AI adoption is outpacing organizational capability

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. You're listening to The Influencers Digital Transformation, a Hogan Lovells podcast exploring how technology is reshaping industries, regulation, and the practice of law. Each episode features conversations with leaders driving change, offering insights to help you navigate innovation with confidence.

This is Season 4. Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of The Influencers, our podcast conversation on digital transformation and law. I'm Leo von Görlack, and with me in the studio today is Stephen Golos, the founder of one of New York's preeminent consulting firms for digital advertising and AI-enhanced marketing and selling, Stephen Golos Consulting, New York. So today we take a deep dive into how artificial intelligence changes sales and marketing, and in particular, their responsible teams and how to bring that change about.

With that, Stephen, great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me, Leo. Appreciate the offer. Stephen, before we dive into our actual subject, AI-enhanced marketing, teams, changing teams, and all that comes along with it, perhaps a few words about how you and I got to know each other.

It's a great story, and it's one of these sort of wonderful New York stories. I was walking around Central Park with my dog, as I try to do every day, and I was walking around. There's a little boat lake where you can take remote control boats. And I was sitting on a bench.

And this couple next to me was speaking German. And I'm in the process of learning German. So I became interested in their conversation. I didn't understand very much of it, but certainly was trying to catch some words here and there.

Leo, you had gone off to, I think, get something to eat. And your wife was looking at my dog. And I said to your wife, and correct me if my pronunciation is wrong, I said, Zheist Gigi, right? Which is, her name is Gigi, which is my dog.

And so we got into a conversation and then you came back and you and I got into a conversation about what we do professionally and AI became a topic of conversation and then we went pretty in-depth in terms of AI transformation around organizations and that was the kismet that brought us together. Wonderful. Thank you for reminding me and I think it was not really the German language because that isn't qualified for bringing people together, but it was either the dog, your wonderful dog, or it was the topic of AI.

But let's today stick a little bit more on the AI side and perhaps starting just with your current consulting practice. Who do you work with? What kind of teams do you train? And what are the problems you try to solve on a very general level?

I've had consulting practice now for the past 15 years. I've been in the digital advertising space for over 25. And 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.

And my focus in terms of my training and consulting has been transformation. And if you think about what these companies have been doing in terms of transformation over the past, let's call it five years. It's the transformation from a business that has been very focused on analog advertising, linear TV advertising now to selling advertising across their streaming services. So a lot of my training and consulting work is working with these teams on that transformation.

Fast forward to about six months ago, seven months ago, obviously there's big changes in terms of AI. And so I saw it as an opportunity for me to grow my business, grow my own sort of knowledge base. And now a lot of the work I'm doing is helping these organizations from a transformation perspective move from a world where AI wasn't something that they need to think about to now how does AI impact both their internal operations as well as their go-to-market products. That's the main focus of my business.

All right. So I think this topic of transformation is in the focus and let's stay with that and that's perhaps go to the beginning of it when you get into an organization you need to find out where the actual problems lie and and you kind of need to diagnose it i mean is it that there is a lack of knowledge a lack of confidence certain leadership disalignment or whatever the type of problem or the conglomerate of problems may be how do you find that out yeah so it It interesting because it varies across the organization So I have a framework that I developed called AEIO and that stands for, are they an organization that's avoiding AI?

Are they experimenting? Are they integrating? Or are they orchestrating? And you can quickly see within an organization whether or not they are just dabbling, or on the other ends, they're orchestrating AI as something that is going to change across their entire organization.

And so it's really interesting to sort of diagnose these companies, because if you look at it in terms of a histogram of where these companies are, I would say most are past the avoidance stage. They understand that they need to be doing something, I would say most of them are in the experimenting stage, trying to figure out how to experiment. Many of the companies I'm working with are now also moving from experiment to integration. And there are very few that are at the orchestration level.

I think this is still very early on where we need to understand what that orchestration looks like across organizations. So that's how I think of it from a macro perspective. But then from an individual perspective and from a leadership perspective, it's sort of the same framework. And it's really interesting.

What I'm finding, in particular, with senior leadership is that if you look at senior leadership across, in particular, the media space, a lot of them feel like they're missing out on something, that they don't know AI very well. But I'm hearing this across basically all the senior leaders that I'm working with. And so interesting, 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. So this is not a bad thing. It's just the reality is in a lot of instances, organizations think they should be further along than they really are. But we're just in any one of this.

This is still really early on. So that's interesting. And let's stay with this individual perspective that you just touched upon and there you say is kind of some are in the experimental phase some are in the integration phase how do you move people up the ladder so that they are kind from wow this is interesting i would like to look into it into wow yes i have a certain fluency in these topics i am literate and then just becoming more and more intrinsically knowledgeable about it this is a a marathon, not a sprint, meaning this change is not going to happen overnight for individuals.

So I think about sort of my own AI journey, and I think about like, let's take a year ago. So a year ago, this is my morning. I'd wake up, I'd make coffee, I'd walk the dog, I'd do my puzzles. I love doing crossword puzzles in the morning, and then I'd go to the gym.

And so if I look at those five things this year and how AI has changed my way of thinking, I think across my entire day, and I think this is 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? So let's take a couple of things throughout the day. Coffee, right? How can AI make coffee better?

Well, I have this particular type of coffee I like. 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?

Right. So a very, very simple example. Another example is, again, going to the gym. So I have a particular metric that I track.

It's called VO2max when I work out. And I've been hitting a peak in terms of my VO2max. So again, my behavior change now is, okay, how can I use AI to help me overcome these hurdles? So I took all my Apple health data.

I uploaded it into Claude. I had to create a dashboard and I basically said to Claude, be my own personal trainer and put together, based on what you see in my health profile, put together a training program that will get me past this peak. So I think for a lot of folks, it's really about a behavior change and going through your day and saying, how could AI help and enhance what I'm doing to make my life more efficient, better, to make myself smarter, and then ultimately from a work perspective to make me more efficient and more effective at work.

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 but then you also mentioned the organizational side of it and something somehow similar applies to organization And we see a lot of challenges there, significantly more even than on the individual side to make that, I think, progression up the ladder. So what would you say does organizations hold back and how would they be best advised to go from one grade to the next?

Yeah, I think, again, it's the same framework. It's thinking about what are the activities across an organization both at an individual level, at a functional level, and then at an organizational level. Take a look at your week and your cadence for your week and think about what are these little incremental changes that we can make to make what we're doing more efficient and better. So, for example, 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. So within organizations, if you look at these opportunities for efficiency, we went through and we discussed, okay, where is that data being pulled from? How do you think you can make it more efficient? And then let's take a look at that.

And then let's start to build a plan to make, again, that pricing discovery and that pricing exercise much more efficient. So I think organizations and the way I train organizations and coach organizations, take a look at two columns, right? What are the things that we're doing in terms of the time it takes to get these things done? And then if we looked at AI and how AI can improve these, what's the level of time commitment to automate these things?

And then what's the impact? So take a look at those things that don't take a lot of time to implement, but can have a huge impact in terms of your ability to make the business more efficient. So again, it's taking a look at, much like I look at all my activities across my day and how to make them more efficient, how do you take a look at all of your activities across your week to make it more efficient? And I think it's actually interesting.

One thing that I found, it's a really important skill set, that needs to happen at both the individual and the organizational level is this concept of intellectual curiosity and just being curious and just being curious of how can I solve these problems in a way that will change the organization. And don't be afraid to break things. Don't be afraid to go into an AI tool and experiment. You're not going to break things.

That's the way to get So that seems super important that you just instill that notion of, yeah, everything just is worth to be considered and considered to be improved and to be improved on the basis of some advanced technology. And to get us ever closer there, there are many hurdles. One of them being, where do you actually allocate in a given organization that power, that authority, that accountability to make that move forward? So how should organizations structure themselves and how should they allocate the responsibilities to bring about what you just mentioned?

I love what Disney is doing right now. So if you look at Disney, and this is public, Disney is tracking the number of tokens that their employees are using across the tools that they use. I think Disney uses maybe Copilot. That has to happen at the orchestration level.

So again, thinking about from an organizational standpoint, I think all organizations at some point will have a chief AI officer. Again, if you want to get to that O piece, that orchestration piece, which I discussed, you're going to have to have somebody that orchestrates this from a top level. So I think having that orchestration at the top level is incredibly important. And if you think about from an ownership standpoint, I think AI is now falling into a bunch of different functions.

It's falling into legal for compliance and legal purposes. It's falling into IT. It's falling within the function. But again, my sense is that you need to have that overall orchestration.

But then there also needs to be functional expertise. So I work with a lot of companies who have allocated one or two people within their function to be the AI experts. In fact, 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, I think 60 or 70 attendees, and each attendee was sort of the go-to AI expert within their organization, within the sales function.

So I think it has to happen at the orchestration level, but also there needs to be functional expertise. And you basically if you running a function whether you a small company or a large company you need to find that one person who you can trust as your main point of contact and your main center of knowledge about AI that can disseminate all that AI knowledge across a particular function Okay, great. So now we looked into this AI journey on an individual level, on an organizational level to become ever more literate, to become ever more native in applying it and bring it all under your own skin and that of your organization.

If you now just break this down into something even more practical than you just outlined in terms of kind of a program, perhaps something you can do as a routine as the month progresses. Is there something what you can recommend you should do to yourself in order to get easily going into the rhythm we just talked about? Yeah, I think it's a self-diagnosis thing. It's basically thinking about, and it's a question I think everyone should be asking themselves, is when did I reach for an AI tool without being prompted by somebody else?

Because again, to the point before, it's about behavior change. You're not using AI because your manager tells you or your organization tells you, but because you personally realize that AI can be much more efficient. I think another question people can be asking is, what did I use AI for this week? that I couldn't have done without it?

And then are there other things I could be doing with AI that I feel like can help me be more efficient? So I think there's a lot of, I think, self-reflection needs to go into this and a lot of being humble, being humble and understanding that this is ground zero for a lot of folks that are just learning how to use these tools. And to the extent they can be incredibly self-aware about what they do and don't know, that I think is key to that journey. I think also like using the AI tools, like almost like eating your own dog food, right?

So if you're trying to learn AI, and this is something that I'm doing with my learning German, is use AI to teach you. So go into an AI tool, whether you're using Claude or Chat or whatever you're using, and have a conversation and say, I'm looking to learn AI. Can you put together a learning plan for me so that over the course of the next 60 days, I become proficient enough in AI where that behavior change happens. And you'd be surprised at the output of these tools and how they can help you.

These tools can push you micro lessons every day. So again, my sense with the individual, in particular, the management level, if you're not making these changes now, and if you're not changing your behavior in learning AI, not to be crass about this or blunt about this, 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 something you're going to need to know.

So challenge yourself, put it upon yourself to put together these learning plans and ultimately get to a point where you can move from, you know, that experimentation to how you're integrating this across your work. And then ultimately, if you can become that conductor, that orchestrator, that will basically make your job incredibly secure. I love this image of ground zero, eating your own dog food of this humbleness, just really starting from the absolute bottom and just be willing to learn and to absorb it to just make everything better that is around you and that is a task that is put on your table.

I think that is very, very inspirational and very helpful on a practical level. So, Stephen, thank you a great deal. And thank you, everybody. that was actually the last episode and that concludes our fourth season of the influencers we will be back in fall but we will change the focus slightly so up until now for the last four years we have focused on how the technology is changing the law how the technology is changing business going forward we will go into the topics that just steven touched today and that is how will you thrive on an individual level you yourself and the people around you we do that for professional service people like us we do that in specifically for lawyers like us so that just we get a sense of how life will look like in the future and how we will thrive in that new world with that thank you once again steven that was terrific thank you everybody have a great summer and we will be back in fall.

Take care. Goodbye. Thanks, Leo. Thank you for listening to The Influencer's Digital Transformation from Hogan Lovells.

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