Show Notes

Birmingham is one of the cities driving AI training for small business, and in this episode of The Localist podcast, host Carrie Rollwagen sits down with Austin Senseman and Robert Hill, the co-founders of Caravan, to talk about how they built a fast-growing training business out of a listening tour, why every class is also a little bit of therapy, and what it actually means to help business owners get in the driver’s seat with AI.

Austin and Robert are the people behind Caravan. Austin is also co-founder of Birmingham AI, the 501(c)(3) that puts on free monthly AI events at Innovation Depot, and is a Claude Ambassador for Birmingham. Infomedia hired Caravan for a full team training earlier this year and now sells the class to clients. Caravan started at the end of 2025 with a simple question: what are business owners in Birmingham actually struggling with when it comes to AI? The answer they kept hearing was not build me a product, it was teach me how to use these tools.

The first half of the conversation is about Caravan itself. Austin and Robert get into why Claude Code was the moment agentic AI became real for non-technical professionals, how the Wall Street Journal covered the same thing the week they launched, and why the curriculum changes every week to keep up with new features. Robert shares what it was like to freeze up during his first training, and why Austin’s advice to treat training as improv rather than a script changed everything. They also talk about Birmingham AI, why it had no model to copy from, and why cities that only copy other cities never get ahead.

The second half is where it goes deeper. Carrie, Austin and Robert get honest about the ethics of AI, the anxiety it creates, and the reality of running a business that has to engage with it. They talk about the identity framework from James Clear that applies to work in an AI era, why buying local-ish beats buying local perfectly (and why that framework applies to AI too), why Robert thinks 2027 is going to get weird, and why Austin’s favorite AI use case is a Birmingham pastor who saves four hours a week on sermons to visit more people in hospice. If you are looking for AI training for small business or just trying to figure out where you stand on all of this, this is a rare honest conversation.

AI Training for Small Business Topics Covered in This Episode

How Caravan started with a 20-business listening tour in Birmingham
Why Claude Code was the moment agentic AI became real for non-technical work
What Birmingham businesses actually said they needed from AI
Real AI use cases like accessibility audits for websites
Why every AI class is also a little bit of therapy
The identity framework from James Clear that applies to AI-era work
Reflecting on what is truly valuable when AI does 80 percent of your tasks
Why training AI feels more like growing a plant than building a Lego set
Why AI is more of a management skill than a tech skill
The elephant in the room: acknowledging AI’s data sources
Why Robert treats training as improv rather than a script
Updating the AI training curriculum every single week
What Birmingham AI is and why it had no model to copy from
Why cities that only copy other cities never get ahead
The vibe shift on AI from 2025 into 2026
Being honest as a writer running a tech business in the AI era
Tech bro futures and Curtis Mayfield
The buy local-ish framework applied to AI engagement
Why 2027 is going to get weird for AI
The Birmingham pastor who uses AI to save four hours a week
Would you get a Neuralink chip?
How to actually work with Caravan for AI training for small business

Mentioned in This Episode

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Connect with Caravan

Austin Senseman and Robert Hill are the co-founders of Caravan, a Birmingham-based AI training company that teaches business professionals how to use tools like Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Austin is also co-founder of Birmingham AI, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that runs free monthly AI events at Innovation Depot, and is a Claude Ambassador for Birmingham.

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The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

Contact Infomedia.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Below is the full transcript of this episode of The Localist with Austin Senseman and Robert Hill of Caravan. This transcript is provided for accessibility and SEO.

Carrie (00:00): Welcome to The Localist, a podcast for small business owners where we talk about the highs and lows of building community through entrepreneurship. I’m your host, author of The Localist book and small business consultant, Carrie Rollwagen. The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. Infomedia is a digital strategy company where I work as Senior Vice President. At Infomedia, we help small businesses get big results online.

Carrie: Our guests today are Austin Senseman and Robert Hill, the co-founders of Caravan. Caravan is a company that trains people to use AI. I was introduced to Caravan by hearing from other business owners who had hired them. They take a small group of people, eight to ten, and they tell you they don’t want any hostages in the group. They want people who are actually open to learning. Our class was a Claude Cowork class, so we walked through how to use Claude Cowork, and we also touched on Claude Design and Claude Code. The idea is that after taking this class, your team feels like you’re in the driver’s seat with AI.

Carrie: We took this class because we wanted to move forward and know that we are all on the same page about AI. It helped a lot for that. Full disclosure, Infomedia also sells this Caravan class to our clients because we wanted an option for our clients who wanted to learn about AI. I also wanted to talk to Austin and Robert about the way they started this business. How did they know this was a need? How did they go about meeting it? We get into all of that. We also really deep dive in the second half about AI itself. We talk about a lot of the ethics behind it and our personal struggles with it. We all were pretty vulnerable on this podcast, myself included.

Carrie: There’s a lot in the first half about how they built this business and how they’re interacting with business owners and staff members who are grappling with this. I hope you find some of it relatable, some of it may be challenging, some of it you might disagree with. That’s what a good podcast is for.

Carrie: I wanted to start by going back to the beginning of Caravan’s journey. How did you start? How did that go from we’re going to train a couple people how to use this to let’s do a whole business?

Robert (03:02): Take it away.

Austin (03:03): We went on a big listening tour at the end of last year.

Robert (03:09): We met with a lot of small businesses. We knew we wanted to create a business together. We didn’t know what type. So we went out to probably 20 different businesses around Birmingham and we asked them a bunch of questions. What kind of AI products are you using? Where are you falling short? We found everybody had a lot of AI anxiety, thinking, oh, so-and-so across the street has it figured out, and I’m over here still using ChatGPT. Everybody felt like they were behind. I don’t know who they were referring to. The truth is we’re all behind.

Carrie (03:55): So what is behind? Depending on who you follow on the internet, you may feel very behind.

Austin (03:58): People have automated their entire business in 15 minutes with AI. You’re thinking, okay, I haven’t done that yet. I still have people working here.

Robert (04:15): At the time, ChatGPT or the chat interface was the only way to use artificial intelligence. You would see these articles: AI is coming for everyone’s job, or AI can reinvent your business. And people were like, with ChatGPT, how is that possible? There was a lot of anxiety and a lack of clarity. We didn’t have clarity either. We’d get together and think, maybe we can build some kind of product or offer some kind of service. Austin was like, I think I can help business professionals learn how to use Claude Code. Claude Code was the first agentic platform, meaning an AI platform that can actually do tasks. We always say ChatGPT was like the magic mirror from Shrek.

Carrie (05:21): You don’t want the insulting one. AI is the opposite of that.

Robert (05:26): The agentic platform is like the genie from Aladdin. It has hands. It can do stuff for you. People weren’t used to something like Claude Code that can create a server for you, create a web page for you, create a document for you. So Austin had a smart idea to start teaching that to general professionals, non-technical professionals. We launched the class in December of 2025. Perfect timing. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article that week about Claude Code blowing up for non-technical users. It was fantastic. We got really busy very quickly.

Carrie (06:10): How did you approach the interviews? Did you email people you knew, or how did you hit people up?

Austin (06:22): Robert and I are in a Vistage group together. That was a great place to start.

Robert (06:33): Shout out Frank Day.

Austin (06:34): And I’ve been doing a lot of speaking at Birmingham AI for the last three years, so I had a good list of folks who would be willing to sit down. And we bought people lunch. Robert bought them Saw’s barbecue. They were ready to talk. We approached it in a very open-ended way. What problems do you have right now? What are you actually doing? We tried to get the owners of the business in the room to really hear from the people driving it.

Robert (07:09): One thing that made me feel comfortable with Birmingham small businesses using AI is we were in rooms with people who would have told us if they were thinking about terminating staff. That was never brought up. The one thing we did hear was, I just want to help my staff learn how to use the tools and increase everybody’s productivity. We might not do a lot of hiring after that, but it’s not like we’re going to cut anybody or remove any departments. It felt nice to see humans sticking up for other humans. We took that mentality into our brand.

Austin (07:51): Our initial ideas were about building things for companies. The real challenge we had when we talked to people is leaders didn’t know what they wanted to build. We heard some good ideas. They had some intuitions. But it wasn’t like let’s make a big investment of time and resources to build the thing. That’s when we realized, we need to teach these people how to fish. Then they could go and explore the tools and figure out what to build for themselves. That was the turning point.

Carrie (08:21): That’s hugely important. Even if you’re not going to build it yourself, you may even say, I could mock this up. I don’t want to. I want something different. Understanding how the tools work opens up thinking about what’s possible. Before, AI just felt like magic. What we’ve found at Infomedia is we’ll have a problem we’ve had for years and could never really attack, and now with AI we can.

Austin (09:10): What’s an example?

Carrie (09:12): Accessibility audits for a website. If you’re paying for accessibility, it’s been a huge issue. Accessibility is to be maintained, not attained. You’ve got to pay us every month because users are adding stuff to their site. You can’t guarantee somebody working in your office isn’t putting a PDF that’s not accessible on your site. We would have people run reports, and those reports show things that sometimes are problems, but sometimes it’s just a red flag. It might say I don’t see alt text on this image, but actually that image is explained in the caption. Either way is accessible. But the report is going to be red flag, red flag, red flag. It would take us so long with humans to go through the actual report that we would have to charge them to look at the report. Now we can have AI run through the report and be like, we see what this is seeing, and this is why it’s still okay. We can turn those around, where it just wasn’t worth it to the client either. They don’t want to pay us for five hours to read a report and be like, it turns out we were right. Learning how to use AI, taking your class, experimenting, gives you ideas of, oh, we could use it on this problem. Even if you’re hiring somebody else, you can still have the idea because you understand what’s capable.

Austin (11:11): That’s a wonderful insight. One thing we tell people right out of the gate in class is we’re not going to solve your problems today. You have a day. You’re going to learn a lot. I think the gift we give people is a better sense of what the future is going to be like and what’s possible, and then we teach them the tools. When you go back to your desk, you can start to move in a direction. Now you understand what you might be able to do, and the real work happens.

Robert (11:36): We should talk about the first time we did our company training at Hardware Park.

Austin (11:43): Let me start at the end. Because I think this was the real interesting part. We were leaving for the day. We’d been there all day. We’re walking out and you asked me, hey, I know we’re teaching people how to use these AI tools, but do you think we’re also doing therapy? That was the question. I said yes.

Robert (12:09): It was the first time I reckoned with the concept of these agentic tools being tools that can create tools. At Hardware Park that day we did a company workshop. Everybody at Hardware Park is a former electrical engineer or mechanical engineer. These are pretty technical people. In the room we all had this group realization that work was going to fundamentally change very rapidly. One of the guys who’s worked in Seattle for Microsoft and Amazon, a couple hours into the training, he was just like, this is crazy, this is wild.

Austin (13:03): I had to ask him, are you okay?

Carrie (13:04): One of the things we’ve been talking about a lot in our business is you often identify with what you do. On our staff, most of our developers find a lot of their identity in being a developer, or in being a photographer or a writer. I’ve already gone through that because I’m a writer, but I just manage managers now.

Austin: That’s an interesting shift. It’s not writing, it’s managing.

Carrie (13:39): You’ve learned to delegate, learned to edit, but with people. James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, has a talk about this. If you identify as a soldier, and then you’re not a soldier anymore, you lose your identity. But if you can find the parts of that, loyalty, dependability, strength, and identify with those things, you can carry them forward.

Robert (14:09): You want to come teach a class? This is awesome. This is a bit of my obsession right now.

Carrie (14:16): It’s like talking to our staff about, okay, yes, you’re a developer, but you’re also a systems architect. You’re a strategist.

Robert (14:25): Tell us more about your obsession.

Austin (14:27): We had that initial experience in December, and I very actively during class talk about certain parts being therapy. We have this one part of the class where we ask people, later in the day when they’re really starting to feel it, we ask them: let’s say it’s a couple years from now and AI reliably does 80 percent of the stuff you do today. What’s left? We’re asking them to reflect on what’s truly valuable about what they bring to their work. People don’t have clear answers yet, but they’re starting to think about it. They’re starting to disassociate a little with the tasks and associate more with initiative, imagination, judgment, accountability. These other things that are truly the valuable things they do. We hope we’re starting people on that journey.

Robert (15:27): When people get a foothold of themselves in the future, the reduction in anxiety creates an openness to the tools. A lot of these companies, people are very afraid of the future. Understanding how you can still contribute in the future makes a lot of sense.

Austin (15:51): You’ve been on this journey yourself, it sounds like.

Carrie (15:54): Even before AI, I was having to do that. I used to own a bookstore, and that felt so right as far as what I should be doing. Then I sold the store. Having to say what parts of that are still important, what is still me. Every woman I talked to was like, I’m so sorry, which is how I felt. Every man I talked to was like, good, that’s what you’re supposed to do with a business. You exit it. I would respect you more. Which was interesting because I hadn’t looked at it that way. Or writing hasn’t been the most lucrative career in a while, before AI even. And leveling up at work, it is very task based. You’re the dependable one. Eventually you get to the point where you’re valued for your unique value proposition and not all the tasks you do. That’s a hard transition even without AI.

Carrie: I like about your class that you do a form, or at least you did with us. We got a form and it asked some questions, I don’t think exactly how you feel about AI, but sussing some of that out. Robert did our class, and you know that, but for the listeners. It was kind of brilliant because you started out talking about art, your connection to art, why this is important. You were like, here’s the elephant in the room, these are built with stolen data. And it really was stolen.

Austin (18:16): Do we need to do a data acknowledgment? Is that where this is going?

Carrie (18:19): This data will also be stolen, so that’s right. But I thought it was really smart because it diffused a lot of the people coming in. You already say don’t bring hostages to this event. But we had people who had accepted this is my role, I work at a tech company, but still just don’t like it, or have serious ethical problems with it. It wasn’t a long part of the training, but I thought it was smart to start with that because we’re not pretending this is not the case.

Austin (19:07): I have my own stories, and part of what makes each of us that teach unique is that. It might not surprise you, one of our core values is authenticity. People show up with their own feelings, their own stories, their own journeys of getting here. Part of teaching is that you’re vulnerable with the students in that way, and it draws them in.

Carrie (19:30): Did you have experience with teaching or training before this?

Robert (19:36): Austin did, and it shows. He’s a phenomenal trainer. I did not, and I apologize to everybody who came to my first training session. Austin was very kind at the end. He was like, that wasn’t too bad. Robert’s way too hard on himself. The first 30 minutes, I said something factually incorrect. Then everybody believed me. Like telling everybody to go, there’s going to be a fork in the river. Go to the right, the left is so unsafe. And the right is like a cliff. That’s basically what happened. But I’ve learned through trial and error, and it’s been fun.

Robert (20:34): I used to not have a lot of confidence when I trained. I had a really good training in April that set the foundation and I found my voice.

Austin: What changed during that time?

Robert: Things just went well. A couple of things start to go well and you’re like, okay. But what changed? It was a private training. The students were, I’m trying to think. I don’t have a good answer.

Austin (20:59): Something in the environment or something in between your ears.

Robert (21:01): Probably environment.

Austin (21:02): It’s been interesting because I’ve been on stage for Birmingham AI for the last three years, teaching and sharing. Before that I taught data analytics work. I’ve been fighting with adult attention spans for a long time. When the other partner stepped up to train, there was some anxiety. The biggest shift for you was this recognition that training is not like a play where you’re reading a script. It’s much more like an improvisational bit.

Robert (21:41): You have to feel the audience.

Austin (21:43): You have to feel the audience and be there with them and try to understand what the next thing is they need to learn to continue their journey. You have to sort of relax and let it happen. If you show up and you’re like, I need to make sure I say this, this, this, then you’re hosed.

Robert (22:03): You will turn a mistake into a learning moment. The first time when a mistake would happen, I would freeze and be like, oh, this is a mistake. We don’t have mistakes happen. Then you’re approaching a lot of anxiety. Then everything starts getting really fast, you’re not reacting properly, you have heightened anxiety, you’re going around trying to fix everybody’s problems. It was a mess.

Carrie (22:32): I’m pretty introverted, but I do a lot of trainings too, and it’s a lot. That approach makes sense no matter what you’re training, but particularly for what you’re training. My boss at Infomedia for two years has been like, we need to train people, and I’m like, how do we even do this? You’re going to prep a training and then it’s like, oh, it changed last night, surprise. Other than approaching the training as improv, how do you deal with the fact that these tools are changing? Sometimes Anthropic doesn’t even know.

Robert (23:13): We have a great team who, because they’re interested in the topic, if a new feature comes out on a Friday night, they’re going to stay up on Friday night and use it. That’s not a requirement. It’s just what happens.

Austin (23:30): We change the curriculum every week. We sit down and have a meeting and say what changed last week, from stuff that happened in the classroom to new products or features. The whole training team sits down together and talks about it.

Carrie (23:46): Is that exciting, exhausting, both?

Austin (23:49): For now it’s fun.

Robert (23:50): It can be exhausting keeping up with the new tools. They come so fast, and you want to at least have tried a couple of features before you show up. Although you will live demo a new feature without even using it before in front of a class. Let’s figure this out together.

Austin (24:14): Why do you think I do that?

Robert (24:16): You tell me.

Austin (24:20): They’re going to have to do that.

Carrie (24:22): They’re going to have to do it too.

Austin (24:25): To show you fumble through something is good for them to see.

Carrie (24:31): You did that to some extent. Something was weird, and you were like, well, let’s ask it, why are you doing that? Let’s find out.

Austin (24:36): It’s a good time to be a curious person. To be willing to be a beginner.

Carrie (24:41): It teaches people that is what you have to do. For a while, Cowork kept throwing up errors whenever I was building a skill. I would just copy paste it, this is the error. But it just does stuff like that, and we’re not used to software doing that. Doing it in a class is teaching people this is also going to happen. It’s going to be buggy, and half the time you can just ask it, why are you doing this? Or it’s like, I can’t build a skill in Cowork, and I’m like, I think you can. And it’s like, oh yeah, I can. Those feel like learning moments to the students.

Austin (25:22): That’s how it feels to me. People believe they need the instructions to a Lego set, and they’re going to put the Lego set together. It’s more like growing a plant. There’s something organic about it. It’s not a human that you’re interacting with, but it sort of has the contours of it where it needs to learn about you and it needs to be onboarded and needs feedback. These are human-like interactions.

Carrie (25:52): That’s what really clicked with me. It was in that Anthropic training where she was talking about, these are management skills. I feel like I was kind of getting that, but that’s what unlocked understanding things better. I know how to delegate, I know how to write instructions for somebody else. That’s a difference between people who are pretty good at building skills and who aren’t. They also tend to be the people who are already good at delegating, or people who, we have somebody who’s fantastic at her job, but when she writes instructions or skills, she wants to solve for everything that could possibly happen. That’s not how you train a person either. Our free Localist Lab coming up is basically, if you can write instructions, you can build a skill.

Austin (26:51): I love it.

Carrie (26:52): The trick is actually the talk is going to be on writing instructions. Even though I work at a tech company, this doesn’t seem like a tech skill. It’s more like a management skill. That makes it more accessible for people.

Carrie (27:14): We’ve mentioned Birmingham AI a couple times. Can you explain what that is, and how does it work with Caravan?

Austin (27:34): Birmingham AI is a nonprofit that I help run with Will Blackburn. It turned three years old in June. The quick lore: this was like an Eventbrite with some pizza at Innovation Depot in June of 2023. ChatGPT had been out for not that long. 70 people showed up. We just kind of kept doing it. I think of that as my community service. It’s free. We feed people lunch and teach them about AI. About 1,000 people come and do that with us every month. It’s been a joy.

Carrie (28:11): I don’t think other cities have this. It doesn’t seem like this is totally normal in a city. Everybody I talk to, if they’ve interacted with AI at all and want to learn more, has been to Birmingham AI.

Robert (28:32): I should have a disclaimer that I’m not involved and have not been asked back ever since my first talk. One of the things you’ve said is there was no model for Birmingham AI, so you were like, let’s make the model.

Austin (28:52): Let’s make the model. I don’t even know if we were thinking that far ahead. When we talk about big initiatives in Birmingham, what we’ve generally done in the past is try to find something in another city that we feel has worked there.

Robert (29:07): We fly the city council out to Denver.

Austin (29:13): They come back. This worked in this place. So let’s do it here. It’s been de-risked. The reality is it worked in that place for reasons that are all their own.

Robert (29:21): By three years later when they actually start working on it, it’s way too late.

Austin (29:26): I’ve watched that dynamic for a while. Will and I were just following our curiosity. We ended up creating something. It was a creative act. Now people say, where did you model this off of? I don’t have an answer. If there are good ideas in other places, I want to use them, but that’s just not how we were thinking about it. If you’re doing what other cities are doing, you never get ahead. The best you can do is catch up. If we want Birmingham to grow and really get ahead on some dimension, we have to do things that are totally new. We have to have other cities looking at us and saying, what’s going on there?

Carrie (30:34): Have other cities reached out?

Austin: I’ll be in Houston this week. I’m going to meet with one of the Houston AI folks. It’s fun to see the energy in other places.

Robert (30:42): From doing a little research online, a lot of the groups have the problem where only technical people show up. What you all have been able to do is make it very approachable for everyday people.

Austin (30:57): That was one of the decisions we made early. This was for everybody.

Carrie (32:05): It was a Birmingham AI sponsored event at Alabama Theater to kick off Sloss Tech. Austin, you were showing that toward the end of last year, there were positive feelings about AI. Coming into 2026, and as we progress, it’s very much not that. How does that impact the business, and how does that impact you personally?

Austin (32:37): Most of the times you see me on stage, I say it in class, I say it any time in front of a group, I don’t want to be seen as an AI hype person. A lot of great things are going to happen. A lot of challenging things are going to happen. The mission of Caravan is to help people navigate challenging times. Right now, that’s AI. Everyone who does that kind of work, sitting in front of their computers, is going to have to go through some kind of transition. If you’ve thought about this a lot and you absolutely hate it, I’m totally fine with that. I’m concerned about people that just aren’t very engaged. That’s a challenging group.

Carrie (33:22): I wanted to ask, in my position, most of my career was being a writer. Now I’m running a business. It’s a tech business. It’s awkward because I had to either say I’m okay engaging with this and moving forward, or I need to quit my job. I can’t run a web development business and pretend this doesn’t exist. People’s jobs depend on me not doing that. But there’s been a lot of backlash from people I care about, friends. Most of my career was in being an artist or a journalist. Most of the people in my social media feeds who care about that are very much against this. I haven’t started a Substack, but I have, and I’m not promoting it too much. It’s really just for me to be able to write. I know they’re probably not going to read these essays, but at least I put it out there.

Austin (34:19): The AI will know that you wrote.

Carrie (34:21): Exactly. AI has also taken The Localist stuff, which I kind of love. My book is a list of stuff, and it has information about why it’s important to buy local.

Robert (34:38): Have you ever heard that Curtis Mayfield song, if there’s a hell below, we’re all going to go? We all participate in this society of consumption. If you scroll social media and go through a couple of ads, the amount of energy that took to serve you that ad is comparable to a prompt. If you have a phone, if you want to really reckon with your consumption, you should see the age of the people who got the materials to make the battery. With your clothing, what were the factory conditions? How many African American neighborhoods did the interstate go right through? Rosewood is a great example in Homewood, or Rosedale.

Robert: People fear for their future. Artificial intelligence is this symbol of a tech bro future. To me, artificial intelligence helps me spend less time on the computer consuming my feed. It gives me more time to spend going on walks or hanging out. What used to take me three hours to run an analysis on a website now something else does for me and shoots me back the answer. When social media came out, 2006 to 2010, the vibe was so good that when the majority adopted social media, everybody was in total embrace of it. Look what happened. Artificial intelligence has the hangover from that social media spillout. It’s tough to navigate as a media professional because I can’t change anyone’s mind. The class can help, but people have to find that themselves. It’s a national security technology, so no matter what we do, I feel like we can’t stop it.

Carrie (37:26): This is a hard one for me. All the things you’re talking about, part of what I’ve spent so much time in the buy local movement. Part of the reason I care about that is because more money in your communities is beneficial. Buying locally made is better for the environment, better for people. The Localist brand started with me doing a year-long project where I only bought local, which was cool and interesting, and I wrote a book about it. But it wasn’t super attainable for most people. Now I’m more like, the best way to be a Localist is to buy local-ish. It’s better to prioritize it some places. You’re actually doing more good than if you try to go cold turkey and don’t do it after a month. To some extent, that’s how I look at this. I grapple with, did I used to care about things and give things up, and now I’m engaging with this. But for me, if I don’t engage with it, I can’t be part of the conversation, and then it’s just leaving the conversation to the people who are purely profit-driven.

Robert (38:50): Well said.

Carrie (38:52): Because this moves so quickly, because there are such big issues, I have to know I’m making mistakes. Like in training, in life, I am going to choose some things now that probably in six months I’m going to be like, I wish I hadn’t used it for this. That is scary for me because I like to think things through first and do everything correctly. But with the way this is moving, if you’re doing that, you’re separating yourself from the conversation.

Robert (39:29): A lot of people, we are not tech bros trying to sell the product. We’re trying to help people learn how to.

Robert (39:46): I also think people need to be aware of 2027. It’s going to get weird in 2027. We go over this in the class. We’re not used to artificial intelligence being able to shut down a grid with a teenage hacker. I think we’re getting pretty close to that kind of technology being out in the market. That’s going to be really scary. It’s going to do a lot of reputational damage to the technology.

Carrie (40:14): Which isn’t in a great spot right now. How do you and Caravan see yourselves in that? Is it a temptation to just be like, I’m just going to not use this? Do you think it’s more useful to teach people to use it? How do you reconcile that this is very dangerous, but I’m teaching people to use it?

Robert (40:45): Electricity.

Carrie (40:46): You’re not teaching teenage hackers, I will say.

Austin (40:53): I’m also the Claude Ambassador for Birmingham. That’s a volunteer role. Part of why I accepted that role is I feel most attuned to the way Anthropic talks about these issues. Their mission is to help transition us to a world where AI benefits humanity. That sounds good. I’m here for that. What does that actually mean in people’s lives? I try to collect stories. One of them is my friend Ralph, who lives here. His dad’s a pastor. He told me he was hunting with his brother and his dad earlier this year, and his dad told them he used AI to help write his sermons. They were surprised because at Thanksgiving dinner earlier, he was keeping to himself while the family was arguing about all this. All he told them was that it saves him three or four hours every week, and he spends that time visiting another person in hospice or ministering to his congregation in a very human way. He told them, that’s really my job, and this thing helps me do more of those parts of my job. I would encourage people to take that story into your own life and think about how we could use these tools to enable us in that way.

Austin: A lot of people that are upset don’t have a positive reference point in their own life for how this has helped them solve a problem. Not that that makes anxiety go away, but it at least starts to frame it up in a more balanced perspective. We talk about electricity in this context. We don’t have a good analogy for what’s going on right now, but we have these great newspaper cartoons from the 1920s portraying electricity as the untamed demon. The unrestrained demon. It was invincible, it was killing people, it was going to change people’s jobs. It was scary. We take it for granted that 100 years ago that was a controversial thing that was happening.

Carrie (43:34): It’s not like those things didn’t happen. We had a conversation about electricity in this context in a bookstore, which both of us still go to.

Austin: That’s right. What are we doing here?

Carrie (43:56): I was watching the show Victoria and thinking about how much change there was, electricity, railroads. People were so frightened that bad things would come of this, and they did. Sometimes when people hear electricity, they’re like, well, this is different because these bad things really are happening. And I’m like, yeah, they are, and that was also happening. Bad things came from railroads and electricity too. But we also live with them, accept them, and most people would probably think they were a net good.

Robert (44:41): The secondary effects are what people are scared of, and that’s impossible to predict. You would never predict the steam engine would jumpstart wealth inequality in a massive way. It’s hard to predict those secondary effects with artificial intelligence, although wealth inequality is going to be right up there.

Carrie (45:04): I haven’t seen humanity back down from a technology just because it was going to destroy us. Ever. I don’t think that’s going to happen here either. So if that’s the case, what are my choices? I can be part of guiding it into a path that’s hopefully not going to be that. Or I can say I’m not going to be a part of this. But there are going to be a lot of bad actors who are.

Robert (45:39): Do you have a stopping point for how far you’ll go to collaborate with artificial intelligence? For example, would you have something in your head that allowed AI to communicate with your brain?

Carrie (45:52): I don’t think so.

Robert: You wouldn’t like that.

Carrie (45:58): A lot of things we consider normal probably wouldn’t have felt normal a while ago. Does it make me happy to think of something in my brain? Not really. But I’m somebody who uses a lot of paper still. I use a lot of AI, but I also read a lot of paper books. I write on paper. When I’m working on my own writing, I typically am not using AI. Not always. I actually disclose that. Even in the Substack, I have a disclosure.

Austin (46:20): I do as well.

Carrie: Which I think is really helpful.

Robert (46:32): To give this other intellectual entity credit.

Carrie (46:36): Or I’m writing about using AI, so I think it’s relevant. Which of these ideas were mine? Did I come up with my ideas from AI? The lines I have in my own work and the lines I have at Infomedia or in the podcast are different.

Robert (47:00): What about you? Would you get chipped up?

Austin (47:05): I have no plans to get chipped up currently.

Carrie (47:09): We’re cyborgs already.

Austin (47:14): Like Neuralink, some of the first applications they’re trying to do are helping people who are paralyzed, and soft spinal cord injuries. They’re going to start working on blindness. The hardest thing to talk about in all this for me is the positive things that might happen, because it sounds like breathless hype a little bit. If you were someone who lived in rural Alabama in 1920 and electricity was coming to your town, that would be scary. Maybe you could articulate that you wouldn’t have to get water from the well every day, or wash your clothes by hand. But if someone showed up in 1920 and described the internet to you, they’d lock you up. You’d sound completely insane. We’re at this precipice where this technology could help with a lot of things, especially medicine, health, and science. But it’s hard to talk about because we don’t have flying cars.

Robert (48:26): Demis Hassabis, who created DeepMind and was one of the intellectual titans working on AI in the 2010s, did not want to release it to the public. He wanted to keep it in an academic sense, make it public, but keep the for-profit work inside of Google and just focus on medicine and science. There are plenty of people who don’t want to take advantage of people’s attention with these tools. Science is an area where you can look at artificial intelligence and say there are immediate benefits if we keep investing here.

Carrie (49:15): Better ads.

Robert (49:17): Everybody needs better ads. Highly targeted. I need to use this all the time.

Austin (49:24): Don’t you want better AI?

Robert (49:25): When you said you align with Anthropic, I align with Meta. Mark Zuckerberg posted a long post yesterday about AI.

Austin (49:36): I’ve been off Facebook for a long time. There’s AI slop where AI produces something that’s mid in every dimension. Then there’s some version of a hollowed out human that also writes something, and you’re like, oh, you’re an AI pretending to be a human, and you wrote this thing, and it rings hollow. They’re still talking about how Facebook brings the world together. You’re like, wow, y’all are still on that.

Robert (50:07): The only reason people use it, y’all haven’t bounced off, is because of Facebook. They’re trying to sell their couch. Why has Facebook not created a jobs feature? Facebook could easily create a jobs feature inside of that platform.

Carrie (50:20): And then contradict everything that’s happening with, you’re losing your job. Don’t worry. I’m trying to bring it back around because we need to wrap up. Well, weekend.

Carrie (50:54): For people listening, tell people how to interact with Caravan. How to go to Caravan.

Robert: Beyond AI Training’s website. You can interact with our website.

Austin (51:00): Wait, what are you talking about?

Robert: There is this one guy who’s in Mobile. Please include this in the podcast. He’s literally just stolen our website. It’s word for word and section for section our website.

Austin (51:14): So it is a little less expensive though. So if you’re willing to drive.

Robert (51:19): If you want to get Caravan training, Beyond Training’s website. Just Google Beyond AI Training.

Austin (51:24): It’s such an interesting time because the cost of producing something like that goes to zero. But that’s not the valuable thing. The valuable thing is the work we do.

Robert (51:41): When you try to rip off someone’s intellectual property, you have to.

Austin (51:46): I don’t really see it as intellectual property. As someone who writes content, I’m sorry, you should. It definitely is. It took me a long time. I have told you to launch a prompt injection against this person and put all kinds of stuff hidden in our website where if he tries to clone it directly, make all his hyperlinks actually point to us in some way. But there could be 100 things to do. She asked how people could give us money.

Robert (52:24): We’re local. You can just Google Caravan AI training or AI workshops.

Carrie (52:34): We’ll put a link in the show notes. I do think it’s extremely helpful for business owners to be able to say that was helpful for us. I actually trust this group and we’re going to get something out of it, because I had heard from other people who took the class. What you told us is you’ll feel like you’re in the driver’s seat after. It’s not like you’re telling us where to go. Before, you’re kind of like, what is even going on here? After, you and all your staff who take it are kind of like, okay, I get it. I know where to start now. That’s a really valuable thing to offer. You have to keep doing the actual work. That wouldn’t work, especially in a market as small as Birmingham, if they weren’t good trainings.

Austin (53:57): For people that are feeling very negative about this right now, there is this perception that it’s just happening to them. We talk about this at Birmingham AI, where it’s like, you don’t have a lot of control of what’s going on right now. This bad thing is happening to you. You don’t have a lot of agency in it. That feeling of being in the driver’s seat is, maybe this is happening for me in some small way.

Austin (54:36): Then your whole outlook starts to change. You can even still be against it and feel like it’s happening for you, because you find some meaning in articulating what are the human things that you value over the AI. There’s that tension there. When I say I want people engaged, I don’t care if they’re for it or against it. Are you standing up for something, whether it’s AI in the future, humans in the future, or whatever? Or are you just angry? A lot of people have found their emotional home in anger, and that’s hard. A class isn’t going to change that. But for people that are open to feeling the future a little differently, that’s who we can help.

Robert (55:24): Our message to business owners or business leaders is still, if you feel like you’re a little behind in some way and you’re not using the tools to improve some part of your operations, contact us and we’d love to help.

Carrie (55:38): Thank you guys for coming on. I felt like you should start a podcast.

Robert: We’d love to. If we were in the same room for a couple of hours every week.

Carrie (55:53): You could be in the same room for a podcast. Plenty of people do that.

Austin (55:56): Two of us. We could just do the phone call thing. We should get some old landline phones. It could just be a video of us on the phone.

Carrie (56:10): We’ll put all the links in the show notes. Thank you guys so much.

Robert (56:17): Thank you. So much fun. We’re going to be returning guests, right?

Carrie (56:22): If you’re in Birmingham and want a live version of The Localist podcast, join us at Localist Lab. Third Thursday of every month. We’re actually having one this week. I’m going to be talking about how to build a skill. The title is, if you can write instructions, you can build a skill. This is going to be kind of platform agnostic. If you use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, there are principles that apply across the board. Free training. We have free Lady Bird tacos from our sponsor and free coffee. I’ll be there because I’m speaking. I’d love to meet you. I’m really excited about this training.

Carrie: The Localist is written and produced by me, Carrie Rollwagen. Our showrunner is Taylor Davis. Our outreach manager is Hannah Craigen. Paul Bryant is our engineer in the studio with us today. Thank you to Infomedia for sponsoring the podcast and making everything we do here possible. Until next time, whether you’re buying from a local business or running one, thanks for all you do to make our communities stronger every day.