[applause]

I don't think that there's a rule.

Like, I think there's some people who aren't career-focused, and they are all about exploration, and they wanna see as much of the world as possible and have as much amazing experience as possible, and building a career, career isn't as important, or at least it isn't at that moment.

I think that's fine if that's what, if, if, if that's what makes somebody happy.

There's other people who are so focused on money, they'll do anything they can to make the most amount of money.

I could have made a lot more money if I was just chasing the money, right? So what I do isn't about chasing money.

I do what I love, and I do what I'm passionate about, and I happen to make money from it, but that's not really the ends to the mean.

I would almost call it the implementation, the acting upon what is generated in a way, right?

Yeah.

I would say right now there's really three levels of AI that most people need to understand.

The first, the one oh one, if you will, is the call and response, which is, like, you put in a prompt, you get an answer.

And that's just, like, a better version of Google in a lot of ways, and it's obviously it's conversational and does a lot, but anything you need to know in any format, you could ask ChatGPT or, uh, Grok or, uh, Claude or Google's Gemini, and you're gonna get the answer back.

So that's kind of the one oh one.

Two oh one is automation, where you can use a tool like Zapier, for example, or Make.com or NAN, where basically you can say, "I want you to take this Google sheet, extract these three lines from the Google sheet, write a blog post about that and post it." That's kind of an automation, where basically you build these steps where AI is kind of the blood, if you will, in between the organs of the individual applications that you're using.

What are you telling the largest and most prominent businesses you talk to that they should be doing? How are you counseling them? And I'll give you the second part, which is just what would you say to the consumer out there that's either in the workforce or has children? It'd be a lot of different perspectives.

He also shares an optimistic view of what rises in value once memorizing and repeating information stops being the point.

I speak a-about AI on stages all around the world, and one of the most popular questions I get after I speak is, "What tool should I be using?" And I always push back with, "What is the most important problems that you need to solve?" Because a lot of the tools...

Th-there's tools out there to solve any, uh, you know, individual task that you're looking to solve.

But if you don't have an idea of the big problem you're trying to solve, you're gonna be an inch deep and a mile wide.

And when you look at your professional progress or your business progress a year later, you're not gonna really have moved the needle.

Where instead, if you focus on three big problems, so you think about, "What is my growth limiting factor?" Or, "What is the area where I wanna be more efficient? And I'm just gonna focus on that, and I'm gonna take one step at a time in terms of building an automation or building an agent that can help me," well, then the tools kinda fall into place.

Where if you're just inundated with tools, you're just kinda playing with a lot of things, and again, you're not really accomplishing anything.

What's one non-obvious insight or interview or something that, that your research for the book revealed?

Become the best builder, plumber, whatever it might

be.

We've had this knowledge economy for so long where people were compensated for possessing knowledge.

And that could be knowledge and knowing how to code, knowing how to write a contract, knowing how to read an x-ray, knowing how to do someone's taxes.

But those are all things that AI is going to take the place of workers.

AI arguably can already do your taxes better or write a contract better in most use cases than the professional services world can.

If you're not going to be a builder in AI and be a problem solver in AI, then AI will disintermediate you.

Now with agentic AI, we've got them actually, I would almost call it the implementation, the acting upon what it is.

This new ad model Chad GPT is leaning into, is this a big time thing?

a huge thing i think it's a harbinger of things that come i think if you look back at when facebook went public right they spent a lot of resources free ipo gathering an audience tying into the network effect but then once they went public the street had demands and they turned on the ads and it really changed the marketing and advertising industry and right now you know meta along with alphabet really have a bit of a duopoly in the advertising space And that's all about the change.

If you think of the last 25 years, it was consumers finding out about things largely on meta and alphabet properties.

And then when they were in the incineration phase, they would go to Google to search and learn more, and then they would purchase on Amazon.

And now you have these AI chatbots that really have the ability to take consumers down the entire fall.

Okay, so with that in mind then, if you're a brand who's trying to take advantage of the latest place to be, how do you respond as those marketing teams or if you're an individual entrepreneur, maybe selling stuff on Instagram, how do you get involved here?

Well, the first thing I'm advising clients to do is something called AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, which is the AI version of SEO, which was Search Engine Optimization.

It's a lot easier to have these AI chatbots recommend your brand natively than pay to get into the conversation.

How is that going to change the landscape of, I guess, kind of like consumer activity now that we do have this generation that's just, this is just what they do use AI for everything.

Absolutely.

So I've spent my career, you know, I started my career in year 2000.

And back then, the new consumer was the millennial generation, which was the first generation to grow up with the internet and household.

And then 10 to 15 years later, the focus was on Gen Z, which of course is now known as a social media and iPhone generation, meaning that they never knew a world without social media and the iPhone.

Gen alpha, currently age zero to 15 years old, is going to be known as the AI generation.

They are never going to know a world without AI, without a technology that you can interact with the same way that you interact with other people.

So- Yeah, tell us more about that.

What can companies now that maybe don't have the resources to deploy the way that these big mega cap tech firms are for innovating learn from the decisions that companies like Amazon are making now? Said another way, like, what is this restructuring that they announced signaling to others?

don't think capital is the limiting factor to drive ai automation or an organization i think it requires a thorough understanding of what ai can do for your business and frankly just bold leadership i think too many leaders at large enterprises are working simply not to get fired and hope that they're going to be able to kind of fade off into the night with a golden parachute And that's why you're seeing startups say, we need to reinvent ourselves.

Now, one of the exceptions, obviously, is Salesforce.

You look at Mark Benioff, and he's sticking his neck out and saying, Salesforce is not our future, agent force is.

And despite the fact that only a fraction of the revenue is with AI agents, he sees the future.

But I think most companies don't have that.

level of bold leadership they don't have founder operators so for many companies it's going to be too late uh by the time they make the decision and we saw that happen during the digital revolution and i think in many ways history will repeat itself and so many of today's leaders across many categories will no longer be unless they have that bold leadership unless they're acting fearless and part of acting fearless is making these cuts to reduce layers

Do you think that's a fair characteristic, not necessarily just of Adobe, but of that playing out in this way?

What fears should we be cognizant of?

So I think the future is gonna belong in the workforce to people who either go deep into an art or deep into a science.

So deep into an art means that you're creative, you're a critical thinker, you're a problem solver.

You're doing things that the machines probably will never be able to do because somebody still needs to be able to tell the machines what to make or what to do or what to build, right? It doesn't know on its own unless someone lights the fire, so to speak.

That's deep into an art.

Deep into a science is learning how to build, code, operate, deploy the machines.

I think everything in between is going to get eliminated.

How does he incorporate AI into the ones and twos? Or should he even be thinking that far ahead that eventually there's going to be someone who's going to come around, figure out AI with music, and it's going to either make me obsolete or I just he becomes a Spotify playlist?

How do you teach them? How can you tell the difference from one thing versus another? What's real and what's not? And even kind of their own critical thinking, how to still deploy critical thinking in this context.

Yeah, I mean, I think teachers are really going to struggle with this because for years, what it meant to be a good student meant memorization and regurgitation, right? It meant cramming as much information as possible and then spitting it out the next day on the test.

But in this new world, it's going to be about critical thinking.

It's going to be about problem solving and creativity.

it's not really going to be about memorization and regurgitation of facts.

So I think at the youngest ages, kids need to put themselves in positions where they can be problem solvers, where they can look at AI, not necessarily as a tool where, you know, it's about the problem that's being solved, but it's really about to figure out, to zoom out and say, how can I apply this technology to the world? How can I command it to really move forward? Because the world's going to change, the workforce is going to change, the jobs that exist are going to change moving forward.

So where do we start? It's really

mind-blowing.

So like, how are you preparing and even providing kind of sort of, or starting to think about how you're gonna provide guidance to kind of your younger kids?

Yeah.

So, I mean, Toby, we both have been in business around the same time, and we are both blessed to have been running companies through the dawn of the digital era.

When the internet was first introduced and the big thing, I talk about the book, remembering driving down Highway 101 from San Francisco to Silicon Valley to sell youth marketing services to companies like AltaVista and eBay and Yahoo.

And that was a huge change that I wrote about during the book that Hershey's said they would never stoop down to advertising on computers.

That's what an executive from Hershey told me.

So we saw that play out.

So how do we

Mm-hmm.

Um, ChatGPT being one of them, Anthropic's Claude being another, Google's Gemini.

Um, Meta, which is the Facebook company, has one called Llama.

And the large language models essentially take human input in any language, and they generate output that is human-like, right? And that's really what made it take off.

The third layer is something that you just got into, which is, like, how do they know all this information about you? That's data, right? So large language models are fed on data.

Mm-hmm.

So they're gonna obviously wanna optimize their profits, and the way they do that is look for efficiencies.

And what they're seeing ahead of other companies is just how many places in the way they operate where AI can disintermediate human work.