Clay: Okay. Awesome. Well, for starters, hello, everybody. It's wonderful for me to be here. My name is Clayton Luis Ferrara. I'm actually an alum of Rollins. I graduated from here in 2009 with 2 degrees, 1 in biology and one in environmental studies. I've been fortunate enough that since I moved to Winter Park to attend school here, I've lived in the area for. Geez, my freshman year was 2004, so that's frighteningly not 22 years I have been in this community. Tremendous amounts of change have occurred in Orlando. Tremendous amounts of change have occurred at the college. But I'm really honored to be here today to share with you all a little bit of my perspective, not just in the world and what I do and as a biologist and also as an alum.

Clay: So what I really want to kind of talk about today is a multifaceted aspect, but at the heart of it is who we are as people, what makes us human beings, how do we organize ourselves in teams, and how do those teams ultimately lead towards a goal and be successful? Now, the aspect of organizing yourself, your team, the technology you use, is an extraordinarily important skill. And the better you get at it, the better your life is going to be.

Clay: Certainly, I think we're all aware of the kind of concept of the little Russian nesting dolls, of a small doll inside of a slightly larger one, inside of a slightly larger one, inside of a slightly larger one. You can think of your own ability to organize yourself, your thoughts, your values, your beliefs, your goals that you have in your life, what you want to do in your profession, have a family, knock, all of those kinds of things. And if you organize those in yourself, in your goals, whatever they may be, your career, your business, your family, and ultimately the teams you work with, extrapolating out into the world, you will find that that hierarchy of understanding and of meaning is tremendously valuable. And it's in that structure that we now, as human beings, are grappling with AI.

Clay: So I'll talk a little bit about kind of my foundation of my thinking and my philosophy, which is as an evolutionary biologist. And as an evolutionary biologist, right, we think of Earth in deep time and in the concepts of life forms, relationships to one another. We understand that we're part of a very long story and a complex system. And some of you may have seen this on bumper stickers or T-shirts. But the aspect that we all depend on the top three inches of soil and the fact that it rains for essentially our entire society and all life on Earth.

Clay: So in that aspect, there's a lot of discussion around AI. Certainly you all are not ignorant to understanding that this is a massive consumption of RAM on your computers, right? If you're running multiple AI programs at once, you can feel everything almost like it's stuck in glue. There's the aspect of the water and the electricity that's used in the proliferation of AI and of data centers. And certainly this was a big topic for Florida in the last election, the primaries that just occurred. Multiple candidates were running on both sides of the aisle on what do we do about data centers? How do we regulate ourselves? How do we make those cut of decisions? Is the environmental cost worth it?

Clay: So these are things that is really important to contest with and to think about. And I certainly don't have a definitive answer, but I wanted to come up with a decision making framework to use in my organization.

The Decision Framework: Utilitarian vs. Nuanced Tasks

Clay: And what we decided was that there are definitely uses to AI that are extraordinarily utilitarian, meaning that whoever the user is that is telling the computer to do something that you want it to do the task and the end result doesn't necessarily depend on the individuality of the user. These are things like stuff that's never been fun. Data entry, spreadsheets. If you have a for-profit company, you're doing accounting, gathering receipts, all of these types of things. Typically they would be someone in an entry level or even a little bit more advanced position working in a company, sitting at long hours at a computer, doing this type of data entry stuff. Not particularly fun, not particularly glamorous.

Clay: We knew that that was an area that if we could find a good trade off of having the computer system handle those kinds of things for us, it would free myself and my team up for some of the more cerebral and intellectual and nuanced things that we need to do that really moves the organization in my case or business or your own life right forward in a positive way.

Clay: You may have heard this concept referred to as the signal versus noise concept, right? One of the aspects as to why Steve Jobs was such a brilliant giant in the world of business, and certainly with Apple or someone like Elon Musk, is that there's a lot of noise out there. That is distraction from the goal even in my day today of running three for-profit companies and one United Nations accredited nonprofit doing work in nearly 40 countries around the world. My day was unfortunately on the phone, on hold, trying to recover a password from inside the USDA online portal and picking up mail at various inboxes around town here in Winter Park.

Clay: So often there is more noise than the signal that you need to hone in on. But first of all, thinking about separating those kinds of tasks as to what is prime for AI to take over and what are the things that we as the humans behind the customers company truly want to be doing was a good starting place for us to look at.

Clay: We also have the ethical concerns of trying to understand what is the greatest abuser of energy and water that AI is doing right. And of course these are high level computational, graphical, mathematical computation, heavy problems and our little receipts and accounting for a handful of millions of dollars was not going to be a tremendous energy suck on the use of the data servers. So we felt that, okay, we've kind of found a sweet spot of things we don't want to be doing. As responsible of the take on AI as we possibly can. Let's go down that rabbit hole. And that's essentially what we did.

The Mission: IDEAS for Us

Clay: I'll rewind a little bit and give you some context of the problem that we solve in the world, and then I'll go into how I think that you all can help.

Clay: IDEAS for Us started actually in the college dorm room back in 2008. It was not on this campus. It was at the University of Central Florida. The founder of that is a gentleman named Chris Castro. He started it as a student club when he was a sophomore at UCF. Chris and I became friends. One of the things that I was really big on in being a student here at Rollins is understanding that most of my life revolves around here and Park Avenue. I don't need to really stray away any further. And I'm quite happy in this fall. But once I graduate, the world is actually larger than Winter Park. And I also as a student here and doing research for my biology thesis, there were far more publications that UCF's library had. So I started going to campus over there and utilizing their data systems to pull all different kinds of journals that they paid for millions of dollars for in an annual subscription at their library that Olin didn't have. And I started to see flyers about student clubs and wound up meeting a team. And we turned the organization into a nonprofit.

Nonprofits: The Independent Sector

Clay: So for starters, let's simplify things. There's two kinds of companies in the United States. For-profit company and a nonprofit company. But don't be fooled. The nonprofit part does not necessarily mean that they don't make a profit. And in fact they often make the most profit. Dare I say our dear Rollins here is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and so are many entities. Hospitals are often nonprofits. Credit unions are often nonprofits. Insurance companies can be nonprofits.

Clay: So what's going on here? Well, what a nonprofit really is, and a better term for it would be "for mission." If your for-profit company exists for one reason, and that is for the purpose of generating profit. And that's all the IRS cares about. How much profit are you making and are you paying your fair share of taxes? That's really it. That's also the litmus test of success in companies as well.

Clay: In the case of a nonprofit, you're not paying out taxes that other companies that are for-profit would be paying. You're being excused that tax burden. And you're even given access to tax dollars to do things with.

Clay: I'll tell you a real world story. I'm also a founding member of the Winter Park Land Trust. And the whole concept of that is to keep the park in Winter Park, where we literally leverage millions of dollars and buy pieces of real estate that would become a Jiffy Lube and turn that into an actual park here. So we put together $3 million internally in our board. We then approached the city of Winter Park at a town hall meeting. We said, hey, we've got $3 million. We want you to match it. We need $6 million to purchase this piece of land that's owned by a bank called Bank of the Ozarks on Orlando Avenue. And because we were a nonprofit, because our mission was tax exempt, we could access tax dollars inside of the city and extract that capital and have them match it and get us the $6 million that we needed to purchase this. And today, that's the park called Seven Oaks Park that is right off of Orlando Avenue. If you go down the other side street by Fiddler's Green and keep going straight like you're heading out of Winter Park towards I-4, you'll see it on the left and that Seven Oaks Park is great and a nice asset to Winter Park.

Clay: If we were a for-profit company or if I was just some guy, I couldn't have shown up there and leveraged the fact that we're nonprofit to essentially have them gift $3 million to us to be able to do this project. So a nonprofit is very powerful.

Clay: And at the heart of a nonprofit is also how people organize themselves for doing good. We're very lucky in this world that in addition to the tremendous amounts of problems that we're facing, we also have great people like you all who are wanting to do something about it in some way. A nonprofit is ultimately the embodiment of a group of people coming together and organizing themselves to do something positive in the world and to be unified by a mission.

Clay: Imagine a Venn diagram. One circle is the public sector of government. The second circle is the private sector of business. And nonprofits exist in the circle in the middle, in the overlapping Venn diagram. And that's called the independent sector. So nonprofits are in the independent sector. They take resources from the public sector of government and the private sector of business, and they solve extraordinarily important, complex problems that neither the public sector or the private sector can solve on their own.

Environmental Action, Not Just Advocacy

Clay: So what does IDEAS for Us do? Well, we were very aware that we're in a real jam when it comes to things going on with the planet. All of the data and evidence shows that we're facing the sixth great extinction, with more species becoming imperiled as time goes on. We're facing rising heat levels across the planet. And we're even seeing shifts in plankton, dissolved oxygen, and currents around the planet, which has a major potentiality of disrupting the aquatic food cycle of the planet, which feeds more than 70% of the planet.

Clay: For us, what we thought was, well, there are many organizations that focus on the advocacy side of things, and that's very important. If I were to walk out into Times Square with a camera and a microphone and ask people, tell me five things that are wrong with the planet, most people would be able to rattle off something. And that's a real testament to showing how environmental education has been extremely well funded in the United States since the 1970s.

Clay: In the late 1960s, you had the rise of a lot of things. The American counterculture movement, the third wave feminist movement, the second wave environmental movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests. All of these things created an environment of people questioning a lot of the structures of hierarchy and education and governance. And from that, a new concern for the planet and for health emerged. The outcome in the early 1970s was the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, among others.

Clay: From then on, a lot of the money that has been put into environmentalism is around teaching people the problems. That's called advocacy. But it creates an interesting problem. You feel very small in a world full of gigantic problems. You have to grapple with the aspect of what do you have agency over actually in your life, if anything. And often that is not answered in the narrative of environmental advocacy. Instead, you're educated around the problems. But the message is always, "And you're the next generation. Good luck and go solve all of the problems and have a nice day."

Clay: So we knew that when we created an environmental organization, we actually wanted to focus on the other side of the coin. We wanted to focus entirely on the action side. The boots on the ground, the shovel in hand, the engineers coming in, the chemists and scientists, the financiers, the business people, the brands, the institutions, and the money that it takes to power a lot of these different solutions.

Matuvo Paul and the Soil Tower (Uganda)

Clay: That picture there of that structure was invented by a gentleman named Matuvo Paul. Matuvo Paul grew up in Uganda, in the Buduta district of Uganda, in an environment of absolutely crushing poverty. People selling their children in order to survive. Prostitution, drugs, all kinds of terrible addiction to Chinese synthetic drugs and over the counter counterfeit medicines, poaching, illegal logging, human trafficking.

Clay: And even in those extraordinarily difficult settings, the reality that much suffering comes from people who don't have enough food and also who are so poor that they don't have the place in which to grow their own food or the agency over land in order to feed themselves.

Clay: And Matuvo knew that. And he also knew that if he could create a stacked way of compacting 300 yards of soil into a tower and created a chute down the middle of it that he could fill with compost, he could potentially also feed worms that would create castings, which is a nutrient rich shedding of their skin in their life cycle. And that these worm castings would provide a fantastic source of nitrogen and phosphorus for these plants to be able to use. And in something half the size of the tables in front of you, he could literally produce tonnage of food.

Clay: And he was able to invent this and put it into play through a simple grant that we were able to give him and empower this kid to be able to embed this and grow food in his own village and then to scale them to literally thousands of these across his district. So these are the kinds of things that we care about and that we want to focus on.

How IDEAS for Us Uses AI

Clay: And of course, this then begs the question of, well, if we're going to act and behave like a 21st century environmental organization with our heads screwed on, focusing on action as opposed to just advocacy, what was the role of AI?

Clay: And when I went to answer this question, I thought about the values of our organization, the values that we have for our staff. And I started there. I started to unpack how our team could use AI in a way that helped them to do the things that we knew were not dependent on the inputter of the information and what kind of drudgery that computers could help with and to also preserve the things that our team wants to be doing. The in-person touches of going to these places, meeting people, understanding the contextual aspects of the village and the problems that they're facing. And also the human stories.

Matias: I wanted to let them know that there's ways they can get involved beside the class. You guys have the Fleet Farms every Saturday. Their Whisper Creek Farm is just on South John Young Parkway as well. But yeah, I wanted to bring it a little bit closer to how you see them getting involved. And how are you implementing AI within IDEAS?

Clay: Yeah, of course. I think that all of these ultimately come down to decisions. And if any of you aspire to be entrepreneurs or to build something or volunteer your time for a nonprofit, you'll learn so much. It's tremendous. Whatever the organization or the cause may be, I really encourage all of you to find something that you're passionate about and to give your time to it and to see where that leads you.

Clay: We're very active here in Orlando. This is where our primary headquarters is. We also have another office in St. Petersburg, Florida. We also have another office in Miami. We have an office in Washington D.C. and we have an office in San Francisco, California. And then we do work in a lot of different countries around the world, from Romania to Bolivia to Afghanistan to Uganda and many sub-Saharan African places.

Clay: We have had Bonner Scholars at Rollins work with us. We have had many interns. Many people matriculate on to becoming staff even or take on temp roles with us because we're hiring for all kinds of things all the time based on the different grants that we are receiving for projects and programs here in Central Florida.

Clay: Of course our good old fashioned website, ideasforus.org, is a repository of things.

Receipt Processing

Clay: Now, when it comes to AI in the organization, the immediate aspect that we wanted to try to understand was could we utilize this to do some of the things that we don't want to necessarily be doing. Receipts and accounting and all the things. Okay, great. It can do that very well.

Clay: I can literally take a bag of receipts from a trip internationally and scan them with my phone, drag those pictures into Claude, have it turn everything into a spreadsheet, instantaneously put everything in chronological order and even drop pins on the map of where the purchases were made. Because I made sure the metadata was turned on on my phone when I took a picture of the receipt and it geotagged where that picture was taken. And now I have the GPS data that I can quickly extract from that.

Clay: And it saves the step of me back in the day of having to take a literal Garmin GPS thing, connect it to a satellite, punch in where I was, get the GPS readings, type those imperfectly into a spreadsheet, and that was how I knew where I was.

Grant Writing with AI

Clay: As Claude got really, really good in grant writing, which a lot of people in my sector knew, and we have been training large language models since 2019 to write like me. I win millions of dollars in grants and have for many years. I understand a lot of the context of how this works in both the federal government, the state government, also in brands we work with: AT&T, GM, Sprouts and all kinds of things.

Clay: And in doing that, we knew that this is a very time-consuming act. Writing, you're truly pouring out your heart and soul. But a lot of what the donor is asking for has a set format. It might vary here and there, there might be character counts, there might be questions that are given you in boxes, but ultimately the way in which you're making a case for support, where you were stating the problem that you're trying to solve, why you have the perspective to be able to solve it is all very important. And we knew that we could get the robots to do that.

Clay: So 2019, we started with our own large language models, but they were quickly beat in quality. So we started trying to get Claude to learn how to write like myself, learn how to write like my team. And we had great success. We were able to increase the amount of grants that we were able to get out the door very quickly.

Clay: Now, were we just making the robots write it and packaging it up and sending it off? No, we were very rapidly creating a rough draft.

Clay: The more you tell the AI before you hit enter, the better you're going to have come out the other end. Garbage in, garbage out. If you tell it just a total crap prompt with no detail of what it is you want from it, you're going to get that on the other end. If you are extraordinarily detailed, sometimes I'll just brain dump and attack this thing for 40 minutes of just pounding in text into this prompt and hit enter. I promise the quality that will come out the other end of that is far superior.

Training Claude to Write Like You

Clay: There's a whole way to think about that. Apparently, that was shared with me from some of the Anthropic people. And they said, at least for Anthropic, the goal behind Anthropic is to make AI connect with a human being like a human would. So they said, talk to it like you would a person.

Clay: So I thought, okay, let's try this out. So we give it a prompt, and it would write something. Be like, "That's terrible. We would never talk like this." Read these examples. And we'd give it five examples of grants that had been entirely written by me. And we would give it to them. We'd say, "Okay, try this again and come out with something." And it was a little bit better. And then we would edit it, but we would always give it back to it. And we would say, "Hey, we edited this. It was terrible. We fixed it. It's much better now. Write like this next time."

Clay: We've been doing that for over a year now with everything that we put together.

The EPA $4.7M Grant Experiment

Clay: I also wanted to run some really interesting experiments. There was a massive grant from the EPA for $4.7 million. And this was a grant that was given around environmental education. So I said, all right, there's one winner. The odds that we win when they have thousands of organizations, massive organizations, National Wildlife Federation, World Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, you name it. The odds that we're going to win this as one winner in this administration is low.

Clay: But let's see how far we can get entirely through using AI. And let's test if the federal government has scanners. Are they looking at metadata? Are they hacking into this? Are they able to see it with AI? How far can I push it?

Clay: And that was what I wanted to know. We made it to the top 10. And I have a call at the end of this month with the internal team of the EPA who scored our project so highly that they want to talk to us even though we weren't chosen.

Clay: So right now what I was saying about the fact that the legislation hasn't caught up to the technology is true. Even the Edith Bush Institute here at Rollins, which teaches on nonprofit excellence, their stance was: use it. See what happens. Most agencies, foundations, and brands and the government have no AI policies yet.

Standing Out When Everyone Has AI

Student: With a bunch of nonprofits not using AI and you are using AI to stand out, once more nonprofits start using AI, how will you stand out?

Clay: Great question. Because the reason that I was able to absolutely dominate and whoop ass was that I could write like crazy. And that's one of the things I'll give props to Rollins for. When I was a student here, you could take as many credits as you wanted once you paid the flat rate. I would saddle my workload out crazy. I did mainmester. I was stacked out and I learned how to just absolutely churn out tonnage of text.

Clay: So coming into my role, I was able to just wipe the floor of my competition. Now, that unique aspect that I bled for through my time here in college, anyone can do by hitting enter.

Clay: So I then knew that this is where the real touch of finesse of understanding sustainable development, project design, the design of metrics, the theory of change, the concept of storytelling and taste and coolness were areas that we could dominate in.

Clay: It's one thing to hit enter and get a program for a farm to pop out the other end. It's another thing to create an urban agricultural program that uses people on bicycles riding from farm to farm with small farms and front lawns called farmlets, and then having a solar DJ out there and creating a whole fun experience that brings in hundreds of young people all the time to learn about urban agriculture. That detail of what Fleet Farming is, which is one of our programs, was very unique. And that's what happens as a unique identifying aspect in our organization. So we're trying to lean more into that.

Proposed Student Project Areas

Matias: We're going to have two teams that will be partnering with IDEAS for Us. They're each going to be working on different things. What do you envision as the needs where these teams could be tackling?

Clay: Yeah. Well, I think the best experience that we can both have in working together is one where we are both mutually gaining. I think probably three areas we are very interested in kind of inviting you into considering, but I'm really open for anything.

Clay: One of them is the fact that we are looking at the aspects of creating something called biochar on site in farms across a place called Hardee County, Florida. We're going to be gathering a tremendous amount of information about the process that we're going to be utilizing to create this biochar from dead citrus trees that died from citrus greening. Hardee County faced over 90% drop in citrus production.

Clay: So not good. Big problems. We're going to be working on that. That's a kind of agricultural project. And the curation of that data, the storytelling that will come from it, the case for more funding that we'll be building, the network of elected officials of senators and representatives that I'm going to need to support us to push the project through in the state. We'll also be working closely with whoever winds up being the governor.

Clay: The other aspect is that just yesterday I received word from Anthropic. And when I was at Harvard Business School, I was able to meet a lot of the Anthropic team. We were fast-listed for the first cohort of 50 nonprofits for the Claude Corps program that they're doing. We were kind of, just due to timing with the budget aspect with the state, we've now moved to Cohort 2, which starts in November.

Clay: So the actual Anthropic team is going to be helping us internally to work on our structures and how we're working on those kinds of things. I would love to have a student involved directly in that and working with us. There's a big conference that's going to be in California and I don't know how many from our organization can go. But if there's an interest of anyone here who wants to go and I can get you in, hell yeah, I'm gonna do that.

Clay: And the third one is something specific to Orlando Winter Park. We have a multitude of different things that are going on here. There are a lot of aspirations that the city of Winter Park has for increasing park space, tree canopy. The side of Winter Park that someone would enter from the Maitland side gets very neglected. Everything is happening on this side of town. And there's the aspect of complete streets, walking trails, more tree plantings, different kinds of bike trails. Is it pocket parks?

Clay: You may know that we are facing a mayoral election, which is a pretty big deal because the mayor of Orlando has been mayor for the entire time that I've been here. He's literally been mayor for like 24 or 25 years. He's the longest serving mayor currently in the United States, and he's now vacated. So this has created a chaotic power vacuum where a multitude of commissioners and others in the community are running for the seat and will cause great upheaval in how the city thinks, functions, and does things.

Clay: So how do we navigate that as an organization? Well, perhaps AI can help us. Perhaps AI can analyze everything from town hall meeting minutes to voting records of commissioners and council members and committees. And perhaps all of this information can just be puked into the robots. And then we can ask it very specific questions drawn just from the content that we've given it. And in an afternoon, we can become much more deadly in our decision making of how to navigate something that was once very abstract and would create 40 hours of research and reading for me to have done before and to essentially have in an afternoon instantaneously.

AI as Team Member vs. Adversary

Clay: Ultimately, I think it is really important for us to understand that AI in its best sense is a team member and in its worst sense is an adversary. And that what we don't want to do is create systems that remove the heart and soul of what we ultimately wanted to do all the way back to the dorm room, creating something that gives people great purpose and meaning. And if we allow our uses of technology to erode that, well, then we put ourselves in a position where all of our work is ultimately for nothing. And that is something that we all have to be really cognizant of and careful about as we navigate this.

On Pitching Without a Portfolio

Student: We have to start somewhere. How would you recommend pitching your service to a business owner when you don't have any past clients?

Clay: Great question. There won't be any proof at first, right? The first clients are often the hardest. The way that you hone in on sales is ultimately by selling the dream. So what does the end result for them look like? Talking to them about how a good website with an easy tool of someone booking an appointment with them, look at some data. I'm sure that it's a delta of over 20% and you can say, look, if you have this tool versus not having this tool, all of the data shows that you're going to be able to book 20% more clients than you did before. It's going to pay for itself. Focus on the ROI. What did they get as the end product from this?

Clay: And if they want to see examples, show them a mockup or show them examples of other work that you didn't do, but still show the outcome that someone could have a really well-designed website of a similar business. If someone is a shoe store out there and they have no website, no online presence, show them what a small boutique shoe store's website could look like and say, "Hey, I didn't make this, but this is ultimately the kind of thing that I want to do for you. And here are some of the end results that you can get." And let's try it together and work something out with them. Even if you have to take the client for the dirt cheap amount of money that it takes for you to get to a yes, winning that first client, you're going to make back up the money as time goes on.

Matias: And I'll add to it. You don't need to have a paying customer to start building yourself a portfolio. If you can just search, "What are 10 projects that I can do over this weekend to learn how to use AI for building websites?" and just start tackling those, you're going to build a portfolio that whenever someone asks about, "Oh, what have you done before?" you can show it. And it's mostly a learning experience in the beginning. It's going to be awful. It's not going to look that good, but you're going to learn through it. And eventually you're going to have something that looks stunning and learn about SEO optimization and making sure that their website will stand out on Google Search and things like that. That's one of the ways to get started.

Matias: All right. So everyone, this is Juan Pablo and good friend of mine and also one of the people from the Mills Gallery, as well as his partner, Boris. And I just met Ambar earlier today, but I know she's the third piece of their team. And they're here to tell you a little bit about, you know, first, who they are. What does the Mills Gallery do? And also a few areas where they might be looking for AI as an opportunity. Opportunity or as a threat. Where do you want to steer away from where they actually want to utilize it more. And I'll just hand it off to them right now.

Juan Pablo: Introduction and Mission

Juan Pablo: Okay. So if you don't mind, I'm gonna stand. Well, thank you for the opportunity of being here, for me to be here talking to you guys. I'm from Colombia, so you're gonna notice my accent. So if you don't understand anything or something that I say, just please feel free to ask me to say it again.

Juan Pablo: So on August 10th, my life changed. I was in Colombia when the earthquake struck. I was with my mom, so I had to go through the whole devastation of being in my city. Half of the city was destroyed. So I remember when I talked to you, we video chatted and I was there. So we had our first meeting about this privilege of being here. So you were telling me about this amazing project. So why am I telling this is because I appreciate my life more now than before. So I value the time that you guys are giving us here. And I also want to share also to put all our efforts of giving you as much content as we can for the developing of your career.

Juan Pablo: So my name is Juan Pablo Santa Luna. I have the privilege of serving as a director for Mills Gallery. Mills Gallery is not just an art gallery. So our business is selling art. You know, so we hang art. But it's not just that. We go deeper. We tell the stories of the artists. So how many of you guys like art or understand a little bit about art?

Juan Pablo: Okay. So I think we are surrounded by art and we don't know. Once that we notice the beauty of the creations there, we appreciate it more. So to understand our business, it is a good idea to maybe understand about what is art. Art is the creation of another human who put their emotions, feelings, sufferings, sometimes trauma, sometimes a lot of things that we don't say to words. Today I'm an artist myself. And Ambar Santiago, our gallery administrator, is also an artist, so we understand that perspective. We are also in the business side of selling the art and helping the artists.

Juan Pablo: So our gallery sells art, we create exhibitions, solo exhibitions, and also collective exhibitions. And we tell the story of every artist. So it's like a boot camp of four months per exhibition where we talk to the artists and we walk the artists through the process of selling art and becoming somebody different.

Juan Pablo: So we are here to tell you about our business, to see how you can implement the AI tools for social impact. So Orlando needs places where we can showcase fine art and we can bring those stories alive. We are in the pursuit of those places. We transformed from an LLC company to a 501(c)(3). That was two years ago. So our business model, besides selling art, it became also nonprofit. So we also received donations to create new art programs to make more impact. So that's a different side of our business. So I want to hand it to Ambar. So she's going to tell you more about the day to day operations and how you can impact us too.

Ambar: Operations and AI Stance

Ambar: Thank you, JP. Hi everybody. My name is Ambar Santiago. I currently serve as the administrator for Mills Gallery. And I handle a lot of the day to day operations. The administrative stuff behind the exhibitions that includes like press releases, creating labels, reaching out to social media, doing the contact work, basically to get the word out for our exhibitions that are up and coming.

Ambar: So right now, part of my mission at Mills is to represent undervalued and unseen artists, specifically those of the Latin descent and women in particular, because those historically have been the ones that really need the exposure to the modern art world. And I really enjoy it. That is a passion project for me specifically.

Ambar: And so part of that is also being integrated into what our selection process is in a way that doesn't compromise quality. So a lot of that administrative work is also looking at who is applying, who's ready for a show. But we also guide artists on how to approach other galleries. We get them ready because often or not, galleries are just expected for you to drop off work and probably never see you again for like two months. And then you come back and pick up the work that you didn't sell. And that's usually the end of the relationship. But at Mills, we also help you create your avatar essentially to, you know, be public, be personable, explain your work in a way that everyone understands because art can be really lofty. And sometimes the artists use a lot of big words that, like, maybe we all don't understand, so we kind of help them form that as well.

Ambar: So part of the administration, where we really need help optimizing things, is like putting stuff together for the artist to be presented to the world, like the press releases, media contacts, what we need to send for invitations, because we also do private invitations for certain diplomatic representatives. And, you know, we want to cater it to certain different audiences and see how they respond to those catered emails. So that is part of what I do. And sometimes I really need help putting together all this stuff because I am typing it all out and vetting it through Boris and Juan Pablo. So it's something that really needs optimizing because it does take a lot of my time. And I could really see AI being useful in that sense.

Ambar: Although I just want to be clear, I do not condone AI being in the creation of artwork. I do not want to see it. If we find out that you use AI in the artwork, that just tells us that you are not capable as an artist yourself and you do not trust your own ability to create work. Because sometimes, you know, it's pretty obvious when you use it. It's not like a secret sometimes. You know, I've seen it when artists copy AI, but it still comes out kind of crappy, you know, and they're like, oh, I copied AI. So it's not technically like AI. But I'm like, you still did the same thing, though. Like, you didn't put in any of your creativity, and that shows. So I think, you know, AI belongs in certain places, but definitely not in the creation of artwork. So, yeah, that's my stance.

Boris: The Founder's Perspective

Boris: Hi, everybody. So I'm going to give you very quickly the caveat. Forget how I feel about AI. I'm the oldest one at 60, and I am from a generation that is fearful of AI for several reasons. I don't know if you understand when somebody, when we talk about AI art, how can you tell if it's AI art? That's the problem. We can't tell anymore the way it works now. You can create an image on your phone using any apps that you have. There are labs that are being built all over the world right now. They're in California. I think they're building two at UCF. AI labs. So these AI labs have computers that are basically an arm that holds a brush and they can transfer an image that you sent them onto a canvas using oil, acrylics, and watercolors. And you cannot tell the difference because since it's wet paint, the computer makes mistakes as well. So it looks like a human mistake. It's definitely not perfect. So it looks like human made.

Boris: We've been fooled once, Mills Gallery, and I wasn't happy with that because we tell every artist, please let us know in advance whether you're using AI and of course they don't, you know. New York has been fooled. The OMA, which is the Orlando Museum of Art, has been fooled. City Arts has been fooled.

Boris: So the way I look at it is a problem. I think AI, quite honestly, I use AI. I think it's a wonderful tool, but it's also a wonderful tool that can be misused. And I don't think I'm just saying that because I'm old. I see it, I feel it.

Boris: But what I have tried to do as the founder of Mills is, I have now I have. But when I started 10 years ago, I didn't know jack squat about art and I was proud of it because I wanted to enter a business where I didn't know anything and learn from my experience. I learned a lot of things. And I learned that artists were underrepresented. The way women are treated in the arts is horrendous. The way minorities are treated in the arts is horrendous.

Boris: And so I gave an interview once. I said, I don't give an F about art. I care deeply about the artist. And that ended up hurting Mills Gallery for a while until AI came up. Because I had kind of predicted something without knowing it. I had predicted that the artist is more important than the art that they create. That's why we teach the artist how to do business, how to sell their art, how to talk in front of a crowd.

Boris: You might not believe this, but I am stuck nervous talking in front of a crowd. And I love it because that shows me that I still take this seriously.

Boris: And we've kind of realized, the three of us, you can be a great, fantastic, wonderful artist. If you don't know how to sell your art, if you don't know how to talk about yourself, if you don't know how to answer elemental questions about your art, then it's not going to happen. Now, your personality is as important. I believe that your personality, the way you communicate, is as important as the art you create.

ORCA Initiative

Boris: One of the things that I particularly need help with is Juan Pablo, because of Colombia, what he told you. He started an initiative called ORCA, which stands for Orlando Reaches Cali and Arts. And Ambar and I started a project called Cali Lando, which is Cali and Orlando combined. We are going to adopt a gallery in Cali, and we're going to be the big brother. We're going to make sure donations are sent to this little gallery.

Boris: And that's important to me. I don't know how to go about this, but our initiative has already picked up steam. Last Monday, Juan was on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel because of this. So we don't want to lose the momentum. And what I want to do is I want every newspaper in the world to write about what's happening in Colombia for six months. That's our initiative. We want to see if this can be done, if this as a social experiment can be done, if the newspapers and magazines and anywhere all over the world can help us. And then this is Juan Pablo's gift to the world. Everything that we've learned from that experience, we're giving away freely to the world so that if something like this happens again somewhere in the world, they can use what we're doing.

Boris: And my last thing I want to say is it is an honor to speak in front of you because you are the future of whatever the hell is going to happen next. So just realize arts are very important for all of us. Arts are a way of showing how we feel without having to say it. But what I've learned is you better be able to explain your painting to somebody who wants to buy it, because if you don't, then it's not going to work. What people have been saying, art needs to stand for itself and speak for itself. And I always say it's not going to happen. You have to be able to explain your art.

Q&A: AI and Art Creation

Matias: All right, so let's move to a quick Q&A. Use your prepared discovery questions, focus on best behavior, current workflows. What are some questions that you guys want to ask to the team at Mills Gallery?

Ambar: As an artist myself, because I do paint, I did go to UCF for painting. So I have a lot of studio experience and having gone through critiques where stuff like that does happen. And what I learned from my professors is that yes, you can use the Internet and sources to get inspiration. And it's tough, you know, because like you want to see it already happening through Chat. I know it can recreate those images for you just to see what it might look like and then you end up just doing it through your art style. But I would say, don't just find any kind of art for here. Find what speaks out to you personally and what your goal is with the art. Investigate that first before anything else. Because it could end up really hurting you as an artist if you put something in there that doesn't match the message that you're trying to create. So I think if you are going to do that, do it with intention.

Boris: May I answer that too? And please don't be offended by this. It's cheating. So if you're an artist, you're in charge of the canvas. If you have to ask, you're not feeling sure. If you have to ask, ask a human being because AI is going to give you answers that are good enough to think, okay, I'll do this. Ask a human being, but you shouldn't.

Student: So you feel like it would be different than say an art professor telling you, hey, I think you should do this or that?

Boris: Yes, because an art professor I hope is human. I consider it cheating and it's not a good cheating. This is your passion. And if you have to ask a computer to help you with your passion, I'm not comfortable with that.

Ambar: Right, that's fair. If you're not even comfortable enough deciding for yourself, the art is the most personal thing you could be creating for yourself. So if you really have to go to a computer and be like, hey, I need your help with this, then what are you even doing it for?

Student: Juan, what do you think?

Juan Pablo: Yeah, I think the tools are there to be used at your convenience, but it's just you against you. If you are gonna make your creation based on artificial intelligence, which is the collection of the whole data of the whole world, you are going to be influenced by something that is not going to be you. So my recommendation is if this is something related to you, if you are exploring arts and you want to get on the train of transformation, give it a try on your own, find that meaning, put it out there. And if this is personal for you, come to us and we can help you follow that creation. Don't stop creating. If this is you, if somebody close to you, don't stop creating.

Q&A: Finding Artists

Student: I am very curious how you guys find these artists. You say that you're bringing more women and more people from internationally. Do you guys just go explore a lot or do you guys specifically go to certain places?

Juan Pablo: We learned the process of scouting for artists. We are not experts. I come from corporate America, so I quit my whole life and I became full time into the arts and culture. So the way that we now do it is we make call to artists for certain exhibitions. We use press, we use Facebook, we use LinkedIn, we use Instagram. And we make the call to artists based on what we want to achieve with that exhibition.

Juan Pablo: So right now on September 23rd, you are all invited, all of you. We have the opening of our flagship exhibition. It's called the Win Win Emerging Artists Exhibition. And it's sponsored by one of our champions in the arts. Five emerging artists, they happen all to be from UCF, but we received more than 50 applicants. So we made that call to artists for a specific exhibition. We go outside to the fairs to scout, we fly, we go to Miami, Gainesville, Lakeland, Tampa. So we try to reach all these places where we can find these artists and we want to bring other artists from outside and also from international destinations. So we use social media.

Boris: And Juan Pablo is being very modest. He is the creator of the Win Win. And you created it with a purpose. It's an art exhibition with a purpose.

Juan Pablo: Yeah, well, I decided to do everything with purpose in my life and helping emerging artists go through the stages and not quitting. The future is not like we need to make it look bright for the artists before we ask something from the artist. Something has to change here. So scouting for artists for us is really important. We take it serious, we go to their studios, we talk to them, we explore their minds. Because it's not just about finding the right art, it's about finding the right person to turn that story. So yeah, every exhibition is like a four month boot camp where we teach them everything from how to talk and we record interviews, like professional level interviews in order to give them the spotlight. So no other gallery is doing that. We feel very proud of that.

Q&A: Connections and the Gallery Business

Student: What have you done previously to find connections, invitations, media contacts? And are there specific groups that you would value more than others?

Boris: Well, I can tell you, for example, these two right here did not have their first exhibition at Mills Gallery because both decided that they didn't like how that looked, they didn't want to have their first exhibition at the gallery they worked at. So both decided to have an exhibition outside of Mills Gallery. So it looks like they earned it. And in many ways, that's exactly how they earned it. By meeting with these galleries, we became friends with those galleries.

Boris: Unfortunately, the gallery business is very competitive and very cutthroat. I'm not going to say here in Orlando because we have made relationships with other galleries, but the galleries are like islands upon themselves and they have their audience which they don't want to share and they don't want to work in collaboration with other galleries because they might lose something.

Ambar: Sometimes they don't allow, like contractually don't allow certain artists to show at other galleries. And sometimes that can be really limiting. If the gallery says, hey, you can't show within like a 30 mile radius or something like that.

Boris: And I hate that. When a gallery represents you, you are not allowed to show at any gallery in town. They give you a 10 mile, 20 mile, or 30 mile radius. I don't agree with that. We let artists show elsewhere. There was a lady that was here before Ambar, Christy Lee. She was an artist and she decided to work at a second gallery while she was working with Mills. I had no problem. Zero problem.

Q&A: AI Shaping Art Perception

Student: We're very influenced by technology and now we're very influenced by AI. Do you guys think that AI will now tell us what we think we would like?

Boris: That's a brilliant question. The difference between you and me is that you were born into AI. By the time you were conscious, it was a reality. When I was in high school, they didn't have computers, but they had electric typewriters. And that was so cool. But that's how my background with technology is.

Boris: I think one great thing that you have going is that you don't have to fear about AI that I have. May I ask, who is fearful of AI?

Student: I am, but I think AI can do a lot of good, but it can do as much harm. People can do deep fakes, AI phone calls with random calls. So as much as it can do good, it can do as much harm. You just have to make sure you can keep control of it.

Another Student: I'd say more concerned. It is causing lots of fakes on all sorts of things. I'm getting maybe a billion more calls than I ever gotten my whole life. And some AI bots, you can hear them breathing on the phone, like trying to make you feel like they're real. I was calling Verizon the other day, and I could not tell if the person was AI or not.

Boris: We are now living in a time where if you see a movie on Facebook or Instagram, haven't you already asked yourself, is this real or not? We're being taught not to trust our eyes or our ears. That's a huge problem. And when you don't believe what you see anymore because it might be AI, it might be fake, that scares me. And it gives politicians and other people cover because if they do something bad or say something bad, they're going to say, that's AI, I never said that.

Boris: But I want to state this. I believe AI is a tool and that it can be used to work. But if you use AI to create art, then you're a tool to me and that's how I feel.

Visitor Experience and Operational Needs

Matias: I want to ask you to walk through the last time a visitor came to the gallery, what's that process. And also what's taking the most time in your day to day operations that could be automated. Especially being a gallery that showcases emerging artists. It can be a stepping stool and you want this artist to be showcased in other places and giving them not only a media kit but the tools and materials that they can use to succeed post their experience showcasing at Mills Gallery.

Juan Pablo: Every exhibition, for instance the Win Win is from September 23rd to November 12th. We have an opening reception, around 100 to 120 people come. And then during that period of time we offer private tours. We select people from government, diplomats, business owners, institutions. We send those emails. That could be very helpful if we can come up with something that accelerates all that process on sending emails, inviting people to the artist talk, which is once during the event where we bring the five artists to give a talk and people just ask questions and they tell their own story. But we also offer private tours for institutions. They contact us and we schedule a tour and they come and we tell the whole story of the exhibition.

Juan Pablo: I was thinking, every time people come to the gallery, one of us has to take some time away from our duties to give a private tour. So maybe coming up with some kind of QR code for each painting where they can scan the painting and they interact maybe with the artist. I don't know if you can get it. Like this is a nonprofit organization so I'm confident that we are getting the resources to bring AR components, guide boards, all these things that can enhance the human experience with art. So maybe a QR code where they just scan and they put the headphones to begin with and the artist can tell the whole story of that painting, maybe next painting. Every exhibition, when we have solo exhibitions, is probably 25 paintings. 20 to 25 paintings. And we always create the story behind every painting. So we organize, we curate the exhibition, telling the story of the artist.

Juan Pablo: And another way that we can save time is in the search. When we are searching for grants, there are a lot of institutions out there that have money to help the arts through grants. Federal grants, institutional grants. And that's a lot of work to do, going to Google or maybe with ChatGPT. But being assertive on those, on that data is very important to us to know where to apply our energy and also when are the deadlines. So you can be one of the first ones to apply and submit for their grant.

The Three Gatekeepers

Boris: I also want to point out that we speak from experience. You've heard of the word gatekeepers? A gatekeeper is kind of the person who decides what's shown, what's not shown. In the business of art, the gatekeepers are the people who own the galleries and who decide what art is shown, what art to promote. Well, this gallery has three gatekeepers. I'm the old guard. I'm the one that was influenced by art in the 60s and 70s. I have probably in some areas an old fashioned point of view. Juan Pablo is the current guard. He is the guard that is making the decisions about what type of art we're pushing, what type of artists we're pushing, and Ambar is the future guard. She is going to be running her own gallery in the future, and she's learning from both of us. So this is the only gallery that has three types of guard.

Boris: So the experiences we make are based on our mutual decision. Sometimes there's been art in the gallery that I didn't like, but they loved it, or sometimes there's art that only Ambar and I liked. But I think that's what's so beautiful about Mills, that we can get more things done than the average guy.

Boris: But to go back to your point, what is it that we prefer? We all know together that the biggest problem for the artists that we meet today is that they're incapable of talking about themselves or their art or answering questions or dealing with the public or taking an inquiry. Incapable. And yet it can be learned very easy.

Ambar: Oh my God, it was horrifying. It was literally, I was pooping my pants. Because it really isn't, at least in my experience, being taught at UCF, they taught me a lot about how to be an artist, about how to paint a certain way or how to put the wire on the back of the painting. But I feel like I wasn't asking the right questions when I was there. I missed out on information on who to contact for galleries, who's in the town, who are the big players, where can I show my work. And that just wasn't there. So there was an incompleteness to what I was being taught. And part of that was personality. How we should present ourselves, how do we dress accordingly, how do you write an email. We were taught how to write a CV and things like that, the small stuff. But then they were just kind of like, go out into the world and figure it out on your own. So I was very unprepared.

Boris: When Pablo finishes this, if you don't think we've had artists come in drunk, high, wearing completely inappropriate messages on their T-shirts, being rude, having a chip on their shoulder. A guy came in and stood by the door and said to me, this isn't a gallery, this is the lobby of a building. It is. And I said, well, then that's the door. Bye bye. I mean, that's not how you start. You start with, hi, how are you. And criticizing the gallery shows you have no idea. You have to have a feeling for the game. Whatever business you're about to enter is a game. And you need to know the rules of the game.

Closing

Juan Pablo: I just want to say thank you for the opportunity of knowing about what we do, and we appreciate any efforts on helping us to improve our productivity. And we are open to suggestions. So I hope we can work together on this. Thank you.

Matias: Just on the more practical side, you were talking about a QR code on each of the paintings. Is there a specific set of questions that you guys already train the artist to talk about with their pieces? Maybe we could standardize those per piece. Maybe more like a learning management platform where they're not only learning from you guys, but they can practice on their own, how they talk about their painting and things like that. Maybe kind of like a Duolingo for artists in an interactive manner. And I'm sure the students might have some ideas as well. But as part of this process, engaging with us, you will receive a proposal. And once the teams are allocated, the students will also reach out to you individually to schedule one-on-ones to learn more about the operations and follow up with specific questions. Thank you very much.

Boris: Come visit Mills Gallery, 1650 North Mills.

Juan Pablo: Yeah, just here. Probably less than a mile away.

Ambar: Yeah, it's free.

Boris: Good luck with everything.

Matias: All right, give everyone a round of applause as well. Thank everyone from the Mills Gallery.

Matias: I'm going to give it off now to Oscar to present a little bit more about ecoPreserve. Give him a round of applause, everyone. And Oscar, do you mind if I record this because there are some students that are not here. I'll just transcribe it and then I'll send it to them.

Introduction and Mission

Oscar: All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Matias mentioned, my name is Oscar. I am the CEO and owner of ecoPreserve. We are a sustainability consulting firm. So we wake up every morning with the mission of helping create a future where people can thrive in harmony with nature. And the way we do that is by making a stand on buildings and operations. So we work on high performance buildings and resilient operations. We are based right here in Central Florida. And as Matias mentioned, we turned 17 last year, which is pretty exciting. We're almost to college, so it's pretty cool.

Oscar: Every year we help about 50 to 60 different organizations advance their sustainability projects, which we call one engagement project. They take anywhere between six months to two years, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. We work in 15 different states, still only national.

Oscar: And yeah, so we're really excited about the possibilities that AI can offer to power what we are trying to do.

Oscar's Background

Oscar: Just to give you a little bit of background on me, I was sitting where you are. Well, actually this building wasn't here, but I graduated in 2008 from Rollins with a bachelor's in economics and a minor in Business Administration. And I wanted to go to Harvard. That was my dream. I really wanted to go to Harvard and get my MBA there. I tried really hard. I worked on it for about a year, did all the things that I needed to do, and I didn't get it. So, really disappointed. I didn't know what to do. So around that time, I became an American citizen and I decided I didn't live here anymore, but I wanted to do something special for my master's. So I moved to Australia and I got my master's degree in the best business school in the country. And then I moved back here to continue my career.

Oscar: But along the way, while I was here at school with you guys or as you, I was working, I was building my career. And I built it in hospitality primarily, helping airlines and hotels maximize their revenue. And I worked with Southwest Airlines, with Expedia, with all the large organizations. And about 10 years ago, I just had a radical shift. I just couldn't continue that journey. I did really well, loved it, traveled the world, built a great lifestyle. But there was something in me that changed. And at that point, I knew that I needed to try something new. And I was really pulled towards doing something about the environmental crisis that we're facing and doing something about it. I didn't know what. I didn't know anyone in that space. I didn't know where to start. Had no experience or education in the field, but I had a passion to do something.

Oscar: So I very responsibly transitioned out of my job. I was leading a team of strategic consultants out of the west coast of the United States. And I decided, you know what, I'm just gonna take a step back and fully commit to this sustainability space and see where it leads me. Well, it wasn't a straight road, but eventually I met Alexis Stone, who founded ecoPreserve 17 years ago in the midst of the global financial crisis. She decided to launch the company and at that point we were taking off. So I joined as a business manager and eventually director, VP, CEO. And about three years ago, I had the opportunity to buy the business as she retired. So that's kind of my story in a nutshell.

Current AI Usage

Oscar: But I am really excited about the possibilities that AI has for us. So just to give you a little bit of an intro how we use it, we primarily use Copilot. It comes with our Microsoft suite of products. It's embedded on everything. So it makes it really easy for us to leverage the power of ChatGPT through Copilot. We primarily use it to start our research when we are working on a project that we need to do preliminary research. It's a great resource for us to get going.

Oscar: For years we'll also be using Grammarly and it's been super helpful. It helps us kind of level the field in our communication skills across consultants. So it's very helpful to maintain that similar voice and tone.

Oscar: We also use Google NotebookLM. It's super helpful for us to do research, integrate multiple sources, especially when we're working with large data sets.

Oscar: But I would like to see what else we can do. I certainly feel that some of the things that we do now could be streamlined. There are proposals, for example, that we create. They're pretty manual. We create them from scratch. Well, not from scratch, but we start with a previous proposal, try to adjust. There are processes that we could optimize, especially when it comes to green building certifications. I feel that there is some repetition, some predictability that could be streamlined. And our newsletter, we have a newsletter that goes to about 10,000 sustainability leaders around the country. We have some international readers. And we create the content manually. Well, we use AI for research, but we create that content manually. There might be some opportunities to do that too.

Oscar: So working with Matias, it seems that there could be possibilities for a few of you to help us out in seeing how you can leverage what you know for a real business and a practical application to help us advance our mission. So I'll stop there and see if you guys have any questions.

Q&A: How Do You Find Clients?

Student: How do you find companies to help with sustainability? Do they find you, and do you have a process to figure out what part of their business you want to help improve?

Oscar: That's a great question. So I forgot to mention, most of the clients that we serve are governments. We serve local governments like the City of Orlando, state governments, regional authorities, as well as the federal government. Those projects are massive and we want those because we want to be part of something that makes a real impact that helps millions of people. But we can't do them directly because we're too small in most cases.

Oscar: So we partner with larger companies, usually engineering firms or construction firms that have the insurance, the wherewithal to be able to pursue these projects, compete and win. And we come as a sub-consultant for a very specific focus. So we have very strong relationships with our major partners. We have about 30 companies in our portfolio that we work with across the country.

Oscar: And when it comes to specific clients or ultimate clients, what we call owners, we keep an eye on public solicitations. So we use a solution called BidPrime, which has been enhanced a lot by AI to see what's out there, what solicitations are being put out that we find interesting. We bring them to our partners and say, hey, can we pursue this together? Just want to make sure that out of this whole scope of work, we can do these three things really well. And if there is some small business participation requirement, we can check that box too. So that's how we usually pursue business.

Oscar: Now, a lot of the work that we do comes from existing clients, and they know us. So when they know a project is coming, they say, hey, this part of the project is perfect for you guys, just come join us. But we can't count just on that. So when it comes to outreach, we do it through BidPrime and existing relationships.

Oscar: Now, we could optimize that more. That's definitely an area where I feel we can optimize it more because the net that we cast is really wide. We get thousands of new solicitations a week, and we have some good keywords and filters to help us narrow down what we need. But out of those, we usually have a handful that are actually interesting to us. And the process is still pretty manual. Even though it's AI enhanced, it's still pretty manual. I think we can do better.

Matias: In that process of outreach, where you say you also have a newsletter that's read by 10,000 people, do you have a lot of inbound customers coming in from the newsletter?

Oscar: No. And that is intentional. We use that as a way to educate our customers, to prove the authority that we have by bringing them attention to trends that might be of interest, to create awareness. So it's more of an advertising tool than a marketing tool that creates leads for us.

Five Business Lines and Project Examples

Student: Could you give us some examples of some of the sustainability projects you've worked on? And is there a specific area you tend to focus more on, like renewable energy or community development?

Oscar: Thank you for asking. There are five main business lines that we have. Green building certifications is one of them. The second one is transportation electrification. The third one is sustainability and resiliency. The fourth one is decarbonization. And then grant funding.

Oscar: In the space of green building certifications, which is about half of our business, we help with government standards for specific buildings during design, construction, or operations. For example, the Orange County Convention Center is going through a massive expansion. They're adding about 200,000 square feet. We're working with the architect to meet all the sustainability requirements as they are pursuing LEED Gold certification for building design and construction.

Oscar: In the fleet electrification space, we have served Orange County to have a roadmap on how to electrify the light and medium duty vehicles in their fleet. They have about 5,000 vehicles, 1,500 that could be prime for electrification. But they wanted some help on how to do that. So we created a roadmap for every single vehicle with different scenarios and personas depending on who is using it, where they are charging it, how they use it, and so on, so they can make the decisions on how to move forward.

Oscar: In sustainability and resiliency, it's a pretty wide net. It's kind of a catch-all for everything else. We, for example, have worked with large international airports to facilitate something specific as the solid waste management. If they want to know what they are sending to the landfill, how much they can divert, we have senior consultants that facilitate a waste characterization study. A waste management plan includes stakeholder engagement, possibilities for pilot programs, including composting. And then we just kind of give them a plan for them to move forward.

Oscar: And in the grant funding arena, we help large organizations understand how they can fund the initiatives they have, which these days is the hardest part. They might have the best of intentions, they might have the people, which is not always the case in sustainability. There is a shortage of people to get the work done. But even if they have the intentions, the commitment, and the people, many times they lack the funding. And these days it's been even more difficult because a lot of the funding comes from the federal government. And that has changed dramatically with the current administration.

Oscar: In decarbonization, the city of Denver has a large metropolitan area and the buses that serve all that community are under the Regional Transportation District, the RTD. They hired us to help them decarbonize their fleet and their facilities. We focus on the facilities, the fleet maintenance facilities, the storage facilities, and we try to figure out what opportunities they have to lower their carbon footprint primarily with energy efficiency and some electrification.

Oscar: And with the Philadelphia International Airport, we're working with one of my favorite partners to help them with their sustainability program. They're one of the first airports that are diving into sustainable aviation fuel. And so we work with them to understand where the feedstock for the fuel could come from, how it will work to get that fuel processed and on site and available and mixed to go into the planes safely. It's a really cool field of study.

Entity Status: For-Profit B Corp

Matias: We had Clay coming on the first day. They were founded as a nonprofit, as a 501(c)(3). Then we had the Mills Gallery which was originally created as a for-profit business and then they transitioned to a 501(c)(3). What's the status for ecoPreserve? Walk us through the B Corp certification as well.

Oscar: We are a for-profit business. And I feel very strongly about that because part of our mission is to prove that you can actually do this and create a great life for yourselves by living in harmony with your values. And it's a really tough thing to do. So the B Corp program was a way for us to express that. And we actually had the help of the University of Florida. They have a great program to help businesses in the state that want to go through that track.

Oscar: It is involved. We're very sincere and genuine in our commitment to what we do and who we are. And it challenged us. There were commitments and policies and practices that we didn't even know we needed to do. But it made us better and made us stronger. And since then they've raised the bar. So for our renewal, it's going to be tougher, but we're up for it. We're really excited to do that.

Matias: There was a big revamp on how the B Corp certification process works. I worked with B Lab back in Brazil 10 years ago. They had the B Impact Assessment and it looked into six categories. But now I think there's a minimum score in each of the categories. If you don't reach it, you're not able to get certified.

Oscar: It is tough. In fact, we recertify next year and we're going to start next month working on it to make sure that we are checking all the boxes and hitting all the marks. This is really important to us.

Oscar: One of the cool things about being a for-profit business is that you can help nonprofits. And the way we do it at ecoPreserve is by assigning usually $1,500 a month to a different organization. And we go through our team and every team member chooses a different nonprofit to support. And it's been amazing to see the type of organizations that we support, anywhere from people committed to responding to communities after a tornado just went by to saving loggerhead turtles or feeding families.

Oscar: So it is a wonderful privilege to have the resources to help others. And to do that, we have to continue to do more of the work that we want to do and just materialize the mission, which will probably never end. To thrive in harmony with nature is something that is more of a lifestyle that I probably won't get to see in my lifetime as a community or as a society. But we can aspire to that and just chip away towards that. And so I definitely support the work that nonprofits do, but we choose to do it for-profit, in part to prove that it can be done.

LEED Certification Process Walkthrough

Matias: What's the process of onboarding a new customer? Walk us through the last time that you prepared a certification document. What takes the longest?

Oscar: Because we have so many different types of projects, certifications have a very predictable process for the most part. The other ones are a lot more fluid.

Oscar: The U.S. Green Building Council started a program to create some standards of what a green building was. And they called it LEED, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Right now we're on LEED version 5, and we at ecoPreserve help organizations meet the standards to get the certification. You can get it at a certification level, or you can have three other ranks if you want to stretch yourself.

Oscar: We usually start at the design. It's supposed to be an integrated process. So we help our clients from the very beginning where they're in conceptual design. Once they start schematic design, when they start to actually do some wireframing, what the building could be, how it is positioned, what is outside, how the user experience will be, then we get involved.

Oscar: Our involvement usually is to help them understand what they need to do from beginning to end, create a roadmap, give them clarity on the landscape, what they're signing up for. And deciding how they're going to get there, because there are many different ways. There are some things they have to do as prerequisites, and there are some things that they choose to do to get to the total points and the certification level.

Oscar: So we help them make those decisions. There's a lot of documentation that supports those decisions, calculators that need to be populated, for the most part, manually. There is an organization called Green Badger that has advanced the automation of that process, and they do a pretty good job with that.

Oscar: So once we get involved, we start documenting what the building needs to do, we create some narratives to describe the strategy that they want to use, and then we start documenting information and pulling a portfolio of proof that the building is compliant during the design phase. That goes into a package that is uploaded online, is reviewed by the certified agency of USGBC. Then it goes back to us. They usually have questions and comments. We address them, go into construction, and they start the rest of the process.

Oscar: From a LEED perspective, design is about 40% of the journey because most of the decisions are made at design. And construction is mostly about verification. And then we do it again. We just put the package together, send it for construction review. Once it passes construction, then the certification is awarded and our job is done.

Matias: Even though it's fluid and you start with benchmark research, is there a specific onboarding process where you sit down, interview the CEO, then do interviews with the rest of their teams?

Oscar: That varies. Normally because these are governments, by the time we get involved, the contract has been awarded. The owner is very familiar with who is going to do the work. So there is not a lot of onboarding in the sense that they already told us what they want us to do. They just want to get to work. It can be surprisingly challenging to get going just because government teams are so stretched. So scheduling and arranging that can be challenging. But usually by the time we get involved, let's just get to work. We know what it is, so let's just do it.

AI Gaps: Document Formatting and Iteration

Matias: You mentioned that you already use Copilot and Gemini. Are there things that they already do well and places where they fall behind?

Oscar: Yes. I think Copilot is really good as a starting point for us. It's a good starting point to just dump ideas and help us structure what we want to say or create. But then we take over, which is where we add the most value for our clients. And then at the end, we come back to it for refinement. To look for clarity, brevity, remove the redundancies, and just make sure that it is as helpful as possible to our clients.

Oscar: I'll give you an example. We have a client, it's a confidential project. But long story short, they created a massive sustainability plan for a large local government. The plan is probably 50 to 100 pages. The part that we played was relatively focused. We focused on the greenhouse gas inventory.

Oscar: So I wanted to give the executives at the city level the opportunity to just open one document and get what they needed to know about the work that we did. So I worked with the senior consultant on the project to draft all the content. We initially used Copilot, but then we switched to Google NotebookLM to organize the information in a one-page document. The template they gave us was pretty good, but it gave it to us in PDF and when we tried to update it, it was no good. It was really hard to update.

Oscar: So I actually asked it to do multiple iterations of the same document and in the end I had to recreate it myself. Now, it gave me great design patterns. Like, oh, I like this one from this version, I like this one from that. But the ultimate product was created by me. I tried multiple times to ask it to update things that I wanted to see differently, but it didn't do a good job. And even when I tried to export it into Google Slides or PowerPoint, it still was clunky.

Oscar: And I wanted to give my client the ability to just take the slide that we created for them and just plug it into presentations or whatever they wanted to use. And the AI applications that we used were really inadequate to do that. In fact, the more I asked it to refine it, the worse it got. So I opened multiple queries to get different perspectives of high quality, and then I manually integrated them into one that the client is really happy about.

On AI Boundaries

Matias: Clay and the folks from Mills Gallery were very adamant about areas where AI should absolutely not touch. Are there sacred cows for ecoPreserve?

Oscar: I don't think we have that. But what I would say is that we feel very strongly that AI is an enhancer, not a replacer. So while we appreciate the research, the speed that it offers, we certainly don't delegate the leadership and the ability to create valuable recommendations for our clients based on real experience. We don't delegate that to AI. We can get some ideas on how to structure it or how to present it, but we don't rely on AI for that.

Oscar: Our clients do have restrictions. We work with a government client that specifically says, you cannot use AI on my projects. And we have to sign a form confirming that we don't.

Oscar: So we don't have sacred cows, but we do have autonomy, and we don't want to give that up.

Oscar: I do question, though, and I have to be honest with you guys, I question at what point AI would be capable of replacing us. And in the consulting industry, it is a valuable concern. At what point does ecoPreserve add value, or any consulting firm for that matter, compared to something that our owners can just query and get within seconds?

Oscar: We still feel very strongly that our experience and expertise is where we add the most value in helping make decisions that are practical and feasible to implement. But as things evolve, that is a looming shadow on the entire consulting industry. And if you're planning to go into that space, I want you to think ahead on where you can add value in an AI world in the consulting space, because it's getting increasingly more challenging.

Oscar: A lot of the research that we used to delegate to junior associates is no longer available to them. In fact, during the pandemic, we flipped that business model. We used to have one or two senior consultants, and then everyone else was junior. We flipped the model. We now have actually no junior consultants. We only have senior consultants that power their work with AI and replace the junior associates. And that's a concern that I think you already expect in the workplace. But I like to think that larger organizations are a better greenhouse for young professionals. But as a small business, we just can't afford it.

Three Priority Areas for Student Teams

Matias: Just before we wrap up with your portion, the logistics. Because of the type of customers you deal with, the team will have to sign an NDA. How big is the company, and what are some of the other constraints?

Oscar: Most of our clients have very strong confidentiality rules. So we will need to sign a non-disclosure agreement with whoever comes to help us, which is a really easy form. I have it ready for you guys. Our team is 15 consultants, plus a marketing and administrative team. For simplicity, I'll be your primary point of contact. I am very busy, as you can imagine, so I can dedicate up to 30 minutes a week to connect virtually and maybe from time to time in person, to see where you are, what the progress is, what questions you have. If you want to talk to any of our consultants, I can facilitate that too.

Oscar: The three areas that we chose as a starting point, and I definitely welcome feedback on this, are the green building certification documentation and seeing how we can automate that or streamline the process. The proposal development. We churn out a lot of proposals and those are pretty manual. And I feel that we could do better at streamlining what we create. And then the search. We talked about BidPrime and the searches that we can optimize to find what's out there that is relevant to us and our clients.

Matias: And you said you were already using a tool for that?

Oscar: Yes, it's called BidPrime. They're basically an aggregator of government solicitations. It makes it easy for you to see everything that is in a specific geographic market in one place. However, the keywords are not ideal, but they help. We have four pages of keywords that BidPrime uses to narrow it down, and still we have hundreds of solicitations.

Oscar: They recently released an embedded AI application where you don't have to open all the documents, but you can ask the AI bot for a summary or specific questions. For example, does it have a small business requirement? Are there any LEED requirements? Or just give me a quick snapshot of what the solicitation is about, when it is due, things like that. And it does a pretty good job. That part is a good step forward because before we had to open the documents and do the scanning ourselves.

Matias: So it's usually like a scan of what's available and then where you guys fit in.

Oscar: It's somewhere in between. It tells what's available with the net that we cast, which is for those five service lines. So it's still really wide. And because the keywords are not ideal, we get a lot of stuff that's not relevant to us. But it becomes visual noise where every day we have to clean that up to get to what's really good. I think we could do a better job on that.

On the Consulting Industry and AI

Student (Jillian): How much AI has taken over at least the consulting business. I didn't really think it was that much of a threat. I used to want to go into consulting, but just seeing the way that competitors have to use it, you kind of have to learn how to navigate it in order to stay in the consulting business now.

Student: I really like the aspect of being a for-profit business and then still giving back to nonprofits. Do you think that in the future you will be working in other countries as well?

Oscar: That's a really interesting question. We have explored that a lot. My background is international so it'd be kind of natural. The domestic market is a little hard for me but it's really intimidating to go abroad. There are wonderful organizations doing the kind of work we do in other places. I am from Colombia, was born and raised there and I have really good friends who have their own consulting firms doing great work over there.

Oscar: To go into those markets we would need to make an investment that at this point we are not prepared to make, to build the kind of relationships that will help us thrive there. Especially because we're a service industry. I think with a product industry where we could bring a box solution that we could deploy quickly, that would be really interesting. But most of what we do is relationship-based.

Oscar: We have a consultant from the Middle East where surprisingly sustainability is hot right now and he wants to go into business there and wants to take us along. So we're exploring that. But I just feel very cautious because of how little I know about those markets.

On Convincing Companies to Invest in Sustainability

Student: How do you convince companies to invest in sustainability when costs are sometimes high?

Oscar: That is the question that stops many organizations from moving forward. The simple answer is that we don't. We don't convince anyone to do this. We empower leaders who want to do it and who don't have the expertise or the team or the funding to do it. And we can help them get there. But we're not in the business of changing hearts.

Oscar: The financial benefits are clearest in energy, because the return on investment is usually within a few years. So it's easier to talk C-suite on the terms for energy. Other fields, like waste management, are a little trickier.

Oscar: Normally it falls into two areas. One, living up to their own values. If they care about what they're doing to the planet, we can help them be authentic in that way. But from a financial perspective, resiliency has become a key word. How they can become more adaptable to climate change. If a hurricane is coming, how quickly can they get back to business if the building goes down. That reduces risk and it's very valuable from a financial perspective. And that's where most of our clients are shifting to. They start talking less about sustainability, especially in states like Florida where the political atmosphere is pretty negative about that, and they just talk about resilience.

On Impact Metrics

Student: What role do impact metrics play in your consulting? Is that part of the contract, that they have to report the impact they made through your consulting work?

Oscar: It's a great question. Actually the other way around, what impact can we have for them and work through them. For example, a community action plan, we play a role, but the impact is made through the organization, the community, or the government.

Oscar: We could be better at that. We have some metrics of, for example, how many greenhouse gas emissions are being reduced by a specific project. But I have to be honest, we could do a better job about measuring our impact. And sometimes it's tricky.

Oscar: I am open to exploring how we could take a look at just the metrics of our projects and how we can use AI to tell a better story, perhaps a more articulate story of the impact that we have.

Closing

Oscar: I feel very privileged to be here with you guys. I am really curious to see what you can do for us. I think that this is also a good test for you guys as you go into the marketplace. It's a good assessment on where you can add value because every company is going to be leveraging AI in one way or another. And how you say, hey, you guys are doing a great job with that, but I can help you do even better with this, is where I think you can set yourselves apart.

Oscar: If you have any questions, please let me know. Matias has my contact information. If you guys want to contact me about ecoPreserve or anything else, please let me know. I really care about the work that we do and can relate to all of you Rollins graduates. If there's anything I can do for you guys, let me know. Happy to help.

Oscar: I also want you to consider, once you go into your careers, who you'll be working with. One of the best things about the sustainability space are the human beings in that space. I feel so blessed that my partners, my clients, even my competitors are amazing human beings. It is awesome that we all feel on the same team. We play different roles and sometimes we sit across from each other on different tables. But it is a phenomenal group of human beings just trying to make the world a better place by helping people thrive in harmony with nature. So if you guys have any questions about how that plays out in everyday life, I'd love to talk to you guys about it too.