Tesla, Waymo, and Building LightSource: Culture, Speed, and AI Strategy with Spencer Penn

Speaker A: I think that leaders need to apply, I would say, a right sized amount of pressure to their system. Like if you blow into a system of tubes, the only way you can really find the leaks is by, uh, just pressurizing it. Now I think if you pressurize too much, you create burnout, you create churn. And if people fail to hit their objectives consistently, then people will get discouraged. Or worse yet, the mandates start to become less credible.

Speaker B: Volatility, uncertainty, um, complexity. This is the work environment that is our reality. What will leaders need to know to be successful in the future? Who will they need to be to build team member commitment? How will they need to show up to create a motivating environment for their people? Welcome to the Sal Sylvester on the Future of Leadership podcast. A, ah, dialogue about how leaders will need to adapt to be successful in a rapidly changing world. And now please join your host and executive producer, Sal Sylvester to engage in the conversation about the future of leadership and how to transform people into confident leaders.

Speaker C: Welcome to another episode of Sal Sylvester on the Future of Leadership. I am Sal Sylvester, founder and CEO of 512 Solutions, where we help growth minded leaders and teams elevate human performance at work. Welcome to season eight. I'm calling this season the transformation season because there's so much that's changing around us. AI, technology disruption, shifting workplace expectations. The world is changing faster than at any other point in history. And the question I think that leaders should be asking themselves is how do I scale my leadership at the same m pace of change that's around me while staying grounded and performing at my highest level? That's why I'm excited about today's guest, Spencer Penn. Spencer has lived transformation from the inside out. Spencer is the CEO and co founder of Light Source. Before founding Light Source, Spencer worked at Tesla, helping scale one of the most ambitious manufacturing operations in the world. He also worked at Waymo, where he was part of the team developing an autonomous vehicle technology, one of the most complex transformations in modern transportation. So today Spencer is focused on transforming how manufacturers use data, AI and automation to modernize supply chains and operations that haven't fundamentally changed in decades. Let's go to the interview with Spencer now. Spencer, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Sal, thank you for having me.

Speaker C: It's great, great to have you and I'm very excited about the conversation. A lot of people know obviously about Tesla and Waymo and now because of you and your work, Light Source, and I'm curious what the through line is between those three companies for you personally.

Speaker A: Mhm. Interesting. For Me personally, you know, it's funny, in hindsight, of course, you can try to draw through lines, but most of my career and what I've. I've just followed my instinct and followed my gut. And so I guess if I look at it backwards, I could construct some meaning. But when I think about what I actually did at the time, I just thought Tesla sounded like a cool project. And when I started there, it was a boutique car business. And my friends and family from the east coast told me it was a career mistake to go work at Tesla, that it was a tech toy, that it was an iPad with wheels on it. And Tesla's and electric cars, by and large, would never be someone's main vehicle. And my experience up until that point was maybe you saw the Nissan Leaf around. I had an uncle who lived in Westchester in Pleasantville, New York, who was sort of, I would call early into the sustainability trend, and he had a diesel car that he converted to run on vegetable oil. And so he'd go to the local Chinese food restaurant and pick up vegetable oil, and he would just smell like General TSO all the time if. As if this was an actual person, you know. And so anyway, long story short, I just thought was very excited by what Tesla was doing because they're not trying to build an electric car. They were trying to build a better car that just happened to be electric. And, you know, if you can align the value to, like, society with the product value, I think you get better outcomes. Like, I've always felt like, do you remember Tom's shoes?

Speaker C: Of course. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. So I always thought that Toms was kind of a. A weird business because, you know, people were not really buying the shoes because they gave a pair away. They were buying the shoes because they liked the shoes. And then the pair that they gave away was an, um, ultra simplified version of it. And so there's sort of like this weird misalignment between the businesses, like sales goals and their giving goals. But the thing I loved about Tesla was it's like I can totally see people get to be selfish and they can buy a cool, functional, better, faster, higher acceleration vehicle. And it just happens to be that with the technology of 2012 or whatever it was, 2015, with the Model 3, you get a better car. And so that was the thing that really excited me. And then in my career, I've always sort of pivoted with one foot like basketball. So when I was at Tesla, I reported into the CFO and I was managing a lot of the bill of materials New product introduction, major investments for the Model 3. So it was involved in leading the Model 3, but it was a company wide initiative. And then by the time I applied to work at Waymo, which had been a dream of mine actually for many years, I had a big chip on my shoulder. I really wanted to be part of Google's self driving car program. Ever since my first round of grad school back at Upennial in robotics, there was one part of the job that was new and one part of the job that was old. The part of the job that was new was being a product manager, which is something I hadn't done before explicitly. But what was not new was the automotive experience. And it was sort of funny I took that automotive tech experience, parlayed it into a new role in a new business and it was funny I showed up and uh, even as a very junior person knew a lot more about how cars got made than just about most folks in the company, of course, excluding John Krafczyk, the CEO. Now the funny thing about what we're doing at Light Source today, and just to give the audience some context, we're procurement technology business and we have a range of customers who are OEMs, so similar to Tesla and Waymo and we help them to develop and source and find suppliers and negotiate pricing for all the components that go into their car. And this was previously done through spreadsheets and emails. Of course people have transactional systems, the ERP for pos, but all the collaboration between engineering, finance, procurement and their suppliers. That uh, iteration loop was all done very manually and that was a problem space that I was exposed to at Tesla. And then the real link in with Waymo is, is sort of a skip. But you know, I met my co founder there and that. So I can't say enough about that experience. He was at Google and Google Research. And I do think there's sometimes in Silicon Valley these like really great cauldrons of, you know, I'd call it, I don't know, cauldrons of like tech innovation where you'll see these unusual spikes in pockets of great people or companies that come out of a certain period of time at a certain place. You know, the classic example is the PayPal mafia, right? All of those folks who are involved in PayPal, whether it was Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or The founder of LinkedIn, who is uh, Reid Hoffman, Joe Lonsdale, gosh, Max Levchin. So there was like a huge number of these PayPal guys. I think that we're going to See something similar with the Tesla people from, you know, 20, 2015. I think that was a really, really a moment fecund with innovation. So yeah, I don't know if that's an answer to your question.

Speaker C: Yeah, and thematically, uh, part of what I'm interpreting from you is you're not just trying to optimize something, but you're really building. You're interested in building things that are radically new and innovative in our society. That's what it appears to me on, um, at least on the surface.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean something that's interesting about Tesla and Waymo both, if I have to draw through line, is that both products had obvious markets, but the challenge that we were solving was a technical one. So like nobody disagreed that a self driving Uber was a great business idea. But the big open question was like, is that even possible with Tesla? I think that the commercial side was largely solved when I was there because Elon got up on stage, announced the Model 3, set really aggressive price targets and timeline targets and we had plenty of pre orders. The issue was not the uh, demand at that time, the issue was can we manufacture the vehicle and hit those tight timelines given how much he had pressurized the system at light source. It feels very similar. Like a lot of what we do, it's very clear what people want, you know, in terms of procurement, supply chain. They want to understand am I working with the right suppliers, is this price fair, what should this cost, how can I edit my designs, how do I manage risk, how do I manage tariffs? The hard thing is building a really well tuned product that's AI enabled to do that. So yeah, I think that maybe is one through line. I'm just thinking through like

Speaker C: I'm really curious about culture and then how culture drives behavior. So you just mentioned something about Elon and setting those aggressive timeline targets. How does that shape how people think, how they innovate? Is there something in there for us to walk away with as uh, leaders?

Speaker A: Yeah, this is a very big and a very good question, Sal. Let me start by trying to explain the difference in leadership styles between Tesla and Waymo. And then, um, I'll try to address some of the insights that I experienced there. I think Tesla is a very horizontal organization from a structural perspective.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: So there's not a lot of layers like Elon and a lot of these sort of tech founders, you see that they have a bit of an aversion to what I guess you could call like MBA ification of business. And so they want everyone as much as possible to be working on the product or working on delivering something to customers, not middle management. I think they view that as maybe a waste. And so Tesla's a very horizontal organization at certain points. Elon had 50 something direct reports. If something was going wrong, all of a sudden you'd find that org directly reporting to him until it got fixed. And it's like a question of he doesn't have the time to actually fix it himself. It's just that he's the eye of Sauron, you know, and wherever he focused, it would just like the heat would accumulate and eventually, you know, people would get fired or it would get, or get fixed. So it was weird because it's a very horizontal org structure, but a very vertical power structure. Like Elon was the king. There's no two ways around it. And the biggest stock price swings that I feel like we see are when he is distracted versus not right. So he, the guy really does have a power, but he is ultimately the decision maker and if he wants something approved, you would ultimately have to go to him. Now Waymo is a very different business. The founders of Waymo, who they are is actually a little bit unclear. You know, you could argue that it's folks like Chris Urmson who were part of the original R and D side of the house. But in effect, I think the founders of Waymo are really the founders of Google. It's Larry and Sergey, it's their organization that produced this R and D project that then later got converted into a, uh, an actual commercial business that's thriving as far as I'm concerned at this point. The problem is that a lot of the folks that came over to Waymo were ex Googlers, which is an organization that had so many levels. There's like L4, L5, L6, L7, L8. I mean you have a huge promotion ladder within every org. And so when people would move over to Waymo periodically, you'd end up with this big hierarchy structure, which I think was oversized for our scale at that time. Um, but Google in general has a very horizontal power dynamic. You know, the individual contributors sort of to some degree decide what they work on and then that rolls up to the overall company goals, not the other way around. So I kind of feel like they're shifted like 90 degrees. Like Tesla's a horizontal org with a, a very strong power dynamic at the top. Waymo is a very verticalized org, but with a very grassroots power dynamic from the bottom up.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Not one is like necessarily better than another. I think that depending on the culture that you build and the people you recruit, they'll do better in one organization versus another and they'll naturally sort that out over time. And I think the people that like the Elon style will gravitate to, uh, his company and the people that like the Waymo style and maybe they just want to feel more comfortable on a daily basis will go to those organizations. And by the way, those people can be extremely creative and extremely innovative and they can work really hard, but it's on their own terms, you know, and just the way that people work. I think as a leader you have to be aware of what will motivate your team. And you know, people often ask leadership lessons and team management lessons and I, you know, I'm not a parent, but I think it's a lot like having kids. You know, each kid needs something a little bit different. And so I think it does depend a lot on the, on the team that you build and the people you attract. And those things are all interrelated. You know, they feed one another. So.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. Well, I can definitely comment on the kids that uh, my 12 year old is much different than my 9 year old, so very much situational leadership from a parenting standpoint. I've done some work with aws. Very strong culture there. I've done a lot of work with Google in their cloud business. Very strong culture there, but radically different. One's not right or wrong, but you're right if you sort of don't fit into the norms of those cultures. It takes much more energy to be successful in either one. I'm curious for you, like, as you're building the light source business, what are you carrying from Waymo and or Tesla into the culture that you're trying to build as a co founder and leader in, in the light source business?

Speaker A: It's a really good question. It's funny, we just, this was completely unplanned, but we just had our leadership off site last week with our leadership team because our fiscal year ends in three days on January 31st.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: And so we align and we, we had a set of values and uh, some of them are informed by Tesla and some of them are informed by Waymo. And it's uh, actually sort of a funny mix when I look at it. The values, there's five of them. So the first one is, is one team, one dream. And I think that's really important. Breakdown, organizational silos. We all win together. We are, you know, brothers in arms, us against the world as the underdog Which I, I think of that was a very Tesla sort of approach. Pragmatic optimism. I think that it's important to have a lot of optimism. Something that Waymo did very well is we celebrated people's successes. And so I think it's very easy to point out when someone does something wrong because it doesn't sit with you. You're like, ooh, like that's wrong. But it's very rare that people naturally will point out when someone does something right because it's not tactically useful and cause you're not trying to change anything. But those things are really important to make people feel good and excited. And I do think that carrots do work better long term than sticks. The third is embracing transparency. And I saw this in both organizations to some degree. You know, I think it's very important that people, you know, if you have a team, people are smart, people are intuitive. I think you have to be direct with people if you want them to actually believe in what you're doing. And listen, the fourth is bias for action. This is definitely a Tesla thing. At Tesla we moved really fast and it was sort of like this question of what's better, indecision and caution. But maybe like the measure, uh, twice cut once approach or the let's move fast, break things. And look, I think at Tesla the amount of waste was enormous. I mean there's so many things that we built, we tried that we had to scrap or tear out or redirect. But I think that's necessary for innovation. You can't have an innovative organization and an efficient organization at the same time. You know, it might be that eight things you try don't work and then two of them are game changing thousand X outcomes. And the only way to do that is to move really fast and like redirect and be agile. And then the final one is, you know, and this is a little bit of a cheeky one, we call it balling on a budget. I like it because it's like, okay, we're trying to do things that are fun and cool, but we're doing it in a frugal way. And the frugality is not just in terms of price, but it's also in terms of resources. Like I think one of Tesla's superpowers, uh, or rather specifically Elon superpowers, was that the company continued to feel like a startup even when it was over 10,000 people. And the reason he was able to do that was he continued to move the goal post as progress was being made in the Organization. So it was never like, hey, we have a goal, let's achieve it. And then we're like, comfortable. It's like, hey, the goal keeps moving. Just when they figured out self driving cars, it's like, hey, we're going to be building our own chips, we're going to be building Optimus robots, we're going to be doing a robo taxi service. And his timeline expectations. You look at it and you think, how the heck is this even possible? And then half the time it's not, and half the time it is. And I think that leaders need to apply, I would say, a right sized amount of pressure to their system. Like if you blow into a system of tubes, the only way you can really find the leaks is by, uh, just pressurizing it. Now I think if you pressurize too much, you create burnout, you create churn. And if people fail to hit their objectives consistently, then people will get discouraged. Or worse yet, the mandates, uh, start to become less credible. You know, there was an element of, there's a period of time at Tesla where I remember, you know, Elon would say, we're doing this. And people would then have their own layer of interpretation. We discuss among ourselves, like, is that for real or is it not? And the funny thing is, you see, sometimes it actually is very real. You know, I think Starlink is a great example from SpaceX. I truly did not believe that Starlink was going to work. It sounds exciting, but like it's going to be the same as maybe like some projects that never got launched. But then all of a sudden one day I was at Waymo and a guy was in his cabin in rural Minnesota calling in perfectly. And I'm like, whoa, how is that possible? Weren't you in a log cabin this week? And he's like, yeah, I have a Starlink device. I'm like a person I know has space Internet. Like that's insane. And so it is amazing. It is amazing. But then again, look at TESL, they announced a new roadster in 2017. People put down a 250k deposit and that has been deprioritized. Or maybe it's not even being worked on. Who knows? I mean, it's going to be 10 years next year since that was unveiled. It was supposed to be released the following year. So there's definitely a lot of. You shoot for the moon and sometimes you hit the stars, sure. But sometimes you fall back down to earth.

Speaker C: Yeah, I remember the roadster because we used to have this little. In Boulder, there was this little showroom down on Pearl street. And we'd kind of always look in. In the Tesla showroom store. And fascination of these roadsters. They're beautiful. And then they became more mass market over time. I love all those values. Thanks for sharing that. It feels like a really nice mix of pushing the needle, but then there's also this kind of sense of pragmatism and stewardship of the resources that you have. The recognition that you're doing, I think, is so important because I think just sort of biologically or maybe from a neuroscience perspective, like, we have thousands of thoughts a day. Most of them are from yesterday, and of those 80% of them are negative. And it's just an evolutionary function because there's always more consequence for something that might go wrong than something that would go right. So it's so important to keep people motivated by also pointing out all the good things that are happening, because it's our natural tendency as humans to revert to what might be going wrong. The idea of the time, like these really aggressive timelines, I think when we think about just sort of like incremental improvement, our thinking doesn't typically change that much. But when we have these crazy timelines, it forces us to think radically different. And I think that's what drives a lot of the innovation. But to your point, I think we have to balance that with not burning people out too.

Speaker A: Right. That's the art. That's where great leaders, I think, really thrive. Easy to say it. Very hard to do it. You have to understand the ship that you're driving, the people in it, and how fast can you reasonably move. And you want it to be just on the edge, if possible. Impossible is it's not motivating. Too easy is not motivating. I will say, though, like, one. One thing that. And maybe this is just me that I feel is that there is nothing more demotivating than not having high enough expectations. Like, if I, you know, there were certain days at certain jobs where I knew that, you know, if I didn't log in that day, yeah. Nobody would notice. Nobody would. Would know. You might think, okay, that's really. Oh, what a relief. You know, that's so nice. Like, you don't. No one's on your back or whatever, but it just makes you. It just really deprives you of purpose at some level. You know, you want to know that the world is not the same with or without your having ever been in it. Right?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that's not the way I ever felt at Tesla. I Always felt like, wow, when I leave this company, like, how are, how are folks going to pick up the tacit knowledge and slack that I'm leaving behind? And you just felt like, okay, there's a lot of stuff resting on your shoulders, you know.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, it sounds like your ceiling was, was elevated in that culture where expectations were high and, you know, you lived up to those expectations. What have you had to unlearn as a founder at Light Source?

Speaker A: That's a very, very good question. I think what I've had to unlearn, I think I've had to unlearn a little bit of my level of directness with people. I think something about being a CEO, your message gets amplified in the business. And so if you say something to somebody, you give somebody feedback, you just have to remember that they're going to hear it much louder than you're saying it and they're going to apply like three shades of additional self critique on top of it. And so, uh, you should be really quick to give positive praise when it's deserved. And then you should, if you need to give people feedback, be direct about it. Try to make sure it's coming from a place where it's clear to the other person that you're really trying to help them be better because you care about them and because of how good you think they are and they could be, and then do it in a one time constructive way. This is a very subtle point. I feel like people don't like hearing feedback constantly. You know, instead of like a little gnawing every day, like, this was wrong, this was wrong. You know, you only want to go to the chiropractor once, have them like really figure out what's up. Feel the knots. One big realignment. Okay, now let's like revisit in three months. You know, um, I don't know, there's. I need to think through this more. As a very half baked thought. I think the second thing I've had to unlearn but relearn is my ability to focus. I think as the company's gotten bigger, I have noticed myself becoming more, I don't want to say adhd, but something like that. Because I used to be extremely proud of my ability to focus on one task very deeply for a very long period of time. You know, when you're in school, I would sit with textbooks and just read them again. You know, I'd read for hours as part of like studying for my exams and stuff. But now there is such a. I, uh, want to say like an invasion of threads, like just different ideas, different things that are coming up. When you're a CEO, you're a chief problem solver and so things bubble up from across the organization and I need to be tacitly aware of what 60 something people are doing. And we're not even at a big scale yet. So I think there is an element of when you are a leader where you do become a little bit of like a WI fi router for information. And so the speed at which you can triage between people and resolve challenges and solve problems at scale is really important. I've not dialed in that system 100% yet. So what I've had to unlearn is the single task focus, take a bit of a broader view. But now I'd like to actually go back the other way and find ways to, you know, quiet the noise a little bit, quiet the mind and refocus on the like I think the smaller core pillars that work really well. And so that's why even in the off site we spend a lot of time coming up with our operating principles and our values. Because instead of explaining to somebody the things that they should do, I'd rather explain to them the ways that they should think and the way that the principles in which they should operate and then let them do their own translation. You know, don't, don't make people memorize a chessboard. Teach them how to play the game and then the chessboard pieces will be very obvious, you know, so key and

Speaker C: I think what we often see in growth stage tech is sort of a widening gap between the leadership capabilities on that C suite team and then either the next layer down or mid level leaders. So it is really critical that you're aligned on those values so that you're teaching people to think and you don't have to have a nuanced SOP for every little thing that you need a leader to do.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And then is the audience. How much of the audience? You know, I'm just curious Sal, is folks who are in startups and growth stage companies versus people who are in large enterprise.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's a mix. It's leaders in both sides. It probably follows a bit of a pattern with the clients that we work with. So we've worked with a lot of big tech and other companies and also a number of growth stage tech. So I think the audience is, the commonality is the leadership and management aspect of their roles and, and also their desire to improve their human performance. At work, it's kind of our sweet spot. That's probably the through line between, between the audience. But say it's a mix of both.

Speaker A: Okay, yeah, makes sense.

Speaker C: Maybe just a couple other quick questions and then we'll start to wrap up. I'm curious what you're seeing from an AI perspective and sort of like how people are responding to adopting AI. If you're seeing resistance, what's some of the cause of the resistance? What's sort of your sense or pulse of what's happening in that world?

Speaker A: It's a very good question. And if you know, I will share some of what I'm seeing. I went to dinner with this guy, Justin Finelli, who's the CTO of the US Navy. Speaking of your, your military experience, he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said, we have so much AI today that if we were to stop as a society development of foundation models, like right now, it would take us 10 years to make it fully useful. And I do think that that is true. And so there's like been this big step change in AI and LLMs. And now I think we are as a society trying to catch up to what does it mean, how can it be used, how can it be useful? And the earliest beneficiaries of this, I would say, are the people who themselves have technical savvy. Because when they see the tool, in order to use LLMs really effectively, unfortunately you have to be a power user to do more than just the basic like write me an email type stuff. You need to give it context. You have to basically be able to pull data into the LLM system. The context window is limited, so maybe it's the context directly, or maybe it's a rag system like retrieval, augmented generation, where it goes out and does stuff. Then you have to, when you get the output, you need to structure that output. Right now, by default it's just text. But folks who are more savvy are trying to structure things like JSON outputs. Then you have to make sure and understand the limitations and possibilities of where these models are. And then you have to actually use it in a repeatable way so you make sure that you're systematizing it. Uh, it's taking action on other forms of data, like an agentic system, and that you're doing it repeatably so that way it doesn't one day have some kind of catastrophic failure. And so there's a lot of error, I think, between, or a lot of big gap between giving somebody access to an LLM and Then having it be useful in like a very large portion of their business function or day to day life. What I'm seeing in a lot of companies is that they are just trying to get people to start using the basic stuff, you know, just trying to get them to use, you know, ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot in the organization. But what I think is taking a much longer time to diffuse is actually helping people to use LLMs to automate or augment like the full scope of business processes that they do in their day to day life. I feel that that's like the current state of affairs. I think the future state of affairs is very different. And I think with Waymo I saw this very clearly where people's expectations around when things will happen is usually the thing that's miscalibrated. But what will happen is usually spot on. Like we will have, yeah, we will have self driving cars. That's not up for debate. That's going to happen and in fact there's going to be a period of time sales when it's going to be illegal for you to drive your car. And the reason is it's going to be like horses on roads. People will look at it and say you are putting others in danger by driving your own vehicle. And by the way, there'll be an in between period of time where your insurance won't cover you if you hit someone while you're self driving. You know, if you're manually driving and that's it'll be like finding out someone was drunk. You know, it's like, right, it's no matter if it's your fault, it's your fault. Right. Like there, every other car is statistically so much less likely to be dangerous. But you decided to take, you know, driving into your own fallible hands. Right. Um, these things will happen. But the issue with Waymo, for a lot of employees it was when it was like it was two years away for 10 years. And I think with AI it's clear like there will be job replacement. Like a lot of roles will be automated. And I think it's a thing we have to think about longer term. Now does that happen? The difference between that happening in three years and happening in 30 years is enormous From a societal perspective. People often ask me the question like which jobs are going to be automated? Right? Like is my job safe? And my answer is very simple. And this is not even my answer. I'm borrowing this from a friend of mine who works at Anthropic, one of the big foundation model Companies, he said. And he put timelines on it. He said, conservatively, in three years, 50% of white collar jobs will be automated entirely. And I'm like, well, how do you determine which portion of jobs will be automated? You know, am I in the 50% on which side of the coin? Uh, and his answer was, if your job can be totally done from behind a computer without human interaction, then it's gone. So if you can do things, if your entire job involves clicking buttons and reading from a screen, that is exactly what LLM and AI systems are good at doing. The thing that they're not good at doing is talking like we're talking now. What they're not good at doing certainly is going out into the world, right? There's going to be a long period of time between right now, like an LLM can produce a really good research paper or paper, versus when an LLM can actually, like control a robotic system that can open doors and walk and go buy you groceries. I mean, that is a really different problem space. And in fact, the big innovation in AI has been language models, not computer vision models. I mean, there have been improvements in computer vision over the years, but the step change that happened was really about input and output of textual data and so things on screens. That's the place where you're going to see a lot of job replacement. And so we'll have to contend with that, I think, as a society, you know, at the corporate level Today, uh, every CEO is trying to form a digital strategy related to AI. Every board of directors is asking the CEO, hey, what's your AI strategy? And every CEO is asking their VPs and lieutenants, what are we doing with AI? And then they talk to us and they say, hey guys, you're lightsource AI. You're an AI native company. We're looking for AI. What do you guys do? And my question is always the same, which is, what are the problems that you're looking to solve? I never want to be technology looking for a problem. Then you end up with the segway scooter circa 2008. What I'm much more interested in is what are you trying to get done? And people don't have good answers to those questions. And sometimes AI is the solution, but sometimes AI is not. Or sometimes it's a system that is like muscle and bone, right? You have like the AI muscle, but you still need the infrastructure. The data lake, the data layer, the data model that a human could input and output to has business logic. Or an AI system could interact with and sometimes that's really the gap. But I just think it's one of these things where, you know, there's a lot of creative people. We live in a meritocracy of ideas. I think that a lot of the stuff will happen. It just is a question of when.

Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you for that. It's super interesting. I think everything that we've talked about today in terms of culture and leadership, we have to keep pace with the pace of change. Our leadership has to scale at that same pace of change and complexity. And look, today's probably the slowest day that we'll ever experience for the rest of our career in terms of pace of change. So thanks for that perspective. I think it's a good reminder for us to all be thinking ahead, thinking about how we can learn, experiment, be agile no matter what, what our roles are. Spencer, it's been great connecting with you today. I know this is going to be extremely valuable for our listeners. Thanks so much for your time, Sal.

Speaker A: Thank you for having me. It was a wonderful conversation.

Speaker C: I hope you enjoy today's episode of the Sal Sylvester on the Future of Leadership podcast. You can get session notes on our website at 512solutions.com. That's the numbers 512solutions.com. Please follow and like the podcast on itunes or wherever you're tuning in. And if you want to learn more about how we can help transform your people into confident and action oriented leaders, please check out our website at 512solutions.com. I look forward to continuing the conversation about the future of leadership. I'm out.