Most Companies Are Stuck in AI “Pilot Purgatory” | Keynote Speaker Charlene Li

Speaker A: When you graduated, the Internet was about to change a lot. You wanted to be at the forefront of something that you could forecast was going to be a major disruptor.

Speaker B: I've made a career of being disruptive and following the disruptions from my career at Forrester Research, where I was an analyst for 10 years, covering everything from the rise of Internet advertising and search to social media. And I wrote my first book in 2008 called Groundswell, which is about how companies can use social media, thinking about how we as leaders thrive with disruption rather than run away from it. When AI came out so early 2023, I'm like playing with it. This is great. Really cool. I wonder how good of a job it could do being me. In other words, how replaceable am I? So I took a podcast that I had recently been on and I took out the questions and gave it to an AI and said, answer these questions. AI was about 80% as good as me. That was terrifying. So if AI can do 80% of what I do, what is the unique 20%? So you could look at that and go, oh my goodness, this is terrible, I'm going to be out of a job. But I focus on the 20%. And the 20% was the stuff that wasn't in AI. It was me synthesizing in real time. It was taking all of my experiences and my knowledge and my wisdom and my judgment and intuition, those very human traits and pulling them together in a way that no one else can. Again, I look at this disruption as an opportunity for change, for growth. And if you aren't feeling disrupted, then you're not growing fast enough. Growth is what drives disruption, not the technology. It's the actual act of growing that is hard.

Speaker A: What's something that is so obvious to you that people are missing?

Speaker B: How do I get comfortable with change? Because it is an admission that you are not comfortable with change. That's the question I wish people would ask themselves more. Do I need to change? But more importantly, how do I change? That's a lot of introspection that I think a lot of people are not necessarily going through.

Speaker A: Oh, uh, I really wish I had more time with this guest. It is not every day I get a chance to sit down with one of the top voices on LinkedIn and one of the most sought after keynote speakers around. She's a best selling author. She talks at companies like Google and Apple. She's incredible. Charlene Lee, my next guest will blow your mind with her thoughts on artificial intelligence and the disruption it's causing with business you guys are going to love this one. Boundary breakers is brought to you by Carter and Clark. Charlene, thank you so much again for joining us. I'd love to learn a little bit more about your background, like what I refer to as your origin story. So tell us a little bit about, you know, kind of where you grew up.

Speaker B: I grew up in Detroit, and people probably can't see it on the podcast unless you're watching the video, but I am Asian, and so growing up Asian in Detroit is not a usual thing, especially when I was growing up. And so I learned how to be different very early on and how just the fact that me walking into a room would be a disruption. So it, it very early on in my formative years, this was a thing I dealt with every single day. So I leveraged that and went into business again, kicking the trend from my most of my family who are in medical doctors and nurses and engineers. I decided to go pursue this area called, um, business, and, and then ended up after Harvard Business School, working at a newspaper, which is not the normal track that people take, but it was 1993 and the Internet was becoming a thing. And I like to say I graduated the same month that the World Wide Web browser was created. And I ended up in Silicon Valley at the San Jose Mercury News because I wanted to be at the very front edge of this disruption that was going to come called the Internet, and helping newspapers traverse that chasm and to figure out how they're going to go online. So I've made a career of being disruptive and following the disruptions from my career at Forrester Research, where I was an analyst for 10 years, covering everything from the rise of Internet advertising and search to social media. And I wrote my first book in 2008 called Groundswell, which is about how companies can use social media. So I've been in the thick of digital transformation, but especially thinking about how we as leaders thrive with disruption rather than run away from it or try to ignore it and hope that it goes away. And so, and I feel like I do it in my life, but also in the work and the research that I do on behalf of all the people that out there interested in this topic.

Speaker A: Wow. Well, so I want to spend a little bit of time on your early years because I think there's a really interesting comparison between, you know, when you graduated and the, the Internet was about to change a lot. Uh, you know, sort of comparing and contrasting to where we are now. But what's fascinating to me about that part of your story Is that it sounds like you were able to, I don't want to say predict, but you had uh, a, you wanted to be at the forefront of something that you could, you could forecast was going to be a major disruptor. Talk to me a little bit about that because I don't think a whole, it wasn't like the entire world knew, okay, here comes the Internet about to change everything. How could you sense that that was on the horizon?

Speaker B: Well, I had been online in some form or another since 1991. I'm sorry, 1989 actually, because I was working overseas and a friend of mine had access to a server at University of Michigan and we were messaging each other back and forth on their servers. I would literally just copy and paste. I had no idea what I was doing in the terminal. And I thought this was the coolest thing, this is the coolest thing I can talk to my friend halfway around the world. I was living in Europe and uh, when we went to school we all got laptop computers and we had again emails through AOL accounts and Prodigy accounts and we had to email in our responses to a business case to one of our professors. And I'm like, okay, this is pretty cool. This is going to change the way we work. And so I set out to figure out what kind of work I wanted to do afterwards. And I went, what's going with this Internet? So I did a value chain analysis, I sat down and I looked at how value was created from hardware and software to the connectivity and pipes to the content. And I go, I knew nothing about the first three, but I'm a big user of media content. So I went and interviewed and did research in television, radio, newspapers, software as content and figured out, oh, newspapers are going to move fast. And first, because it's just text, we're not talking about pictures and not talking about audio or video. So it was easily going to go online very, very quickly and easily. And it's perfect real time news. We never had that before. Uh, it's scale even. And so, and I just believed in temporarily vision that the Internet would be there for anyone to use. It'd be completely democr, democratized and not controlled by anyone. So again, the democratic purpose of newspapers is to be the fourth estate. So I, for many reasons I ran towards newspapers like this was a great fit because I also knew the economics of newspapers and that if it went online the entire business model was going to be at risk. So from a business point of view it was very interesting. So that's how I got into that, that's great.

Speaker A: Well, it's such a refreshing. It's so refreshing to hear, you know, as I'm sure that you run into all the time on the, on the sort of precipice of change, so many people adopt a negative mentality or, or a mentality of fear. How is this going to change? You, uh, know all these things. What's it going to do? What's all the. The bad that it's going to bring? And it sounds like you're focused far m more on, wait a minute. This is a fantastic thing that we should leverage and harness. How can we use this for good? How can we advance from where we are now into something more positive? It's interesting because fast forward, you know, 30 years, and I think here we sit on the precipice of an enormous amount of change with artificial intelligence. I would love to hear your outlook on all of the positive things that it's going to bring and your analysis with artificial intelligence that you. I'm sure you've performed the same analysis or similar analysis with AI that you did back then. From a positive perspective. What are you excited about with artificial intelligence?

Speaker B: Well, let me, let me talk about both the negative side and the positive side for just a quick second. When AI came out so early 2023, I'm, like, playing with it. This is great. Really cool. I'm like, I wonder how good of a job it could do being me. In other words, how replaceable am I? So I took a podcast that I had recently been on, and I took out the questions and gave it to an AI and said, answer these questions. And of course I had my responses, and I took those and gave them to a bunch of people and said, rate these responses on a scale 1 to 10. And in some cases, AI did a better job than my responses, but in most cases, I did a better job. So when I looked at the scores, AI was about 80% as good as me. That was terrifying. All of me is in AI. If you ever wanted to get an opinion of me, it's all in there. So I'm like, okay, so if AI can do 80% of what I do, what is the unique 20%? So you could look at that and go, oh, my goodness, this is terrible. I'm going to be out of a job. But I focus on the 20%. And the 20% was the stuff that wasn't in AI. It was me synthesizing in real time. It's taking the most recent experiences, it's taking all of my experiences and My knowledge and my wisdom and my judgment and intuition, those very human traits and pulling them together in a way that no one else can and asking the questions that no one else is asking. And that isn't an AI. So, so my, this is a long way of saying I believe that the optimistic view of the world isn't AI or not AI, it's AI plus Human. And that we call this actually a term called integrated intelligence, where a person can take the best of AI and use it to amplify the best of the things that make them truly human, that make them uniquely human for that individual person. And, and if you as an organization could harness and develop these superhumans who have this integrated intelligence, imagine the things that you can do. Imagine the things that we could do. If everybody in our organization was fluent with AI. Not just literate, but fluent, comfortable, agile, confident about their use of AI, what could they actually accomplish and do? Uh, and so I have this natural optimism, but it's also tinged with the reality. I call it realist optimism because it's just to be blindly optimistic without a healthy dose of what's the reality out there? Is this not going to get you to the place that you need to be? You need to understand the challenges that are ahead of you. And as an entrepreneur, I started an analyst firm, having left Forrester after 10 years. And I think of it as a disruptive analyst firm because we gave away the research for free. We didn't charge anything for it.

Speaker A: Oh, wow.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah. So, but it was a blue ocean strategy because we figured these mainline players can't follow us here. It's their business model. And so we just blew the doors off. Using social. We would get a hundred thousand people to read the reports. And then literally people would just pick up the call. Just inbound sales and no, uh, outbound marketing at all. People would just pick up the report. Like, have you been sitting over my shoulder? Have you been in my boardroom? How do you know we had this problem? Because we took a design thinking approach to identify the problem that we knew people would pay money to solve. And it was really tough, hard problems. And so we wrote reports focused on those problems. And so we knew people would call us and say, just show up. And so our sales process is scoping and timing. That's it.

Speaker A: I love it, I love it, I love it.

Speaker B: Again, I look at this disruption as an opportunity, an opportunity for change, for growth. And if you aren't feeling disrupted, then you're not growing fast enough. Growth is what drives disruption, not the Technology, it's the actual act of growing that is hard.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I suppose we all need to be comfortable being uncomfortable for the next, for the foreseeable future. Well, look, uh, I mean, I want to take a little bit of an organized approach. Get this. There's so much I would love to, I would love to hear your thoughts and opinion on. But first I, I'd love to get your, your just honest general take. If you're speaking to a room of CEO, a room of executives or, and, and, or entrepreneurs, your, your thoughts on how disruptive you feel the next several years will be or how, excuse me, how disruptive you feel AI will be on business generally the next several years. And then I want to talk about sort of a thoughtful approach that business, uh, executives and entrepreneurs should be taking to not feel overwhelmed and bewildered by all of this, but to, to start to be able to harness it the way that, that will be beneficial for everybody. So with all that said, I don't want to assume anything. What are your thoughts on how disruptive AI is going to be in the world of business in the coming years?

Speaker B: I think extremely disruptive because so many of the assumptions that we held true, that we are the foundation for our business strategy are going to be challenged. Let me give you one example. In real estate, there are fairly high commissions that people pay agents to sell the profit. I'm talking about homes, commercial, it doesn't matter. But there are these fees that go to real estate brokers because agents, because it's high. It's a high friction environment. Now imagine if a buyer has an agent and a seller has an agent and the agencies work everything out. The friction is greatly reduced and therefore the commissions are greatly reduced to the point of potentially zero. That's a big challenge for people in real estate. Now go through and think about all the other areas where AI can potentially address friction that is in the system. And now you begin to see the tremendous impact the friction is. I now have to go through 13 different systems in my back end legacy platforms to get an order approved through procurement, for example. It's something that everyone has to deal with. Now I don't have to do that anymore because AI just sits as an intelligence layer on top of all those legacy technologies. I don't have to rip anything out, but I just smoothed and took away all that friction. I used to have all these people doing all this procurement in the background and now I may not need so many. We're talking about seismic shifts here potentially that will reduce friction in a good way, but also has tremendous implications for the way we run our organizations and in particular what happens to our people. And I think, uh, we as leaders to not think about those and to hope that, oh, but new jobs will be created to take away the old jobs. They won't be the same jobs and most likely it won't be the same people. That is going to have a huge impact. And I think as responsible executives, we need to be thinking about that and preparing our organizations and also our people for that change that's coming up.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to the. That's sort of the positive outlook versus negative outlook. So much of what we are bombarded with constantly is what I consider to be the negative viewpoint. Right. It's all of the things that AI is going to take away, all the jobs, is going to replace and, and just chaos in the future and everything's going to be different. There's, I mean, you know, I am a religious viewer of the podcast called Moonshots, which if you watch and listen to Peter Dumas and those guys, I mean, it is, oh, it can be overwhelming how quickly things are happening, the different tools and models that are announced on a weekly basis. And I know this is a very general question, but, uh, as a business executive, you know, you mentioned the analysis you did to try to wrap your arms around the Internet. How is this going to sort of impact things for somebody that has been in the world of business for decades and may not know really where to start? What are your thoughts on somebody's willing to be positive? They want to harness this for the benefit of their organization? How do they get started? It's like drinking from a fire hose.

Speaker B: This is why Katya and I wrote this book, because we heard this from executives over and over again. There's so much to do. What do I do first? What do I do second? What do I do third? Uh, that's why we created a 12 week, roughly 12 week, 12 step process for you to take. So understand how AI works. Develop a responsible AI policy. Figure out who's going to lead your efforts, because you need one person who's going to be accountable for driving value with AI. And more than anything else, do not have what we call an AI strategy. You should never put technology and strategy together because you're talking about technology here. You already have a business strategy. You understand it better than anyone else. So center on that strategy. Where are the opportunities? Where are the challenges? And then figure out how is AI going to help us either, uh, to exploit those opportunities uh, maybe even potentially create new ones or reinvent the business or to overcome those challenges. Very specifically, don't ask what AI can do. Ask how AI can be in service of your business strategy. First and foremost, as a business leader, ask how AI can help us. So when somebody comes in with a bright new shiny object, hey, let's go use openclaw. It'll be a great thing. Let's just run everything in the background. You go, okay, wait a minute. So how is this going to help us achieve our strategy, which is one of these three things? Oh, you don't know. Okay, go figure that out. Then come talk to me, because I need everything in the context of, uh, our most important strategic objectives. Because as an executive, your goal here is to just constantly be focused people. This is where we're heading. This is the future we want to create, this is how we're going to get there, and this is how you are going to help make this strategy a success.

Speaker A: So I want to unpack that a little bit. You know, there was a lot in that answer, and what jumped out to me was sort of the temptation to suffer from sort of the shiny object syndrome. Right. Is that this Wall Street Journal article or podcast? I heard this. Let's go use OpenClaw or the latest version, Sonnet 4.6 for Claude can now do this, or Codex can do that. But then you also said technology and strategy should never be used at the same time. Right. So help. Help us understand, how do you avoid the. If you don't have a strategy, how do you avoid the shiny object syndrome? I don't think you're saying you don't have a strategy, but help us understand how you stay focused and aligned given the how. How fast things are moving.

Speaker B: Right. Again, I, I keep coming back to, you have a business strategy. Now, what you need is an AI roadmap that says, each quarter, how are we going to use AI? What AI applications are we going to build to deliver value against our strategic objectives? So you have your business strategy that dictates what you will do and won't do. And then you have a very specific AI roadmap that says how you will use it. And here's the thing, make it 18 months so it goes beyond a specific budget cycle, because it is not a budget. People confuse and conflate a budget with a plan. Those are two very different things. The roadmap is a plan, and there's a budget associated, but it's a plan to say, this is what we're going to achieve. How much value we're going to create. And then every quarter, lay out your milestones for what you're going to do. Because if you are truly focused in the future, you need a vision for where you want to end up 18 months from now. And a roadmap back to say this is how we're going to build toward that future. And at the end of each quarter, review how far you've come, did you hit your milestones, which things are ahead, which things are behind, what changes have happened in the marketplace, what new technologies and then, and also what new capabilities do we have now? What do people have you brought on that changes the picture? And update your roadmap for the next quarter, the next following five quarters and then add another quarter. So It's a rolling 18 month roadmap. The reason to do this is that your strategy is etched in stone, but your roadmap is written in pencil.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And that gives you the focus and the guardrails to stay on task with what you're trying to achieve. But also communicates to everyone, this is what we're going to do. So we're going in the same direction. We know exactly what we're trying to deliver. And so when somebody says, oh, but I got this bright shiny object, I really want to do it, you can point to the roadmap going, great idea. That's two quarters from now. What we need you to focus on is to make this quarter a success. Then we can do that two quarters from now. And the people who are falling behind, like you need to hurry up because you're, you're pulling everyone behind. You're, you're not on track with our roadmap here. Get with it. So it's a forcing function to make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction.

Speaker A: Gotcha. And so I uh, I suppose that, that it's more, what you're saying is more don't let AI or technology define your business strategy, but focus on your business strategy and then determine how AI uh, can assist and, or accelerate. Is that fair?

Speaker B: Yes, yes. And I think oftentimes when you think about it as a technology, the business leaders exit the scene. They say, well my IT person can take care of this. It's a technology. Right? They can take care of this. Just pull in Microsoft CoPilot or get ChatGPT Enterprise in and uh, we're done. Right? No, uh, that's abrogating your responsibility as a business leader to again, in a time of great uncertainty, we need leadership. We call this a knowing, doing, leading gap. We know AI is important. We may be using it and doing it, but very few people are now leading it, truly leading to say, this is what we're going to do with AI, this is how we're going to use it to support our business strategy. Here are the implications for us. This is how we have to pull together. And I think one of the key areas that leaders can do right now is to make sure that your key people, and as many people as are, uh, needed to make your strategy a success. AI fluent. Not just literate, but fluent. And I'll uh, put a stake in the ground that says you have to get those people fluent in the next three months. So what would it take and what are you waiting for? In some cases I'm like, why would it take you three months to do this? Because AI fluency is knowing what AI can do, what it can't do. It's knowing how to use it responsibly and ethically and knowing with confidence how you could use it in your job and just having confidence that even if you don't know, you can figure it out. So it's these three aspects of AI fluency I think are non negotiable. You need to make sure your executive team is fluent, that they know how to use it. And they'll be the first ones to be like, I don't know. And they often say, so what's the best course or podcast or newsletter I can use to get up to speed on AI? And I think again, this is something to unlearn. You're never going to be up to speed. But if you start with your business problems and opportunities and then ask how can AI be used to support that? And then here's uh, the meta aspect of this. It can use AI to tell you how to use AI to solve those problems. So I'm like, that's your best teacher.

Speaker A: And to me sometimes that's one of the most mind bending aspects of sort of thought experiments. Right? Is I can sometimes get caught in a loop of, well, how are we going to know how to do that? Well we, we can just ask AI how to do that. But so stake in the ground, it is the beginning of March 2026. Within the next 90 days you feel like it, it's imperative to have your executive team fluent in AI. And, and that, that's a, it's a great SW segue into the, the topic that I want to dig into a little bit, which is the speed of this particular disruption. Right. I mean, I don't want to pretend like I know what's going on or that I know what even tomorrow brings. But it certainly feels to me like the speed with which the disruption is occurring, especially in comparison to the Internet disruption, is just on an entirely different level. Right. And, and, and almost to the point where it's difficult to foresee or comprehend is, is I assume the reason why you put a stake in the ground for the next three months is because of your understanding of the speed with which this is happening. Is that fair?

Speaker B: Right. Exactly. We have this great quote from, um, the AI thought leader, investor Vikram Mahidar. And he said, speed is the new moat. That's the only moat that's out there because all the knowledge is out there. You may think, oh, the data that we have is unique. Oh, no, your, uh, competitors have the same data. The question is not just how quickly you can adopt AI, but how quickly can you adapt your organization to be able to use AI and also adapt your strategy because inevitably it's going to change and morph. So I think of AI fluency as table stakes. You can't figure out all these other things if you're still trying to figure out how does it work? Uh, you just can't. So table six, get everyone fluent. I mean, start now, and you have 90 days to complete that. But at the same time, and this is the parallel trek aspect of this, you need to figure out your roadmap. How is AI going to support your way of creating value with AI so we can talk about customer experience, how it's going to drive efficiency and productivity, how it's going to reinvent your business. Take your pick, but have a clear idea of how AI is going to drive value for your organization. Otherwise you're just walking around doing a ton of pilots, and that's not going to get you anywhere. We are in the midst of, uh, pilot purgatory because leaders refuse because they don't know what's going to happen. They refuse to actually put a stake and say, we're going to do these things because it's going to be valuable to us. So they kick the ball down the street and say, let's do a pilot. So it'll look like we're doing something AI but we don't actually have to commit anything to it. If instead you say, this is mission critical for us, being able to reduce from quote to purchase, reducing that time, it normally takes us two weeks. What if we could reduce it to two days or even two hours? What would that do to our business? And then you say, how can AI Help us do this? Because that would be a significant competitive edge that you would have. The book is called Winning with AI Not Doing okay with AI So I do believe that speed is going to be the big differentiator. Speed will be the new moon.

Speaker A: Uh, I think that's a very insightful quote. And Winning with AI can be found anywhere you buy your books, Amazon, et cetera.

Speaker B: Yes, it'll be out on, uh, March 24th, so.

Speaker A: March 24th. March 24th. All right. And m. I'll make sure that we put a, put a link up on the screen to make sure that everybody sees the title. And those were to get it. I'm gonna. Can you pre order now?

Speaker B: Any day now.

Speaker A: Do you know?

Speaker B: Any day.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: This is the bane of print on demand. It's like they don't give you pre orders because they just like, what was this available? You can just order it. So, so, like, um, I'm like pinging the publisher every day, like, when, when is it going to be available?

Speaker A: Well, I, I'll put a note on my calendar maybe for next week to check to see if, if pre order is available. But, you know, going back to the speed question, you know, it. It seems to me that there are sort of. Everything's going very fast, but there's kind of two speeds, right? There's the, the speed with which technology, the, the. The capabilities of, uh, of AI and the different models are being announced, you know, from the front frontier models. And what. It could do this now, and it can do that now, and it's better with reasoning or it's better with vision. So the speed, the capabilities of our, the existing models and what's, you know, people, how people are implementing them and, and when those are being announced is sort of one thing that's happening very, very fast. But then there's the speed with which it's. This technology is being genuinely adopted and utilized kind of on Main street, for lack of a better term. If those catch up or if they're anywhere close to one another, it will be very bewildering. And whoever can do it can adopt these things fast, like you said, will build the moat. Do you feel that the amount of disruption is going to be limited by sort of this pilot purgatory or this kind of refusal to adopt, or do you think there's going to be a couple that get it and start jumping out ahead? I mean, how, how do you see this race unfolding?

Speaker B: Well, you can say, well, I'm not going to go do it until somebody else is doing it and be a fast follower. And guess what? You may be too late. So do you want to be the fast follower? You can. I mean, that's a viable strategy to let somebody else figure it out. But they're going to figure it out in a way that's unique to their business. Not it may not be very public and visible. Uh, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a manufacturer and they said a really cool thing that they've done with agentic AI is to take when a shift is coming off the shift, they typically have to spend the last hour pulling up a shift report, pulling up all the things about which machines need to be repaired, which ones were repaired, what issues they had in the manufacturing line, and then they transfer that. And then the new shift coming on for the first half hours, absorbing that and figuring out what to do. They took AI and automated that entire reporting. And so the team just looks at the report and sees what are the things that they have to go do. And in fact, many of those things are already in progress. So they have this pane of glass that is extremely functional for them and just saved both shifts an hour and a half on either side of things. Now, that's really unique to that organization. But they built it at speed because that team understood that they could use AI to do this. That was the team that developed this and then went to the technology team and said, we want AI and the tools to be able to build this. And they gave them m the tools and they built it themselves. Now that is an organization enabling speed and also making sure that people have that fluency and aligning that against their business strategy, which is manufacturing efficiencies, the ability to have not just more efficient lines, but can we get the lines to do things in a different way, in some ways reinventing the way we do things. So you can sit back and say, I'll wait for those examples and then maybe I'll take a look at it and maybe we'll do something with that. But that is not a proactive way to win with AI. A proactive way to win with AI is to say, here are my biggest. Again, it sounds like a broken record. Here are our biggest opportunities. These are biggest challenges, and we're going to use AI to do that. Uh, let me give you another risk. If you do not move fast on this, your employees are watching you. They're saying, our organization has their act together. They're giving me this training. I feel confident about how we're using AI and I, more importantly, feel confident about our future versus we're not doing anything with AI. Our leaders are clueless. I'm sitting here watching my skills and my job and it's atrophying. My company's not investing in me. When I try to do these experiments, they shut me down. I need to go to an organization that's going to prepare me for that tsunami of change that's coming across. So you're going to lose your best people to organizations that are running towards AI versus just kind of hanging in this sort of middle space waiting for things to happen.

Speaker A: I think that's a really, really important point because I can tell you from personal experience and, uh, I don't think I'll ever forget it, but I still remember the first All Hands meeting where I had a significant portion dedicated to artificial intelligence and what we were looking at and how we thought it would be impactful, et cetera. And I was not prepared for the long list of questions that I got from employees from different departments at my company saying, wait a minute, should I start looking for another job? Because is AI is going to totally replace our customer experience team? Wait a minute. Uh, what, what you mentioned this potential tool. Do you think that, you know, I need to learn something else? What are your thoughts on messaging? Right? I mean that you, you highlighted a very positive aspect of that. How do you tell executives they need to message, particularly maybe to the line level employees or the newer employees, that, that this isn't a bad thing for them. This is a good thing.

Speaker B: Well, I think again, what they're looking for is security. They want to know, am I going to have a job tomorrow? Is this company going to exist tomorrow? Are we at risk? That's what they want to know. And you cannot promise them that they'll have a job. No one can. And so you're walking this line like, what's the reality? What can I say? What you can promise them is, look, we're all in for, we're in for a lot of change over the next few years, and we anticipate that. And we are investing in the business and we want to invest in you so that we can best weather this change. I don't know where we're going to be even six months from now, honestly, but we're going to try really hard to figure that out. We have an idea, this is what's going to be, but I can't guarantee that's what it is. And so having that honest conversation with somebody like, okay, I get that. And again, this this idea that we're in this together and we're going to figure it out together. You can say I don't have a lot of answers, but I got a bunch of really good questions that we're all going to have to figure out how to do. And here are the questions and they, that that will feel really good to them because even though you don't have a clear idea what the answer is, you have a clear idea of what we're going to do to move forward. And that's all you can expect for leaders. He's like, just give me a path, show some leadership here and show up with a plan. If you don't have a plan, they'll be like oh, they're clueless for sure.

Speaker A: And I love that. The, the what I hear when you say that is, is ensure that you bring authenticity.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And genuine this in that and humility that we don't know what's going to be here in six months, but that in accordance with our core values and our attempt to harness this for the positive, this is where we're going.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Uh, if only it were that easy. I tell myself, right, it's not easy. I'm kidding. Because it isn't.

Speaker B: I find that the organizations that already are very value centric and that they incorporate values frequently and often into as many commerces as they can are the ones who are doing really well with this because they lean into those values to help them make decide how to use AI. And I talked about it before, uh, just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. And your values are going to have a big role in helping you figure that out. Your strategy is one side and your purpose, mission and values are on the other side to give you guidance on how to proceed, how to have these conversations, how to make really tough choices. Because absent that, then you're doing it purely on dollar and cents. And I can guarantee you that's not going to get you to where you want to be.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I'm a firm believer, particularly in times of disruption or times of uncertainty, that the strength of any organization or group or team's value is critical. Because that's sort of the, you know, this kind of home base right, where, where everyone at least knows what to expect.

Speaker B: Well, just to, to, to put a final point on that is that when everything is changing around you, there are certain things that cannot change that give you that foundation. And, and this is the interesting thing about these disruptive organizations. The ones who are doing things really, really well, they were moving super fast, doing lots of disruptive things and they were extremely well run. They know what their strategy is. They again have that roadmap and people understood where they stood. They didn't worry about their jobs. They knew what was happening. They had tremendous confidence to go and take risks and not get and know that if it didn't work out, their head wasn't going to roll. For example, they knew that they were valuable to the organization and how they created value. And if they didn't know, they could go and ask and somebody would tell them and they would have these frank conversations like, you're not creating value so you know exactly where you stood. So you had great confidence moving into things. And it's that uncertainty when you don't feel good, you don't feel good about yourself, your organization that freezes you into inaction.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So a lot of, a lot of organizations, you know, we talked earlier about business strategy. A lot of organizations in terms of a growth strategy, employ, you know, inorganic M and A type strategies or other organizations may be at a point where, you know, they're at the end of uh, a uh, three to five year window where they're considering potentially putting themselves up for sale. What are your thoughts on being able to make strategic decisions like that, like whether to move forward with a potential acquisition or merger, given the uncertainty about what the world's going to look like 18 months from now? And how do we navigate and not let that entire sort of ecosystem grind to a halt because of uncertainty?

Speaker B: Well, the number one way to deal with uncertainty is scenario planning. Scenario planning is a tried and true business analysis tool to just say, okay, so what are all the potential scenarios? What are the most likely scenarios that are out there? Best case, worst case, what are the percentage chances that they're going to happen? What are the implications for us? And what happens is that you start making choices that work across all the scenarios. Like these are, you know, these are the safe bets. Like we know that no matter what the scenarios are, these actions are going to support any scenario that comes out. Then you put out your radar to try to understand, is it this, uh, scenario that's unfolding, is it that one? And you're constantly monitoring those, you're monitoring them to say, are these things happening or is it something else completely that we didn't anticipate? So this goes into that quarterly review that I talked about. How are scenarios developing? Which world is developing in front of us? And guaranteed it's a mix of things. And so the Scenarios aren't to say this is the path that's definitely going to come in the future. It's again, like the Citrini report that we saw come out last week. It's a really interesting way to test your assumptions, to test and to make your strategy as robust as possible across as many scenarios as you can. And you're constantly adjusting your strategy and your roadmap based on how you see the world unfolding. So there is uncertainty. There has always been uncertainty. And if you have a good planning process, you're able to just absorb that uncertainty into your planning process rather than be frozen into an action.

Speaker A: Again, what an answer. Yeah, so I think that's incredibly insightful. So to break down scenario modeling, maybe, uh, pretend I'm a middle schooler and explain scenario modeling to me so that myself and the audience completely grasp and understand exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker B: Well, let's put it in the context of what a middle schooler is oftentimes thinking about dating. Okay. And perfect. I would like to ask this person out, what hap. What, what, uh, how risky is it? What are the potential? How do I evaluate whether I should ask this person out? Okay, so what are the scenarios that can unfold that this person says, absolutely, I would love to go on a date with you, or they laugh in my face. Right. And it's terribly embarrassing. And what are all the other scenarios that are out there? And then given all the things that you know which are most likely, and then how do I prepare myself for each of those scenarios in case they happen? And so no matter what happens, you're prepared. You thought about the worst case scenario. Right. You thought about the best case scenario and everything in between. So that's how you're thinking about your business outcomes, too. How do I think about what could happen here? And so you weigh all your risks and you decide, am I going to go forward and ask or is the risk of being laughed at too much? And I just don't want to go there? So each person is going to come to their own conclusions in a dating scenario like that, and each company is going to take the scenarios that they have in front of them and really go through and figure out what are the possibilities here, what are my options and how, very importantly, how do I prepare myself for each of these areas and have contingency plans. I once talked to Nokia, you know, big, huge Nokia, the telephone company, and they were going through a huge amount of change because they were revamping the company away from being handsets into A, uh, communications company. And they had to have three things in terms of acquisitions, all go super well with the perfect timing. And in the middle of this, they were trying to sell their handset business to Microsoft and they were going, yes and no and yes and no. And they had a scenario and a plan for every single contingency. So each time something happened, the chairman would get the board on a call and say, this happened and this is what we're going to do about it according to plan to plan. And every time, uh, the board would say, yeah, sounds great, thanks for checking in. And so I think they had 67 board calls in that year. It was a ridiculous amount of calls.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: For a large company. And I asked him, how stressed were you? He goes, I wasn't stressed at all because we had everything worked out. We had all our contingency plans and we just operated against that plan. We update our contingencies as things change. But we had a plan.

Speaker A: Interesting. Gosh, 67 board calls.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's a great example of how do you. Again, they were prepared. They knew they were going to go through this huge transformation and they took all, they did all this planning ahead of time to do with all this certainty. I mean, to pull off three major transactions. I think he said that at the end of the year, 95% of the people who had a Nokia badge didn't work there. At the beginning of the year, it was a huge transformation.

Speaker A: Holy cow.

Speaker B: Yeah. Just kind of reinvented the entire company. So most companies are not dealing with that level of transformation and uncertainty, but if you are, that's the way to go through it.

Speaker A: But that's a great example of it's manageable even at that level of extreme uncertainty. Right. You know, one thing I'm jumping around a little bit here, and I apologize if I'm frustrating or confusing you, but in doing scenario modeling, scenario planning, trying to, trying to sort of think about worst case scenario. Something I've noticed a lot of, particularly recently is this sort of, uh, I don't know, call it a talking point, that, look, AI is going to disrupt knowledge workers, white collars, you know, anything you can do behind a computer, uh, it's just, it's a matter of guessing the timeframe of when that's going to be disrupted. But when it comes to, you know, physical activities or moving atoms or, you know, hanging drywall, that's going to be okay, at least for the foreseeable future. And I'm not, I'm not so certain that's Whether that's the truth or not, there's been a lot of advances in the humanoid robots and quadruped. I mean, the, the, it's unclear to me how quickly that side of things is coming along. Do you have any thoughts on sort of that assumption of, well, you know, everything, if it's a manufacturing company moving these boxes or moving this inventory. Right. That that's not going to get changed. We need to focus on, you know, back office stuff. What are your thoughts on those assumptions?

Speaker B: I look at the history of automation and it came for physical labor first, now it's turning onto white collars, and then I think it's going to keep going and continue to look at physical services too as well, thinking hospitality or healthcare. I recently checked into a hotel, never talked to a staff person. I could go to the kiosk, check out the kiosk again. I didn't talk to a single person. Uh, of course I said hello and everything. But I, I, there was, there was no friction. I just could kiosk. You go to fast food now and you can order everything for a kiosk because again, they're trying to remove the friction from the customer experience side. I drywall. I've seen quite a few startups that are doing robotic drywall installations. I and, and I have a friend who's a truck driver and he said, I know that autonomous, uh, vehicles are coming for truck drivers because they just, it's just very expensive and we can't find enough truck drivers. So I'm going to get my hazardous materials license because that's going to be the last thing that's going to be automated. And so I encourage people who feel like they are being threatened by AI to be like my friend, the truck driver to say, okay, it's coming here. I can see it clearly here. I'm a, I'm a marketing person who writes content. I'm an analyst who crunches a lot of numbers. I'm a coder. All these things AI can do really well. Not the monotonous, tedious tasks that are very data intensive. And it's threatening because it challenges my identity of who I am. I'm a writer. And now what does it mean that AI can write all the things I took pride in that devalues me. Who am I as a person now? Uh, how do I value? So we each need to have that conversations with ourselves, sort of the same way I had to have a conversation. Like 80% of it can be done by AI. Like, what am I now, chopped liver? No, you have to say, okay, uh, this is a reality and m. So what am I going to do about it now? How am I going to develop the skills? How am I going to use AI and not let it replace me? Because it'll replace a lot of the work that I do, but it will not replace me. I bring to the table unique expertise, perspective, collaboration skills. You still need people to work with other people. So while AI, ah, can take on a lot of the work, we will so need people to do the work. We just may not need as many. And that's a whole issue for policy. And there's going to be a lot of change that is going to impact our society and hit it a lot faster than I think, unfortunately, our ability to deal with and cope with it.

Speaker A: Interesting. What do you tell the younger generation? Or, uh, what would you tell. Imagine, I don't know, you're giving a commencement speech or talking to recent high school or college graduates who are totally confused and feel like they don't have the first idea where to turn, what the world's going to be like. What do you tell them?

Speaker B: Um, we have been living in a very luxurious time for the past century where growth was driving new jobs. And so it was pretty much guaranteed that if you came out of college or came out of high school, there'd be a job waiting for you. It was just a matter of connecting the dots and making it happen. Now we're seeing a significant slowdown in hiring because people are uncertain. And so you're going to have to work super hard to make yourself relevant to the people who do have jobs. And that means not just relying on what they teach you in school. This goes back to vocational training, it talks to self training, it talks to YouTube, teaching you everything that you ever needed to know on how to use AI to do these skills. And it's also about marketing yourself, the networks, the human connections that are going to get you a job. This is not about applying to 500 jobs using AI, they're just using AI to screen you out. This is about making the connections with people who understand you and understand what the job market is out there and could connect you with the people who have hiring power. And that can happen in all levels. You don't have to be super rich and connected. I live here in San Francisco and it's a very open space where if you can help me, I will help you. It is this value exchange and creation that happens. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that happening because there's a recognition that these human factors are the places where true value is being created, not just from machines connecting from with each other, because anybody can connect the machines. If you really want truly differentiated value that you're going to create, you're going to use the machines to connect with other humans where that 20% of value is going to be created.

Speaker A: Gotcha. Gotcha. You mentioned that you feel like that the amount of change that's coming and the speed with which is coming is. I don't want to put words in your mouth, so correct me if I'm wrong, but that, that that change is probably or might be more than we're really able to handle as a, as a society or at the society level. Can you explain what you mean by that and what do you, what in your heart of hearts, what are you really sort of anticipate is coming?

Speaker B: Uh, again I think there'll be a shifting of expectations that uh, again we've always believed that my kids would do better than me. And I think we're seeing a shift of that happening. And in particular that the road to that has often been white collar jobs, college and white collar jobs. And that may not be the case anymore. And in particular we're going to see also a lot of displacement from middle management because you just won't have as many people, you don't need as many managers and middle managers in particular are going to have a hard time because what is the skill that they have? The skill that they have is to remove the friction inside an organization. And AI has done that. So how do I get another middle management job that doesn't exist? So these are people with skills that again have to go through retraining. So retraining dollars and programs for them, universal basic income potentially to tide them over until they can find that new job while they're being retrained. Uh, it's helping organizations figure out how do I identify the new needs and actually create the training programs for the new skills that are needed. So it's a whole bunch of things systemically that need to be happening. And I believe this is where government becomes really important. And at least in the United States we have at the national level, nothing's happening there. And a lot is happening at the local and state level, a lot. So I have hope that our governments can still do something. But it's a matter of who's going to step forward and see that there needs to be some coordination of this happening and the uh, investment of tax dollars to smooth that transition. Not again just Blindly throwing dollars into this, into just universal basic income. But it's all the training and the identification of needs that really needs to happen.

Speaker A: Yeah, look, I agree. Whatever the ultimate sort of policy decision is, I agree. I think that there's going to be a very uncomfortable, disruptive period. How long is anybody's guess. But between, you know, call it the bridge to get to the right policy decision or the policy environment. But you know, it goes back to how, how we are approaching this and your mindset from the very beginning, from your first comment, you, you love disruption and you see the benefit and the value that is within it. So. Oh my goodness, we're running out of time here. I can't believe it's already, we're already up on the hour. But to close out, why is it that you gravitate toward and enjoy and like times of disruption?

Speaker B: I'll answer that by just sharing a little hobby that I have developed over the years. I like to jump off of high places. So it started with just jumping from a rock into a river and then I found bigger rocks and then found waterfalls and now I'm jumping off of 35 or 40 foot cliffs. You don't do that overnight and feel comfortable with it. But I love it because it makes me feel like I'm alive. I feel like I'm learning, I am growing, I'm not staying still. Uh, that is where I run towards disruption because it's where growth happens. It's where I'm expanding my horizons. I'm learning new things. I feel intensely human in those moments. It is very humbling standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down. And the first time I jumped off of a 30 plus cliff, I'm like, it's taking a while to get to the water. It was my first thought. It's like this is a long climb, chopping into the water, like when some water gonna come hit me. So it's, it's, it's really, it's, it's, it's one of those things that you make disruption a part of your daily life. You make, you want to find more of it because it's, it's very addicting. It's just a thrill to have your problems sweating and to face a challenge and to know that you have confidence that everything's going to be okay, be okay no matter what happens. I, again, I will only jump off of cliffs where thousands of people have jumped before me. Okay. So I know it's safe and I've practiced techniques and things like that. You just you have to like, be prepared. So this is about taking very calculated risks that knowing that even for example, if you're dating, if you're asking somebody to date somebody laughs at you in your face, you're going to be okay. And that's where confidence comes from.

Speaker A: I love that. I love it. My dad used to say, nothing beautiful comes without pain. That reminds me of that. Okay, last question. I promise. You are a, uh, highly sought after speaker. You speak all over the place to Google. I mean I'm, I'm so fortunate to have you here today, but you get asked a lot of questions. You, you sort of, I feel like you've got your finger on the pulse of, you know, the, the general sort of outlook and what's happening. What, what is a question that you aren't asked, that you feel like people need to be asking? Or what is it? What's something that people, uh, that is so obvious to you that people are missing as opposed to the sort of the general run of the mill questions that you get.

Speaker B: How do I get comfortable with change? Because it is an admission that you are not comfortable with change. And very few people ask that question because they think they're good at it or they're not necessarily convinced that they have to change. But this whole topic of change, change and with it, failure is, goes to the core of a person's being, of how they see themselves. Do you see yourself changing and growing and that's a benefit to you? Or do you see yourself with a fixed mindset and say, you know, change is dangerous, but then something wakes up and goes, maybe I need to change. So how do I change if it's not something I've done in the past? That's the question I wish people would ask themselves more, like, do I need to change? But more importantly, yeah, I probably do. How do I change? And really look at that question and say, why is it hard? Why am I having a hard time with this? And that's a lot of introspection that I think a lot of people are not necessarily going through.

Speaker A: So if anybody did ask you that, what's your answer? Is it repetition like you were talking about, like the, your example of the cliff jumping?

Speaker B: I like to say that leaders create change by definition because, ah, if you're not creating change when you're a manager of the status quo and you're waiting for the present to become the past. So if you see yourself as a leader, and I know you speak to, there are many, many leaders in this audience, then what are you doing to create change. And I say this to my high school students. I go, every single one of you is a leader. They're like, no. And now we're just students in high school. I'm like, oh, no. Every one of you is a leader because you know things that could change in your life, in your family, in your school, in your classroom, with your friends, in your church, in your communities. You see the potential for change all around you. So pick one of those things and change it. Pick one. Uh, it could be somebody saying, you know, I'm going to replace the paper cups in my cafeteria with all these mugs we have sitting in a box because I care about the environment. That's a change. It requires that you go and find a way to get rid of all those paper cups and not have them and put them away. And everyone agreeing that we're going to wash these cups, I mean, that's a change that's significant and that's something that you can influence. And what you find is that when you do that, it gets addictive. Like, wow, I just created value and made a difference against something that was really important to me. What else can I change?

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, that's really cool. That is really cool. That's very inspiring. So thank you, thank you so much for sharing that. But okay, winning with AI coming out March 24th. Right. And everybody keep checking to see when pre order is available. Just keep checking until March 24th and then you can just go ahead and order.

Speaker B: Yeah, it can go to winning with AI book.com and all the latest information will be up there. I'm just sitting there waiting to like push the launch button for the new page or the pre ordered page. But any updates will be too as well.

Speaker A: Winning with AI book dot com. Okay, fantastic. Well, Charlene, I feel blessed and very appreciative that you agreed to spend this time with us. And I mean you're, you're full of wisdom. That is, is very impressive. I, I feel like I'm m not kissing up or, or brown nosing, but it, it, it's, it's. I don't know, you're, you were gifted with a, a wise mind that finds comfort in what a lot of people find very uncomfortable and then communicating in and around that. So thank you for sharing. Uh, very much. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: No, thank you for the opportunity. Really appreciate it.

Speaker A: And we look forward to watching you continue to go on to do great things and, and will keep up with you via LinkedIn and via your, your books.

Speaker B: Okay, thank you. And all the best to everyone.

Speaker A: Don't forget everybody. You can find Boundary breakers in a lot of places. You can watch our episodes on the Boundary Breakers YouTube channel, or you can listen to each podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any of the other major podcasting platforms. Thanks for listening.

Speaker B: Radio.