In this episode of the AI Update, David Lykken welcomes Kevin Popovic—better known as The Idea Guy—to discuss how AI can amplify, not replace, human intelligence. Drawing on his work with LoanWorks, his university teaching, and his upcoming book Amplified, Kevin explains why leaders must stop treating AI like Google and start treating it as a tool for reimagining business models. He shares practical examples of using generative AI to identify the right problems, design real solutions, and unlock opportunities that traditional thinking often misses.
[David] Listeners, we’re doing another AI update. Excited to have a new friend of mine with me, Kevin Popovic, am I saying that right/
[Kevin] Popovic, you got it right, you always get it right.
[David] I’m working on that For an old Norwegian. I’ve got it down. But anyways, better known as the Idea guy. Idea guy this guy has got more ideas than you can imagine. I love the story that you even have a vanity license plate. You’re located in San Diego, you have a vanity license plate called Idea Guy. Tell us a story about the car that pulled up to you and this is just brilliant marketing and how this worked. Come on, tell me.
[Kevin] So the short version of it is for years I ran a creative shop called Idea House, and then it was at San Diego state and I got selected to create the Idea lab. So the school came out with a little bit. It says, hey, it’s the idea guy on campus, he’s creating the idea lab. So, walking around campus and some guys like, hey, it’s the idea guy. I’m like, hey, how you doing? You know it was funny. And somebody goes, hey, you should see if the license plate’s available. So I go on Cali DMV and it’s available. How idea guy isn’t grabbed up? I got no idea, so I get it. Put 39 bucks under this thing, put it onto my car. And three days into having on my car, I’m going to play basketball at the club. Somebody’s beeping me and I thought I cut the guy off and something you know. I come up and he’s like put your window down. I’m like what’s up? And he’s like put your window down. I’m like what’s up. He goes are you the idea guy? I’m like, yes, yes, I am. He’s like I told you my idea. This guy starts pitching me at the red light. So it was that and a bunch of other cute little, funny, endearing stories that said there’s something to this brand because it helps people feel comfortable about sharing their ideas and ultimately they’re real problems that they’re trying to solve with ideas, with me, and that’s the business I’m in as an expert in organizational innovation.
[David] Yeah, you do. You’re brilliant. I mean you’re a brilliant marketer. You’re so much fun to hang with. If you want to have fun at a conference, hang with Kevin at a conference. It is an epic event.
[Kevin] You’re a great wingman, David. I want everybody to know what a great wingman you are.
[David] Yes, it was fun, it was just delightful, and we were in Las Vegas, so you can imagine from there. But we won’t go with that, because what I want to talk about is what you were talking to me about yesterday, about AI and marketing. You are teaching. You’re a professor at San Diego State University, right, SDSU.
[Kevin] Yeah, I was at SDSU and then I was at UCSD. I do a lot of. I teach at a number of universities now.
[David] Okay, good, so anyway. So you’re an educator, but you are know what the heck you’re doing. Talk about what AI is doing in the world of marketing and how people can better utilize this.
[Kevin] Well, let’s talk about one relevant example, Dave, about AI and mortgage. As you referenced, about LoanWorks, I’ve been working with Troy Kennedy at LoanWorks since the very inception. Troy and I have used AI into shaping the company and ultimately moving him into the position that LoanWorks as a leader, a pioneer, if you will, of mortgage loans in the space, partnering up with SunWest and Pavan and all those great people that we’ve partnered with. But I think the conversation about AI and mortgage really starts with efficiency, how to cut costs, how to speed up processing. But I think that really misses that bigger picture and that’s what we’ve seen at LoanWorks that that real opportunity is expanding access right, bringing credit to communities traditional lenders have overlooked. That’s why I shared in my keynote for the Gulf Coast Business Coalition. AI isn’t about the future. It’s about whether leaders today are ready to reimagine their business models. It’s a very different way to look at it and that’s what I dive into my forthcoming book Amplified how Generative AI helps users identify the right problems and then create the right solutions. And that’s what we’re seeing, I think, today. And there’s that running joke about people are saying like AI is going to take my job, and then there’s the running punchline that goes AI isn’t going to take your job. Somebody who knows how to use AI is going to take your job and your customers and your market share, et cetera, et cetera.
[David] Yeah, and it’s so true. So you tell me, how are you? I’m so glad you brought up Troy Kennedy and Pavan and Angel AI, because that is at the core of what Troy is doing. It’s very innovative and you’re helping and you’re running. You’re the CMO there. You’re the professor of the CMO of that company. You’re doing all these things, but what is the most important thing you would say in this AI update that we impart to our listeners? KP.
[Kevin] I think that some people, David, don’t even really understand what the darn thing is. I’ve got people telling me they’re going in and they’re using it like Google. It’s not Google. You don’t go type it in and tell me the thing and it’ll do it. But that’s not really what it is. I think what people don’t understand is that thing that’s holding them back. How do I integrate AI into my HI? How do I work artificial intelligence into the workflow of my human intelligence? This stuff doesn’t Gen AI, or they’ll call it narrow or weak AI. It’s really good at one thing, it’s awesome at one thing, but doesn’t usually do two things, and the longer that the request gets, its performance tends to drop off. Where I think people have to learn is how do I work this tool into what I already do, and I’ll give you a couple of quick examples. We all remember when desktop publishing came out in the early eighties. Right? What was the first? What was the first computer you got, David?
[David] Well, I go back all the way back to the Commodore. So I mean, I’m one of those I had a heat kick computer was the very first micro, but it was an IBM pc. That’s where we started.
[Kevin] And I had a mac SEW, 30 mac people know that one of those little boxes you know yeah and uh, it converted to max later in life, but that was and the reason I got that box is because my dad bought it. He had an ibm selectric remember the little ball that you spun around like the fancy typewriter. Yeah, those things you gotta be worth a nickel or something.
[David] Museum piece, piece.
[Kevin] Yeah, so my dad bought this. My dad was notorious, he loved buying new gadgets. Well, he bought this Mac SE30. He couldn’t figure out how the damn thing worked, so he gave it to me. Right, and that was a challenge that a lot of people have. At that point, David, people either learned how to work a personal computer or they didn’t, and there was a divide how to work a personal computer or they didn’t, and there was a divide. So, moving forward, one of those requirements that we had as a business professional is that you had to know how to work a professional computer and all the new learning and stuff that came with, like when it didn’t work, how do you get a floppy drive out, or you know, with those disks when it got jammed in there, and you know all the other things. We had to learn that. Now you either learned it or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, you became antiquated. Fast forward to the internet, right? People get on the World Wide Web. You either learned how to use it or you didn’t. This is that same type of divide. I think people need to learn how to work Gen AI into their workflow, and what I’m finding it tends to be a vacillation back and forth between the tool and the human. Human goes first, figures out what they want to do, leverages the tool, works with that at that phase, moves on to the next phase. And I think that’s where people have to decide am I in on this phase or am I going to? I’m cashing out. Now, the one thing I’ll note is I see a lot of senior people thinking they’re going to cash out. I think this is the best opportunity for you to extend your one way on your value to your organization and your career. Because, yes, younger kids may know how to use it, but they don’t know what to ask and they don’t know the follow-up and they don’t have the experience and the wisdom to say go this way, not that way, because it’ll take you wherever you want to go, but you got to know where you’re going in the first place and you have to know how to ask those right directions to get you there, and that’s the deficit I see that the young kids don’t have.
[David] That’s true, and there’s wisdom. I’m reading a book from success to success, but it’s not the title. I have to think of the name of it and I’ll post it down in our show notes, but it’s talking about that. As you get older, you shift your expertise from being innovative to the wisdom that comes with it and delivering wisdom. And when we apply the wisdom that you have with years those of us who are more senior in our careers, we can use the knowledge that we have to ask generative AI. The more appropriate questions get the results that we want. Now you hit on something that too long of prompts on a large language model have a tendency to degrade the answer. Did I hear you correctly on that?
[Kevin] Not exactly the prompt. In fact, I think most people have, you know, kind of a minimalist approach to a prompt and for something that’s important to me it looks like an RFP right even to get started, because you could just give it greater focus over time. Where Gen AI tends to lose its efficacy, efficacy is in a thread the farther that you go down it starts to wane, if you go too long, you know. So at some point where you’re not getting it, you go and start a new one. But where you can save the cumulative learning is if, like if for those listeners who have ChatGPT, which most people do in my opinion the best $20 you can spend on any Gen AI tool, and the reason when you log in you get that $20 membership or subscription is because you can create a project. Now that project is again just big, basic how to use Gen AI. But it puts all those threads in one place and every time you run something it learns from all the other stuff that you have reviewed and approved. Now if you have a bunch of threads and you just, like garbage, come back and you never get any feedback, then I would be a little suspect of that body of knowledge. But if it is stuff that you have followed our best practices, where you give it a prompt and you give it feedback, hey, I like this, I don’t like this dude. Again, this isn’t right. This is right. You correct it, you help it set up for success. If you have a bunch of those in a proper project, you can add additional files and its focus becomes that body of knowledge, and that is the best practices that we teach in all my workshops with my clients as well, as most people are learning on their own.
[David] So let’s talk about your workshops. I want to take a moment to promote KP because, listeners, you need to get to know this guy. This guy, there’s so much knowledge in him. He’s a professor. He’s working in practical, real-world places like LoanWorks with Troy. What are your workshops? How can people learn more? Are they virtual? Are they in workshops? How can people learn more? Are they virtual? Are they in person? How are you doing this?
[Kevin] Yeah, I do them on-site online. I did a series, for instance, for the University of Southern Mississippi called Empowering Creativity, and it’s really two parts
[David] Empowering Creativity.
[Kevin] Empowering Creativity, yeah, and there’s two parts. There’s problem and solution. So there’s a day workshop where I teach Gen AI powered problem statements. I can work with a team to identify the problems that they have, every company has a problem and every one of them could be impacted with a good idea. But you have to make sure you’re solving the right problem. I’ve seen customers in my agency experience telling me they got a sales problem. It was a brand problem, looks the same but the solutions are very different. So if you don’t pick the right solution, the problem is going to remain. So I see companies time after time, solving the wrong problem very well. They put good money.
[David] That’s interesting. What do you mean by solving the wrong problem? Really well. I have some insights, what you mean, but explain them so.
[Kevin] So they, they move forward on something you know, they get into it and they’re like oh, the problem is in my example, it’s a sales problem. So they cut all the sales incentives, they put all these sales people, they make all this effort and it’s a great program and everybody loves the program and the sales guys and they’re spending out money. But the problem isn’t a sales problem, it’s a brand problem. So everything that they throw at this sales problem is not going to change. Nobody wants to buy their stuff because they’re not vibing their brand. So understanding the real problem to solve is the whole thing I teach in the first half of my book it’s a two-sided book and the first day of my workshop it’s a two-sided book and the first day of my workshop making sure that you can move from problems, which tend to be people just bitching about stuff, into a problem statement which is an actionable, measurable statement that has KPIs in it and how to use generative AI to challenge you and your team’s thinking so that you can be sure the problem is right here, so that anything you do is at least in the right space, for God’s sake.
[David] Yeah, I am really wanting people to get a hold of you. Kp, can you send me a link to your book so they can read the book and then have you come on so you do these workshops at different places around the country? You’re willing to fly to companies’ offices and help them.
[Kevin] Yeah, we do that frequently.
[David] I think there’s several corporate headquarters right now that I’m consulting to right now that could really use this. They’re stuck.
[Kevin] Yeah, the second part of that too, when we are on site, is then teaching them how do you come up with a solution. Now, I know what the right problem is, and most companies find they have more than one problem, so you got to pick ones, or the ones you’re going to start with, because you can’t solve them all the time. People don’t have budget, bandwidth, focus, et cetera. So we’re teaching how to use design thinking and generative AI. Design thinking is a critical thinking process. It’s very well established, but now we’re leveraging gen AI like ChatGPT. Dolly, Sora does videos, all kind of really cool stuff and the progress that we’re able to make in a day, David, is amazing. We can have an outline of a strategic plan at the end of day one and we can have potential solutions to those problems in that plan at the end of day one, depending, as long as you have enough people to put on those teams. But the thing that’s most exciting me really is this amplification of human intelligence, and that’s the stuff I’m excited about and that’s the stuff that’s really the focus. Right, you know I keep getting back. There’s that fear that AI is going to replace jobs. No, AI is going to change it. Right, and if you learn how to do this, it amplifies your human intelligence. You’re better, faster, cheaper. Remember the bionic man when we were kids? We can rebuild him. It’s not $20 million, it’s $20 a month. You can have the damn technology to get you to that. It shows you how Gen AI can be applied both to identifying the right problems and creating the right solutions.
[David] Professor KP, the idea guy, this has been delightful having you here.
[Kevin] Just a quick note about that. You know, Dave, I just started my doctoral program in organizational innovation, so Dr. KP will be the appropriate thing, although it’s been suggested Dr. Idea guy, but it doesn’t have the same ring as it.
[David] Yeah, that’s the idea. I like that. Yeah, thank you. It’s so good to have you, so good to see you again. I appreciate you taking a few minutes to come on here, friend.
[Kevin] Thanks, friend, good to see you as well. We’ll reconvene soon in Vegas.
[David] Yes, we will. So best way for people to reach you.
[Kevin] @theideaguyus. I’m also on LinkedIn. I’ve got a newsletter called what’s your Problem, and I love having conversations about people’s problems. I’m probably the friendliest business therapist you’re ever going to have, so reach out. Remember, if you don’t do something different, how are you going to change your circumstance right? You got to show up for something good to happen, so show up.
[David] So good KP, good to have you friend.
[Kevin]Guest Thanks pal.
Important Links
- Press release about Japanese investor bringing AI powered innovation
- SunWest Mortgage website
- Angel AI website
- LinkedIn – Pavan Agarwal
Pavan Agarwal is a renowned leader in the mortgage lending industry and a pioneer in bringing artificial intelligence to the financial markets. Agarwal serves as the President and CEO of Sun West Mortgage Company and Celligence International, LLC.