Latest / The Scene Projects / Merav Yanai on AI, Operations, and the Art of Problem-Solving

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Merav Yanai on AI, Operations, and the Art of Problem-Solving · The Scene Projects

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  Welcome into another exciting episode of Real Biz.
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  I am your host, Bubba Starts, and with me today from leap.ai, Marav Yanai.
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  Marav, welcome to the show.
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  Hello.
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  Hello.
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  And thanks for making me bringing me here, and I'm very much excited to be here.
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  Let's, start.
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  Yeah.
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  Well, before we get too far into what you've built with Leap dot ai and everything that it's
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  it's doing to revolutionize operations for corporations, I'd love to get a little bit of
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  your backstory out there and kind of bring us forward to how, we got to where we are now.
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  So I'll give you the floor, and you can share as much as you like.
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  Okay.
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  So actually, my career starts thirty five years ago.
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  And and for sixteen years, I've been an organizational consultant and I had a firm of
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  my own.
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  And then then I moved into organizations and corporates, and had sixty more years with
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  holding executive c suite positions, moving from HR positions to operations and to merger
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  and acquisitions.
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  That's in a nutshell.
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  Some of the companies are well known like Danaher, AIG, Orbotech, and some are less
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  known.
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  But in general, I spend my time in corporates, in big corporates.
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  Well and and I feel like from our our initial conversation that your the beginning of your
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  career working in HR heavily informed how you operated when you got into operations and then
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  eventually with your consulting business.
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  Can you talk about how that time spent in HR really gave you a foundation to build Leap AI
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  on?
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  Okay.
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  So the first step is moving from HR to operations.
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  Now this move is not a trivial one.
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  Okay?
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  You need to build some foundations before you can run this kind of of a change.
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  And luckily, I was responsible for business processes as well for continuous improvement.
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  So I I knew something about what is going on in operations.
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  When I say operations, I'm literally talk about engineering, production floors, warehouses,
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  spare parts.
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  It's a totally different world than than HR, and I spent the my time there for three years.
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  And these years were very, very successful in terms of impacting p and l.
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  However, the majority of the learning I made in the first month.
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  And here's a short story.
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  You know, I joined operations at the November.
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  Now if you know operations, December, it's end of the year, and you need to deliver the entire
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  promised revenue, and it's it's a lot of pressure.
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  So I found myself don't do any of the liturgy practices I've I I taught others to do, even
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  even not the junior team leader.
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  So after the first month with which was the December, I stopped like it it was it was a
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  hard stop.
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  And I realized I I tried to to explain myself why why why I don't implement any of the best
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  practices.
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  You know, I've I managed thirty years before.
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  I I consulted hundreds or maybe more of managers.
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  How come I don't do any anything of the practices?
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  Then I realized something that it took me thirty years to learn, that we, as a
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  discipline, we talk to managers with the professional terms.
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  But managers have problem to solve.
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  They wake up in the morning, and then they don't say, I have team building.
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  I need to to run a process of team building.
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  They say, come on, these two guys.
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  Stop fighting with each other.
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  We need to progress.
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  Okay?
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  So it's a totally different angle.
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  And this was a transformation for me because I learned that managers have the their problem
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  point of view, and we, as a discipline, have these professional terms point of view.
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  And now it's like two parallel lines, and we always expect managers to implement our best
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  practices while they have challenges, daily challenges to solve.
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  So jumping to these days, when I decided to to found Leap, which was at the beginning of
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  twenty fifth 2025, I I decided to bring this experience into Leap.
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  That's that's kind of the intro.
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  No.
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  Perfect.
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  What and and you touched on something really important there is that most people who have
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  risen to positions as managers and operations, whether that's, you know, whatever level of
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  that mid management that it happens to be, they've risen there usually from the ranks of
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  the floor.
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  They were on the bottom of the totem pole and have risen to this.
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  So they understand things in much more of what I would call layman's terms.
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  They understand it in workers' terms.
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  And, yes, while they understand the words that are being said and and but they don't
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  necessarily understand how that gets implemented in a practical way.
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  And I feel like Leap is helping to bridge that gap and what you're bringing with that
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  experience that even you had who taught the technical terms, but then being put in the
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  operations position understood that it's not always easy to take these terms and to make
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  real sense out of them in the workplace.
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  Definitely.
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  Definitely.
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  This is a very precise definition of a of it.
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  Okay?
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  Because what we do in LIP, actually, LIP is a decision making platform for mid level
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  managers.
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  Okay?
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  It's it's important.
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  That turns daily leadership challenges, friction into better decisions and and faster
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  execution.
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  And we blend the the the idea is is to coach the managers on the job and give them a
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  blending of the emotional and the what we call HR insights aside to business process
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  improvement.
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  And this combination is really important.
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  Why?
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  Because we used to think in silos.
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  Okay?
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  People and and the the disciplines work in silos.
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  HR knows psycho organizational psychology.
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  We know our silos, finance knows theirs, and so on.
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  But the world is more complicated than than our silos.
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  And the combination of understanding the processes I need to be responsible for and the
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  dynamics, the people dynamics around the process, only the combination of these two can
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  really help me to solve my challenges as a manager.
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  So this understanding, I learned it, by foot.
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  Okay?
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  I learned it, and and by practice.
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  Okay?
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  And I understood that it's not it's not enough to understand one part of the equation.
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  You need to to, you need to work with the two parameters, in order to really solve problems.
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  And we solve really big problems like inventory reliability, like availability of parts, like
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  delivery of systems, on time delivery, like shortened the the delivery delivery time as
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  well.
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  So we we impacted a lot of parameters that were important for the company, for the customers,
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  but it was not by mistake or it just happened.
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  It was a very consistent problem solving system.
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  Okay?
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  Very consistent.
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  And we went from one problem to another from we we implemented the principle of critical few.
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  Okay?
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  You have 300 problems.
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  You cannot manage 300 problems.
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  So start with the critical three.
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  Now you have two ninety seven to go.
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  So but but after these three, you can go to the next three and so on.
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  Okay?
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  So all in all, this is the once you have a consistent process to lay on, it works.
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  And this is what we do in Leap.
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  It's not just a chat GPT or whatever LLM you use, Gemini or Claude.
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  It's not just getting the answer.
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  It's going through the process of analyzing the problem.
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  Well, because there may be several different answers to the problem, that you're facing, and
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  you have to get beyond the buzzwords.
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  I think it's really easy to lean on, oh, well, you need to, you know, do some team building or
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  you need to yeah.
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  It's easy to get caught up in these buzzwords, though, but to not really understand what that
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  means.
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  Right?
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  And not all team building is the company picnic or the retreat that everyone takes together or
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  small group things like that.
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  Team building can literally be, are you checking in with your people on a personal
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  level every day?
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  Are you communicating?
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  Are you finding out what's going on sometimes in their personal lives to understand and not
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  just relaying, relying on data to, solve the problems or or to identify the problems?
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  Maybe the reason that your inventory and things aren't happening is because somebody in that
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  department isn't as efficient as they can be because of something that's happening outside
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  of the workplace.
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  And while it is not your problem as a manager to solve all their problems, sometimes just
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  being heard for a worker is good enough to feel like they can do their job effectively again,
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  to know that somebody cares about them.
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  And I think that's the unique position that you bring with your time in HR because you've seen
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  those problems and you've seen how they affect worker productivity, and you're able to apply
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  them using the AI now by by plugging your experience into it to to deliver answers to
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  these mid level managers
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  Definitely.
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  So that they don't have to learn, as you put it, by foot.
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  Yeah.
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  And, you know, they they actually, they learn it.
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  We call it you know, 70% of the learning is by trial and error.
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  Okay?
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  Sometimes more error than than trial.
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  Okay?
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  So it impacts the organization, the engagement level, the attrition, the performance.
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  It's kind of a a wide impact on the organization and it cost the company millions.
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  So it's it's it's a real problem that we had no re no no not enough not good enough tools to to
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  solve before.
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  Nowadays, we we have we do have.
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  With the AI, we can really coach team leaders.
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  Okay?
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  Give team leaders the privilege executives had before.
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  Because executives had coach or a mentor, or they had a decision making procedure or a way
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  to to kind of discuss and and debate.
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  Team leaders, senior leaders, group leaders, department managers, project manager, product
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  managers, they don't have that kind of support.
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  So they try whatever they can.
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  And here we are in the in the the point that we can leverage it and make Leap the standard for
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  every manager.
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  Do you see My Leap as more of a agent for mentorship in that area than necessarily just a
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  problem solver?
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  Okay.
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  That's a good good a good question.
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  Okay.
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  I'll tell you my vision.
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  Okay?
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  My vision is that this agent okay.
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  It's not one agent.
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  It's, of course, tens of agents.
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  But talking about let's talk let's call it agent.
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  Okay?
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  This agent goes with you as a manager as your buddy.
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  Okay?
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  Your best friend, your best coach on one hand.
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  And on the other hand, it helps you to really work, manage, coordinate, and cooperate between
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  team members.
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  Now, let's talk about future of work.
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  What is the situation we're going to face in two, three years now?
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  Okay?
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  Every employee will be a manager.
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  How come?
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  Because they they are going to have agents.
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  They need to to manage agents.
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  They need to manage processes because every agent is responsible for part of any process.
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  Okay?
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  Now imagine a manager that has employees or managers, the new managers, and agents.
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  The complication of managing all these chaos remotely, hybrid, call it whatever, it's it's
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  it's a it's a much higher complication than than we have today.
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  So the managers of today needs to be masters in business processes.
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  So only the combination of soft skills and business process improvement, only this
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  combination is going to win.
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  Because we need to see processes.
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  And we we didn't tell our managers, oh, we haven't told our managers up until now, need to
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  improve your business processes.
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  We told them you need to perform, give us their bring their results and meet the timeline, la
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  la la.
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  However, now we tell them, you know what?
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  Yeah.
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  You need to perform and bring the results aside to improving the business processes because you
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  need to implement AI.
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  It's a new era for the majority of the managers.
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  So it's it's kind of going to be with us for a long journey, and I believe that it's not
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  enough just to give you insights.
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  You need to understand what to do with these insights and how to transform your business
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  processes and take all of it into action, into execution.
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  Now, taking only insights is nice.
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  It's awareness.
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  It's improve your awareness and making you a better person, but it's not enough for the
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  business.
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  So this orientation combines two disciplines, two sectors.
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  Okay?
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  It's the organizational psychology aside with the industry engineering.
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  So it's it's not trivial, but this is what we expect from our managers.
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  So this is the way we need to support it.
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  Yeah.
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  I think it's absolutely incredible, and it's going to be a powerful tool for corporations to
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  put a mentor and a process expert and to help their managers be better managers, which is
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  going to make everyone more effective, more efficient, and and eventually affect that
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  bottom line.
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  And while it's not all about the, you know, the red or the black and the profit and loss
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  statements, those things are affected positively by using Leap AI.
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  And I think that's so incredible what you're bringing to the world and using your experience
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  in your life to craft these agents, these tens of agents now that are inside of this, and
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  they're always going to be learning.
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  And I think that's what people kind of fail to understand about the evolution of artificial
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  intelligence is that when you're able to plug these agents in and introduce them to you and
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  every all of them may come as a stock unit, but each one is going to learn more about you and
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  your processes as it goes, and it's only going to become better at doing the job in helping
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  you to be better at your job.
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  Definitely.
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  And managers now need to practice new skills.
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  So it's not just that the AI is here to improve processes and help them.
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  They need to acquire new skills and they need to connect the dots now and to open
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  bottlenecks.
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  And and they need to make clarity.
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  Now the way to make clarity is not to call JGPT or any LLM and tell them, okay.
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  Can you make a clarity for me?
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  Because you need to make this clarity daily.
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  However, you need to take your challenges and analyze them deeply in order to create this
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  clarity.
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  And another point came from your point that I want to mention came from your point is that
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  the majority of problems is not people problem.
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  It's not that we come to work and hate each other because I hate you or I don't wanna work
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  with you.
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  It's because of system problems.
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  It's because our work processes are not aligned.
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  And we need to structure it differently in order to reduce this friction.
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  So it was there before AI, and it will be more complicated with AI.
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  So it's it's not just that you need to understand people problem.
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  Okay?
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  Each again, you need to understand the system.
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  We used to say that 95% of problems of organizational problems are because of work
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  processes and not because of people.
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  I think that the the the the main skill managers are going to face is how to
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  orchestrate this whole system.
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  How they should orchestrate agents, the people, the remote management, and the some of the AI
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  work, how to embed it into the the day to day, and so on.
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  So and, of course, execution, which was there before and and is there for last maybe.
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  Well, Marav, I appreciate you, coming on and sharing about leap.ai.
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  It's been an absolute pleasure, getting to chat with you again.
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  I think it's absolutely revolutionary what you're doing.
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  I have not heard of any other such program that is really plugging this into the middle level
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  of management, which is where so many of the problems are solved for these major
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  corporations.
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  They're usually not solved at the very top of the company.
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  They're solved by the people that have direct contact with the ones in operations that are
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  doing the work and that are below the people necessarily making the decisions, who get the
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  cash, the big paychecks.
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  So, Marav, go ahead and share, anything else you'd like to where people can obviously find
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  Leap dot ai and to contract your services.
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  Definitely.
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  I'll be it it was my pleasure, and I'll be very happy.
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  I wrote a book about it.
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  So if someone is interested, it calls Dialogic Management in a Changing World, and you can
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  find it in on Amazon.
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  And also about Leap, of course, contact myleap.ai, and I'll be very happy to contact
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  you directly.
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  Well, thank you so much, Mirage.
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  Very much.
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  Oh, it was absolutely my pleasure getting to chat with you, and I hope we get to chat again
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  in the future as well.
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  So thank you for your time today, and thank you for being part of the scene.
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  Thank you very much.
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