Right.

So what they did in that process is he actually said, and this is something that if I were teaching you, we could do this, is say, um, "Let's imagine that the value that your business creates is gone, like it's been wiped out." And so in his case, he said the US telephone system is completely eliminated.

We're starting from scratch with the current technologies, the current, you know, political and regulatory and financial environment, and we're going to create the best version of what we can create now.

In that case, they ended up creating, like, in that one year, a string of inventions that took some of them decades, including the basis of cellular technologies and voicemail and IVR and all these different things, just that one year.

So for you, what I'd say is if we imagine the, the business that you lead, if you imagine that was eliminated and you were starting from scratch, so you're not starting from what you have and trying to make it better.

But it's hard, and I don't know how you build that capacity in people.

Yeah.

So for me, it was baked into the way that I thought at a very early age because of, um, chess.

But I would've thought that that would've been squarely, squarely in the realm of agents in terms of what they could do in the most optimal way.

Well, where, where they, where they can be very valuable is for, like, SMB 24/7 support.

So if you're, if you're a bank, let's say, like BECU, I love the fact that I can, you know, update my spending limit on the fly in the app.

Like, I don't wa- I don't need to call someone for that.

So I think it's part of, and like you said in the book, is figuring out what are those points of, of interface that matter for relationship building versus the ones where they just want a quick and easy fix.

And so ironically, like McDonald's, for example, piloted two fully autonomous drive-throughs where you didn't interact with a person.

And you would think that's a very s- short transactional experience.

An audience member asked Brian whether there's a point where the cost of AI exceeds the cost of a human worker doing similar work.