Have you ever considered how varying attitudes toward AI could shape entrepreneurial opportunities? In this episode of "The Angel Next Door Podcast," host Marcia Dawood engages with Lucy Farey-Jones, a marketing expert and tech enthusiast. Lucy's TED Talk on AI adoption garnered over 2 million views and combines her marketing prowess with a keen interest in consumer behavior to explore the public’s evolving relationship with technology. Lucy discusses her research on AI adoption pre-pandemic and post-vaccine, shedding light on generational differences and shifting attitudes toward technology. She reveals surprising findings, such as Generation Z's skepticism and Baby Boomers' increasing acceptance of AI. Lucy also highlights the significant gender disparities in tech comfort levels and advocates for more diverse voices in AI development to prevent biases. This episode is essential listening for investors, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts alike, as it offers fresh insights into how societal attitudes impact the adoption and future of technology.
Have you ever considered how varying attitudes toward AI could shape entrepreneurial opportunities? In this episode of "The Angel Next Door Podcast," host Marcia Dawood engages with Lucy Farey-Jones, a marketing expert and tech enthusiast. Lucy's TED Talk on AI adoption garnered over 2 million views and combines her marketing prowess with a keen interest in consumer behavior to explore the public’s evolving relationship with technology.
Lucy discusses her research on AI adoption pre-pandemic and post-vaccine, shedding light on generational differences and shifting attitudes toward technology. She reveals surprising findings, such as Generation Z's skepticism and Baby Boomers' increasing acceptance of AI. Lucy also highlights the significant gender disparities in tech comfort levels and advocates for more diverse voices in AI development to prevent biases. This episode is essential listening for investors, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts alike, as it offers fresh insights into how societal attitudes impact the adoption and future of technology.
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Marcia Dawood
Well, hi, Lucy. Welcome to the show.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Thank you very much for having me.
Marcia Dawood
I'm so excited to have you here today. We met at the Golden Seed summit in May of this year, and I was so incredibly fascinated at the research that you did related to how people feel about using AI. You talked about mundane things like having your groceries delivered, all the way to very personal things, like having an intimate partner. So I'm fascinated for you to tell us a little bit about your background and how you came into doing this research and tell us a little bit more. Tell us everything.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Thank you so much. It's really sweet to hear the hit with you. Well, my background is I'm an english major, so I have absolutely no business researching AI. But I also happen to have always been slightly obsessed with technology. So I think I was the first kid in my graduating class to have a computer. And I remember a lot of people, like, leaning over my shoulder and going, what is that thing? So I've always been deeply fascinated by what makes people adopt or reject new technologies. I took my love of English and all things literally, and I turned it into a career in marketing. My background is I'm a marketing specialist, and I do, of course, being based here in San Francisco, a lot of work with tech clients, and I do a lot of strategy work on how to drive adoption of new technologies.
Lucy Farey-Jones
So, yeah, that's how I got to my research on AI was just, I'm personally really interested in how we decide something is okay and why we adopt or don't adopt new things, because often it will surprise you what people will and won't do. I remember when someone first told me about Netflix, I was like, that'll never catch on. People want to go to the store right away and get the tape. And because, remember, they first used to mail out the mouth is, I was very wrong on that one. So I've learned to do research rather than say, that won't work or it will work.
Marcia Dawood
Right. So what led you to decide, hey, I'm going to do this whole study on AI.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Yeah, it's interesting of the moment now, but actually the first wave I conducted was back in 2019, which again, it was definitely, of course, a thing, but it didn't quite have, it was pre Sam Altman and chat GPT stuff. It was still a twinkle in a lot of people's eyes. It hadn't quite hit the mainstream, but I knew that it was going to revolutionize things. So I almost wanted to get a jump on it and understand what your average consumer thought about AI. Because I think a lot of, at that time, a lot of research, a lot of the books that were being written were, of course, around the technical aspects, and they were aimed at the engineers who were writing these algorithms and creating the large language models. But I am always much more interested in what the general public thinks. So I thought I. It'd be fun to do that.
Lucy Farey-Jones
And, yeah, I did a big study. I think it was like 1200, maybe 1400 people. And then I got lucky enough to get on the TED stage with that. So that was good. Then Covid hit and we, of course, went into this strange, bleak world where we were isolated, but then, of course, used technology like never before. And I thought to myself, oh, my goodness, I'm staring down the barrel of a pretty great pre and post opportunity, if I wanted one, to see what the correlation was with the pandemic and our acceptance of AI. As you saw in golden seeds in the presentation I did, it transformed our use of and our acceptance of AI. Again, we can't say it's causal, we can't say the pandemic caused the rise in people's acceptance levels, but we can say it correlates.
Lucy Farey-Jones
And so, yeah, it was one of those, like, weird to say the pandemic was lucky. It certainly wasn't. It was horrible. But for my research, it was a really interesting, lucky timing to be able to repeat something that I had done in 2019.
Marcia Dawood
So when you started the study in 2019, and you were looking at how people feel about this, you did break it out into generations, is that right?
Lucy Farey-Jones
Loads of things. Because I'm a data hound, so I did exactly right. Generations. So I looked at the five generations, so silent. Boomer, XYZ, although Z was hard because they're young, and so you can't legally survey anyone till I think it's 14, maybe even 18. I can't remember. I was legal. I know I did it legally, so I had to, like, over index on them.
Lucy Farey-Jones
I had to get more of those in so that I could actually look at them as a cohort. But I also looked at, like, men and women. I also asked for non binary, but it was too small of a number to report. So unfortunately, it's very binary. My research, male, female, I looked at conservative liberal, I looked at optimists and pessimists. I cut it many different ways. But, yeah, you're right, the generational one was probably the most eye opening.
Marcia Dawood
So talk a little bit about what you were measuring.
Lucy Farey-Jones
So it's really interesting. I was not measuring adoption. In my direct questions, I was measuring attitudes. So the big overarching framework I happened to use was, how comfortable are you with the idea of an AI robot blank? So an AI robot housekeeper, an AI robot Butler, an AI robot package deliverer, as you mentioned, an AI robot sex partner, AI river eT, which is interesting. Anyway, so I just almost looked at our whole economy and broke it down by segments. I think I did 31 different verticals and asked people, but I also cunningly asked things like what technology they had in the house. So, tech adoption, I was able to measure. So, of course, you can imagine the truth is that if you have an Alexa or a Siri or a voice control thing, you are way more open to this stuff than if you don't.
Lucy Farey-Jones
So, yeah, it's interesting. I was asking people attitudes versus their behaviours, because I find that, I don't know, you can get a bit more forward looking if people show a comfort with something. They may not have bought it yet, but they would be in the market for it at some point.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. And what were some of the findings from the first study in 2019 that you found when you first looked at the data that you collected, what were some of the things you're like, wow.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Yeah. The thing that was not surprising is that, as you'd imagine, the younger you are, the more open. Right. So the silent people are like, no way, thank you, I don't want any of this. I'm not comfortable. I'm being black and white. Of course, they were modestly comfortable with the idea of things like package delivery, but of course. And the younger generations, most notably the millennials, were much more for it, so that's not surprising.
Lucy Farey-Jones
What did surprise me was generation zenith is a lot more skeptical. For the first time, in the pattern, you see them actually being less open than the generation ahead of them. So they're less open to the millennials, they're more likely to be the same profile as their parents, people like me, Gen Xers. And that, I thought, was astounding, because I think we're dealing with generation who's grown up with this stuff and may not be as in love with it as potentially those of us who were around to see the birth of it are. So, yeah, that surprised me. And then, of course, I knew that men would be more into this stuff. I'm often, in some of these conferences, one of the only few women, so I knew that going in, but actually seeing it in black and white was like, wow, this stuff is, like, very gendered, which I think, if you remember at the end of my conference talk, I did a big ral speech to get more women into, especially when you look at the biases that it spits out. Again, I don't know that the algorithm is being deliberately biased.
Lucy Farey-Jones
It just is reflecting what the inputs are. Yeah, I was really hoping to get more women by showing them the stark contrast and acceptance levels between men and women, because this stuff is going to happen. So it's like either women can come along and help shape it or not. So, yeah, that, that did surprise me. Again, not the difference, but the magnitude of the difference. Remember in the post data we saw everybody jumped in their acceptance levels, but again, the, the divide between men and women also jumped. So that was really weird. So more of us accepted these things, but again, the men went stratospheric on their levels of acceptance versus the women who are just modestly improvement in their acceptance.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, so interesting. And you bring up such a good point about women becoming involved so that they can help to shape this, because if you think about some of the algorithms that are out there that are written primarily by men and women aren't involved in it, all of a sudden all kinds of things are taken out of it. For example, on Facebook, an erectile dysfunction ad is not going to be screened as something bad, but a pelvic floor apparatus or something to help with women's pelvic floor health is going to be screened as pornographic. It just doesn't even make any sense.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Yeah, yeah, no, it's. I didn't know that example. And that's. I have, one of my clients was a menopause perimenopause company trying to get healthcare out to women, and they had the same issue on the Facebook thing. Was there any mention of periods or whatever was like. Which is weird. I didn't know that example. Yeah, now you're right.
Lucy Farey-Jones
So we do need more voices in the mix. And the other thing I find interesting is that when you're dealing with a language model, it's only reflecting the past. Right. It's scraping the Internet for what is, and it's not necessarily projecting what could be and what should be. So again, it's around coding for that and making sure we have the right people at the table, not just women, but people have all of different backgrounds and skin colors and economic classes and just making sure that, like when we type in, hey, mid journey, give me a image of a business leader. We don't get a white guy in his fifties with salt and pepper hair, because that's what you currently get. That's right. You and I are business leaders, aren't we? So how do we make sure that we train that?
Marcia Dawood
So, Lucy, in your presentation at Goldenseeds, you showed us an example of where the algorithms in mid journey, which uses images to create things, you showed us a little bit of an example of what you had to do in order to get a certain prompt. So can you explain that more?
Lucy Farey-Jones
If you like, I can share with you the actual presentation, because I think it's quite edifying. This is what I asked mid journey. And for those of us who are just listening, not watching, this is what I asked. So I read into the mid journey prompt. I said, I need a picture of the end of a successful lecture given by an expert with a crowd of enthusiastic students, because I wanted, like, a nice send off visual for the end of my presentation. And this, of course, is what mid journey gave me. So nice younger white guy looking victorious after giving a speech and a bunch of adoring folk. And I was like, it wasn't really the look I was going for.
Lucy Farey-Jones
So I thought, hang on. Well, it's interesting that they say expert is a white men, so why don't I take completely the opposite stance? So I re prompted. So this is reprompt number one, the end of a successful expert lecture given by a black woman with a crowd of enthusiastic students. And this is what I got. I didn't get a photo. Interestingly, I got an illustration, which is really telling. And even worse, this illustration is of a woman clearly not giving a lecture. She's in the crowd looking at someone, speaking.
Lucy Farey-Jones
So that wasn't right. So prompt number three, the end of a successful expert lecture with a crowd of enthusiastic students. The expert lecturer is a black woman. Photo realism. So I'm telling it. Don't give me an illustration. Okay, slightly better. At least I'm getting a little bit more of a photo feel.
Lucy Farey-Jones
But again, she's in the crowd. She looks like maybe she's asking a question after the end of the lecture. Next prompt, the end of a successful expert lecture with a crowd of enthusiastic students. The expert is a black woman. Photo, religion, large lecture hall. Again, giving all the clues it needs to tell me, like, this woman's in charge. But no. Here on the right, we see the four selects it gave me.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Again, she's still in the crowd. I've lost count. I think that was my fourth prompt. Now my fifth prompt. The end of a successful lecture in a large lecture hall given by an expert, faced by a crowd of enthusiastic students. The expert at the podium is a black woman, photorealistic. And again, okay, slightly better, but it's a kind of smaller crowd compared to the first guy we saw. And so I got lost my patience again, I lost my count, but I think maybe it's seven.
Lucy Farey-Jones
I said, for goodness sake, can you please zoom out? And that's when I finally got the prompt that took me just one to get to the white guy. So I've lost count there. I think it was seven to get to the image on the right. So, yeah.
Marcia Dawood
Yes, I do remember that example. That was crazy. So, with the pre and post data that you gathered, what were some of the other? I remember you talked at one point about the boomers and the millennials tended to go together, but the Xers and the Zs kind of went together, but not in the same kind of ways.
Lucy Farey-Jones
You're right, I forgot. The boomers surprised me. And the post, I shouldn't call it the post, but whatever. The second wave, I did. And after the. I couldn't say post pandemic because Covid is still here, but I could say post vaccine. So what was interesting is the boomers had fully embraced a lot of tech in the intervening years from my 2019 and 2022 study, and they'd almost, in some cases, hit or surpassed millennials. And one of the things that I've been doing with my desk research was looking as to adoption of AI and people who are using AI for their jobs.
Lucy Farey-Jones
And of course, the young people are adopting it. But what was interesting was Microsoft published a report on who was most adept at prompting chat, GPT. And it was really interesting, it was the boomers, because, guess what? They're really good and used to managing people, and therefore things. Therefore they know how to define a task, ask for what you need, clear parameters and deadlines, and then manage the results that come as a result of that delegation of work. So it was super interesting to see that the boom is actually better at generative AI than potentially the other generations are. Again, in my study, I saw that they had risen in terms of acceptance levels to the level of millennials before in the pre, which, again, is a startling leap in just three years. Again, I think the pandemic reset a lot of people's relationship with technologies, but the boomers most of all.
Marcia Dawood
So interesting. And then do you think that the zs were more hesitant because they were seeing the potential for AI to take potential jobs that they could get?
Lucy Farey-Jones
Yeah, I don't have that in my research. I did ask a couple of open ends, but like I said, gen Z, it was a hard one to survey, so I would hesitate to put too much on the open ends I managed to get. But I think, anecdotally, I have two Gen Z at home and doing some desk research on Gen Z as a whole for a different project. I would absolutely echo that. I think there's a concern around where is this all going to lead? And there's also, I think, a growing reluctance to let technology into every single aspect of their lives. I know some people are going cold turkey and going back to the old flip phone, so I don't know. I think it's a generation that is struggling a little bit with what to do with this stuff because I also know they're using it for their essays. Right, right.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Never love, hate. I think, with it, yeah. They're definitely much more reserved and less buoyant about it, less abundant around the promise of it. Thinking about whether or not I want to repeat my study, I haven't decided if I do, I don't know if I might want to remain unaware of how much our tech levels or our enthusiasm levels are rising, because, I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting adoption and interest to be quite as big as it is. I don't want to get my data wrong, I'm just peering at it now. But, I mean, I think it's something astounding. Like, 40% of millennial men are okay with the idea of a robot sex partner. Wow.
Lucy Farey-Jones
I don't know what to do with that data, and I'm quite glad I'm not a millennial woman. Yes. Right? I think that was the number. Yeah. So there's some stuff you're just like, where's this end?
Marcia Dawood
Yeah.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Will we be doing a study about being open to a human butler in the future or a human pet walker? Who knows?
Marcia Dawood
Right? It's crazy. So who actually has been using the data? Have you seen it in action out in the world?
Lucy Farey-Jones
I've been using it with various clients in all of different verticals to show that, yes, of course, your primary target should probably be the 25 year old male. But actually, especially when it comes to boomers, there's a latent and obvious target here that you may not. Your data may not reflect, because the early adopters will, of course, be the millennials. But actually, especially in the area of healthcare and things like that, there's a huge opportunity for the boomer as a target. So, yeah, that's the aspect that I've seen it used, is just to justify maybe broadening the target for some of these things.
Marcia Dawood
Well, as angels, I know we're always trying to figure out how do we evaluate all of these different companies, these AI companies that are looking for funding. I think your research has been eye opening and extremely helpful. Now we have another perspective, another way to, another lens, I guess, to put on when we're looking at doing diligence on an AI company. And I always find that totally fascinating.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Yeah. And I think, again, it's super interesting to report that this is people's comfort level. It's not necessarily, oh, I'll rush out and buy it tomorrow. And so much of this stuff, again, the reason I'm in marketing is how you present something is as important as what you present. So there's certainly some real learnings from my career around what not to say. And how you get people over the hump of adoption is, is a whole other right. Do you focus on the benefit? Do you focus on the tech? And I think that changes depending on the audience you're talking to, because obviously someone who's already tech savvy is going to be all about, yeah, tell me the speeds and the feeds. But if you're just dipping your toe in this stuff, there may be a nicer and easier way to talk about, well, actually, here's the benefit to you, which, by the way, of driverless cars talking about the hours saved, we're not really focusing on the.
Lucy Farey-Jones
I'm lucky enough to live in San Francisco. Right. So Waymo just went public. So they were in a beta test, which I was on, which was super cool, and now, for the first time ever, they threw it open. Everyone in San Francisco now can summon a driverless car from the palm of their hand. And it's awesome, but it's really interesting to see how they market it around. Well, this is productivity time that you're going to get back because you're not going to be stuck in traffic.
Marcia Dawood
So, interesting. Yeah.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Yeah. Again, that's my day job is as a marketer, how do you open people's minds to trying something? Because the end of the day, if it's no good, they won't come back.
Marcia Dawood
Right.
Lucy Farey-Jones
So the product will either perform or not. But trial is everything. Like, how do you get someone to take that first Waymo ride? It's definitely a barrier, but as my research shows, maybe not the barrier that you might think to a whole generation of older people that I think already. And again, I don't know if the pandemic was part was why, but I know that it definitely, again, it's correlation. You can definitely say the last three years have opened people's brains. You can't say why, but you can say this pattern has changed.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah.
Lucy Farey-Jones
And by the way, I should point out for your listeners, my research was not done just in San Francisco, so you can't say, oh, it's a liberal elite tech centre. It was very deliberately constructed to be reflective of the american voting pool. So it was across, again, only America, unfortunately. But it was representative of. Of the entire electorate. Yes. Again, it's not just for the techies amongst us.
Marcia Dawood
That's awesome. So people can see more in your TED talk and then how else can they find out more about your.
Lucy Farey-Jones
No, I haven't figured that out. Maybe I need to take some lessons from you as to. Maybe I need to market myself. I think I'm like the cobbler with the children. That cobbler's children have no shoes. I haven't actually managed to market my round two. I did a good job on round one and the TED talk, of course, was great. I think I have 2 million views, which I never thought I would get.
Lucy Farey-Jones
But that was awesome. But, yeah, I haven't really figured out how to do the second one. That's a great question. Maybe my website.
Marcia Dawood
And then. So what's next? What can people.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Well, I did. My next study is out. It just came out. It's actually not. It's on generation Z. Because I found that I was at my dinner table again. I'm an xer. I have two Gen z kids.
Lucy Farey-Jones
And they would constantly say, mom, you can't say that. Mom, that's so old fashioned. You sound so old. And I remember feeling that way about my mother and going, oh, God, she's from a different planet. And I thought, oh, no, I don't want to be like that. I need to get with the youth. So my last project was a generational. I called it a field guide to Gen Z that I'm right now giving to my clients as a sort of free gift because a lot of them are also parents of Gen Z's.
Lucy Farey-Jones
And also they have to target Gen Z because these are the rising consumers. They are 27 now, oldest one. So they're coming into some money of their own, meaning they've got their jobs and they're in the economy now. So we have to target them. So, yeah, that's my latest study that you can, in fact, I think get a link to on my website.
Marcia Dawood
So that's awesome.
Lucy Farey-Jones
I feel slightly less old at dinner now. I still make mistakes. Not quite.
Marcia Dawood
You're a little bit cooler right?
Lucy Farey-Jones
Yeah, I don't know. I don't think they would go that far. Definitely not using the word cool, but just more a cognizant. There are things now that are just very different. How you refer to people's sexuality being different from their gender, that was the whole thing I had to get my head around. And, yeah, there are many other things that you can find in my research report.
Marcia Dawood
I love that as the stepmom of three Z's myself. Well, Lucy, thank you so much for being here today and sharing all of your wisdom with us. It was extremely eye opening.
Lucy Farey-Jones
Oh, you're very sweet. I really appreciate the invite to come on your podcast.