. We're really glad about that. So please rate, review, subscribe, helps us know what we're doing right. Give reviews, people around the world, tend to your friends, et cetera. But I also want to thank my team who believed in this project and when I asked for help, made it happen, got it out the door to your ears right now. I mentioned milestones, things I've learned, outtakes and bloopers. If you haven't heard the big announcement, there is a book, companion book to this podcast, and it's called Your AI Roadmap. Ta -da! So as I was, my team and I were looking at like how to launch a podcast well, which different social media channels, how to leverage YouTube and think about the flywheel there, I went to this seminar that was like, how to do a podcast well. And it said, when you do your companion book, and I like dropped my pen. It's like, no, when you do your companion book, it's like, no, book projects take a very long time, folks. I wanted to do a book for many years and I was actually told roughly four years ago, you are not famous enough, in quotes, to do this book and the proposal was, yeah, anyway, it wasn't going places. So. When I heard that on that lovely webinar, I was like, whoa, okay, get in gear, make it happen. I reached out to my my book person. He shops books around. He's the one that previously had given me that constructive feedback about not being famous enough. And I said, hey, by the way, I'm interested. I've got more social media followers. I've got this podcast. I'd love to talk about a book. Would you be interested? Ayo. He responds back right away. We get on a call, make it happen. If you've seen my socials, the book is coming out January 9th, 2025. It's called Your AI Roadmap, Actions to Expand Your Career, Money and Joy. I thought it was gonna be far more technical, thinking about AI, but when they did competitive analyses, okay, it's wild. I wasn't in the room, but I had this champion. Thank you, Danielle. who took my proposal, who asked me for more data for my proposal, who was really championing my work, she was in a room with my proposal and all these other people with different book proposals. And like, apparently, around the table, the proposals were being shot down. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And my proposal was different enough, quote unquote, refreshing, that it got approved. And one of the key factors of why it got approved is because it didn't say that you need to climb the corporate ladder to be successful. It was really thinking about success in different ways. You know, on this podcast, we talk about the projects and we talk about people's careers. I don't know, ask them about money. I don't know if you've noticed, but some of people said like, finally got the money I've been looking for. Or, you know, I'm finally paid what I want to be paid or what nots. People add these phrases, but this book, is so there it was meant to be three parts, a part about AI and plain language. The second part was meant to be careers and really modern approaches to careers. Basically, my recommendations for all the people in my DMs asking for career help. And then the third part of the book being about finances and what you're making at those different jobs, how you set up your financial house and think about all that. So that was my pitch to them. And I also had a social justice through line. If you're going to get content from me. it's gonna be inclusive. It's hopefully gonna be modern. I continue to learn and grow and want that to be part of how I deliver content. Woohoo. also looking at how this is differentiated. Anyway, that's how the sausage gets made. I'll just say that. The book is really two pieces of that. It's the modern careers. I've got frameworks. I've got tons of research. It's a lot of work. And the second part being about modern finances and taking care of your modern house. I talk about all my revenue streams, 22 revenue streams. I talk about all these different things that I've learned from my mentors across the years about how I negotiate contracts. I talk about money in and really how to increase instead of drinking tinier and tinier. Really think about expand your career money and joy. Really thinking about how we can instead of like trying to save I did literally the other day I was like, I could save $200 like this. I was like Joan like sell more for five -figure projects like Trying to save 200 bucks versus make $10 ,000. Do you see what I'm talking about? Anyway, this book really goes into nuts and bolts concrete frameworks of expanding money thinking about how we build wealth. It's very inclusive in gosh Anyway, we can have another episode about the podcast and the book. loquacious over here. Many, words. But this is a book that is a companion to this podcast. They really speak to each other in beautiful ways. And I look forward to writing more technical content. I've got some other ideas, books. Let's see, let's see. In French we say, verra. On verra. We will see what the world brings to you. But I'm really, really hopeful that if you like the content, this podcast. If you like what I was just mentioning, I will be reading some chapters soon and giving some little tidbits and we've got these freebies for pre -sales. point being, I am so darn proud and grateful and frankly shocked at the success that's going on right now. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being on this journey with me and my team. Your support means the world and I'm really grateful. I'm really grateful. Yeah, I think we're on the same page about what we want the world to be and opportunities to learn and grow together. So that just warms my heart, literally. I wish you all the best and I can't wait to see you for season two. All right, have a wonderful rest of your day. Bye folks.