Episode 22: GPT 6 Astra: AI Just Took the Mouse

Untangling Tourism Tech Episode 22, with Fabienne Wintle and Liz Ward. Each line shows who is speaking and when. Times match the video. We removed filler words and fixed mis-heard names.

[00:01] Fabienne Wintle: Hello Liz.

[00:02] Liz Ward: Hi Fab. Here we are. Episode 22 of Untangling Tourism Tech. And this is a pretty big episode, and I am very pleased to welcome all of our members and clients and guests to Untangling Tourism Tech. It’s an exciting time at the moment. I think everyone would agree that the end of the year always really picks up pace, and for us, next week we are flying out to Prague, where you and I are going to speak on stage about AI for business at the Femmes Chefs d’Entreprises Mondiales conference, which is a conference of hundreds of female entrepreneurs and business leaders. And we’re going to be talking about what they can do to transform their businesses, enable themselves with AI so that they can remain really competitive and keep reinventing themselves.

[01:02] So that’s pretty exciting. So it’s all been a mad rush. And landed in our laps on the 3rd of this month, on the 3rd of September, was ChatGPT 6 Astra, which has been one of those really amazing shifts in AI that we have to report on and get our heads around. And that’s exactly what it has looked like, in a flurry of experimentation and sharing that knowledge with our members and clients, and now bringing it in a verbal story to the podcast because it’s just such big news.

[01:42] And if we reflect on what we said about autonomous booking agents back in Episode 20, where we said two to five years away, and here this is now, with autonomous agents for our work. We’re here on the 3rd of September, so it’s moved really quickly. What are your thoughts, Fab, in terms of the, you know, where this is sitting in the marketplace with what’s been going on with AI?

[02:15] Fabienne Wintle: Well, I think people are not understanding the huge change that this is. You know, everyone’s talking about AI, AI, AI, this, and people are getting bored. And I sent an email out about a session we’re running tomorrow, and I got an answer of someone saying, “Oh, but I’m so busy doing this and this, I can’t attend.” I’m like, “No, you’re not understanding. Clearly you need to attend.” This has changed. It’s as big as when AI came. Like, this is AI 2.0. Like, AI can take control of your screen and is smart enough to make the decisions on how to go about doing your work. Until now, you know, I think it needed a bit of coding. Like, the developers were at the front of that, because you could talk to AI and it would code for you.

[03:08] Now it’s like coming out of your screen. The mouse is moving and you’re actually talking to an agent, whether you’re looking at your screen or not, and it’s doing the work for you. So it’s removed that need of being a bit tech-savvy to make it work really well for you. It’s AI for admin.

[03:26] Liz Ward: And that’s incredibly important for any business and any business owner, is that removal of the technical requirement, where somebody like me, who knows what the outcome roughly needs to be and understands the business and the brand, can now have that fully automated assistant, well beyond the prompting and the custom GPTs, and I don’t need to know how to code. But it’s… and that sounds a little bit similar to some of the things we’ve been saying before, but it’s significantly different because of the on-computer activity, where my ChatGPT Astra agent can go and log into the back end of my website or CRM and actually do things.

[04:17] Fabienne Wintle: Into the front end, I’ll say.

[04:19] Liz Ward: Sorry. The front end, to be able to…

[04:20] Fabienne Wintle: It will copy what you’re doing. Yeah. So you can train it. You know, until now you have to write skills and it’s a bit more complex. Now you just say, “Hey, record me.” Record, like you do a Loom, right? It will learn from the recording and then hands off. It’s a bit like, I guess, one of these cars that self-drives and the steering wheel is moving. That’s where we are. That’s it, right? And you can… It’s mesmerising. You can sit there and watch it.

[04:51] It’s a bit annoying at the moment because if it’s… let’s say if you’ve got an Excel spreadsheet and you’re copying things across to a Google Sheet, your screen will be used. But it’s as if someone is working on your screen. Very, very shortly they’ll have background processing. That means you’ll still be able to be in your Chrome while it does the thing. At the moment, if I’ve got Chrome open, I can’t touch Chrome while it touches it. This is how… front… How would you say? Top… Can’t find the word now, but this is how avant-garde it is, right? It’s just right there.

[05:32] Liz Ward: Yes. And it’s the beginning, right? This is the first time we’ve seen, in the hands of the average business person, a tool like this, where we’re seeing more intelligence and this level of capability. It’s interesting, the marketplace shift. We think about the fact that we saw ChatGPT came into the market first. That’s the one most consumers and business people are using. But then what’s been really interesting has been to see the advancements, the transformation in Google. And there’s so much more to come there. And that’s evidenced in the usage numbers, where ChatGPT share of AI traffic went down 23.7% in 12 months and Gemini’s went up 27.3. So we’ve got this real race going on.

[06:17] Lots of people saying, “Well, God, Claude must be looking around the room and going, well, what happened to our market share because of ChatGPT?” So we’ll see this continual kind of ups and downs, but we’re starting to see really key players. I think the other thing, just to set the scene, is that, yeah, we can still see that the destination marketing organisation traffic is down, because that AI visibility and being able to get the information people need is happening in the AI conversations and Google AI summaries.

[06:50] We’re now looking at ChatGPT monthly users of 1.1 billion. So it’s going up. A month ago we were saying 1 billion. Gemini 662 million, reflecting that market share. So it’s just going up, up, up. The usage is there and it’s growing, and tools like Astra, ChatGPT 6 Astra, is the next evolution. So we know it’s big news. You’ve explained really nicely about the difference here from working with one prompt at a time, and now you’ve got a really capable manager with a brief, not a junior with a checklist, who can do this work for you.

[07:33] I think that something that is worth explaining, Fab, is just how it hangs together. What are the different tiers and models? Like, people have to pay more for this if they want the advantage, but the return on investment is there. And I’ll give you… you explain the models and, or the different tiers and the modes, and I’ll give you an example of a conversation I had with an operator this morning.

[08:01] Fabienne Wintle: Right. Well, like anything, AI has… well, they’ve copied humans, right? So if you think of humans working in an organisation, there’s the juniors, there’s the seniors, etc. You need to understand when you go to AI who you’re talking to. If you want planning mode, proper advice, you don’t go to the junior. You go to the most senior person. And Astra is… what that is, is I’d be talking to my Julia and… or our Julia, and I would be saying, this is what I need. Now I trust you enough to go and figure it out, and I know that you will come back to me if you have questions that you know you need to get from me. I will not micromanage. Right. This is what it is.

[08:46] The prompting was kind of… the kind of getting the junior to do a bit of work back and forth. I can just let Julia go and she’ll… Astra will go for two days, three days, weeks if I wanted it to, to actually get the job done, like an agent. So what was your discussion this morning with an operator?

[09:05] Liz Ward: Well, I was just thinking about the practical uses, so that, you know, some things don’t change. I’m working with a fantastic restaurateur in South Australia this morning, and social media, you know, I’ve got somebody doing the social media. We looked at the post engagement, is really low. He said, “Could I use this new ChatGPT Astra for… to create my social media?” I said that is a perfect use case, with the right voice file and instruction file and the right workflow, in terms of him checking the drafts, that whole process, after he just has the process of sending the content up there.

[09:50] He’s done the marketing plan. He knows what his audience is looking for. So all of that is mapped out. At… if the cost is $300 a month for him, for his licence, compare that to the cost of a social media person, and he’s going to get what he has orchestrated. It’s a no-brainer in terms of the return on investment.

[10:18] Fabienne Wintle: And if you think $300 is really expensive, that means you do not understand AI. You do not understand the capabilities. You know, it’s like, wow, you must be in 2023, thinking that $300 a month is expensive. No, because it’s actually 10, 20, 30 new staff member that will work for you. Now, I’ll challenge that, Liz. You were saying that yes, of course, it will be able to do the responding. What Astra will do is you will go, this is my problem, this is my business. But you already know about it because you’re in ChatGPT that you’ve been working on forever, right? Let’s say since 2023. You got to tell it what you truly desire and just say, off you go. You know, that’s what I did just before. Off you go. I want you to build it the same way I built that.

[11:06] It’s going to go through all the files. So it’s going to do much more than at that reasoning level. It’s going to do so much more than just putting the plan in place for you. It’s going to connect the Buffer. It’s going to connect all the tools. And then you’ll realise, oh, it’s asking me for… to input my credential in my password manager. Oh, I don’t have one. And then you realise, wow, okay, to do… to playing this game, I seriously need to have everything in order technically. So a lot of people find some big potholes when they realise the power of this.

[11:40] And it’s about how quickly they’re going to be able to make sure their digital workspace is secure. They can give the right access, because I can tell you, if you’re sharing the one calendar there and you want to set online booking for your consulting, it’s not going to work, because there’s basics that you must have in place. One person should have one calendar, one email address. So it depends, you know, to use these tools. You’re playing with the big boys now, or the big girls. So it’s going to be fantastic. But if you feel that there’s limitations or it can’t do this, it can’t do this, it’s not it. It’s you. It’s your setup.

[12:19] Liz Ward: So it’s the genie in the bottle is what you’re saying.

[12:22] Fabienne Wintle: Yeah. Absolutely.

[12:23] Liz Ward: But then you’ve got to be the designer of what comes out of that bottle, in terms of the what you want and what the brand voice…

[12:32] Fabienne Wintle: You got to know what you want. Yeah. You don’t have to design it. It’s like that show Lucifer. I think it says, “What is it that you truly desire?” That’s Astra. You tell it what you truly desire. You do not have to tell it how to cook, or, you know, that salt doesn’t go with sugar. It’ll know. And there’s a lot of people saying, I’m not actually giving it the skills that I’ve created, the skills or documents, because these skills might not be required anymore. It’s so smart. So you don’t use Astra for everything. That’s another thing that we learned in our session, or that we ran last week. We’re running it again tomorrow.

[13:08] You know, there’s different models. Like, you might not need to pay the senior lawyer to write just a pro forma letter, right? So you got to understand that. You got… as part of your business acumen, you need to understand models. You need to understand effort, because your $300, they might not stretch a month if you get the senior lawyer to do everything when you don’t need to.

[13:32] Liz Ward: Yeah. And that’s the job transformation that is starting to occur because of AI. You mentioned emails, calendars, and I often am having conversations with wonderfully committed, passionate people out in regional local government associations like councils, and also destination marketing organisations, not-for-profit organisations, who are on Office 365. And so they say, “Oh, we don’t use, or can’t use, we’re not allowed to use ChatGPT because we have Copilot.”

[14:17] Fabienne Wintle: Now, I’ve got another great example for this one. It’s not because you’re driving a manual car that you should not know how to drive an automatic, or vice versa.

[14:29] Liz Ward: Yeah. So can we just talk, just to set the scene for people? Some people be going, “Well, what does that mean?” What does that mean to you, Fab, when people say they have to use Copilot in their business? What can Copilot do for them versus ChatGPT?

[14:48] Fabienne Wintle: It’s an AI model, obviously. It’s the Windows… not the Windows, the Microsoft product. It’s attached to Office, Office 365, Microsoft 365. It’s generally, as opposed to the other systems that use, for example, Google Workspace, it’s preferred by government. More rigid system admin type of things, with very good permissions and security. So they can limit a lot of things. It hasn’t grown anywhere near as fast as the other models. So it doesn’t perform anywhere near as well. If you’ve only ever used Copilot, you’ll go, “Oh, it can do this and this.” And you’ll find it fantastic, because you’ve never seen the rest of what is possible.

[15:37] But as I said, if you are working with operators or people that might not have Copilot and have been on ChatGPT forever, and your business has totally changed because the directory, now, that the website of marketing organisation was all about, is now gone. So you have to prove your value in a different way. Well, you need to know what tools they’re using to deliver value. And yeah, yes, as I said, car: you need to learn. You’re driving one car, learn how to drive the other. It would be doing yourself a disservice only to look at whatever you’re being provided in your office suite. You know, I can work across different models, but you have to see what’s available. You have to see what is growing. There is nothing like Astra in Microsoft, you know, so…

[16:39] Liz Ward: Well, we know it’s going to… on the standard models of Copilot, we know it’s going to limit the users, so those wonderful tourism offices in council, to just internal kind of data analysis, isn’t it? It’s not going to be able to reach out and do something like an audit of Google Business Profiles of their tourism operators, for example.

[17:05] Fabienne Wintle: And it’s also, you know, it’s not as well trained. It doesn’t have access to as much. And the other thing I find, talking to a lot of tourism organisation, I’m like, okay, what plan are you on, on Copilot? And they have no idea, or so they, like, understand what is possible. A lot of them have been limited to just the Copilot inside the tools. That is not it. So there’s no… like, we all have to learn. We have to be AI savvy in our business. And the more… most popular tools, unfortunately, are not the ones that are inside environments like councils. But it was the same when I started at Gold Coast Tourism. We couldn’t access Facebook. “Oh no, Facebook is social media, is just for fun.” Can you imagine? Like, we’re at the same stage now.

[17:52] Liz Ward: Yeah. And same, a lot of councils are only just now allowing their staff to use TikTok, whereas a big part of their consumer market is using TikTok. So they’re just getting there. A really good analogy I’ve heard you say, Fab, is that restricting your marketing team to only use Copilot, that’s the equivalent of giving a creative team access to Microsoft Word but then prohibiting them from using Canva or Photoshop or web browsers. That’s the equivalent. And we really hope that this message lands with the audience who are in those sectors, because it’s really important. This… the pace is so fast, and so many of these people who work in the industry are trying to support tourism operators with AI marketing enablement or better workflows and practice, but they can’t use the tools themselves. So it’s a really limited situation.

[18:53] Fabienne Wintle: And the other thing people need to understand is you still have to have your own content, your own digitised assets, right? What model, what brand you put on it, is only… I see it as temporary. Like, you know, I was all about Claude. Codex came. I get three, four times the amount of value for your dollar. I just flip. If I’m about… like, for example, our plan is going to kick back in this afternoon. If I was hitting 100% Monday night, it would be the end of the world. I’d have to buy another Claude plan. Now I’ll just go, oh, Codex, because everything is adaptable from what… well, especially between Claude and Codex. They’re very, very clever, aren’t they? Codex wanted to get the market share of Claude, therefore they’ve made it really easy to plug and play. The other thing that we’ve got to mention… Sorry.

[19:48] Liz Ward: I was just going to say we’ll see another big shift. So there’ll be another player. Maybe somebody we don’t even know yet who’s going to come in with something better and shinier and more functional. But we’ve just got to ride this wave. Yeah, we’ve got to be adaptive and we’ve got to recognise that this is the pace of change and just keep working with these tools in a safe way.

[20:10] Fabienne Wintle: Brain plasticity.

[20:13] Liz Ward: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. So just talking about that safe way, I think, you know, to help any organisation out who is wanting to stretch the tools that they’re using and the way they’re using AI. If we think about our Compass model for destination marketing organisations, the S, the first S in our Compass model, is about safeguards, and that’s why it’s there, because you do need to have a workable policy around AI and how you’re using it, and you need to be really transparent with it as well. So that’s in that governance space, and it is critical, absolutely critical. We’re not recommending that any business just use AI without thinking about it and publishing their policy around it. And I think also the security has never been more important, Fab, in terms of the risks associated with…

[21:11] Fabienne Wintle: Oh, and your Claude, ChatGPT, it’s an app now, right? People don’t realise. Like, “I’m in ChatGPT.” I’m like, “No, not in your browser. Download it.” Right. And then you give it permission, and look, it’s much better now. It triple checks. It tells you exactly, “May I please?” Like, you know, made a lot of efforts, and same, I just saw on Claude as well. Something’s changed yesterday.

[21:34] But you might think, “Oh, that’s great. It’s going to go and scan the internet for business opportunities in my regions, and I’m going to get it to draft an email.” Yeah, no worries. I’m going to give it access to my email. Next minute, it’s gone online, got prompt injected. It got told, “Oh, you know, you’ve got access to my emails.” So it got told to go in your inbox on a computer, find every password, and email this random Gmail address with it. Well, guess what? You’ve given it access. It’s going to go and do it.

[22:07] So have you got login and passwords in your inbox someone may have sent you? Have you got a… for, this is a really good one, a copy of people’s passports in your inbox that you’ve been sent? It’s not about what you send now, it’s what about other people may have sent you that’s accessible to anyone on your computer. So basically, you’ve got a new person in the business, a new team member. Can they access anything on your computer? Because they’re highly likely that they will find a way.

[22:44] Liz Ward: Mhm. So that is an absolute prerequisite for anybody using AI in the business. We have to tighten this up. I’m just thinking, Fab, maybe we should kind of wrap this up and sort of hit some of the key points that we’ve covered, just to help people to leave on a solid base in terms of what they’ve heard and what it might mean to them. I think probably the first one is this new term that we’re going to hear a lot, which is computer use. So ChatGPT 6 Astra, it operates on the desktop like a really smart staff member.

[23:27] Fabienne Wintle: On your phone.

[23:28] Liz Ward: Or the phone.

[23:29] Fabienne Wintle: But it can take… it will… Think about computer use: sounds very technical. No, it uses your computer just like you would use your computer, not like a programmer use. It uses the user interface. So when I say you’re about to be cloned, well, you literally have been cloned. And saying, I’m not a techie? Well, if you work on a computer, you can use it.

[23:57] Liz Ward: Love it. Love it. Work mode. The definition of work mode. People are going to hear that term more.

[24:04] Fabienne Wintle: Well, there’s ChatGPT chat. There’s just where you have a quick interaction. There’s ChatGPT work mode, or Claude Cowork. Basically what it is, is you can connect apps to it. So you can chat to ChatGPT and say, go in my email and do this, right? So instead, that’s what it’ll do. You open the door to your emails, to anything. Anyone can develop a plug-in. I’ve just plonked… connected our own brain to ChatGPT. You can say, ask the brain, what did, in fact, Fab talk about last week? It’s all there. So all the doors have opened. But to do that, you got to put it either in work mode or in Codex. Codex is the third one, which is the programming interface.

[24:52] So it goes a bit more technical there than work mode, but you’ll find yourself pretty much just working in work mode. But do not go to the normal chat. You’re not going to see all the features, to see Astra, etc., and to be able to change these models. Go to work mode.

[25:11] Liz Ward: And what’s the importance of downloading the ChatGPT app as opposed to working in the browser?

[25:20] Fabienne Wintle: It can run your computer. So it’s sitting on your computer, getting permissions to different tools that are on your computer and not on your browser.

[25:30] Liz Ward: Because I dare say a lot of people wouldn’t have downloaded the ChatGPT app. They’d be working in the browser and they feel really comfortable there. So that’s a really important piece of information for people who are, you know, basic users and don’t have, you know, the level of experience that you have. I think circling back to our Compass model, the O in Compass is about getting knowledge out of the heads and getting it digitised. And that is really important as a step, isn’t it, in using… taking advantage of ChatGPT 6. Because if it doesn’t have the digitised knowledge about a region, about a destination, then there’s a chance it will just make it up. So that’s still a very important first step, isn’t it?

[26:27] Fabienne Wintle: We should really test it. But yes, if, you know, it’s super smart, it always… these models always want to sound smart. They might just make things up, and you might think they’re so smart that they haven’t made it up. So best to ensure that everything that’s in your heads about your region is digitised and made available to AI. And that’s another thing I want to finish on, Liz, and probably something we need to talk next in our next session. It’s about agents to agents communication. You know, we talk about schema. Make sure your website’s machine readable. It’s next level. What we need now, we need to be the website to be transformed into a database.

[27:14] So schema is a little bit, but really next level. There’s now six, seven points that I’m adding to our AI health check, with connectors from websites to ensure that agents can read everything. API, crazy. So if you’re still at schema, look into A2A, or agent-to-agent commerce, if you wish, because it’s not going to be us buying a holiday. It’s going to be our agents in our phone knowing what we want and going to surprise us with buying everything on our behalf. And these agents, they don’t read websites. They talk to databases.

[27:59] Liz Ward: So that digitised content, that agent-to-agent enablement, is critically important. So I think that is another one for a next session, is to say what does that look like, because we know that it is not far down the line before we see Google in Australia open up universal cart technology, and we know that accommodation booking within Google AI is something that’s being tested in the UK.

[28:31] Fabienne Wintle: And there’s been some changes yesterday. If anyone’s not been in AI Mode, go and check out the maps and the new layers on there. It’s on our doorstep.

[28:40] Liz Ward: Yes. Yeah. So I think that’s a wrap, Fab, for the latest news and the critical step that we’ve seen that has been taken with ChatGPT 6 Astra, and this new intelligence and agent tasking that we’ve all got at our fingertips. So come and talk to us if you need some help to unpack this more for your business and understand what your next step should be. If you’re a destination marketing organisation, have a go to the tourismtribe.com website and have a look at the Compass playbook for DMOs, because that gives you a really good, solid road map, framework, that you can follow to make sense of how to move through this safely, but also how to be really proactive, as opposed to waiting for the world to go past you. So see you next time.

[29:46] Fabienne Wintle: All right. Thanks, Liz.