Mark Smith doesn't see AI as a tool he uses. He sees it as an extension of himself, one he's spent years training on his own voice, his own biases, and his own standard operating procedures. In this episode of The Team Check-In, host Emre Ok talks with Smith, known online as nz365guy, a longtime Microsoft MVP and creator of the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge, about what it actually looks like to build that extension, and why he thinks it could get him from 20 hours of input to 40 hours of output every week.
Smith explains how his dyslexia shaped his entire career, from mowing lawns because he couldn't read to becoming a Microsoft Certified Trainer who now credits neurodiverse thinking as a genuine advantage in the workplace. He also walks through how he actually uses AI day to day, treating it as a sparring partner rather than a search engine, and shares his blunt take on why the current economic model rewards the people who own the automation, not the people doing the work.
.svg)
.svg)
Mark Smith: Classic. So where are you today? Where are you located? Istanbul?
Emre: Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey, yeah. And where are you right now?
Mark Smith: Nice. Have you been to New Zealand at all?
Emre: My cousin lives there. Haven't been, though. Look, I would love to go, honestly — from everything I'm seeing him share, it just looks perfect.
Mark Smith: Yeah. But your country is pretty amazing. I've been to Cappadocia, I've been to Anzac Cove — founding of your... you know, New Zealanders and Turkish people have a bond.
Emre: Nice! That's... yeah. It's a special bond. A strange bond, honestly, that's just there throughout history. Yeah, we can all relate to that.
Mark Smith: Yeah, yes. And I didn't realize how much Turkey has featured in the biblical context, because after Anzac Cove we traveled right down to Ephesus and places like that, and Troy — I never knew all of that was part of Turkey until I'd been there.
Emre: Come on. Yeah, most of Greek mythology, right, took place around the Aegean Sea. Those are beautiful places to visit — a lot of history, a lot of context there. As a kid it blew my mind. Sadly, most of it isn't in Turkey anymore. If you visit the British Museum, it's a frustrating thing.
Mark Smith: I even remember, from Troy, how the archaeologists sent all the locals home while they pretty much uplifted all the treasures and took them. Amazing.
Emre: Yeah. It's crazy, it's crazy. Have you been to Istanbul, though?
Mark Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been down into the — you know, the big underground place you can go to in Istanbul. You know Dan Brown, right? The author, the Da Vinci Code guy — he wrote a book about Turkey, and the culmination of one of his books is a virus being released, tied to the world population, that happens in that underground system in Istanbul.
Emre: Huh. Yeah, yeah, the Basilica Cistern. Of course, of course.
Mark Smith: And in Istanbul you've got a couple of mosques kind of opposite it — the one that's currently a mosque. I stayed in a hotel just down the road from there, opposite the gardens, went across the harbor, ate at some of the restaurants that had been featured on things like Chef's Table.
Emre: Nice, that's... yeah — the Sultanahmet one, and the Hagia Sophia.
Mark Smith: I think I brought home ten different T-shirts from local artists — really cool, really unique designs. That was up by, I forget the name of the tower, the big tower where all the tourists go up to the top. I never went up there — I'm not a fan of lines, and when I saw the line going down the block, I just thought...
Emre: Go to the tower? Yeah. No —
Mark Smith: (laughs) Wow.
Emre: I said, "I've lived here all this time and never been up there." She said, "You want to see it? It's empty this week." I said, sure, let's go. This is our first date, Mark — first day, and she takes me up there. We look around, nice view, this is so nice. We come down, she looks at me and says, "So you know what this means, right?"
Mark Smith: No way. No way. She entrapped you.
Emre: Yeah, exactly. But no — the real cool part about Turkey having descended from the Ottoman Empire is that a lot of the cultures the Ottoman Empire encompassed over the centuries still have their marks in Istanbul, and I think that's pretty cool. It depends on how tolerant you are, though — there are some Turkish people who are very hyper-nationalistic, right?
Mark Smith: Yeah.
Emre: I just love how the Jewish identity in Istanbul is huge, the Christian identity is amazing, all those relics from Constantinople — they're so cool. There's an archaeology museum around Sultanahmet that's one of the best things I've ever seen, because it has relics from the Hittites, the Sumerians, all of that.
Mark Smith: Wow.
Emre: It has the first written contract in human history in there — it's crazy. It's a peace agreement between the Egyptians and the Hittites, the first written agreement in history, so cool. And there are so many amazing stories there. The guy who founded the museum needs a biopic — he was an amazing painter, a chemist who studied with Pasteur in France.
Mark Smith: Wow. That's incredible.
Emre: And just all sorts of stories — I'd happily do an entire episode on history, art, culture, and mythology, because I'm a literature major, that's just where I come from. You know what, next time you're anywhere near these places, hit me up, I'll show you around. New Zealand is definitely on my list, because —
Mark Smith: That's right up your alley. Nice, nice.
Emre: I'm a surfer, and I have family living there.
Mark Smith: Wow. So I've got a surf beach about 15 minutes down the road from me.
Emre: Do you surf?
Mark Smith: No, no, no — I was brought up on a farm, well away from the sea. But my neighbor, she's 14 years old, and she just came second in the surf competition here. She's tiny — and she'll go out for five hours straight.
Emre: Nice.
Mark Smith: Her dad was always into sailing and yachting, so he just takes her there, sits on the beach, and she'll go for five hours straight. It blows my mind.
Emre: I think everyone needs some kind of connection with the sea at some point in their life. It's an incredibly humbling experience. If you're struggling to build a team at work, take them sailing — have them work a sailboat together, collaborating, trying to run the thing — and it'll set everyone straight and humble everyone. Once you feel a strong wind shake that boat, you realize —
Mark Smith: A hundred percent.
Emre: Humans are cool, but we are not all that.
Mark Smith: Yeah, so true, so true. My grandfather was the chief harbourmaster here, and he went to sea at 13 as a ship's boy — he sailed the last sailing ships into New Zealand before it switched to steam and coal power. He looked at modern boats and said he'd never go on one. He survived three shipwrecks in his life.
Emre: (laughs)
Mark Smith: He'd say he had no idea people could understand the ferociousness of the sea, how powerful it is if you get caught in the wrong conditions — he'd never go on a small boat.
Emre: I love that, I love that. Mark, this is a great note to officially start the podcast on, so I'd love to keep a bit of this in. Hi, everyone — we did not wait for you, we've been going on for a while now, but welcome to the Team Check-In. I'm your host, Emre, and with me today is Mark Smith. Mark, again, we've already been talking, but welcome to the show — it's awesome to have you here. And believe it or not, the episode will not be about sailing. Or surfing, sadly.
Mark Smith: Nice. Thank you, thank you. Or surfing.
Emre: But there's a note in there that I think ties into what we'll be talking about today, which is: humans are great, but we are not all that. And Mark, you're one of the leading voices on LinkedIn when it comes to using AI. So can you tell our audience a bit about yourself? Then we'll get into using AI as an extension of the self, in the workplace. I'm genuinely stoked to hear your take on it. Everyone, meet Mark Smith.
Mark Smith: I like it. Thank you, thank you. So, my name is Mark Smith — I'm known online as nz365guy. I had to create an online brand, because my name, Mark Smith, is — a positive spin would be to call it popular, a negative spin would be to call it common — either way, it was completely unidentifiable if you Googled it. If you heard me speak somewhere and then Googled me, you'd never find me.
So I decided to create an online identity that was uniquely mine, and it's traveled with me all over the world. I've lived in London. Speaking of visiting Turkey — I notice I didn't get a hair transplant while I was in Istanbul, since it seemed like a fifth of all the men walking around the city had had their hair plugs done. I've decided to just live the bold lifestyle in that respect.
But yeah, I'm big on AI. A term I heard back in 2019 out of Microsoft was that a lot of businesses around the world were talking about AI but it felt abstract — things like breakthroughs beating chess masters or Go champions, which is what DeepMind was doing at Google. I'd actually been to the DeepMind offices in London, because my wife was working at Google at the time and they were in the same building. All of that kind of AI felt very abstract to me. Around that time, Microsoft came out with this concept of "practical AI" — AI that was usable — and this was in the context of machine learning, well before the generative AI we live in now.
So yeah, I'm a big fan of AI. I think it's going to transform the world. And when you say humans are not all that, one of my questions is: what happens when we're no longer the most intelligent species on Earth?
Mark Smith: Right. And, yeah, it's sobering.
Emre: Now you're getting right up my alley, because there's a recurring theme on this show where I say I approach AI from a heavy sci-fi background — I'm a literature major, and I keep getting schooled and educated by more tech-savvy people. But that idea, that humans might not be the most intelligent creatures in the world, is right up my alley — right up the Asimov-through-Arthur-C.-Clarke alley. I love that.
So before we get really deep into the AI of it all — you help people succeed using the Power Platform, Copilot, and Dynamics 365, and you're a Microsoft MVP for business applications. And you created something called the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge, which I find really interesting. Can you tell us about that?
Mark Smith: Sure, sure. That happened back in 2018, I think it was. I was in London at the time, freelancing, and I'd been in this community a long time — I'd been an MVP for a while, well through my career — and I had a lot of people reaching out on LinkedIn asking me to mentor them, wherever they were in their careers. They were all working in the same space as me — Power Platform, Dynamics 365, that kind of area.
I'm the personality type who, whenever I look at something, thinks: can I scale this? How can I make it more accessible? If I'm mentoring one person, why couldn't I mentor a hundred? The other thing that concerned me is that most mentoring in my area of expertise required you to be geographically close to the mentor. I thought about the people in Nigeria who don't have anyone nearby with 20 years of experience in this space who's just starting out.
That really got me thinking, so I decided to create an online program where I'd run all the sessions live — everyone comes on, I don't care where they are in the world, and I'll try to cover enough time zones. This idea came to me on a Thursday, and I announced it the very next day, because one of the things I've always done is what I call "buying motivation" — you put it out there publicly, tell a bunch of people, so now they're going to hold you accountable for delivering it.
About 40 people signed up that first year, and it was amazing. Word spread, and the next year people were asking when I'd run it again, so I did.
Mark Smith: I ran it for five years. About 40 people signed up the first year, and by the end of the five years I was getting around 250 people at a time, from 60 different countries. I ran two time zones — an AM and a PM session — to allow as many people as possible to join, and I'd still have people getting up at 3am to participate.
I'd go on a Teams call — or Zoom, back then — and see a whole checkerboard screen of people from all different walks of life, all with completely different stories, all at different points in their careers. I came up with six things I taught, and they were all soft skills. There's no shortage of people teaching technical skills — no excuse not to develop your tech skills, because people give so much of that away free, on YouTube, on Microsoft Learn. I'm in the Microsoft ecosystem, but if you look at Salesforce, at SAP, every provider offers an unlimited amount of free technical learning content.
Emre: Yeah. Very true.
Mark Smith: What I didn't see was space for people to learn all the soft skills they needed to excel — how to communicate effectively, how to understand that different audiences need different types of communication. The things that motivate an executive don't motivate an end user, don't motivate someone in HR. How you show up in a room really propels you forward, or puts a blocker in your way.
A lot of people just haven't been taught this stuff. They fell into tech for whatever reason — they didn't go to business school, didn't do an MBA, didn't learn how to do any of this. In the world we live in, if you're going to stand out from the crowd, you have to proactively do something to be different, because we're in a global economy now and a CV isn't going to cut it. One blog post a year isn't going to cut it. You need to be differentiated in the market.
So yeah, that was the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge. I actually let it lapse for a year — I was working for IBM at the time, and I grew a community inside IBM of around 3,000 practitioners. I've always been into growing communities. When I lived in Australia, I grew six user groups across the country, around 2,000-plus members. I'd started two user groups in New Zealand before I left.
I've always liked the idea of bringing people together, because when people see someone like them in a community, they're motivated — if that person can do it, maybe I can too. That's why I talk about my dyslexia so much in the community. Not for pity, but so people think: if that guy who can't spell, who can't read well, who didn't go to university, can make it, maybe I can too. The more people I can motivate like that, the more I want to do it.
Emre: That's very, very interesting to me — and honestly, I can't in good conscience agree with the part where you say you can't speak well, because you're clearly killing it. I want to touch on the dyslexia a bit, because my younger brother has dyslexia — he's 16 years younger than me — and initiating the reading process, first grade, when you're actually learning to read, was a tough one for him.
I remember sitting down with him, focusing on the reading, and I made this little book with just a bit of writing in it where he and I went on adventures in dinosaur land, with spaces in between where he could draw illustrations of what he'd read on each page — just to get him a bit excited, because he hated reading but loved drawing. So this is something close to my heart. How has dyslexia affected your career, coming up and building your brand?
Mark Smith: Yeah. So, I couldn't read. In New Zealand, high school starts at 14 — your final schooling before university. I was brought up in a rural community; my school, from age five to 13 or 14, only had 21 students in the entire school. A husband and wife taught two different classrooms. Anyhow — I'm 12 years old, about to go to high school, and my mom realized I couldn't read. Literally could not read, and I'm about to go off to college.
Emre: How could that go unnoticed for so long?
Mark Smith: I got on well with the teacher — good personality, no skill. I copied answers on tests. I couldn't do math either. Anyhow, my mom worked it out, got me a tutor, and I started at 12 with "the apple is red, the banana is yellow."
Emre: That's a skill in its own right.
Mark Smith: That's the level I was at, at 12, 13, 14 years old. As you can imagine, I hated writing, I hated reading. If I had to get up and read something out of a book in class, that was terrifying, because I knew I'd get words wrong. I'd look at words on the page, and even in my mind, sentences never formed logically. If I was writing, words that should come at the end of a sentence would come mid-sentence, because my brain was just ricocheting all over the place.
Then take that into my professional career. Growing up this way, the concept of working a non-labor job was foreign to me. So straight out of school, I became a groundskeeper — mowed lawns. I didn't have to write, didn't have to read. I could sit on a tractor for six hours straight, mowing grass, and that's what I did for three years. Straight out of high school into that role — and how did I get it? Nepotism. My aunt worked at the place and got me the job.
And I did really well — it was for one of the most prestigious schools in New Zealand, and I became the highest-paid groundskeeper in New Zealand, in a unionized scenario. I actually left the union because they were paying me so well. I used to fix the tractors and mowers myself — I could do anything with my hands. You'll often notice that with dyslexic folks: they tend to excel in a more kinesthetic kind of world.
Anyhow, long story short, I got into my career, developed my tech skills — I wanted to get into web design, right as the web was first coming out. I found a company that supposedly taught a course on it, but it turned out to be aspirational — they didn't actually have an instructor.
Mark Smith: I went and worked at this company, and I sold the first classroom — I was good at selling — around 14 students, every seat sold. Then they said, "We don't have a trainer." I said, "I'll train it." So I went to train-the-trainer in the US with the people who'd created the course, and overnight — getting up at 2am — I learned it, then delivered the training and taught those folks web design.
Emre: Mm-hmm.
Mark Smith: That was my taste of it. I stopped selling, got properly into tech, and became a trainer for seven years — taught everything from how packets operate across a network, how routing works, internetworking, the whole behind-the-scenes of what happens when you send data. I was heavily into Linux systems and Windows.
That's been my journey. But just to give you an idea of what it was like professionally — I had one colleague say to me, "Whenever I read something you've written, my eyes bleed."
Emre: Whoa. Whoa.
Mark Smith: Right. It's actually funny, and I take it in stride — but that gives you an idea of how bad my writing was, and I'm talking about typing, not handwriting. I'd go back and look at a sentence and think, I don't even understand what I was trying to say. So when tools like Grammarly and spell-checkers came out, it changed my world. Now people who know I'm bad at writing will see something I've published online and ask, "Did you write that? I can't find a spelling mistake in it." Text tools have come a long way — it's like an appendage to me now, helping me in that area of difficulty.
But there are so many benefits to being dyslexic too. I can understand strategy, I can see things ahead of time. Right now, on election night, I'll say I'm 100% confident Trump is going to win. It's not really a good idea for me to say that publicly, but I have a knack for making statements I believe will come to pass — it's not woo-woo, but I can just see patterns other people don't see, and it's not that I think about them, they just come to me.
Emre: Yeah, let's not get into that. (laughs)
Mark Smith: And they generally do. I don't know if it's a sixth sense — I wouldn't say I'm an overly spiritual person, but I feel it's part of the dyslexia. I can see patterns and things other people don't.
Emre: That's what I was going to attribute it to — after a whole childhood and life spent piecing together patterns when it's especially difficult, I think you probably develop a better knack for reading patterns in social structures, in everything going on around you. I think that's a very inspiring journey. That anecdote about the colleague — did he know you had dyslexia?
Mark Smith: See, dyslexia is a fairly modern label, right? I wasn't diagnosed as a kid — it's a modern name we've put on this. And it makes sense, because anybody who's neurodiverse benefits from understanding that other people are neurodiverse like them, and that it's okay. It's not actually a disability — it's an empowerment, if you like.
Emre: Was it like a nudge-nudge kind of thing, or —
Mark Smith: For me, I've become able to just laugh about it, because I get it — it was a good, honest metaphor for exactly how my writing came across. I wasn't offended at all. He's a good friend of mine with a real gift for words, calling out something nobody else had put into words. I love it, so I don't mind. It's let me tell that story a few times, and people are shocked someone could be so blunt about it — but he's Australian, and Australians are blunt. That's just how it is.
Emre: I've met my fair share of Australians — sharing a surf lineup with them in Bali — and I can't object to that statement. But, Mark —
Mark Smith: Yeah, there you go. Exactly, exactly. What's their favorite swear word, right? It's a word that would get you in trouble if you used it in America.
Mark Smith: No, I won't say it.
Emre: Mark, I did want to talk AI with you, but I also want to touch on something that's come up very organically, and I don't think it's talked about enough in the world of work. We talk constantly about how important diversity, equity, and inclusion is, but what often slips past that discussion is neurodiversity in the workplace. As someone with firsthand experience, what advice would you give managers and leaders when it comes to managing neurodiversity at work?
Mark Smith: So, I worked for IBM for a while, and I hated the company — probably the first time I've said that publicly. But one thing they did well was neurodiversity education. When I went through it as part of onboarding, it honestly brought a tear to my eye, because I thought: my kids are going to have an advantage, because people will understand the value neurodiverse people bring to a team.
We had people at IBM with PhDs who'd never had a job before, because they were neurodiverse and could never get through a traditional interview — they'd just be told they weren't a fit. Neurodiversity can show up in different ways: the smell of someone's perfume can be a trigger, fluorescent lights or flashing lights can be a trigger, loud or multi-noise environments can be triggers. Yet you've got incredibly smart people who see the world differently.
That PhD person I mentioned — IBM built a custom facility for neurodiverse staff, removing all those triggering things from the environment. And guess what they worked on? Government contracts, because when someone's brain sees patterns differently, they can spot a hacker's attack vector on network activity — not by logically working it out, but understanding it in a heartbeat.
One guy on my team decided to write a piece of software in every programming language that had ever existed, just because that's how he was wired. I was on a call with him once, dressed immaculately in a suit, working from home.
Mark Smith: He knew he was neurodiverse and wanted to put it into practice — he said, "Can you see me okay on camera?" I said sure. He said, "Yeah, because I wrote the drivers for my camera myself last night — didn't want to use the ones that came with it." That's what neurodiverse folks bring: they think differently, see differently, hear and smell things differently — everything about them is different, and that's a superpower.
Emre: That's incredible.
Mark Smith: It's a superpower, because especially in business they can see things long before the logical brain gets there. They have an intuition, their brain just fires differently and arrives at an answer people can't explain — it defies logic. They're wired differently, they operate differently, and they're a massive asset to a team. Massive.
I hope the world moves further down that path — realizing we don't all have to be influencers, look good on TikTok, smile with just the right Instagram filter, because that's not necessarily normal either, in an influencer-driven world. I'd just say the more managers can genuinely upskill themselves — not lip service, not "I did my diversity and inclusion training, let me post the certificate on LinkedIn" —
Emre: Yeah.
Mark Smith: — but actually understand it. I think the biggest thing is: don't take pity, but empathize. Connect and try to understand the world from their lens. And understand that this person, although they might not act like you, has a superpower that can add massive value to your team.
Emre: I love that, I love that — especially the part about brilliant people who are an asset to their workplace but couldn't get through a traditional job interview or recruitment process. That's probably where most of the training, most of the big changes, need to be applied.
Mark Smith: Mm-hmm. Yeah, a hundred percent, a hundred percent.
Emre: So, last question on this topic: what do you think is the fault in traditional recruitment methods that allows this to happen?
Mark Smith: Bias.
Emre: Bias. Bias. Straight up.
Mark Smith: Yep. I think AI is going to solve it.
Emre: Okay, okay, Mark, great segue, great segue. Thirty-five, forty minutes into this talk, and none of it is what we'd actually planned to discuss — this has been fully off the cuff, and I'm loving it. But what we intended to talk about today was using artificial intelligence as an extension of the self.
You touched on it earlier, when you talked about dyslexia and your writing troubles, and using digital tools like Grammarly and ChatGPT to improve your writing. I think this whole concept ties in well with something I studied while looking at posthumanism — Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, where she speculates on what it means to be human now. From pacemakers to prosthetics, we're breaking past the traditional image of the human, transcending it — and that applies to gender, to social identities, to all of it.
Mark Smith: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.
Emre: This conversation about what it means to be human, and what a human brings to the table, feels even more relevant now, because AI has always been around, but it's never been as accessible as it is today. I had a great conversation with Chris Huntingford — sorry, Chris Huntingford — about using AI just for the sake of it, or "for nonsense," and what that entails. But when it's used smartly, in a calculated way, trained on organic data, it has the potential to be a genuine extension of yourself rather than just a quick, mediocre generation tool. You're someone who's an expert at this — can you explain how an AI tool can become an extension of oneself?
Mark Smith: Yeah. So first, I'm not an expert — I'm just on a journey. I feel like I've got a long way to go, but I'm glad I've started. My encouragement to people listening would be: you need to get really practical about how you use AI. If it's going to be an extension of you, you can't understand it purely from a theoretical point of view, and you can't use it like a search engine.
I see so many people look at the prompt box, which looks just like a Google search box, and assume it's a Q&A tool — they ask it a question, it spits out something, and they think, wow, how did it know that? But I think that's the wrong way to look at it. It's a dialogue tool.
Emre: Especially now that search is live.
Mark Smith: I call AI, at the moment, my sparring partner. I want it to challenge me, I want to ask it questions, I want to have a conversation with it on very specific topics. A few weeks ago, when we talked, I mentioned this idea of people making judgment calls about AI — "it's a fad, it's not going to be here for long, I tried it and it doesn't work." And I always think:
If both of us picked up a paintbrush and a palette of oil paints, and you'd trained for years under an instructor in, say, the style of Picasso, you could create these beautiful pieces of art. And me, with no training, the same paintbrush, same paints, same canvas — I'm going to produce something well short of a Picasso. The difference is one of us practiced and studied the technique, and one of us didn't. So whenever I hear someone say "I tried it, it doesn't work," I think —
I'm glad the artist didn't say, "Well, I picked up the paintbrush and the first thing I drew was a stick figure, I didn't like it, so I never did it again — this thing must be broken." The pen must be wrong, the paintbrush must be wrong, the surgeon's scalpel must be wrong. Come on — it's practice, and application. I did a presentation last week at a conference, and —
Emre: This thing must be broken, you know? There must be something wrong with it.
Mark Smith: I've been trying to work out what my actual process is. I ask a lot of the people I interview: what's your process for building a presentation for an event? So I decided to retrospectively look at what I did for this one. Months ago, I'd put in my topic — 10 strategies to accelerate your career in the Power Platform, since it was a Power Platform audience.
I already had my target persona defined — I have a three-page document I call my "one-pager" that sits on the wall next to me, this is who I write for, this is who I create for. I started from that point and came up with 10 strategies. Then I took each of those strategies into AI and asked: what do you think of these? Are these the most compelling things my target audience would want to hear about? It came back with pushback — "I don't know about that one, what about this?" — and that's what I mean by sparring partner: we went back and forth until we settled on the 10.
Once those 10 were settled, I took each one individually and started new prompt conversations for each. How I start each conversation is by telling the AI a personal story about that area — my story — and one of the instructions I give it is: don't dilute my story, don't take it out of the picture. By the time I finished that process, I had a 7,000-word document, preparing for a one-hour speech. That's the process I go through — it took a couple of hours, going back and forth until I felt, right, now I'm on message. And I wasn't going to read all 7,000 words out loud in a one-hour talk.
Emre: That's a lot to work through. That's a lot to work through.
Mark Smith: From that, I created essentially one slide per strategy — 10 slides. Then I go through and think about how the imagery can best support each one. I'm not a big fan of generating AI art for presentations — I've seen presenters do it, and it just feels off. It distracts from the message.
Emre: It looks off. I think it's the uncanny valley thing — I don't know exactly what bothers me about it, but you can instantly tell. There's a whole separate conversation to be had about AI art, and the incredible stuff Refik Anadol is doing, but that's a whole other conversation.
Mark Smith: Yes, yes. Well, here's another thing — there's a free tool called napkin.ai that takes your content and turns it into a visual diagram, like something a professional graphic designer would create — not a picture, not a photo, a vector graphic you could drop into an SVG image on your website. It illustrates the concept — if I said "here are 10 pillars," it'll create something like a Colosseum, with pillars labeled for each point I'm making. Powerful tool.
Once I've gone through that process, I bring in a graphic designer. I don't hand them the 7,000-word document — I go back to AI and ask it to distill a brief for the graphic designer, making sure the imagery on the slide supports the message rather than distracting from it. I don't want an essay on the screen, I don't want a million words up there — people aren't there to read the screen, they're there to hear me. The screen is there to back up my message.
I'm a big fan of a TED-style experience for what's on screen — less is more. I like bold graphics, I like it engaging, almost movie-esque. I want to take people on a journey, I want them to feel something when I present. So that's the process I go through. Did AI create the presentation for me? No. Was it an extension of me? Did we collaborate? Was AI my sparring partner? Absolutely. Did it help me find my own biases? Absolutely — that's one of the things I ask it: "You're now an expert in identifying bias — can you see any bias in what I've done here?" That's the beauty of it: you can hand it your material and ask, are there gaps in my thinking, what questions do you have for me to get to a better outcome? And then it starts questioning me, and I answer, and we get into some genuinely powerful, robust collaboration.
That's an example from a presentation last week. Earlier that same week, for something completely different — I have a greenhouse, I'm big into sustainable living.
Mark Smith: I grow my own food. I want the distance from food production to my plate to be as short as possible — I don't want it sitting on a truck, don't want it covered in fumes. I want to plant a seed in my garden and see that carrot on my kids' plate, and know it all happened right there on my property. So I plant a lot of seeds, and I have seed trays.
What I did was open ChatGPT's voice mode, set it going, and put my phone up on a shelf in the greenhouse. Then I'd pick up a packet of seeds, say the name of the seed, and ask, "I'm about to propagate this — what gives it the best chance?" And it might say, "You need to plant it five millimeters below the soil surface," or "this needs cold stratification, so keep it near the surface, don't bury it, put it somewhere warmer." So I'd move it higher up in the hothouse instead of lower. I'm having this whole ongoing collaboration with AI — it's just permanently on, and I'm talking away to it: "Now, how many weeks to germination on this one?" It's a constant back-and-forth conversation.
That's what I mean when I say it's becoming an extension of me. I read a book about the idea of a "second brain" — creating a second brain for yourself using technology, because your own brain isn't always the best at retrieving ideas. I'll have an idea and think, I didn't write that down, now I've lost it. Now I capture everything, and I can riff on it later. I've got a whole methodology for capturing all the data, all the inputs, everything I'm working on, in a structured way — as a digital extension of me. I really like the idea of digital twins, which was originally a concept for IoT devices —
Mark Smith: you know, a General Electric engine on an airplane, where they create a digital equivalent of it so you can monitor parameters, run stress tests, and so on. I like the idea of a real digital twin — a digital me — because I've been collecting my own data for close to 20 years now: every doctor's visit, every receipt.
For 20 years, I've never gone back and looked at 99.999% of any of it. But one day, I know the memory context of AI will be large enough that I can feed all that data in and say, "Tell me who I am — what's the context of all of this?" You've got 20 years of my experiences, all my photos, all my data, all my conversations, all my emails — make sense of this for me.
Mark Smith: And, of course, I'm partly joking about that, but I do like the idea that AI will be able to draw on experiences I've had, even now, to build context, because it has that dataset from my past. Even 20 years ago, when I started storing everything, I always envisioned a future where technology would be good enough to take this personal data and create genuinely amazing outcomes. So I'm loving where we're heading.
Emre: Yeah, there's so much to unpack there — from everything you just went through. First, here's something I wanted to share with you. When you talked about wanting the shortest possible distance from your food to your table — there's a story, I couldn't find it again, but you've been to the Dardanelles, near Çanakkale — there's a story about tuna being caught around those parts, and that tuna being purchased by fishmongers in New York, and then a restaurant here in Istanbul saying, "I want the best fish for my sushi," so they source it from the New York fishmongers, and that tuna ends up crossing the Atlantic twice, just to cover what would otherwise be a two-hour drive.
Mark Smith: Mind-blowing. Crazy.
Mark Smith: Yeah. Nuts, right?
Emre: So, a lot to unpack there. But what you said about using AI in the right context to catch bias — that's something we here at Teamflect do a lot of. Teamflect is a performance management solution for HR, and for anyone using Microsoft Teams or Outlook. When you're conducting performance reviews in Teamflect, picture a scenario where you have a lot of people to write performance review comments for. We didn't want people generating those comments wholesale with AI, because that wouldn't be very genuine, but we wanted to provide an AI writing assistant for people already writing their own comments.
Mark Smith: Mm-hmm.
Emre: So you write your own draft, and it can lengthen it, shorten it, formalize it, simplify it, help edit it — but we also added, "check this for biased language." Check my performance review comments for bias. We've had great feedback on that. So we're trying, and I think succeeding, to implement AI in a way that takes advantage of —
Mark Smith: Yes.
Emre: — the organic data your employees create day in and day out. Because it doesn't make sense to just plug in ChatGPT, put it in an app, and say, "Okay, we're ready to take AI to market." That doesn't work. Where it does work, where it actually becomes applicable to the world of work and HR, is if you can —
Companies create so much data day in and day out — like you said, 20 years of "me," and now, tell me who I am. Companies create that much data through people collaborating and working with each other, and if you can turn that into training data and use it to inform decisions, that's where AI —
Mark Smith: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Emre: — starts making a lot of sense in performance management and in the world of work.
Mark Smith: It's so true. I read a case study about Shell — the oil company, about a 117-year-old business, started around 1907. The interesting thing is that these big oil rigs, built 20, 30 years ago, were built by engineers who are no longer working — they're all retired. But because they documented everything so thoroughly at the time, all that data can now be fed into AI models, and a modern-day engineer can operate with the clarity of having that original person right alongside them, saying, "This is what I did here, this is what we did here."
I remember, ten years ago, hearing people in business talk about the four mega-trends that were going to affect the world, and one of them was the proliferation of data. Companies got very good —
Emre: Yeah, guys.
Mark Smith: — at collecting data. The problem is they just collected it — in a lot of cases they didn't really know what to do with it beyond that. Now they've got these massive stockpiles of data, and they need to make sense of it. I think the tooling is finally becoming available that will let organizations make sense of it, and maybe filter out what's genuinely irrelevant and always will be.
But here's a funny thing, about nuclear waste — just to digress, this is how my mind links things together. With modern nuclear research, they can now take nuclear waste that's been buried in the ground, sealed off for the next 150 years because it would otherwise be lethal, and turn it into fuel for new nuclear reactors — burn it up and consume it safely, rather than burying it and waiting for some future earthquake to expose everyone to another Japan-style scenario, or what happened in Ukraine with the power reactor that went off in the '80s or '90s, when the fallout spread everywhere.
What might look like irrelevant data today, who knows how it'll make sense in the future. If you look at all the research and data points that have been collected on cancer over time, who knows what AI will be able to look at and say, "There's the problem, right there — and here's how we solve it." Potentially, you and I might live to 150. There's no reason we should die young — the only reason we die is disease. So in the next 50 years, let's say AI helps us solve most diseases and we live to 150. I reckon that would be pretty cool. What would that mean for us? It would be pretty epic.
Emre: Yeah, I don't — that's the part where I feel we're getting into the sci-fi territory, which I have no problem with — those are honestly my favorite conversations, the hypothetical ones: okay, we do this, and then we live to 150, 200, and what does that even mean? Do we turn into Tolkien elves at some point, where the passage of time doesn't mean anything anymore? But that's an entirely different rabbit hole.
Bringing it back to the world of work — I think the main takeaway here is: if you're looking at AI tools in the workplace as, "our marketing team can write website copy with it," that's not the right outlook. But it can be.
Mark Smith: Nope. Nope.
Emre: The right idea, at least from this conversation, is that all the data your employees have created over the years — and continue creating every single day, every task completed, every piece of feedback exchanged — that data is now more powerful than ever, because now you have the right tools to make that data mean something, to turn it into something actionable.
Mark Smith: Yeah, something useful. But here's the thing — if we look at work and what the future of work potentially looks like, if I had the choice, I would like to do less work that makes me money. If we distill it down: why do we go to work? Because we want to have a great weekend, we want to go surfing, we want to do the things we actually want to do. So we work five-sevenths of our week to live for two-sevenths of it.
I like the idea of dropping my work hours down to 20. Not a four-day week — let's go further than that, down to 20 hours a week. But could I have an output of 40 hours? I use the word "output" deliberately — could I create 40 hours' worth of tangible, money-making value while only putting in 20 hours of input? In 2025, we're going to see the rise of agents and what it means to be agentic. If I can take what I do and put it in a format that's consumable by AI, that's where I see the extension of me going so much further.
So it's still the way I think, the way I operate — but could I do 20 hours a week and still produce 40 hours of output? If I'm working for myself, which I do, that means I get paid by customers for 40 hours of deliverables, even though I'm only putting in 20 hours of input.
So what I've started doing is looking at every area of my life and writing what are called standard operating procedures — SOPs — for how I function. How do I respond to email? It takes a lot of work to actually codify this into documents. Then I bring in virtual assistants, VAs, hand them my SOP, and they have to run it without my input.
Mark Smith: And once a week — they run it every day, I'm paying them to do this — once a week they have to come back to me and say, what were the outliers, what were the anomalies you couldn't answer automatically? Because we'll update the SOP to address those, and theoretically we'll see diminishing outliers over time as we capture the edge cases.
My end game is: let's say I do that for the next six to twelve months, and by then the agentic side of AI has gotten to the point where it's really good. I'm not going to be starting from ground zero — I'm going to take my SOP, which has already been iterated on by humans, and hand it to an agent and say, "This is how I do this." It's not going to be a small prompt — it might be a 30-page prompt — but it's going to understand me, understand the nuances, understand the variations.
Then I'm going to say, "Now I need a hundred of you to do this at scale." OpenAI just came out with their Swarm API, which lets you take one agent and iterate it 50, 100, a thousand times. So my question is: could I get down to four hours of input a week, but produce 500 hours of output a week, in a world where we use AI as an extension of ourselves? I think that's going to be possible.
My challenge to people is: I don't want to be working for a corporation at that point, because they're the ones who'll make the money off it. I want to work for myself. I want to be a solopreneur, own my own destiny, because as I create that extension of myself, I want to be the financial beneficiary of it, not a corporation. That's my challenge to people.
Emre: That's the point.
Emre: Love that. I love what you're laying out here, but everything you're describing feels like it works best in the context of a solopreneur — because when you take all of that, even just the starting point of 20 hours of labor producing 40 hours of output, and you factor a big corporation into that model, the focus can really shift to "let's just get 40 hours of output from someone on 20 hours of labor." So do we really still need the other people for the remaining 120?
Mark Smith: Yeah. So this is the problem with the free market. And I'm not a socialist, not a Marxist, not into communism, "everybody should be equal" — none of that. But the problem with the free market is that it's free for the guy who owns everything, the boss at the top. Say I invent a machine — let's call it a humanoid robot, like the ones Tesla is currently building — and that unit can do the work at half the cost of a human.
As a business owner, my instinct is, "That's money in my pocket." A fair and equitable system would instead say: "Hey, all our employees — we've got robots now that can do 50% of your job. We're going to pay you the same, or even more, but give you 50% of the week to go work in the community, add value elsewhere." No one loses their job, no one takes a pay cut — that would be a fair, capitalist system. But of course, the capitalist system as it exists only really works for the people at the top of the pyramid. That's why, right now, in my mind, this only really seems to work for solopreneurs or people who own their own businesses.
I'll tell you this: in 10 years, I doubt there will be any car manufacturer using people to assemble anything. And if that applies to cars, it applies to every single manufacturing process. The biggest threat right now isn't AI — the biggest threat to people's roles is the fast-approaching robotics industry, and where that takes things in replacing human physical labor.
Emre: Do you remember when we were talking about neurodiversity, and I asked you what the problem was with traditional job interviews and recruitment processes? I was expecting a longer, more complicated answer, but you boiled it down to a single word: bias. And now, in this context — when you talk about the real horror being robotics and everything you just described — I think the real antagonist here isn't AI, and it isn't robotics. It's greed.
Mark Smith: I'm not scared of it. I can't wait to have it.
Mark Smith: Yeah, and that's a problem — and that's actually why I think AI might potentially help solve greed for us as well.
Emre: Okay, Mark — no, no, go on, go on, I do want to hear this.
Mark Smith: Because — carry on, sorry, I'll let you finish.
Mark Smith: Well, here's the thing: human nature is wired to take everything for oneself, to protect one's own tribe — that kind of instinct's been baked into us over generations, I suppose. I think that's what becoming enlightened is really about, and I think AI can help us get there. It might need to come up with different operating models that aren't purely socialist or capitalist. Maybe there's another way our minds haven't had the ability to explore yet, because fundamentally, we like to sort ourselves into "red or blue," "them and us." We've got this innate wiring: I like people like me, and I'm wary of people not like me — this is my group, that's their group.
I think AI potentially gives us a way to cut through and understand these human challenges that a future world is going to need to address — like when someone can be bought off for a decision, whether in the legal system or the political system, which we know happens all the time. That's why maybe we won't be the most intelligent species in the future — and maybe that more intelligent thing wants to build a better world for all of us.
Emre: I mean... I feel like that's the overarching theme of today, and I think that's a nice place to wrap things up, because — for those listening, we're recording this on election day in the US, even though neither of us is there. Mark, we've covered so much today that I could honestly take every thread we touched on and turn it into a whole episode of its own. This has been an incredibly fun conversation, and I feel like I learned a lot — I feel like I've got all new questions in my head now, and honestly, that's what all of this is about, right? Every day, you wake up and try to come up with new questions to ask. So I think this has been a very special episode.
Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you, where can people reach out?
Mark Smith: The best place to find me is on LinkedIn — search nz365guy, you'll find me. nz365guy.com is my website. You really can't miss me if you search nz365guy — even the AIs will tell you who nz365guy is at this point. I've trained them well.
Emre: Nice. And if you're listening to us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts, leave us a like, subscribe, it really helps the show out. And if you're looking for a performance management solution in the Microsoft ecosystem — specifically Outlook and Microsoft Teams — you can always try Teamflect for free, by clicking the link in the description. This has been the Team Check-In. See you guys on the next one. Bye-bye.
All right, Mark — great episode. Nice conversation. Loving it, loving it.
Mark Smith: Ciao, ciao.
Mark Smith: Good. I just listened to your conversation with Chris Huntingford beforehand, since he's a colleague of mine, and I found out a bunch of stuff — I didn't know, for instance, that the Scottish Summit was going under new ownership, with different people running it. He made some comments I already knew more detail on, from what he'd said on your show, and I just thought, this is quite interesting. He's a fun guy.
Emre: Yeah. It was a fun conversation — I think he's taking a more eco-critical approach to it, which I think needs to be part of the conversation. It's a piece people don't often think about. And with the Chris episode and this one going back to back, I think that's a nice touch, and I'm really happy with how the conversation on neurodiversity came up so organically — there are some really nice bits and pieces there.
So, I'll be working on editing this episode this week — we'll probably publish it on Spotify next Monday or Tuesday, and the other distributors too. Then it's all about finding the right clips and posting them on LinkedIn, and tagging you. Awesome.
Mark Smith: Nice. Cool. Yep. Awesome — yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, on X, on Instagram, and on TikTok, so wherever you want it, I'll amplify it. Tag me in it and I'll share it. Cheers, man, I appreciate it. It was fun. Bye-bye.
Emre: Nice. Awesome, awesome. Mark, really nice conversation, man — it's awesome to meet you. Cheers. Talk to you later, everyone. Bye-bye
.svg)