Why Developers Are AI's Canary in the Coal Mine | AI For The C-Suite EP 76

I'm Chad Harvey, and this is AI for the C-Suite, the show for senior leaders who know AI matters and need to figure out what to do about it. Each episode we dig into what it all actually means for middle market orgs, how it's changing decisions, strategy, leadership, and the very nature of work. Let's get into it. My guest today has spent nearly three decades watching how tech actually gets adopted.

Not in the slide deck, but in the room on a Tuesday by people who have other things to do. Sean Campbell is the CEO and founder of Cascade Insights, where his team works both sides of this market, helping organizations actually adopt AI and doing deep research for the companies building it. His client list includes Microsoft, Google, and AWS. All the way down to mid-market firms that look a lot like yours.

He's also an assistant prof at George Fox University, where he leads AI integration for the MBA program and teaches business students what this all means for careers they haven't even started yet. He writes a newsletter called The Human Side of AI, and if you're really nice, he may be persuadable to take you out on a fishing charter. Lastly, when I asked him what he cares most about in this work, he said, I have a heart. that people don't get run over by this.

So that's where we'll start today. Sean Campbell, welcome to AI for the C Suite. Thanks for having me on, man. You bet.

All right. Let's start out here with this idea of people not getting run over. And I know when we talked earlier, you started teaching AI at the business school because in your words, again, you don't want to see folks get flattened. And you're saying that from the perspective of both a business owner, a professor, and a guy who trains corporate teams for a living.

So what does each of those three seats show you that the other two don't? And what's this all mean? Yeah, it's a good question. Um, and where that comes from is when my son, who's about to get married this coming Sunday, as we record this.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, first one to get married. So there's all the all the associated drama. The actual rehearsal dinner is tonight, of all things.

Anyway, yeah, so busy weekend for us. But but as he goes to uh George Fox University for his first year there, he was a transfer student. Um, I ended up bumping into the business school faculty. And uh I said, do you guys hire adjuncts?

Because I had been a contributing assistant professor in an MBA program before. I had taught during my master's degree. I always wanted to get back to it. And as my kids were adulting, I'm like, I'd like to get back into this, right?

And uh I should mention that like all good college students, Josh immediately changed his degree right after getting to school and ended up graduating with a psychology degree, but that's where he met his bride to be, who's also a psych major, so I guess that all worked out. But he's not a business school student. But what it led to me is I ended talking to the dean. Um, and she said, Well, yeah, I mean, we are right now in one of those loops where we're looking for adjuncts, and here's this class that I'd like you to teach.

But, you know, what else are you interested in? And I said, Well, definitely artificial intelligence. And she said, Well, that's something we're trying to consider. Now, this is two plus years ago.

So from a higher education standpoint, that's a little bit ahead of the curve. Like, I mean, you can go through LinkedIn now and watch a very cathartic set of posts going on amongst professors saying like what shall I do with AI this fall? But two years ago, that was a little more abnormal to be talking about. There was mostly just resistance.

And so I said to the dean, I said, you know, frankly from my standpoint, my heart is that people just don't get run over by this. uh and so from an educational standpoint, we could tackle that one first. I think this is incredibly challenging for this generation of students, right? And this is a generation, and the one kind of, you know, if you think of generations as like a couple of years, not like Gen X millennial, like, you know, these couple generational cohorts just by a couple years.

There's been a lot of challenges. You know, there was COVID, I don't get to go to high school. Then there's like, you know, then I've got other challenges with just kind of the economy and like what is this doing to my parents and where are we at with things? And, you know, just your your standard kind of transformative kind of things your average college student gets to deal with.

And now they're hearing that whole parts of the job market they might be considering just aren't going to be there anymore. And the bottom rung of the ladder will be kicked out. Um and you know, I'd say another thing on that, this is maybe a deeper click than I intended to get into, is that There's also kind of like a like who you're made to be problem. And what I mean by that is like, you know, if you looked across all the personality profile tests, right?

You know, I think we all know that like extroversion and great communication skills, and I want to be a podcast host someday, is not equally distributed. Do you know what I mean? That's not that's not like an equally distributed gene, right? Now, I taught public speaking while getting my master's degree, for example, and I can tell you that.

No public speaking professor on the planet who has a heart doesn't grade on a curve. You know, it's like being a youth sports coach. It's the same thing. I did that for a while when my kids were young.

I wasn't like in it forever, but like a lot of dads, you know, you coach your kids' team or whatever. And there were kids that would enter the field and they could turn a double play, and I hadn't told them how to turn a double play. And there were other kids that the ball kept hitting them in the chest all season long, no matter how many times I told them how to catch the ball. And so, you know, there is the senateability thing.

And what I mean by that is. I think one of the things that's really creeping into these kids' minds, and it's it's a good thing for them to consider, and it's a good thing for you to consider as a parent, is okay, so the personality tests say that there's only so many extroverts, and there's only so many people who are like super intuitive, and there's only so many people who have a sense of taste and judgment kind of innately. And then there's a whole bunch of the rest of us, arguably by the numbers, if you look at these personality tests, more of us who are analytic, who are driven by like.

You know, as somebody once said, I forget the guy who quoted it, but he's like, you know, managing symbols, words, and code and numbers. Those are the jobs that are under threat. Right? And in all those jobs, and if you look at developers, that's it's easily the canary in the coal mine.

I tell people all the time whether you're a developer or not, as a parent or a student, look at that industry and see what's happening to work in that industry. And everybody's like, well, we need people with judgment and decision making and the ability to manage multiple agents at a time and the ability to delegate. These skills are not equally distributed and they're not equally God given either. They're actually some of the hardest stuff to teach people, right?

In a meaningful way. Right. And so I think a lot of the students are kind of recognizing that, wow, I'd really like to be, I'm just gonna knock a career for a minute, but like I don't mean it like it's it's all dead, but You know, I'd like to go into the bottom rung of financial planning, says a young person, right? And I'm like, well, the bottom rung of financial planning, young person, is going to be AI.

The upper level of financial planning may not be AI, um, because there's a big human connection there. But that bottom layer of you just doing analysis and spreadsheets all day, well, that's I don't know if I'd trust that anymore as job. And yet, yet somebody is maybe wired to maybe do that for their whole career, right? You know, and I think that's a real real big societal challenge.

I think it's a big challenge for individuals, you know, and and maybe less so for the two of us talking, because you know, you own a podcast and I like getting on them. So I don't think the extroversion issue is really an issue, right? But you know, but but I really have a heart for like how do we move people and train them and and do those kinds of things and steer them around careers that are gonna go away. That's one other thing, and then you We can take this wherever you want, because we just started talking about education.

But like, you know, if you if you threw a rock, there's gonna be somebody that says there'll be plenty of jobs for everyone after all this is over. And somebody else will say there'll be un you know, enough money for everyone. And somebody else will say there's not enough money for anyone when it's done, and somebody else will say there'll never be there'll be total job devastation. I it's hard to know at this point.

I mean, it's easy to write a you know, a conjecture, right? And I've got my opinions on all those things. But what I do know is there are some jobs that are going away. I mean, we don't need a lot of medical transcriptionists anymore.

You know what I mean? And we don't need certain jobs. And and worse yet, if we're being honest with ourselves, some of those jobs are not the most highly skilled jobs. And they might be filled with people who have incredibly meaningful lives outside of work and education.

And they're not super excited to go back and get another four-year degree. You know what mean? In nuclear engineering or whatever, you know what I mean? To go get another job.

And I don't know how we really transfer that workforce. I'm not saying everybody doesn't want to do that. I'm not trying to be disparaging. I'm just being like objective.

Like if you took, you know, people sometimes take jobs so they can have a life and they can contribute to their church and their community and and you know, spend time at home and all those kinds of things. Not everybody's like massively driven to reinvent themselves every five minutes. Mm-hmm. and so there's a lot of interesting things there.

And yet I think the university has an incredibly important role to play. If you're an AI forward university like Fox, and that's not me just raising the flag, they they legitimately are in a lot of places. Um you not only can help train the next generation, but you can be a source of insight and inspiration and education to professionals. Um how we get there, how we fund all that, I I I don't know.

I'm not a government policy maker, so that's a different No, that is absolutely a different problem. And and as we're recording this kind of uh midway through the summer of twenty six, there's an a lot of open letters. There was one that was drafted just yesterday by I think thirteen hundred tech leaders and employees uh asking for more regulation, which is kind of a perverse thing. So let's let's put that in a pocket though for a moment.

Um I think a lot of what you're really speaking to here, Sean is Is the idea of pace of change. And when we talk about um what we don't know and we've all got our opinions, yeah, we do. I think the one thing that is really, really clear is that unless and until this technology plateaus its exponential increase, we are going to be confronted with a very disruptive period where the pace of change continues to accelerate and quite frankly in unpredictable ways, right? Whether you subscribe to the idea that we've crossed the threshold into the singularity or any of that other geek speak.

The point is we are confronted with a very rapidly changing situation, which makes it very difficult for employees as well as for the uh up-and-coming college students and folks in the educational system that you talked about. So I think that's kind of a grounding point in terms of how do we as a species, but then also as individuals, going back to your comments about personality tests and wiring, how do we as both a species and individuals grapple with that pace of change? Because I don't know that most folks are a equipped with that type of mindset and even those that are, quite frankly, it's exhausting.

I don't know what you see with the folks that you're working with, but it's tiring. Well, yeah, I mean, the the rate of change is astronomical. And I know there's some people when they hear that, I wanna, you know, full state, you know, you never know how old a podcast guest is. I know I don't mind saying it, right?

I'm Gen X, I'm fifty five. So I saw mobile, I saw a cloud, I entered computing, I say, before color. That's what I tell people. My first computer was Hercules monochrome.

So I had a computer that didn't have color, what had shades color. Right? You know what I mean? So like but um A good trusty IBM 286 is what it was, right?

And so like, um, so I've seen a few waves, right? And these things have similarities, they have echoes, right? Like, I won't trust my data in an LLM. Okay, all right.

Well, you didn't trust your data in the cloud, and you didn't trust your data in a mobile device. And you were basically ultimately, and I know there's probably like a CIO that's gonna freak out when I say this, but like ultimately. No matter how many different compliance checks you did, and no matter how often you read their SOC report, and no matter whatever you did, ultimately you were basing that on trust in the words. That's what you were doing.

So if an AI provider says it won't go in the training data set and we're wigged out by that, some of that is just because we believe that AI platform is new and therefore can't be trusted, right? But I mean, we did research study after research study when the cloud came out. I don't know how many we did, and it was the same progression. It was like, you know.

Uh industries that didn't have a lot of compliance concerns and a lot of regulation. We all know the ones that do and the ones that don't. They were like, Yippee, the cloud, I get rid of my servers, no more colo, right? Or whatever.

And then the banks were like, No, no way. I will never put your data on a mobile. Well, until it makes us money to put money on a mobile device and sell you mobile checking and banking. And then we're more than happy to do that for you, right?

So it's it's kind of the same, it's the same arc in some ways. And I think um, you know, one of the challenges with the speed It's a slight counterfactual. I agree with you, right? That that the velocity is crazy high compared to anything else.

I mean, even if you just try to sit on the news stream, you know, like I've never taught anything out of all the technology and business topics that I've had the opportunity to teach over my career, either like explicitly in a classroom setting or just as a business leader, right? Mentoring people, there's nothing that's done things like, oh, I was gonna teach this thing in an hour. Now this announcement came out, and I'm not going to teach it anymore. And I'm going to go teach something completely different for the next 50 minutes.

Right. And on one level, if you're if you're in if you like that kind of thing, well, that's kind of fun. But to your point, it's a little bit like, wow, I come back from a vacation and like everything's different all of a sudden. But but a counter to that, that also kind of agrees with you, kind of in a duality, this guy Ethan Mallock that I love following, and he he said, he said, this is like a couple months back, he's like, what people don't get is if like this all stopped.

It got no better. This was pre-fable, by the way, just to put a benchmark. Like, he's like, there'd be a massive amount of disruption. If it just stopped.

And I think people just don't they they struggle with that. They struggle with that conceptually. And another reason I think people struggle to understand what's really happening here is that um this generalization, like all generalizations, phrase at the edges, but like like, you know, if you look at what Computing has done to work. Historically, it's done um more to, let's say, the analytical left brain tasks, right?

I shall give it you a grammar checker. I shall give it you a spell checker. I shall give it with you a thing that calculates formulas. Anybody who's ever taught Excel to newbies, everybody knows the moment they go.

Ooh, pivot tables. There's like five people in the room that get it, and five people that just like, my brain hurts. I cannot understand what just happened in that spreadsheet, right? And and and so, but you know, and I and I understand people could point to like Adobe and like Photoshop and all this stuff, but even those, you know, you're driving.

Like I taught some of that stuff at one point in my career. A lot of like, you know, if dates me, macromedia director, right? You know, go back. But like, but the point is like you're still in the driver's seat in a really like tangible way.

And when you can just prompt an AI video that looks real and there is no way if it scrolled past your feed you would ever know that it's not Um, that's tackling a whole different set of like right brain creative, you know what I mean, things that I think really melt people's brain. They str they struggle with that because they haven't seen computing come after that. You know, and there's there's kind of an answer to that, which is that, you know, I had a conversation with a student once that always stays with me.

Um, this student came up and it was after a guest lecture I gave in somebody else's class. on like AI's impact on a particular career. Not not the one the student ended up bringing up, but but a different one. And the student said, I are are you okay with all this?

Because you know, my I I've always felt the same whenever I teach on AI is that I have to tell you how it's changing. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to demonstrate it's going to be hands on the keyboard. You're going to get your hands on the keyboard. You're going to learn that way.

But then we're not going to have to wonder what's actually possible. We're going to actually like see it. Mm-hmm. And yet, so I did a lot of that.

So I'm pointing out like a lot's gonna change. And the student said, Ha are you okay with all this? And I'm like, well, one, I'm not I'm not responsible for it, but but I understand where you're coming from. And I said, What do you want to go do?

Uh and student said, Well, I don't really like what AI is doing to writing. And I said, after a little bit of back and forth, I went up to the board and I drew a vertical rectangle and I said, At the bottom of this, like all these writing tasks, you're just gonna have to give up. This this is me like telling the truth before I said something sensitive, right? You know, I'm like, I think you're gonna have to give it up.

I mean, if you love stringing prepositions together, that game's up. You know, the last time I told a client this this morning that I was actually training, I said, you know, I I think it's been over a year that I've actually written something from the top to the bottom. Now we come back to that because I know some people are like, he's not writing his stuff. I would actually argue that I am writing my stuff, but but that's a that's a if you want to come back to that, we can have a conversation about that.

But but I said to this student, I said, so the bottom of your box, the routine stuff, that's gonna go away. I said, but here's the question you gotta ask yourself. Did you get into writing to influence people? And if you did, and that means inherently the top of your box as a writer is dotted.

It's limitless. It just goes on into infinity. So you get to do more of that. You get to do a lot more of that.

And we've always had a medium. We've always had a way of communicating, right? You know, a way of getting our message out. And um, I'm not saying I convinced her one way or the other.

That's never really necessarily my goal. I think I think a weird thing about AI is people go through a standard arc, especially the people who are less likely to immediately pick it up, uh, for better or worse, you know, is that. I think they they see it, they resist, you know, they get angry. It's all the stages of grief, you know what mean?

And then and then eventually, and I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, I don't mean it like a jerk, they post six months later, Well, I used AI to write something and I liked it. You know, and and like and and that's like a super common loop that I see. And what does that mean? That means this is attacking us, and that's the right word, I think.

In ways that we're not used to. We're not used to technology doing it at at this speed and and at these abilities that we don't we kind of thought were uniquely human. Right? and um and one last thing, because just made me think about it when we talked about like personality tests and who's more affable and engaging and whatever.

I think one of the challenging things is, you know, a lot of the people that and and and I mean this in a good way, like a lot of the people who are who are Talking about AI, you know, are natively people that like to get a message out, whether they've got a great Substack or a LinkedIn thing or a book or whatever, right? Or a YouTube channel, whatever. and that almost by definition, I think makes them a little, a little blank on a message that's screaming, thou shalt communicate more effectively, thou shalt be more engaging, thou shalt be more human, thou shalt be connect with more people, thou shall be more emotive.

It rings kind of hollow to some people that they're like, you know, I mean, my wife. We've got a wedding speech planned for Sunday. Um, my wife is like, You will say all the words, honey. I will stand next to you.

There is no way I am giving any of the words. I will just be in tears. There is no way I could communicate this speech. You know, yet she's she's all in.

She likes all the words. You know what I mean? Uh, you know, and these people put out these pronouncements of like, the future shall be taste, judgment, and great engagement skills. And it's like, But what do we do with the other part of it?

And how do we address that? And and I think there are some educational solutions we can talk about that, but like and there's but there's also professional ones. You know, where is that kind of training? Because the research shows to move somebody like a standard deviation on some of these skills takes a lot of intensive training.

It's not just like, hey, go take a weekend seminar, you know, from Toastmasters and all of a sudden you're really good at all this stuff, right? Right. I mean it doesn't work that way. And and and here's the corollary.

Writing's the same. Mm. That's right. I I I mean I mean to become a good writer, we know, is a long time.

Right? You know, and maybe one last thing on this is that I think one of the one of the the silver linings in all of this when it comes to skill building is, and I say this to students and professionals and teams a lot too, is like, you know, wouldn't it be a wonderful world though if like, you know, instead of being T-shaped, you know, or 10,000 hour shaped or whatever thing you want to use to describe like that barber pole of skills that's that's you. Mm-hmm. That you had to hone, right?

You know, like our joke about fishing, right? You know, I'm on the Willamette River a ton, right? The charter thing, by the way, is free. Like I just like taking people out fishing.

It's not like so. If the IRS is like, wait a minute, he's running a fish. No, no, no, no, no, no, this is just free. I don't charge anybody.

But I love to teach people to fish, right? So I've fished for smallmouth bass on that river for years. You know, my son even said when I took my future father-in-law out, or my future, by the way, this is funny. What do you call your son's Father.

There is no name for that. We realize that in our family. We were like, so my my other son, we were trying to say, I'm like, well, what is he to you, Ryan? It's like he's your brother's father-in-law.

Like, that's really mouthy. Like, brother's father-in-law. So he's the BFL in our house. He's the BFL.

And to me, he's the SFL because he's the son's father in law. So I took the SFL out fishing, and you know, and my other son says, You are stay nice, nice of my son to say. He probably said it because he's in front of his father-in-law to be. But he said, you know.

You're standing in a boat on a mountain of fishing knowledge. And he looks at me and you know, shrugs, right? And so, like, because I've fished that river for a long time. And so, where am I going with that?

So, that's my 10,000 hours as a hobby, right? Um, so what if we were W or shaped? I can tell you right now, I started my career and I was probably a horrible writer. I have an objective example of it too.

I came across a post, some people might know David Maester's work. It was called Running the Professional Services Firm, right? uh and uh that's close to the title of the book. I can't remember for some managing the professional services firm.

Anyway, so um so he had a website, he's long retired. perhaps because his second book, his second major book for some reason was named Strategy and the Fat Smoker. I mean, of all the odd title choices to swing to after writing a perennial. Um, and so last thing here, you know, I uh a couple years back.

Probably more than that, frankly. I go bump into his website, find some article that I'd referred to somebody else, and I'm scrolling through the comment stream and like, you know, what's that comment? I can't even really make hide nor hair of it. What's what is that?

And you know who I realized? It was me that wrote it like 15, 20 years ago. And it was a mess. It was just a mess of a comment, right?

And so I'm saying, like, I I you know, I think I've become a better writer than that even without AI, and I think I can empirically prove that, but, but what if we were W and shapes? What if somebody that, you know, was really good at writing could practice public speaking with you know, a video and audio based AI? What if somebody that's really good at public speaking could just really get the those really awesome thoughts out that they have, those creative ideas, and yet get them out in a way that is in the written word?

And and that's that's pretty cool, I think. So that's the gift we get for the things that might be destroyed, I guess. I think that's a wonderful turn of the phrase there. That's the gift we get um instead of the things that may be destroyed.

And at at the risk of sounding like a nodding, yes, I agree, I I agree with what you're throwing out there regarding the idea of WRM shape versus the T-shape. And while it's not a perfect apples to apples comparison, what occurred to me as you were going through this was the idea of transportation. And and bear with me for a minute, right? When We were reliant upon horse drawn or just singular horse, I guess horse singular transportation.

You, as the owner of that horse, had to understand an awful lot about how that horse worked, right? You had to understand when it was sick, you had to understand when it was time to shoe it, you had to understand how to feed it, how to care for it. But your goal wasn't to be an expert in horse. Your goal was to get to the grocery store or the corner store or to go to church or to visit your family and friends.

Similarly, when the automobile came out. You had to transition your skill set to understand how to make this car work. If you go back 70 years, you know, the shade tree mechanic is legendary. You changed your own oil, you had to understand all this stuff.

You know, the the first 50 years of car uh versus the past thousand years of horse were very challenging, right? Now we're in an era where I couldn't tell you what half the stuff in my vehicle does. I don't need to. I go out, I get in the car, and I go.

Uh, and that doesn't mean that we don't still need mechanics and other specialists out there. But what has really changed is the time that I would have spent being an expert in horse or an expert in car is now transferred into other things. And the barrier to my mobility has been significantly reduced, thus enabling me to do a lot that I couldn't previously do in other eras. And I think while it's an imperfect example, it it speaks in some ways to what you're talking about with the W or the M.

And we shouldn't be, I think, Preemptively grieving for what we are about or in the process of losing, in as much as trying to understand what we are gaining, to your point. So I I offer that up just as a different kind of contextualization of something similar that I think you're saying. And I I think it's really important for us to keep that in mind because just because you don't want change to happen doesn't mean it's not going to happen. We don't have a choice.

Yeah. a it's a good touchstone because um, you know, my other son, the one not getting married, uh this weekend, you know, he races spec meatas. and if anybody knows anything about that, they're you know, it's a great, easy racing league to get into. You can go buy a used spec miata like ten K-ish, uh at least a starter car, and you can become a race car driver.

And you can go run around in a field of fifty cars on a big race and have a lot of fun. And he's really good at it. he's also a mechanic. He he got a certificate, two year degree to do that.

Um, he's taught me things. Like I'm like you. I cars started to rapidly go beyond like your average person's ability to kind of deal with all the computers and the electronics and batteries. But, you know, we have a older NB Miata, like a two thousand five, and it's you know, it's like Mater from cars.

Like there's very little electronic in there. You know what I mean? Like everything is just a hand reach, take the oil filter off, remove this, you know what I mean? Away.

And And and yeah, and and we're gonna need some of that. You know, like I tell um students, you know, if you wanna be the saddle maker in your domain, that's fine. Like like there's one saddle maker I know of in this little town called Malala that's not far from where I live in Oregon City. And I I don't remember driving by any other ones, but this is Oregon.

Oregon City is literally where one of the two places in Oregon, where the Oregon Trail ended. Like, you know, that video game some of us played in grammar school, like we are we are the end of it. Like literally it's at the end of my, you know, about ten miles from me. And so, you know, I imagine there was lots of saddle makers in Oregon City when it you know what I mean?

And now we have, as far as I know, one. And it's not even in Oregon City. So, um, you know, and and and there are there are meaningful things to ask ourselves. You know, there's somebody else, um, another student, actually kind of a friend of the family, a friend of some of the kids, you know, and um This student is into photography.

And this particular individual is into photography when it comes to racing. And now I would argue that in that domain, you don't really want a lot of AI. I mean, we joke about it, me and her sometimes. I'll be like, well, the mountain wasn't out beyond the racetrack.

You sure you just don't want to add it back in. You know what I mean today, right? And she's like, no, I only wanted my photo what was in my photo. Right.

And so I do think we got to keep that part real. You know? I mean, if you're asking somebody to write poetry from the heart. about their personal lived experience.

But you know, that's another interesting one. One I this may be off topic, but I'll make this quick. But like one of the things that happened last semester that was fun is the advent of AI music in a classroom setting, right? And so I had a really particular interesting conversation.

George Fox is a is a Christian university. So just to mention that because this ties into what I'm gonna say real briefly is that um so uh there was some good discussion amongst the students about like, okay, well I don't believe This is truly inspired music. I don't believe, you know, it's inspired by kind of the spark of faith, et cetera. I not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with that student perspective.

But what I came up with was I said, okay, well, here is a Christian music artist. Um, it's AI music. What do you all think about it? I played it.

And there was kind of a general, uh, I don't really like this. So then I said, okay, well, what if I told you this? What if I told you this person is of faith and they're really good at writing poetry, but they don't happen to know music. and they know how to make instruments, and the lyrics to this are awesome if you actually check it out.

And so she used AI to fix a deficiency when it came to music, and the song is now popular on the playlist, on the charts. Those are the conversations we're gonna have. And they're gonna be across every domain, right? Science and programming and development and and leadership, right?

I mean, you see all the snarky stuff about CEOs should be replaced by AI, right? You know what mean? Um There's a great parody site. I I don't know it off the top of my head right now.

I I'm gonna put it, it'll probably show up in my newsletter this week. I that's not a ping for that. I just remembered I'll probably put it in it. But like, um, there's a site that's one of those like, you know, parody hire our AIs to replace your CEO.

But what makes the site sing is there's all this ROI language on it. You know what I mean? About like your CEO costs this, enter the cost of your CEO, the cost of tokens to replace him. You know what I mean?

It's kind of a fun, goofy little thing. But um yeah, we're gonna wrestle with a lot of this stuff. And we're not gonna get away from it. Well, and I think what you're I'll use a different phrase.

I'll say it skill extension. I think that's what you're talking about here when you give the example about that music. And and that's where I think a lot of folks are lacking imagination because we haven't seen it um made real for us in in enough different ways yet. But that is a way to extend your skills to get the result.

You know, it's like that old parable about. Well, why does somebody buy a a drill at home depot, right? Um, you know, level one is they want a hole in the wall. No, they don't want a hole.

Level two is they want a hanger on the wall. Okay, why do they want a hanger? They want to put a picture on the hanger, right? and then eventually we get to the point where they don't actually want any of that.

They want to be reminded of the good times they had on the Willamette River, fishing with uh SFL, right? And yeah, so we we just gotta get to that point where we understand that the result in many ways Matters more than some of the intermediary steps, but not always, right? It's it's a nuanced caveat. Um, like you mentioned earlier when you gave the example about the top of the box and the bottom of the box.

A lot of the stuff from the bottom of the box can go away because that's now table stakes. Yet the top of the box is still extremely relevant and putting the work in to understand how to be good at that top of the box so that you can get the result that you want, that's what really matters. Well one on that point, you know, I had somebody a couple quick things. One, I agree.

I'm uh imagination, if I said what are some of the skills that really I can recognize will lead to someone being very effective in like using AI and using it meaningfully. Imagination, I you know, and back to our personality test, that's that's not equally distributed, right? In terms of our ability to imagine creatively. But that's a big one.

The other one is delegation. But but the thing you mentioned just literally came up in a training session I ran this morning is somebody asked me in a corp, they said, um, how do we know if all the spending is right? You know, it was kind of a frustrated like, you know, how do I know? Like if I go build a bunch I'm gonna generalize a bit so it's not super clear what they were trying to build.

But like, you know, if I if I generali if I create a bunch of agents and they're for a bunch of sellers and we're from this kind of team, I'll leave that part vague, you know, and how do I know that they just don't waste tokens and whatever. And I said, well look, There's a lot of potential answers to that. But one of the biggest ones is what was the outcomes those sellers were made were measured by? And if ultimately the major variable that you have changed in that quarter, you know, you haven't changed their comp and you haven't changed a thousand other things, and the competitive dynamic, you know, it goes up and down in selling, you know, but it hasn't changed dramatically, you know, and your products are still roughly, you know, the same level of competitiveness they were before and whatever, you know.

Well, take a pilot group, give them access to whatever infrastructure you've decided to build, authorize, or kind of give them available in an ad hoc way, and figure out if the outcomes change. You know? And in a way, I recognized I could tell that was like an unsatisfactory answer, but I think it's the but it's the right answer because that's what this is. It's meaningful AI use changes the job.

It changes the box. And it changes it in some cases dramatically. So then it is change management and it's a leadership initiative and it's a monitoring initiative. If anything else came in and changed the job as much as AI can and should, you you would bring in all the change management philosophy you could think of and all of the thinking, right?

And the the hang up is a lack of imagination in recognizing to your point that. It's it's a massive job changing kind of exercise. And it's not just another CRM. It's not just another marketing automation tool.

It's not just kind of a slightly more buff outlook. You know what I mean? That's not what it is, right? Right, right.

It's not that. It's not that, right? You know, Buffy with bigger shoulders. I mean, Clippy with bigger shoulders, right?

You know what I mean? It's not that. It's it's it's you have to reimagine the job. And the teams, you know, to kind of segue slightly into like the the business side of it.

I think it's the teams that really start to say, what should this job look like when it's AI enabled? What do we give away? What do we not do? Like if you can't look back after you used AI in a job role for X amount of time and say, I no longer do this thing, I have given it to my AI companion.

You know, maybe monitored, maybe goal set. I mean, I I get that. But if you can't meaningfully say, I as a human Don't do this thing anymore. You have either not been imaginative enough.

So go find somebody who is. Or secondly, you haven't meaningfully delegated enough. You haven't done it effectively. because teams that really succeed, they can look back and they can see that.

Uh a side note though, I'll say like it's the message to leadership. Try not to be tone-deaf. When you recognize this though, because I don't know how many YouTube videos I've seen now or or ex posts or whatever, right? Where somebody's like, We have rolled out AI.

We have removed at least 2,600 people from this building due to AI. I am so happy. Things are more productive. Our bottom line is great.

When I go on the earnings call, people love me. You know, and I'm like, okay, these are people's lives, man. And you know, and I get, I get you can't keep them all. Like my students ask that.

They'll be like, It's it starts every semester the same way. I don't, you know, some of them will say, like, I don't really like what's about to happen. I think companies should keep everybody. And I'm like, Padawan, I like you as a student, but let's really talk about competitive dynamic and what happens when something allows you to create the same thing for half.

Right. And all of that stuff, right? Does it mean we shouldn't try? But but I will say there's there's a massive amount of tone deafness coming from these execs.

And and yet I kind of get it because I'm like, I see it in my own business. I know stuff that we do way faster than we used to be. But I think, I think I've prevented myself from turning around and going, Wow, that's amazing. You don't get to do that anymore.

I'm so excited. Like you don't work on that thing anymore. And then just stop. Because the employee goes, Well, one, was that was all I the things I did?

And two, if you take away all my things, do I get a job? Mm-hmm. is that the goal? And it's like, no, no, no.

That's where we go back to outcomes. Where you got to turn that conversation back and say, I I'd like to keep all twenty six of you marketers, actually. You know what I mean? And and but let's talk about agency and outcomes and what do we really get to do.

But what is that? But job reimagining. That's that's redesigning the job. And that's that's the biggest thing.

Yeah, go ahead. Well, yeah, I was just gonna say I think that's a great point. Um, because and this comes up a lot both in consultations as well as previously on the show, is we are not equipped, and by equipped I mean trained or acculturated to understand how to look at our own jobs top down, break them into pieces, figure out what the workflow looks like, figure out what could be handed maybe to an agent or uh an AI automation sequence. And this is just not something that people have been asked to do or equipped or trained to do in the past.

And I know from our prior call and conversation that this is something that comes up an awful lot in your work. And I I wanted to pause here because you had talked about this at the beginning of your comments a few moments ago. And I think that this is something that folks need to understand when we're talking about the outputs uh and getting to those outputs. Your job is not.

All of these tasks, your job is again the output. And do you understand how to segment your role? How do you understand how to figure out what that workflow looks like? So when you work with companies, when you work with the people that we're trying to preserve not just their test, but more importantly, um their their livelihood, when you work with them to pick apart their jobs and understand the process from the top down.

What does that actually look like? Do you have any examples of maybe a real role or a real person? Yeah, take that apart from me. yeah.

I mean, like, like I'll I'll get into a real role in a sec, but like, you know, I think um, you know, one thing to mention, this is a place where maybe the imaginative person can pair up well with the analytic. Because the imaginative person might intuit that there is a part of this that can be handed to AI, but they may not be the person to look down upon their job and actually break it up into shards, decide what segment. can be meaningfully boxed in, given to an AI in an enclosed loop, and basically, you know, audited, maintained, and like run forevermore on that stack, right?

And there's a good, there's a good partnership there. But I'd say the first step is um good delegation to an AI is a lot like delegating to a human. It's it's right at the front of the book I wrote. And and I I I mean I love it that people like the book.

Like that's always cool. Like who what who doesn't like that? But but but here's the key thing. I'm still a little surprised they like that part.

Does that make sense? Like I'm still a little surprised that that's one of the parts they like. So don't feel bad if you like it and you ever go get it. But like I'm like, and maybe that's because you know you're you're pairing up different personality types.

That was one of the first things I stumbled into. I was like, it feels like, and maybe that's because I owned a business and I delegated a lot in my life, right? You know. That um, you know, it's it's the same contextual frame, right?

I have to give context, to give background context to delegate wall. You don't just go up to an employee and say, like, go do this. You don't say get on a plane and go sell Oklahoma. You know, you say, like, here's our history, here's what we have for sales, here's what's on the truck, as people used to say, right?

Here's basically what we've got to offer, here's the competitive landscape. You preload all that context, and then you set bounds. You're like, okay, I need you to sell at least this much. You know what I mean?

Be great if you sold this much. Then there's an accelerant. When you report back to me about your sales, this is the format upon which you have to report back. No chicken scratch.

You actually have to like give me something I can use to generate a PO and an order and all this other stuff, right? A seller's nightmare. I sold it. Wait, there's paperwork, right?

You know what mean? All of that has to happen, right? And and we give guardrails and we give exemplars. We're like, hey, these are the proposal formats that we use.

We do all of that. And what happens so often with AI is people go up and say, Write me a proposal. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

And and they're trained, I think, from a search engine mentality. That's where they come from. And and and here's another thing. You know, for those who might say, I don't work that way and I don't really do that, again, I the future's here, but it's not equally distributed.

I just trained a group this morning. Incredibly smart people. They work in a technology company. Some of them are still just slinging basic prompts.

You know what I mean? Like you it this is not it's it's a there's a guy that put up a post that I read at the end of it. Actually, I think I still oh I think I might have closed it. well, that's a bummer.

Um but the but the guy the guy said, you know, he was talking about his own company and he's a CEO, and he said he said to those of us who have wired and delegated I'm paraphrasing so much of our life to AI, it seems like magic to everybody else. And it seems almost untrustworthy. You know what I mean? Like this, this, but you know, so like I'll give you example of like job role imagining specifically.

Like, because we own, you know, we do a lot of research in the tech sector. So some some of the teams I'll talk to are research oriented. And I can give you examples from marketing in a minute and sales, but you know, research, it's a classic thing to monitor the existing environment. To go look at competitors, to look at pricing, to go look at recent announcements, to read earnings calls, to synthesize through that.

Um, it's a it's a constant thing to go talk to wins and losses and um do maybe bespoke research on new customer segments and have conversations. And it's common to go run quantitative surveys and then basically do that analysis, cross tabs, pivot tables, you know, all the way down to max diff, depending on how complex you want to get and what the data set is. Um in our workflow, all the quantum analysis we feed through an AI. And I should say for any client that's listening appropriately, and if you don't want us to, we've always said no, we'll go take it out of it.

We won't do it. But all those things aside, right? Um, we've grown to trust it. Nobody does quantitative like crosstabs around here anymore.

Nobody does that. Qualitative analysis, a lot of times we use Gemini Notebook. We used to pay for a third party tool called Coloop, really nice guys. I like the Coloop guys.

But we're the classic story of one of the main frontier models decides to launch something that basically just eats the SAS that we were paying for. And we're like, why am I going to pay that much a month? So all the qualitative analysis is done that way. Um on top of it, like any of the routine market scanning that like an internal team might do, that should just be handed out.

Or in the in a conversation I had with somebody the other day, right? You know, they're like, what I want to go take, you know, like the uh go to market engineer, which is a role. Right, you know, which is a very AI enabled role. Like I was talking to a client, they've got the classic hit list they want to go after, but it's like an ICP, and they go into sales navigator and they go look for all that, but then they don't have the emails.

And so how do they correlate that? Well, the answer there is Clay, which is a very AI empowered tool, right? Which can enrich a data set and it goes ahead and pulls and can even go write all the emails that you want. Um, from a sales example, there's even a personal one.

Like the other day, I I used superhuman as my email client. I can wax poetically about superhuman, by the way. I've used it for years, but um got super happy they got bought by Grammarly, but that's a separate point. and um, well, it's an MCP connector now.

So I had um a list of people uh that had downloaded an asset of ours, and I was like, I feel like I should reach out to them about an update to the book. And you know, instead of the normal way of doing that, the variety of ways I could, I was like, you know. I'm gonna just feed all that to Claude. I'm gonna say, here's the list.

I want you to sort it for me based on the ICPs that we feel we should target as an organization. I want you to draft emails in my voice with my writing skill. And I want you to actually uh I have a skill that declaudifies it so it doesn't say like, you know, the the quiet part should be said out loud, doesn't start every sentence. Right.

You know what I mean? Which is the easiest tell on the planet, right? And right, and so so I get all that out of there. And then I said, go ahead and drop those drafts in superhuman.

So they're all ready for me to send and they're ready just sitting there and I can personalize them however I want. Um all that's routine. But I could tell you, like not that long ago, that was all manual. That was my Thursday afternoon and my Friday, you know, and and and and marketing's the same, you know.

um, you know, there there's so much meaningful content creation and asterisk on, you know, say the quiet part out loud. not meaningful content creation, but there's so much meaningful content creation if appropriately trained, right? Or even on the data analytics side. You know, there's a client I'm talking to that's like, hey, we have all this data from all of our dashboards and we need to justify um basically the inbound spend and what we're doing with it from a marketing standpoint and all the classic marketing things.

And they just can't get to it because they can't synthesize it. They don't have the time to go do that data analytics work. And well now you can go ahead and do that. And it's just across job after job after job.

And the same thing at the university too, you know, it's like different classes we teach, you know, have different levels of AI water in it in terms of how that job is being transformed and what tasks can be meaningfully given away. But but I would say it does all come back to enough imagination to consider the possibility. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. um and the ability to delegate meaningfully so that you get the response back you want and that it's a safe one and maybe maybe a third one that I don't always say I guess which is like and it gets to what you were talking about like like an an openness to embrace the churn because once you step down reimagining those job roles you may be on that crazy train for well a long while right right.

And and that's and that's that's a full-time job. And and one other thing I want to say on this like reimagining thing is kind of tip-wise is I don't know if you saw Atlassian's report that came out about what they did with Job Force. Okay, super cool report. came out about a week ago.

And they basically detail how they changed job roles in the company because of AI. It's a super powerful report, but here's the first point in the executive summary. Make The AI rollout, a C suite initiative, not an IT one. yeah.

And that and that is honestly one of the biggest mistakes I see in every org that I I I talk to. It's like that's the ones that are slow. Yeah. where the initiative goes to die.

Exactly. Because all immediately they're talking about compliance and security and the choice of a single model and all this other stuff. And and and again, I talked to lots of IT guys over the years. I like IT guys.

I mean, we've interviewed I don't know how many of them over the last 20 years, right? They're great, they're great people. But um, but if you're if you have a a technology that is going to reimagine the work. The people who need to be in charge are the business leaders.

They need to be informed by IT so they don't go crazy. And the other thing that Lassie report nails, which I thought was great, they're like this whole single model thing is fooie. They're like the productivity we get from giving multiple models once secured and that are tailored to the individual for 20, 30, 40 bucks a month, whatever, is like massively overweight. But they're like, but these things have to be, have to be there.

Right. And um yeah, anyway. So that it's a really it's a really great report. If somebody hasn't looked at it, I would highly recommend it.

I have not looked at that report. I'm definitely going to check that out. I I think the other piece that comes out from what you're you're talking about there is when we talk about all of the ways that work is getting reimagined and reinvented. I don't think there's an appreciation for folks that when you leverage these different tools, you're essentially building a team around you.

And I don't see a lot of people thinking about it that way. I still see a lot of star performers out there. That either say, do this, do that with their team members, their human team members, or they're just like head down, uh, I'm the rock star, I'm gonna, you know, soup the nuts, I'm gonna crunch this out. But you've got the benefit now of, as we said earlier, skill extension, but you've also got the ability to get the feedback and to get better outputs in a faster manner than you would if you were working individually.

And I I feel like that gets missed an awful lot. And that's really a lot of what you were speaking to just now, too. Yeah, it does. And and and so much so that I and I'm I'm looking forward to to teaching it because it's the first time I've ever taught anything exactly like this.

And it's the first time um it's always dangerous when you say what I'm about to say. To my knowledge, a course like this doesn't exist. So if anybody out there is like, I know one, fine f feel free to email me. I do want to know.

I I I w I want it right. I want to know. Okay. But to my knowledge, when I looked out at MBA level courses.

Because I'm teaching in the MBA program as well this year. I'm the AI integration lead for the MBA program at Fox. And so like I'm teaching there. And I said the course I want to teach is I want to teach entrepreneurship with just you and AI.

How far can you get with just you and AI? And I always feel slightly awkward even bringing it up because I love my employees. So I don't mean anything against the employees I have, right? You know what mean?

But I'm like, okay, if I could jump all the way back to the beginning. How far could I get before I needed an employee? For example, writing. I hired an ex-journalist.

I used to joke that her nickname was half as long from the movie A River Runs Through It. If so, it you sound like you know what that is. We won't unpack it. If people know what that scene is, go look it up.

It has a lot to do with writing, okay? But the point is I used to nickname her half as long because everything I sent her, she basically told me it could be half as long, right? And I and I needed her. I actually gave it as a as a what's that um Christmas thing where you give a gag gift?

I forget the anyway, I can't remember. Yeah, exactly. So so actually the thing I gave her was a copy of the movie River Runs Through. It was really funny because she was a millennial, so I think she's ever gonna watch it.

You know what I mean? But she was like, that's real I I should have actually. No, it was a DVD, but they're close enough. Right, right.

So um so anyway, you know, do I need half as long now? Probably not. Not in the beginning stages, right? Do I eventually need a marketer?

Yes, yes, absolutely. Because as it scales, I need I need that, right? But for my personal writing, you know, as the principal who's trying to get thoughts out, well, I I don't I I don't know where where where is that line? So the course I'm teaching is that.

And uh it's weird because when I looked around, I I could find a lot of entrepreneurship courses that were like, let me teach you all about LLMs and ML. kind of like the CS department decided to have an MBA course. Right. And then there was a whole bunch of entrepreneurship courses that were like, let's talk about AI governance and strategy for AI deployment.

And that's great. I'm not dissing that at all. We have that in our MBA program too. But but I couldn't really clearly find this lane that you hit, which is like, how far could I go if I birthed the company today with AI?

Like, when is the first time I need an employee? And what does that employee look like when I do? Right? What exactly is that employee?

Is that is that a singular role employee? I you could argue maybe not. Maybe they're just a great orchestrator and they're a great delegator, right? I mean, there's all these kind of interesting questions of what the shape of a company looks like.

It reminds me, although much it was less, much less of an impact than what we're talking about here, but it reminded me of like when we did research uh when Cloud adoption was accelerating. There was some research we did around companies that their born on date, as we said, was after the major clouds had taken off, right? And the major cloud-based email and cloud-based calendar and cloud-based services had come off. Because those companies that were born, their born-on-date was after the cloud.

They operated very differently internally from like an IT stack because they just simply trusted the cloud. They were born after it. So they had this kind of like first mover advantage. And I think we're gonna see, you know, all the way back to the beginning, I think we're gonna see young people build some really amazing companies because they to them, this is just substrate.

That that's what it is. And and that I'm kind of I'm really excited to see what the students build during the course, actually. Uh, because you know, I too kind of wonder what it would have been like if I started a new venture now. you know, and what my decisions would be and where I would put things.

So it's a super, super interesting point to think about. Well, it it is, and it it harkens back to that bet that's been running in Silicon Valley for many, many years about the first billion dollar company with uh zero employees, right? So we'll we'll we'll see where that goes. Um and and I agree with you.

It is it's a fascinating, not just a thought experiment, it's just an experiment that's gonna play out in real time that we're gonna get to see. Um you you said something there too that I think harken back to a previous thread of conversation and It brought it home for me in a way that I hadn't quite thought about before, but it was this idea of what I don't need to have in my skill set anymore. And and here's what really crystallized for me. And I I work with a lot of companies and we talk about the power of the the transformative tech and how you can leverage it in different ways.

And one way that I think is underappreciated since we were talking about writing earlier, is the idea of oral communication or verbal communication versus written communication. I have met a lot of people that are very intelligent that despite their best efforts, they can't write very well, right? Doesn't mean they can't think clearly and they don't have great ideas, but they can't write very well. And I think the transcription tools and the oral capture that's out there right now allows those folks to get their thoughts out, to diagram them, uh, and to have a uh an editor, whether it's a human or an AI.

Help them architect them into a different format because we've placed so much emphasis on the written medium in the past. Even throughout this conversation, we keep coming back to it. And I'm not sure that that emphasis has to be there anymore. I think the critical thinking skills, the ideation, the ability to articulate either in uh writing or verbally, those are now almost equivalent because the verbal is no longer ephemeral.

Once you speak it, it's no longer gone. Yeah, there's so much under what you just said. So I'll try to hit a couple different things, but it's a really good point. Is like one, um, but my favorite story about writing, outside of knocking my own writing from 20 years ago, is is that during COVID, this guy says, and he wasn't being a jerk, but he was being direct.

It was in the throes of COVID. You know, we happen to live in a state, for better or worse, for making a judgment call where it was really slammed down, like nobody could go anywhere. And our client base was kind of similar. And so it was in the midst of you know everybody not going anywhere.

and the client said to me, I had no idea how dumb my colleagues were until they had to write me to ask me to do things. And which scares with me to this day. Because I'm like Yeah, it's not like, hey, Bob, I think we could reading human reactions, can we really you wanna give me a raise? You know, like like that's that's very different than trying to write someone to ask for a raise or a promotion or an initiative or a new investment or just even like a proposal, right?

And so so there are a lot of things in what you're getting at. Like one, you know, um, yeah, we it it's it it's kind of funny, right? I I say something again that's a generalization, so it's it's risky, but you know, you could almost predict what we're gonna be dealing with was gonna happen because we put the sum of human knowledge in a written form on this thing called the internet. And eventually computing got to the point that it could suck it all down, which is AI's original sin.

Anybody who's been in AI long enough knows that, you know, that they're never going to really pay for that. They're only gonna pay somewhat for that because the productivity benefit outweighs it, which is a conversation we have a lot in the classroom, because they're like, but they stole it all. And I'm like, I'm not entirely disagreeing with you. I'm just telling you that it's never going to be adjudicated the way you might want.

You know what I mean? It's just not going happen. And so, um, and and maybe even I'm a little dismayed about that, but but it is what it is. And so um, so anyway, the point is we did all that only so that we could make writing less of a unique skill.

You know what I mean? And at the same time, the the other force though is like what a great equity leverer, to your point. Not just for like creative ideas and entrepreneurial ideas, but but voices, communities, right? You know, people who I mean, learning how to write well was hard, you know.

Um, and maybe, maybe circumstances were part of it. Maybe it was, you know, um just innate ability. You know, I mean I could blame bumping between six different grammar schools as we floated around schools from K through six. I don't blame doing that, by the way.

I could have learned to write at some point if I really wanted to. But like, you know, in a meaningful way. But but you know, there there are structural things that prevent you from learning a skill sometimes. And so um, I want to hear those voices.

I do. I want to hear them. And you're absolutely right. The things like whisper flow and monologue.

And and all of these are game changers because the reality is we speak faster than we type. Now, some of us might like writing as a way of organizing our thoughts. And by the way, there's a tyranny in the academic community, and I I hate to call it a tyranny, but it is a tyranny, where there's certain people that will say, and I'm not specifically talking about Fox. I don't know if I've had an argument with anybody in the English department about this, but I imagine there's people in the English department that would feel this way in all schools.

You know. The act of writing is a is an act of thinking through what is full of meaning and and your thought process. And I'm like, yeah, well, so is a piece of chalk. So is walking around with your Labrador.

I mean, so is like talking out loud to your spouse. Like, so is, you know what I mean? It's not that that the act of stringing prepositions together was the best way to generate a new idea. It was just exactly to your point, it was the medium since the printing press.

Yes. That it was the most easiest, that it was the easiest to distribute at scale with structure and impact. Right? And and yet we're living it right now.

You know, podcasts, YouTube, everything else. There clearly verbal communication can impact people in meaningful ways. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a transcript for that to work. Right?

So, so it's it is really a whole interesting bubble of ideas. Honestly, there's a there's a and back to a callback, I guess, to something I said earlier was you know about you know, me not writing something top to bottom. There's a there's a professor that um calls that distant writing. It's a great phrase because he's like you're still directing the writing.

You are, and you're probably getting more out that's more meaningful, that's more on point. A again, if you don't have the you know, catchphrases, you know, and all that stuff, right? You know, Chat GPTs is however, comma, you know what I mean? Like there's there's you know, if you don't have all that stuff and you've actually bothered, which weirdly enough is again delegation and mentoring.

Because if anybody's had a ghostwriter or a half as long working for them, you know what I mean? They've they've worked with that person to get the voice lined up right, you know, and and one marketing team example. There's a there's a very, very well known uh PC computer brand, let's say. Um and they do other stuff, but just PCs are one of the things they do.

Um, and I talked to somebody that I work with on and off a long time over the years, and they said, Yeah, we used to hire ghostwriters to write in the voice of the CTO. We don't anymore. We just trained an AI to do it. And now every post comes out bang on and sounds just like the CTO.

So so you know, that ties together, I think, the idea of like, you know, the way we delegated to that ghostwriter, we can delegate to an AI, but you have to have the imagination, the openness. And the structure to do that. And at that point, you have reimagined some of that job. There's a whole part of the process that just runs like a flywheel.

And we can argue that that should have stayed bespoke, like our, you know, family friend that's a photographer. But but and and and in certain circumstances that may be true. You know, a heartfelt letter from the CEO about a hurricane running over some part of the infrastructure and and hurting people. I don't want AI to write that.

I want the CEO to sit down and struggle with the writing. And if they don't know how to string prepositions together and write an active voice, they can go phone a friend and they can figure out how to do that. You know what mean? But like um, but yeah, I mean there's there's all these kind of interesting questions we're gonna face about like what does it mean to create and to participate?

And what does it mean to have a certain job structure? And um and it takes us all the way back to, you know, this is a big deal. Yeah, it is. Well, and and the questions that you're raising uh I think are super critical.

And so I I I want to make kind of a a statement to that effect and then ask you a final question because we're we're running uh into our time block here and an hour goes very quickly on this show. But the statement is this uh I see an awful lot of generational pushback about AI, especially from the sub 25 year old crowd. Um and I've got thr four of them in my house, candidly. So I I get it.

I hear it all the time. And I think the conversations that you're having with your students, they really matter because you cannot put your head in the sand. You cannot just say, oh, AI bad, and and walk away. So I first of all, I commend you for the level of engagement with your students that you're having because they need to be exposed to these ideas.

They need to be challenged and pushed, not because their position is wrong, but because I think it doesn't serve them well in the long run. And so That level of engagement and conversation is really important. And that brings me to my final question for you here. uh What advice would you leave younger folks or people in the workforce that are, you know, younger than us, let's say, uh about AI, about all this?

I know during our prep call, one of your uh your uh recommendations was to keep talking to your kids about this topic constantly. Don't assume that the trades are safe, right? Get good at debating, things like that. Where should we leave people today with our conversation about a good advice point?

What do you recommend? What would you like your parting thoughts to be here today? Um I'm gonna start with something that I could end with, but I don't I don't want to forget it. And then we'll get into some other things.

Um it's honestly my biggest piece of advice to almost anybody, and it's probably super critical with this piece. Read stuff you disagree with. Love it. read stuff you disagree with.

Do you do not have to agree with it in the end? But for the love of God, read stuff end to end that you disagree with. Or if you have to have an AI summarize it at least. But at a minimum, like, like, like engage with it.

And to that point on debate, you know, um, I include a debate component in the AI courses I teach. Now, historically, debate is not a course in the business school curriculum. I could argue that may change. there's a guy, Stephen Bruchard, a Boschard or Bruchard, I forget.

And he talks about this all the time. it's one of those weird things where I get intellectual credit for thinking about incorporating in my debate in my classes before I met Stephen Bruchard on the internet in his Substack. Um, but he's been talking about it longer than me. Does that make sense?

So I feel like it's like I get credit for thinking it up myself, but he honestly is probably a better authority on it. And like, It's important to the class because, you know, I ask every semester and we we we debate meaningful things like this original sin that we talked about earlier, right? We talk about UBI as a potential solution. We talk about like all you know a whole raft of things that we could have got into, you know, but even the stuff we did.

And like like in an organization, who's responsible for retraining the employees? The employees themselves or the the or the actual employer and to what degree and all this stuff. If I ask students how often they have engaged in a debate. In their academic career in front of the classroom on a meaningful topic.

Every semester so far, it's been no more than two students, which frightens me. So I would say to tie it in a piece of the thing you brought up: debate with your kids. Nicely, dad, mom, nicely. Listen to them.

Read stuff you disagree with. Listen to stuff you disagree with. Listen to it fully. And then with your own wisdom, say, Not I've been there before and this is the same.

We all know that falls somewhat on deaf ears, right? It's more like let's really engage with this. Like, for example, if you have access to one of those AIs, you know, or maybe go buy one of those models for 20 bucks a month for your kid. I'm not like getting reseller value from from Claude, but like, like say, you know, don't say use this to cheat on your homework or whatever, but like say, like, look, imagine what job you're gonna go do.

A ask Claude to go do that job. You know what I mean? What what does Claude think? You know, or what does you know, ChatGPT think?

Have them, because hands on a keyboard, I find, for young people, um, destroys and creates an equal measure with AI. You know, I don't teach every week that I teach, there's a structured lab, almost like it's a computer science class, but not, where they're actually building stuff with AI. And every time it's kind of the same, right? Somebody who's a little resistant.

Will build and build and build and build and build through the semester. And I'm not saying they fall in love with AI. That's not my goal. But they recognize what it can actually do.

And that's the place I would say you need to get with your kids. They have to understand what it can actually do. They can't just be like, ah, it always says, let me say the quiet part out loud. Aha, I'll always be able to tell when it's AI.

No, you you won't always be able to tell, you know? Just like we used to believe a video that was AI generated, we'd always be able to know. Right. And so I think I think that's the key thing.

And that all just comes down to engaging with stuff that's that that's contrary. And you know, I the last thing on the career thing really fast is like uh find careers where the top of the box is dotted. There's there's a longer conversation we could have on this point, but I but the short version is you know, look at the level of agency you have. Like that ultimate agency, like what does this job allow you to impact?

And even as young people, those jobs do exist. And if you can't find it, well, think about that entrepreneur point. Because you're gonna live in a world where you can build things and create things that frankly us Gen Xers want to see. I want to see you go build cool things.

I don't have plans for world domination. I don't need to do everything on planet Earth. I want to see what you come up with, right? So like go do that.

And inspire your kids to do that. And I think that's and and I last thing, very, very last thing I'd say is, you know, um they're right to be a little scared. So keep that in mind. I I'd say they are, but there are meaningful paths forward, and you just need to help show them the way.

And they need to find it themselves. But thanks for having me on, man. This was great. Yeah, this was a lot of fun.

I I enjoyed our conversation and I think there was a lot of value here. And to that end, for anybody that wants to learn more about you or your work, your book, get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that, Sean? well you can look me up on LinkedIn. Um so and the fastest way is probably just Sean Campbell and then pop in Cascade Insights.

On Google, I think I'm like now the sixth link. There used to be a hockey player above me. He's no longer above me. But I think I'm on page one.

I think I am still, but who knows these days. So I think you can find me that way. And um and then the book is available through our website. You can also just email me at Sean at CascadeInsights.

com. And I'm happy to talk about Cascade or if you're just interested in like You know, even if a listener's like, Hey, I just want to pick your brain about, you know, kids and school and AI and careers, I'm always happy to talk about that too. So um, but yeah, that's how folks can find me. And is there a secret code if they want to retain you for fishing guide?

say I'd like to learn fishing. That's it. That then you're done. Then then we're all set.

And probably have to live close enough. That would be the Beautiful. Thanks, Sean. I I appreciate your time today.

This was great. So and and thank you to our listeners out there. I appreciate you once again tuning into AI for the Sea Suite. If you liked what you heard, subscribe wherever you get your pot on, follow us on LinkedIn and check out AI for the C Suite dot com.

As always, until we get together next time, keep your algorithms running, your leadership evolving, and your AI in check. Take care, everybody.