I Got to Talk AI in Front of 40+ People at EMU. Here's What We Covered.

Honestly, I did not know what to expect walking into Eastern Michigan University last Monday. I had slides, I had a plan, and I had a whole lot of things I wanted to say about AI. What I did not expect was a room of over 40+ people who were genuinely curious, asking great questions, and staying engaged the whole time.

I am grateful. To EMU for the opportunity, to everyone who showed up, and to the honest conversations that happened when the slides finally ran out of runway.

What the talk was about

The session was called "Real-World AI Implementations," and the goal was simple: show how a small agency like PlusCode actually uses AI in its work every day. Not theory. Not hype. Just the tools, the workflows, and the real decisions that go into making AI useful for a business our size.

We covered a lot of ground. Here are a few of the ideas that seemed to land the hardest.

Context is King. The quality of what AI gives you is entirely determined by what you give it first. We talked about how we record discovery sessions with clients, scrape websites, pull social content, and turn all of it into a brand brief before we ever ask AI to help us create anything. Rich input leads to useful output. Thin input leads to generic output.

Prompting still matters. People often assume AI just figures it out. It does, but only if you tell it who you are, what role you want it to play, what you want it to produce, and what you want it to leave out. We walked through the anatomy of a prompt that actually works and why each piece earns its place.

AI as a thought partner. This one got some good reactions. I talked about how I use AI to find my blind spots, stress-test my ideas, and challenge my thinking before I take anything to a client. It is not about getting the right answer. It is about finding the questions I was not asking.

"I did not get through every slide. But the conversations that replaced them were better than anything I had planned."

That is the thing about a room full of curious people. They will take you somewhere more interesting than your outline.

Thank you, EMU

Getting to share this kind of work with students, faculty, and professionals at an institution like Eastern Michigan is not something I take lightly. We are a small agency based in Milan. We serve local businesses. We care deeply about this corner of southeastern Michigan, and getting to bring what we have learned into a space like that felt like exactly the kind of thing we should be doing.

If you were in the room and you want to keep the conversation going, reach out. I am always happy to dig deeper into any of the topics we covered.

Something is coming from PlusCode

I will leave this part brief because we are still putting the pieces together. But the work we have been doing with AI, the systems we have built, and the results we have seen for our own business have made one thing clear: this is not something we can keep to ourselves.

We have been using these tools to do better work, move faster, and serve our clients more completely. And we think there is a version of that available to the businesses we work with too.

More on that soon. If you want to be the first to hear about it, the best thing to do is stay connected. We will share it here when the time is right.

Want to talk about what AI could look like for your business? Reach out at dave@pluscodedesign.com or give us a call at 734-249-8028. We are always happy to start with a conversation.