Clips from AI is Wonderful. So Why Is It Driving Us Nuts? (public version)

[00:00:00] hey folks. Welcome to our session on why copying and pasting between AI tools shouldn't be the holy grail of our AI enabled project management dreams and what the future of integrated AI supported project communications could look like.

Galen Low: Uh, we do events like this regularly as a way for our members and our VIP guests to engage directly with the experts who contribute and collaborate with us here at the digital project manager. And today I'm here with Qalo, CEO and co-founder Devin Mahoney. Uh, and we're gonna be kicking off shortly. Uh, and, and I will do formal introductions, but I thought maybe we could start first with just a little bit of tradition.

Um, so I'm wondering if maybe you could just let me know in the chat. Where you're joining from and maybe just like what your biggest work challenge has been lately. Uh, it doesn't have to be a long description. Even just gimme like two words that sum it up. Maybe it's like prompt hoarding or reporting backlogs or carpal tunnel syndrome caused by the various keyboard shortcuts that you use to switch between your 18 tools and 92 browser tabs.

Okay, that was more than two words. Uh, but while you do that, I'm gonna go through a little bit of housekeeping and talk a little bit about, uh, today's session. Uh, so today's session is being recorded. It will be published as an episode on our podcast, the DPM podcast. We may also use video clips from it on our website and on our social channels.

Um, your cameras and microphones as guests, as attendees are off by default, so you will not appear on the recording unless you opt to come on stage and ask a question. Um, but please feel free, uh, we don't feel like it's rude if you keep a side conversation going in the chat. Um, and the chat will not be published.

Um, although we may. Pull from it in real time just to build on the conversation as we go. I should mention that, um, the q and a session at the end will, will not be published alongside the episode. So don't worry about, you know, becoming an overnight viral success for asking the world's spiciest question.

Um, it'll be totally like just intimate. I. Intimate vibes, uh, and won't be shared. Uh, but also please don't be shy about asking questions along the way. Um, Michael, uh, from the community, my producer and kind of Swiss army knife, uh, he's gonna be collating them all, uh, and putting them into a dock. And we're gonna address as many questions as we can at the end.

Um, and I know we do have some VIP guests in the audience today, so if that's you, welcome. This is just one of many live sessions that we hold for our members who get access to a number of other benefits, including our entire back catalog of session recordings, our library of templates, resources and mini courses, as well as our flagships certification course, mastering Digital Project Management.

You can join in the fund by going to the digital project manager.com/membership. Uh, and last thing, I'm going to just give you a bit of a session roadmap. So here's how things are going to work today. Um, we're gonna start with a 15 to 20 minute interview, and then we're gonna follow that up with a 20 minute walkthrough of Qta LO's Command Center prototype.

And then we're gonna end with 15 to 20 minutes of audience questions. Um, and because this is a podcast recording as well as a prototype walkthrough, it might sound like we're wrapping up multiple times during the session. Like, you know, like the fifth act of like, when, you know, one of those, uh, Hollywood films that just doesn't seem to end.

Um, but it's all by design. Um, and feel free, please, to say for the full 60 minutes, um, we'd love to have you wanna make this as interactive as possible, as valuable as possible, and as fun as possible. Um, so if everyone is ready, we will dive in. I'm just gonna drop my throne into do not disturb. Um, and we are going to kick off.

All right. I'm gonna do my podcast intro. So for folks who like, uh, you know, don't feel like this is jarring, but I'm gonna switch to my radio announcer voice for the podcast and then we'll dive in. Here we go. Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Lowe with the Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident at get connected, so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world.

If you wanna hear more about that, head on over to the dpm.com/membership. And if you're into future looking conversations and practical insights around digital project leadership, consider subscribing to this show for weekly episodes. Today we are talking about the plethora of frankly, amazing AI tools out there to help you manage your projects and the absolute abysmal user experience of copying and pasting between them just to get the results you need for your project communications.

Uh, with me today is Devin Mahoney, CEO, and co-founder of QTalo, but above all, a project manager hell bent on easing the pain of project management using ai. Devin, thanks for joining us today.

Devin Mahoney: Galen, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here and talking to this audience.

Galen Low: excited too. Uh, we also have members [00:01:00] live in the studio today who are also gonna be getting treated to a use case walkthrough of QS command Center prototype, as well as an intimate and interactive q and a session with Devin after this interview. Um, so I, I thought maybe what I'd do is just kinda like start by zooming out because you and I, we've been, we've known each other for, I guess like over a year now.

Um, you know, when Qala was in its, you know. Baby days, I guess I would say. Um, and what I love about what you do at QTalo is that you've got this like really specific focus on like zeroing in on challenges related to project communications. Um, and you've kind of, you've been talking to reams of project managers doing the jobs and, and the, the pain and the challenge that they're running into, and you've built your product around that.

Um, everything from like adapting project communications for their intended audience to like streamlining like the proverbial communications coming from everywhere problem so that pro project leaders like don't have to be burdened by that, that like, they don't have that friction in their day that we [00:02:00] kind of accept as like normal, but you've kind of said, listen, that's doesn't have to be the case.

Like we can, we can use technology to like help us around that. Um, but really what struck me is that like Qalo has, like AI in its DNA, like you set out. To figure out how AI can be used to solve these problems. Um, I'm just wondering like, what was it that made AI the right ingredient for your mission of like fostering a more efficient, more engaged and more effective project management workforce?

Devin Mahoney: Yeah, well, Galen it, it seems obvious to us project managers, but it's not obvious to, uh, ev everybody else who's working on one thing at a time. I mean, wouldn't, wouldn't that be crazy just to work on one thing? Uh, but for a project manager, your data is living in dozens of different places. It's in Slack, it's in email, it's in Jira, it's in your documents.

It, the context for your project is fragmented across all of these different places. And so the reason that we [00:03:00] have AI here is 'cause AI can help us ingest all of these streams in real time, stitch 'em together and surface what matters to the pm. We are trying to automate that, finding the needle in the haystack.

Work so that PMs can focus on planning, they can focus on risk, they can focus on their stakeholders instead of just chasing status result. Here, it's less context switching. It's faster decisions, and it's a consistently informed team without adding a ton of new manual steps.

Galen Low: I love that it is like, that. There's so much like trauma that's like kind of bubbling up in my head as you say that because like, I, I, I, like, I very often do this where I'm like switching between apps or I'm like looking for that thing and I'm like, gosh, I wonder how much of my life has been spent just like trying to remember what TAB I'm trying to go to.

Or like getting like distracted by that, you know, slack pops up and I'm like, oh yeah. Like I can solve that quickly. And meanwhile that really important thing I was supposed to do, like, it gets pushed [00:04:00] further and further into the future and like, it's like such a reality. And there are, there's just like so many tools.

Um, and like one of the things that you and I had had chatted about sort of leading into that, um, I, I I should mention that like the working title for this episode is, um, AI is Wonderful. So why does it suck so much to use, which is kind of like our way of ribbing, uh, the sort of usability of the tech right now.

Uh, can you like, talk to me a bit about what you mean when you say that AI sucks to use?

Devin Mahoney: Yeah. Well, Galen, I love ai. Like I'm in here every day. I, it's, it's helping me with, with everything. I, I, I, uh, and so I just love using, it's just this magical thing. Um, it, it kind of, it for, for a project manager, it shows up in two places. It can show up as an add-on into your apps. So if you're using, you know, Trello and Clickup, it's like, oh, here's our little AI fairy and it's gonna do something for you.

Or it's a standalone chat, j PT style [00:05:00] of like, okay, I'm gonna chat with my, my friend, the AI and it'll help me with something. Um, so those are the two kind of flavors. Now, when AI is a, is a feature inside of an individual app. The problem, the frustration is they can only see a small slice of the project.

Re remember, you're getting slacked about all these things. You're getting emails from your customer. They're not inside of, uh, uh, inside of these specialized apps. And so you still have to copy and paste stuff into these tools to give the model the full context for what's going on. And it's even worse when AI's in a central chat.

And again, I love using chat, GBT. Like it's, it's, I love the prompting. It's so much fun to like craft the perfect prompt. Um, but you have to do it, you have to get the prompt, right? You have to get the follow up, right? You have to do the manual cleanup, and now you have 50 chat threads to go along with your 72, you know, browser windows.

And you're, you, you, now, you've turned a project manager into like a [00:06:00] copy paste monkey again, instead of being the strategic leader that we were meant to be, um, gosh, like really I have 50 different, you know, chat GBT things and I don't know which one is the one I'm supposed to working on. Um, and then the output.

The output, like, it's really good. I mean, it's, it's better, it's better than I am. Uh. But it's like 90% of it is right and 10% of it is wrong. And you gotta be, you gotta put all this time into fixing that last 10%. And so did it save you time? Yeah, it saves you time, but it's, it's, uh, you still have to put that effort in.

So this is like the most magical technology. And you, you use it once, you use it occasionally, but you, you put it into your day-to-day workflow and all of a sudden, uh, so the thing that you were doing consistently is now clunky and it's, it's not the same experience every time. It's not that same magical experience unless you get it.

So it's getting fed the data that it [00:07:00] needs from this unified cross tool context. Uh, so I love ai, but man, does it suck today,

Galen Low: I,

Devin Mahoney: better.

Galen Low: I, it's very relatable. I'm like, I, I, my chat GPT is a mess. Like, um, it's like very disorganized. I was even just taking the, the, the PMI prompt engineering course. Uh, lovely course. Um, and it's kinda like, Hey, like just create a spreadsheet of all your prompts and how they're working for you. I'm like, that's a good idea.

Also that thing you said about being a copy and paste monkey and getting lost in like, you know, all the prompts that I wanted to test and all the data because I need it in a central spot because I'm using all these different LLMs 'cause I'm testing them. Like there's actually a lot more in common with like onboarding a new team member who has their blinders on for whatever reason than actually like using software.

'cause it's like, cool, let me give you the context. Lemme describe the thing that I'm trying to do. Okay. Yeah. Not that we need to kind of refine. It's not exactly like a tool workflow. It's like, um, it's an interaction. It's like [00:08:00] a, it's a sort of, um, colleague style interaction, right? To kinda like, get the results and you know, frankly, a lot of us just aren't great at that or haven't been trained at that and it's a bit of a different thing.

Um, but then the, the other thing is just like, yes, like we're still kind of like figuring out all of the tools in tech. Like there is a myriad of tools out there right now and the current guidance is try 'em all and see what works best for you and then keep refining. And the last thing that I wanna do when I'm adding all this time to kind of figure all this out is like, okay, how am I gonna shuttle this information sort of back and forth, like between some of the tools, some of which have AI features, you know, like models that don't know what, you know, conversations I had with chat GBT like you mentioned.

It's just like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's clunky. It's amazing. And it's clunky,

Devin Mahoney: Right. It could be two things at once.

Galen Low: right? Yeah. And I think it's like, you know, I, I, I think it's important because I think, um, you know, we're, we're, we're very impressed [00:09:00] with the output. You know, like, and I, I think that's, you know, it's fair that we are impressed by the output. Um, a, it's not the end. This is like, we haven't sort of like reached the like final gold standard of what AI looks like for project management.

Um, and also it's like we, the way we're using it today is not necessarily how we're gonna use it in the future. Like even just the usability.

Devin Mahoney: Oh, I totally agree, and I can't wait for that future. But also, you gotta, you, you, you're, you have the tool you have now and you gotta figure out how to use it.

Galen Low: Yeah. Well, and the other thing I was gonna say, we, we need to build it as well, which is like, you know, kind of what you're doing, which I, I love. Oh, I wonder if I could take a bit of a side quest and I, and I, for, for folks listening, I will tie it back. Um, but, uh, one of the things, uh, Devin, that I notice about Qal is that like, you've got a really strong focus on privacy, but you have a bit of an unorthodox take on the matter.

And I was wondering if you could just like, talk to me about like [00:10:00] why privacy is important to you and why it should be important to people who lead projects. Uh, not just sensitive data, but like the way we like, just the way we work.

Devin Mahoney: Yeah, O okay. Good question. And, uh, Galen, I'm, I'm a cybersecurity guy and so like, privacy is, it's in my DNA. Uh, and I could talk your ear off about SOC two, which I'm not gonna do because this podcast is only so long. Um, but, but let me talk about privacy for a project manager, because for a project manager to do their job, we keep a private working memory and some of us use our notes app.

Some of us use our spreadsheets, some of us use actual paper. This is, these is my notes, uh, as a project manager. And, um, this is where your half-baked ideas go. This is where you're, you're sc scripting your notes before you actually like, write an email or commit something to your system of record like G Jira or [00:11:00] Salesforce.

Um, there's no cost to use it because it's just for you. You, you don't have to worry about whether it's tagged. You don't have to worry about whether it's even correct. It's, it's, this is a, it's a liminal workspace. It's gotta stay private. It's where your critical thinking goes. It's where your rough drafts happen.

It's where the real risk planning begins. And our goal qalo is to honor this liminal zone. We help you pull insight from these drafts without prematurely publishing them. It gives you this opportunity to think aloud safely and still benefit from this shared context of what's going on in your system of record.

So we're protecting this creative buffer. We're helping bridge this gap. And our, our goal is to yield cleaner, accurate updates for teams, for your leadership, for your customers, all your stakeholders.

Galen Low: I love that so much because like there's like, yeah, there's stuff in my notebooks I don't really want anyone else to see ever. Um, and I love that [00:12:00] notion that like I. You know, privacy, we always think of like sensitive client information, right? Or, you know, sensitive financial data or, you know, personally identifiable information from, you know, like, uh, like in, in, in healthcare.

Um, but I really like this notion of like, me as a user, I. Like I, I want to benefit, I want that notebook that is an LLM, right? Where I'm like writing stuff and it's like, okay, cool. Do you want me to like correlate that for you? How about this? Like, you know, asking me questions. Um, but that's my like working sort of context.

It's not my presentation context. And I would love to know that, like the broader model in my tool is not training on all of my like rough draft notes. And then someone's going like, Hey, what kind of project manager is Galen? They're like, uh, scatterbrained really? Like it's a loose cannon. Like you start sentences and he doesn't finish them.

Like, it's wild. You know, like I don't want that like entering the ether, um, you know, of my tool and you know, like, like, uh, coming as a layperson in, in, in, in this conversation, right? And I'm like, [00:13:00] I don't know. It seems like all these models are training on pretty much everything. I don't really have that much line of sight.

Um, without getting into the sort of compliance side of things, I don't always have line of sight of what's being shared, where honestly I'm not like. Committing to memory all the terms and conditions for all the tools that I've like signed up for. I probably should, but I'm kind of like, okay, like, you know, I'm taking for granted the idea that, you know, I, I should probably approach it with caution, um, but that it's for the greater good.

Whereas I think what I like about what your, like, your angle is like, no, like there should be this, you know, this layer where you still benefit from what you're training your personal sort of model on within your tool. Ideally not just jumping around to all these things. Um, and that should be like a thing that's known.

It's like, don't worry, you're in the zone where like this won't get shared with your colleagues and you're like, cool. And it's like, would you like me to print this to your colleagues? I was like, yes. Now it, now it's fully baked. Let's go. Like, just that level of clarity I think is just it. It [00:14:00] demonstrates that well, you know, to pay you a compliment.

It demonstrates that you understand the way project managers work. You're not just building software, um, which I think is like the real, I don't know, the real it thing, the thing that gets me excited about what you're doing.

Devin Mahoney: Thanks Galen. Really appreciate it.

Galen Low: Uh, I, I wanted to kinda like, I'm like, I'm gonna pay you a compliment and then I'm gonna backhand you with the devil's advocate thing, which is like we've been talking about, uh, we've been talking about how there's so many like, product to, like productivity tools out there. There's so many AI tools out there.

Um, part of your criticism, if I'm picking up correctly, like part of your criticism of modern efficiency is that we, we are using too many disparate tools. Um, so my devil's advocate question is like, why did you feel like the world needed one more tool in qta?

Devin Mahoney: Oh, that's, uh, it's a great question and everybody asks that question of, of, of every, every tool. Um, these, these productivity, [00:15:00] uh, tools, these communication tools, they, they, they multiply faster than anybody can possibly integrate them. Um, and the, the budget that a company has, uh, for these new tools, they, they, they, uh, they haven't, it hasn't kept pace with, um, the tool acquisition budget.

So like, what I mean is like. You know, we got all these, all this, this information that's, that's spread out across all these tools, but there's no budget for con consolidation. And so where does it have to happen? It's on the project manager. And so now we are having to do this consolidation by hand. Um, thankfully it's a lot easier to implement because of ai.

It's a lot easier for us to do this by hand. And it's almost, it's almost worse. It's almost worse because it's possible for us to just copy, paste everything into chat, GPT. Now it's our job to do that instead of, uh, instead of thinking through like where all the data is. So you qalo isn't just one another task application.

In fact, our goal is to get you. Into Qal and get you out [00:16:00] of Qalo as soon as possible. We're making this the connective tissue so that your existing stack can work as a single system. I actually think there's plenty of room for other consolidation tools besides qalo. We, we need more of them. Uh, 'cause efficiency is really about every, making everything work together.

Uh, and, and so by sitting next to all these other tools, it it, it, it eliminates this like swivel chair work. It reduces the sprawl of licenses all over the place. 'cause it's really only the PMs who, who need this. And it pays for itself in recovery time. Um. I, I wanna tell you something. 'cause like I, uh, a lot, a lot of us PMs who work with engineers, there's this concept of technical debt that accumulates during the ENG engineering process.

Well, there's operational debt too, and every time we add a tool, every time another team is, is using a new tool. It we're adding to the operational debt. And this consolidation effort helps us pay down that operational debt so that we [00:17:00] can have our communication channel focused. That's, that's the goal.

That's why the world needs and other tools that do consolidation.

Galen Low: I love that notion of operational debt, like it's so true. Um, but I also love that sort of like clarity of recognition that we're gonna have tools. Um, but also that like, it's not that like all of our tools need to string together into like one sort of big brain tool that's like, you know, the tool to end all tools.

It's kinda like, you know, tie it all together. It's like a web. You have to have, like, you have to make sure that like, you know, you're important tools that are related to one another, connect to the same node that node could be qal, doesn't mean it's to your only piece of software that you're opening every day.

It just means that, yeah, like this is a node that is strategically stringing together some of the software that you're using. Because like you said, we can't integrate with every tool as it comes out, you know, um, you know, maybe Zapier and Make, but even then, like that is like, you know, that, that must be such a severe, intense, um, process to try and like keep pace with every API, uh, [00:18:00] versus like, okay.

Here, we've made a decision on these tools. We don't want to incur a lot of operational debt, but we do need them talking to each other better so that we can do our jobs better. Otherwise, we're really blunting the, like, overall advantage that we have where AI's gonna come and take over all the admin and you're gonna be strategic.

Just kidding. You're copying and pasting. You know, like, it's kind of a, you know, it, you know, it, it's a bit of a bait and switch actually. How, how it works right

Devin Mahoney: It is. It is. Yeah.

Galen Low: um, I'm wondering, maybe you could just talk to us about like, sort of like what's coming up for Qalo. Like in what ways are you like, uh, attempting to sort of solve this problem and just, you know, what you're excited about?

Devin Mahoney: Yeah. Yeah. Let me, let me, I, I'm actually pretty excited about this command center that we're, we're building. Um, and you know, you said at the top of the, the, the podcast Galin, but like, we are project managers. We are building for project managers and that let us have a very narrow focus on only things that project managers need.

Um, [00:19:00] so for instance, we've got AI prioritization. So like a PM you, you just started your day. Other people have been working in other time zones. You wanna know what is on fire today. What signals do I need to pay attention to across email and chat and ticketing that I need to. To, to work on right now.

This is my day. Um, I need summaries. 'cause like lots of stuff happens. I'm not on top of everything all the time. Uh, I need automatic summaries of all the key packs, the next steps, the links to the source so I can get right back to it. I need a unified search. 'cause I can't tell you GayLynn how often this literally happened this morning where somebody sent me something, I was trying to find it, and I didn't know if it was an email or in some random Slack channel.

Uh, and the Uniprise search is the thing that saved me because it, I'm, I'm getting all my information all over the place. I need workflow checklist. Okay. PMs, like, when, when we get a notification, uh, like it, it like, I like, it's, [00:20:00] it's like a lot of work. And so like normal people, you get, you get an email, you're like, okay, fine, I'm gonna respond.

I'm, I'm done. A PM gets an email. You gotta do five to seven different things. I. It is such a lot of work and like no one really appreciates that. And so these, the workflow checklists allow you to build a, a list of tasks and like your, your life kind of sucks because you have to do the seven things, but at least you can enumerate the seven things and you can check them off your list.

So you can finally get rid of that email. You can take it out of your world. And we're providing context that all the timeline, the files, all the decisions, so PMs can get up to speed, they're switching context into it. Uh, and you don't have to scroll through all of these, all these apps to, in order to get there.

So that's, that's exactly what our command center does. It's really focused on the pm we're getting you in, telling you the, the things you need to do next and getting you right back into the work that you're doing in the other apps.

Galen Low: Boom. I love that. And yes, very relatable. The number, like if you look at my search history across tools, it's the same [00:21:00] search. It's just, I was like, where was this? So I'm searching the same keyword across multiple tools to find it. Um, that sounds really exciting. Uh, I, yeah. I love what you're doing. Um, Devin, thank you so much for this chat.

Uh, it's been a lot of fun getting your perspective on just ai, our AI clutter, AI usability in the future.

Devin Mahoney: Well, thank you, Galen. It's been a pleasure talking to you.