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The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation with Steve Brown · Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hello listeners, today we have a special guest and author on the code story podcast, Steve Brown.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Steve is a former DeepMine futurist and recently published a book called The AI Ultimateum, preparing for a world of intelligent machines.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the book, he provides a step-by-step framework to guide leaders and identifying use cases for AI, turning it into business value and obtaining buy-in from employees.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: In our conversation, Steve is going to elaborate on why AI is a teammate, not a threat.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: The top AI rollout mistakes, leadership and management tactics that need to go, and much much more.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll Steve, thank you for being on the show today.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being on code story.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a delight to be here.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, the pleasure is all mine.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm excited to dive into all of the things for you for your AI futurism, your book you've written.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna dive into to quite a bit.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: The book that you have written is called the AI Ultimateum, preparing for a world of intelligent machines.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've got lots of questions around the content you've put into there and all the work you've put into there.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Before we move into that, tell me in my audience a little bit
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I help companies to become AI first organizations.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've been a future boy of some sort for a long time.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I trained as an engineer, but I've always found orientations in my jobs that allowed me to be thinking about and working on the future.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I worked at Intel for a very long time when they were a force to be reckoned with.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I then moved more recently to Google DeepMind to DeepMind is Google's AI research labs based in London.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm based on the West Coast, but I got to go back to London for a bit and
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what I do.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I work with boards management teams, leaders, to help them understand AI where it's going next and what they need to do to thrive at an AI-first world.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're definitely in the right spot and the right timing for this sort of thing that AI is definitely a topic of conversation that is on everyone's mind.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So,
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: really excited to dive into that and I'm curious let's jump into the book.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now again the title of the book is the AI ultimatum preparing for a world of intelligent machines.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: What led you to write this book?
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ultimately what were you trying to accomplish here?
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I worked with a lot of leaders and what I saw was incredibly busy people who are focused on growing their business.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they're experts in their field, whether it was manufacturing or retail or mining or finance, but they're not experts in AI transformation and they're now being required to be, right, that is now part of the job.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted to help them, and I get hired and I'd who keynotes and I, you know, to round the world, but I wanted to give them a handbook, a how-to guide.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I laid it all out for them, and here's what you need to know, and I wrote it
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: and I just wanted to empower people with the information they need so that they can ensure their companies are still around five years from now because that's what it comes down to.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you don't jump on the AI train, you're just not going to be relevant five years from now.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I want you to protect as many existing brands and businesses as I could by empowering them with the information they need.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: to make that jump.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's fantastic and a very worthy goal and I hear you on the companies being around in five years if they don't take advantage of this and you think there is some fear and some posture around AI and how it's going to eliminate jobs, right?
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's coming for everyone's jobs but you argue in your book and probably in your presentations as well that it's actually the newest teammate, the newest addition to the team.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can you elaborate on this a bit more?
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: What AI does is it changes workforce planning.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the way you think about your workforce has to change, because the workforce of the future is now a combination of humans and yes there will still be human workers, but alongside them will be digital employees, AI agents that will support those workers, and we can talk about the three different flavors of those agents if you like, and then if there's a physical component to your work, robots and automation.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So thinking about how you're going to grow your workforce, grow your impact, grow your revenues, is fundamentally changed by thinking about your workforce differently.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a great example from Jensen Hall, who's the CEO of Nvidia.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was our spec in, I don't know, late 2024 or so.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: What his plans were for the company, how you're going to grow the company, specifically employees.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And his answer, not the data, but something like, we've got about 32,000 employees today, and over time, I plan to grow that to about 50,000 employees, supported by 100 million AI assistants across every group.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he's thinking about growing his impact in multiple dimensions.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right?
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's not just thinking about how many people do I have, he's thinking
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: by pairing them with AI agents and robots to have much greater impact.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the opportunity here is not to substitute.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is old thinking is, okay, there's new technology, how do I use it to cut costs?
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is, thinking of the 20th century.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The new thinking has to be, how do I amplify the impact of my company?
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than thinking, okay, let's grow the business 15% or 20% or even 25% next year.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: How do I use AI to grow my business 10x next year?
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the new paradigm.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the new way people need to think, how do I amplify what I have?
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you can do that, you can unlock so much.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can collapse costs.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can collapse time because you can do things much quicker with AI.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can start to serve your customers with products and services that you could never have done before.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I completely agree with you there and there's some old ways of thinking that you're matching there.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then I'm going to ask about in a second, but you're highlighting that key point there.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to double back on something you set around the flavors of agents.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's dive into that.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are those three different flavors?
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I've identified three main flavors.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you like offload agents, elevate agents and extend agents, then explain what those three are.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Offload agents, pretty obvious, can name is written on the tin.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: What you get is an agent that offloads a task.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does things you don't want to do.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's simply way to think about this.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: These agents will take the suck out of your job.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They will do stuff you're not interested in doing.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The repetitive boring stuff that is lower value work.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Finding a time on the calendar when five people can all meet and then booking a Zoom call and a meeting and blah blah blah.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of that busy work just goes away because agents will handle all of that.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's offload agents, and there'll be a lot of the initial agents that you see.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the real impact will come from elevating extend agents.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those two classes of agents collaborate with us, that they partner with us to help us achieve something.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It elevates agent, works for this, to elevate our performance.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So to help us do something we could already do before, but do it better.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, if sites say performance, they're in not productivity, productivity, is one vector of performance.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: They might bet boost our productivity, of course, but they may also boost our creativity, our intuition, our decision-making abilities, expand our knowledge and so on.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's what an elevator agent is, it's partnering with a person to help them do what they could do already better.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The final class of agents is a more rarified group, but in this group what you're able to do is partner with a person so that they can extend their capabilities.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They can do something they could not do before.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: What you're essentially doing is partnering your people.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: with an agent, with an AI machine, that gives them superpowers that turns them into superheroes.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the real job of leaders now, is to staff up teams to build teams of superhumans, because they're supported by an Amplified by AI.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Very cool.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's super clear in those three types of agents laid out really does create someone who can who can be that super human in their role and get a lot of stuff done either offloading or being able to do things that they haven't been able to do.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, you mentioned the leaders part of it.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So over time, leaders can fall into operating out of their experience, sight, assumptions about a particular endeavor, right?
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're all guilty in that sort of a way, but
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: and how we're looking in our businesses with the advent of AI.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: What sort of assumptions need to be retired?
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think you mentioned one already, but what sort of assumptions need to be retired and what needs to replace them?
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think leaders have got into the position that they are through hard work and building experience.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're known as sages, right?
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're known for what they know.
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: They know where the bodies are buried.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They can see around corners a little bit because they've been there before.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They know how to get things done, and so they get promoted to a leadership position because of that experience and knowledge that they've recruited over time.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the world of AI, we're all making this stuff up as we go along, right?
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is uncharted territory.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what that means is a leader needs to let go of that identity as this sage that everybody comes to when they go to the mountain to find out the forecast for the future and what we need to do.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like your experience goes away overnight to all your domain experience and the business is still relevant.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when it comes to AI transformation, this is moving at such a pace that even somebody like me, I spend half of my day, I spend at least three hours a day just keeping up with all this stuff, reading AI research papers and understanding what's going on.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very hard to keep up with this and we're all figuring this out as we go, and that requires a different leadership posture.
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to show up in a different way, because now you have to be able to go to your team and say, you know what, I don't know the answers.
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not the sage in the room here, but I'm going to lead us through this anyway.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to be a philosopher explorer and thoughtfully think my way through this in partnership with you, and I'm going to
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's super exciting, but it's also scary for people who are in this comfortable zone of, yeah, I've been here for 30 years or 20 years, whatever it is, and I know my stuff, and now I don't.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's both exciting and as always opportunity, but it's also a little bit discouraging.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's what you need in this era to be successful in this.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: you have to have vision.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to have a bold vision for what's possible.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's classic change management.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Cotta said you have to paint a vivid vision of the few imagined future inland lead people there.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you have to have this strong vision and then you have to have the courage and the conviction to say this is where we're going.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's go build it.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, in that same vein.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you've got leadership and how you approach that.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there's also management style, right?
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is there difference there and far as what needs to change?
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because you mentioned that old school management fails in the age of AI.
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it the same thing as the leadership changes or what do you mean by this?
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what needs to be changed?
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a little different.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love Simon Sinek's definition of a leader.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a leader only needs one thing.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Follow us.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's as simple as that.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as a leader, what you're trying to get is people to follow you in a certain direction.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Managers are doing something different.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are managing the resources that they have, and typically that's what a lot of the time that leaders spend is also managing.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're trying to figure out, what do I, how do I achieve the goals I have with the limited resource?
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have limited headcount, limited number of hours in the day, limited dollars, limited capital equipment, wherever it might be, or living in this world of constraints, of scarcity, and being a manager is just doing the
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you can make the leap to becoming what I call an AI first company, that means you can start to shake off those constraints.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can collapse the major constraints of time and cost, reduce your marginal cost, and start managing in a world where you're no longer trying to get through the next quarter with the limited headcount you have, because now you can amplify your headcount.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: by 100x if you want, by complimenting the humans you have with AI agents.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you had to shift from managing limited scarce resources to then having an abundance mindset.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where now you spend your time focused on building superhuman teams.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and finding ways to use AI to collapse the constraints you have.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because once you've done that, once you've built superhuman teams and you've collapsed the constraints that were stopping you from doing amazing things, now you can start to completely reimagine your business.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can go to market in a different way, you can develop new products, new services, you can develop new business models.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the real job of a leader now in an AI first world.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's important to think about these three different categories of companies now.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Traditional companies, AI first companies, an AI native companies.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps these are way to reflect on what those are on those categories is to think about 25 years ago.
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were traditional companies, they were internet first companies, and internet native companies.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You traditional company would be, you see as your JC pennies, the companies that were too slow to adapt to the internet era.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then you've got your internet first companies that made that pivot successfully, they refocus how they went to market, their fulfillment, and when omnichannel like target, targeted a great job of that, they're clearly an internet first company now.
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And obviously the poster child for internet native would be Amazon.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're now doing that all over again with AI.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you are startup, now you have an opportunity to be one of the first AI native companies.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now if you're a mature company, the only way that you can compete with an AI native competitor,
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: is to become AI first.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because if you state traditional, you're toast the same way, see us in Blockbuster and Haudenek all become toast right.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, that's the challenge.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, what is an AI first company?
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: An AI first company doesn't just use AI.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They build the entire organization around it.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the difference.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: That makes sense and switching to that sort of mindset difference there being AI first is definitely the key that resonates that resonates for sure in the book you talk about AI wins that you can use today and this probably is a good stepping stone into being an AI first company but effectively pointing to immediate impact teams can feel from using AI today can you talk about a few of those and maybe even what you consider the most important one.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there are two main steps on the way to becoming AI-first.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first is enabling your teams with tools, AI-powered tools.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're marketing department, help them with AI as they can help generate copy, better copy, and faster copy, so they can generate more over time.
• 14:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You might also have AI's that are there to do that offload stuff, right?
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: To be able to automate or semi automate some of the lower value tasks, booking meetings, booking flights, those sorts of things.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once you've done that at Nadement phase, and there are many
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: tools out there that people can use to generate video to automatically summarize meetings.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are the things that people are using already day and day out if you have sales forces or something like that.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are agents in there that will capture the details of a customer call and put all the information into the CRM for you.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those are the sorts of things you can do to get started and that's necessary but it's not sufficient.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So enable is where you start.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: and maybe three to five percent of the return, the impact that you get.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next phase is where you re-engineer your business processes, you look at your workflows and say, okay, let's break it down to tasks, and that's work out which of these tasks is still the best done by human, because there'll be many that are, and then which that are best done by an agent, or by a robot, if there's a physical component to what you do.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then how do you orchestrate all of those three groups working together with handoffs between them, how do you exchange data, what's the modality of the handoffs and so forth?
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that you're building these workflows that are optimized based on the three different components of your workforce that you now have.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's probably 30% of the effort and maybe from
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've got to do those first two phases before you can then get to really thinking about AI first.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: You could just jump straight there, but it's probably a heavier look, but that's what's going to give you 60% of the impact that you have.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's very clear, and I appreciate that you broke down the percentages too, because people may be thinking, like, okay, if I just enable the team and give them the tools, I'm good to go.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to get, I'm going to get the value.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that's just not the case and we're seeing that happen today all the time.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, yeah, I get together with CEOs and there will be so proud We have a site-wide copilot license and they think we're done I have to tell him well done.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's great.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a good start.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, what else you got?
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because it's a bit like back in the internet here, if they had just if they just got a dot com and then declared victory and said okay we've done the internet it's there's so much more to do absolutely and that's very clear okay let's move into the next piece of it and you talk about reinvention and how it beats reduction I think sprinkled into the things that you have mentioned about being an AI first company and the things that leaders need to be doing to think differently and how they lead and how they manage.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can cherry-pick some ideas, but can you explain that concept about reinvention, beating reduction?
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And since this is obviously the case in what you're explaining, how can leaders and employees move into this way of thinking?
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it requires a bit more effort, honestly.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And some of it is just it's muscle memory.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you think about the last 55 years of IT, it's largely given us technologies that allowed us to improve productivity and reduce cost.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so if you're a leader of manager, you see a new technology coming in form of AI and you think, okay, I can use that to, let's think, improve productivity and reduce cost.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you can do that with AI, but you can do so much more because you're not talking about an automation technology here.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're talking about intelligence in a bottle, right?
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Intelligence on demand at scale.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it allows you to think about growing your business.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's take an example.
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have two big competitors.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have equal access to capital and technology.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're battling
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: to automate away as much of the human capital as we can, right?
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're just going to automate, automate, squeeze as much cost out of the system as possible, because agents will work for less money than humans will.
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They work for electrons instead of dollars, as the electrons have cost, but you get what I'm saying.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those two companies then fight their way down.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They reduce their costs as much as possible and now what's the differentiation?
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they fight to the bottom on cost and everybody loses.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's not the way forward.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Great leaders will understand this is no opportunity to amplify their people, amplify their brands and to show up in the world in a much bigger way to have much greater impact.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so this is about ambition and courage.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And some leaders don't have that.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: All there, there may be came up through finance and all they're good at is, let's look at the bottom line, it's really okay.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's still be how many people we can cut today.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is just not gonna get you eating it to go, because your competitors who do have a growth mindset who are saying, how can we grow the business 100x in the next four years?
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not making that stuff that is possible using AI.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we grow the impact of the business, the revenue of the business, and create new products and services that we couldn't even dream of three years ago by using AI.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are the companies that are going to be wildly successful and crush the ones who only focus on cutting costs because they're not my relevant anymore.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a total strategic shift there and how they're thinking about things and
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's clear that it's only a matter of time if you don't make these changes, then you're going to be relevant and you're not able to compete.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: We laughed earlier about people rolling out AI and today people are doing that all the time and they're getting it wrong.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not really think about how to get the maximum value from the startup to the enterprise.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are the top AI rollout mistakes for companies to avoid?
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Probably three big ones that I see over and over.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first one is, to some extent, there were some companies who went too soon.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right, the technology wasn't mature enough.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They built something that wasn't ready for prime time.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It failed because the technology wasn't ready.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they were like, oh, hey, I think doesn't work.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they walk away.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a category of mistake I see, but the two big ones are this.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Personal is data.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: AI operates on data.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: If your company data isn't clean, organized and ready for primetime, there's a whole chapter in my book about how you get your data AI ready.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: then it's just not risk successful.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of garbage in garbage out.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you don't connect and ground your AI's in your corporate data, then they can't possibly understand your environment and therefore provide you with value.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's a huge one.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not spending enough time getting the data ready for the AI implementation.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you have data engineers, data scientists give them all a raise because they are in high demand and you need to keep them as a resource in your company.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other big category of mistake I see.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll illustrate by telling a little story, I was with a client and they were so proud because they had rolled out a Gentic AI solution, and this is maybe, I know, four or five months ago now.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they were there ahead of the curve, well done.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they said that we rolled out these agents, we created these agents, they were really great.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we rolled them out to the employees and the employees hated them.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: They refused to use them, and actually some of them quit, they said they wouldn't work with AI.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I said, did you involve them in the development of these AI solutions?
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: No.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're just the IT department built them and then we're gave them to them as like a gift and they didn't like it.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just laughed quietly inside as I can hear you chuckling now and because you know what went wrong there, you know, you have to bring people along and then there's two reasons for that.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: One people need to feel agency in their own future, right?
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: They need to understand, what's in it for me?
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they need to engage in the process because what you're trying to do is create supporters, not saboteurs, and what that company had done was create a whole army of saboteurs who were like, hell no, I'm not having that in my world.
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other reason that you engage people on the front line early on is this.
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: We all have policies and procedures written down, but we all also know that the work doesn't get done the way that the manual says they get done.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are all kinds of work arounds and different ways of things being done, and the people who are doing the work are the ones who know how it actually gets done.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you don't engage them, you will build a solution for a world that does not and has probably never existed.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's why you need to engage people early on so that you build a solution that is actually going to have impact and land in the way that you hope.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: engage your people early on, explain to them both the with them and the with who.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what's in it for me and what's in it for us collectively as an organisation?
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: This means leadership needs to communicate your purpose.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's the mission statement, what's the core purpose that the companies is, the humanistic purpose and explain how we're going to use AI to amplify our impact in the world so that we can do more for people.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: if you get people excited about that, then they're going to be the supporters and not sabotage.
• 24:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It fits with trying to accomplish anything.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to align to the mission.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to align to something you're trying to accomplish, tie it to a result.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's no different than how to operate in that sort of thing.
• 24:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that makes total sense.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Steve, where can people connect with you and learn more about what you have some courses, you have some things, and obviously the book will link in the show notes, but tell me about some places where people can connect with you and learn more.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sure, my website, CZDFIME, SteveBrown.ai.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: On there, you'll see at the top of that, there's an AI course designed for leaders.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's essentially, if you don't like reading books, it's the course version, and it's designed so you can download it to a tablet or a phone and just watch it on your
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: so it's it's me talking to camera and you get see videos and all sorts.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It more things that you wouldn't see in the book.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I post a lot of stuff on LinkedIn.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can find me on LinkedIn.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are a lot of Steve Browns out there.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Try Steve Brown, AIF, you trust you might find me that way.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or it's just LinkedIn.com slash ian slash future Steve and that will get you to me.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I'd love to connect with people if I can help you, listener, dear listener.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: If I can help you with your AI transformation strategy, help me understand and your team understand what AI first means and how you get there and why that is essential to your future.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd be delighted to help.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's fantastic.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll definitely link all of that into the show notes.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Steve, thank you for being on the show today.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very clear the message you're bringing right to survive.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: You must become an AI first company.
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: A.E.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: a company that builds its processes and org around AI.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to enable your teams, you have to break up the work and orchestrate the groups to work together in the groups being people and agents and optimize those workflows.
• 25:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Leaders have to change the way that they think and the way that they manage in order to really survive this change in the industries.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: They really appreciate you being on the show today and highlighting all those things.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know a thanks for the great conversation I really enjoyed being here.
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: This has been the stellar conversation with Steve, whose message is to the point.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You must reinvent your operation and center around AI to withstand the changes across the business landscape today.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: AI is here to stay, and agents are your newest teammate, one that enables you to have superpowers and be the hero for your business.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you'd like to connect with Steve, please check out the show notes for all the appropriate links.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And thanks again for listening.