Introduction

Good evening everyone.

So first of all, a quick introduction.

So people know me as James. My family name is Leong. My short middle name is just the letter C. My last name is pronounced as Foo.

So whenever I give my name card to people, they will say, Leong, Sifu. And it sounds exactly like Master Sifu in Kung Fu Panda.

So you can call me James or Sifu. I'll be happy to answer you. I think Marcus calls me that.

The AI Paradox: Faster Doesn’t Always Mean Better

So the AI paradox, this is, I believe, we are at a very interesting place right now. Whether you're right or wrong, AI gets you there faster. Would you agree with the statement? We can scale rightly, profitably, or we could burn a lot of tokens and not get anywhere.

We just go deeper and make Mr. Huang very, very rich.

What I'm going to do this evening is to share with you my journey. So it's just my journey, not a methodology of how you can work with generative AI and what the future of AI is going to look like, but just my personal journey and potentially,

hopefully you can get some ideas of how you could incorporate some of these ideas into your own as well.

So I think one of the key things that we experience today is, like I said, cognitive atrophy. people tend to submit our thinking process to what AI could think because AI has access to the world's data it thinks a lot faster it's very efficient

but I believe that if we use AI as our third brain we potentially maintain our humanity and our value in being human and at the same time make AI our slave rather than our master and not seek control cognitively or otherwise to AI So that's my belief and let me share with you my journey.

How We Think: Conscious vs. Subconscious Problem-Solving

So we all have a conscious mind. The conscious mind is where we are right now. We are focusing, we are thinking, we are making decisions.

So actively present in the moment.

But have you ever had problems that somehow your conscious mind is not able to solve in the moment? Yes.

That if you have given a bit of time, Maybe you go for a walk. Maybe you just have a nice dinner.

And you realize that the solution just gets sparked in your mind. And you realize this is the aha you're looking for.

Ever have that experience? Yeah. So this is a very human experience.

And this is what I call the subconscious mind.

It's the accumulation of all experiences and how all the patterns that we could see that we recognize in our mind. And when our mind is still, that's when it surfaces the answer.

Reimagining Finance Education Through Storytelling

Now, so I've tried to write a book. I've been trying to write a book for a long time. And one of the key things here is that I want to write a finance book that is totally different from any other books that is out there.

How many of you have attended finance courses? How many of you have fell asleep in finance course? Almost the same number of hands. So I think you will find this topic very relatable.

Not the most exciting things to learn, necessary, but not the most fun, not the most exciting. So I wanted a different way to write a book for my readers. So I teach in a very different way and I write in a different way.

But based on all the research that I've done, which probably LLM would have access to all the finest books in the world, they will probably tell you something very technical and very very logical as well, but not interesting, not engaging.

So that has been my experience in doing a lot of research.

And one day I just had the idea that I wanted to write a book and I created a world where finance learning takes place. So that was kind of how I started my journey.

And AI is where subsequently to me publishing my book is able to help me to scale my thinking. and bring it out to the world so that's kind of my journey i'm going to share with you

so first of all my book once upon a balance sheet is about helping to turn financial clarity into a leadership advantage and this is the subconscious mind work the creator i created a world called the financial story verse none of this exists before i own a trademark for this is where finance meets storytelling so i bring readers on a journey from the world of confusion to the world of illumination

and you pick up knowledge along as they sail through a money magic carpet you and you visit different islands of knowledge so that's essentially what the readers will experience I created in the financial story verse world where they are different characters that they are story guides that teach finance you can

find this in any other book because I created it and the first guy first character on the left is called count jargon but miss numbers staff the model Huat and I hope you can recognize this guy's Master Sifu. So Master Sifu has a

role in the book as well. So in my book you see pictures as well and the whole purpose is to make finance click in minutes, not years, not weeks, but minutes. So this intuitive is fast.

So that's my whole approach. Now what you've seen earlier on, these characters, I created them, they're hand -drawn. The pictures that you see,

hand -drawn, painstakingly done, right? Painstakingly done. This is pre -AI days, the book was done before that.

And I also created something, a world first in financial education, I created a character, I turned Count Jugger into a plushie, short if you like, call him CJ. and CJ loves a hug so that is my work so my philosophy and my belief is that we can make finance seriously fun how many of you resonate with the message that if

you want to learn finance you like to learn in a fun way yeah so that is my brand promise so that's what I do so in NUS teaching in my corporate work that's my brand promise I make that happen in class now I thought this is

When the Publishing Plan Collapsed

going to be my book journey after i've explained that i published my book but unfortunately midway through the process this was actually how my journey turned out because the publisher i engaged went bankrupt so i was left with only a pdf i was faced with a very tough choice and

i have to decide what am i going to do do i abandon my my project because it didn't leave me with any original files do i look for another publisher start over again or do i do something else which I never expected to do and that was to become my own publisher.

So that was my induction

An AI Pivot: From Single Tasks to Workflow Design

into the journey of AI about one and a half years ago. I evolved from task to scaling my body of work to workflow design.

So the first thing that I used AI to do was to help me to proofreading, right, because I don't have an editor. So that becomes my main use case to ensure, to check that whatever whatever is written is accurate. So it was very helpful.

In spite of that, I still had three human proofreaders to pick up things that AI could not have picked up.

Practical Use Cases: Proofreading, Content, and Visual Style

Secondly,

scale my body of work.

So what I did, so now the whole philosophy is we make finance seriously fun. It's visual learning. So I want people to get that message.

How do I do that? How How do I go build a brand that is uniquely mine, that is recognizable the moment you see it? So that's the mission that I have.

So AI comes in very handy now in terms of being able to help me with social media. I believe we do that. Yes.

So from article writing to post writing, I think it's able to scale, free up a lot of my time because of the way I have trained my models to work for me. So with minimal input, with minimal corrections, I think the key thing is minimal corrections is able to respond to me the way I want it to.

AI allows me to scale my visual style of teaching. In the old days, things have to be done painstakingly by hand. All those drawings in my books were by hand.

Now, to scale this, so this was all on Pinterest. I never had a presence in Pinterest before. but now I'm able to. But this wasn't easy.

Why? Because all this was done in anticipation of my book launch. Took me about six months to prepare my journey.

And these were the days when AI imagery was not so strong. I wonder how many of you remember those days, how you could spot something that's done by AI, right?

Count the number of fingers. Somebody with six fingers or their face starts to melt in the imagery. So those were the days.

So for a good six months, that was what I was doing, refining my imagery prompt when AI wasn't able to deliver the results that I wanted. But I've got a presence that extends my brain work.

Now, Carl Jagen exists not just in a physical form. So I could design him. A very tedious manual process is pre -AI.

But now he exists in digital form that allows me to put him in different scenarios. He can be teaching, explaining jargon. He can be your best pal, for example. He can be dressed in different, dressed on different occasions.

I also created a sticker pack for account jargon. So he's going to be deployed in different ways to send the message to make finance seriously fun.

And in fact, he does not just exist in digital form today. He also exists in another form, which is in a sticker pack. So these are the three stickers that I've created.

So if you would like to take Count Jagan home, please approach me. and this is like think of it as a blind box just deep in and you can draw out one of three

stickers how many of you think this thing is fun okay yeah so so you realize that this is a totally different approach in learning finance try to ask chat gpt will come out with it i think chat will struggle right because it takes human creativity to understand the audience needs the empathize with the audience to be able to create something that's never been created before

but using AI to give us the speed yeah so what I've done now is redesign the

Redesigning the Way You Work (and Run Events) with AI

workflow I embed AI so the product true productivity comes from changing the way you work right not just doing this more of the same thing and so AI now is built into my entire life from brand building to running events finance teaching so

So, for example, my book launch, just me and my wife, we did it for close to 100 people, just two of us, but we managed the whole book launch.

Recently, I did an event, and first time I was running a session like this, we had ticket sales, get AI to create a break -even calculator for me so I know how many tickets I have to sell.

and at the same time, I was able to create the MC script and give it to the MC, all from prompting as a result of the event flow. That's amazing, isn't it?

I don't have to, it used to be, I have to ask somebody to craft the MC script or I have to craft the MC script myself, but now it's totally seamless.

The Next Phase: Building Interactive Finance Learning Tools

My next phase is app building. So these are some of the, let me just show you a demo, a quick one.

So used to be, you have to do dashboards that from Excel, which is really, really takes time consuming. But now I have interactive dashboard that looks like this, upload an Excel, for example, a set of financial statements, and you will just change.

The other thing I've done is I do training consulting for my clients. And one of the key things I do is industry comparison. It used to take me hours, days to do research, to pick up the financial statements of the three banks and do all the comparisons. But right now, I have the entire dashboard.

Oh, the pause. Okay. Let's see how it goes. Reload. Okay.

So for example, you even have interactive graph. At a glance, you could see what's happening to the competitors. How many of you think this is kind of a fun way to learn?

in class pretty good right real time drawing real data and the other thing i'm also building this all work in progress is building modules on how to learn finance think about it build the balance sheet right so what goes into assets and liabilities so i think cash goes here loans goes goes here, equity goes here, inventory goes here, check my balance sheet.

Hey, well done. He balances. How many of you have struggled to balance a balance sheet? Is this a more fun way of learning?

Yeah, so yeah, so I believe that we need to have domain knowledge first to build a direct AI. So we have to learn first, then we accelerate. Rather than letting I think AI telling us, tell us what to do or how we should be thinking. Direct AI rather than let AI direct us.

And of course, very important, professionally looking, but still wrong. It's a better check. Verify the source, the formula and the conclusion.

AWARE: A Simple Framework for Responsible, Effective AI Use

So I want to leave you with a simple formula or simple framework called AWARE. That we need to start with clarity, assign a role for AI, work iteratively, audit the results retain responsibility evolve the workflow so I believe that

now here's the thing you could use chat I could use chat but we key in the same question you get a different result from me same thing for cloud as well why is because we train it differently it responds to us differently because of

the way we use it so this is really I think AI is like training our own dragon so we have to train it work iteratively until you understand what you are what

you want and evolve from so this is about evolve the workflow evolve from just using it for single tasks checking using it as a a sophisticated search engine to building systems right

The Diverging Curves: Sporadic Use vs. Compounding Advantage

so i believe this is where we are the very interesting time for all of us the choice ahead

head of us is this, the curves are beginning to separate. So if we're still using AI and think it's going to be business as usual, well, we use it sporadically, maybe every day, but we use it for very simple tasks.

We think it's business as usual, get our job done a little bit faster, we're quite happy with it. But here's the danger.

The danger here is that if we still stick to our old way of thinking and just kind of using AI to help us to get there a little bit faster, Unfortunately, even though we are not moving ahead, we are being left behind by people who are able to use AI smarter than us, who are able to embed in there.

So that is the curve that we want to be, the green curve, where it not only compounds our productivity, it compounds our learning as well. Because we get smarter when we use AI smarter, because it's able to do things that we could never have done on our own.

me i could never build that brand on my own single -handedly i'm an accountant come on i'm just a finance guy but i have a brand out there without paying a brand consultant a huge amount of money will charge me an arm and a leg right or app developer to build those interactive

learning tools i could do that myself i think the world has opened up vast opportunities for all of us who is willing to step in and take control of how we use AI.

And the time and the gap between the red line and the green line is the shortest right now as we speak. The longer we wait, the further we will drift.

Closing Thought

So I'd like to leave you with that thought.

Q&A

Okay, question time. MR. Thank you very much, James. Thank you.