Latest / The Growth Project / Episode 397: AI Strategy Starts with People with Mike Rudinsky (Part 3)

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Episode 397: AI Strategy Starts with People with Mike Rudinsky (Part 3) · The Growth Project

• 0:00
  I will help us grow as a business, that is an exciting thing to to keep your people on board. And we're going to be able to do new things. We'll be able to do things that we weren't able to do before. And I think as long as you keep that as your North Star, I think you will be able to motivate and inspire people to to play along with this process and to have I take some things off of their plate so that they can do other things, ideally to to help the company grow.
• 0:30
  Welcome to The Growth Project, a podcast brought to you by AMP doctor of your Brain and joined again today for episode three. Are you going to miss doing this? I will Mr.. I will. Thank you for having me back. Back with Micro Dinky, who I have, nicknamed our AI guru for our podcast series, but that's okay. It's scary.
• 0:53
  I don't know that anybody is an expert or a guru in this, but you just. Just guru. Okay? Which can mean that. Yeah, I'll take it. Yeah. Now. But we're back. For episode three, this has been. I mean, I'd like to say, I mean it. I really enjoy doing podcasts with the growth Project. One of the reasons being.
• 1:14
  Yeah, it just pushes me to think and, explore and wrestle with a lot of different things. This one has been especially enjoyable. And I think in part like that's because these are things that everyone's wrestling with right now. So the ways in which this series has pushed us to really think critically about these things, for me, it's it's pushed me a ton down in how you feel.
• 1:37
  I do it's real and it's current. It's exciting. It's, you know, a little scary at times. It is. So landing the plane today. We're going to make our best attempt to do that. You know, Mike, I mentioned to you, prior to us getting on air here. This is very familiar ground for us. Not as specifically, but where we're landing today.
• 1:59
  And here's what I mean by that. So much of what we do in the world of psychology is a matter of working down a funnel that truly does begin with concepts and principles. So whether we're talking about, I'll just admit some examples that we commonly are in high performing teams psychological safety, the mindset of performance. There's so many things that we're working through conceptually in our work, and it always, always, always funnels down to the narrow end of the funnel at the bottom where people are now saying, what do I do now?
• 2:31
  Yep. Where do I go from here? And I get that like, that's a fair question. It doesn't do us a whole lot of good to simply live in the space of conceptual type discussions. So today is going to be about that question of where do we go from here? I like it. I like it. It can be daunting at first, especially around AI.
• 2:49
  But having some very tangible things to do. Tomorrow or next week helps. That's right. And I want to mention this to as we calibrate our discussion, we will be framing this through really two primary lenses today, that of the individual and that of the organization. For our listeners out there, you either fall into one or both of those boxes and you certainly fall into the individual basis, and you may or may not be with an organization, but we're going to be doing our best to speak to both those, and we're intentionally going to be very practical, very concrete.
• 3:26
  So we're when we do that, we're leaving some things out and we know that we aren't trying to speak to bigger picture strategy. And Mike, why is that important as far as how we're thinking about today, that we're focusing instead just on very actionable items. I think a large part of AI is getting reps in. And so I think the sooner that you start, the sooner you start, practicing being curious that that that's that's the best way to do this.
• 3:56
  Yeah, absolutely. And then I think also, just so we're all clear with our listeners, there is, without a doubt, a massive, massive strategy discussion to be had. We just are choosing not to go there, today. Okay. So that said, let's get into it. So let's retrace our steps a little bit. What do you remember from episode one is in an attempt to kind of summarize, like, where were we really kind of camped out and focusing there?
• 4:23
  Yeah, I think it was the, the idea of AI getting it down to very fundamental terms. Things, a mental model that, that, that you could hold while approaching this and understanding what the tool actually does and what it doesn't do, you know, and you need to know those things. Yeah. Like if you didn't get a chance to tune in to episode one, we highly recommend that you do it.
• 4:47
  You know, we literally talked about what is AI, where did it come from? How did we get here? And I've seen this many times that unless you understand the true foundation of anything, it's so much harder to then install the things into your life that you want to install. It would be no different from you're trying to kind of implement a plan to lose weight, and you don't even understand the basic concepts of gaining weight and losing weight.
• 5:15
  Yeah. But you've got to know the fundamentals. So so episode one was all about that. Then we got into episode two, which focused on all the things, the mindset of AI, which is slightly important. It is very important, very important. And we went into the mindset of a leader, and how the leader thinks about, about AI.
• 5:35
  yeah, I think certainly for leaders, that's one that we would give you a kind of a callback on to get back in there list that if you haven't yet. We recognize the challenges of being a leader right now. And as as AI is for the in the forefront of your mind, if you are a leader, it's there are a lot of principles we got into and just kind of the mindset of how we want to be thinking about, what AI is.
• 6:01
  All right. So today,
• 6:02
  Mike, we've got to move beyond what I'll call reflection and analysis. Why do people have a hard time doing that in this space? It can be difficult to figure out where to start. There are a lot of folks selling a lot of different things and a lot of folks posturing as if they're experts or that you may be behind in, in a lot of cases, you aren't behind, it just determining where to start.
• 6:35
  And then, as you said, starting, yeah, there we've all have these examples we can think about in our life where we were thinking it over, we were thinking it through and feeling like we needed to have a certain degree of whether it be comfort or confidence before we actually started. And that's when you really kind of watch in on this topic, right?
• 6:59
  Because if you wait until you feel comfortable and or confident before you begin executing some of these, tasks and leveraging some of this tech, you might wait a long time. You might. And we did note that one of the nice things about this particular technology is it will help you implement it. And it's a it's an infinitely patient tutor and mentor.
• 7:23
  You can ask any dumb questions. You can. There are none. With respect to AI, but you can ask the AI those questions. It will give you answers. And so it's very nice. Very nice feature. Yes. Okay. So with that said let's jump into a mic. And as I mentioned earlier, we kind of have these two tracks. We're going down one for the individual, another for the organization.
• 7:45
  Let's start on the individual basis. Okay. So I'm an individual. I'll, I'll set the stage to I'm an individual. And I've now really kind of wrestled with and thought about whatever my internal dialog says about AI. And I'm recognizing, as you said, I want to start building reps. How do I start? Where do I start? Sure.
• 8:07
  We we talked about AI doing, drafting, summarizing, writing emails, performing analysis, all of those things. It's excellent at. And so those are good places to start being a little bit of curious along the way of going, can you do this? Or how should I think about this? You can ask the tool, those questions and it will help you.
• 8:27
  It will, it will, it will guide you and help you set up those exercises. You know, and those are things people are already doing every day. I hope so, I hope so, yeah. At this point,
• 8:37
  The tools have evolved to a point where those types of efficiencies are
• 8:43
  are becoming very common. I was going to say table stakes, but but but almost there. If you're not there, that's okay. Today's a good day to start. But for a lot of folks. Yep. That's summarizing and drafting and okay. And then I wasn't as clear on that as what I meant to be like.
• 8:57
  What I was trying to refer to was such as emailing, people are doing those things every day already. Yes. So I see what you're saying. There are great opportunities. And if you think about what am I already doing? Perhaps, though, I'm not leveraging AI. And so all I'm really, really the only adjustment I'm trying to make is I'm going to be doing something I'm already doing and a little bit of a different way I like it.
• 9:21
  Yeah. To play with it. Yep. Same activities. Just a new tool, right? Right. Yeah. Same things you're already doing, but implementing some some new ways of doing it. And Mike, can you talk a little bit about how why do we know. And this is especially true for the individual. Why is repetition so important? In order to really see this begin to integrate into your life?
• 9:46
  I think you're learning every time. And so each new experience will help you learn the capabilities more and more. And so you'll you'll ask that extra question or ask that, give it that extra context and you will see it help you more. And more. And and the only way to do that is by is by trying. And I think it is that that's the fun part of the journey is going this, this really this really added value.
• 10:15
  This really helped me today. I wonder what it can do next. Yeah. Okay. And and that's the perfect segway into another element here that we want to think about for the individual is try to be focused on asking the question of how can I become more of myself, not less of myself, as I'm using these these tools and leveraging these this technology might break that down a little bit for us of like when we talk about how can this healthy be more of myself, not less?
• 10:46
  What does that really mean? Sure, if we break our job down into different tasks, there are parts of tasks where you might have had yourself thinking, this is not a good use of my time. This is tedious. Anyone could do this. And those are the parts of those tasks where I can help. And that way you can get to the part where you actually have to exercise real brainpower to to think through and do a thing, the things that really challenge you versus the tedious thing.
• 11:15
  So being able to decompose the task into those chunks and saying, yes, I please help me with this. Because this just takes too much time. I need to get to this part over here where I can really add some value. Yeah, I think that's a great example. And then, you know, practically speaking, I'll even share this one.
• 11:34
  Also, I know this has been a very effective way I've leveraged on some of my work is let's imagine you have, whether it be an idea or maybe like an early phase, something in the way of a project. You're 15% into this thing of like, all right, I know that this is generally what we want to be talking about and need to be talking about, kind of heading this direction.
• 11:54
  It's amazing how the right tools can take you from 15% of the way there to 80% of the way there. Yes, the way that gap can be closed in such a blink of an eye time period of time, and then okay, getting from 80 to completion, that's on you. Like that's where you as a human, the professional with expertise and you've been in the trenches.
• 12:17
  This is where you, you have to do the lift. But it's amazing how bringing in that thought partner in the foot, whether whichever your favorite tool is, can speed that thing up and you can talk to it and say, this is where I'm trying to go. Help me think through your capabilities and helping me get there. And so it can it can walk you through the steps.
• 12:40
  It can walk you through the thought process. It's it's an incredible tool. But I think that that example that we're talking about of really kind of this partnership, I don't really know a better word. I just have found that people are thinking less about that in ways that they should like when they're talking, and they're thinking about the ways in which AI is integrating into their world.
• 13:00
  It's more in the form of kind of replacement. And I don't think that's what we want people doing. Yeah, if you could picture a round table, if I could have these 2 or 3 people at a round table and just going back and forth and ideating with them or thinking through a process with them, you can do that now with AI in your car, on the drive to work and have that conversation like you've just assembled 3 or 4 experts together in a room just to help you think through something.
• 13:27
  Yeah, they know I, we, I had a conversation recently with some people and over dinner topic was this. And here's the question that was posed that we had some really good debate over pertaining to our kids. And the question was, with AI coming onto the scene like it is, will it make our kids more creative or less creative?
• 13:52
  So, before you get philosophical on your, we were talking about this because a certain parent was expressing some frustration over, his kids tried to outsource everything to AI, and, and so let's think through this a little bit more creative or less creative and why what's your take on that? Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, I like the word outsource.
• 14:17
  We can't outsource our thinking to AI. That is uniquely human. It's something that only us, you know, only we can do. You want to outsource the things that are repetitious and, you know, the very task oriented things that that I can help you with, but not the thinking. I think that we would see cognitive decline in folks that outsource their thinking, that say, I'm just going to let the AI do it.
• 14:47
  Whatever it comes up with is great. I will I will ship it, you know, and I think that's the that's the scary part. I think you can feel or I think any human can feel when your head's being challenged. Your brain's being challenged. And that's a that's a feeling you do not want to go away. Yeah, yeah.
• 15:07
  We don't want cognitive atrophy here and we don't want to have atrophy. And so I think, you know, I'll go back to this example if we're talking about curiosity, not just for for kids, but for you, even for us as adults. If there's a certain question that gets me going down the path of leveraging a tool, okay, this this popped in my head.
• 15:30
  I want to as quickly and as efficiently as possible, get some good data on this. So there goes my prompt. Right? Okay. I'm just very quickly gained information I didn't have 10s ago. That's a good thing. And I'm now thinking about the double click and the double click of the double click that I might not have gotten to on my own, if I'm being honest.
• 15:52
  Which leads me to think you know what? Maybe we are going to be more creative as a result of this. If. Now here's the key. If I'm not satisfied with my first click and here's the data, right, right, right. If I continue to build that habit of I'm going deeper, I'm going deeper, I'm allowing some of the question prompts being suggested to me.
• 16:12
  I'm coming up with some of my own as well. I think there can be a really healthy balance of how this is helping us be more curious. Yeah, I agree it can widen your range greatly. Wider range. Okay, so but I want to call back to this and I think for our listeners to really be thinking about this language of going into it, how can these things help you become more of yourself, not less, and be very careful.
• 16:39
  We'll go back to what we just said, Mike, of that, that kind of outsourcing word and the danger associated with that. Yeah, understanding where you bring the most valuable, you know, where you are irreplaceable and focusing on that and not outsourcing that the things that make you uniquely human and all the, you know, incorporating all the experiences that you've had into a work product or a decision or something like that, that's the part that you need to hold.
• 17:08
  Keep close. All right. Let's go back to our recommendations. We're making your mind for the individual. Another one we're recommending of action steps would be guard your inputs specifically. Be aware of the hot take. Yeah. When we say beware of the hot take, what do we mean?
• 17:25
  This thing can be wrong. You know, this this thing can be wrong.
• 17:29
  And asking a question, taking the first answer it gives you running with that is is a mistake. And so you've got to apply the same judgment. You always would in different situations. We, we say think of AI as, as a very capable intern. It takes supervision, takes instruction, takes all of that. And if you've not taken that care with it, it can give you bad information, wrong information.
• 17:56
  So you do have to pay attention and be active. Yeah. Now this might sound a bit crazy, but when I have run into the AI being wrong, I've actually seen that as a positive because it's been such a healthy reminder to me of, you know what? I'd like be careful here. I mean, the the easy example I can share is I mentioned on a previous episode that we took a trip this summer and used a ton, related to trip.
• 18:28
  Well guess what? We got the against the wrong bus schedule one time. Yeah, I know the bus. The bus never came by. The schedule was wrong. Yep. And I think you can tell you're using AI enough or putting reps in when you get frustrated with it. It's like, how did you get that wrong? What were you thinking?
• 18:48
  Now it turns out, as we discussed in episode one, it is just recognizing patterns. It is just giving you the next word. So it is not in fact thinking, but but I think if you're getting frustrated with AI that that's a good, healthy, good, healthy thing because you are watching what it does, you're supervising it, which I think is important.
• 19:08
  And look you. Here's another reason why verifying is so important. The the voice that gets spit back to you is very confident. Very confident.
• 19:18
  let's let's talk about that like the confidence with which the information comes back to you. Help us think through that. Like how are we as the recipients of that supposed to digest that you can get the sensation when you're working back and forth with AI, that you are talking with another human.
• 19:36
  Yeah. And and maybe even an expert human. So when it returns an answer, you consider that the answer. It was well thought out. It's based on years of experience, blah, blah, blah. And so it's it's easy to go, okay, cool, run with it. But that.
• 19:53
  That's the tricky part we talked about. So here's my example. I want to get your take on this. I was using a certain tool recently to figure out, well, I'll just say kind of to get some feedback on the direction for something. Okay. And the feedback that I got, I really didn't like I didn't feel like it was the best direction.
• 20:18
  And so then when I pushed back and began to kind of like at least drop some hints about a different direction, the voice very quickly took this position of, well, actually, and that's like, that's actually a better approach. And I'm thinking, well, that's not what you said a minute ago, right? Right. It confidently redirected based on the smallest challenge to it.
• 20:41
  It changed that opinion. Its opinion went the other way. Yes. Right. And we've got to be very careful with what we do with that. Yeah. And I think a lot of the early models, it's getting better now. But validated you every step straight thinking it's in. It's the right time to ask and whatnot. And you feel good for a second until you realize that it may not be spitting out the right, right information or information that you can trust.
• 21:03
  Right? And if you push back on, I mean, let's make this super practical. If you're getting a strong recommendation, why it makes so much sense to head east, and then you have some reason why you think maybe west is the move, it'll support that. It will, it will. And that again just says where the human fits in this.
• 21:23
  And it's so important. And that's why we can never lose sight of the, the value of the human. And where the human sits in this process. Absolutely. Okay. All right. So one final comment we want to make on when talking about the individual and this is I'm going to open up a, a big can of worms here, and we'll do our best on it before we transition.
• 21:45
  Mike. And that is be very certain to be very careful that you are giving your brain downtime. Why is that? You
• 21:55
  humans weren't built to act at their highest cognitive level for eight hours a day during the workday. So say you have successfully used AI to take tasks off your plate that are repetitive, kind of the the the lower level, the lower level stuff, thus leaving only the higher level.
• 22:16
  You know, I think if you talk with a lot of folks, I think Jeff Bezos says I make my decisions in the morning. I load all my my, my, my highest level thinking to the morning. Well, now with I, if I is is doing a lot of the repetitious stuff, it leaves only the higher level cognitive stuff and decisions that you have to make.
• 22:36
  And if you're doing that for eight or whatever hours a day, that is exhausting. Yeah, I know that. I've had the experience of like, let's say that I made a plan for a given day. I allocated an hour and I'm going to spend this hour really trying to kind of go deep and think through a challenge or, some type, whatever it might be, leveraging some kind of tool, the way your brain begins to kind of process going through that hour.
• 23:07
  And then when that hour ends, you can kind of feel the pull a little bit, right? Like you can feel being pulled back to the inquiry and wanting just being curious about it, kind of wanting to know some of that is good. Yep. Some of it isn't like that. That feeling you can get where you're getting pulled back into.
• 23:27
  Want to go reengage again? If I ask this or ask that. Got to really watch that. I agree and I think the challenge now is you could be running three high level tasks at the same time, and you show me how to do that. You've got you've got Claude Cobra going in three directions. And then so the human brain not only is operating at a very high level, but context switching at a very high level.
• 23:48
  And you do that all day long and that's where that AI brain fry comes into place. Not good. Okay. So hopefully those are some solid recommendations for you as an individual. Mike, let's pivot over to thinking about the organization. And although there are some similarities of kind of what to get going on, how to begin there of course are also some unique differences.
• 24:13
  So let's start with, let's start with the message. Why is it so vital for organizations to spend extra time, extra thought, and be super intentional around the message? And I, your people, will be decoding every word that you say with respect to I. Again, a lot of the things we talked about a of a spectrum between efficiency and opportunity efficiency.
• 24:48
  I, namely the layoffs and all of that get get most of the news. And so your people are acutely aware of that. And if you don't have a clear strategy and understand their value as humans and where they fit in this whole thing, they'll pick up on it real quick. Yeah. You know, it's here's how I look at it is everybody's human.
• 25:16
  No organization out there will be perfect with how they roll out the messaging on it. Any initiative, whatever it might be here yet. Here's what's so unique about this one. Very few innovations and times in history will be like this one and that. What do we know? In the absence of information, people will go to some not so great places in their minds.
• 25:42
  But what's going on right here? That's so critical is in the absence of information, there is such an abundance of information that's out there that people are then consuming. It isn't always like that, you know, like, here's an example. If you didn't do a very good job of rolling out the messaging around your new sales strategies, right, or your new reorg or whatever it might be, guess what?
• 26:06
  No one's feeding people anything about your reward on Twitter, right? No one's feeding your people anything about your new sales strategy on LinkedIn. It doesn't that's not what's going on here. Whereas in this case, it's all day, every day, just input after input. And so I'm not sure that we have seen many examples that are more pressing from an organizational messaging standpoint than this one.
• 26:28
  Yeah, I agree, I think we've got to think about where the tools fit and where the humans fit. And again, I know we mentioned this in a prior episode, but not conflating those those two things. And if you can say this is our strategy and human, this is where you fit in it, that is very powerful. And if you can confidently say, this is what will allow AI to do so that human you can do this and you're on the right path, and you're pointing out a really important distinction here to Mike.
• 27:00
  And that strategy and messaging are two completely different things. Now, one stems from the other, but there will be many organizations, I'm sure of it, that will really think a lot about the strategy and have a pretty good plan and totally fail on the message. Yes. And that that messaging. And I think you had an example for us in the last episode of why messaging is important.
• 27:22
  But that messaging goes all the way down. So start at the top, then to your senior leaders, then to your managers. It has to be consistent all the way down. Any any deviation in there or any mistake that's made in their will could cause fear, apprehension. Yeah. I think I mentioned in our prior episode and touched on the Georgia football example and I'll say I've heard this so many times over the years from Coach Smart is he said it in so many different contexts.
• 27:50
  We don't need any independent contractors around here. And he's used that for a lot of different situations, let's put it that way. But it certainly fits here. And I think in the absence of us having a good buttoned up strategic messaging campaign, we will end up with a bunch of independent contractors, some of whom will be really well intentioned, like, I don't I don't really have anything that was communicated to me about what I'm supposed to tell my team.
• 28:16
  So I'm going to tell them this. And people are trying hard. It's tricky. They're all going through the human level of this, as well as a management or a leadership level of this, that they're going through that themselves. And so I think the best thing is just to as always, as a leader, put your put yourself in the shoes of your team members.
• 28:34
  Get it? Okay. Let's talk about the ratio, as a next recommendation, Mike, as we think about organizations and not trying to land on a certain ratio numerically, like we're not trying to do that. But let's talk about the principle here of where have you seen in your time in this? People really make mistakes on the ratio and clarify what that means in terms of the tooling versus the people said, sure.
• 29:02
  A lot of technologies, especially the exciting ones where you go out and buy the tools first. You could spend 12 months deciding what tool to buy. Then you buy it and you spend an hour or two on training the people to use it. And that.
• 29:24
  Very, very challenging, very common. You know, with AI.
• 29:29
  Yeah. Why do you think smart, competent, high performing organizations end up there?
• 29:39
  You hope that it could be that easy? Kind of the easy button. We bought the tool now do I, I think some of it stemmed from.
• 29:49
  Leadership not understanding. What do I even meant? Episode one. Yep. Is he part of the answer? Yep. And I think we saw that a bunch. But it really does take a strategy. We always like to say, let's start with business goals and work backwards and how the tool can help you get there. If that wasn't done, then you're launching tools with no real plan, and that leads to a whole host of other issues.
• 30:16
  But the biggest one, I think, when we're talking about humans is, well, what's my place in it? You gave me a tool, you know? But what do I do as a as a person? What value do I add in the context of this new tool? Because this new tool is supposed to be able to do a lot of great things, maybe even some little tasks, maybe even my job.
• 30:36
  But where do I fit and where does the tool fit? And I think that's where leadership needs to go. Oh, I know exactly where you fit. Human AI does a thing. Human does a thing, AI does a thing, human does a thing. And the ability to be able to articulate that for your team can can dramatically help the situation.
• 30:55
  For the humans feeling comfortable of going, oh, okay, I know my role in this. I know the tools role in this. But without that, if you were just delivering training on how to use the tool that does not contemplate that other dimension of know, let's talk to these folks as humans first and then we can discuss the tool.
• 31:13
  Yeah, yeah. And what you're saying there, I think is so critical. Mike. In that instance, you're highlighting the leader is proactively doing that. Right? Not waiting for a knock on the door for someone to say, I don't understand where I fit in this. Right. And the scary thing is, a lot of AI is about efficiency. Which begs the question, okay, if I took this part of my role or my job, then then what do I do?
• 31:47
  What do I do with that? Freed up capacity? And that's where leadership really comes in and goes, I know exactly what you're going to do. We're going to be more productive as a whole. So if you had an output of one thing per week without AI, now you could have an output of three things that week with AI.
• 32:07
  But it does take a proactive, proactive communication around that to say, no, I know, and I know I say human a lot, but person human, I know human. What do you do that special? I know the things that you do that I cannot do. We're just going to do more of those will let I take some of the, the more mundane stuff so that you can do more of the higher value.
• 32:30
  And I want to make one last comment on the ratio thing that you touched on here. And that is there's a there's a concept in psychology that I've always been fascinated about, which is just called attribution error. And all that means is that in our minds, if we are careful when something doesn't go well, we mistakenly label the root cause, and it's because we don't understand correctly what's actually going on here.
• 32:58
  And so if we go back to the ratio thing, here's what I think probably already has happened and will continue to happen. If your ratio is off, is companies will spend a great deal of time investigating and determining what tools they want to purchase. They'll install them in the organization. It won't go well and I think they have the wrong tools or the tools are bad.
• 33:19
  Yeah. I mean, we often liken it to a three legged stool of started strategy, people and process. All those need to be in balance. So we need the strategy, originally to get going. You need the people on board and then we can get to the tools. But there really is that balance. And there really is no way to properly and correctly evaluate the tech unless you're attending to each of those, I would think.
• 33:46
  Right. That's exactly right. You need to understand what the tech is trying to do at a, at a very, very granular level and at a task task level. Okay. Before we transition away from organization and any other thoughts from you or anything else you'd like to mention, on that topic, like, I think anchoring to the business goals in the North Star, again, using AI to your advantage.
• 34:20
  If you do that and you say, look,
• 34:22
  I will help us grow as a business, that is an exciting thing to to keep your people on board. And we're going to be able to do new things. We'll be able to do things that we weren't able to do before. And I think as long as you keep that as your North Star, I think you will be able to motivate and inspire people to to play along with this process and to have I take some things off of their plate so that they can do other things, ideally to to help the company grow.
• 34:50
  All right, so as we switch gears away from the organizational discussion and Mike, this is going to get really exciting. Let's get into the tension. Sure. And you know, when I say that an attempt to bring a little levity to the conversation, which is sometimes helpful, but I also want to recognize that there is an element of this conversation that none of us are getting away from.
• 35:14
  And it's it's focused on some matter of fact realities that are true and will continue to be true in organizations about, the dynamic of technology and people and the fact that there's some there's some tension up ahead. So so let's start there. We know that. And you cited a study, and I believe episode to take us back there for just a moment on the KPMG example.
• 35:42
  And let's dive into that for a moment here. Sure. I think if a strategy isn't thought through and if communication is not rolled out in a way that, your people can understand and buy into, then that will cause fear and fear, I think, as you've said, leads to, you know, some actions. And I think when we referenced the KPMG study, we were specifically talking through when people fear for their value or what they bring to the table, and they see that I might be enabling a process or maybe even an agent to do what they used to do.
• 36:28
  We are now seeing a lot of evidence of even sabotage of the humans actually sabotaging agents, because they know if that agent is that good at that task, maybe they won't have a job anymore. Yeah. Yes. And this is where it just gets tough. And we acknowledge that because when fear becomes real to a person, we'll go into the biology of this for just a moment here.
• 36:53
  The amygdala is a part of the brain and everyone's familiar with the amygdala. Will become increasingly active. And we know that when that happens, kind of normal fear responses can be, a degree of inclusivity and a greater tendency toward questionable decisions. So would these people be sabotaging the agents? Wow. In a more composed state? Maybe. Maybe not, but they'd be less likely to them.
• 37:22
  Yeah. It's tricky. And this is this is the hardest thing right now. I think as a leader, you want to lead with compassion. You want to lead with clarity and honesty when you can. We all know as leaders that's not always possible. I think the one thing that we can do is when we say something, it's true. We may not be able to say everything and communicate everything, but at least when we can, say it with compassion and say what is true it at that point in time.
• 37:49
  And that's the best we can do. It is. And I think let's go back to one of the fundamental jobs of any leader. Above all things, you should make your best attempt to honor your people. And in some of these conversations, unfortunately, the reality is honoring people will mean telling them the truth and the truth will be something they'd rather not hear.
• 38:11
  That's correct. It just is. And having said that, there still is a way to communicate with compassion. There's a way to act with compassion, which might mean if there's going to be some type of disruption to their employment, the organization, you can do what you are capable of doing to help them land somewhere else. That's correct. Like you can you can actually get behind that sentiment.
• 38:37
  So we don't have any specifics on that, obviously. And this will look different. Different organizations do not naive to the fact that some of what will happen here will create disruption
• 38:48
  Okay, now let's get into.
• 38:49
  Here's how I want to kind of wind up our discussion of the series. Mike is, rapid fire. Are you? I like it. I'll do my best. It doesn't mean that the answer has to be rapid fire. Okay, plenty to say on these, but we're going to do some rapid fire questions, and we're going to kind of ping back and forth.
• 39:05
  Some of these are applicable to individual versus organization. Start starting with individual. So here's the question I have 20 minutes today. Where do I start.
• 39:16
  there's a little microphone button on your lap where you can talk to it. And I would simply start with here's what I am trying to do. And if you can explain that and ramble on again, you're using the microphone button so you're able to talk to it faster than or at least I can type, give it all the context and then just see how it can help you.
• 39:36
  So I've seen you do this by the way, and I think the first time I started up my thought was like, does he know the microphone still on? He's still going, I love it, I love it, I heard it from someone. It's a great it's a great thing. It just gives it so much more context. And you say the things out loud that you probably wouldn't have typed.
• 39:51
  So it helps a lot. So I would say if you had 20 minutes, play with that to start talking. Most people don't mind doing that. Okay. Next one for the organization. We already botched the rollout. Can we reset? Of course, of course. And I think you want to start with your business goals in the beginning and create a strategy to get to there.
• 40:15
  So if the business goal is launch a different product or go into a different market or something like that, then work backwards, figure out where the tool can help you have a strategy. Be able to articulate that strategy to your teams. And then, as we discussed earlier, give them the training that they need to actually use. Use the tools and understand where they fit, where the human sits in the loop so that I can do a thing, and then the human can do a thing and we go, so it is never too late.
• 40:49
  It's an important, important time to do and your people will appreciate it. You were the expert on this. I'm not. But I would imagine if you realize that you botched the rollout, it would be far better to try to retrace your steps and sort some things out for versus kind of forging ahead and hoping for the best. Yeah, and the nice thing about AI is it's very easy to say, look, this thing is moving so fast.
• 41:14
  This thing is moving so fast. New capabilities are coming on every day. And so even if you botched rollout even six months ago, the capabilities have have progressed. So it's a very easy way to say, y'all, this is possible. Now you've got a little bit of a built in landing spot for this. You do. Okay. Next one here for an individual.
• 41:36
  How do I know if I'm using it to grow or using it to cost?
• 41:42
  This is the individual side. So let's let's do a little bit of a work angle on this. Imagine just turning the output over to your manager. That's a without without reading it. So and again we brought up earlier a really, you know, treat AI like a really capable intern.
• 41:59
  Would you just let that intern present whatever their findings were to, to to your manager. And so that will tell you, am I just coasting? Am I still thinking, am I using it to grow? Am I using it, as you said, as a as a thought partner to, to challenge, certain assumptions, to challenge you? I think you all know, or at least I do.
• 42:20
  I know when I'm handing real thinking over and it should it should scare you because this thing can be wrong and is wrong frequently. So I think you just have to think through the idea of, okay, if I give information that's wrong to somebody and there's actual consequence to this, how will that reflect back on me? You know, I thought partner is not equivalent to a replacement.
• 42:45
  That's correct. And to me that's a very simple framework. They can be effective on this question right here. Well and if it if it were truly the case that you could do use AI to do your job, you've got some other questions you've got to answer there. Yeah. That's not a good thing. Mike, here's the question. An organization could be asking what is one thing we should do before we touch on a single tool?
• 43:12
  Ideally, that comes back to governance. How do we think about AI? How do we think about autonomy? How do we want to use these tools in ways that we can actually trust them? And so to to think through some of the implications of that, to think through when and where a tool can be used or not used, think through all of those things so that your people aren't having to always make those decisions on the fly, because a hundred different people might make 100 different decisions.
• 43:42
  So if the organization has a stance on these things of this is the place for AI and this is the place where we should not use AI, that's really helpful. But it's a lot about trust and setting that up. You know, setting up this idea of governance from from the very beginning rather than trying to catch a moving train after everybody's out, you know, enabling processes, building agents on their own.
• 44:08
  There are very few rules at that point, and you can get in a lot of trouble. So I think set the set the framework up the right way in the beginning. Last one here, this could be either organizational or individual. What should a human ever hand over. You know, I think as part of some of those governing docs, in the beginning, you start to determine levels of consequence.
• 44:31
  There are tasks that are very low consequence things. Those are easy, you know, summarize this email or something like that. That's easy to hand over as you go into a little bit more consequence. This could go to a customer, you know, it's like, okay, so we've got to think about that a little bit more. Even more consequence is external commitments or decisions are being made from this.
• 44:53
  And some of those things are things that should never be handed over. They need a human sign off before that can ever happen. So I think it's just it's just tearing those out and saying, okay, these are these are low consequence, some consequence, your high consequence work. You know, never let the machines do that. You not going to get your final approval on those contracts where they go.
• 45:15
  Yeah that is correct. Because I would I would put that in the consequential bucket. It would I think it would. All right. I know we need to kind of bring this thing to a close. This has been a ton of fun and is is really neat to hear. And see your expertise in this arena. So thank you.
• 45:34
  Likewise, I appreciate understanding actually how the human brain processes this. And I hope what you we keep saying this, we said this throughout that this thing is moving so fast. I hope this series can live for at least a little. Yeah, at least a week. No. I think some of the foundational things that we've covered, we'll, we'll live on as we always do.
• 45:54
  This is August 2026. Yeah. So just as a final kind of summary and a final thing, just to recap for our listeners, you know, yeah, as you're thinking about how do you continue to get the most out of this episode, one was heavily focused on what is this, how did we get here? And let's get the foundation set.
• 46:13
  Episode two. Deep into the trenches of the mindset particularly focused on the leader. And then today we went through the process of talking about what do you do? Where do you go from here? So we hope that our listeners find this series to be helpful as you're trying to navigate the complexities of all things AI. And as always, we really appreciate you tuning in and look forward to our next conversation.
• 46:35
  Take care. Thank you.