Latest / Better Together / Why 95% of AI Initiatives Fail - and How to Be in the 5% with John Michael Thomas

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Why 95% of AI Initiatives Fail - and How to Be in the 5% with John Michael Thomas · Better Together

• Shawn Sundsvold: Welcome back to the The Better Together podcast. I'm Sean Sunswold, your host, along with Kelly Sunsvold, my partner in business and in life. Today's guest is John Michael Thomas, and he spent nearly 40 years solving the problems no one else could fix. As the last line of defense problem solver for a Silicon Valley tech company, he traveled the world, often with just a few hours' notice, to solve brutal technical, business, and customer problems across product, RD, sales, operations, compliance. and support. I don't think there was one I missed there. when no one else could solve it, John got to get on a plane. Now he applies that same problem solving expertise to the challenge keeping most CEOs up at night. AI transformation. 95% of AI initiatives fail to achieve their goals. Most leaders know that. What they don't know is why and what to do about it. John does. Here's this contrarian take. Most leaders are failing at AI not because they lack technical skills, but because they don't recognize what makes AI truly revolutionary. AI isn't human and never will be, but it's the first tool we've created that we can treat as if it was human. And that's the real game changer, because it means the delegation skills, risk frameworks, and leadership principles you've spent years mastering work with AI as well as people. No engineering required. John is a fractional chief AI officer. AI transformation consultant and author of the number one bestseller Lead AI with confidence. His first AI tran his AI first transformation framework helps business leaders break free from failed technology playbooks and start getting real results fast. So, John, quite the introduction. Thank you so much for being here on the show. Welcome to Better Together. John Michael Thomas: Well thank you so much for having me. It's it's definitely great to be here. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah, so let's kinda give everybody a chance to know who you are a little bit for our audience just meeting you. Tell us a little bit about what you actually do as a chief AI officer, or fractional chief AI officer. John Michael Thomas: Yeah, so as a fractional chief A C A I O, I come in and help leaders, CEOs or or CXOs to build incorporate AI into their organizations in a way that actually works. Right. So the the idea is not to to just use AI, right? And that's actually one of the big failure modes a lot of leaders have is that they're chasing the shiny object. But the question is how is it going to help your business? And also it's you know, a lot of times it's not even about AI at all. It's about, hey, we need to identify what business problem you're trying to solve and then guess what? About eighty percent of the time I tell people AI is not your solution. Right. So a a lot of what I do is is just kinda help leaders remember the leadership principles that say, Hey, you first you have to have a business problem you wanna solve. Otherwise, what are you doing? And then second we're gonna say, Okay, let's go look at that problem and let's see if AI is really the the real problem or the real solution to that problem. 'Cause there's a lot of other ways to solve the problems and and a lot of times they are they are better than AI for particular types of problems. Kelly Sundsvold: No, makes complete sense. you know, we we've heard too that you you can't I mean, you're only as you're only going to lead as well as you're able to and AI can't replace leadership. Like you still gotta have that that leadership instruction. So that's fantastic to hear that you're you're doing that in your job too. and piggybacking off of that, you've mentioned that your real superpower isn't AI. It's fixing problems No one else can fix. So going back to your everything engineer days, flying out on short notices, for the first line of defense stuff, how did you become that guy? John Michael Thomas: So they sent me out to solve software problems, because I was a software engineer. and when I got out into the field I recognized most problems were not software problems. you know, sometimes they were system problems, they were hardware problems. But the more I got sent out to solve these problems, the more I found out that it was, you know, it was political problems inside the customer or it was a salesperson sold something that we just didn't have. Of course the software couldn't do it, it never could do it, right? or even we had some cases where you know we had a couple of times where competitors actually physically sabotaged our installations. And so, you know, the the company had a motto when I was working there and it was don't come home without it. So from early on in the company history, you know, the the CEO had told people, you know, you're gonna go make a sale, whatever you're gonna go do, go do it, and you don't come back till it's done. And so I kinda took that to heart and what that meant was, you know, I went out for a three day trip and I came back four months later. because that's what it took to solve the problem. And so, you know, when I started out, I was not, you know, the great problem solving guru. I was just the guy stuck out there until it was fixed. And so I learned in the field how to solve problems and how to realize that, hey, this is not a technical problem. And, you know, I was I started as an engineer. I was very comfortable with computers and dogs and not much with people. And I had to learn to get really good with people because when it really comes down to it, There are very few problems in the world that are not ultimately people problems. so I got very good at at working with people, understanding organizations, and you know, getting down to the crux of it of saying what's the real problem? Right. A lot of times people have a ch a challenge solving problems because they aren't actually they haven't identified the real problem yet. Right? They've identified something else, you know, i it it it sounds good, there's flash, whatever, but the real problem is How is it affecting your business? You know, how is it affecting your people? And so I I just I I learned. I learned because I I didn't give myself the option to not fix the problem. And I often, by Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. John Michael Thomas: the way, went in and and replaced people who gave themselves the option to not fix it, right? So I was the guy who who who was I was the last chance, so I didn't give myself that option. And and so I learned and it tur it turns out I think I told you this maybe Sean earlier, but you know, the first book I wrote was not about AI. It was how to solve any problem even when you know nothing about. And I didn't publish that book because the people I talked to weren't interested in that book. but they were very, very much interested in the one chapter I had in there about problem solving in the age of AI. Everybody wanted to know about that. And so I took the hint and I said, okay, well it turns out I have experience being successful with AI. Let me focus on that because that's what people want and need right now. So I still have that book, Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. John Michael Thomas: by the way. The the book that I haven't published on how to solve almost any problem. someday I'm gonna publish that one too. Shawn Sundsvold: I think that would be a fantastic book to publish 'cause I think there's so many people who don't know how to solve problems like that. They just sit there and spin and go, Well, what do I do? What do I do? And they don't know how to break everything down in le in enough levels to really identify what that problem is. John Michael Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Shawn Sundsvold: So so you know we we talked about this a little bit, but you know, when Chat GPT came out, you were the VP of operations at a company and you built a full AI product suite in five months on a small budget with the idea that these are tools, not toys, right? John Michael Thomas: Yes. Shawn Sundsvold: you know, what did that five months actually look like for you as you were building that? John Michael Thomas: So the actual build was five months. getting the initiative up took a little bit longer, right? Particularly, you know, this was early twenty twenty three. Nobody really had a good idea what AI could and couldn't do. And we struggled initially to figure out, you know, what are we going to do in our product? And you know, the the the challenge one of the challenges we had, which a lot of CEOs run into right now, is you know, your competitors, they go and they push this thing out and they say, Hey, we're using AI. And we saw all of this and I was like I'd get into it, I'd look at it, I'm I'm like, this is eye candy, right? This isn't gonna really help anybody. And so I, you know, I basically said to our our CEO and our executive team, I said, you know, I don't wanna build eye candy because that's not gonna give us it's not gonna give us any durable customers, it's not really gonna help them, right? I said, I wanna build tools, not toys. And, you know, that's basically what we focused on. So, you know It was a a content management system platform. So this is a platform that you use to build your websites or to build applications. And you know, we we were a platform more than a product. And so I said, we're gonna build the platform so that the people using our product can actually use AI for the applications they're building on it or for the websites they're building on it. And so it wasn't about making it look cool and flashy, it was about giving them the capability to use this. without them having to become, you know, AI gurus. And so for example, you know, one of the one of the nice things about a content management system is people that used our platform, their data was already on our platform. So instead of saying, hey, you know, we're gonna we're gonna give you tools so that you can go put these huge prompts together, I said, let's give them tools so that we can take the data they've already got and now they can create a chat bot that you know that's based on their their support pages or whatever else it has. That's what we did. We put it together you know, very quickly. again, there was turbulence at front to figure out what AI could do. And you know, I had a list of twenty different types of of use cases, but nobody really knew if they were good if AI was good at that or not. And so we had to figure that out and we built the platform. you know, and then from there we built other features on top of that as well, you know, th that were a little bit more user facing. But you know, that was kind of that was not an easy decision to make to say, Hey, we're not gonna focus on these these cool, you know, eye candy things that we can then trumpet tomorrow, we're going to focus on building something that our will actually not just give our our customers capability, but honestly make them stickier because once they build on our tools, now they can do it quicker, but also now they're on our platform. They're using our platform. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. And you know, you mentioned you've said it a couple times there in like building eye candy, right? And that's where a lot of some of the AI sits right now. We are inundated with being have AI thrown at us from every angle, every company, news headlines, stock prices, you know, IPOs, you name it, right? How much of what we're seeing right now is functionality versus eye candy? John Michael Thomas: I mean it's a little hard to put, you know, a number on that or even a guess on that because it covers everything, right? AI's A AI's all over the place and and you know, I say this a lot is one of the challenges of AI is that it is universal, right? So if you look at past technology transformations, when we went to the internet even it wasn't it didn't affect everybody, right? It affected marketing first, right? It affected sales, but with AI it affects literally every industry, every function. every role and potentially every process you've got. That's every that's everything in every organization under the sun. And so, you know, a lot of leaders are they're overwhelmed. How do you keep up with that? How do you figure out which information matters, right? That's like trying to understand how to be the CEO of every business on the planet. It's not gonna work, right? and so the important thing is again, I can talk about how much is I candy and not, but Does it matter for your business? Right? So if this guy over here is doing I whatever your competitor is doing, and it sounds great, and maybe they've got a marketing campaign going out, but I guarantee you once customers start to use that, if it's eye candy, it's not gonna, it's not gonna hold them. But what can you do that's going to actually give them value? Right. The whole point is you want to give your customers value with AI. And that is a much narrower subset of all the things you can do, and that's the hard choice you gotta make. But once you start figuring out what AI can do and what it's bad at, that gets much easier. Right. So there's some things AI's terrible at judgment, right? It's terrible at tastemaking. you know, it's terrible at anything that is truly novel. So if you get truly novel, you know, issues come in or or or content comes in, AI's really not good at that. But if you've got something that's repeatable and tedious and is, you know, relies on some rules or rubrics that are a little bit fuzzy. That's perfect for AI, right? If you have if you want to put together a dashboard, right? And you don't want to have to use Power BI and learn all these skills, guess what? AI's great at that. You say, here's the APIs for, you know, I I saw a CFO did a great job with this in a in a a CFO AI round table that I was recently a part of, where he put together dashboards That just went out and got all the information and put it together so that now he's got something that instead of getting a report once every month or three months, he's got it daily. Right? AI's great at that. Now AI isn't doing that every day, but he used AI to build the code to do that. So he's got our custom tool. So there's some things that AI is fantastic at, but there's a lot more things AI is terrible at. And so one of the key things that leaders need to learn is what's AI good at and what it's not good at, so that you can make decisions about where to put that effort. And and I kinda went very far away from your question and I kind of avoided your question a little bit because I don't really want to answer it because it it's a I mean it's it's hard to but again I think I always come back to how does it affect your business? Regardless of what anybody else is doing, how does it gonna affect your business? What real Shawn Sundsvold: Mm-hmm. John Michael Thomas: business problems do you have to solve? Kelly Sundsvold: I think that's I think that's really smart and it's with the age of AI there's a lot of things that are happening very fast. Like I think about back when the you know, the internet first launched and email service and you know, I heard a story about I think it was Beanie Babies, I can't remember their parent company, but I think they were they started doing like online marketing, you know, pretty much out of the gate and it was you know, it's interesting, like you could see potential there. You know, and with AI, you know, back five, six years ago you know, we we none of us were really none of us regular people were like into AI and they really brought it down and made it really bite sized and consumable for you know, the regular customer. and you know, it's interesting what you say. It's not a one size fits all, it's not a solution for every single problem. Sometimes you gotta mix that human in there or make that higher as a small business and you have to think about which direction and what needs to be solved. Like you said, and I think it it underscore this if you're listening to this podcast, like if it's it's repeatable, systematic, you know, maybe a little fuzzy like you said around the the points. Like that's where AI can really shine through. And I think when you have you know, when you want AI just to solve all your problems, that's just that's just gonna be a problem in itself. so on that you've said ninety five percent of AI initiatives fail to hit their goals. So what's the one thing almost every failing company has in common? John Michael Thomas: there's not one. I have twenty seven AI failure modes that I've identified, that I outline in my book. But I would say the most common is using AI as a solution in search of a problem. it's it's you know, saying, Hey, we're gonna have this AI initiative. the second I would say is, you know, putting together a big AI strategy or an AI initiative when you when you haven't even used AI yourself yet. Right. So how do you put your you know, your CEO, you're gonna put together this big strategy, and I've seen lots of companies this way, right? So I come in, they say, Hey, here's our AI strategy, it's not working, what's going on? I say, Okay, so let's put the strategy aside for a minute. How much do you use AI yourself? I don't I don't really use AI. I'm like, okay, how did you put a strategy together if you don't even know how to use it yourself and you don't know what it can do and what it can't? and I mean there actually is a way to do that if you you know, if you work with people who've done it before. But if you know, if you start from scratch, you know, you you've got a strategy, but what's the goal of the strategy, right? The goal should be we're going to improve something in our business and what are the particular problems. And you know, again, like I said, there's twenty seven failure modes, but you know, number one, right, is making sure that you're you're solving a real problem and and number two is making sure you understand what it can do. And there's more, I mean th the biggest complaint I hear or the biggest challenge that I actually hear from CEOs is AI overwhelm. There's just too much information. So how do you know? And you've got all these AI experts, many of them came around overnight, that are telling you to do this or telling you to do that. How do you know what to follow? Right. And I have, you know, like for AI overwhelm in particular, you know, I I I preach the gospel of what I call strategic ignorance, which means There's a lot of stuff you can completely ignore because it's not going to affect your business at all. And then what I call just in time learning, right? So you may have heard of just in time manufacturing. There's a lot of things that come in place. But before AI, if you wanted to be a leader and you wanted to be able to make decisions in the moment, you had to learn stuff before that moment came because you didn't ha you couldn't just go and figure it out, right? But AI actually gives us the ability to learn a lot very quickly. So when you're in the moment. You can actually stop and say, okay, give me 15 minutes. You can go back and get very educated about something that might have taken you weeks or months before very quickly. So you can use AI to actually help you not have to learn everything up front because you can't. And so those two things help with the overwhelm, which is really once you get past the overwhelm, I find that that leaders start to actually get back to basics, right? Because when they're overwhelmed, they're they're chasing something. They're chasing somebody doing this, they're chasing somebody doing that, because they don't know how not to, right? But once you get back and say, okay, I can ignore this, now leaders start to focus better on the problem. And you know, I I mentioned this before, but you know, a lot of what I a lot of what I coach leaders to do is actually not about AI. It's about just management. And a lot of times I will say, hey, you need to do this, and they're like, yeah, I've probably should have known that, right? Because that's just a management thing, right? But there's so much going on, they get overwhelmed, they don't realize that. Once you get past the overwhelm, all of a sudden the management skills start start kicking in more naturally and they can say, okay, let's cover the 80%, right? So all my frameworks, everything in the book, it helps you cover the 80 to 90%, right? That allows you to focus on the 10 to 20% that's actually different about your organization or this particular situation. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. Yeah, and that's it's it's imperative, right? To figure out what those things are and I I think it ties in well with, you know, c kind of looking at where your journey started, right? When you first went out on your own, you tried to position yourself as the guy who fixes problems that no one else can. Like that had that you had built your whole career on that, right? you weren't necessarily the AI guy. So Do you why didn't that land and what changed, you know, besides just the book side of it, but what else changed that you really realized AI was really the discussion I needed and the the problem I needed to solve for people? John Michael Thomas: Well, you know, the the reason I figured it out is because I went to to I I went and found a publisher to help me publish my book and he said, Great, that's a great sounds like a great title. Go talk to people about your book and make sure they want it. So that was probably the best advice my publisher ever gave me. And part of that is also understanding who your audience is, right? And so when I'm talking about how to solve problems, most CEOs are not thinking about that. Most CMOs are not thinking about, how do I solve problems? COOs are t are thinking about it. Right, that that's a COO discussion. The problem is most COOs think they already know how to solve problems. So you know, I I got a lot of people saying, Hey, that sounds great, but basically saying I don't I don't need that, I already know how to solve problems. so it it it really was kind of a mismatch between the audience you know, and and what I was trying to position. Now what as I mentioned, what really tuned me in. I mean, I knew that AI was a big thing and a big change. When I was VP of operations and and AI, you know, Chat GPT broke. Not AI. AI had been around. In fact, I'd used AI back in back in the day, you know twenty twenty eight to twenty eleven or so I I was working with neural networks. But what when I was VP of operations, I did not have time for the world to change. I I I was overloaded, I was running multiple multiple teams. I was building new teams at the same time. I was working on company, you know, metrics and new engine new initiatives. I didn't have time. But I sensed that there was a shift, right? Because I'd been familiar with AI, but I said this is different. And so I said, okay, we need to do this. And nobody else was doing it. So I said, okay, I'm going to have to do it. Right. And so I recognized there was the shift. I I went for my problem solving approach because that's very comfortable for me. that's the easiest thing for me. And AI is not necessarily the easiest thing because it is very it's still very very turbulent, right? It's it's very what I would say frothy, right? There's still a lot of unknowns, right? So that isn't the one I went for first because I was being a little bit comfortable and lazy, but but everybody I talked to and when I was talking to CEOs, everybody was interested in AI. When I talked to COOs, everybody was interested in AI. When I talked to mid-level managers, Everybody wanted to know about AI and okay, I'm a little thick, but I kind of eventually got the message, right? Eventually it got into my head that, hey, this is what people need right now and this is where I can actually help. And so, you know, and I think at this point now, you know, I started my consulting about a year and a half ago. I started the AI consulting business, but at this point everybody knows AI is it, right? And So when you talk about AI, everybody's like, okay, yes. But at the same time, now we're at the point where there's too much information, right? So, and there's people saying, Hey, yes, you can use AI to replace all your employees. Okay. That's bad advice, but people hear so much of it that they actually start to believe it. and so, you know, I would say the the biggest challenge right now is getting people to again come down a little bit and think about your business. Your business first. It's always about your organization first. How are you going to improve your organization? And can AI do that? Or is that wishful thinking that the AI salesperson is telling you? And what I will call the chief AI hucksters. you you can fill in your names for who those people are, but you know, that's really the mindset that I try to promote is it's about your organization. And yes, AI may be able to help. And it may be that you you have a problem you really need to solve and AI is not the right tool for that. And that's where I help. I'll help you make that decision. Kelly Sundsvold: Yeah, yeah, definitely super helpful. so, you know, a lot of our our listenership are owners of small businesses. Some of them have made the full time leap, some of them are still working this as a side hustle to hopefully make it a full time job. So what was that catalyst moment for you that took you from working part-time in this business to going full time and really making that jump into your own business. John Michael Thomas: Well, I mean the honest truth is is is I was kicked, right? Because I was I was doing some consulting. I was you know, I wasn't making it my full time business and my company restructured and and I was one of the people that got laid off, probably because I was one of the most most expensive people at the company. but that basically made me sit down and that didn't even that isn't even what told me, you know, that prompted me to do my consulting business, but that is what prompted me to finally say Hey, I'm gonna publish my book, because I'd already written my book on problem solving. and so that's what prompted me to go out and find a publisher. And then you know, the more I worked with people, the more I said, people actually need this, right? And and this is something I can help them with. So so I wouldn't say that I I was proactive in making that choice. I will be honest. I would say that, you know, the the the universe sort of kicked me into it. and I didn't even take the first kick. It took this Took the second or third before I realized, hey, this is you know, this is something that I really need to do. because I can and because it'll help it'll help people do that. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. you know, kind of looking at what you mentioned a little bit ago, eight about eighteen months into it, what's been the hardest part of running the whole company versus, you know, running a function inside of someone else's company? John Michael Thomas: everything. so Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. John Michael Thomas: th you know, th the the challenge is that, you know, I I like to do the work, I like to do the research, I like to help people get stuff done. And the biggest challenge with running business is that there's there's extra time I have to spend doing things that are not directly, you know, d not directly helping people. I have to go find clients, right? Shawn Sundsvold: Mm-hmm. John Michael Thomas: or I have to pay somebody else to help go find clients. And so that's you know, I as an engineer I consider that a little bit of a distraction, right? you know, there's benefits to it, but there's costs to it as well. And you know, there there's other parts of it as well in that, you know, when you're running your own company, you don't have an option of taking Labor Day off. you don't have an option, right? So these things, whether you want it or not, you can set aside that time, but it's it's it's an open question whether you're really relaxed when you're taking time off, right? Because because it's on you to actually make everything work. And so I don't have a big enough team yet that I can just say, hey, you know, go go let things run for a week and I'll take the time off. So that's something that I, you know, I'm still building towards. And there's a lot of benefits. It's great, but at the same time sometimes I just want to, you know, put on my engineer hat and my problem solver hat and just go go spend a few days f you know fixing problems for somebody without having to worry about that. But there isn't really a break. Right. So I I I don't have a choice of not answering somebody who says, Hey, I need help today. Right? That's just not a choice 'cause I I'm I'm the bottom line guy. So, you know, that's that's probably the biggest thing for me from a, you know, an emotional perspective or a personality perspective. you know, and then obviously from a financial perspective I've got to balance it all out and I've got to you know it And I've had budget authority before, but it's different when everybody's riding on you. Right? It's not just it's not just a small team and you know that the company's gonna keep going, whatever happens to you. It's that everybody's riding on you. Kelly Sundsvold: So who's actually, you know, like I would assume that you have mentors, you have people around you, you talked about your team and it's growing. who actually helped you build this and opened a door that you couldn't do for yourself? John Michael Thomas: so I mean initially my publisher helped with a lot of that in terms of helping me, you know, get started in the business. I have found a number of networks of other small business owners and and consultants. and d I've also found, you know, mentors that I don't know directly, but like, you know, i i if you run a small business and you don't know who Alex Hormozy is, you you're missing something, right? So you n you need to understand who some of the some of the people are and and w there's a reason that they are as popular as they are because they're telling you some real truths and like Alex Hormozy doesn't doesn't pull the punches, right? You need that when you are starting a business because you don't need somebody who's gonna make you feel good. You need somebody who's gonna say, you're screwing this up. Because you don't have time to you know to kind of get over that. And so, I've I I've mixed it I have, you know, now I would say there's two major networks that I work with that I you know that I trust because I also and I'm sure a lot of business owners go through this, I also went through a lot of cases where I went with people, I even paid for their support and it did not work out, right? And you know, sometimes I paid a significant amount for that and it just didn't work, right? So ultimately that's on me and maybe it's maybe it's about me. Maybe I didn't do it right. But at the end of the day, I need to find people who are gonna help me be successful in my business, right? That's my responsibility. So so yeah, I have a couple networks that I that I work with. I'm not working with the same publisher I was working with before because I got some good advice and some that was very much not good advice. And you know the the challenge whenever you're starting is you you don't know how to identify good advice and bad advice until you've gotten some really bad advice. so, you know, at the same time, you can't go and expect anybody to give you advice for free, even if it may end up being bad, right? So you have to put some ex you have to, you know, expend some time, energy, and money to figure out what questions to ask so that you know how to evaluate those answers. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. What what did learn what did those experiences and having to vet people who you w are gonna trust with your business, what did those bad experiences teach you? John Michael Thomas: Some of them just taught me that I didn't know what I needed to know to ask the question, but some of them also taught me that I, you know, I was being impatient. I was trying to shortcut things that I was trying to shortcut learning that I still needed to do myself, right? So we can hire anybody to be to be a coach or to be a mentor, but that doesn't mean we don't have to learn it before we can actually do it. Right. And so I you know, I tried to shortcut some things and paid money to do that and guess what? It wasn't a shortcut. it was just money out of the bank account. Right. It w it was money out of the runway, that that didn't come back. And it was more about me wanting to do things now instead of saying, Hey, let me make sure I understand what this decision really means and how to how to make a good decision before I make it. And by the way, that Shawn Sundsvold: Mm-hmm. John Michael Thomas: all ties back into AI too, right? That's that's what a lot of CEOs are dealing with with AI is they're being pressured to do something And so they make a decision even though they really know they didn't know how to make that decision yet. And so, you know, I went through the same, not n not necessarily with AI, but with you know, business as a whole. Kelly Sundsvold: Yeah. So AI is moving really, really fast. Like we talked about like five years ago, it wasn't really for the common user. So like where do you see this business going in a few years? Like obviously leadership is never going out of style, you know. Is fractional C A I O work the whole vision or are you stepping into something bigger? John Michael Thomas: So that's a good it's a good question and and one of the reasons is because one of the things I tell just about anybody who will listen is that the the CAIO title has a shelf life. And you know, I am old enough that I went through the dot com boom and bust, right? So going from I went from paper forms to computer forms to the internet, right? And so I I've been through technology transformations before and if you look back to the internet when when the internet was was booming, there were chief internet officers. And people got excited, you know, saying, hey, I use the internet today. Nobody's excited they use the internet today, right? There's no chief internet officers left. Because it just became normal. It became the way business is done and the way life is done, right? And so AI right now is in that new phase where everybody's like, I'm really excited I used AI and there's chief AI officers. But Eventually it's just going to be expected. This is something that you do as part of business and as part of life. And when that happens, the the CAIO title doesn't make sense anymore. At least I don't think so. And so there may be room for that to move into a chief transformation officer where because once AI is gone, there's going to be something else. Maybe it's humanoid robots. I don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is, but there's going to be something else that's this new thing, and people have to figure out how to use it. And so That's where I see the role may eventually transition into. And I mean ultimately that's that's the lens I bring on it now anyways, is that I've been through enough technology transformations that you look at the the the errors that most leaders are making have been made before. Right. So if you look at you look at the numbers, right, five percent of of AI initiatives are successful, seventy-seven percent either have no value or a negative value, right? You look back at at some older technology transformations and when they were new, those numbers are really similar to what it looked like then. And even now, you know, most issues, eighty percent of the issues or sorry, seventy percent of the issues, depending upon who you talk about. Seventy percent of the issues, they're not technology issues, they're people issues. And it's exactly the same as it was back when the internet came around or when ERPs came around. So This is a pattern that repeats and as technology accelerates, which I think we all understand it's doing, that looks to me like more like a permanent role that you will see. Who's the chief transformation officer saying, Hey, what's the latest technology is coming down the pipe? How do we prepare for them? How do we prepare our people for them? How do we integrate them? I think that makes sense. For my for my consultancy in particular, you know, that's the route that I I am looking to go is to say, you know, you know, I would like to be the person who has a team who can help you do that, who can help you transition, no matter what the next thing is. And there's gonna be different kinds of AI too, right? The current AI, large language models, LLMs, it's it's one little piece. And it's the biggest piece now, partly because it sucked up all the oxygen in the room and all the capital, because people saw the potential immediately. But there's others actually with more potential that have been starved of oxygen for the past three, four, five years. that are actually going to to come in soon and we're gonna see some more disruption from those because some of the things that that L LMs cannot do well, those are gonna be able to do much better. And they're gonna be able to replace some other human jobs that right now are relatively safe from LLMs, right? So I think that idea of dealing with transformation as a regular thing is probably the trend that we're gonna see. And that's where I'm kind of positioning myself to be. Shawn Sundsvold: Wow, that's hugely insightful because I I would not have, you know, thought of it like that. So thank you. appreciate that. Well, as we wrap up, John, for people who, you know, might be interested in getting in contact with you to learn more about what you do or maybe they need some help in that transformation area, how do they get in contact with you? John Michael Thomas: I would say reach out to me on LinkedIn. my profile is John Michael Thomas, right? J O H N I C H A E L T H O A S. Make sure you get all the all the H's right in there. and I also have a website which is John Michael Thomas dot AI. you can reach out to me in either place and you know, I'm always open to having a conversation. particularly if you're a leader and you're not sure what to do or what to do next. I have a I have a specific niche that I focus on. I typically focus on enterprise software companies, typically between five million and fifty million in revenues. and I'm I particularly help the people I help the most are non-technical leaders running those technical organizations. Because not only can I help you with AI, but I can help translate that technology for you because that's what I've done my entire career. so reach out to me and you know ask to have a conversation, I I will not tell you no. Shawn Sundsvold: Awesome. Kelly Sundsvold: Yeah. Well thank you so much. I appreciate the time and you sharing your wisdom. We'll talk to you next time. John Michael Thomas: Thank you both so much. Really appreciated being on the show and I look forward to seeing you next time. Awesome.