Artificial Intelligence

AI on the set

Will AI be the future or the end of the film industry?

By Mike Schiano

on the set and in the queue

As reported by the BBC, “two years ago actors and writers shut down Hollywood with strikes demanding protections from AI. Now the technology is controversially creeping into TV, movies and video games. Two films honored at the Oscars even used the technology.”

Is AI more dangerous than green screen technology? Green screen technology, also known as chroma keying, has been used in film and television for more than 100 years. Its earliest applications date back to the 19th century, though it gained wide popularity in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Today, green screen technology continues to be a key component in film making. It is used in everything from major productions to low-budget productions.

Traditional green screen use can be time-consuming and requires precision to achieve clean, realistic results. AI-driven tools are improving the process in several ways:

  1. Automatic Background Removal: AI-powered tools can automatically detect and remove the green background.
  2. AI algorithms can detect and refine edges more accurately. They perform well even with complex lighting, shadows, or other details. This reduces the “halo” effect around a subject.
  3. You can see the results of your edits in real-time, making the entire process more efficient and creative.
  4. AI can help apply more sophisticated visual effects to the green screen footage.

There is no doubt in my mind that Hollywood film makers will leverage every bit of technology to help cut costs, speed up production timelines and create content that is too difficult to create with current technology. Humans stand the most to lose as AI continues to transform how every industry operates. Where creativity can be replicated by machines without the cost, it will be done.

I’m interested to know what you think. We will be covering this topic in depth on an upcoming episode of the podcast, In the Queue. Listen where you get your podcasts.

Are you noticing any Job losses due to AI?

By Mike Schiano

This is a time of great enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). Employers and employees are excited about the prospects of the new tools coming online. We are introduced to new versions of AI driven tools and ways to use these tools to become more productive every day.

Students, small business owners, investors, and individuals seeking to cash in while avoiding having to hire people to help them build businesses are on the tech bandwagon.

A recent report from Venturebeat reiterates the looming threat to jobs that many are either ignoring or are ignorant to.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) “almost 40% of global employment is exposed to AI.” Brookings said last fall in another report that “more than 30% of all workers could see at least 50% of their occupation’s tasks disrupted by gen AI.” Several years ago, Kai-Fu Lee, one of the world’s foremost AI experts, said in a 60 Minutes interview that AI could displace 40% of global jobs within 15 years.

AI is here and as I point out in AI Is Coming for Your Job, you can take action now to upskill and ride the AI wave while others are struggling to find work.

Let me know your thoughts on surviving in the age of AI.

Using AI but don’t want the boss to know!

By Mike Schiano

Three out of four “knowledge workers” around the world are using generative AI. However, many of them are hiding it from their employers. This insight comes from a new joint report from LinkedIn and parent company Microsoft.

Employees are worried they could look replaceable. Therefore, they are reluctant to share that they use AI for important tasks. Meanwhile, 75% of office workers report using an AI tool, without their employer’s knowledge.

The labor market is already being impacted by AI powered tools and will continue to shift as AI plays a bigger and bigger role. Despite fears of job loss, leaders report a talent shortage for key roles which are AI skilled. According to the report, “As employees eye a career moves, managers say AI aptitude could rival experience. For many employees, AI will raise the bar but break the career ceiling.”

Leaders of businesses across all industries are eager to employ AI across their organizations as soon as possible. There is some frustration with the speed of implementation.

Major technology companies—including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), and Meta—are investing over $300 billion in AI infrastructure in 2025 alone, a 70% YOY increase.

Imagine standing at the edge of a technological revolution, where the ground beneath your feet is shifting faster than ever before. That’s where we are with AI today. The tech giants aren’t just throwing money around. They are placing colossal bets on a future they believe will be powered by artificial intelligence.

Where is your company with AI implementation? Has your job been helped or hurt by AI at this point?

AI is taking the “Human” out of Human Resources

by Mike Schiano

AI technology is being used to streamline onboarding processes for companies large and small. It can save HR days of time…and reduce the number of people needed on the HR team.

Hitachi, for example, uses time reduction as a key performance indicator. Its department conducted market research and built a private AI system with a custom large language model. MSN reported the details: Workers fed the model with data from corporate sites, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, and employment books so that it could accurately answer new hires’ questions.

This work was previously completed by “human” resources. Note, humans are still needed to feed AI tools the information needed to replace ultimately replace themselves.

Hitachi’s IT then worked with HR to beta test the AI onboarding agents with various departments. Once KPIs and service-level agreements were met, teams scaled the AI for onboarding in October after the roughly six-month process.

The results: saving four days in onboarding and reducing HR staff involvement from 20 hours per new hire to 12 hours.

As I point out in my new book, AI is Coming For Your Job, What you can do to Survive and Thrive, people in businesses across the world are being used to train AI technology to do the work. Companies thirsty for the cost savings are pushing AI as hard as they can. Your only hope for economic survival is to upskill toward AI support roles. Any job which includes repetetive tasks, such as onboarding and training new employees, will be replaced.

Has your onboarding been replaced by AI yet?

AI won’t just be replacing us at work

AI is on a path to replace us in our personal lives also.

According to reporting from Robert Hal Schwartz at techradar, “Rabbit AI’s new Android agent doesn’t just summarize Wikipedia pages. Rabbit’s agent can coordinate tasks across different apps based on your prompts. You could ask it to write and send dinner party invitations on WhatsApp, pick a meal from a recipe app, or assemble a grocery list based on that recipe. It can also find and save a YouTube music playlist for when you eat and even download a game from the Play Store for after the meal.”

Rabbit’s agent isn’t available to the general public who have android smart phones just yet. Schwartz reports that “once it is available, you will be able to get the app from the Play Store and link it to Android apps after you give permission.”

Whether we want to go there with technology or not, this is coming at us. I suspect this tool will be readily adopted. This is similar to so many of the AI-driven tools the public is using more and more each day. We continue toward full AI domination of all walks of life. It appears certain that we should all start planning our soon to be lives of leisure. There will be no work and no personal tasks to complete on our own.

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Are you excited about the possibility of AI operating your Smartphone functions? Please comment below.

The New York Times is Rolling Out AI—At What Cost to Journalism? 🚨

Semafor.com is reporting The New York Times has officially opened the door to AI in its newsroom, signaling a seismic shift that could undermine journalists’ jobs in favor of machines. In an internal email, the company announced AI training for newsroom staff. It introduced Echo, a proprietary AI tool capable of generating social media copy, SEO-driven headlines, and even code.

This move raises a critical question: If AI is creating content, who gets the byline? While The Times claims AI will “assist journalists in uncovering the truth,” the reality is different. Machine-generated content threatens to replace human reporting. This change potentially strips journalists of their roles. It also dilutes accountability and transparency in news production.

The company is framing AI as an enhancement to journalism. It is touting its potential for “digitally voiced articles, translations, and yet-to-be-discovered applications.” But let’s be clear – when AI starts shaping the editorial process, where does that leave real reporters, researchers, and writers who rely on these jobs to make a living?

As AI tools creep into more editorial functions, proper attribution and ethical use of sources will become an even greater battleground. If AI aggregates and regurgitates information without human oversight, will original reporting be devalued or even erased?

Journalists should be alarmed! This isn’t just a tool – it’s a takeover.

Read more at Semafor.com

New Skills Needed in an AI-Driven Manufacturing Era

You are undoubtedly aware that factories have been replacing assembly line workers with AI-powered robots for several years. They don’t take breaks or call in sick. This means massive efficiency—and job losses. According to a recent report at TheManufacturer.com, “manufacturers are beginning to use AI in even more areas of their organizations, evolving from being used for basic tasks such as monitoring, reporting, and other isolated use cases, to being used for problem-solving and decision-making.” If you’re in manufacturing, you must learn new skills.

AI enhancing Contact Center performance

Partner AI with your Human Resources to boost your business performance.

Gerd Leonhard wrote on LinkedIn, “Machines are getting smart. AI, fuelled by machine learning brings the end of routine-tasks for us. But it’s NOT the end of Human Work!

The bots are coming – yet the biggest danger is not (yet) that they will take over but that we become too much like them!”

Contact Centers are looking for ways to employ AI to improve the customer experience, but are they also looking at AI as a way to enhance the employee experience?

Companies who embrace AI as more than a way to cut personnel costs will be the big winners in the future because they realize a partnership with AI and humans can supercharge productivity, energize stale employees, and boost the customer experience and service delivery capabilities.

AI can allow Humans do more high quality work while it takes care of basic, redundant tasks. Many of my clients are overpaying humans to do the mundane, repetitive work that AI can easily do.

A key to success is identifying the high quality work for human resources to take on that will enhance the business’ products and services in the eyes of the clients. Basics improvements like speeding up the connection of callers to a human resource with AI handling the verification process can provide a simple but noticable boost to most Contact Center productivity.

AI is the future. Embrace it and partner with it to make your business and your employees better…and your customers happier.

A new window into the very soul of your Customers and Business

man with steel artificial arm sitting in front of white table

I’ve previously written about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used to improve the quality and accuracy of customer interactions within companies of all sizes. Read more here.

As AI and machine learning gain more widespread understanding, development advances, and use, through a range of business applications, I’m particularly intrigued and interested in the use of Speech and Text analytics applications to deliver previously unknown insights into the daily interactions between customers and sales and service representatives. This new technology will provide companies that care a much more granular, 3-D view into the behaviors of their customers, their workers, and their business model.

We’ve enjoyed call audio recording for a long time but, listening to the calls has been limited by the cost of hiring enough people to listen to enough calls to provide meaningful data. So, only a portion of calls were ever reviewed and scored by human Quality Analysts. In my experience, this feedback has always been very useful and valuable in correcting performance and gaining new insights into both our customers and agents. We just couldn’t get enough of it fast enough. For the most part, we were reviewing historical data. AI offers real time data and alerts to aid in managing performance while it is happening rather than trying to go back and fix things that happened already.

With AI based applications, used properly, businesses can analyze EVERY call and text-based interaction from channels like Chat, email and Social media. Call audio is transcribed and analyzed along with other text-based interactions and the results area a treasure trove of manageable data and information being delivered in actionable formats in real time and near real time.

This will transform the way we manage businesses because we will have first-hand knowledge of what customers and representatives are really saying, and, in what context they are saying these things.

Even after direct interactions with your company channels, AI can track customer actions which will give business leaders unprecedented intelligence. For example, if a customer ends a call with your representative and immediately takes to Twitter and  mentions your company, AI tools will allow leaders to be alerted on their smartphone, so they can act more quickly to counteract negative comments or promote positive comments.

Over the years, so many business leaders have expressed their desire to me to know more about their company’s overall performance. Reading daily tallies of call reason and result codes never really delivered a full view. But, AI combined with Speech analytics and Machine Learning will now give business leaders real “eyes and ears” in virtually every place your customer lives.

Workers who interact with customers will have more information about the customer at their fingertips, but will also be under increasing scrutiny because every contact will be recorded, transcribed, reviewed and reported upon.

How much of these new data insights will  be put to good use by businesses will remain to be seen. We have the tools to gather these data and smart business leaders should be researching and reviewing options with vigor.  Using this new technology successfully is another topic.

Want to know more about the options for Speech and Text Analytics? Contact me to schedule a call. You will be amazed at what you can learn.

Mike