The Influencers: Digital Transformation

A few genuinely interesting data points surface (C-suite AI self-rating of 1/5, Disney token tracking) but the episode is heavily padded with a Central Park dog anecdote, a coffee flavour optimization tangent, and a gym VO2max story that consume several minutes and deliver nothing actionable for a B2B operator.

“Maybe I want it to be a little more bitter with a little more chocolate notes. And I could prompt an AI tool to say, hey, I have this particular coffee. Can you enhance the flavor through blending other coffees to achieve this taste that I want?”

“I had a conversation yesterday with three C-level executives at a major global media company, and I asked them each to rate themselves on their scale of AI understanding from one to five, and all of them gave themselves a one.”

The AEIO maturity framework is a rebranded version of standard technology adoption curves, and the headline insight - AI literacy is the new Excel - is one of the most recycled takes in current AI discourse; almost nothing here challenges conventional thinking or offers a genuinely counterintuitive perspective.

“your job is in jeopardy because that skill learning AI now is the same thing as basically 20 years ago having a proficiency in Excel, right? It's just going to be table stakes.”

“it's a behavior change that most people need to go through, is how do we take a look at any activity that we're doing and say, how can AI or some sort of automation or some sort of intelligence make this better?”

Stephen Golos has genuine practitioner credibility - 25 years in digital advertising, active engagements with Disney, NBCUniversal, TikTok, and Paramount - but he presents as a transformation trainer and consultant rather than an operator who has run revenue, product, or marketing at scale, and the episode does not extract depth proportional to his client access.

“my main sort of client base are some of the larger media companies across the globe. So companies like Disney, NBCUniversal, TikTok, Paramount, and other big companies in the advertising space.”

“I just got back from Brussels last week, where I helped and participated in running an AI forum across a bunch of sales houses and broadcasters in Europe. And we had about 60 attendees”

There are isolated concrete anchors - Disney tracking employee token usage, a CRO whose team spends 20 hours a week on pricing across two people, named AI tools (Claude, Copilot) - but the majority of claims remain vague process advice without supporting metrics, timelines, or outcomes.

“Disney is tracking the number of tokens that their employees are using across the tools that they use”

“I spoke this morning with a chief revenue officer from a large broadcaster and talking about pricing. basically pricing is something that they spend, I think he said something like two people spend 20 hours a week on pricing.”

The host asks uniformly broad, open-ended questions with no follow-up probing and zero pushback on vague claims; several minutes are spent on an irrelevant origin story, and the session closes as a season-finale farewell rather than a substantive interview - a textbook soft PR chat.

“So what would you say does organizations hold back and how would they be best advised to go from one grade to the next?”

“Wow so basically it kind of trying to build in AI into every kind of step you take and then always with a view towards improving it optimization so kind of that turbocharger of personal life”