Evolving Executive Leadership with Agentic AI (Elise Neel)

So everybody talks about agentic AI, but there are very few talking about how you actually use this with executives and for executives. But today we're going to change that. So let's jump right in. All right.

Welcome back for another episode of What's the BUZZ?, where leaders share how they have turned type into business outcomes. Today we'll talk about how you can evolve executive leadership with the help of Agentic AI and who better to talk about it than someone who's actively doing that. Elise Neel.

Hey, Elise. Thank you so much for joining. Hi. Thanks for having me.

Hi, everybody. Awesome. Hey, I saw your session at the AI Summit in New York at the end of last year. And I saw so many great points that you shared there that resonated with me, and, that's why I reached out and, asked if you'd be open to sharing them with the, audience here today.

but maybe not everybody is familiar with you yet. Could you share a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do? Sure. again, thank you so much for having me, and I think through our discussion today, recognizing that we're all learning, we're all growing, we're all navigating this new world collectively together, and figuring out the bumps along the way.

I'm coming as a humble person, trying to figure out. What we're doing at Panasonic and then how to really share that with the community of other innovators, both your listeners as well as other leaders as well. So at Panasonic, I have the privilege of leading our strategy and strategic partnerships for the Panasonic Go Initiative. So Panasonic is 106 year old company with a lot of incredible roots in hardware excellence in manufacturing.

And Panasonic Go is our strategic transformation initiative that aims to really. Look at the ways that AI and software can revolutionize our customer touchpoints, our new growth pathways, and really fundamentally change our operating model inside the company. So I have the pleasure of doing that, from a global perspective, which has provided a lot of really incredible stories and challenges and a few successes along the way. Wonderful.

So looking forward to hearing more about the successes and, also the, learnings, that you've made personally and, as part of the organization as well. Like I said, everybody's talking about Gentech AI. there are very few people talking about the impact and the opportunity that it has for executive leaders. But I heard you, share something really impactful how you are thinking about this at Panasonic and how you're going about this.

I'm curious, what are your findings in that journey? Sure. I think that Agen AI really provides a leadership reckoning as we think about an opportunity to redefine operating models, from a leadership perspective. And so in the past transformations as we've looked at just leveraging technology, whether that be, everything from mobile device technology to big data services and analytics, to cloud compute, to 5G technology, to robotics, et cetera.

Agen AI in particular, which to me is defined very differently from just basic bot kind of interactions. one dimensional kind of question response into actual AI that has agency. it really does provide a much larger opportunity beyond just your classic technology upgrade. And so what we learned quickly is that this.

Has an opportunity to fundamentally change our leadership operating model. And so as we set out on our transformation journey at Panasonic, instead of just looking simply at where can we apply AI to automate existing processes, we're really trying to reposition it to say where are the places where humans are the bottleneck? Where are we? The problem as we think about processes and services that.

Have been designed to fit nice and neatly into the way that our human brains operate. And how do we move that to the side to say what would happen if we didn't have scarcity of intelligence and instead we had abundance? What would happen if we didn't have to do linear decision making from point A to point B, but instead could have. Parallel execution or what would happen if we moved from human specific approval chains to different kinds of probabilistic decision outcomes and decision making.

And so what we have started to discover is that some of the greatest gains that I think a lot of people are focusing on, which are real and tangible today, and great, easy, low hanging fruit with using ENT AI to drive productivity. It's not just about the efficient efficiency of implementing those solutions, but what happens when you can add. Massive streams of optionality into the decision framework. And how does that really change the value that we add as leaders, and how we actually apply that into kind of transforming our culture and perhaps building the leaders of the future.

And we've introduced, which I spoke about a little bit at the AI Summit, kind of four different ways that we believe organizations will operate in the future. Today we operate in a human over human, or a human to human construct. We are now seeing humans over AI, as humans are beginning to direct and to, basically look to AI as an additional source of intelligence or productivity. We then quickly move into AI to AI, so machine to machine orchestration.

And we believe that we're not that far away from AI to orchestrate humans. And so as we think about how we push to that third and fourth dyad in this trajectory, it really does rock the world when you think about how it changes, leadership for the future. Absolutely And I think for, many leaders that's a new challenge as, as well on, on top of everything else that you expected to do on a daily basis. managing that, that uncertainty of how are things progressing, where are they going?

Seems like very few people have answers to those questions right now. We're, all writing the playbook as we're going along. but how do you feel leadership needs to evolve and what do leaders need to embrace? Given those uncertainties, but knowing what the direction roughly is.

Yeah, I think there are three takeaways that, that I'm on the personal journey for. And then we're also seeing patterned not just at Panasonic, but inside our customers, inside our partners, and frankly inside of our competitors as well. And so the first big leadership change is around. Our own egos.

And so what we see is that egos are losing and collaborators are winning. And as we think about this shift, it's not just about our human ego in terms of, as a leader, I am paid what I am paid and I am hired to do a role because somebody believed, or a system of people believed that I was really smart, or I was really adept at this particular set of capabilities. Oftentimes, particularly in the mid-manager and lower levels, there's extreme specialty that comes with those specific roles.

And so what ends up happening is we are positioned as, let's ask Elise, or let's ask Andreas, or let's ask somebody else into the room as the expert to help speak on this particular topic. What we're now seeing through the use of Ag Agent AI is that those people who rely on that human intelligence, who believe that they are the smartest person in the room, that believe that all roads lead to the human, and particularly to them, that this breaks down very easily, and the efficiencies and opportunities with Ag agent AI.

Basically fall apart or they don't get realized. And so instead, as we think about collaboration, these machines and LLMs by their very nature, their, inherent nature is to take this swarm complex to think about connections that. that we can't make from a human mind perspective. And as they think about these machine to machine collaborations, they actually are really designed well to collaborate not only among themselves, so machine to machine, but also to help connect dots between humans as well.

And so as we think about this difference between, I am the smartest person in the room. To now, I am the best orchestrator of all of the minds and all of the intelligence, regardless of where it comes from. It really does shift to say, maybe I'm not the smartest person, but I'm the smartest organizer. I'm the smartest articulator, I'm the smartest question asker.

And so now that kind of problem frame articulation is a really valuable tool. The second piece is around okay, if you know that, how do you put it into action? And so we really see the power of orchestration from a leadership perspective is really, a very distinguishing capability that leaders will need to have in the future. And so I heard it said once, by one of our partners at Microsoft who talked about the.

The way that Hollywood organizes a movie. And so maybe from an analogy perspective, this might be easier to understand. When someone sets out to go make a movie in Hollywood, they go and they assemble the best groups of individuals, producers, writers, talent, boom, mic handlers, sourcers, et cetera, and they all come together with a collection of skills that this director or producer kind of felt were correct. They make the movie, they make it with excellence, and as soon as that movie is done.

They all dissipate and they go back to other jobs where they're available for the next task. Yeah. This orchestrating and kind of radial organization making as we think about the assembly of a team or. A set of intelligence for a particular task, project, or execution, I think will create a lot of dynamicism in the org.

Where today we have very structured hierarchies, and so not only are you orchestrating how work gets done between humans and machines and machine to machine, et cetera, providing oversight, providing you know, risk, tolerance, like all privacy, like considerations, all the things that humans do really well. But you're also thinking about these. Assembly of how do I get the best group of people and the best group of intelligence together for a particular task? And then maybe dissipating that over time.

And then the third big learning that we think are is gonna be really important for leaders in the future is really about co-creation. And so I would just challenge everyone, all of your listeners on the line. There is something very different from talking about agentic AI versus actually putting your hand on a keyboard and figuring out how to build it for yourself. The best way that you can lead is to know about it.

This is not a technology that you can just receive PowerPoint docs or read Wall Street Journal articles or hear other people talk about it. You have to figure it out on your own, and the best leaders will differentiate themselves because they will know how to do that. They will not just push it into their downline. And so what we found across the industry and lots of research that we've done with our customer sets and with our partners, is that actually leadership confidence is very high.

I know about iden AI, I know about the opportunities, but their ability to execute and their confidence and execution is extremely low because they haven't spent the time putting those things together, themselves. And so figure out what are the. Like high value tasks that you're doing that are creating constraint. And here's an idea.

If you use an LLM every day, just ask them, where should I be using you better? It's fascinating. Ask an LLM for a 360 review of yourself and just brace yourself. 'cause I did this not that long ago and it was sobering, which is great.

This is how we get better. and so thinking about ways to apply that themselves. So those are the three big things that I would say are pillars that we're navigating through. And I'm doing it also as a.

As a leader myself and trying to fumble my way through, through how to make myself a better leader, more efficient for the future. Great. Great to hear those three examples. I think the, last one isn't always easy to incorporate in your daily work if you have busy schedules, if you're in back to back meetings, calls, what have you, carving out the time to, to sit down and actually.

Get your hands on the keyboard, try to figure this out. Not all of the things are a linear process or success. So going back to it, re iterating, revising, I improving. But I think that's part of that, mindset we need to build, to.

Be informed, be more informed than just, reading about it. it's also become easier than ever to do this yourself, whether you use, LLMs like you said, or, some, other products, co-pilot or what, have you. and the big shift for me is. Is also in, how do you, take away some of the, fear that maybe some of your team members might have, that there's this AI, this intelligence, this nebulous thing.

Nobody really knows where this is going, but. If it does parts of the work that I've been doing, what is my value? What do I bring? And I think a lot of that has to do with shifting how we define work, right?

It's not just about being here for 40 hours and filling a role, like you said. It's about what is the outcome? Who is the outcome for, it's not just about accomplishments, but how do we, how did we get there? And I think reframing that around some of the things that make us unique as humans, that we add to that mix.

Yes, adds a lot of value and brings a lot of reassurance that, hey, yes, we need your expertise. We want your expertise. That's why you're here. Yeah.

I think that it has been a really, it has been a really honest journey and a sobering journey as we think about exactly the question that you're asking, which is, what is my true value? And so I think as we. as I look to myself, a lot of it was around, I'm great. I manage up really well.

I'm helping to orchestrate workflows against the team. I'm packaging together stories. I'm thinking differently from a strategic perspective, and I'm able to take the lessons of leadership over my tenured, career and really apply them there. My lived experiences adds a lot of value to it.

The challenge that I've been experiencing personally is, what happens when every case study of every transformation is now available from a global perspective, not just to me, but to every other competitor that's there? What now sets me apart? How do I really think about. I'm now building and deploying agents that are assisting me and significantly augmenting me as a leader.

what is my differentiation and value? Why should I command the salary that I command? What happens when my agents are more promotable than me because they're learning and adapting faster than I am as a human? And so how do I stay sharp and how do I continue to offer?

My expertise to my company and to my network of colleagues, and how do we learn those pieces together. Now I tend to be a little bit more as somebody who's, who spends a lot of time in innovation and a lot of time on in frontier technology, more on that three to five year journey. So I don't know that this is gonna be a problem for everybody today, but what I do know is if I'm not preparing today for what will happen tomorrow. That I'm gonna have some challenges articulating my value.

How would I put together my resume if I was looking for a new role five years from now? And how is that different? From what I do today, we're seeing some incredible powerhouse individuals who are early, early in their career, brand new people who have never worked in business before, begin to outperform and outshine their thinking and their application of AI agents because they're learning with a new paradigm. And so some of the things that made me so valuable today, like my lived experience, like the fact that I've worked for 20 years and done transformative elements, et cetera, et cetera, that actually creates.

A biased that is not necessarily great because I've done it and figured out the ways that work. Those have all been structured elements that aren't necessarily ready to be thrown away, but that maybe all need to be reevaluated. So is my experience an inhibitor versus an enabler like, like my brain is just going in so many directions. So anyway, all to say, there's a lot here for us to sift through, and I think if we rely on our.

HR leaders, our resource leaders, our technologists, et cetera, to help figure out exactly how these things are gonna work in the future, versus us as leaders modeling it and helping to show and to shepherd the way I think we might be disappointed so we have an opportunity to craft and shape it ourselves. I think that's such an important point here. on, on, a couple different dimensions. One is I think your future value as a leader, as a professional, as an in individual is determined by the strategic, decisions you make today.

Such as getting hands-on, figuring out how does this work, how can I augment myself and do more, do better things, have access to insights, like I said, case studies and whatnot at my fingertips. and then think about How how can I apply this? How can I model this so that my team doesn't just think, Hey, this is a top down thing. Sure.

Yeah. It's, one of those change initiatives. Everybody says we're doing it, but The reality is on. On the ground floor, nobody's really doing it, or my manager doesn't embrace this, so why should I?

No, you have a responsibility, to model that as, as well. And it sounds like, you're doing this personally at, Panasonic, but others, in the organization are doing that too? We're trying, yeah. I think that's very honest and very candid.

and, a lot of times that's the best you can already do. but there was one example that you shared at, the AI Summit that I thought was, so interesting. and I've been a leader myself, and I. No time is of the essence.

you're in, lots of meetings, lots of competing priorities, lots of feedback, alignment alignments. Before the alignment. Before the alignment. And if you take your proposal to your, next level leader, you might get feedback.

You very likely get feedback. Maybe you get different feedback every time, but after, after a couple iterations, after a couple projects, you figure out what he or she usually looks for. and it sounds like you've, got an interesting way to, to approach this and, to save some of the executives time, but also give actionable feedback to the teams working on projects. Can you share a little bit about that?

Sure. so you're referring to some of the work that we're doing for our C-Suite around the deployment of a sparring agent, and our C-Suite has, repeatedly talk about, how do we increase the speed of decision making across Panasonic. So if you are unfamiliar, Panasonic is a Japanese company and one that, embodies the principles of consensus-based decision making. what this does is.

Takes a really long time for decisions to get made, but when decisions get made and consensus is gained, then execution is typically incredibly swift and very, accurate. It's part of the principles around Kaizen, and we have a name for this in the. Japanese language called, which is exactly what you're talking about. It is all of the meetings before the meetings.

And it's the meetings after the meetings. And it's the prep to do the prep to prep the prep, And so this takes an inordinate amount of time. But the reality is exactly as you said. Oftentimes the feedback is similar.

You have new people. We have a rotational system inside of Panasonic, and so it takes a little bit of time. And also the pace of change that we are undergoing as a company along with everybody else in the industry. Is much more rapid.

And so if we continue to take the same amount of time to make decisions, we will continue to fall behind. And so what we have built is a structure where first we have identified. A C-suite individual who has allowed us to go in and to record their meetings. All of this is standard, as many of you do it today already for note taking and summarization.

But what it captures is it captures tone, it captures language, it captures intent. It captures the essence, or at least begins to capture the essence of some of the feedback that is provided to the downline as you think about how do we prepare presentations to move them forward. And so basically taking those meeting notes in minutes. Taking the tonal components, taking strategic documents and things like that, things that can be readily shared, and used for training to the downstream teams.

Those have been assembled from an agentic perspective. Now what we have is we have a kind of living, breathing dynamic agent that the downline teams can begin to interact with on behalf of the executive themselves. And so whether that is a deck review, whether that is a one-on-one preparatory kind of situation, whether that is. Feedback as they think about performance reviews, whether that is, how do I think about, what would my boss say when he is trying to collaborate with the CMO, with the CEO, et cetera.

As you think about dynamics that happen in meetings, our sparring agents on behalf of the C-Suite have allowed the downline teams to learn at a faster pace to improve the speed of decision making time so that when the. Deck or the deliverable or the outcome goes to that particular individual. A lot of that feedback is already in place. The other piece that happens is that the downline is also providing feedback of into the agent of, that's different than what I heard in the meeting.

How should I really think about this? That's not gonna work, boss man, because you're missing all of this other, here's what's really happening on the line. There's a lot of stuff, of course, that leaders don't have insight into, and so that also gets bolstered into the agent, so it becomes bi-directional. So the agent isn't just for the benefit of the downline, it's also for the benefit of the leader as well as they're thinking about.

Okay, now you know, Susie has given me this. Piece of material that they're asking for a decision on. Let me ask the agent, what do I need to know about this process? What am I missing in my analysis, et cetera.

And so what we see is this constantly evolving and learning and adapting and healing notion that happens with this agent that our aim is that. Over time, this reduces executive decision making speed, by 50% or so. It increases their ability to make decisions. Yes.

And so this is a really interesting work in progress. It took quite a bit of time to convince, our C-suite that this is a viable and really strong opportunity. And again, what it does, going back to our previous conversation, is it challenges that some of these things can be automated. and when you think about the decisions that are, you're being asked to make every day as a leader.

Most of them could be automated. and potentially you would make a different decision if you had different optionality. You had different exposure to options that may not have been present before in our kind of human thinking. And so this is an active project that we have first with our CTO, and then we've got a couple other C-suites kind of lined.

Maybe not, maybe the line isn't wrapped around the block. But, but we're hoping to demonstrate some of these pieces. And what it also does is it teaches the organization. Sets a precedent for what leadership will look like in the future, and it helps us learn and adapt along the way.

Now that sounds like a real tangible example of top level, leadership sponsorship and, embracing and encouraging this and also showing this in action while at the same time also looking for some tangible and realistic savings, time savings, picking up additional speed and so on. Elise, thank you so much for, sharing this. we're getting close to the end of the show. So I'm very appreciative of you spending time with us today and sharing what you're doing at Panasonic around Ag Agentic AI to help executive leadership scale better and also promote the, notion of more AI in the business for business benefit, for individuals benefit.

Elise, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. And be brave, everyone. We can do it together.

Wonderful. All right folks in the audience. See you next time for another episode of What's the BUZZ?. Bye-bye.