How to Build Trust in the Age of AI

What does it really mean to stay human in the age of AI? In this episode, I’m joined by a lovely guest, Joachim Lépine, international bestselling author of AI Resilient, and we explore the mindset shifts, ethical tensions, and trust building strategies that creatives and business owners need, now more than ever.

Today, I am joined by Joe Lépine. Joachim, I hope I say your name right. You can correct me if I haven’t. And the reason that we know each other is because, Joe asked me to review his book, his new book, and it dovetails very much with some of the stuff that we’ve covered on the podcast, which is around AI and also resilience, which was the whole of last year’s theme.

And so his book is called AI Resilient. And I love the book so much and what it’s doing because it’s all about service-based businesses and some of the changes, some of the pressures and challenges that are coming around because of AI in terms of clients’ perspectives about the value of the service.

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And I was super pleased to endorse it, but for our listeners today Joe, maybe you can introduce yourself. And tell us a little bit about the backstory for how the book came about. What were the changes you were seeing? What changed for you? And we’ll take it from there.

JOE: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on Jay.

I think this is such a, powerful combo, right? Because my focus here is resiliency. And this is all like your platform’s all about leverage. And if you put those two things together, I think we’ve got something really really potent.

Joe’s Backstory & The Birth of AI Resilient

In a nutshell. My background, I am a professional translator. My full name is Joachim Lépine. Everyone calls me Joe, but my full name is Joachim Lépine. I’m a French to English translator. And after many years of translating professionally, I started teaching university courses in translation. And that led me to launch my own translation academy. So I train translators. I provide professional development for them with my colleague Ann Marie.

And the reason I wrote this book is really that in, I think it was in December of last year, so December of 2024, I was thinking, gosh my, all these people I know in my life just happened to be struggling with how do we cope with AI? How do we grapple with this? What do we do about this?

So my programmer friend Jonathan, was telling me that his job would disappear within three years, max. Concurrently my graphic designer was telling me there’s less work for graphic designers these days in many cases because AI can do some of the things that a graphic designer can do.

And it just goes on and on down the line. Like actual people that I knew just in my circles were telling me to AI is changing the game. AI can do some of the things that we can offer, but not everything. So like everything is in flux. And of course, translators who are very much on the front lines of the impact of AI, since it’s a text-in, text-out profession, right?

At the end of the day, they’re definitely on the front lines of this change as well. So a lot of people were saying, the earth is shifting beneath our feet. What are we going to do about AI? And I literally went on Amazon and I thought, gosh I, have my own resources. I’ve been coaching people for a long time. I’ve also been coached by some really great mentors. So I have my own sort of stash resources and strategies and things. But essentially, I thought someone must have written about this.

So I jumped on Amazon to see if there was a resource book I could point people in the direction of and say: Hey, here’s a really great compilation of trust building strategies and perennial wisdom for business owners are now coping with the new pressures of AI. And lo and behold, there was nothing out there. And I thought, my gosh, if there’s nothing out there, then you know what? I think I’m going to write the book. So, it really was born out of this seeing a genuine need out there.

And I thought, I’ve never written a book before, but this is a topic I feel really passionate about. I wish I could help my programmer friends, my graphic designer friend, financial planner, all these people in my circles who are being impacted. And I thought someone’s got to do this.

Work of bringing together strategies that can help come back to basics and see how we’re going to cope with AI. So that’s essentially where the idea came from.

AI as a Wake-Up Call for Service-Based Businesses

JAY: It’s a brilliant idea. And I love the combination of AI and resiliency, as you said. Obviously, I had the same idea ’cause like my books on the shelf, your book’s on your shelf, it’s funny.I don’t think you can ever get too much in terms of those strategies. A lot of it is how you get into it. And so a lot of people are looking at AI for content; a lot of people are looking at like from my point of view, from the consulting side for digital transformation. They’re like how can we save money? How can we make efficiencies? But no one was really looking at some of the biases and the regulatory things and the ethics of it all. And they were just looking at performance and efficiency and operational improvement, which is like my bag. But there’s an inherent risk.

So I think part of resilience is to use AI well not just go for it. And part of it is how to be more collaborative with AI. So from your point of view what’s your sense of how AI gives service providers like you’ve described business resilience. What’s coming up as the primary drivers and focus, and the quick wins?

JOE: My perspective may be a little unconventional or counterintuitive, but I think in a way it’s a wake up call. And that wake up call can be very valuable. For people who do not necessarily have their marketing completely dialled in, AI is changing the game and making a lot of people rethink things, and in some ways that can be beneficial.

It’s AI is here. A lot of people are using AI. Should I be using it? Should I not be using it? We’ve seen a lot of cases where people use AI but very much as a slot machine I’ve seen people put like LinkedIn comments that were really blatantly written by AI. It doesn’t have the intended effect, right? It doesn’t build connection; it doesn’t build trust. And so a lot of people, even today in 2025, they’re using it very much like this slot machine where it’s: Give me this thing, give me a social media post, give me a business proposal. And that’s not an effective way to use it.

So I’m very much about saying I’m not for or against AI, but if we’re going to use it, let’s figure out how to use it right. So that’s very important point, and you touched on that in your wonderful book on using AI as well which I got a lot out of.

And then the other piece is that wake up call might also spur us to build better businesses and to focus more on trust. So a lot of people are jumping in the direction of let’s go all in with AI. Let’s outsource everything to AI agents. Let’s do our marketing with AI. I’m going the other direction. I’m going, I’m humanizing my business.

So while everyone else is jumping on AI and creating a lot of word salads, I’m going in the opposite direction and saying I’m very much human first, and then AI can be used to enhance what I’m doing. But it’s not the driver for me. The human is the driver for me. The AI is really more the enhancer, if you will.

JAY: Yeah, I love that.

The Promise and Pitfalls of AI

JAY: In your book, you were talking about the promise and the pitfalls of AI. And so I think you just started to get into that balance between being an absolute raving fan of AI but also really understanding like how to keep it real. And how to work with the AI in that kind of human AI collaboration. So I think that’s what you’re unpacking.

Any other areas in that sort of promise versus pitfall, optimism versus realism? Any other sort of things to unpack out of there?

JOE: In terms of the realism and how are we gonna cope with this, I think it can be helpful to think of it as the new internet, right? When the internet came out in the late nineties, it’s you might be for the internet, you might be against the internet, but the point is the Internet’s here.

And that’s my perspective. Yeah. So it’s let’s sit down and look at realistically what we can use this for and what it does well. Let’s also look at what it does poorly. And it’s funny, like with ChatGPT 4o, they had to update it because it was too obsequious, right? It was like flattering people like crazy saying, oh, this is so brilliant. And then you say, no, you’re completely wrong. And chat GT would answer. You’re right. You’re so smart. I was completely wrong. And it’s really quite, it still does that, it still does that. It still does that. Yeah.

The point is here and then it’s looking at how we can use it. So it’s more about this is the new internet, this is the dawn of a new age in technology. In terms of specifically, what we can start using it for. There are many great tips in your book. I’ve distilled it to what I call my three Rs, so I like to think of it as research, rounding out and refining. Those are the three things I found that AI can do well. So really quick, like an example of this is research might be identifying a need that your clients have.

Rounding out would be coming up with an outline yourself and then going to AI and saying: Hey, did I maybe miss anything or would you have any feedback on my order of elements in my outline, which it’s quite good at. And then refining can be as simple as I’ll give you an actual real -life example.

I put together a little workshop on how to create a five-star case study that I sold a few weeks ago. Did really well. And one of the things that I showed people how to do is to write a case study. And when I did it myself, I wrote out a case study that a client was super happy with my services and that’s all great, but it came out to about two pages.

And that was longer than I wanted it to be. I really wanted this to fit on one page so that readers would actually read it. We know that people online read about 20% of what they see on a website, so I really wanted to distill this case study and I was able to go to AI and just say: Hey, make this literally 50% as long as it is right now, and it did a great job.

I had to tell it like, don’t leave out key information, make sure to leave this and that. But it did a fantastic job and it required very little tweaking. So that was a real legitimate time gain. So these are my three Rs that I find that it’s super helpful for.

JAY: I like that. It doesn’t always do numbers very well. Like when you say 50%, no, it does not know what that means. You’ve gotta be very specific, like what you want to be expanded or what you want to be cut.

From AI’s Raw Output to Your Unique Creative Work

JAY: And also every time you ask it, it comes up with a different version. And I was finding that I was getting like five different versions that then I found the word consolidate works super well. ’cause you can say I like lots of different things in here and pick a few examples. Please consolidate and then you end up creating something very much that is more your work than AI generated because you’ve done a lot of the reshaping and in your rounding up and refining sections, you’ve done a lot of that yourself rather than just taking what AI says and running with it. There’s lots of layers to it.

So I think that’s what I’m hearing from you as well, is through that process and when you iterate all of those three Rs, you end up with something quite unique to you. It’s a bit like AI’s the mud and we are the ones with the pottery wheel and creating.

JOE: I like that. Same, that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I love that image. That’s very much how I find I get the best results. And of course, results are key, but it’s also important not to lose our humanity in this. I don’t want to be someone who is tweaking AI. I’m the creator. Yeah. AI can tweak what I create.

Yeah. I’m not going to become the slave to the machine as it were. So it’s also about. Yes, being creative and being the creators and stepping fully into that role and keeping control, to me that’s very important. And I have tried it both ways. Yeah. I’ve done things like Hey, write my next newsletter and here’s some parameters. And it does tend to create a word salad.

JAY: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE: Even if it does a good job, and even if you iterate. So not only do I feel I create something better if it comes from me, and then AI is tweaking and refining, but I feel better about it as well, which also I think has real value. It’s like I don’t exist to serve AI. A lot of people are working that way. They’re going to the vending machine and AI’s creating, then they’re tweaking. But I’m going in the other direction and think that’s why my offers do well, intend to sell out because I am writing from the heart and I don’t I don’t intend to change that.

JAY: Brand style and teaching it what your voice is like and what your style is. Priming it with all of your pre-AI day content that can really help. Because it sounds more like you and sometimes we’re choosing different tools. People say Claude writes more like me and ChatGPT is more generic, but it’s evolving all of the time.

So I think that’s also something not to take as it’s always gonna be this way. You’ve mentioned a couple of things already about how it’s evolving and getting better, just like the internet did back in the day.

Retaining Creative and Strategic Agency

A lot of what you do or the people that you support, they’re very much in the creative space. So retaining the agency and the ownership over what you are creating is important. And at the same time, I find it really great for brainstorming. Like I’ve got a sort of a rough idea in my head and I want it to build out some of those ideas and help me think it through. Kind of like chicken and egg, which came first, the brainstorming, all the the shaping. But either way, it’s still something that you’ve molded, that you’ve initiated and that you’ve set in motion and using it to collaborate essentially.

JOE: Totally. And I find that I do a lot of brainstorming with AI. what works really well is I’m setting the parameters for the brainstorms, so I’m not just saying, come up with a bunch of stuff. I’m very specific so for example, if you take like a, I dunno, a, an ad campaign, right?

Like a major campaign, you could say, come up with an idea for a campaign and provide lots of context and you may get something interesting. But I like to doing things like saying, give me seven different permutations of what this might look like going from the most literal to the most free or outrageous answer possible.

And when it’s giving me that breath and those gradations, I find I’m going into the mode of critically assessing the outputs and comparison. Yeah. Which is a good way of using AI. But I’m still, I’ve agency in the sense that I’m, comparing different things, so it’s already more active.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of that famous MIT study where they found that people who are using AI to just generate an essay without a lot of critical thinking, like your brain is really underactive. But I find that if you have good prompts that are spurring you to reflect and getting the machine to give you different permutations and ideas and gradations of things, it can actually be a lot of fun to play with. And then I’m like, I’m in critical analysis mode, and so that also can work. You’re right.

JAY: Even before AI, I was always trying to get people to be strategic about their content marketing. In the sense of like, why are you publishing any of it? Because a lot of time people just put a lot of effort into content and they’re churning stuff out without really too much thought as to what’s its purpose and who’s the audience, and what’s the occasion, what’s the medium, and how do you vary it?

So it was always my standard rant is purpose, audience occasion. But it’s the same with AI, and it’s exactly the same. If you were outsourcing to an assistant, a creative assistant, asking them to write copy, as they can like work with you and collaborate, but you are telling them what to do. You’re the boss.

So I don’t think, in essence, it’s very different of what we’re trying to do with AI, but because of the medium, I think people suddenly get brain dead and they just like. Try to take shortcuts, which take them out of the equation. And that’s, I think what we’re both saying is that’s the worst thing that you can do ever, that you really want to be driving it all.

It’s something that we need to keep doing. And in AI get very specific about the context for what you’re asking it to do so that it knows. That direction is clear. So that’s one thing that’s come out of what you’ve just said, that is the fundamental stuff, AI or otherwise, it’s fundamental to be strategic and to be specific in any sort of form of content in that sense.

To draw on what you’ve written in the book not just for content and creating, but you mentioned critical analysis and, taking data and insights about your customers, about your lead generation, about your engagement levels, and taking that kind of data into ChatGPT in order to, get things that you have to go deep and take time to get into if you were doing it manually.

Wanna share a little bit about that and what you teach and help people with from your book?

JOE: Right on. I think we’re very aligned because you’re starting with purpose and I love that. I think that’s, a very powerful way forward. And my book is primarily about building trust in the age of AI. But I do have a bonus chapter at the end where I talk about how to use AI effectively.  this is really I guess saying the same thing, but in different words, which is have a really clear idea of what you are doing and why and what you’re intending to do.

And then you’re going to reiterate with AI to bring it about. But having that really clear idea is just primordial. Whereas if you start with the primordial ooze and you just say, create this, create that, it’s going to create monsters, right? It’s going to have all these strange, gooey creatures.

JAY: Love that metaphor. Yeah. A lot is about what we want to output and if we could get clear on what we want as the output, then out of that soup, you’re telling it how to shape it and how to get it from A to B.

Tools That Enhance, Not Replace, Your Thinking

JOE: If you have a purpose and you have clear direction, and it’s more like we’re gonna iterate, we’re gonna work together as a team, and we’re gonna bring this about to bring it to where I want it. It can be quite I’ve done this with things like sales pages, I’ve done this with emails, tricky emails I had to write, things like that.

And and there are also amazing tools that are not ChatGPT that a lot of people don’t know about that are out on the market, but they’re not yet well known. One of them is a little app I use called Voice Type, so I can speak my email and what it does is that it just transcribes what I said, but it will automatically add punctuation and fix grammar and fix any flubs in what I said. So it’s very minimal editing, but just so that my message is clear and well written and even separated into paragraphs so it analyzes the thoughts, put thoughts of a like nature together. And that’s just one of so many examples.

So we think of Like these AI bots like ChatGPT and Claude and all the others, but all the APIs that are empowered by these technologies are going to allow us to enjoy more time gains. And I think I love Voice Type. It’s a good example of us also being in the driver’s seat. It’s the same idea of intentionality and purpose.

When I’m speaking, it’s still my ideas. This is me, this is what I want to say. But instead of me literally typing out every letter of every word, which takes a lot of time I can say what I want to say. Within maybe 30 seconds and I have this beautifully written email, just maybe touch up one or two things and then hit send. The, time games are really fantastic. And then an interesting question becomes, what do we do with the time that we’ve gained from these tools?

JAY: That’s a whole different conversation. There’s so much to explore in all of this.

The Ethics & Bias Conversation

In terms of the ethics – the thing I said a while ago about the ethics in AI – I think that’s a really interesting area. Cause ‘ it’s, the same. It’s like we’re so focused on the output of getting something done that like two things: both what we’re feeding it in terms of privacy and information sharing, but also in terms of analyzing it for bias and you just accept it as is and you don’t, ’cause it’s quite subtle, some of the biases that are in there. , tell us a little bit about your perspective on that.

JOE: For sure. There are so many ethical questions. There’s confidentiality, there’s what they’re doing with your data. There is a way that you can turn off training on your data. Yeah. With the paid version of ChatGPT. But it changed places recently, so that’s go find it and turn it back off. So it’s changing all the time. You have to watch it. But yes, there are many, there are lots of legitimate concerns.

There’s privacy. There’s the environmental footprint as well, which needs to be addressed. And also the question of people’s jobs, right? In the best-case scenario, you’re not taking away someone’s job. They are going to be upskilling and we’re going to be leveling somethings up. That’s an ideal outcome. And there are some reports that have suggested that’s the way that’s going, at least in some sectors. But then there are also real-life cases of people losing their employment. Like one that readily comes to mind is bank tellers in Asia that have been laid off by the tens of thousands.

We’ve got programmers at Google being laid off en mass as well. These are really legitimate concerns. But the issue that I think we’re confronted with today is that we don’t really have the occasion to have like a big societal debate before the next rollout comes. Yeah. It’s just boom, It’s coming. Yeah. And we just have to live with it. So it’s in a way forcing us to confront our demons and, figure out what are we going to do in terms of all these different economic sectors. And I think the solutions absolutely exist, but it’s true that it’s an unsettling time because of the speed at which these technologies continue to be rolled out.

JAY: Yeah. And, our skills aren’t keeping up with it as well. And I think somehow people see it as separate and different than just the integrity that we would want to bring professionally to any, anything we do. And just applying those same things, it’s somehow, like a different space.

But I think one of the things is when people don’t notice, like the inherent risks and biases that are in the outputs that these tools are producing. You talk about a guiding principle. So in that respect of hey, just bring your own integrity to the party, what would be that guiding – how are you teaching and coaching people to bring that integrity piece to what they’re doing?

JOE: I do think that there is a greater risk of bias if we are giving more sort of creation power to AI. So it goes back to our earlier conversation. Yeah. The more we are creating and it’s brushing up, I think the more likely we are to continue to be respectful, to avoid prejudices. The more we give the reins over to AI and say, Hey, create this, then we really see bias, right? We see like just simple things like gender bias, but also the kinds of assumptions it’s making that are sometimes really shocking. So I think the more we can continue to be creators, the more we we can be in the lead.

My rule of thumb, the way I’m teaching it these days, and again, this may change because the technology is changing, but the way I’m teaching it right now is Joe GPT before ChatGPT. What I mean by that is I first use my own brain and my own professional judgment. I think that’s a wonderful term we need to bring back. I talked about this in my book at length because this is something the machine does not have, and this is where the bias comes from. It does not actually understand what it’s creating. It’s recognizing patterns and regenerating content in new forms.

Guiding Principles for Ethical AI Use

JAY: And you forget that, right? ’cause it turns stuff out so quickly you forget that it’s just based on probable next letter in the chain. Yeah. Good point.

JOE: Exactly. And so it’s very easy to start taking it for cash and thinking this must be fine if ChatGPT wrote it. But of course that’s very dangerous. So I try to consult my own brain first and then AI I can use subsequently. But yeah, I think there’s probably a need as well for some training along the lines of ethics and critical thinking. I’ve been thinking about creating some training on this lately, like mental models, biases, critical thinking paradigms, even things that we’ve maybe lost sight of like Socrates. Socrates had some really good rules of thumb for asking the right questions, and I think that can be a very interesting thing to come back to today in an age where we, especially as AI gets better, right? We may not always question what it’s giving us. Yeah. So I think, yeah, it’s gonna be important.

JAY: ’cause it looks good. It looks really good. And it’s the same do you remember all the controversy around Facebook and, influencing elections and things like that? Because programming stuff that. Was manipulating people essentially. And then there was an app I’ve still got it on my phone, called Ground News, which looked at the same news story but showed you in the different publications where the bias, was it left or was it right, was it middle? Something like that for AI feels like we need something like that. That sort of says ah, you’re not really looking carefully ’cause you’re missing stuff that’s in there.  But the only difference is that the AI is not doing it maliciously, it’s not doing it with any kind of political gain intent. But even we can fall foul to it.

JOE: And even there, it depends on which AI, right? If we’re talking about Grok, there’s been some criticism that Grok is being programmed to be more right-leaning. Yes, there may be some political bias that’s built into certain engines. That’s not something we can assume that all of them will be absolutely neutral either. I love your suggestion of having a news platform with different perspectives. I want the link. Yeah, we need an AI app for that.

How to Stay Ahead Without Burning Out

JAY: There’s a lot of training and coaching and strategy behind all of this use. And I guess that’s behind writing the book is that it’s a feeder into this is why you need to work with someone that’s further down the line and you don’t fall into certain traps. But there’s just so much of it and it’s evolving so fast. I was the same when I wrote the book. I’d pretty much written 80% of it a year before I published it. And then I kept adding to it because it was going so fast that, oh, I’m gotta include that, gotta include that. And then in the end you just have to draw a line under it.

Even now, since I’m thinking about doing a little update certainly maybe talking about things on the podcast because I think our capability is, growing very fast, but there’s a very long tail in terms of the innovators and the early adopters and the people that are just thinking I missed the boat. So what do you say to, your kind of clients, the people that you work with who they wanna stay ahead of the curve, but they feel they’re too far back.

JOE: Yeah. I think. What I personally often find myself saying is “stay curious”. Because we are humans with emotions. And when we see this massive new technology constantly changing, constantly evolving, changing the workplace, hard to keep up, hard for anyone to keep up with, think it’s easy for the brain to go into overwhelm mode or shut down and just say you know what? I’ve had it with AI.

And this actually really connects with something a friend of mine was telling me. He developed an AI app and he was telling me that when AI came out, this was about a year and a half ago, so when it was like in full swing, he did a survey and 50% of his audience was, optimistic about AI.

The others like there were some skeptics and some people that were against, and today the optimistic respondents – he ran another poll – and it was like below 20%, and he was like, Joe, have you heard this too, that people are less optimistic about AI? I think it, points to a wider trend where when we get so overwhelmed with anything, right?

We’ve seen this with other phenomena, like political news. You get overwhelmed and at some point it’s just to protect your own sanity, because we have so much going on in our lives, we can be tempted to just shut off and say, you know what? I know what I know. I’m okay. Whatever. Business as usual.

And so I think it requires a little bit of active effort to say, okay, I’m going to take that extra workshop. I’m going to go and get Jay’s wonderful book on AI. I am gonna go and learn a little bit more about how to respond to AI. So it takes maybe in some ways, take some extra effort to keep pushing ourselves to say, okay, you know what? Even if I feel saturated, I’m going to keep periodically updating my knowledge because this is what we need.

Closing Thoughts

What a powerful way to close this first part. Joe’s reminder to stay curious, even when it all feels overwhelming, is such a grounded invitation to keep learning and adapting. In this episode, we’ve explored how AI is challenging business models, what it means to stay human-first, and how to use these tools ethically — with intention, integrity, and awareness of bias.

In Part 2, we move from mindset and ethics into real-world application. We’ll explore how Joe uses AI in his own creative flow, the tools he recommends, and how you can integrate AI into your business without losing your voice or your values. I’ll see you there.

Connect with Joachim Lépine on LinkedIn and his Lion Academy website. Focusing on strategies to build trust in the age of AI, Joe’s book AI Resilient is available on Amazon.

Resources mentioned:

• Grok: https://x.ai/grok – an AI chatbot developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company
• Vento: https://vento.so/
• Voice Type: https://voicetype.com/
• Groundnews: https://ground.news/

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