AI Transformation: The Leadership and Behavior Change Challenge of AI | Nikki Barua | S1E15

Utsav Bhatt: Welcome to Alt Consulting, where we do AI adoption conversations. My name is Utsav Bhatt and I'm founder of Strattof. We help companies drive AI adoption and innovation led growth. Today's conversation is one I have been particularly looking forward to because it sits right at the intersection of AI adoption, organizational transformation and leadership change.

A lot of organizations, as we know today, are investing heavily in AI. They are doing co-pilots, they are rolling out AI agents, there are pilots happening everywhere, there are sessions, training sessions, which are being done by HR team. But if you speak privately with leadership teams, there's still a very real frustration underneath all this. AI not yet translating into meaningful business transformation or productivity gains?

Why do organizations still struggle to move beyond experimentation? And increasingly, I think we are realizing that this is not primarily a technology problem. It's a behavior change problem. That's why I'm excited to have Nikki Barua with us today.

Nikki is the CEO and co-founder of Flipwork, a company helping organizations reinvent culture, capabilities and leadership for the AI age. Over the last 25 years, she has worked on large-scale transformation efforts with companies like Disney, Coca-Cola, Nike and many others across digital transformation, workforce reinvention and organizational change. Nikki, welcome to the podcast. Nikki Barua: I'm so thrilled to be here.

Thanks for inviting me. Utsav Bhatt: Great. So you have worked on these large scale transformation programs with marquee companies. And what's interesting is that you have now seen multiple waves of these transformation over the last two and a half decades.

You have seen the internet era, the digital transformation era, and now the AI transformation which is happening. So when you look back at all those earlier moments of transformation, what separated the companies which were genuinely changed how they operated and how they transformed as compared to those who could not make that leap? Nikki Barua: Mm-hmm. Utsav Bhatt: you Nikki Barua: What's been fascinating to see all of these waves of tech-driven disruptions is that all the focus would be on the technology, and yet the through line of what actually required the change was all about the people side.

It was really ⁓ empowering people to see a different vision for themselves. It was about enabling them to build the skills and the capabilities for it. And it's ultimately about moving them at scale into an entirely different culture. And the ones that got this right, no matter what size enterprises they were, it really came down to addressing the behavior change problem instead of the technology problem.

⁓ there was three things that, when I look at all of these larger enterprises, the ones that really distinguished themselves had three things in common. Number one, their executive sponsor was a true change agent. ⁓ They had a leader who truly believed in this greater vision, not just delegating it to the IT department and driving this change themselves. ⁓ Number two, they focused on a fight worth having.

So it wasn't a tactical problem. It was using every disruption as a real opportunity for turning the business upside down. and really looking at, know, how is this company going to make money differently? How are they going to serve their customers differently?

How does that ⁓ change their operations? Actually using that disruption as a catalyst. And that was the power in it because that's the real opportunity. And so many companies miss that.

And finally, the third thing was that they really ⁓ looked at how they can completely change the operating model. and their competitive mode as a result of that. Not just looking at the tech stack, but looking at like, what does this mean in terms of, you know, ⁓ how our people work together? What are the right incentives?

What are the new team norms and rituals? How do decisions get made? All of those things, each of those layers, starting from the executive sponsorship to picking the right fight and the right focus to supporting and building a new operating model that brings all of that to life. Every single company that was able to do the transformation successfully got these three things right.

you know, it's bottom line, you know, a number of fancy PowerPoints are really going to drive that change. Ultimately, it's getting people to behave and think differently. Utsav Bhatt: Right. Great points, I think, for anyone who is looking back at how to drive these transformations.

And this sort of connects to the point that we discussed earlier when we were speaking. You made a very interesting point. How do you make elephants run? And I thought that perfectly captures the challenge large incumbent organizations are facing today because many of these organizations are filled with smart people.

They understand disruption is happening. They understand that AI matters. It's the future. But structurally and culturally move Nikki Barua: Yeah.

is it? Utsav Bhatt: it's still very limited, it's quite slow. So from your experience, why is it so hard for large incumbent organizations to move fast when the need for change is so obvious? Nikki Barua: Mm-hmm.

So interesting story about that line, by the way. It was, I think, ⁓ more than 15 years ago, I was being interviewed on a show and it was about the company I led at the time. And we were competing against really large consulting organizations, but our results were superior. We were able to make Fortune 500 companies deliver outsized results because we could make them move faster.

But as you can imagine, it's very hard for a startup to be differentiated against well-established competitors. And so I was asked on the show, so what do do? And it was just literally on the spot. And I said, I make elephants run.

And it just captured that sentiment. Because the truth is, big companies are not slow because they're stupid. It's because they have the mass. and of resources, intelligence, capital, market share, all of that, that even small gains in velocity massively increase the momentum that they're able to do.

And so you look at like, well, what is it that slows them down? And bottom line, these are companies whose environment actually rewards them for protecting the downside. When you have so much scale, you've got to protect the downside. And that's what everything is optimized for.

when you're being measured every quarter by Wall Street and you have to consider the risk and the regulations and protecting your brand and managing thousands of people that are part of your organization, your entire environment is designed to manage that risk. And so the forces that constantly kind of keep that elephants from running, I think of it as a... like antibodies, right? When you introduce a new idea, it's like the large enterprise has this very sophisticated immune system that instantly detects a new idea and neutralizes it immediately.

Not because they're against new ideas, because the systems and processes that they have in place, whether it's procurement, or IT, or finance, or HR, or legal, they have to really consider the impact that any new idea has. And by the time they evaluate that new idea and put it through the wringer to make sure it's not destroying the status quo, it pretty much ends up killing a lot of bold ideas or it drags out the timeline so much that the opportunity gets lost. And when your incentives are aligned for doing that, it makes it very, very hard for an elephant to run, no matter how many smart people and how much capital and resources you've got.

Utsav Bhatt: Right. ⁓ I call it the organizational DNA, much like biological DNA sort of resists any change. Similarly, the systems and culture are so intertwined and the business model evolves so precisely. And the system and culture don't let it change.

So the metrics, as you say, reinforce the behaviors, incentives reinforce it, career progression reinforces it. So now sort of when we move to AI, what feels different to me is that AI is not just an enterprise technology wave. Nikki Barua: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Utsav Bhatt: ⁓ digital transformation changed sort of workflows, AI changes the work itself. It changes the knowledge work, changes how people think, how they create, how they make decisions, how we in fact define expertise. So when AI, we talk about AI transformation or AI entering the picture, what felt fundamentally different to you or feels different to you compared to the digital transformation era?

Nikki Barua: Mm-hmm. So when we think about digital transformation, it was about giving humans better tools. Every function of the business, effectively the humans that were in those functions got better, faster, cheaper tools to achieve their goals. AI is about giving humans teammates that can think.

And that's not just about a faster tool, it's fundamentally a category shift. And so, you know, When you have a completely new category, especially one that has massive speed, the speed of the model development is something that feels fundamentally uncomfortable for human beings to metabolize. We're not designed to stomach that speed of change. that in itself is, we've never even in the best of digital transformation era, we never had a situation where you have a new idea in Jan.

and it's in the market in March, right? It doesn't happen that quick. There's a process by which you would see things come to life. And that's, you just don't have the luxury of that kind of timeline.

So that is a massive change, which means old transformation playbooks are just not designed for this kind of clock speed. ⁓ Second, the democratization of expertise. There's so many of us that grew up in the digital transformation era and gained years of know, ⁓ depth and wisdom from like going, gaining all those battle scars and learning all of those different things. But today you can have a young college grad, first year, you know, in the workforce that has, you know, an advanced AI agent that can actually produce the same kind of output as someone far more experienced.

And so it kind of levels the playing field in some ways, you know, which is also very different. But what does that do in terms of the workforce within an enterprise? And how does that shift all of that? And then probably the biggest shift of fault to me is about identity.

When it changes the idea of cognition, you're not just automating time or skill set or transactions. You're automating thought. And that just hits identity in a whole different way that digital transformation never had to encounter or solve. And that's why at Flipwork, we call this era sort of about agentic human reinvention.

transformation, digital transformation, this is not digital transformation 2.0. That's almost like making it too small and not considering how massively ⁓ different this is. And this requires truly like reimagining what humans are like in context of AI.

Utsav Bhatt: Right. You spoke about identity shift. So let's let's talk about that in a bit more detail. So, you know, if you look at all the discussions underneath all the AI discussions, all the tooling discussions, the identity question is important.

And I often say employees are not resisting here. They're just fiercely protecting how they know to succeed. And those are two very different things. So someone who is spent like it's a very, very important question for so many of us.

You've spent decades building expertise, credibility, status around Nikki Barua: Mm-hmm. Utsav Bhatt: particular way of working, you know how to succeed, you know how to grow. ⁓ AI can feel threatening, not because they dislike technology, but because it sort of destabilizes the thing that made them successful in the first place. So what typically holds leader back?

Is it just skill, irrelevance, loss of identity? What have you discovered? Nikki Barua: Okay. all of the above, but at different levels, skills is actually the smallest.

You know, problem to solve, ⁓ anyone who is curious and capable, ⁓ and is, you know, a committed learner, which is true of most leaders. They can master the skills that that's even if they're entirely non-technical, this is not a hard thing to master. ⁓ the. Second layer that is somewhat bigger than that is the fear of irrelevance because so much of your playbook and your rules of success have been defined a certain way.

that starts to, it's real, that fear is real and it's rational. You've spent decades building a reputation. You're the person who has the answer in the room. You're the person that everybody goes to.

And suddenly there's a new you know, ⁓ hero in town and it's not you. So there's there's a certain level of like, OK, this feels different, you so it leads to a level of resistance and, you know, deflection, like that kind of thing that just naturally happens. But I think that, can be overcome because as you build the skills and you figure out new ways of becoming relevant, that goes away. The deepest barrier hands down is identity, because, you know, ⁓ we are used to being who we are.

And so much of our sense of self and a sense of worth and even our core values are wrapped up with the identity that we lead with. And when that, you know, that expertise, that expert identity, you got to just say, okay, I got to shed that. I need to unlearn everything that I've learned over these years. And now I got to have a day one rookie mindset and I got to go in there saying, ⁓ I don't know.

I don't have all the answers. And you go from, you know, leading and directing and managing to doing and building. That too is a shift. Like, you know, the more senior you get, you've gone so far away from the actual doing and building.

But AI is not something you can read a book about. The only way you gain competency is actually becoming a builder again. Yet again, another identity shift of all of the things that we were told. This is the formula for leadership.

This is, this is where you spend your time. This is. what creates value and therefore this is who you are. You can Excel spreadsheet your way to address like an identity question at all, right?

Like you can go to an AI ⁓ training class and say, okay, you know what? I know how to use Co-Pilot or I know how to use Claude and therefore I have a different identity. It doesn't work like that. And so until you kind of address those very deep fundamental and philosophical questions, ⁓ that shift doesn't happen.

And when you go through that shift, and this is so interesting because I see this in the work that we do, the skill part builds very quickly, that first layer. And as soon as that build, relevance, you know, fear of irrelevant starts to shift away. But that identity one still lags and it's a little bit like a ping pong thing where you keep latching onto the old identity. Then you start feeling the new identity.

And it's that in between space where you're neither here nor there that is deeply threatening. And there's also a level of grief. because you're giving up a version of you that is never coming back. But that's the hard work and that's the real reinvention challenge that every leader faces.

Utsav Bhatt: No, it's a... You've put it really well. In fact, I had this identity shift a couple of years back when I said, gosh, I don't think like I did one project where I did not have any team members. I did it on my own.

Three country go to market. I'm like, the world is changing. This is not how it's going to be. Ended up writing a whole book around future of consulting.

I'm working as a solopreneur and I could sort of I can feel that I can't reimagine going back to that old way of working. But like you mentioned, like, you you need to be builders again. How do you... Nikki Barua: Yeah.

Utsav Bhatt: enable this identity level transformation at scale inside large organizations because for small teams, individuals, yes, there is a shift you need to learn, you need to build, but when you are looking at a system, ⁓ what are some sort of ways in which people can ⁓ drive that? Nikki Barua: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so we take them through this process that number one gives them a safe space, because making identity shift happen is, like I mentioned, of a deeply threatening, very personal change. And it's not the kind of thing that a consulting playbook or some kind of slogan or motivational speech is going to drive. It actually has to. ⁓ you know, and it take them through a step-by-step process in that.

And, know, what I've, ⁓ what we've seen repeatedly work is that. Number one, kind of like helping them understand where they are. And, you know, what are the specific bottlenecks that are getting in the way? Sometimes they're just environmental, you know, that like, they don't have the right support systems or the workflows are too outdated.

⁓ and sometimes the internal where, you know, they're latching onto a version of themselves or some ideas that are completely outdated. So once you help them understand the baseline, you we use a proprietary diagnostic to do that, that awareness, you know, because the first step to any kind of change is always awareness. So that produces that awareness. Then helping to understand what does like great look like in this new world?

Because the definition of great is no longer the same that it was even three years ago, right? It's completely different today. So understanding what it means to be an orchestrator, you how do you go from, you know, just being an operator to a true orchestrator and breaking that down into specific, you know, skills, mindset, behavior shifts gives them clarity on what that is. And then the roadmap of going from point A to point B is giving them very systematic step-by-step ways of building the skills, building the right ways of making decisions.

changing the operating cycles to be far more agile, right? Like you don't have 18 months to make a decision. If you're operating on three-year roadmaps, my gosh, like you're playing with fire there. So all of that starts to shift.

But as they see this, one of the first things we notice is a change in language. Instead of saying like, because the starting point often is using AI like a search engine. Like I'm typing in questions. It's like a Google advanced Google search type of thing.

And then the language shifts to say, you know, my agent, you know, I work with my agent to get this done. like starting to think of AI as a teammate and co-evolving with it. So the first shift is kind of like seeing, you know, the language shift and then the decision method starts to shift, you know, of like, okay, I'm going to look at decision-making totally different. And finally, the execution mode and speed and scale dramatically shifts, right?

So then that whole like, okay, I'm truly agentic because now I'm not like, you know, operating the old way. can see why this would be so much more valuable. And when all of those things started to shift, the language changes, the decision cycle changes, and then the execution speed, you know, like just becomes light speed. When all of that happens at that point, it's sort of like an awareness of saying, ⁓ my gosh.

my identity actually has shifted because now I've got evidence. As long as the evidence isn't there, you're sort of lying to yourself thinking you are that agentic leader. But this actually gives them the evidence to say, I have made that shift. that's when taking that diagnostic again, they're surprised at how much, wow, my baseline was here.

My new diagnostic score is at whole different level. I've truly become an orchestrator. Then at that point, they've become completely unstoppable. That's when no matter what new change will come, they feel equipped to be able to handle it.

Utsav Bhatt: you You know what, I have a couple of agents which I run and I interestingly named them. So what I do is subscription fee that I or whatever fees I am or cost I'm waiting for that. So every month I'm doing like an audit saying, Hey, I paid you so and so have you done my job or not? I told my son to name them.

I can name these agents because I want to humanize them. Otherwise it always feels like a distinct technology, but more you think like you rightly said, if you think of them as team members and some Nikki Barua: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Utsav Bhatt: One thing sort of flips in your head and you start working with them differently. That actually brings me to a different question. So if I just sort of zoom out right now, we're talking about humans and identity change. There is also identity of an organization.

So one pattern which I see across organizations is AI is largely getting deployed in efficiency use cases, or shared service automation, back office, IT ticket management. And those are extremely useful and practical applications, but very few are using AI to fund Nikki Barua: Thank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Utsav Bhatt: fundamentally rethink the core business model. And I think the real apostrophe lies there because if I could draw an analogy, Blockbuster did not become Netflix or could not become Netflix by just improving their store operations. So they have to change the business model. So at some point of time, you have to reimagine the business model.

Why do you think few organizations are using AI to rethink the core model and simply focusing on these immediate use cases? Nikki Barua: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Well, first off, because it's just terrifying, mean, that's re-imagining core business for a big company.

That's pretty damn terrifying. ⁓ That's why leadership courage is sort of the non-negotiable. In the absence of that, no amount of technology or great partnerships or great PR is going to get you there. ⁓ Secondly, ⁓ when you consider reimagining your core business, at some level, you are cannibalizing your current business.

And I think the Blockbuster analogy is a really good one, right? Because if they adopted the Netflix concept, they would be cannibalizing those video stores. Or what Kodak happened with moving to digital photography. I think in each of those cases, they...

especially as a public company to risk your current revenue stream, tank your valuation, all of those things while experimenting and going into something new that isn't guaranteed. That's the other part. There's no guarantee that if you come up with an entirely new business model, it's actually going to work, even if in theory it seems like it's going to do well and have great market share and profitability and all that. There's no guarantee in the execution.

So that's the, it's an existential crisis that, you know, leaders deal with. And that's why ultimately it's about leadership courage. And my opinion's, you know, not just about the CEO, but also the boards of these companies to say, don't just ask the question of how are we using AI? The real question you should be asking is how is AI changing who our customers are, what they expect.

What will they pay for and continue to pay for as their landscape and their needs change? if you're able to clarify that, then despite the risk, you know that you've got to focus on the opportunity cost, not the sudden cost. And that's the bottom line of knowing that you can either choose to disrupt yourself or you will get disrupted. Utsav Bhatt: Yeah.

One sort of point that you were sharing when we spoke earlier was about the GenX leaders and senior executors, especially those who are 45 plus in their demography, because most people sort of assume younger employees will naturally drive AI adoption because they know technology and they're closer to it. And senior leaders will resist it. Your observation, I think, was opposite of that. So what did you discover there?

Nikki Barua: Well, I fall in that category, right? I'm a Gen Xer. And so, you know, this is my peer group and you know, there's the category that is naturally at risk, regardless of seniority is that age group because we're experienced, we're expensive. We're also, you know, ⁓ more often than not, less tech savvy than someone who's in their early career stage.

⁓ less AI native, if you will. And so the assumption is that this is going to be the hardest demographic to shift. And there's natural expectation of worrying about irrelevance, because you're the easiest to lay off or replace in a company. And ⁓ there's a concern around, will they be able to adapt?

Or are they going to block that change? ⁓ My perspective on this is that this is the demographic that has years of pattern recognition built in. You've seen so many business cycles, right? The ups and downs, the booms and busts, the restructuring, the ⁓ &A, all of that stuff.

You've seen so many of those cycles that builds a level of contextual wisdom. And when you think about what is the missing ingredient in just AI having the answers and the intelligence for everything, It's bringing that creativity and contextual wisdom that actually makes, you know, any person exponentially capable, any business truly valuable. That's what this demographic really represents. And when deployed the right way, you know, that becomes that to me is actually the tipping point where they go from being, you know, a liability that can be replaced as opposed to be like the, generation that takes.

companies into this AI age with the perspective and wisdom that nobody else can bring to the table. They also happen to be the ones that have the decision rights and often the budgets. ⁓ So if you think about any company, that's the layer that has the credibility, the authority, all of the decision rights. So enabling them to make that transition the right way changes the game.

Utsav Bhatt: Right. In fact, ⁓ as you said, we fall in that bucket. And I sort of wrote a whole book around future of consulting, where we talk about five different archetypes of consulting models emerging. One of them is like solopreneurs, senior executives who are quite hands on with AI and doing the work.

Yeah. So the first one is solopreneurs who are quite hands on. They can do their own stuff. need analysts and they can make their slide decks and do client management.

The second is a more evolved version of the Nikki Barua: Tell me what all the five are. What are the five? Utsav Bhatt: where you have a couple of principles and partners who are all hands on, but want to use a proper AI as an operating system. So they have a lot of agents which are running in a structured manner.

So you have a agentic operating system supporting them and they're running their own practice. They will team up wherever required. The third are, think what Flipwork is also doing. So productized firms, so productizing consulting.

And there are a lot of companies who are saying we are McKinsey killers and there are some who are saying we can do a part of work differently. Nikki Barua: Thank you. Yeah. Utsav Bhatt: Jury is still out on that, you have sort of productized consulting models which are very powerful.

Then there is a fourth one which has already been there. In fact, fourth and fifth both. So fourth ⁓ companies which are like AlphaSites and GLG of the world, they have, I think, millions of exports. You talk about an industry and experience, they will have that export for you.

Nikki Barua: Thank you. Utsav Bhatt: They have a ⁓ very rich knowledge base of conversations which have happened for decades. And transcripts are available. You could just anonymize that and sort of sanitize of a client secrecy ⁓ and confidentiality reasons and give that to any company who would want to know a bit more about, hey, tell me about food and beverage in Brazil, what's happening in this market.

And you have an interview which comes up. And in fact, they're actually doing that right now. The fifth are ⁓ companies which are getting Nikki Barua: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Utsav Bhatt: BCG, Bain, McKinsey Consultants on their payroll. They are doing the work of getting the project and just assembling the team.

So you have Katlint and BTG and they're multiple companies in that domain. So I sort of, when I started looking into it a couple of years back. Nikki Barua: Okay. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Utsav Bhatt: I thought these five might be interesting ones and who knows what the future is. There might be a version which sort of is a different and you might have some fused options come in there. But you know, just talking about the third archetype, which is productization of consulting.

You are in that area, like part of your business is focused on that and it sort of changes the leverage model completely, changes the economics of expertise. So what do you think about it? If you could sort of talk a bit more about your thinking behind product-led consulting. Nikki Barua: Yeah.

Okay. Utsav Bhatt: you Nikki Barua: Yeah, mean, what ⁓ originated this for Flipwork ⁓ was just seeing similar to you, right? Like seeing kind of the same patterns within the professional services industry where effectively you're trading expertise, ⁓ you know, over time for dollars, right? Like that's the real trade.

⁓ And for the most part, you know, for clients, even when you do fixed time, fixed price engagements, there is a level of unknown for the client. You know, there's no real guarantees. And if you do T ⁓ deals, it's like, you know, good luck to you. Hope it turns out well, right?

⁓ But the human element was so much based on like the human carries the IP and the relationship and is responsible for the outcome. And the pricing reflects the time rather than the deliverable for the most part. And so there are two factors that really drove us into ⁓ being product led. ⁓ Number one, recognizing that like scale looks very different in the AI era.

Traditionally, scaling and consulting meant adding more headcount. You just keep hiring more consultants and they keep doing the work. ⁓ Scaling that way, you know, has some disadvantages because you're not institutionalizing that intelligence across the board, but you also, your delivery timeline changes because you just you're not there operating 24 seven. And then, you know, the pricing pressure that it was inevitable, right?

I mean, and that's true for law firms. That's true for accounting firms, all of them. can't even if your talent and expertise remains the same, it's very hard to justify old pricing models. And so if your revenue side is getting compressed, you have to look at what your expense side, you know, gives you efficiency and leverage.

And so for us, it was really looking at how can the product carry the IP and yet offer that kind of ⁓ personalization to every client engagement? And so ⁓ our AI change agent built within Flipwork OS, so basically we're like the operating system for reinvention. And so within our OS is our AI change agent that is able to provide that personalization. even in a productized platform.

And so it's driving workforce transformation, changes in process and tooling for those companies and yet using that in a very proprietary methodology and ⁓ intelligence that is built into the platform. It does not replace the human element, but what it does is that the product becomes the core and the human becomes the wrapper around it. And so the human consultants are still essential because they're facilitating For example, the identity shift, the empathy and the connection, the safe space that individuals need for this kind of transformation.

But because you're combining it almost in reverse order, right? Like where the human used to be the core and if there was productized anything, it was the wrapper, this is the reverse way. That fundamentally changes pricing and it reflects the outcomes, not the hours. ⁓ you know, and where the humans are involved, it's a reverse pyramid.

It's the ones with the experience and that bring that wisdom and context, which is the exact opposite of the traditional consulting model, which is the partner sits at the top and all the junior analysts do all of the work. And this kind of has replaced that layer completely. So you've got to reverse it to what is the unique value that humans would bring in the consulting context. Utsav Bhatt: Yeah.

Right. In fact, the book has this cover which shows if you can see, you have the pyramid which is being broken from the bottom and you have an obelisk which is rising. It could be a Riemann's pyramid, it could be anything. But I think it's just fascinating and we can have a whole different discussion on just future of consulting because such an interesting topic.

⁓ Nikki Barua: There you go. Yeah. Right. Well, it's also fascinating to now see like the research labs, you know, having deployment consultancies, right?

Because it's, ⁓ but they're not staffing them with thousands of people. I mean, you've got 154 deployed engineers, you know, driving that change for all these enterprises. That too tells you the level of, you know, ⁓ sort of the leverage approach that is being taken even in that. So it's a space to watch.

It's going to be super exciting. ⁓ And it's a time to experiment with models that never had a chance before. Utsav Bhatt: Yeah. All right.

Now, I think I call this podcast, Alt Consulting AI Adoption Conversations. We just had both. So we spoke about future consulting and AI adoption in general. Nikki, this has been such a thoughtful discussion.

What I really appreciate is that this conversation moved beyond AI as a pure technical discussion into something which is much deeper, which is how humans, organizations, and leadership itself needs to evolve in the AI era. Thank you so much. This was ⁓ a lovely conversation. Nikki Barua: Yeah.

Thanks for having me.