Inflexion Point · 2026-07-21 · 33 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
58 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Greg Nieuwenhuys shares his transformation from skeptical CEO to AI advocate after attending a generative AI training in summer 2021, and his subsequent founding of Waymakers with entrepreneur Wouter to help businesses genuinely adopt AI. Rather than positioning AI as a cost-cutting tool or delegating it to IT teams, Greg argues it must be CEO-led and focused on reimagining customer value propositions. He uses the analogy of AI as a "superhuman" colleague with unlimited knowledge - more akin to an executive coach than software - that works best when fed rich context and data. This mindset shift is critical: companies pursuing back-office automation alone miss transformational opportunities in marketing, sales, and service delivery. Alex Mathers, head of Value Acceleration at Inflection, reinforces that technology adoption without process and organizational redesign yields only surface-level productivity gains. Both emphasize the importance of hands-on CEO experimentation ("show, not tell") to overcome fear and unlock genuine organizational change, as demonstrated in Inflection's own AI hackathon where partners discovered they could compress weeks of work into hours.
AI should be viewed as augmenting and amplifying human intelligence, allowing people to focus on high-value work like customer relationships and strategy while AI handles research, data processing, and routine tasks. This framing makes adoption more exciting and successful than positioning it as a cost-cutting or replacement mechanism.
Leaders failing to spend hands-on time using AI to solve their own problems, combined with treating it as a technology or cost challenge rather than a CEO-led strategy and people issue. Without executive understanding through direct experience, organizations lack the vision and commitment needed to drive real change.
Basic AI usage delivers individual productivity benefits, but transformational value requires reimagining business processes, changing how people work, and rethinking the customer value proposition - which demands CEO leadership and organizational redesign, not just tool adoption.
Tools like Claude with agentic memory can access a user's emails, files, and meeting history, creating context that makes AI recommendations progressively better over time - essentially providing an always-available executive coach rather than a fresh assistant with no organizational knowledge.
When leadership commits to hands-on usage and assigns clear KPIs with accountable owners, ROI can be very quick - as evidenced by Inflection partners compressing three weeks of work into three hours during their AI hackathon.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode covers AI adoption territory with some useful tactical points (weekly goal-setting, hands-on CEO practice, avoiding shadow AI), but largely recycles familiar frameworks (people > technology, start small, measure ROI). The metaphor of AI as a 'superhuman co-worker' is accessible but not novel. There's moderate specificity in examples (Nodor's manual processes, Inflection's hackathon), but substantial stretches of abstract discussion about mindset and culture without new operating insights.
I would set at the beginning, maybe a weekly goal. And the weekly goal might be, Tim, I'm going to spend four hours using different AI tools and I'm going to do some of my work.
the real value sits in strengthening your value proposition. But the other problem is that if you focus on cost only, of course this will scare your people a lot more.
The framing of AI as a 'superhuman' rather than software is mildly fresher than 'tool' language, and the critique of strategy decks in favor of hands-on proof-of-concept has merit. However, the core thesis - CEO must lead change, focus on value proposition not cost, start small and learn - is well-trodden in change management literature. The optimistic view on job creation echoes common counterarguments without advancing them.
I would not speak of this as a computer program. Um, I think the better analogy is to think of it as a superhuman who has unlimited, uh, knowledge
I see a lot of AI strategy decks, I mean, and most of them are useless because you can talk a lot about AI, you can kind of try and predict the future. But if people don't understand how it applies to your business today
Greg Nieuwenhuys is a serial CEO with real operational experience (Mammut, What Bike, Nodor) and has actually spent 2+ years deeply embedded in AI adoption across portfolio companies, giving him earned credibility. He co-founded Waymakers and advises PE-backed businesses. Alex Mathers, a PE partner, adds institutional perspective. Both are practitioners, not pure theorists, though Greg's primary background is consumer goods, not AI or technology.
a serial CEO, uh, walked into a one day training session on Generative AI. He walked out convinced the technology he had just seen was going to reshape everything
I've been CEO and chair of very exciting, uh, consumer businesses like Mammoth and what bike and now Nodor
The episode provides some concrete examples: Nodor's transition from manual/paper processes, Inflection's AI hackathon on deal sourcing/execution, personal anecdotes about email-integrated agents, and token cost comparisons between models (Fable vs. Opus vs. Sonnet). However, most claims lack numbers: no actual ROI figures, timeline specifics, or measured outcomes. The Nodor example mentions 'only got to personal productivity' but no metrics. Model costs mentioned qualitatively, not quantified.
Token is twice as expensive for the same token volume as Opus, which is, I think, twice as expensive as Sonnet
NoDOR is the leading manufacturer and distributor of darts, dartboards and everything. Uh, darts in the world has been growing extremely fast. Inflection bought the business, uh, 18 months ago.
Tim does ask follow-ups and probing questions (e.g., 'How do I know where to set objectives?' 'Is there a risk you end up buying Betamax?'), but rarely pushes back on claims or exposes contradictions. Greg's statement that 'the most expensive thing you can ever do in your career is not to adopt AI' is treated as wisdom rather than questioned for its absolutism. The conversation is collegial but lacks tension; there's no genuine disagreement or skepticism that tests the guest's thinking.
So you uh, would follow that, would you Greg? The show not tell to get people to understand what it can do completely.
Is there a risk, Greg, that you say, right, I'm going to go down this line and you end up buying the Betamax or the VHS.
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Artificial intelligence will decide which businesses thrive over the next decade and which get left behind. But the biggest barrier is not the technology. It is people, culture, and leaders who have not yet seen what it can really do. In this episode, Greg Nieuwenhuys, chair of Inflexion portfolio company Nodor and senior partner at AI advisory firm WAIMAKERS, joins Inflexion's Alex Mathers and host Tim Smallbone to explore what it takes to make AI stick in a business: why adoption has to be owned by the CEO, why the prize is reimagining your value proposition rather than cutting costs, and why human skills matter more than ever.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Inflection Point, the podcast that explores those crucial moments in a company's journey that change the trajectory of success. Through conversations with business founders and entrepreneurs, we explore what those moments look like and how to recognize and harness them. I'm Tim Smallbone, and in my 20 years as a partner at Inflection, I've been lucky enough to witness a huge number of those moments that are a part of every success story. In today's episode, we're turning our attention to the technology that is going to define which businesses thrive over the next decade and which get left behind. Artificial intelligence.
Speaker B: The big challenge here is learning how to work with AI and unlearning how we have worked. It's just not very comfortable and I think that is particularly why the barrier is people and culture.
Speaker C: There's a kind of show, not tell, that's really important here. Going and telling CEOs, uh, in our portfolio you should be thinking about this is not nearly as effective as actually showing them what's possible.
Speaker A: Two and a half years ago, a serial CEO, uh, walked into a one day training session on Generative AI. He walked out convinced the technology he had just seen was going to reshape everything and that he was going to be at the head of it, not playing catch up. Today he is chair of the world's leading darts brand, nodor, chair and senior partner of AI advisory firm UM Waymakers, and one of the most listened to voices on AI in the European private equity world. He is also, for good measure, an ultra endurance athlete who has skied down an 8,000 meter Himalayan peak with a broken rib. And his name is Greg Nieuwenhaus and he joins us today. Also in the studio with us is Alex Mather's partner and head of Value Acceleration at Inflection, whose team supports our, uh, portfolio companies on growth, including AI adoption. Greg and Alex have been working closely on Inflection's own AI journey. Greg, Alex, welcome to you both. Thanks for joining me.
Speaker C: Good morning.
Speaker B: Hi, Tim.
Speaker A: Greg, first of all, can you just tell me a little bit about your background? You are now a tech guru. You're now AI Trailblazer, or whatever your title is. Were you always a techie?
Speaker B: Well, uh, good morning, Tim. Interesting question because I think in what you just shared, I think Trailblazer is probably more correct. I've always been kind of climbing big mountains, running very long distances. I've never considered myself a tech guru. I have an engineering background, but I've been CEO and chair of very exciting, uh, consumer businesses like Mammoth and what bike and now Nodor. That is backed by inflection. Um, and I've always been interested by tech and interested by finding, I would say, almost unfair ways to create an unfair advantage against your competitors. And when I went to this training and saw the power of AI, I thought, this is going to become quite big.
Speaker A: So tell me about that moment. That was a real inflection point for you. You were interested in generative AI, obviously, because you went along to. To find out what it was all about. What did you learn?
Speaker B: Well, I was probably quite skeptical going in, but there was a lot of chatter about AI. And this was the summer of 2023, so three years ago, and I signed up, I went there, I thought, like, you know, it's going to be a waste of my. Waste of my time. And at the end of the day, I realized I can either fall behind and become a laggard, or I can fully lean in and hold on for dear life and be at the front runner of what's happening here. And the latter happened, and it's been an amazing experience, but it was everything but uncomfortable because I've had to learn faster than I ever had. And I've also had to unlearn so many of my old habits that, uh, it's completely changed how I work in very good ways. But it's not necessarily been a comfortable
Speaker A: journey for those of us who are not techies. Let's just start from the beginning. What exactly does AI do?
Speaker B: Well, that's what I realized on this day. I realized two things. AI is intelligence. It can basically think in a very similar way to humans, and it can interpret context, and it can create poems, IC memos, marketing campaigns. And some of these things it does actually today already much better than most humans. And on some of these areas, it's actually not so good. And it's not always easy to predict when it will be very good or not so good. And that's why I think there's a lot of mistrust and a lack of understanding. And that holds a lot of people back from using it. But once you get the gist of it, it is extremely powerful.
Speaker A: So how should we think of it? Should we think of it as something which is going to replace people?
Speaker B: I don't see it that way at all. Although if you ask me, like, am I nervous and also a bit afraid of what's going to happen to the world? I would, you know, be naive to say no. But I'm very excited about what AI can do for work and for people. And I see it very much as something that actually enhances and augments the intelligence that humans have. And if you think of the way we've worked in the last 50 years, kind of sitting behind a desk, writing reports, reading emails, sending reports, making PowerPoints excels, I don't think it's what the humans were made for. And I think in a world where you can have the AIs to make the Excels, do the research, follow up, and do all the hard work, and we as humans can actually focus our time and energy on people and our customers, on our investors, our teams, I think that's much more exciting. So it's all about amplifying the human skills that we care about most, uh, and which happen to be the most important, I think, to lead an organization.
Speaker A: I bet we're going to spend quite a bit of time talking about how people get to use this clever skill, um, just to carry on with the story. You had this moment where you went to this presentation and you learned about it, and you then, did you create Waymakers, or was Waymakers, uh, a business that would already existed? You're now leading the charge.
Speaker B: So, I mean, I came out of this session thinking I need to do something, and I had no idea what, but it was clear, like, if I don't do something every week, this is going to run away from me, and I'll just get very busy and focus on other things. So the first thing I did is I kind of gathered a group of people and we met every week to speak about AI for an hour. Uh, then I reached out to typical consultants, McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and I asked them, please help me implement this at Mammut and what Bike, the companies that I was chair of at the time, and what they came back with was very long term, very strategic. It was not practical, and it was not at all people centric. And that's when I realized I don't think this is what it's about. And I met Wouter, uh, who's an entrepreneur, and he had just founded Waymakers. And I was the third employee to join. And quickly it became clear this. I believe in AI. I believe in him. I think this can become very big and very powerful. And I think it's a bit of magic that we have that we want to give to our customers.
Speaker A: So you met with a colleague, and the pair of you shared a vision for how AI could influence people's behavior. And is that the nub of what Waymakers does? It's teaching people how to use it.
Speaker B: So I think we start by shifting what I call a genuine lack of understanding and fear and overwhelm into a sense of genuine excitement and ability to do more and better work within a given week. And that's where we start. And then we kind of look at a company and say, why does this company exist? And why are the customers buying this service or products? And how is AI going to help the people make that customer proposition better and faster through faster innovation, faster international growth, more personalized marketing, whatever it may be? Uh, and then we make it happen through those people. So what we do is we don't deliver a report, but it's actually our work, is that the people work in a different way.
Speaker A: Getting the people to work in a different way. I'm going to turn to Alex now. Um, this is all about changing behaviors. Just first of all, Alex, you head up our value Acceleration team. So getting people to change their behaviors is what you do even before AI came along?
Speaker C: Yes. And for me, this is the latest in a long line of technologies that can help change the way that businesses work. And it is the most exciting thing I've seen, I think, in my entire career. But unless you change the way that people work, you change the processes, you rethink the way the business works, then you remain on the surface. So you get individual productivity benefits, for sure. And, um, I think everyone in our company has seen that over the last few months. But you don't get that real transformative power until you start reimagining the way that things can be done.
Speaker A: So it's a technology that can be applied to virtually every business?
Speaker C: Yes. Our view is that, uh, every single business can benefit from AI in terms of back office processes transforming the way they do sales and marketing, for instance. There are then some particularly exciting opportunities with businesses where you can change the way the service is delivered using AI. So, for instance, I've been working with one of our consulting businesses over the last couple of years where there's an opportunity to take the data they harvest as part of their consulting projects and productize that to give a whole new offering to their businesses. And that is taking AI, applying it to a data set that they get from their customers, and creating something brand new that they couldn't have, um, they couldn't have offered a couple of years ago.
Speaker A: Greg, I find this difficult to understand. Are there processes presumably in every business to which AI, ah, can be applied, as Alex referred to them as the back office processes? Is that where it is at its most effective?
Speaker B: So I agree with Alex that this applies to every business. And I would also go and say every function within every business and probably also every process within every function. I don't believe there are processes within a business that cannot be improved by AI. Uh, and the back office is easy. And I think one of the mistakes made is that people often think of AI as an efficiency tool to do things faster and therefore as a way to save costs. But as Alex is saying, m, the much more powerful use case is to reimagine your value proposition because everyone is using AI now, today. So if you are not improving what you offer to your customers every day, you're going to fall behind. And that's inevitably where the vast majority of the energy of leadership should go towards, is towards creating that faster value proposition which, by the way, the people who work in the company care about the most. And if this is all about bringing people along on the journey and getting them excited, of course, customer satisfaction, faster innovations, it's what really get people out of bed. And those two are very linked.
Speaker A: So you chair, uh, nodaw for us. And obviously, um, we've already done a, uh, podcast on NoDaw, so everybody listening will all be entirely familiar with NoDaw. But just in case somebody's listening who isn't, just tell us for a moment. Greg, you chair Nodor for us and have been working on AI with them.
Speaker B: NoDOR is the leading manufacturer and distributor of darts, dartboards and everything. Uh, darts in the world has been growing extremely fast. Inflection bought the business, uh, 18 months ago. It's been a phenomenal journey. And I've also been very impressed by working with Alex and his team on this case. And, you know, of course, last year when I joined as chair, one of my priorities is like, we're going to start working a lot with AI. I think nodor came from a, uh, very low base. A lot of processes were still manual on paper. Probably, you know, the worst quartile that I've ever seen in my life. So the journey there and the overwhelm in the team was much larger than I think an average company would face. I think my ambition for the first year was higher than what I achieved. And we only got to personal productivity. And the main reason why, I think, is because as the founders moved out of the business and we were hiring a professional leadership team, they. There was a lack of leadership, a lack of vision of exactly where the company was going. And that comes to my point around AI adoption has to come from the top with a very clear vision And a uh, very clear understanding from the CEO and his team around what AI is and how it can actually improve the business. And that's what we didn't have in place yet. So we made some progress but this year we're making much faster progress, particularly for example in how we create our marketing content.
Speaker A: Ah. And that's a common theme is that you have identified in businesses you've worked with. It's got to start from the top.
Speaker B: Yeah, no question. Because this affects every process, every function. There's going to be resistance in the company by a lot of people because they're afraid they don't understand and it's the big unlock to faster value creation. Uh, and who owns that. It can only be the CEO in my view.
Speaker C: I think there's another thing to add there which goes back to um, Greg's point about the kind of transformational, kind of almost epiphany type experience of seeing the power of this firsthand. Unless the CEO, uh, has had sufficient hands on experience to understand just what's possible, it's very hard to internalize how transformational it might be for their business. And therefore this is something that we've always focused on. There's a kind of show not telling that's really important here. Going and telling CEOs in our portfolio you should be thinking about this is not nearly as effective as actually showing them what's possible. Showing them a small prototype of how you might automate a process in their business because that's what really brings it to life for them.
Speaker A: You uh, would follow that, would you Greg? The show not tell to get people to understand what it can do completely.
Speaker B: I mean I see a lot of AI strategy decks, I mean, and most of them are useless because you can talk a lot about AI, you can kind of try and predict the future. But if people don't understand how it applies to your business today and tomorrow and haven't seen the use cases around how it's going to transform marketing or sales, that strategy paper is useless. So we spend, I would say the initial touch point with a management team is mostly about showing them use cases that apply directly to their business.
Speaker A: So I understand that it will help you do um, data processing, but how does that actually, how do you apply it to you both referred to the value add to improving the marketing, improving the sales. I don't understand how a computer program can improve your value add.
Speaker B: Well, that's interesting because I would not speak of this as a computer program. Um, I think the better analogy is to think of it as a superhuman who has unlimited, uh, knowledge and who's very intelligent and can think and reason but needs very good input from its co worker. And the coworker is the person basically driving the car who is steering the AI. Uh, this is the same power as someone in Alex Team M, but that may fail on, um, some projects, but actually do extremely well and be extremely fast on others. And that's how you should think about AI. And they can go in and solve. You know, I use AI for some of the most strategic questions I have. And also, surprisingly enough, my role as chair is very much about stakeholder management and creating a strong team at the board. I use this a lot to think about relationships and how to get people to work in the most, in the best way possible. And it's taken away so many blind spots where I now feel like I have an executive coach alongside me all the time that I can go back to and ask what do you think about this and what do you think about this and what am I missing here? And it just elevates the type of leadership I can provide to nodor, for example.
Speaker A: And it learns, does it? You go back and ask it another question and it learns from the answers from the previous ones. Is that to get that sort of level of insight you must have built up a lot of knowledge within the tool.
Speaker B: Yeah. So I think, I mean this is probably. I often speak of kind of AI usages. There's a few gears, gear one is basically shifting from riding a horse to driving a car, uh, and writing good prompts. Um, the AI in the chatbot does not learn, it has a limited memory. But if you work in tools like Codex or coworker Claude code, uh, you can create a self recurring memory that learns on the go. Um, and where the AI has stronger context, that's where you get much, much better results. Uh, so I would recommend everyone to start working in that direction of really having an AI that works alongside you, which is agentic. And my email has contact access to all my emails, all my files, every single meeting I've had in the last three years. And therefore it often knows better than I do what I should be doing.
Speaker C: There's a key point there which I think is interesting, which is AI is as good as the context and data that you can feed it. Otherwise you've got a kind of superhuman intelligence. I used to semi flippantly talk about AI giving you infinite interns. I think that's unfair now. And, um, the level of performance you're getting is significantly um, higher. But the concept is right, you're getting an infinite pool of people that have no prior context as to what you're trying to do. They're fresh into your organization, if you like, and therefore they're only as good as the context and data that you can provide them. And so if you think about this as kind of waves of development, wave one of development is um, to Greg's gears analogy, your working with the tools out of the box and you are getting some personal productivity gains and things like that. Wave two, I would argue maybe there's two kind of parallel streams here. One of them is improving the way that you can feed context and data into that. So Greg talks about giving um, his um, agents access to all of his emails and context data. So that's providing a really rich stream of context, um, uh, into the application. One of the things that's really important for I think all businesses doing this is to, whilst they're focusing on adoption of tools and the kind of driving in the first and second gear, they're building the platform that allows them to feed all of that context and data into AI, because that's not trivial for businesses. And unless you're in paradol building that up, I think you lose the ability to shift into fourth, fifth, sixth gear later on.
Speaker A: And Greg, you've gone to many, many companies now. What are the most common misconceptions, what are the most common sort of tripwires that people fall over as they try to adopt these tools?
Speaker B: Number one is that the leader is not spending time using AI, solving his own problems or her problems with AI, but it's just so that's number one. Two, I think that it's a strategy paper rather than real doing and the best value there is just free up an afternoon and go and try and solve your problems with AI hands on in the tools and if needed, you might need some expert to kind of guide you around the way. Three is thinking that this is mostly a technology challenge and it should be led by the IT team. Whereas this is all about people and about your strategy and value proposition. So it needs to be owned by the CEO. And four, I think I see a lot of speak around this is all about cost and we should save costs, which I think to my earlier point the real value sits in strengthening your value proposition. But the other problem is that if you focus on cost only, of course this will scare your people a lot more. And this is not how you drive the adoption and the excitements that actually makes work much more exciting. In a business. And I fundamentally believe that AI, ah, can be very powerful, but it should also make working a lot more fun for people in the business.
Speaker A: So you, uh, amongst your many clients have Inflection private equity, uh, of those four sort of tricks, the leaders doing the real doing, seeing it as a tech challenge of the people challenging the cost, where have we been stumbling?
Speaker B: I need to be very careful here, Tim. No, so I can be very honest as well, particularly well. Yes, exactly. Well, I mean I think you all know Flora is an amazing example and I think she's put the, the bar very high in terms of expectations and our own usage.
Speaker A: That's Floor cast side of managing part of Inflection.
Speaker B: I think when we started discussing this with Inflection, you know, six or nine months ago, I think I said at some point Inflection is probably a little bit behind uh, some of its peers. And to me it was surprising because I see Inflection as a very technology savvy entrepreneurial fund, uh, that moves very quickly. If I see the progress made over the last six months, I would completely say I think you're ahead of most of your peers in the mid market. And I think it's thanks to Floor and it's thanks to a lot of hands on building that we've done a lot of training. And I remember we had a session with uh, all the partners which we call an AI hackathon, which is basically reimagining how would we source deals and execute them in a world where everything was AI enabled. And the beauty of it is that all the partners spent most of the day building things in AI tools. And I think for a lot of them it was a realization like, oh my God, if I can do this work in three hours, which I would have thought it would have taken me three weeks, why should I ever go back and not use this again? So I think that for me was a step changer.
Speaker A: As I've been listening to you both, I've been trying to ask questions, putting myself in the position of a CEO, a business leader who feels as if they're a bit behind whose company is not adopting AI. How much does it cost to do all that you're talking about doesn't sound cheap. And how confident would you be of a rapid payback?
Speaker B: Yeah, so I think probably the most expensive thing you can ever do in your career is not to adopt AI Seriously. Right. That's the obvious thing, uh, to say here. Of course, token costs have exploded. Well, the costs are coming down, but the amount of Token usage is going up and as a result the, uh, overall cost on tokens is going up for businesses. I would say that this is still a very small factor compared to what it is to do that work with people. I think a mistake I see a lot is that, you know, with any change program you have to assign a goal, a KPI and an owner and a timeline. And that is something I don't see happen often enough with AI. They kind of set off and let's say, let's use all these tools, let's burn all these tokens. But what are we actually trying to achieve and how are we going to measure it and who is accountable? I think that part, which of course all leaders have done all their career, but somehow forget to do it here. So that would be my one recommendation. And then you can track that roi. I think if you see that the leader is stepping in, the ROI will be very quick.
Speaker A: That's the tricky bit you've just said. To make it effective, you need to set a clear objective and then you can measure against an objective for the average manager, okay, I want this level of extra sales or something he can get his head around knowing what it can achieve. Where would I know if I was doing that, where to set the objective?
Speaker B: Yeah, I think you don't know until you've spent enough time in the tool trying to solve some problems. So maybe, I mean, that's another mistake I see is that people set two big goals, uh, which take too long time and people get demotivated and defocused. I would set at the beginning, maybe a weekly goal. And the weekly goal might be, Tim, I'm going to spend four hours using, uh, different AI tools and I'm going to do some of my work. I'm going to get it done with AI. That might be the goal the first week and then the second week goal will be bigger and then you will soon become very proficient at defining more ambitious goals that are realistic.
Speaker C: I do think actually one of the big things that we're going to see in the next 12 to 18 months is a lot more discretion around the models that are being used. Because as Greg mentioned, um, the token consumption is going up, the cost of frontier models is going up. Fable is twice as expensive for the same token volume as Opus, which is, I think, twice as expensive as Sonnet. But you don't need to use those frontier models for the vast majority everyday tasks that businesses face and that kind of discrimination around. Actually what model do I use for that task is a whole new Set of things for businesses to learn.
Speaker A: Is there a risk, Greg, that you say, right, I'm going to go down this line and you end up buying the Betamax or the VHS. I read some of that. There's a risk that ChatGPT is going to go the way of Firefox. Is there a product you should buy and you shouldn't buy?
Speaker B: I think you should buy the product. And if you want your company to adopt AI, you should be paying for AIs. I think one of the biggest mistakes I see is also shadow AI, people just using free tools which are accessible, but that gives a huge data protection issue. And also you don't have access to the frontier. And those are dumb models. I mean, if you're using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, you're in a very good place. And they all have differences in terms of what they're good at, but those are all three very good. Copilot has made some improvements, but I would say does not meet, does not come close to ChatGPT or Claude.
Speaker C: Uh, at the moment, the rate of progress means that some things that we would do today in a custom fashion in Claude or ChatGPT will just be built into products that people are using. And so I think the risk is less that you pick Claude or ChatGPT and you pick the right horse. Because actually what you learn about how you automate is much more generic than it is when you're locking into a, uh, kind of ecosystem. But you do need to be careful about making decisions about where you have an opportunity to win by being cutting edge. So for instance, where it's transformative to the service you give your customers versus where in six months time it's likely that this is going to be something that is just built into Salesforce or whichever CRM system that you're using. So it's not to say that there aren't gains to be had on both counts. It's just that, uh, the window to benefit from the gains on the things that are just going to get baked into products is likely shorter.
Speaker B: Yeah, I would agree. And I would say I think it's important to be tool agnostic. And I see people focusing a lot on kind of which tool do I need and which use case do I need. It's the wrong question. The question is kind of why does your business exist? Why, why do your customers come to you and how are you going to make that better? And then what is the process behind that that people have to follow to get there? And then which tool could Help us
Speaker A: solve this inflection operates in the mid market across the whole of Europe. Is this a market where AI particularly has great application or is AI really for big large enterprises?
Speaker B: Yeah, so I think this is different than what we've seen in the past and I think two years ago it would have been kind of the mega funds that were ahead in terms of AI. If you then think that kind of culture, leadership mindset and the people and how people change, how they work is the bottleneck. Of course it's much easier to realize that in a mid cap environment than it is in a large cap environment. Uh, so we tend to see that the majority of our customers are mid cap companies, mid cap private equity funds, and that the adoption there can go much faster. What we also see is that startups, and sometimes even one man startups, can really reinvent how business is done. And I think those are very good examples for any of uh, founders on this uh, podcast listening to Think. What if a founder on his own started to disrupt my product, fully AI enabled? What would they do and what is my response to that threat? Because I think here smaller companies can move faster than ever and I think it's a very exciting prospect for the mid market and all of us as entrepreneurs.
Speaker C: I think one of the things that makes this really exciting is just how accessible this technology is by comparison to some previous technology shifts which required deeper uh, technology expertise to really benefit from them, larger teams to implement them, uh, bigger barriers to entry just in terms of cost of implementation before you can get any benefit. The revolution we've seen, I think revolution isn't too strong a uh, word actually in the last, especially the last 12 months and the kind of democratic access to this technology for businesses of all sizes is really something quite different to what we've seen before.
Speaker A: We've talked a lot about um, getting our people within our businesses to change. Is this going to change how we hire people going forward? Are we hiring different people in a different way?
Speaker B: Yes, I think it does. And this is a topic again I'm very passionate about. I have five children, uh, and my eldest is uh, nearly 17 and she really does not like AI and I think she feels a bit like she is in an environment where it's unfair and why she has to be the generation where AI is kind of doing all the work and taking all the jobs and we have lots of dinner conversations about this and I do feel for her and I'm a general optimist. My view is that I think the skill sets that you need now are shifting quite dramatically, and they shift much more towards, number one, adaptability, people who can thrive in an ever changing environment, number two, empathy and teamwork, and number three, critical thinking and judgment. And I think those three skills become much more important. And people who have very vast knowledge or people who are the absolute most smartest kid in the class, I think, start to matter less because the AI can do a lot of that piece. But people who are very strong with people and can thrive in an ever changing world, I think will become much more important. And we see this in the clients that we work with. Those are people who stand up and really lead the change from the front.
Speaker C: And a bit like Greg, uh, I tend to take an optimistic perspective on this, especially from a kind of broader macro perspective. I think there is going to be a slightly uncomfortable shift that we need to go through over the coming years. I was having this conversation with my father, uh, a few weeks ago, and he was telling me about when he started in the late 60s as an actuary and had large bookkeeping ledgers that people were filling in by hand. And can you imagine people operating like that now? And yet we have more accountants than we've ever had before. The jobs, the nature of the jobs will change. And we as a society need to adapt, uh, in terms of the way we develop our workforce and, uh, train people for slightly different jobs. But on the whole, I'm optimistic that this is going to be a productivity boost, not a, uh, not, uh, a kind of job.
Speaker A: You're both such optimists.
Speaker B: Well, let me also take the slight flip side of this because I think, uh, Alex mentioned, um, courage and comfort. And as you mentioned, Tim, you know, there's probably a reason why I do these stupid ultra marathons and climb high mountains. And people say that's kind of a nice way to say this guy is a bit crazy. And that might be true, but I do embrace discomfort. Um, and I think the big challenge here is that learning how to work with AI and unlearning how we have worked is just not very comfortable. And I think that is particularly why the barrier is people, uh, and culture. And for me, it has also not been comfortable. But once I accepted that I, I had to learn every day and unlearn every day, and that this was just the new normal for me, then it became very motivating and very empowering. But before that, I went through periods when I thought, oh, no, I'm falling behind. I don't get this. I'm this. I work waymakers. I'M like the oldest in the team and I'm feeling like this stupid old guy who doesn't get it. And, uh, that's very uncomfortable until you realize, like, I just have to embrace this. And I think this is also coming back to the CEO. If you can acknowledge that this is how people feel in your business and you can talk about it, you can say, how are we going to get people to get excited about this and get that control back? I think you're halfway there. And that's a very human skill.
Speaker A: Yeah. So actually the people with the human skills are going to be the winners. That's very encouraging thought, especially for you, Tim.
Speaker B: Right.
Speaker A: It is. If you were sitting opposite a chair or a CEO of a mid market business who feels behind what's the single most useful thing they could do this week?
Speaker B: I think it would be carve out two or three hours, explore some of the AI tools, think about the strategic problems of the business and just go and chat to Claude or chatgpt around the strategic problems you face and come with some real outputs. But spend the time and embrace the discomfort because that journey will not be easy in the first hour. The second hour will be better and the third hour will probably feel quite empowering.
Speaker A: So embracing the discomfort, that's a thought to end with. That's it for this episode. My thanks to Greg and Alex for joining me. Remember to subscribe to Inflection Point wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. And you can listen back to our previous installments as well. Thanks for listening.
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