Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Why 90% of AI Investments Fail | Lisa L. Levy
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Good morning, everybody. Today we are chatting with Lisa Levy, the founder of LCubed Consulting. welcome to the show. We're really happy to have you here on the Tech Matchmaker podcast. Lisa L. Levy: Gina, thanks so much for inviting me to have this conversation. I'm looking forward to it. Gina Gibson: Excellent. So we always start with the basics, Lisa. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Lisa L. Levy: Absolutely, so I am an owner operator of a management consulting firm about 18 years ago I had what I like to describe as a corporate temper tantrum and Decided that I needed to do something really different and 18 years later that is L cubed consulting where we are helping business owners founders CEOs build teams that are self-reliant and Really using people plus process times technology to get to the the growth and scale that they're looking for Gina Gibson: Love that. What's one thing about you that we wouldn't find on LinkedIn? Lisa L. Levy: I am a painfully introverted person. I look at the look on your face right now, right? So we all have skills and things that we learn to survive in business. And for me, that was getting out literally from behind the camera and being the spokesperson, the face, and doing these kinds of things which are not naturally comfortable for me. Gina Gibson: I'm and you do them with such ease. So it's a well hidden ⁓ secret that you have there. ⁓ With your origin story, do you want to share a little bit more about your corporate tantrum ⁓ that you had? Lisa L. Levy: I would love to because it was so fantastic. I was working for a company that was everything I ever thought it would be. was highly contact center driven, but it was pre-IPO. It was a rocket ship getting ready to take off. Everything about it was exactly what I had dreamed of doing. And every morning I found myself driving to work with my hands on the steering wheel, white knuckling it with tears starting to roll down my face. And I realized that The dream wasn't it. This wasn't the dream and I needed to do something very different. And yes, in my head one day at work, I was standing in the parking lot looking at a building crying because I could not make myself go in that door. And I had been a fabulous team of people, wonderful thing, it just wasn't working for me. And I had in the previous nine months reported to seven different C-level executives and my whole project management practice kept bouncing around this organization and I finally said to the CEO For whom I still am a raving fan. He's a fantastic person. I said dude You don't know what you want from me. I can't give you what you don't know that you want let alone what you might need I'm out help me get out of here because it's serving nobody and Without a parachute without a plan without anything other than I've had it up to beyond, you know the point of feeling like I was drowning, I started a company. I had no idea what I was doing. Gina Gibson: I love that. And I think your story, probably a lot of people can find pieces that they resonate with that ⁓ from along. So thank you so much for sharing that. Is that part of why your tagline is? What does it turn turn your why into wow? Is that part of part of your history? Do you want to talk to us about what that looks like in practice? Lisa L. Levy: Sure. You turn your why into wow really is we nobody in any set of circumstances can do something that demotivates them on a recurring basis. So until we understand what our why is, we're never going to wow. We may have moments of it. We may pretend we may we may position ourselves into moments of success, but right inside, we're probably silently dying through all of that. So when we have our why clearly understood. And we work towards that. So for me today, that means I work with disruptive leaders. I only work with people who are willing to challenge the norms so that they can get better outcomes. That gets from why they have a business to wow for their clients and their customers, because that's where the wow really exists. Gina Gibson: I love that. And you've described adaptive transformation like turning a boulder into a Swiss army knife. ⁓ I'd love for you to unpack that a little bit for us and for the audience. Lisa L. Levy: Absolutely. So adaptive transformation very quickly is the framework that we've developed to leverage project management, process management, organizational change, and controls inside of a business. Things that huge corporations do and build multi-million dollar operating teams with these. We do it in smaller teams across functions so that we're really building skills and capabilities inside of our client engagements. inside of every person in that team that we work with. Because consulting is not about building my team in your environment. It's about my team building up everybody who works in your environment to be better and more capable. Every person can manage a project. Every person should understand the process that they work within, what happens before them, that leads to their input, what they do, where that output goes, and most importantly, what that means for their end client, customer. And if it means nothing, that's waste. And well, that's a whole nother conversation. In the organizational change, right, we are all people working inside of our businesses and we all have to understand the why behind change before we can ever say, yes, sign me up, I wanna participate. Gina Gibson: I love your comment about not your team working in their environment, but really building their team within their role. And it's something that we talk about a lot too, is that, you know, it's important that we take the customer and what their goals are and not try to put the round peg in a square hole, so to speak. ⁓ So AI, how does that play? It's central in your framework. How do you use it as a... Lisa L. Levy: Absolutely. Gina Gibson: strategic accelerator while still governing like the human perspective. What's your take on it on AI? Lisa L. Levy: So this is the coolest thing ever that we have ever done. And over the last couple of years, as we've started to bring AI into the environment, many people are like, well, aren't you afraid that AI is going to take over what you do? And it's like, absolutely not. And I hope it does. Sorry, it's sort of both sides of it, because there are things that AI should take away from your teams, from my team. We really need to do it. But what really pissed me off, and I... I tend to make change happen when I get frustrated. What really started to piss me off last year is starting to see the data. 90 % of companies are investing in AI experiments, pilots, doing things, and getting zero ROI. And when you dig into the data, the reason why is they haven't aligned the AI experiment or pilot with the strategic goal or objective. But when we do that, that 5 % of companies that are really getting the gains did it very strategically. And so we've taken AI around that adaptive transformation framework so that it is now the enabling agent of it. And many of our client engagements over time, things that happen, we go in, we do great things. The teams start to take ownership of the things. But what we really want to set them up for is this mindset of continuous improvement so that they're always looking for that next opportunity. And the problem with that model and people is one, it takes time, it takes effort, it takes energy, and our day job gets in the way of that. And so that starts to sort of fall away. One of the other problems with that is sometimes it's really hard to raise your hand and say, I think that there's a problem here. Whether you're feeling like you're saying, I think I'm not doing my job well enough, or you see it in somebody else's team and you don't want to feel like you're pointing fingers. Well, if we let the AI play that role, Gina Gibson: Yeah. Lisa L. Levy: and it is constantly looking at data about how our business operates, what we do, how we do it. It is continuously learning and it can continuously make the suggestions for opportunities for improvement. And now we've positioned ourselves to say, I think there's something going on and we can make a difference. You're not pointing blame, you're pointing at data that was provided to you by the system and it's no longer, we take away all that personal fear portion of it. And in the projects and the things that we've done over the last two years, our return to our clients is exponential. We did a project for a large organization that had a huge percentage of their senior leadership team, like 100 people, getting ready to retire out. And they had no succession planning in place. We went through and touched all 100 of those people, documented 250 key processes that are required for that. entity to exist in a way that they had never done before. We created career paths and defined succession plans for people who worked across that organization to start backfilling and being in a position to take over, knowing, one, that we would not replace 100 leaders with 100 future leaders, right? There was going to be some streamlining. And leveraging AI to become sort of that knowledge base that we could then talk to and interact with about how things work. Stats on that we four the value to that organization because we were able to do more people than we thought we would be able to in a time frame. We got twice as much depth and the output was twice as rich. you know, somehow in that I messed up the math, but ultimately it was a 4x value back to that company. Gina Gibson: That's incredible. When you mention ROI, what are the stats that you're finding? Like, what are the numbers that clients are actually caring about today? What does it boil down to that you're seeing? Lisa L. Levy: So it depends on what sector we're talking about. So talking about a business, right? One of the things that we look very closely at is EBITDA, right? And we want to be able to, with our AI and with this platform and what we do and how we do it, everything we do, we are dashboarding and showing hard dollar savings, soft dollar savings, revenue increase. right, increasing profitability, decreasing overhead. Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Lisa L. Levy: And day by day, it is up on a dashboard with hard numbers around it saying, this is the dollar value of this. Back. Gina Gibson: That's fantastic. And that was a great success story. Is there another one you'd like to share on your consulting side, different things that you've done out there in the market? Lisa L. Levy: One of the other things that we've seen ⁓ is improvements on things that we take for granted, how we schedule work. So in a manufacturing environment, as an example, we have been scheduling work on lines, and I'm sure that there are tools and processes that do all of this. But when you have an AI analyzing the data, it can make connections and correlations. that we just sort of miss because just the way it just it's faster, it's better, it's what it's designed to do. And in one environment, they were able to redesign the manufacturing runs so that there was less than 10 % material waste at the end of each year. They were working in a just in time ⁓ approach that was actually fulfilling slightly ahead of time, but with nothing extra. The lines ran more consistently. They did fewer shutovers between builds for different clients. was operationally, it took away the work of three people that were just overseeing the line scheduling. ⁓ hard dollar savings in wasted materials was tens of millions of dollars. That business basically on paper Gina Gibson: Wow. Lisa L. Levy: when all was said and done and that was just one of the projects in there. But they basically doubled their value on paper just by retooling how they ran their business. There was nothing new sold. There was no change in pricing. It was just operationally efficient that it doubled its revenue run. Gina Gibson: That's impressive. So what is an engagement with L Cubed consulting look like? How does one what is what's the average length of it? And I know there's no cookie cutter. It would vary but talk a little bit about the Lisa L. Levy: So I'll start with right here's the consulting answer. Well, Gina, it depends. It depends. But with what we're doing with AI, with that offering, our AI value path offering, it really is a bit more predictable. So the first three to four months is the kind of labor intensive data cleaning experience. We start with a discovery workshop. We understand what the priorities are for the organization, for the team. And we pick. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Lisa L. Levy: two projects out of however many we come up with in a brainstorming session to start on. And it all starts with the data, getting the data cleaned and getting it ready to be useful. And with that, we're doing and using patented technology to standardize and normalize the data in a way that teams of consultants right out of college would never get to, just saying. Get that all going and we start to run the projects. And when I say run the projects, that might be, let's look at accounts payable. Let's look at payroll, let's look at something, one of the processes inside of the organization. Let's look at our customer experience. Let's look at our sales process. Whatever that is, we start on two, never more than two projects at a time. And in that first 30 to 90 or 90 to 120 days, we will get those two projects tuned, showing the results. And then we pick the next two and the next two and that whole idea of continuous improvement that I was talking about. that AI is continuing to run it. Our engagements are not what they used to be. This can be a month to month engagement and know, neighbors, landscapers are here folks, sorry, welcome to the party. And we go through, we can then work kind of project by project and the projects usually run about 90 days. Gina Gibson: Welcome, they know it's real, they know it's live. Excellent. Lisa L. Levy: But what's different is the AI is doing the heavy lift. And so the overhead from my team, we're probably talking one person on a fractional basis as opposed to a consulting team on site. Gina Gibson: which is a huge benefit for the customer from a cost perspective, I would imagine. Lisa L. Levy: It's a huge benefit. It's a significant financial savings. And over time, the ROI is paying for us to be there. So it is no longer operational over. Gina Gibson: Love. Love that. Is there anything Lisa that you would like the audience to know that I haven't asked you? Lisa L. Levy: Gina, we've covered all the fun stuff. But the most important thing that I guess I want to share with any audience and everybody who's listening is whatever we're doing today might be good enough, but it's not as good as it could be. And so always ask why, why are we doing the things we're doing? Gina Gibson: Yeah. Hmm. It's that continuous improvement always, right? Staying on that. So to wrap things up, Lisa, I have always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do some rapid fire. So this is funny, but what sound or noise do you love? Lisa L. Levy: not the leaf blower. I love the sound of ocean waves breaking on the sand. Gina Gibson: Love it. And what sound or noise do you hate? Lisa L. Levy: Right now in particular, it's the leaf blower next door. Gina Gibson: And what profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Lisa L. Levy: I would love to be a... not a rock star. I would love to be the tour manager for a rock band. Gina Gibson: Love that. So Lisa, if someone wants more information on working with LCubed Consulting, who should they reach out to? Lisa L. Levy: I am really findable on LinkedIn, Lisa L. Levy. The middle initial L is really important. You can Google that. And the product, the service, we were just talking about, aivaluepath.com or lcubedconsulting.com. Gina Gibson: Wonderful. Lisa, thank you so much for joining us today. And I love the work that you're doing. And it's very innovative and very applicable to our audience. So thank you so much for your time today. Lisa L. Levy: Thanks for having me.