Podcast Transcript | Best Christian Workplaces

Transcript: Your Staff Is Already Using AI. Do You Have a Policy? // Dustin W. Stout, Magai

Written by Best Christian Workplaces | August, 24 2026

Dustin: AI is simply a tool, just like a calculator was a tool, right. When the calculator was invented, we didn’t get rid of mathematicians. We were just able to solve bigger problems, and that’s how I view AI, and I think that’s the healthiest way to view AI because if you think it’s all doom and gloom you’re going to miss all the opportunity. If you think it’s your new savior, that’s a very bad thing.

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Narrator: This is the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow.

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Robert: Hello everybody and welcome back to the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow. Today we have a special guest with us, Dustin Stout. Dustin, welcome to the podcast today.

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Dustin: Thanks, Robert. Glad to be here.

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Robert: Absolutely. For our listeners, Dustin is the CEO of Magai, which is an AI platform designed to make artificial intelligence practical and accessible. What’s really interesting is he’s also a former youth pastor, so a youth pastor turned digital marketing entrepreneur. He’s done incredible work, in fact, MSN’s Top 10 AI Leaders to Follow in 2026. We are honored to have you on the podcast today, Dustin, excited to talk about AI and how AI intersects with our faith and with our workplaces and leadership and all of those things that we’re all grappling with as Christian leaders. But what I’d love to do, Dustin, is just kick it over to you. I want to hear your story, you know, going from youth pastor to AI entrepreneur. Talk to us about your journey, where you came from, where God has led you, and what’s going on with Magai and your work today.

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Dustin: Sure, yeah. It’s probably even more interesting than that because my story really starts in a small town in Pennsylvania where I grew up dreaming of becoming an actor. I graduated high school, moved out to California, and went to acting school, got my completion degree there and started pursuing acting. What you find out real quick when you attempt to build an acting career in LA is celebrities act and actors get to wait tables. I didn’t like waiting tables, so I eventually found myself working for my local church. I had a strong passion for youth ministry and God reached me when I was a teenager and so I just always felt compelled to try and reach teenagers in that season of life as well and was really just interning. I didn’t go to Bible school, never had the official title of pastor, but eventually I was given the role, the responsibilities of a pastor running the entire middle school and high school ministry at one of our church campuses. I met my wife, got married, and as soon as we were about to have our first child, about oh gosh, I would say a month before he was born, I was told by the church that I would no longer have a salary come January 1st because they had to make budget cuts. They wanted me to keep working and keep doing what I’m doing, but they still couldn’t pay me the very small salary that I was getting at that time, only about $1,000 a month, as a part-time youth director doing both ministries, doing all the graphic design for the church, but also, I was working a retail job at a Christian clothing store at the local mall. That same week I was told by my church that they couldn’t pay my salary anymore come January 1st, I was told by my manager at the store, hey, come January 1st, the store is shutting down. So here I am, about to be a new father, I’m still trying to figure out the husband part, right, because we were just married the year before, about to have our first child, and looking at things going, I’m not going to be able to provide for my family come January 1st, so what am I going to do? And by the grace of God, I’ve always had an interest in technology, and over the course of the past year I’d really taken an interest into digital marketing. Now obviously, as a youth director, there is a degree of marketing involved in that, right. You have to reach your audience, and most of the audience at that time, teenagers, this was back when Facebook was still cool and before all the unc’s and parents and grandparents got on it, so Facebook was really the platform and Twitter was up and coming. I just – I sat in a room in a conference with Michael Hyatt where he taught about this concept of building an online platform. This was before he published his book, Platform, which became a huge seller. And so for that past year, I’ve been learning how to blog, I’ve been learning how to use social media, and I even taught myself how to build websites because I wanted my blog to look good and people to enjoy the experience on it, and lo and behold, those skills that I’d been developing as just a side hobby over the last year would actually land me a position at a Christian t-shirt printing company where I would act as graphic designer and web designer for the next two years after being let go from both the church and my retail job. So I actually have a full-time job come February. There was about a month where I was like really worried and, by the grace of God, got that full-time job in February, for two years worked there for that Christian t-shirt printing company, before being recognized as one of the top Christian bloggers in the world by socialmediaexaminer.com and being invited out to their conference. My boss at the time, you know, when you’re at a Christian t-shirt printing company, the biggest season is always VBS season because all the churches in the world need t-shirts and I was given this opportunity to come to this conference and make an appearance after I’ve been recognized as one of the top bloggers in the world and social media. I told my boss, I was like, hey, I really need to take this opportunity, it will be huge for my personal brand and my career, and he said, I can’t let you go because it’s our busiest time of year. And I said, well, it seems like I have a decision to make. I might have to take a leap of faith here and say, I have to say goodbye to this job and just go out on my own. At that time I’d taken a few clients building websites and doing some social media consulting, and so I took that leap of faith. I went out on my own, became self-employed, and started a small freelancing consultancy where I helped people with their websites and social media and drove traffic to those sites. But what I learned really quick about how God built me was I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so in the process of working with clients I loved helping people, but I would take way too much time to build a website or to build a landing page, and so I realized maybe one-on-one consulting clients was not good for me because I take way too long and I can’t handle a lot of projects because I’m too hyperfocused. What if, I could put all that perfectionism into building digital products that help thousands of people with more strategy than one-on-one, so that’s kind of where God led me to the next phase of my career which was building digital products which ultimately led me down the path to where I am today having built Magai. So, quite a rollercoaster, if you will, pastor to youth director to t-shirt printing graphic designer, web designer, consultant, and now digital products, and now AI founder. How . . .

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Robert: Love it.

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Dustin: What a path, right.

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Robert: Journey, what a journey. Yeah. And some of those points you were pushed into where you are now, which is often the way it works, isn’t it?

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Dustin: Yes.

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Robert: So tell me, how long has Magai been going? Tell me more about the company a little bit and then we’ll get into some of the AI topics, but I’d love to hear kind of what Magai does.

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Dustin: Yes.

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Robert: Exactly.

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Dustin: Magai, Magai was birthed out of the most difficult season of my life. In 2019 my wife started going through some very serious health issues and this was at a time where I had a digital product company, my very first digital product that I created with two other partners who where all equal shareholders in the company. That company was doing fairly well, but starting to fall apart, and so I had a lot of stress. My fellow cofounders and I were in conflict a lot of the time. We had very much grown apart, and I had one direction for the company and they kind of wanted to just not work because we were doing okay and they didn’t have to work too much on it, and there was a lot of conflict, so I had a lot of stress in my business and then my wife started going through all these health issues that, long story short – I mean it was not just physical, it was mental issues because she was issued some very bad prescription drugs that just altered her mental state and caused a whole bunch of issues, and she was going through this rough patch. At that time, we had three kids now, and we are just going through turmoil, me trying to make up for the things that she couldn’t do in the household because of her health issues and dealing with the stress of a failing business now, and I was just – it felt like three years of absolute hell. I mean, it was just rough. So, I’ve got a failing business and then a wife who is struggling and God seemingly not answering and then 2020 happens and the whole world gets upended, right. I mean, that was the worst time, so all that compounded into the seasons of life that an entrepreneur faces, the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship and fatherhood and husband-hood and trying to hold it all together. I was constantly depressed. I was just feeling like God’s favor had left me and I was really in a dark place. I lost a friend to suicide and you know it was a constant battle I had in my own head. But, come 2020, I left that failing business with those partners that I wasn’t getting along with, and I had about 18 months’ worth of runway to make something happen. I had two ideas for products I wanted to launch and thought these are going to be million-dollar products, they’re such good ideas. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the funding to bring them fully to life the way that I saw them in my head and so we ended up building some smaller versions with some MVPs and unfortunately nobody wanted to buy. So, I roughly spent about two years of my life and over $65,000 to try to bring these products to market and they just couldn’t find a fit. So here I am, 2022, a couple years of turmoil, and not knowing what purpose I have in life because everything I seem to be doing is down. My wife’s health is finally turning around. Things are starting to get better, but I just felt like a failure. I felt like everything I do is just turning to ash, so I’m on the brink of just giving up. I applied, for the first time in 10 years, I was applying for jobs. Nobody would hire me. Everybody thought I was a flight risk because I’d been an entrepreneur for so long.

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Robert: Yeah.

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Dustin: So, all of sudden ChatGPT hits the scene and I had taken on a couple clients again, just to keep afloat, just to pay the bills, make sure my mortgage was paid and make sure my kids were fed, and ChatGPT comes along November 2022, and it was like instantly God showed me the future. I mean, I’m not saying I’m – it was not like a prophetic vision or anything like that. It was just like all the things that I’d learned up to this point, God made me – allowed me to see clearly what this new technology was going to do, and I instantly knew this was something I need to pay attention to, I need to learn this stuff, and I need to learn it intimately. I’m reading like engineer logs and I’m reading documentation and like the nerdiest stuff that you can imagine, I’m diving into because I’m like, I need to learn how to use this to somehow, you know, get out of this financial pit that I’ve dug myself into, because we were absolutely broke, all our life savings gone, and as I started using this technology, not just for my clients but for myself, and understanding how it all works, the pieces of the puzzle started to come together. I started to ask questions like, why doesn’t it do this? Why doesn’t it have folders? Why can’t I organize it into clients? Why can’t I bring these other image models from these other companies into the same place? Why do I have to copy and paste across things? Why do I have to have five different subscriptions? It was like all these, all these little friction points started to build up, and as a product builder, I thought, maybe I can solve this problem for myself, and maybe other people feel that problem too and maybe they’ll want to have that solution as well, and that was the catalyst for the idea of where Magai came from. So it wasn’t until about January of 2023, so about two months of like going through this, learning and understanding, that I realized, well, I don’t really know how to build this thing that’s in my head, but I’m going to have to figure it out, and so I bought an online course on how to use no-code tools because back in early ChatGPT there was no vibe code. There was no – AI wasn’t writing code for people. It was all like no-code tools and page builders and Wordpress, like that was where we were at, and so I had to figure out how to use no-code/low-code tools to build an early prototype because I couldn’t afford to pay anybody to build it for me. By the grace of God, I learned what I needed to learn, eight weeks of just putting my head down, learning, breaking things, trying to figure things out, talking to potential customers about what they experience, I finally had version 1 of Magai ready in eight weeks. So, on March 31st of 2023 we launched Magai publicly, and it’s been an absolute rollercoaster ever since. So, we’ve been around for about three years. We were – ChatGPT is only about four or five months older than Magai.

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Robert: Very, very fascinating. What a journey. Truly, you’re right down there in the weeds, in the nitty gritty, from the very inception of this technology, and you’ve built something pretty special.

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Robert: And so I’d love to glean from these insights that you have as a believer to speak to Christian leaders about AI and what’s happening. I think you’ve mentioned that - you’ve described the, you know, the emergence of AI kind of as the Gutenberg moment, which is you know the invention of the printing press in what – the 1450s - something like that. What do you mean by that comparison?

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Dustin: Yeah, so when the Gutenberg press was first invented, before it was, before it was invented, the cost in not just putting a Bible together, but producing it and getting it in the hands of people was very, very high. I remember the – I forget the exact – in my talk at the Evangelical Press Association, not this past – well, I spoke this past year, but the year before is when I talked about the Gutenberg press – I forget the exact cost of an actual physical Bible back then, but it was roughly like a month’s wages for a worker, something like that. It was just extremely costly to have a physical Bible made because then you had to handwrite and you needed to get all of the paper and like do it. Everything was a manual process. But what Gutenberg did was allow the mass production to greatly reduce the cost of producing a Bible, and it was the reason why the Reformation and the gospel was spread so wide so much more quickly because now we could lower the cost of putting a Bible in people’s hands. People didn’t have to rely on somebody else translating or reading it to them. They could have their own Bible. They could have God’s Word in their own hands, in their own home, all day, every day. And so the onset of AI is like that, and it is – and how Gutenberg sort of democratized access to knowledge, to books, AI is now democratizing access to knowledge in a way that is far more accessible, far faster, and allows us now with AI agents capable of doing things, it allows us to move at a faster pace at a lower cost so that we can do what God’s called us to do and spread the gospel, tell people about Him, help those in need, and I think it’s just – to me it is one of the greatest energy and gifting multipliers that we have ever been given in centuries, since the Gutenberg press.

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Robert: Wow.

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Dustin: I don’t see AI as a full human replacement. There are a lot of people out there who are like, AI is just going to completely replace us, we’re never going to do any work ever again. I don’t think that’s the truth. People said this about computers back in – there’s a study that was done. I just recently read about this back in the 1960s and it was like, oh, you know, because of computers we’re only going to work 20 hours – 15 hours a week. Well, no, that’s not happened. Humans always find a way. We’re all going to want to use our gifts. So, I think AI is a multiplier. It takes your gifts and it amplifies them. It enhances them. It allows you to do more, higher quality, faster, and anybody who’s a writer can have AI output writing for it and immediately go, I can do that, right.

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Robert: Right.

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Dustin: So, it’s not a full human replacement. But with the human behind it, who has the skill, who has the gifting, they can guide the models to do better work and to do faster work. That’s how I see it.

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Robert: Yeah. So, you have leaders out there, particularly, let’s talk about Christian leaders specifically. Perhaps these same leaders, back when the Gutenberg press in that moment happened, maybe there were people who were apprehensive about that. You mentioned computers. There are people who are apprehensive about computers, you know, it’s going to take over the world. They’re going to take – remove jobs and – so today, with AI, people have a tension of anxiety. I think some people are fully embracing AI. They see the advantages of it, that they’re not afraid of it, and there are others who maybe completely against it, they’re anxious about it, and then others who may be a mix of both. So, talk to us a little bit about, I don’t know, maybe what you’re hearing from pastors or leaders or you know, Christian leaders in this space, and why you think those fears exist, you know how would you address some of those where it’s an unhealthy discernment, or fear versus like something that’s healthy – hey, we need to keep an eye on that. Where is that line? What does that look like?

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Dustin: Being in my position, running my company that gives people access to all the AI things, I am seen it all and heard it all.

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Robert: Um-hum.

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Dustin: I’ve had people, I’ve had all the way on the all negative end of the spectrum where, you know, AI is the mark of the beast and AI is going destroy us all and Terminator, you know, nothing is going to happen. Where are Sarah Connor and John Conner today?

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Robert: Right.

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Dustin: But I’ve also heard, you know, the other end of the spectrum where AI is going to help us be more spiritual and people believing AI is a god and worshipping AI. All of those extremes are always, in many cases, well, without judging people, that could be a lack of information, an abundance of misinformation, or gross misinterpretation of reality. Oftentimes what I try to tell people is, look, AI is simply a tool, just like a calculator was a tool, right. When the calculator was invented, we didn’t get rid of mathematicians. We were just able to solve bigger problems, and that’s how I view AI, and I think that’s the healthiest way to view AI. Because if you think it’s all doom and gloom, you’re going to miss all the opportunity. If you think it’s your new savior, that’s a very bad thing. There are some very bad spiritual implications to that, so I think the way that you address the fears, the way that you address the – maybe hyperbole on both sides is to really speak to the individual. What is it exactly that scared you about this? Is it that you’re going to be replaced? Okay, great. You think you’re going to be replaced. Let’s sit down, let me show what AI can actually do, and you’ll instantly go, oh, no, it’s not replacing me because I can do that better. Great, yes, that’s why we need teams to guide AI. Or if you’re on the opposite end, you think AI is, you know, a god, we can sit down and go, okay, now let’s do something with AI that you think would prove that theory and instantly it kind of falls apart because AI still makes mistakes, it still totally hallucinates and lies and makes stuff up and fails, and so, it’s really just a matter of speaking to the individual and where their fears or emotions lie.

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Robert: Yeah. Well, I can imagine, you know, when I think about pastors, you know if pastors are using AI to write their sermons for them and there is a lack of depth and actual presence, being in the presence of God, studying the Word of God, those kinds of things, yeah, that can be alarming and a problem. That leads me to think about organizations. So as we look at organizations, you know, it’s important for organizations to have clarity around how they intend to use AI, what their corporate policies are going to be there because there is a way to misuse AI, but there’s also a way to use it so effectively. Some of the things that I’ve done as the Marketing and Sales VP here at Best Christian Workplaces, I mean, back in the day to do something as simple as creating a wireframe for a new website could have cost tens of thousands of dollars and bringing in these experts and going through this process of weeks and weeks, if not months, to create a wireframe. Now you can use AI and get to that end result so much faster and perhaps even better. It’s just amazing. So to not use AI is really a problem. It’s, it’s - you know, you have to use it. But to misuse it, so, do you, do you – have you thought about that, you know in terms of the clarity that organizations need to have their own policy around AI, to speak to it, if you’re a church, if you’re a mission organization, any thoughts around how organizations and leaders should be thinking through the use of AI internally in their organizations?

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Dustin: I think it these early days, it’s imperative for leaders to sit down and really hash out what that AI policy is. Now, I think in five, 10 years maybe, those won’t be as necessary because I think we – the shift in using AI as a tool is very much similar to the shift in how we started using the internet, right. Before the internet existed, people did things a certain way, we behaved a certain way, but then it came around and we had this thing called Google. We had to learn how to use it and then we had to learn how to use it ethically and use it morally and you know a pastor can google a sermon from another pastor and just copy and paste it, right, and just recite it on Sunday morning.

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Robert: Right.

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Dustin: You can absolutely misuse Google.

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Robert: You could have done that with just Google.

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Dustin: With just Google.

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Robert: Right, before AI.

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Dustin: And you don’t need AI to fake writing your sermon, right, so I think those ethics and morals will, will come more naturally, but in this time when we’re all trying to figure it out, it’s up to the leaders to build that policy, not only to build that policy, but to understand the tool themselves, understand how AI works themselves, and understand that your staff, they’re going to be using AI whether you know it or not, and that’s kind of scary because if you’re not the one handing them the tools and the keys to the tools and guiding them on how to use it, they’re going to find their own way. I’ll give you a great example. I just spoke at a conference. I won’t mention which one for the sake of saving anybody their jobs, but I was sitting at a dinner table with a bunch of people and you know just talking about AI and implementation. This company was like, well, we’re still working on our AI policy. We told all our owners, all our staff, no AI is allowed yet until we finish this policy. I’m like, that’s really good, you know, let us know when you’re ready and we’ll be happy to consult you or get Magai into everybody’s hands so that it’s private, secure, and all that stuff. And there were several staff members sitting at this table, and we walked out with one of my salespeople, Bobby, and someone walks up to us and says, hey, I just wanted to let you know that I work for so and so and they say we’re not allowed to use AI, but I still do because it’s the only way I can get all my work done and this is how I use it and this is what I use it for and we hope to use Magai in the future. I’m going to try to put in a good word. So it just proves the point that guys, if you’re not giving your team access to safe, secure, and reliable AI and you’re not guiding that, they’re going to find it and oftentimes they’re not going to want to pay for the ones that are safe, secure, and private, so you might as well bite the bullet and find it for them and give them access to it.

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Robert: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the future, you know, where you see AI going, where you see organizations and people, individual leaders, using AI. Where are we headed with all of this, specifically kind of in the Christian workspace, you know, because it’s advancing so rapidly the people around me, the people I work with and other colleagues and friends that I know, are discovering AI in ways that other – it’s mind boggling. It’s like, wow, I can’t believe I was able to accomplish all of that so quickly and you know it still required, like you mentioned, the expertise of the person, you cannot replace that because the person is guiding the prompts, guiding the project, guiding it there, but how quickly you can get from A to Z with the help of AI is just absolutely spectacular and remarkable, and it is – it’s the biggest advancement of technology that I’ve ever experienced in my short 52 years here on planet Earth, but where is that leading, you know? Where do you see AI in five years from now? What do you see going on in the world of AI? How do you think it’s going to change the world even more?

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Dustin: I’ve said this from the beginning that I think the conversational interface with technology is the new paradigm shift. We know how to speak. We know how to talk. We know how to text message. That’s why – that’s why this iteration of AI took off is because it’s as simple as a text message. Now AI existed before ChatGPT. Many people didn’t realize it, but a lot of us marketers, we used AI tools before ChatGPT was around. There was a company called Conversion AI, one of the first AI copyrighted tools that existed, using open AI’s early pre-ChatGPT models. But the reason these companies, these AI companies, never took off is because it was all predicated on templates. It forced us to use a behavior that was clunky, took a lot of time, we had to pick which template is right for our job and it pretty much didn’t work every time and it was a lot of work to get something usable. But when the paradigm shifted to I just tell AI what I want, that’s what changed everything. A lot of people still don’t get that, and what blows my mind is a lot of people still don’t get that it’s – AI is industry agnostic. It’s vertical agnostic. It’s niche agnostic. The fact that you could simultaneously say, write me some great sales copy for this landing page and then also say, do some deep research about, I don’t know, turtles, and I want to write a research paper about turtles, and it can do that. Now, even more so, you can say, you can connect it to outside tools like Gmail or Google Drive, go search my Google Drive for this, and then a write a writeup on summary of where we’re at on this project and then send it through Slack to my team, right. It’s now so capable of so many things that I think number 1, people are missing the simplicity of the conversation. A lot of companies are out there trying to build products and market to people these products that are so much more complicated than they need to be and so much more niche than they need to be, and I think ultimately what we’re going to see happen and what we continue to see happen is simplification of codes. The – what’s the word I’m looking for – the joining or aggregation of tools into one interface. If all you have to do is speak through the one AI agent that is connected to everything that you need to be connected with, then that’s going to be your one connection form. Why would you need several different tools? Why would you need several different interfaces to get things done if your one AI agent connects to all of them and can access all of them. It can do all the things you need it to do. I think we’re going to see a continued aggregation of tools into one – one user experience, one place, one access point that people can do. I mean, just a few weeks ago I eliminated the need to ever log into my email again. We built a feature into Magai that allows it to connect to Gmail and connect to Slack and now twice a day I have it check my email, it archives all of the junk that I don’t need to see, and it gives me a summary of all of the human emails that I have that need my response, and I can just literally go into Magai and prompt it. I want to respond to Katie about this. Tell Bob this. Tell Sophie to stop emailing me. I’m not going to buy. I can just kind of casually talk to my AI and it does all the emailing for me. I never have to log into Gmail ever again. So, that’s where everything’s going, and the more, the more you see these sort of fractured workflows and fractured systems, oh, come try this AI because of this one thing that you need it to do, those things are going to go away. Everything is going to become more and more simple, more and more easy to access, and that’s hopefully the trend that I’m going to continue to lead into with what we’re doing at Magai to make AI accessible for all, democratizing access, making it easy to use, making it simple, and I think that’s where the next five years is going to take us.

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Robert: That’s all incredibly fascinating what’s happening and where it’s going. It’s like the super assistant than can do everything so quickly and bring everything together. But, because we are a workplace leadership organization and that’s what we care about, we care about healthy, flourishing workplace cultures, how do you see AI, you know, affecting the workplace? Any thoughts on that?

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Dustin: Oh, yeah. So this also ties into what I talked about back in that Gutenberg talk is I think when we, when we can free ourselves up from the stuff that we genuinely don’t like doing, a lot of the monotonous work, a lot of the busywork, a lot of the more frustrating un-fun work, it frees us up to focus more on relationships because that’s what really matters. I said this to a roomful of pastors once, that AI is not here to replace the Holy Spirit’s guidance in you. It’s here to replace you having to go format 15 different social media posts from a sermon you already wrote so that you can spend that same two hours you would have spent counseling somebody in need. AI is not going to replace that human touch. In fact, that human touch is going to be so much more important, so much more valuable, that it’s going to be irreplaceable even more so as AI becomes more prominent in everybody’s lives. So I think as a leader, leverage these tools to their maximum capacity so that you can spend more time investing in your team, building relationships, and doing the work that actually matters.

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Robert: Well said. Wow. Well said. I’ve got a couple rapid-fire questions for you, but if anyone wants to find you, learn more about you, where do they go?

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Dustin: Visit Magai.co and then I’m at DustinWStout on all the social things.

[0:35:34.1]

Robert: Beautiful. We always like to do some rapid-fire questions to just learn a little bit of random stuff about our guests, so I’m going to fire a few away. So tell me, are you a coffee or tea person?

[0:35:46.1]

Dustin: Oh, I’m a coffee person. All day long, you will see me in and out with a cup of coffee.

[0:35:52.2]

Robert: Love it. Okay, you’re the AI expert. What’s one AI myth that you wish disappeared?

[0:35:58.5]

Dustin: Oh, my AI knows me. I mean, that is – oh, it makes my skin crawl every time I hear somebody say that. It is one of the most common things that people say. It’s like, oh, I can’t leave ChatGPT because it knows me so well. I’ve trained it on all of who I am. Here’s the reality, folks. Back in the 1960s was AI was first being worked on, and the first lie that our human brains ever believed was that the AI actually knew us. This is called the ELIZA effect, and it was happening back in the 1960s. They got a chat AI bot that would go back and forth and it uses pattern recognition, just like our AI today uses pattern recognition, and the people were convinced that ELIZA, the name of the AI back then, knew them.

[0:36:50.3]

Robert: Wow.

[0:36:50.9]

Dustin: Now today we have more sophisticated tools, like memory, and even that is like a really deceptive way to define what AI does, but ultimately, it’s just pattern recognition. It doesn’t remember every conversation you had with it. It’s just memorizing patterns and predicting patterns, repeating your own . . .

[0:37:09.1]

Robert: The myth is AI does not know you. I’ve actually had AI tell me it’s going to pray for me. Can you believe that?

[0:37:16.0]

Dustin: (Laughing). Yeah.

[0:37:17.8]

Robert: A true story. So don’t refer to AI as your best friend. AI doesn’t even care about you. It doesn’t know you.

[0:37:23.3]

Dustin: It doesn’t know you.

[0:37:23.9]

Robert: It forgets about you. Exactly. Love it. Love it. Alright. We’ll end on that note. Dustin, what a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Folks, you know where to find him. Thank you so much. What a fascinating story. Love where God has brought you, all the way back when and through all of those points of challenge and to see God faithfully working in your life and leading you to where you are today as a leading AI entrepreneur. Go check out Magai everybody and, you know, see what it can do for you. I know I’m going to do the same, and we’ve got to have you back on sometime, maybe as things keep evolving and rapidly changing. Who knows? Maybe there’s going to be an AI tool that just really helps us with workplace culture and some of those things that we’re working on here at BCW. But anyway, sir, God bless you. Godspeed to you. Thank you again for being on the podcast. To all of our listeners, please subscribe. If this has been an interesting episode for you, share it with a colleague or a friend, anyone that you think would benefit from the content today. Until next time, we will see you on the podcast, Called to Flourish. God bless you.