If We Let AI Do All the Thinking, We'll Get Pretty Stupid: Matt Rosen on AI Productivity

Unknown: This is Talent in the Age of AI, the podcast, helping leaders navigate what AI means for their people, their culture and their future. We talk with the thinkers and practitioners shaping how we work, learn and lead and what it takes to keep talent growing in a world that's constantly changing. We create, curate and connect the insights and the community that helps leaders build AI confidence in themselves and in their teams. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to the Talent in the Age of AI podcast where we seek to bring you relevant, current, real world information on how AI is impacting our talent world today. Hiring, recruiting, retaining training, motivating, etc. And I'm so pleased that you're joining us today. And I want to give a shout out to our producer, Brianna Jovan of what's Good Productions. She's a real pro at podcast and makes me look good. Today I'm so pleased to bring you the founder and CEO of Alada Company and his name is Matt Rosen. He's here with us today. Matt, hi. Thank you for joining us.

Matt Rosen: Hey, it's great to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Unknown: Tell us for two seconds, what is the core of Alada? And I know you have a specific focus we're going to talk about today, but why did you found your company? What's your why on that?

Matt Rosen: Yeah, you know, I started the company with a mantra in mind, which is family first clients are king. Take great care of our people. And there's.

Unknown: Wait a minute, wait, hold on. Say those three slower. I think they're so cool, I'm going to take notes and steal them. So say it one more time.

Matt Rosen: Yeah. The mantra of the company is family first clients are king. We take great care of our people. I mean, what we do as a firm is really complex technology solutions that have evolved a custom dev to more AI and data solutions, really helping enterprises unlock their AI capabilities, leveraging their data, their systems, their information and really empowering their employees, you know. But our roots are in custom developing solutions which now we can do faster than ever with AI. But I started the firm 10 years ago, really wanting to build a different type of firm. I'd served as a partner and seven or eight different firms and they always tended to get focused on, you know, inwardly or on a bright shiny object. I'm like, you know, if we just hire great people, train them really well, they do good work for our clients who tell their friends, rinse, repeat, we're doing it all for our family. So that's really kind of the genesis of the firm.

Unknown: I love that so much. That's. There's not a lot of companies that would have so much human benefit in their mission statement and mean it. And it sounds like you do. And I'm a big Dan Sullivan fan who wrote who, not how. And we are about people here and the right person and that old adage, the right bets and the right seats. But it's more than that. It's about culture, adoption, and somebody who really meshes with what your intention is. And you usually know that right away, don't you, Matt?

Matt Rosen: You do. And, you know, people are our product at the end of the day. I mean, we're trading outcomes or hours for dollars. You know, we're trying to help clients achieve things that have never been done before, oftentimes. And that's why they want to partner, to help them. So it all comes down to the people that we bring on. Their ability to think critically, their ability to build relationships, their ability to work with one another, to ultimately solve, you know, interesting and complex problems for the clients that we're serving. And culture is a huge part of it. People that are inspired and engaged by their work and by their peers are going to do better work than those that aren't. And so I jokingly tell clients, sometimes technology projects have their ups and downs. When something goes a little bit off, I'm like, hey, I'm in. Sell the world's most imperfect product, and that's people. But people are fantastic. And when trained well, given a, uh, clear path for growth, they can do really amazing things working together.

Unknown: I think that's so true. And we've experienced it in our long careers, mine longer than yours, just meaning I'm older, but it is the absolute truth. If you have a good team team, and you're all running in the same direction, there's really nothing you can't do. But you started Elena 10 years ago, so that was pre AI did. When did you start to realize AI was going to be a big thing? And your clients came to you and said, what do I do with this AI thing?

Matt Rosen: You know, I think our clients are still trying to figure it out, but it was, you know, 20, 2019. We started doing a lot of work in data analysis, data science, and then a field called machine learning, which is a subset of AI. But that's where you're constantly feeding, uh, machine computer information to help it recognize patterns. And that was an early predecessor. And I mean, AI itself, in theory, has been around since the 50s, but it really got going big time in November 22nd when ChatGPT launched, that's when everyone started to wake up to be like, oh, this is actually real, it's here. And granted, that was some earlier versions of the model, but it was in 2023 that we took some of the smartest folks in the organization and started pointing them, uh, at trying to get as AI literate as they could. We started doing projects internally. We actually had the benefit of having a very large client who's one of the big four, who very publicly invested in doing work with OpenAI. Their ChatGPT models at the time we came alongside them, helped them solve some interesting problems around tax prep, around mergers and acquisition, due diligence. And from there we just continued to invest in our people, getting them up to speed, looking for new and interesting ways to solve problems, some of which I can share with you on the show. Uh, but over the last, I'd say 12 months, things have really accelerated. These tools have gotten great at writing code, which is what we do for a living. So figuring out how are we going to be more efficient with the tools we have. And it seems like every week one model is jumping ahead of the next. And so we've worked to devise strategies to keep ourselves as a firm one step ahead in a landscape that's changing literally every day.

Unknown: Literally every day. No offense to our university viewers here, but a, uh, couple of local universities are offering courses in AI and I really don't understand how, you know, you have to have curriculum approved and all that stuff. And I, I just can't imagine how. I feel like.

Matt Rosen: I've got a number of friends who have kids in school right now. One in particular is at my alma mater studying data engineering. And they're still teaching her C and Python. I mean, Python's useful, C is not. And so I've encouraged her as well as her peers to like, go learn it yourself. I mean, the great thing about these AI tools, you can ask them, how can you help me describe who you are, what you do, what your tasks are? And they will tell you exactly how to use them. Like, you don't need to go pay for expensive classes. You know, my favorite one right now is Claude. And there's a whole university they have online. You can pretty much figure out anything you need to do between the online training they have and just asking the model questions. It'll help you figure out how to use it. So offering entire curriculums in it, I think, you know, it's going to be outdated by the time it gets published.

Unknown: I agree with you. In fact, one of our latest guests. And I think you and he may know each other. You should know each other. Larry Durham from the St. Charles Institute. He wrote a new book. He's an author of many books, but they move so fast. He said it's just a digital flip book because, you know, there's no time

Matt Rosen: every week or every month.

Unknown: Right. There's no time to put anything on paper, and that's kind of a waste. So I find it fascinating and I think the pace is cool. Tell us about. I want to talk about your big four client. Our very first podcast on talent in the age of AI was the title was Is AI the death of Accounting? Because that was myth story too, right? Well, they can do this easy rote jobs and maybe bookkeeping, but, you know, you still have to have a human that has critical thinking and logic and judgment to discern what those numbers say. Especially when you're a licensed accounting firm, cpa, and your firm's licensure and reputation's on the line. You can't just phone it in with Claude, right?

Matt Rosen: No, you can't. And models aren't always right. They make mistakes just like humans do. I think of most of these models as like a good junior analyst. Like you can. They want to, they want to please you. So they will come up with an answer. They won't just give up. They can work 24 7, which is something a junior analyst can't do. But at the end of the day, they're still getting better. And if they're not trained with really good information, they can give you answers that are false. I mean, you saw it in the legal field where some. There were a bunch of lawyers that got in trouble because the model's made up, uh, cases that didn't even exist. And when you're filing, you know, someone's taxes, when you give them complex advice, you need to make sure what you give them a sound or they can be subject to penalties, get them in trouble at the irs. And so, you know, I do think there's a disruption that's already happening and is coming in. You know, I would say in the white collar knowledge worker job market, where people who have their heads down a computer all day every day don't critically think, don't interact with other humans, don't have good communication skills, their jobs are at risk. I mean, so I'm encouraging, you know, any kids going to school, I'm, um, even my daughters who are in high school and junior high today, you've got to be able to read. You've got to be able to put your own thoughts together. You've got to be able to critically think. Even if you use these AI engines to help you, you still have to review the work and be able to defend it as your own and make it your own. Because we're going to get pretty stupid if we let models do all the thinking for us.

Unknown: And then even as a world, as businesses, that's dangerous, right? It's not just about the human impact, but it's about phoning it. In Larry Durham's book, and I think you'll agree with this, is called the Coming Judgment Void, or he'll actually use the word judgment crisis and he says it's coming one to three years because it is the thing AI can't do. Another guest of mine said AI is like a toddler that wants to please you. So you give a good warning there, it's going to try to please you. But it doesn't mean that it knows everything or it's always accurate. It's a, it's machine learning. It's gathering from out there from what it can find. It's not making decisions based on everything it finds, right?

Matt Rosen: Well, it does. It depends which models you use. And so one of the things that we're helping our clients with is really grounded on their information and data because that's part of the problem with some of the early models. It might have been pulling from Reddit feeds or all sorts of dark corners of the Internet and Wikipedia, which half of it's wrong out there. And so if it's, you know, one of the big things I always did early days with AI is like, give me an answer, cite your sources, let me look at the sources. And that's pretty straightforward because there still is, you know, this black box mentality of we're not sure always how it came to what it did, the answer that it did. And so checking sources, the other thing I've found is useful is running one model's output against another model. So I'll do something in Gemini, then I'll pass it to Claude or pass it chatgpt. You know, we've built some tooling internally that allows us to move between models within a chat. Heck, I mean, it's got a dirty word, deep, uh, seeking. It's a great antagonistic model. We have it on our own server, walled off from the Chinese government and we run it against outputs. And it actually is pretty good at finding issues with some of the other models. And so everyone thinks these open source models are not that Effective, but if you wall them off and you can use them fairly effectively. So we kind of use models to square off against other models to give us the best answers, as well as making sure we're grounding it with data that we know is relatively correct versus it, trusting it to just go get answers wherever it can.

Unknown: I love that I want to keep talking about it. I'm going to take a quick break for an advertisement that helps us out here, so thank you. AI isn't just coming, it's here. But for HR and L and D leaders, the real challenge isn't the technology. It's translating AI into workforce capability and leadership behavior. At, uh, Talent in the age of AI, we center, uh, everything around one question. So what, what does AI actually mean for how you develop people and prepare your organization? Don't just react to change.

Matt Rosen: Lead it.

Unknown: Become a member. Today@talentintheageofai.com okay, we're back with Matt Rosen, the founder and CEO of Alada. And Matt, thank you. I want to know, what do your clients come to you for when they show up? What's their challenge? And then how do you help solve and train and coach?

Matt Rosen: Yeah, I think it's worth telling just a little bit of our AI journey, which will then help inform our clients. Ar, uh, journey. So for us, you know, that I, uh, shared earlier, for those that are just now tuning in, our mantra is, you know, family first, clients are king. We take great care of our people. So part of taking great care of your people is you have to review them and do it regularly. And we've got what we call our related growth framework, which is a multi dimensional spreadsheet with like, you know, seven large categories of things. We expect with, you know, lots of subcategories. When you open up for the first time, it kind of blows your mind, but it's. We find that if you can do those things well, you end up being a very good consultant to our clients and you grow as a human as well. So what we do, you know, once a year now is we review people against that framework. And everybody's got a mentor. They meet with their mentee regularly, they gather feedback from their peers, and then they synthesize that information into a word document review that touches on what they did well and what areas they need to improve. And everyone's eligible for promotion once a year. And as you can imagine, that takes a lot of time. And we're in the business of selling time for dollars or outcomes for dollars. And so it was literally taking anywhere from 8 to 10 hours to write a review. And a lot of them weren't that good. So, you know, what we did was we thought, hey, how can we use AI to solve this problem? I mean, this is a repeatable thing. You know, this is a known universe of what we expect. So it took us about six months. And this is back in 2023, we started this, but by 2024 we had built out what we call a Persona or an agent, which allowed us to marry up that Excel format with all the 360 degree feedback review to then create a word output, which is now how we do our review process. Now a human still makes sure that information is correct. They review it, they deliver it. You know, the mentees allow, you know, debate, you know, some of those different, uh, outputs. But at the end of the day, it took this process down to like 30 minutes and the reviews are way better. And we estimate, you know, people say AI doesn't provide an roi. For me, it was over half a million dollars a year and save time because we have 350 employees globally and that takes a lot of time to review all those individuals. Now we still sit in review sessions to make sure the reviews are right and accurate before we deliver them. But the act of writing the review, we were able to drastically shorten that.

Unknown: I think, if I can interject, I mean, reviews are the bane of everybody's existence and they're a must again with respect to our HR professionals on the call. They're a must for a file and all that and matching the handbook and everything. But when there's such a bane of existence and you have to stop everything away from the work you're actually being paid to do, I think there's a little bit of non depth that can go into them or, you know, my corporate America experience. I was just asked to write my own reviews and luckily I was smart enough to give me all A's, you know, because I'm not dumb. But it's not like my boss really cared or anything. I mean, he just didn't want to do it because he was VP level. So, uh, I love this that you said there. They take seconds on the hours and they're better.

Matt Rosen: Yeah, they're better. Computers are good at doing repeatable work. But you asked a question of when. What do clients ask for when they come to us? You know, it's different by industry. I would call us somewhat of a generalist firm. We have clients in healthcare, we have clients in professional services, we have clients in finance, we've got Clients in private equity, a lot of manufacturing, distribution clients. But most people are coming to us, uh, with the thought that they need to do AI. They might have a couple of use cases in mind. They might. They've generally tried a few things. They've tried to do something with Copilot or Claude or Chat gbt. And the challenge they often run into is they're having to upload their corporate data and documents and information to somebody else's interface. And the challenge they've got is nobody knows which tool is going to win. It might be multiple winners, but, you know, nobody has a crystal ball. I mean, OpenAI is under a lot of pressure. So if you were to go all in on CHAT GBT and put every bit of your information out there, and then ChatGPT doesn't make it, you know, uh, transitioning to another tool set would be difficult. And so we kind of took a do it yourself approach when we solved our own review problem. We built our own technology we call the AI Accelerator. I think we're renaming it Ally, so it has a little bit more personal tone. And we have actually taken that and we provide that to, uh, clients in their environment. So what we do is kind of unique. We have this code base we've built. We drop it into our client's environment and then we help them customize it. And what it does is it keeps their data, their documents, their system integrations in their environment in a secure way on their servers. And then we can call out to all the leading model providers that they want to use. Um, um. And so clients could build this themselves. And a lot of them have or have tried, or you could go and license a software. But we found this is, I kind of like it to a do it yourself approach, not knowing who's going to win at the end of the day, but giving clients an ability to get started quickly and start going after different use cases. And that varies across industries. And that's something we can dive into further if you'd like.

Unknown: I like that because, yeah, I don't think every client, every company out there needs to hire a whole IT team to build their own proprietary AI system. Because you're right, the world is building the plane as we fly it. If I can use another analogy. And so you're giving a framework that sounds really malleable and that keeps up.

Matt Rosen: We've tried to design it that way. And to be honest, we didn't start as a product company. In fact, we were a services firm for the first nine years of our existence. We still basically are a professional services firm. We just have an accelerator that helps our clients get value faster, where they can be up and running in weeks versus months, using their data to train these models and to get output. So we've helped companies with everything from sales effectiveness, getting like sellers up to speed, where they have thousands or tens of thousands of products, helping be able to recommend the right one to clients. You know, we've got a client that had thousands of contracts that had consumer price index increases that they weren't capturing, that salespeople just weren't calling and asking for the negotiated spend that they should have expected for their clients. We were able to put a couple of those contracts accelerator and very quickly help them identify clients where there was opportunity to ask for, you know, a higher price for the service they were delivering that had been agreed upon. They just didn't go back and scan the contract and ask them. You know, we've got a university using it to help them actually develop curriculum. Interestingly, you know, we're talking to some defense contractors that, you know, want to keep data safe and secure and in their environment, but still leverage the latest and greatest models to help them empower their employees. So there's a lot of different use cases. I think that's the hardest part for many organizations is figuring out where to start and then once they are using it, how do they empower people to make it part of their daily workflow? Because there is a learning curve to this. And that's what I think the entire human race is experiencing, is getting through this learning curve. And we're all at kind of different places on this evolution.

Unknown: I think so. I mean, you hear from companies that forbid use, which, that's a fool's errand, right? Yes. People have computers on their, in their hands. Two companies that have built their own, two companies like Citgo in Texas that, you know, built a program, a three year program of using AI, encouraging them to use AI and helping them understand throughout their network how to use it to do reviews. And if you have a hundred words, here's how you feed in what you need. You reminded me of the old days. I'll show my age. But when websites were a thing, you know, we had clients call and go, do I need, do we need one of those website things? You know, and I'm marketer by trade, I go, yes, you do. So because I think there's still a lot of these CEOs going, oh my God, are you kidding me? On top of COVID and the economy and tariffs, everything Now I have to do, I have to do this. And so they're probably so relieved to find Aladda and know that you basically got, you got them. You just need people to give you the right data and teach them how to work within what you've built. Is that what I'm understanding?

Matt Rosen: Yeah. And a lot of it's just, it's really getting through all the information that's out there. Yeah. Having a strong partner like us and there's others out there, but, you know, really helping them navigate, I would say, these waves of change that are coming faster than ever before. You know, I got my start in this field during the dawn of the Internet and E commerce, where everything had an E behind it as E business and E course, E this and E that. And you know, and that went away. And you know, I think AI will actually, as a word, potentially go away in the next five to 10 years. It's just going to be part of what we. It's going to be part of business, going to be part of computing, it's going to be part of what we do. But there are a lot of leaders out there that are a little bit hesitant. They're like, well, I want to wait and see what happens, or I want to dip my toe in the water or, you know, we want to wait and see what happens. Well, there's no waiting. I mean, you know, I'd say the biggest challenge right now is that the model producers are producing capabilities way faster than organizations ability to consume them. And so you have what, you know, give uh, him credit, Nathaniel Whitmore. He's got a podcast called the AI Daily Brief. He talks a lot about the capabilities overhang, where there's way more capabilities being produced than humans are able to actually consume in their environment. That's where firms like mine are trying to help companies figure out how do we take advantage of these things that are coming as quick as they're coming, but do it in a way that's going to be sustainable? And I think that's where, you know, a lot of leaders are struggling, is just to keep up. Because every week one model is jumping ahead another and with capabilities. And I would say, I think the large model providers, the Sam Altmans, the Dario Amades of the world, are probably doing the world a little bit of a disservice talking about all the AI jobs that are, all the jobs are going to be lost to AI when there are going to be jobs and fields created that don't exist, and when demand shrinks up somewhere else, it goes somewhere else and uh, we become much more of a service economy. I think blue collar jobs are having a complete renaissance right now. And so I think while, you know, things are going to change, like with every technology revolution, jobs are destroyed, jobs are created. This one's no different.

Unknown: I love your thought that we won't say the word AI anymore. And of course all of our uh, five year olds out there will be AI natives just like they were digital natives. And it's not such a label and like you said, it's really been around forever. Data management and harnessing and thanks to the original chip. I think you talked to me before about like 360 feedback in these reviews and I don't mean to go off track of where we were, but in addition to scaling, I mean, is there more to that story?

Matt Rosen: Well, it was interesting. How we originally got down this path is we use a system called Performyard, which kind of helps us gather the feedback and create the reviews. And it was interesting. Our chief operating officer Phil Leary actually called them up as well as a few other companies up to be like, hey, are you guys going to have AI in your roadmap anytime soon? Because we weren't going to build our own, call it review automation. We were hoping one of the software vendors that we worked with was going to do it. And literally those conversations were like, yeah, that's like in our roadmap three years from now, now maybe it's gotten a little bit better. But we were like, well hey, we know how to custom build things, so let's build our own. And you know, we actually built this technology for ourselves, not recognizing we were going to have something that was going to be valuable market is when we started showing it off just to show that, hey, everyone's saying they do AI, we really do AI. Did clients always be like, you actually have something there that's super interesting. That's like nothing we've seen yet. So gathering the 360 feedback has gotten, you know, it's something we can leverage AI to do. It's something that helps streamline that process. We still use that platform, but a lot of the review process is now done through, you know, the technology we've built that helps gather the feedback, remind people when it's due, then help synthesize that review into that output, which is what we call the review narrative. Does that answer your question?

Unknown: It does. And I kind of, I just feel like, uh, you're the revolution of reviews. I think you are. And I think more and more companies and Especially our audience listening to this are going to be so relieved to think I can alleviate all the time and energy of labor laboring over reviews to say here's how AI can really help me and I shouldn't be afraid of it. And then of course, you did talk about the human element in that, because that's only fair to people being reviewed, right?

Matt Rosen: Yeah, I don't think it's fair for a human not to review the AI output. And you know, there's also been a lot of articles out lately about people that are interviewing with organizations where they're actually like interviewing with AI avatars or voice agents. I'm not a professional proponent of that at all. You know, we use AI to help, you know, find resumes that we might not otherwise, you know, because we're literally looking at 10,000 resumes to hire. You know, less. I mean, less than 3% is what we hire. But we're using it to help source, we're using it to help scan resumes. We're still having a human review it. You know, we're using it to help generate job descriptions, we're helping with record interviews, transcripts. But at the end of the day, humans are doing the interviews, humans are reviewing the resumes, humans are making the decision of who gets hired who. We're not leaving that to the robots. It's really just accelerating the process and helping our recruiters do more.

Unknown: You're good. Yeah, you're leaving to the recruiters the cream of that crop versus they have to toil and spend all of their time pouring through. They would Never get through 10,000 resumes, by the way, the old fashioned way. I mean, I feel sorry for a career link and all those, you know, indeed, of the world, because I don't know. But you know, it is a speeding train. And so some of the corporations that are lying in wait and they don't know how to act, I think they'll miss out because they. The world's moving on without you. That train is going just jump on. It's like the old Westerns with an open train car. Just find a place and just jump on and get going. And you might make a mistake and it may not be the one for you, but it won't be wrong and you'll at least get your toe in the water and understand. One of our other podcast guests said that and actually a couple led me to believe this and know this, that employees want to use AI at work. They just want to be led and they want an example that their leaders do it their C levels do it and then how does the company want them to and facilitate them to. And there are a lot of leaders that this guest would go to and he'd ask him, when's the last time you used AI? And almost all of them go, I don't. So yeah, he does these 101 workshops with the C level going, okay, let's put in your shopping list or let's do something really, you know, let's come on guys, you have to lead.

Matt Rosen: Yeah. CEOs out there listening that think they're going to go through an AI transformation. There are companies that are not using AI, uh, they need to wake up. I use AI every single day. I use our internal tools to help me, you know, figure out where are we on our sales pipeline or recruiting pipeline, you know, what do I have to do for the day. Helping me prepare for meetings, helping me prepare for interviews, helping me prepare to meet with people and ask good questions and help think of creative ways to solve their issues. I early on when we championed this AI initiative, I went out and started getting myself up to speed. I actually did a bunch of interviews, you know, to get myself proficient in AI. I continue to do that today. I've since gone on to build probably five different apps for myself and my family using a tool called Lovable, which is easy way for a non coder to approach coding. And I've done some stuff with Claude code as well and I've shown it off to my team to be like, hey, this is not just something I'm asking you to do, this is something I'm doing.

Unknown: I do.

Matt Rosen: And so it's like I'm going to expect them to know it and use it. I've got to set the tone. But then going a step further, you know, we had to develop a curriculum to get people up to speed. So we had to find training, we developed a lot of our own training and then we've had to reinforce that training. And so just by telling people, hey, go buy your own tool and get really good at it. Well, that's great from an individual standpoint, but it doesn't help your enterprise get better. And so that's why like our framework and there's other frameworks out there are really key in providing enterprise context in building employees tasks and enterprise workflow. So they actually do use it every day and they're not prohibited from say putting stuff into a cloud or a chatgpt because frankly people have their phone, they're going to do it anyway. So it's Better that you keep your corporate data in your walls and train people what is and is not acceptable. But to the employers that are out there, just either banning tools altogether or not giving direction, that's a recipe for failure.

Unknown: Uh, well, it absolutely is. One of my latest guests we talked about, so you can empower a sales team to use AI and build their leads list and they're, you know, basically their own Salesforce. Right. So I do think about the pro, the future of Salesforce, but kind of their own CRM. Um, so when they leave you, do they take it with them? And they can anyway, because it's on there. I mean, what do you. I mean it's going to cause a bunch of other processes, thoughts and policies.

Matt Rosen: I don't know too many amazing m salespeople that don't have other clients numbers and phone numbers on their phone or somewhere else.

Unknown: Yeah, you're right, you know.

Matt Rosen: Yeah. I mean you have non competes, non solicits, those may or may not hold up based on your state, but you have to believe, you know, those relationships are going to follow your really best people. But when it comes to corporate information, there's a lot of stuff that just shouldn't be uploaded to your, you know, 20amonth Claude or chat GPT. And there's lots of instances of security holes and breaches. And if you're HIPAA information or credit card information, social, I mean that's where there needs to be governance, you know, in these organizations and some, you know, frameworks and walls to keep that data from just getting out in the public. But I mean, if you've reached a certain age, you've applied for so many credit cards, your data's been leaked somewhere at this point in time, um, I

Unknown: do have some friends of an age ago, I'm not gonna let them have my info. I go, trust me, you know, now they at least in hospitals will ask you if they can use your tissue for stuff, but for so many years they never asked you stop it. But I think there's a whole new definition of HR and talent development and policies and legal intellectual property. The whole world is turning on its head and I find it exciting. And I think if you don't look toward the future with an eye toward it's exciting and how can I leverage this from my company, my people, my goals, my business, then you're going to be left in the dust, right? Yeah.

Matt Rosen: And I think it's easy for folks to sit back and be like, well, this is going to be like blockchain or something. That didn't go anywhere or, you know, the whole, um, augmented reality glasses or something. There's been a number of examples of recently things that had a lot of hype and went nowhere. This is not one of them. This is going to be game changing. And, hey, it's understandable. It's something new. You know, there's a lot of negative press about it. I think it's normal for people to be hesitant when all they hear is doom and gloom if they turn on the news. But if, you know, they can get into one of these tools and start using it, start playing with it, start understanding how it can be helpful, you know, I think a whole new perspective can open up. And so that's why I think it's imperative for the listeners to they, if they haven't at the very least gone and licensed, you know, Claude with like a, um, $20 a month edition or Gemini or ChatGPT to go out and do that. And if your organization's not offering it, kind of get yourself up to speed. It doesn't take much, but it's going to be. These are going to be critical skills that are needed for the future.

Unknown: I agree with you, and that's why we do this. And with guests like you that are really doing it, that you're more than not afraid. You embraced it early on, and we. It can be such an empowering productivity tool for the people that you have on board now. And you will identify the cream of the crop, the who that's going to take your business forward. And there are some people who won't adopt it, and that's okay, then they might be the ones that do lose their jobs. Right? And I don't want anybody to lose their job. I want people to feed their families. But the fact of the matter is it's here to stay. The train has left the station. And so we want to encourage people to be positive and think what is based on what you're showing and working with your clients. On one of my first forays was my son was sponsoring an ad club Chili Cook Off. I'm like, oh, I guess I have to participate. So I just asked Chad, you know, how do you judge up Hormel chili? And it gave me ideas. I didn't follow all of them, but I won. I won this huge Super Bowl. And I'm like, then I. I did admit it at the end. And they're like, that's cheating. I go, you didn't say that was the rule. It's not cheating. And, you know, you can Do I hate to say this to my fellow designers in the advertising business, but a logo with about. I did a recent logo for a dog sitting service and it uh, took me five minutes at the most. Two versions that it fed me. It's perfect and it's lovable and I went and got them printed. So even that kind of entree, like you're saying, Matt, if you're too afraid to do that, you're not going to be able to adopt it in your organization. So just go do something silly.

Matt Rosen: Yeah, we've encouraged everyone to go out and experiment and for our, you know, developers, their jobs are changing it. You know, these engines do write really good code and that's where they focused on first. And then you know, an organization where we used to, you know, sell time for dollars, we've had to really pivot to do more value based contracts where it's not about how this person, how many hours they worked, it's about what was the output at the end of the day, which means they have to work smarter. And it's more about are they building the right things versus how much are they building. Because building is the easy part. It's thinking about what's the problem we're trying to solve, who's the audience we're solving it for, how are they going to incorporate it. And then once you feed the AI that it's great at producing the output and then you still have to get it in people's hands, get them using it. But it is changing the way we work and it's been impacting consulting first and you hear about all these other field it's going to impact and the only way to stay uh, ahead of it is to start working with it and figuring out how to incorporate it. And yeah, I had some fun with it too. You know, one of the biggest is a fun story I like to share is that I built this family meal planning app. You know, I have two girls and you know a working wife and I do a lot of the cooking. I have a nanny that helps. But you know, between me and her doing the shopping, doing the cooking and then trying to figure out what we wanted to eat, it's kind of time consuming. And so I built an app with all our recipes. Add 100 more and they vote on what they want. It creates a shopping list, it deducts what we have in the pantry and anyone called and say, what are we having for dinner? And I'm like, go look at the app.

Unknown: I love that. Oh my, you could sell that.

Matt Rosen: Matt yeah. If I was a business consumer guy, I could. Yeah. The whole voting thing, I don't think that exists out there. But it was really fun creating that. It showed me how easy it was and how approachable it was to create my own app and actually launch it and get people using it.

Unknown: So I think the things we don't really. Yeah. Things we don't really want to do, but we do for our families. Like you just said, family first. You still do it, but you spend two minutes doing it after you set it up. And not every Sunday going, oh, my gosh, now what are we gonna have? And fall back on the same old chili that they're sick of. So I'm gonna. I'll steal that idea. I love that you talked about this will change the nature of work. So we can talk about COVID and work from home and how do we make sure people are working. And, you know, I come from a, uh, billable by hour business. And that's all changed too, because it's all about productivity. And sometimes we don't even have the, the ability, even in a group or, uh, to understand what the real problem is that we're trying to solve. One person lays on the table what they believe the problem is, and we all work on that, whatever. But sometimes that's not the problem. Right.

Matt Rosen: Yeah.

Unknown: Einstein said, give me an hour to solve a problem. I'm going to send, spend 55 minutes thinking about it. And then five minutes thing what I think the answer is. And so the freedom to use our brains to take that information that, uh, our assistant AI gives us. I hope that people use their time wisely and don't just fill it in with non, you know, non meaningful minutes, because all of a sudden we can be free to ideate and strategize and take that good information. And we, I think in businesses, we're not that good at letting people just sit for an hour and ruminate. You know, we always wanted action and billable hours and everything. But the gold comes in the human brain.

Matt Rosen: Yeah. Still, I think, I think a negative outcome of COVID is people book themselves literally back to back, where, you know, on a good, really productive day, I might have four or five meetings because I was going and visiting clients or meeting with someone for lunch. And now after Covid, I mean, there were days where I'd have 20 meetings in a day. And finally I was like, enough. I'm like, I'm going back to my old schedule because I want time to think and follow up and prepare. But I'll talk to people all the time. They're like, I've just been on back to back all day. I haven't had a break since 8am it's like, I think we've kind of gotten to this mode of, you know, it used to be a five minute conversation. People schedule like a 30 minute Zoom meeting when it's literally used to be, I'm going to stop by your office, have a quick chat and we're going to figure it out in five minutes. And so I think that's why you see a lot of people pushing for a return to office. We've always been global, we've always been distributed. So for me it's a little bit harder. But we've had to encourage people to like, hey, schedule time to think and schedule time to follow up and ruminate on ideas if you will. Because ultimately once these, you know, agents can do a lot of the work for us, it's going to be like what is the work we want it them to do? And so you have to give time for critical thought to that rehanded off.

Unknown: I just think a lot of corporations don't reward time to think because it can seem idle or employees are led to believe they can't just be perceived sitting there.

Matt Rosen: I think the big thing is rewarding outcomes. That's. Yeah, that's the way I've always thought about things. I've always grew up in kind of a business development role. And you had a quota and what you did to hit it was somewhat up to you. It's kind of running your own business. And that's why I eventually decided to start my own, because it wasn't a desk job. It allowed me the freedom and autonomy to, you know, come up with my own schedule. But I knew there was a goal I had to hit because if I didn't, then I didn't make any money or didn't have a job. And now granted, not every role is like that. Maybe they need to be where it's like, let's focus on the outcomes. And knowing the path to get there is not always a linear one. And it's not always based on how long are you sitting at your desk, but how good are you at using the tools and the peers around you to drive to an outcome.

Unknown: Yeah. When we went away from timesheets, the bane of existence, I had a client, I told them we did that and he goes, how do you know people are being productive? And I said, bob, um, you know people, your people are productive and so do I. I Don't. And timesheets, it just dragged them down. The minute I got rid of it, they jumped for joy. And so, Matt, this just disturbs everything, right? The 40 hour week, the 20, 80 hour year. And what are you incenting on and what are you rewarding based on a review that he showed up every day? No, no. The world is changing. And again, I just think we got to stop, step back. What do we need in our organization? What goal do we have? What money are we trying to make? Who do we need to do it and what do we need them to do? And if AI facilitates 50, 60% of that old traditional job, it frees them up to be more contributors. It's rather exciting, I think.

Matt Rosen: Yeah, I'm an optimist. I think it's going to be great for us. I mean, I think about the diseases this is going to help people cure. I think about free time. It's going to give people back, you know, more time to spend with families. I'm a big proponent. I mean, it's got its dark side, it's got its negative side, but I tend to look at the bright side of things and I'm really excited to be, you know, in a technology company. You know, this is the second revolution during my career like this. The first one is the dawn of the Internet and this one's coming faster and more furious than that was. And it's, it's both exciting and scary all at the same time. But you know, it's one of those, if you can kind of get jump on a surfboard and learn how to surf it, you're going to be very successful in this next revolution.

Unknown: You're going to fall off in the wave and drink a lot of salt water, but get back on.

Matt Rosen: Exactly.

Unknown: My guest today, and I'm so grateful to be with Matt Rosen. He's the founder and CEO of Alada and their theme line is Accelerate Growth with Digital Excellence. And he has ridden that wave for 10 years and changing with the times. And his words are, we work with clients to craft unique customer experiences, identify revenue generating opportunities and improve operational efficiencies. And you've heard today all of the ways in which he does that and more importantly, his vision and how he thinks. Matt, for you to give us this 40 minutes today, I'm truly grateful. Thank you so much.

Matt Rosen: Yeah, great to be on the show. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed the discussion.

Unknown: Thanks for listening to Talent in the Age of AI. If this conversation gave you new ways to grow in your own work and to better support your people. Follow the show and share it with others in your HR and Talent Network members get even more full episode transcripts, extended show notes, and companion resources to help you put these insights into action. Learn more and join us at talentintheageofai.com we're here to help leaders create, curate and connect what's needed to build tomorrow's workforce today. See you next time.