Lee Johnson — The Department-of-One AI Playbook

Transcript

Narrator: AI with Kai is brought to you by Harris Vacations. Family owned and operating on the Alabama Gulf Coast, they help homeowners maximize their rental income while delivering five-star guest experiences. Learn more at ourgolfshoresvacation.com.

Lee Johnson: I'm using AI right now as almost an extension of my staff. You know, I go from kind of easing into AI like most people do with chat GPT writing emails to now I'm getting really into coding and interested in building complex dashboards and portals.

Narrator: This is AI with Kai. Practical AI for real business leaders. We break down what matters, talk with people using AI in real businesses and share one idea you can use right away.

Kai Gray: Today is still another great day to talk about AI and that's what we're gonna do today. I'm here with producer Tim Scott. How you doing, Tim?

Tim Scott: I'm good, how's it going, Kai?

Kai Gray: It's going great.

Tim Scott: You actually have AI in your name? In my name.

Kai Gray: I mean, I've tried to buy K.AI but I just need like $4 million. That's it. Wow. So maybe if this podcast does really well, we can do that. But we're here to talk about how AI gets used in your business. The Rundown.

Narrator: Five AI stories you need to know right now. The Rundown's a curated list of news articles

Kai Gray: that I think are important for businesses to know. The first story that's making real news is Oracle laid off 30,000 people. A lot of people woke up to an email at 6 a.m. saying you don't need to come into work today. A note for CEOs out there, don't do that. Not a good way. These are humans. But I think the interesting thing is that Oracle is not in a bad spot. This wasn't a turnaround. This was a reallocation of funds, right? So I think that they estimated that this is going to save them eight to $10 billion, which will be now deployed into their AI efforts. Comes at a pretty big cost for those 30,000 people.

Tim Scott: I've been in that exact situation.

Kai Gray: You've gotten that email.

Tim Scott: I got a lot of emails actually. Email's flying everywhere. Co-workers texting each other. You can be mad and bitter at AI or you can embrace it. I chose to embrace it. I chose to learn more. And now I use it a lot in everything I do.

Kai Gray: Now you're producing a podcast about AI. So it's really come full circle for you. That's right. The next story out of Bain Capital. Bain Capital's David Gross came out and said he's excited and daunted by AI. But he had a warning for companies. He said, CEOs are misapplying AI. And his point was companies are treating AI more like a tool that they're used to, rather than thinking through their business model and truly understanding where AI works. And he said, basically the winners are redesigning workflows around AI, not just sprinkling AI features on top of old processes, which I think is very important. I think AI unlocks something that we haven't had before, but requires us to think about what new things we can do with AI, as opposed to just having it fix the things we're currently doing. So it was a really interesting interview. If you want to read more, there'll be links to all the stories in the show notes. All right. The Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM, I believe is what they call it. They issued a study called the State of AI in HR for 2026. And basically their point was that 19 of the largest US states have AI related laws affecting employers, especially around hiring and automated decisions, but only 57% of HR professionals actually knew what those laws were. In Alabama, we don't have a standalone AI hiring law yet. However, the state is very clear. If AI driven hiring or evaluation leads to discrimination, you're still responsible under existing laws. And so I think that this is a cautionary note for employers. When you're using AI, you have to think about sort of existing laws and making sure that your AI enabled process complies with those laws. And don't just turn that over to AI. And so you have to make sure that you're applying the same thought processes that you do in your, let's say non-AI workflow to your AI workflow. The next new story is about AI reshaping the path from campus to career. So this was a study that came out about what's called laddering, right? So how people are getting into the workforce. One of the big concerns about AI in this is that it was taking away and will take away more entry level jobs. So how do people become senior leaders in companies if they don't have a starting place? That sentiment is driving a lot of college students to change their majors. In fact, 47% according to the study have considered changing majors because of AI's impact on future jobs. And I think that that's true for a lot of parents of college age students who ask about what majors their children should pursue. I think that this is causing a lot of reflection by current college students trying to figure out what are the things that aren't going to be affected.

Tim Scott: You have a son that's gonna be of college age fairly soon, right? Fairly soon, he's got a couple of years.

Kai Gray: And I think that, you know, I think about this a lot. I used to hope that he would go into a technical trade like myself, he has not shown any desire to do that. In fact, he's very involved in theater and the arts. Now really encouraged that he does that, right? I think that I don't want him to pursue software development. I think that that would be a daunting thing right now. We don't know where that's gonna come out. I think that AI is gonna take a lot of that. But I love the fact that, you know, he's learning the skill in theater to, you know, he can get up in front of an audience without hesitation and, you know, ham it up. The Spotlight.

Narrator: How real businesses are using AI.

Kai Gray: In this week's Spotlight, we're sitting now with Lee Johnson, Vice President of External Affairs and Economic Development for Baldwin EMC. Thank you very much, Lee, for coming in. It was great. Hi, Yoda.

Lee Johnson: It's a pleasure, man. Thank y'all for having me.

Kai Gray: I wish I didn't look like Yoda. That's the problem with that.

Lee Johnson: It's a matter of interpretation.

Kai Gray: Yeah, that's right. All right. So I think the first thing we wanna establish is, what exactly do you do?

Lee Johnson: I'm an economic developer by trade. Been in the industry about 15 years. So previously worked for the economic development agency in Baldwin County and had a background in power, working at TVA in Nashville. This is a new role. So this is external affairs and economic development. So it includes economic development, government relations, working with our major customers, our key accounts, and then community relations. So that involves getting into recruiting businesses, site development, certainly working with our legislative delegations at the federal, state, and local levels, major accounts, that kind of stuff.

Kai Gray: But you guys are a private company, correct? We are. We're electric cooperatives.

Lee Johnson: So the largest electric cooperative in the state, and that's basically a member-owned utility. So we're not for profit. Oh, I see. It kind of acts like a government entity, but it's just a nonprofit utility.

Kai Gray: How do you see AI factoring into economic development or within Baldwin EMC or the sort of general picture?

Lee Johnson: I mean, it's really kind of reflective of what I would consider all business. How do you optimize? How do you gain more efficiencies? How do you automate? How do you have better insights? I mean, and how do you just work better? Because AI is really a tool. How do you use AI to make your business better? And I think in hyper-focus on economic development, how can we generate quality leads using AI as inference? How do we distill data? How do we promote data, pull out data points? Maybe we haven't even extracted that we could really sell to that company that we're trying to recruit. And then build meaningful strategies. The strategies that we have been building in historical, are those the right strategies? Like, hey, I can help you do that. It's just getting more comfortable with it. And so you kind of look at my world and with Baldwin EMC, I'm a department of one right now. Over time, this department will be built out, but I got a lot of complexity in my job. With economic development, government relations, key accounts, community relations, I mean, you could have multiple bodies in all these spots and you can go down multiple trails, right? But I'm using AI right now as almost an extension of my staff. So, I go from kind of easing into AI, like most people do with chat GPT writing emails, to now I'm getting really into coding and interested in building complex dashboards and portals and whatnot. I'll give you an example. Government affairs, so I have federal, local, and state government affairs. The state legislature is in session in Alabama right now. I'm using AI to build a simplified portal dashboard for me that really tracks all this legislation, distills it down to things that matter not only to me, but to the cooperative, to Baldwin County, to South Alabama, to the electric industry. Understanding better what our delegation's doing and then giving me kind of like a consumable interface where I could look at this in real time and not have to go through hours of searching, how to make calls, and kind of relying on myself and AI to do that as if it was a staff member. So, I'm kind of cascading that across all my work streams.

Kai Gray: And this is all built on your years of software development experience, correct?

Lee Johnson: 1000%, you know, I grew up in Python. I probably didn't know what Python was a year ago. I definitely didn't know what a code repository was, probably more than a month ago. I mean, which kind of speaks to the sort of the amazing aspects of AI, right? Like, you can now do this, you can just build this stuff

Kai Gray: and it doesn't require a CS degree or any prior experience, right?

Lee Johnson: That's right, that's exactly right.

Kai Gray: For you, what was the first experience or tool that you used in AI?

Lee Johnson: I was probably like most. I mean, I used chat GPT was it, that's kind of, I feel like the best entry point in my opinion, you might have different things on that. People have different flavors, if you will, but I think it's just the most broad from writing your emails to images and whatnot. So, you know, I kind of used it to start to help me write, to write creatively, to help me formulate ideas and that kind of stuff. I really kind of creeped into it, but I'll tell you, it was Hatch-a-thon last year that really got my juices flowing on AI. I'm approaching it from a different perspective now. It's not just using it as an in-use tool more than it is like helping me solve problems. So, Hatch-a-thon helped me kind of connect the dots on, all right, this is how I can use AI. Identify the problem, what kind of data, what kind of inference can I give? What can I give the model? And then what am I really trying to get out of it? If I can at least have some kind of formula on that, I'm gonna get a pretty good result. So now it has me, again, thinking about things outside of work, like how can I automate, maximize, and just do better work?

Kai Gray: Have you shown any of the stuff you've done to your colleagues at Baldwin EMC?

Lee Johnson: I kind of walked them through my models and what I built and the dashboards, and it really looks like a very professionally done website that's linked, something like Tableau would do, but it's really AI-based, and it's easy and it's hard at the same time. It's easy because I'm not out there coding it specifically. I'm not writing code, I'm not spending hours doing that, so that takes that off, but what's hard about it is you gotta have persistence, you gotta continue to train the model, and be okay with 150 different iterations of this.

Kai Gray: Yes, that's a very good point.

Lee Johnson: Working with syntax errors and all these things, like, hey, this is not working, this is not working. It's still not working, you're in a loop.

Kai Gray: What advice would you give to a business owner that is in that, let's say, skeptical, or just doesn't have a lot of exposure to AI, and is right now getting 10 emails a day saying we can offer you a service for AI this and AI that? What advice would you give to a business owner today?

Lee Johnson: My advice first would be test it. Crawl before you walk, before you run, so grab that free subscription at Chat GPT, and let it write an email for you. Then you write an email, give it to them, and see how close it is. Train it to talk like you, and the next thing you know, maybe you feel more comfortable giving an Excel spreadsheet. So I would say first, get some semblance of comfort of what it can do, and then start thinking and let it kind of grow on your business processes. Maybe there's mounds of data that you have that you haven't been really able to synthesize and go through. Maybe you work with somebody to do that, or maybe you can try to train a model to do it yourself, but I think there's just an overwhelming amount of skepticism and confusion in AI right now. And like anything, I think it takes just a little bit of creeping into it, and then giving it a little more, a little more to your comfort level, and then just seeing what you can do. I would tell anybody that's listening here, if you haven't utilized AI, just try it. So we've all been reading the news

Kai Gray: about a big solar plant up in Stockton that's met a lot of resistance from a lot of folks for good and bad reasons. What's your take on that? And for background, all of that energy that was going to be collected through the solar farm was going to Meta's new data center in Montgomery. And so I think there's a whole other topic about data center. Any thoughts or opinions or insight into the stuff that's going on around here?

Lee Johnson: I knew that you'd ask that, and I was just waiting on it. Data centers is the invoke topic, I feel like, across the economic development industry, and really it's transcended to pretty much everything, business, politics, real estate. We certainly need data centers. The more people, we're talking about AI literacy here. This is basically what we're doing here. The more users we have for AI, the more it's going to perpetuate a need for somewhere for that data to go. And that's a data center. It's a house, literally a house for data. It poses a lot of challenges for the electricity industry. Yeah. And not just that, water. The amount of water and electricity it needs to power these facilities, cool these facilities, it's pretty astounding. And the demand for data centers from a megawatt perspective in the electricity industry far outweighs our ability to serve the need at present day. So it's going to be probably a big shift to our industry from electricity. Certainly it's changed economic development. We're really about jobs and capital investment. Well, the capital investment's there with data centers, but the jobs are not. So how do you look at that? Especially when you're talking about incentives and things like that. So I think it's going to be an interesting next three years. I don't even say 10 years. Next three years to see where capacity goes, to see how willing municipalities, counties, and other bodies of government are going to be supporting these. Because the activity's not going to stop. But I think people's willingness to support these are going to wane. You mentioned in the last podcast about moratoriums at the federal level put on. I don't think that's stopping. I think you're only going to hear more of that. We're no different down here. It's kind of met with a lot of skepticism, I'll say that. And as a power company, we're keenly aware and concerned in a lot of ways about it, when one data center can eclipse our total system. That's crazy. Plus, yeah, there's obvious concerns. So we're kind of wading through it. Historically, the Gulf Coast is not an ideal place for data centers.

Kai Gray: Yeah, that's right.

Lee Johnson: Data centers can't really shut off. And there's real risk every year from that, because we know we live on the Gulf Coast with hurricanes and natural disasters. Probably no more than really other areas, but still certain requirements. So we have historically not seen that activity until the last three years.

Kai Gray: You know things are getting crazy when data center operators and developers are starting to put data centers in hurricane-prone areas. Exactly. This has been great. Thank you very much, Lee, for coming in.

Lee Johnson: Really appreciate you guys, man, it's been a pleasure. This episode is brought to you by Harris Vacations. If you own a rental property on the Gulf Coast, they handle everything, marketing, bookings, cleaning, maintenance, and guest experience, so you don't have to. And if you're planning a trip, they offer a wide range of homes across Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, and Fort Morgan. To learn more or browse available properties, visit ourgulfshoresvacation.com.

Kai Gray: You're listening to AI with Kai, with me, Kai Gray. Let's get into the playbook. The playbook.

Narrator: One practical way to use AI right away.

Tim Scott: Oh, this is my favorite part of the show, Kai. What do you have that I can try this week?

Kai Gray: So a lot of companies talk to me about how to get started with AI, and it sounds a little bit low tech. I tell people that I want them to journal, keep a journal of everything that they do for a week. I get a lot of physical looks about this, but I don't care if they write these in notebooks, I don't care if they keep a notepad on their computer, but I want them to keep track of everything. And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, what they consider dumb or mundane, but in fact, that's the whole point, because the more you understand your day, the more we can understand where AI can help you. So what happens is a business leader will journal for a week, will sit down with that journal, and will look at all of the things that they did that week and will highlight things that are particularly annoying for that person, right? So, you know, administrative tasks, or I wake up and I got 30 emails to go through and things like that, we then take that list of, you know, high friction, annoying, non-productive things, and then we figure out which of those can AI help with the fastest, and we make this list from easy to implement to hard to implement. So if you're looking for something to do today, my suggestion to you is to start a business journal.

Tim Scott: I'm too lazy to write everything down now. Just grab your phone and do voice memo constantly, and then you could easily turn that into a transcript. So Kai, what does the small business owner do, like once they get that journal complete?

Kai Gray: Once you get that journal complete, you distill that down into a set of five to six, maybe seven things from your week that you really want off your plate. Don't make a list of 20 things. You really need to constrain this and say, boy, if I could not do these things, it would really, really help me. AI can read your email. AI can create sort of a digest for you. AI can write documents. There's a number of things, but once you have that list, you can start to attack it, and then you can put that list into AI and say, hey, here's the things I want your help with. It's not every item in my business journal. It's these five things. All right, that's a wrap. I'm your host, Kai Gray, along with producer Tim Scott. Big thanks to Lee Johnson for being here. If you got something out of this, pass it along to someone in your world. We'll catch you on the next episode. You're listening to AI with Kai.

Narrator: For more episodes, practical tools, and business insights, visit aiwithkai.com. Follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts and share it with someone building a business on the Gulf Coast.