The Work Seminar

Ep. 16: Jen Crichlow - MA in Arts Administration Turned Software Startup Leader

Jesse Butts Season 2 Episode 1

For Jen Crichlow, art and technology are inseparable.

Her involvement at arts festivals of all stripes revealed the digital divide that affects everything from event management to the preservation of culture. 

So she enrolled in grad school to explore how tech inequity disproportionately affects underrepresented and marginalized arts communities and movements. 

Now as an executive at SAVVI AI, she’s making machine learning accessible to companies and nonprofits that don’t have legions of data scientists and software developers at their disposal. 

And Jen gets to work with artists every day as she and her SAVVI colleagues are building something that doesn't exist. While she might have debated that classification ten years ago, her answer today is unequivocal: “Yes, it’s art. It's absolutely novel. It's creative.”

Resources mentioned

Ask a Manager 

The Nap Ministry 

Where to find Jen and SAVVI AI

Jen on LinkedIn

SAVVIAI.com

SAVVI on LinkedIn and Twitter

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Jesse Butts:

Hey everyone. Thanks for joining me for another episode. I'm your host Jesse Butts. Today, I'm chatting with Jen Crichlow, an MA in arts administration and policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago turned startup software leader. Jen is now the vice president of service delivery at SAVVI AI, a machine learning engine that product teams use to make their own software smarter. Jen, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me.

Jen Crichlow:

Jesse, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really excited.

Jesse Butts:

Absolutely, looking forward to this. Before we dive into how you found your way to SAVVI, can you tell us a little bit about service delivery? That's a term I feel like I know peripherally, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners aren't terribly familiar with it. What exactly is that?

Jen Crichlow:

Yeah this is a great question. So I tend to look at my role and my job and I think others who subsume such a title or are thinking about this too. It's a step beyond just project management. So now we're, we've built the software or whatever that service product is. And we're focused on not only constantly releasing new features, but ensuring that the experience of our customers and users is also smooth. So it's a delicate balance to strike, but it's almost like merging two different mindsets into one.

Jesse Butts:

And when you talk about in software, like constantly updating features and things like this, how often are features updated? Like what is that cadence that you're overseeing in something like that?

Jen Crichlow:

I think it depends on what you're building. So something kind of light and easy, that can be anywhere from like a six week to like maybe a two month, two to three month turnaround, or I guess that is about that. But there are some features that can require a significant overhaul. Part of the duties of the role is to really just constantly be shipping and making sure your, your roadmap is tight. In our case, we can often release anywhere between three times a year to sometimes two to three times within a given quarter, it just depends on the chunk of work that we're looking at.

Jesse Butts:

And speaking of what you're building... So can you tell us a little bit about AI and machine learning and what SAVVI is doing in this space? What does it mean to be producing machine learning that other people are putting into their software?

Jen Crichlow:

I'll take a step back and start with artificial intelligence. So when we say AI, there's a lot of different definitions that can kind of float around. I would argue it's the experience of identifying something that we think is a novel form of intelligence. And it's often constructed by us, which I think is how we attribute that thing to be artificial. We know that there are other intelligent beings. I can look at my dog and say, he's pretty intelligent too, but that's not artificial. He's kind of discovered different patterns and things like that on his own. So, in the case of machine learning, it's a branch of artificial intelligence. There's other branches that are also contained within it and might have similar practices like image recognition, robotic process automation, natural language processing. In essence, what machine learning is doing and in our case, we're taking tabular data, so that is to say it's fairly structured information. If you've looked at an Excel spreadsheet, it doesn't look all that different from kind of the make and feel of the data. And in essence, the machine is able to identify patterns at a rate that maybe a human would have a lot more difficult time kind of processing. So in our case, what we're doing is, we have basically developed a platform that allows teams that might have decisioning software or would like to achieve decisioning software in their system. So the AI kind of allows you that flexibility to, yeah, make changes swiftly and really adapt to whatever's happening in the world.

Jesse Butts:

Could you give us an example, maybe it's one of your clients or a scenario, what does that pattern recognition look like? And what advantage is it giving a business or one of your customers?

Jen Crichlow:

In an ideal world, it would be a decision that can happen pretty frequently because you want the system, the machine to be able to assess patterns rather rapidly. So the more information, the better. Let's say the decision is deciding which warehouse to send inventory items. You know that you have maybe six or seven different locations. The item could go just about anywhere, to any of these, but let's say there's something happening in the environment and the world. When I say environment, I just mean the world in the space that we are all actively living in that it would be more convenient. Like, there's a snowstorm. So send the salt to that location sooner, rather than later. If those are two data points that you're pulling in the, system can look at those patterns and detect it based on historical items. And then, in essence, recommend or predict best outcomes. It's really important, I want to emphasize this point, it's really important that the people who are thinking about the configurations of these logics really understand their system. And so one thing that is novel about the product we're building now that doesn't really exist too much on the market is that we're putting it back in the hands of the people who know their business. So we know that data scientists are incredibly skilled, but there is a shortage of that talent. You also need to really be intentional about incorporating them into your business. And for a lot of companies, that's just not really an option. So if you know your data and you know, what you're building chances are, you kind of know what kind of micro decisions you're making on a regular repetitive basis. It'd be nice to have another team member that can kind of pick up some of that slack. And in essence, the AI is kind of that secondary team member.

Jesse Butts:

Now that we understand what you're doing now, I think it's going to be a really fascinating conversation about how you went from a master's in arts administration to this. but before we get there, I'm curious, why did you enroll in grad school? What made you want to go beyond undergrad?

Jen Crichlow:

That was an interesting journey to get to, cause I, I don't think I graduated from my undergraduate program saying firmly I was going to go get a master's degree. I was definitely debating it. For context, I graduated in 2010, so this is right after the 2008 recession. I think for a lot of us, we were trying to navigate, What does next look like? Because it doesn't, at this point, it doesn't matter what degree I got. I have to figure out a way to apply my experiences. So I bopped around, did a couple of different jobs here and there. And really tried to navigate what a career might look like for me. I think the entry point for me was actually working in a live arts festival, which I'll come back to this as we continue talking about software development, but there's a lot of parallels into program coordination for international festivals and building certain types of software. And in the process of doing that I actually got maybe a little too interested in how our ticketing system was going to reflect all of the shows that we were doing at once. We were doing 150 shows for a festival season, 13 of which were international. So if you can imagine you have 150 productions happening simultaneously in a single city and 13 of them, you also need to make sure that the entire troupe has their visas in place and everything else. So the ticketing system was important because, I mean, the venues varied. We had tiny little, you know, it's somebody's house to this is where the Philadelphia symphony is playing. So it's like extremes and it was important that the ticketing system really understood the types of experiences we were trying to curate. That was my entry point into technology. At that point I realized there is a connection between how nonprofit organizations were adopting technology, and how technology was already being used in for-profit sector, but the two were not in conversation well with each other. They weren't learning from each other. And data was kind of at the root of that. So at that point, going back to grad school actually kind of felt natural because I was like, I need more literature around this. I need more conversations around this. I want to be talking about this more.

Jesse Butts:

What did you mean with wanting more of the literature of that?

Jen Crichlow:

I wanted to understand better why nonprofit organizations weren't able to have as robust platforms as were available in the for-profit sector at that time. Now, if you look back at what the for-profit sector had then to what we have now, it's like apples and potatoes at that point. Like one is leaps and bounds even ahead of the other. But it always felt like nonprofit sector was like if this was available now, then they would have the version from five, 10 years prior. And that didn't make sense to me because we were, at the end of the day, we're still talking about data. We're talking about logistics. We're talking about experience. Like there was too many circumstantial parallels for there not to be like the same quality of experience. Now, the ticketing system that we were working with was like stellar. It was just a matter of the other things in the market that they were kind of contending with were the old guard. Like pre-smartphones. Again, this is like in the wake of 2010. iPhones radically changed I think everyone's experience after...what was that? 2007? 2008? So at that point it's like 2013 for me and I'm trying to figure out how do I... if there's any bridges to be built, what would this look like?

Jesse Butts:

So 2013 was when you applied... started your master's program or finished it?

Jen Crichlow:

That's when I started it.

Jesse Butts:

Did you have an arts undergrad degree? I'm just a little curious how you found yourself in the performing arts.

Jen Crichlow:

I have a BA in art history and I did a minor in German language. At the time I was considering moving to actually Berlin. Because there at that point I'd already been to, this is getting really niche, but documenta is a tenure cycled show that is put on in this town called Kassel in Germany. And it was the first time I'd ever been to an international art festival where it literally took over the entire town. I'd never experienced anything quite as immersive as that. And it was like both sculptural installation, but because you're walking through it, there's also some sort of live interactive artistic expression in that too. So like you're part of it. That was my bridge to it. I was like I'm interested in art, but now I'm getting in this realm that's like way more experimental. That's how I got into live arts.

Jesse Butts:

So you have the undergrad background. You go through all these experiences and you start grad school with the intent of trying to figure out how to bridge the technology between the nonprofit and the for-profit worlds. What was your grad experience like? Were you able to get some insight into that big question that you had?

Jen Crichlow:

Yeah. One thing I think having gone through grad school is, or at least I'll reflect on this and say, personally, you realize like grad school kind of can feel like an exercise in figuring out your anxieties certain around things, in more ways than one. And I realize that while I want to talk about data and I want to talk about the adoption of nonprofit organizations, uh, I'm sorry, of tech... emergent technologies in the operations of a nonprofit organization as I'm looking at this. My actual anxiety was that there are nonprofit organizations that have resources to these technologies. And there's a swath of nonprofit organizations that are culturally specific that will... if nonprofits broadly are five years behind, these guys will be 10, 15 years behind. And I don't know if everyone could see me, I'm an African-American woman with mixed ancestry. And so this especially feels important to me that like if data is now becoming a digital memorialization of our cultural experiences and expressions, and we're a group that has been historically marginalized, what does that look like in our digital futures? And if these for-profit companies, at the time, were constantly experiencing data breaches and like information held for ransom, like what does that look like for a nonprofit organization that is culturally specific? What are some things that they should be considering and thinking about as they make this transition? Because we're all making it. It's 2013 at the time, now into 2014, 2015. I said, we live in a digital culture and everyone's like, Prove it. Now I wish I could show them every time you go into a theater or anything like that before the show starts, just look down. Everyone has their phone open, and then tell me we don't live in a digital culture. You know? We tend to take it for granted now, but back then, It was like, what does this have to do with arts administration? What's the connection? I do feel like by the time I was able to present it again, my argument had been refined and I was able to triangulate my ideas, my anxieties, my hypotheses, opportunities to other ideas and thought leaders in the field. But it just made me that much more curious. Like it made me not want to be a theorist. It made me not want to be an academic. I wanted to be involved at that point.

Jesse Butts:

You said something really fascinating. I want to make sure I understood it correctly. That part of what was driving you was that for these cultural organizations tied to marginalized groups, it's less well-known. Perhaps less well-preserved to begin with. And in the digital era, as things shift, because they tend to be farther behind for- profits and other nonprofits, it's that much more vulnerable to data breaches and things that could perhaps not entirely erase it, but damage what already exists. Am I getting that kind of right, or...?

Jen Crichlow:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You are subsuming my anxieties. Yeah, exactly like, actually like, it's scary to fathom what one could do potentially with that information, especially when you think about like historical donorship. You do not want those groups also compromised. You don't want membership compromised. You don't want your inventory compromised. If everything is moving digitally, what are the implications? What should we be protecting?

Jesse Butts:

So you mentioned that you, during the process, you didn't want to be a theorist. You didn't want to be an academic. So what did you end up doing after graduation?

Jen Crichlow:

So my last couple of months of grad school, I was, you know, typical millennial working my way through school. At that point, I already had a full-time job. So my last semester was like working full-time and going to school full-time. And I was working on a digital transformation project, but it was one project and it was more like quasi-waterfallish. And I was being exposed to agile development. And like I said, grad school only made me that much more curious about being a practitioner. So I looked for agencies I could move into because at that point, your exposure is on 10. You're not just on one project, then you're on like 13. And I wanted that exposure. I wanted that experience. So similar to just being freshly out of undergrad, freshly out of graduate school, I was bopping around figuring out ways to just expose myself to everything. Different types of data structures, different types of software solutions. I'm grateful for the experiences because it really shows you the breadth of what a solution can be and what it would truly mean to actually provide a service on top of that. It's not enough to just build the products. What happens in its afterlife once it's in the, once it's out in the world.

Jesse Butts:

There were a few terms that you mentioned. And I just want to make sure that we're clear for listeners what some of these are. Things like digital transformation project, waterfall, agile, would you mind just really quick definitions of those types of things?

Jen Crichlow:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me bring it back. So digital transformation can look like on a lot of different things. There were a lot of companies around 2015, 2016 that had older websites, like they had built their website in like 2001 or 2006. And at that point, you're looking at a website in 2016 and it's 10 years old. It's kind of Frankensteined together. So digital transformation projects at that time tend to mean, like where we have to kind of overhaul our web presence, tie everything together, kind of refined a uniform unified voice, rebranding, that sort of thing. And then in terms of a waterfall and agile, these are not the only methods for software development. They're just kind of the two you tend to hear about in corporations. Waterfall was a method by which software was developed for, I would say, mostly very large sophisticated projects. And it usually started with trying to identify all of the requirements. Maybe sometimes not. So once everyone hardens what these things look like, the team disappears for like three or four months, they build it and then they come back to you and they're like, Here you go. And chances are, it's not what you're expecting it to be because the rest of the world has changed so rapidly. Those types of projects were great at one point for shipping software, but as software becomes more sophisticated as there's more low code solutions to experiment, when I say low code, I mean you can just configure things as opposed to actually having to engineer the code. It allows you to build software more dynamically. And so agile development is a method that kind of emerged around, I want to say like 2001, although it's ideas and it's like kind of the ethos of it is way before 2001. It's the idea of saying, You need to get from here to three or four blocks away. Now you could absolutely get a car or you could walk or you could have a scooter. So people will treat the scooter as, That's your MVP, as this is a simplified version, it doesn't require as much investment. And it'll get you where you need to go.

Jesse Butts:

So instead of building that quote-unquote perfect software in one long process where there's, it sounds like not much communication. It's like, let's take this in chunks. Let's get something that meets the minimum, then we'll keep on improving that. So we're not waiting exponentially for this magnificent product or allegedly magnificent product.

Jen Crichlow:

And reducing the risk of being disappointed too. Let's not forget if the team disappears and builds something, you're like, Oh, that wasn't exactly what I was envisioning. That happens too.

Jesse Butts:

Yeah. It kind of sounds like signing off on the architectural plans then never checking on the builders, and just showing up when they say it's ready. All right. So getting back a little bit to your timeline, when you're back working in software after graduation, are you still in the arts nonprofits world ,or are you kind of just exploring a variety of different software companies at that point?

Jen Crichlow:

Tangentially. I don't think I could ever fully disengage from it, but also in the process of exploring live events and things like that. My definition for artistic expression broadened significantly. So if you asked me today, Is the work that I do and the team that I work with, are they creatives? Are they artists? I would be like, Yes, in a heartbeat, because they're building something that doesn't exist. They're coming up with something that's not ... I mean, there, there are components of it,sure, that certainly exists in the world, but to pull these things together is novel. It's absolutely novel. It's creative. It requires creative minds, a problem-driven and solution-driven minds, you know?

Jesse Butts:

As you were working after grad school and you talked a little bit about project management before, but I know before you started at SAVVI you had done some project management. How did you... I don't want to say how'd you settle into that, but how did you find your way into project management roles?

Jen Crichlow:

This is the tie in from working as a program coordinator for live arts festivals, is like you are dealing with these pre-show activities. And quite literally, there's like a backend and a front end. This term that we use in software development and what I was finding in the process... when I was a program coordinator, I really had to rely on those around me. That they were the experts in their roles and experiences. So that is to say the artist knows their vision. The license and inspection person knows what our capacity should be, and we've got to meet it. There's all these things that just kind of come into play. And what I'm interested in is how we can make that production work and come together. And so project management to me and even still service delivery is very much that. So it's like a little hard to say, like what I... like if I were to start my day, Oh Jenny, what are you going to do today? It's like, Oh, let me take a look at my tickets, I can kind of give you a range. But at the end of the day, the crux of my work is making sure that there's a coordination amongst all these people who might be on the surface doing completely disparate work. But it all comes together as a production.

Jesse Butts:

How did you find the people involved with SAVVI, and how did you make that leap to working at a small startup?

Jen Crichlow:

Yeah. This is a, this is an interesting question because I feel like I really got... I don't know, just things coalesced. I've gotten very lucky. Basically I had an opportunity to work on a team that was building a solution at a Fortune 500 company. And the solution was primarily going to provide travel and experience opportunities. And the system was going to have... that we were designing was going to have, just some really cool AI driven novel kind of components as a reward system. But when we're reflecting back on how that entire project ran, because, you know, shoot ahead to 2020, we all know what happened in March, February, February-March timeline 2020, the pandemic happened. So there's no travel, there's no experiences. We have a moment to breathe and really think about all the software that we just built. The thing that kind of stood out was building a mobile app at that point was not the same. It didn't require the same overhaul of investment that say in 2013, it would have. In fact, our artificial intelligence systems were the most expensive thing on the entire project. So had an opportunity to move on from that company. And in the process, it was like new tool could do something like that. So I had ... it was almost like no choice. It was like, No, I saw the problem. I am absolutely jumping on that project because this has the potential to like radically change the experience of work for a lot of people. In a positive light, like more people should be able to access this. This should not be some sort of exclusive technology that everyone has to wait 10, 15 years to be able to leverage in order to remain competitive or like just meet user expectations. Like that just seems unfair.

Jesse Butts:

So was it this... some people in this group that were working on this project, all of you, or some of you got together and said, We need to turn this into a company?

Jen Crichlow:

It wasn't that easy. Our founders had already moved on from the company. They were starting an idea that like I said, it just made perfect sense. Absolute, perfect sense. So when I had moved on from the prior company and I saw that they were doing this, you know, went through the same process everyone else does, it's like, can I please join this project? I would like to be a founding team member. I'd like to help build this technology. I'd like to be there, to grow this team. And I felt like, reflecting back on my prior experiences of, Do people have access? Do they not have access? There are new fancy terms that get thrown around like digital divide. Those anxieties still have not gone away for me. And I worry, still now, that if artificial intelligence is not put in the hands of people like myself, like literally to build it. To help construct what this can look like. To help empower other people. Then it's like we're perpetuating some of the same societal issues in some ways. Not to make it sound like this is going to solve everything because eventually there'll be other tools and software that looked very similar to us. I want to celebrate that moment too. There just needs to be more access. There's no reason why in 2022 that there shouldn't be. So that, that was kind of the impetus for me was like, I could continue working in banking, but that doesn't really ... I don't really want to do that. This sounds way more interesting. And frankly aligns with my passions.

Jesse Butts:

So, I mean, it sounds pretty clear that when you entered grad school, you wanted to address this lack of access, divide, or digital divide, excuse me. And now at SAVVI, you have that opportunity, you're doing that. Is there anything else that you see a relationship to, from what you studied in grad school, your grad school experience, to what you're doing?

Jen Crichlow:

This is one thing I'm kind of etching away at is I still keep in touch with a lot of my classmates from that program. And I knew going into it that I was not going to be a curator, which is what a lot of, I think people think an arts administration and policy person might go into, or in the development office, let's say. But it's been fascinating, I think, for me to see how a lot of my peers and former classmates have found themselves in roles that they did not anticipate. So some of them are our writers, now comedic writers. Some of them are trained musicians and that's what they do now. I feel like the takeaway for me was learning how you can apply creatively an administrative practice to production. Where I'll say I'm at, in my career now, is maybe loosening the reins on that a little bit. Right now, I'm very fascinated in the way that AI gets applied. So I try to talk with people who are in other, other streams and different disciplines of AI, be it VR or AR, be it an image recognition, be it in robotic process automation. I'm curious, what is the process like for them when they' ve developed the technology and people adopt the technology. There's just so much more knowledge to be gained through that integration. That's the thing that I think I've taken with me.

Jesse Butts:

Some guests on the show, as they've progressed after grad school, they find a type of work that they're really into, like, oh, you know, marketing copywriting or something like that, and they've explored opportunities. And others are more interested in a problem or an industry. It sounds like, if I'm not mistaken, you gravitate a little bit more toward that passion for the industry or the problem versus the work itself. Not to say that you don't care about the day-to-day of your job, but you're a little bit more driven by the mission, the problem. Is that...fair?

Jen Crichlow:

Yeah, this has been an interesting moment for me. And I' m trying to immerse myself with other folks who identify themselves more as thinkers, because I think, I think a lot, perhaps to a fault. And I'm working on kind of how to sequence some of the ideas that come to me so that I can maintain a balance. Cause I'm one of those people that tends to do things in extremes. Like if we're doing the nuts and bolts, the day-to-day work, I can immerse myself fully in that and not think, but I can also think and not do the like menial little, small tasks that it takes in between. But I like the coordination process of helping everyone else do their things. So what does that actually look like for me? This is kind of a moment in my own career where I'm kind of slowing down to like really try to balance both of doing, of course the day-to-day small little tasks in your way, that just kind of chip away at the bigger vision, but to also still be thinking like, How is the vision morphing? How do I pivot towards those targets? What are the new ones? I don't know what all of them are. So as you and I were talking before we started recording, I'm going to be going to Puerto Rico for about a month. This is that time. Cause I'm like, I can feel it. I can see something. I need to give myself space and time to kind of concretize what that vision really looks like. So that's part of what that trip is to pull myself out of this space, out of this routine that I know I have established and I can keep doing remotely. But now I need to push myself a little bit in a different space.

Jesse Butts:

As someone who is really driven by that mission of a company, of the problem, what are the day-to-day things that you found that you enjoy, or what did you have to discover about yourself for the day-to-day work that would keep you engaged?

Jen Crichlow:

This is a challenging question for me because we're still in the midst of a pandemic. And I think that that has really forced me to think about routine a little differently. I am one of those people that went and got a dog to reinforce a routine. And I mean, it's more than that, but he, that having a pet really helps with some of these kind of like rituals you're trying to establish. For me, one of them is walking every day. Being outside, starting my morning on a walk is crucial for me today. It gives me a moment to kind of like breathe, get my mind together, figure out what I'm doing for the rest of the day, rest of the day, excuse me. And kind of like meditate a little bit, setting some intentions. The other is, I'm a coffee person and I need my morning coffee. I start my day with my team. And we're, we're doing what we call a daily standup, where basically we, each person goes around sort of like a round robin and says what they worked on yesterday, what they're working on, what they intend to be working on today, and if there's anything stopping them or blocking them from being able to accomplish those items for today. And that's a really important time for me because it kind of helps me see where we might be losing our track on time. Or if we're getting ahead and we have an opportunity to like maybe increase our velocity, our speed at which we can do certain things. That's part of agile development, but that's actually a ritual that has become routine for me, not just in work, but now in life too. So my weekends are almost a standup for me to where I'm like, okay, no, Saturdays and Sundays, I really should not be looking at the computer to be, you know, checking tickets. I need to cut off from work. I have other things online that I want to explore and see and do. Like, I love film. I love comedy. I love re-engaging with my friends who are exploring those avenues. I like the conversations. It makes me think. It changes the way I approach certain conversations. So it's like those sorts of investments, come through for me as a routine. And have been really crucial for me during this pandemic in order to kind of maintain relationships and friendships.

Jesse:

Since you have so much expertise in this field, what should we, especially people who tend to gravitate toward writing, marketing, creative fields, whether they're corporate, small business, non profit. What should we be thinking about, about how artificial intelligence may be changing the type of work... well, obviously AI is changing work now, but how it might be changing those types of jobs we want to pursue?

Jen Crichlow:

I think it's at an interesting moment. There's a, generally like a, I don't know, like a healthy suspicion people have because they might've seen Terminator. Artificial intelligence is not quite ready for Terminator. It's not there yet, but that concern of like it being able to just kind of operate on its own, I think is healthy. And I think if we just assume that it can be out there and there's technicians and we should just trust it and that we ourselves cannot inform it and what it looks like in our lives is... it's a moment for pause because I would argue each one of us is an expert on our lived experiences, and technology has already become so immersive. It's an important moment to think about what that can look like in our own work. So for me, there are like day to day tasks that I just don't really, really want to do. I'll give you an example, like. Anytime a task is done from one team member to another. I could go in and manually help update that. Or I could create a robotic process automation that like, based on conditions, it knows, Oh yeah, reassign that thing to somebody else that offloads the work and allows me to focus on other things, allows me to spend time doing things that really require creative thought. You know? So I think it... I don't know what that looks like for everyone, but I'm sure there that if you're already using technology, you might be experiencing it. You might be experiencing it and not realizing it. Research it. See it. I mean, if you're on social media, chances are you've already encountered it, you know? And think about how you want it to, to help you do your own work. Can it? I imagine it could.

Jesse Butts:

You know, for people, and I've experienced with my own career, some of the entry level positions I had just simply no longer exist, whether it's due to AI or offshoring or automation, what should people be thinking about or skills they should be thinking about acquiring as so much of those kind of manual labor or digital manual labor tasks are being taken over by different technologies.

Jen Crichlow:

Yeah. I think a lot of the applications I've seen thus far for AI are still fairly small, redundant, repetitive tasks. So I would encourage people maybe to slow down and think about things that they do particularly well. And this, this can be discreet. Like it doesn't have to be as literal as like, I'm real good with Excel. Like, no, maybe you're like pretty good at sussing out how to phrase a question. There are a lot of people who work in tech that don't know how to do that. Communication is a thing. We still have to communicate. There's still a human element to it. Maybe they start to think a little bit about some of the emotional intelligence, some of the softer skills, some of the things that, again, make you human. Not that you should think of that that's your only way of engaging work, but rather those are things that the computer cannot do.

Jesse Butts:

Yeah.

Jen Crichlow:

And will not do. And it's going to be a while before it is sentient enough to respond to human emotions adequately. And so there's still, I think there's still a lot of runway for people to think about how they can be engaged and thought leaders in the thing that they do particularly well.

Jesse Butts:

As you were exploring what's next after grad school, have you come across any books or Ted Talks or anything you recommend listeners might check out to kind of help them figure out what's next?

Jen Crichlow:

I think podcasts like this are helpful because you get to hear people. So I want to encourage people to keep listening to conversations and things like that. And engaging in conversations. As far as books go, though, I'll be honest. I've been like knee deep in the technical explorations of code and what it might mean in our lives and things like that. But one sounds a little bit off the beaten path, but I'm going to say it anyway. There's a lot of accounts now on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram that are trying to break up some of the noise around what it means to work and to be doing your passionate thing. And so it's almost like an extension of podcasting in a lot of ways. I think these conversations are particularly useful. Like if anyone's looked at like Ask a Manager, it kind of gives you what Ask a Manager does or it's like, Here's the problem. And here's how we solve it, you know? And some of them are hilarious, but the thing that's, so the, the social media platforms, the outlets that do this well is that it gives you it in real time. So for me, I'm thinking of the Nap Ministry. I don't know if you're familiar with the Nap Ministry?

Jesse Butts:

No...I'm not.

Jen Crichlow:

It's an account you can follow on Instagram and certainly on Twitter, but it kind of helps give like gut checks. Like, are you resting today? Are you relaxing? Are you touching back in with yourself? Are you engaged with your personhood, in essence? And I think that's, I don't know for me, I think that that's really helpful, especially in these times because it's, perhaps is a little easy to get wrapped up in the work work, work, work, work, labor, labor, labor, labor. And are we... what's our output? Am I moving ahead in my career? That can still be true, but we also don't want to miss out on like the journey of just living. So, I think that those ones are good helpful balances to that.

Jesse Butts:

Well, this has been a great conversation, Jen. Thank you so much for joining me and I really appreciate it.

Jen Crichlow:

Thank you, Jesse.