S2 - Ep 3 | Innovating the Future: Liventus x TomorrowZone on Digital Transformation

Speaker A: Hey everyone. Danielle Dolof here and welcome back to the Live Bite podcast. Today we have something special for you. This episode was originally recorded for the Tomorrow Zone podcast where I had a fantastic conversation with Deborah Rubin, founder and CEO of UM Tomorrow Zone. We explored innovation in equipment finance, the power of collaboration, and how Liventus and Tomorrow Zone are helping businesses navigate digital transformation. If you're looking for insights on emerging tech trends, automation and you know what's next for the industry, you won't want to miss this discussion. I'm excited to share it with you here on livebyte. So let's dive in.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Tomorrow Zone Catalyst Podcast where we explore the future of innovation, leadership and technology in equipment, finance and beyond. I'm your host, Deborah Rubin and this episode of the Tomorrow Zone Catalyst podcast is brought to you by Tomorrow Zone's Intelligent Automation Catalyst. Your roadmap to practical AI driven automation. AI is way more than just a buzzword. It's a game changer for streamlining business processes, saving time and maximizing roi. Our hands on virtual workshop helps you and your team, especially non technical leaders, to discover and understand AI's real potential and identify automation opportunities and build a clear and prioritized roadmap for implementation. Stop guessing, start transforming. Learn more at TomorrowZone IO and take the first step towards smarter automation today. So let's get on to the show. We know that AI and automation are everywhere today, but many leaders are feeling stuck wondering where do you start? How do you ensure that AI actually drives real business value instead of just chasing hype? Through our partnership with Leventus, we're accelerating AI adoption. Not only co creating and vetting high value automation ideas, but also turning them into prototypes and real business outcomes. So joining me today on the show is Danielle Dolef, the EVP of Sales and Marketing at uh, Leventus. She has over 25 years driving business growth and optimizing business processes across multiple industries. And she's passionate about helping businesses not only identify AI opportunities, but also bringing them to life. So, so welcome to the show, Danielle. It's really good to have you back.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for. I'm so excited to be here. This topic, I know we've been working together on this for a little bit and I'm so excited to be unleashing it on the world and I, uh, yeah, I'm excited, so.

Speaker B: Yeah, me too. I'm, I'm, I'm really excited about this one. I think it's going to be really fun. You know Danielle, at TomorrowZone, we run into so many companies who are really intrigued and curious and about AI but often they're very uncertain where to start. From your perspective, what are some of the biggest roadblocks that you see leaders are facing as uh, they're trying to adopt innovative technologies like this?

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, the one we see a lot is the leader themselves or their team can be in two different camps, so to speak. So either in their own brain or their teams are giving them these two different thoughts. And, and the first one is like wait and see. Let's others experiment and fail and when they get on the right path, we'll follow that one. So people like that, because it is more secure, it likely has less risk, although there's some other risk with it. And you know, you're seeing another company kind of go through those iterations and those failure points and not having to deal with it yourself. So you can kind of do that, wait and see. The downside of that one may be obvious is you really risk the competition outpacing you and you just can't catch up because it's not like you can't capture that technology or capture that process. But the customers are already associating that advantage with your competitor. Right. So they, you might lose out in that respect. The second downside is what your competitors or your industry may do and you copy may not be right for you may look like it's right. And so you may have waited and have to iterate and fail anyway. So now you're behind and even further behind. So then the other side of the brain is jump all in, just fail fast, move on and keep doing it. That is the flip side of the downsides is that you'll be first. Most likely your customers are going to associate you with innovation. The downside of that is it can be an expensive approach and you have to have the right culture for that type of uh, methodology or approach to technology. You have to be able to accept failure and move on. And not all cultures are able to kind of be elastic in that way. So we see sometimes in one leader or a team that's pulling a leader or group of leaders in kind of two directions and then it's almost like a deer in the headlights. Right. So you know what? Now kind of flipping it to you since you work with teams, you know, in this hands on, tackling these challenges and kind of seeing this, seeing also these kind of, what kind of patterns do you see when it comes to AI? Uh, hesitation from your perspective.

Speaker B: Yeah, like a big one is how do I even Think about this. I was just in a, uh, I, uh, was in two conversations this week with clients where this actually came up. You know, we're interested in using these certain AI capabilities that we don't even have a framework for how we should be thinking about this. How do we even evaluate if this is a good option for us, how do we know what is secure, what is safe, or, you know, how it's going to impact the surrounding processes? And so it's kind of, it's not really that dive in and fail fast type of mentality. They are stepping back and they want to strategize, but they don't have a framework. They don't actually have, uh, a toolkit for how to think about this because it is so different from traditional software acquisition, uh, of the past, you know, where you would say, here are all my requirements. And then you would go to market and you do a evaluation and selection process, I think. So that's, that's one challenge is like, we don't have an underlying framework for how to think about this. But the other thing that I'm seeing is a lot of the conversations about AI get so into the weeds about the technical stuff, the technical jargon. And that's where, you know, you mentioned the deer in the headlights, uh, that, that kind of happens in those conversations. And for years, um, I've been involved in leading innovation conversations at an industry level and I bring in speakers to talk about AI and I go straight to, is it machine learning, is it neural networks? And everybody wants, everybody wants to talk about what AI is and how it works, but really what we care about is what can it do for me and what does it mean in my world and in my context? And how should I think about this? I think one of the challenges is often when we talk about AI, it feels like something that's just too abstract or unreachable, and it's often misunderstood. So leaders can really struggle to translate the hype into practical steps and practical value for their business. That's one reason why we designed the Intelligent Automation Catalyst program to help teams uncover real business applications of AI and move from misunderstanding and uncertainty to real valuable action. And, um. Well, and that kind of leads me to a different question for you. In our workshop, and we've been collaborating on this for a while. As you mentioned, in our workshop, we are all about helping people to get unstuck, helping teams to move from AI curiosity or AI mystification to a real plan. And from your experience, you know, just from the struggles that you were sharing. Why is it important for companies to step back and take a more structured and hands on approach rather than just the dive in and fail forward fast method of um, just experimenting with a bunch of tools.

Speaker C: Like the example I gave earlier about the two different minds. You may not have a team that's quite disparate but the nuances within the approach, what part of the business to tackle may not have alignment within the organization. They may philosophically agree on approach to technology. But hey wait, when you start to talk about where are we going to start that may not have alignment and I can tell you how to make technology very expensive is to not know where you're going that will, you'll spend a lot of money with a company like mine and we don't like that because at the end you'll actually be unhappy. So what I think is so key is when you take people through a workshop and they're part of the design, they're part of building that they're adding to the workshop. They're not passive people, they are adding to it through that through a team that's even a well oiled team is going to have different thoughts in their head but they come out at the end with the, you know, same ideas. They're aligned, maybe not perfect but more closely than they've been aligned in the past because they've iterated together and they've kind of talked through this and you know that key because when we start to build technology for people and if they're pulling us one way and then another or they're not answering questions, that's when the bills and the time starts to rise and now your ROI is starting to slip through your fingers. And so I think to me that's the key. And you know what I'd love to hear now is like, cause I want to start diving into it. But it's your workshop because I know about it. But I'm so excited and that's why I'm excited because I uh, think this is such a key element that Levintis has been unable to offer our clients in the past. But why don't you just walk us through, through a little bit how the workshop works and what leaders will kind of take away from it and their teams.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So at Tomorrow Zone, our specialty is the front end of innovation. So we're not building awesome custom software like Leventus does. What we do is we help to explore what's possible and what that means for their business to explore the AI opportunities for instance, and align Leadership on where the problems are that would be valuable to solve and then identify where does it make sense to invest, where does it make sense to start? And we help them understand and identify the right things to build for the right business reasons. And so that way we skip past the problem that you were talking about. The recipe for making a uh, technology project more expensive. Start without a plan and start without alignment. We skip that problem and we start with a plan and alignment. So our Intelligent Automation Catalyst workshop follows a uh, proven design thinking approach. So we are licensed facilitators, certified facilitators of the 3A AI design, sprint method. So it's a company that's based in Europe and they're having really great success with this, uh, with companies all over Europe. And so we've adapted it to this market and kind of embedded it in the tomorrow's own way of facilitating this shared understanding and alignment. So we don't just talk about AI, we dive teams through a very interactive hands on and visual process to understand AI capabilities and connect those AI capabilities with real business value for your business, for your process, for your context. And so we're ensuring that teams walk away with a clear and prioritized roadmap so that they can take action, whether that's moving into identifying the next process to focus in on and reimagine with AI or even taking that reimagined process into a prototype.

Speaker C: So one of the things in this journey I've taken with you, um, and understanding more about what you've put together is the approach this has on um, humans centering this around people. AI automation is a part of it, but it's about empowering people. So it's about making people better and keeping the focus there. So do you have examples of how you've kind of this mind shift around just not focusing on AI, focusing on humans, the people kind of changes the way companies approach AI.

Speaker B: So I've actually been doing some experimenting with this because I've been watching those patterns that we've been talking about that cause people to be um, uncertain or fear adopting AI. We've been using AI capabilities at FemeroZone since 2016. That's when I got into my first AI beta program. And so as we've been working with this workshop concept, we did a couple of interesting collaborations in the equipment finance industry. And so I collaborated with people from the National Equipment Finance association. And I was curious about how independent finance companies in that space would respond to this approach to help them learn about AI and identify use cases Specifically in their industry for using AI. And so we took them through our process, which is highly visual, and we had a visual map of the front office for finance processing, for leases and equipment loans. So we just looked at four business functions. Um, we looked at marketing, sales, credit and documentation processes. And with four business leaders from four different companies from across the industry, we, uh, explored 14 different AI capabilities and learned about them. And then we mapped those capabilities to the different business processes. And they were able to generate 28 use cases in under half an hour through that process, introducing them to what's possible. And then after exploring the art of the possible, really connecting the dots to what could this mean in our business. And so it was really fascinating to see, you know, just how quickly people were able to learn, but also how, when given the right space and guidance for exploring AI, how quickly they were then able to connect the dots between. Now I understand. Oh, that would be really great. Right here. This is a friction filled area in our business. We can apply AI right here. And they were coming up with viable use cases that would add, uh, value to an equipment leasing company. We did it again with another group of leaders from bank equipment finance companies. So a little bit different lens, a little more regulatory concerns, and they came up with 30 use cases in the same amount of time, half an hour. So like, this isn't about like taking weeks and weeks to figure out where you can find value in your business with intelligent automation. Because it's a structured approach and because we're quickly visually learning with lots of interaction, it just fires up your brain in a new way and it uh, and it helps you to get out of the fear zone and into the tomorrow zone where you're exploring future possibilities. And it's really exciting to see. Another example is just in my own company, Tomorrow Zones, five people on our team. And we have been as a team focusing on embracing AI, but rather than, you know, just throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks and just, you know, hey, here's some tools, just do some experiments and figure out what works. We went through this workshop, uh, together and we identified where the friction areas are across our business. And we found a ton of use cases and started implementing them. So we actually now have a backlog of processes that we're just chipping away at, uh, one by one and we're actually implementing automation with AI and we're taking, you know, what's the most valuable process, let's attack that, you know, and so it just teaches you really how to think about it and it's designed for non technical leaders so it really, you know, people walk away with a new understanding of what's possible. And I hear things like wow, I didn't realize just how many ways we could use AI and just how accessible it is. Well I, you know, I just wanted to ask you Danielle, um, at Leventus you're, you're doing custom software development and so you're in the business of helping to bring these AI concepts to life. So how do you see companies balancing the need for automation with that human impact of AI?

Speaker C: I mean you said some of the key things that I'll just kind of summarize, think the key is um, the communication. There's, you mentioned fear. I think that's a reality with a lot of people and I think communication, clarity, a nice laid out roadmap can, may not eliminate fear but can reduce it and give people an understanding of exactly what's going to happen when they can be part of a uh, workshop like this. They can be part of the architect and feel some ownership in it. That also reduces the fear. The other thing I love that you said is the chipping away at it because I think where we are with AI is that's a perfect place, don't try to overhaul your whole organization, chip away. And that is a bottom line and a ah, bandwidth discussion but it's also human discussion because we're just developers, we're all developers but we see how new technology, there's always barriers to change, there's always issues of people going through change management, opposition to change. And when you chip away you do one small thing and then people see the impact and they see the positive impact and they see or very few negative impacts. And so then when you do the next one then they're, they're kind of evolving with you. So I think that's, that's why those things are so important to approach it that way. With the uh, chipping away, the communication, a clear roadmap. I think those are nice ways that first of all are good from a bottom line perspective from my side, from what I see, but from bringing your humans along and get the humans on board because it doesn't work if the humans aren't on board. I don't care. It never will never work. So that's such a key part of it. So I think that going back to the workshop, the workshop, the other thing I wanted to say is the speed of the workshop I think also helps the human side because they're not like we talked about this a Month ago. And they're just wading their way through these murky waters with constantly information changing at them. They get through this workshop faster, you give them information and they can kind of keep moving. And I think that's also key for adopt. Better adoption and uh, better realization from the human side of it.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think you bring up a really good point. I mean one thing that it does do is it catalyzes not only understanding of AI, but momentum to take action. And I love how you laid it out because if you, if you're taking too long in between sessions when you're working through this, you actually are going to lose momentum. And so we actually design this in a way that every session builds on the previous one. And so we're continually creating those new pathways in your brain as you're starting to connect the dots and the lights going on. I get this now. And we can actually see transformation. In thinking about it too, you think about a salesperson who may be concerned about, oh, we shouldn't be implementing AI in the sales process because that will take away the human touch from the relationship. What I found in leveraging certain AI tools during our sales process, that actually helps me to be more present with the people that I'm talking with and it helps me to be a better human for them, you know. And so it's just been really incredible to see the type of transformations just in the thinking about it and removing that anxiety about, uh, how do we approach this? What does it mean? You know, is it going to replace me? When you start to help people understand, a lot of that diminishes and it just opens the door to new possibilities. So back to the workshop. Um, the Intelligent Automation Catalyst is really designed to help organizations uncover high value AI opportunities. So in the end of our workshop, we end up with a heat map of your organizational functions and the AI potential for each of those functions. And that then leads to being able to create a roadmap. Where do you begin? Which of the top three functions, which 1 is the one that has the most potential for you to start taking action? And so once we identify a high value priority process to reimagine with AI, we can actually go through a design sprint and co create a reimagined process flow with AI in the mix, which can result in a business focused design brief that really describes the whole new process, but with AI in the mix so that, you know, what the humans do, what the machines do, goes through a whole, um, assessment of data considerations, ethical considerations, human impact, organizational impact, Cost benefit analysis. And in the end, now we have a concept that has alignment and buy in, um, from the people that would actually use that process. And now we can go to a company like Loventus. And that's where this partnership comes in. Because now we can take that idea that we have dove in deep with the business people, bring it to you, the tech wizards, to see, okay, now what do we need to do to turn this vetted business idea into a prototype or even into a real world implementation? So can you, um, share a little bit about how our work together can accelerate AI adoption for business? Yeah.

Speaker C: And that's probably one of the biggest we're most excited about because we've had people come to us and say, how should I be using AI in my business? And that's not. Can I answer that? Probably. I can come up with some ideas. We deal with clients all the time, but it's not in the same structured way we just went through. I don't have that facility, I don't have that expertise, nor do I have anybody on my team. So I liken it to basically, once they've been through, uh, this workshop with you, and I'm going to kind of push this analogy, but they come out with blueprints for their dream home, let's say. And I'm going to use dream home because it's like they're specific designed for them. Right. That's what I like about it. It's got the bathrooms where they want, it's got the amount of bedrooms, it's got all of the backyard, the front yard. All of that is their dream home, where their team, their family, their team is going to live and optimize their company and their work, whatever. So Deb the architect has walked them through this and they've collaborative built this together and they're very excited. But you can't live in a blueprint, can you? You can't live in it. It's a key step. I don't want to build a house without a blueprint. But you can't live in that. Right? So what I feel so strongly about this process is that by the time the project gets to me and my team, it's taken so much of the guesswork out that we would have to do it reduced the cost from our side because we don't have to do that discovery. As far as what do they need? You've really walked them through a nice tight process to get them in the spot. And so we're just. Now we've got the blueprint but just like if you were to build a dream home, you wouldn't drop off the blueprints and come back six months later and hopefully think they built what you wanted. Right. You would check in with them. And that's how we work, that we use agile. A lot of people is agile, but for those who don't know, it's highly iterative, highly communicative. Because you may have started out with this great blueprint and then the market change or something in your business changed. You need to tweak things. The whole of the blueprint's fine, but now the bathroom needs to move or the flooring needs to change. So you're still in the same sphere of what you wanted. But when you work Agile, you can be pivot like that. And I think that's really key. And it's less expensive. Every pivot's a little bit expensive. But imagine building the house and then telling the contractor, I needed another bathroom. That's going to be way more expensive than you're doing it when he's, he or she's putting up the framing, so to speak. Right. So that's, that's how we work. Iterative, communicative, highly collaborative. And it should feel, now that I'm thinking, thinking on this right now, it should feel very similar to the process they went through with you in that, you know, we're going to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but they're going to have a big say in it still, and they'll get to see it as we build it.

Speaker A: We will.

Speaker C: Some of these projects can be weeks, some of them can be months to build. And so having mini kind of demos in between gets everybody. Because when you, sometimes when you design stuff until you kind of test drive it, you're like, wait a minute, I want to tweak that, or, you know, this nuance I need to change. So that's really how we do it. And that again, to say again, why I'm so excited, why we're partnering with you, because we'll get a, uh, much better blueprint.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, and maybe even cover. Uncover some opportunities that they wouldn't have thought of.

Speaker C: Well, I think, mainly I think they're gonna find, because again, there are some people who. I just got an email today, um, today, this morning. Uh, it's an insurance company and they had some specific bullets around what they wanted from an AI perspective. And we're asking us to build it for them. It's existing client. Um, so we get those. But we also get from some very Large clients, how can. What should I be doing with AI? And I think that's a good question. I don't think I'm the right person to answer that. That's, that's where. So that kind of leads me to. Since I think you're the right person to ask that question based on this workshop you've built and your experience. So from your perspective, what are some of those key AI opportunities that leaders are overlooking or missing, you know, when they go out about their day?

Speaker B: Well, I think that um, a key approach to thinking about this is if we make it too big, we're going to miss a lot of opportunities. And so when you start to understand the skills that AI can bring to the table, you can start to think about your business in a different way. One of the thought leaders that I love to listen to is Dan Sullivan. He's uh, the founder of Strategic Coach and he talks about a concept in business who know instead of getting hung up on how should we do this, who should do this? And in 2025 and beyond this, who often can be AI. AI brings all sorts of new skills to the table. And so that allows us the opportunity to look all over our business for different ways that we could leverage intelligent automation like AI. And so I think that there are opportunities end to end in your business. You know, customer experience, insights for sure you can leverage AI skills to power your business development. Um, I'm leveraging AI constantly. It helps me to reduce the friction for follow up. They say fortune is in the follow up. But what holds up follow up? Procrastination. What causes procrastination? Uncertainty. What's the uncertainty? And not sure what to write or there's too much information to consolidate from what we just talked about. AI can help you with that. AI can bust you through all those things. And so what if you could remove the friction and all of your sales follow ups in your business development? What would that do for you? What if you could leverage AI to uh, power productivity all across your business? No longer deal with the tyranny of the blank page in my own company, Tourism. So I have a team of really enthusiastic, innovative people. Not one of them likes to write copy. Nobody on my team, I mean I've written, I wrote a book. And it's not an enjoyable process, I'll tell you that. You know, AI has helped us tremendously to get over that. And now not only have we busted through the tyranny of the blank page because we can leverage tools like generative AI. There's Claude, there's ChatGPT, all sorts of different ones out there now for the last two years. But we've generated confidence. I now have a team that is confident. Oh, yeah, I can take that on. Because they know they can get past the initial draft and start taking action on, um, really thinking through things. You know, AI generated stuff is never our final draft, but it gets you past those sticking points that hold back your productivity. And so I think that's often an overlooked benefit because often we're thinking it should replace a whole job, it should replace the whole person. And that's not. It augments people and it empowers them to be able to do more. Everybody on my team is doing 5-10x what one person can do. It's ridiculous the amount of productivity that we have. But it's because we are AI forward, we're embracing it, we're inviting it to the table. We have really clear guidelines on how to use it. But it's now triggering our brains. Just like, you know, hey, watch for the red cars. You're going to see them all over the place on the road. We are triggered our brains to watch for AI use cases. So you take your team through a process of quickly and rapidly, over and over again, looking for the use cases and the opportunities to use AI. Uh, they're going to come out seeing the red cars everywhere. They're going to start to see the use cases and change the way they're thinking about productivity. And so it's not only something that can give you the tangible benefits of speeding up your time and processing, enhancing and expanding your productivity, but you're raising up your human capability as well. Then there's a lot of other ones too. Just kind of. Yeah, I'm not going to go into any other ones. We'll find them in your workshop.

Speaker A: Wait.

Speaker C: Exactly. It could be a whole episode on its own.

Speaker B: Yeah, we could actually. Well, I mean, I did a presentation for an executive roundtable last spring around this time, and I took it as a personal challenge because a leader of a large bank was saying, I don't believe anybody in our industry is using AI. So I came. Nothing bad with a presentation with 50, uh, eight use cases end to end. So, yeah, I mean, there's just so much opportunity. But I think, you know, having a way to understand how to get started and how to think about it, that's, that's the sticky point that we got to get past. And that's, that's why we're doing this. It's just going to really inspire people to think differently and empower them to take action that makes a difference. So let's kind of um, shift gears a little bit. We talked a lot about exploring the art of possible finding those ideas. But let's make it real. Can you share a real world example from your experience of how AI has transformed a company's operations?

Speaker C: Yeah. You know what I'll preface this and I think it goes back to how we've been talking about AI this whole time. The most beneficial examples are the least sexy. So they're not going to be a headlines because it's along the lines of chipping away. You just said it. Nothing too big. Let's learn and iterate. I think that's where most companies should be at. So these examples are not kind of but they're not like again headline worthy. But if you think about them in your terms of your business your I could do that so because that's where clients are so reading insurance forms for an equipment finance company. So insurance they have equipment. Finance companies lend money to organizations so that they can purchase equipment that equipment sometimes needs. Insurance and insurance can be acquired from all different types of insurance companies who have all different types of forms. And so this company was spending a lot of time manually inputting the insurance information into their system. They were tracking system. All this does is read the insurance form pulls out the key information and inputs it into the database that they need. Not sexy. But they saved so much time on this one. Another one is we have a client who manufactures industrial machine parts. So again we're starting with the least sexy stuff. I preface this right. Uh but you think about machine parts something they're on the floor. They're in the factory on the workshop floor and they need a new part. There's no number. Sometimes there's or they're in a hurry. So they implemented photo search so that their clients could upload the image and their website will find the part that most is most likely the same part. So they can quickly could they get to it before.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: But it'd be more times that is saving them customer service but more importantly creating a nice frictionless experience for their clients. So then they keep coming back to them. It's either easy to work with one that we actually did for ourselves. Those are kind of fun is we uh, we recruit developers in the US and India and the India candidate pool is very large and we get a ton of resumes every time we put a posting and a ton it's like sometimes thousands. So we've built over time A solid process of how we review candidates. And we have that process down. But now we are leveraging AI to take our process that we've already developed and do it for us versus us doing it. So it's reviewing resumes and flagging and scoring resumes for us. Not, you know, headlines or not super sexy, maybe not center stage at ah, um, ces, but real impact for us because now we're getting closer, faster to the candidates that we want to talk to. And we sped up the hiring process and increase the um, increase the success of that. And this um, I will. Since it's um, Today I just. This company, they're an insurance company and they want um, one of the things they're asking for, which is totally possible. That's what they're asking me today. Because we've done something like this. But so they insure vehicles and they want AI to analyze the pictures of this. Probably some sort of wreck or some sort of issue to predetermine, you know, can go through their insurance options.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: So maybe saving human resources, maybe saving hours, but I think also making a frictionless, easy, seamless process for their clients. So that's also just this huge benefit. And those are just, you know, kind of a handful of them. Um, I think when I was thinking about it, it kind of comes down to like the, where we see a lot of the customer service piece, the billing piece, office operations, hiring, training, development, staff, productivity, those are kind of the categories that we see our clients implementing. And they are mid sized companies. They're not. We have a couple enterprise. But a lot of mid sized companies, investing, technology, don't have endless budgets. So they have to be smart. And again, it's that kind of baby step, which is at least it's a step though what you realize is. And then when you were talking I forgot about all the stuff we, you know, of course we use ChatGPT internally. I, I do marketing. But our marketing has been so streamlined by AI leveraging it to. We uh, do a podcast. The podcast is edited by AI. We make videos which are done by AI. We do emails and. And to your point, it's a beginning. Never we have to come in and tweak it. But this time savings and the tyranny, the blank page, I love that.

Speaker B: Kind of just bring you up so that you don't have to do those mundane tasks that make you feel like. And operate like a robot yourself. Yeah, I can help you be more human.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So what I'm kind of interested in is, you know, what Are, you know, I've talked about some examples of the things that have been implemented and I want to back it up a little bit and ask about what are some of the aha moments as they're going through this workshop that companies have experienced. I think that'd be interesting to hear. Kind of those light bulb moments. LBMs, I've heard them called.

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I did, uh, I did a workshop with a group of emerging leaders and everybody assumes that they're just natively creative because they're young. Interesting.

Speaker A: Aha.

Speaker B: Uh, that came out of that workshop was, wow, I am just amazed at how much more creative I can be when I am guided through a structured process. And so they were blown away. This is an innovation leader within a finance company, just blown away at, uh, the shift in their own thinking and then less technical people. So this is designed for non technical people. This is, you know, your executive team, your management team, you know, your business leaders who are wanting to understand, you know, what AI can do, but also, um, more importantly, what can it do for you. And so the big aha's there are often, oh my gosh, I did not realize how many different applications there are for AI. One of the ways that we help people learn about AI is by showing real use cases in other industries to spark new thinking and new imagination of, uh, what's possible for you. And so just even by showing all those examples, as we're looking at the different capabilities of AI, their eyes start to open and they start to realize, oh my gosh, sometimes they realize I've been interacting with AI capabilities and I didn't even realize it. You know, we all have, you know, one of these things in our pocket, all sorts of AI capabilities in there that you didn't realize you were using on a daily basis. So it makes it, I think another big aha huh is just how accessible these capabilities really are. And once you understand just how much your ability to connect the dots between what's possible now and what does it mean for me skyrockets.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think people are closer to it than they realize. Sometimes some people think, this is not me. I'm so far away from it, I don't understand it. It's scary. You're to the point, I'm sure that's so powerful to show people you're already using it and they just don't even, they don't even know if it's embedded in an app they already use or something. They don't even name it, but they're using it. And figuring out how to optimize it just fine.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, well. And yeah, it just, it just opens the door to thinking different. So, um, I want to wrap this up with our signature question. And I've asked you this before, you've been a guest on our show before, but I always love to ask. And we'll just do this in the context of AI. What is one thing leaders can do today to shape a more awesome future?

Speaker C: As I think about this workshop and what we put together, what you put together and what we partnered on, just get help, don't do it alone. There's no point in that. And one of the things you said as we were doing kind of working together is you meet people, people where they're at. And that was a powerful statement for me to kind of absorb. If you kind of take this all down to that, you know, you don't have to do this alone. There's people that will help and you will be, you'll get there faster with less failure if you get some guidance. And I, I think that's the power in it. And uh, the way you've designed this, you will meet people where they're at. And I think that's the key element of it. Love that.

Speaker B: And I mean, if I were to leave one little bit of advice. We meet people where they're at. When it comes to AI, I would say start where you are. And it's okay to be where you are because this is a really fast moving area of technology and branch of computer science. I mean, we have seen years worth of advancements, even just in the last 10 days. It's mind boggling. And so start where you are. And this is a learning journey and we just need to embrace that. So, Danielle, this has just really been a valuable and fun conversation. I want to thank you for joining me today.

Speaker C: Yeah, I love being here. And like I said, this is, um, I'm so excited that we're part of this because I think this will really have a big, big positive impact on companies and demystify AI for them.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.