How do you advise an organization that may not necessarily be at the cutting edge of technology but has been around for 100 and some odd years delivering value to their customer base and has thousands of employees? How do you make that transition from a cultural perspective? Because this is a big change.

Yeah.

You do it in small pieces.

In the same way, again, the fitness analogy, you can't go into the weight room and say, and throw 15, 315 pounds on a barbell and say, okay, I'm going to squat this.

That doesn't work, right? So you start with really small tweaks and maybe it starts with some online education.

Maybe it starts with a workshop, the sort of things that I do every day.

We show them that we spend 90 minutes.

Are there any capabilities you think are becoming even more valuable than these AI technical skills as employees mature over the next couple of years?

And I suppose what that means for people leading talent functions, how can they, you know, how can they get budget? How can they make progress, you know, with AI in their function?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, look, I think there's a lot of initial momentum that comes out of the desire to cut costs, right? And so I think there are companies out there that approach this from the perspective of, "You know what? We have call center agents and we have this and we have that.

We can probably, you know, let's figure out a roadmap that allows us to cut costs and head count via AI." And look, that is one strategy.

What the research is showing is that companies that are early and intense adopters of AI, they actually grow their head count on average and that's because it's creating opportunities to do work you couldn't do before.

There's a different skill set they're hiring than they did previously.

The companies that are leaders when it comes to AI and in terms of their industries aren't using it as a replacement.

And I suppose sort of encompassing a lot of the things that you've already spoken about, what practical advice would you give to, you know, talent leaders in terms of, in terms of what they should be doing right now? Because there's always a lot of talk about the future, but we'll talk about the future in a second, but what should people be doing right now?

What do you think are the main ways people are using it or the most innovative or new?

Yeah, I think you had called out one is just in terms of marketing.

They're able to supercharge their marketing.

I work with an e-commerce company called Pet Lab, and I talk about this in my book.

They use some off the shelf tools.

Their designers were able to shorten the amount of time it took to create a campaign.

It went from 40 minutes to five.

yeah

So just to continue that point about adoption and people engaging in the change in the new technology and doing things differently, what can leaders do? What do organizations need to do to get out of the way and to enable people to actually get involved and get into this and be part of that future?

Yeah.

You know, the story in the book, technology is easy, people are hard, came from spending years on the front lines, building this technology, deploying it to people on the front lines.

We built hiring software and we could show that if you used our software to hire people, you'd end up with better outcomes.

At some of our clients, we saw a huge lift, at some, not at all.

And so we would dig in and say, well, why is it flat at certain sites? And what you would find more often than not is you'd have a hiring manager on the front lines who who you'd take them aside, him or her, and they'd say, listen, Dr.

Egghead, I've been doing this for 20 years.

are your thoughts on that? What are your watchouts? How should organizations think about it in terms of trust, oversight, accountability? When and where do you keep humans in the loop? What are your thoughts on agentic AI?

So in these workshops that you do, is it with the entire, how do you work within that? Is that only with the leadership? And what have you seen for the most part? Is it usually towards leadership? more of the older crowd? Do you see more of the Gen Zers or the millennials on the younger side being able to adapt further? I'm real curious to what the metrics that you see from that.

Yeah, these are great questions.

So number one, companies are appointing AI champions.

What we've seen and what the research bears out is that AI champions, there's such a big gap between the AI champions and the rest of the rank and file that it's hard for them to bridge that gap, right? They see the power, they're often technologists themselves, and it's hard for them to understand how to connect with folks that are really at the very start of this journey.

It's not to say it's a bad idea, but that doesn't help everyone get on that path, on that journey.

What we found, and again, the research bears this out, is that it starts with the leadership team.

It starts with, Microsoft did study of what drives someone's individual adoption, whether they're using these tools weekly, daily.

kind of comes in like where do we start building the context and especially for an enterprise that has so much data you know from they have so much of data that's Cosmos they have SQL servers so where does the starting point even occur?

So what do you think?

Yeah, and I do want to hear your thoughts.

I think 30, 40 years ago, we had the electric calculator and there was a revolt and people said, no, folks need to learn how to do these calculations in their head.

Thankfully, saying our heads prevailed, we realized, hey, these are tools that exist not only in the classroom, but in the workplace.

We should probably teach people to use these tools.

I think the same is true of AI.

I know there was pushback initially and folks concerned about students writing their essays with AI.

So what does it look like five years from today?

Uh, so what does it look like five years from today?

Yeah.

I mean, I think first and foremost, you think of the org chart, you are going to- We're starting to see the trend of AIs on the org chart.

Think of entire jobs that right now a human being is doing, I think we're gonna start to realize collectively these are collaborators, these are, you know, think of them as a colleague, and you're gonna start to see AIs that are sophisticated enough that they can handle a large chunk of the work that a content marketer does, right? That it's, uh, that data analysts can do, um, that engineers can do.

And so I think, you know, you're gonna see companies that are really getting it are, are effectively gonna either stay the same size while they grow their footprint, or they, they might shrink a little bit.

And you're going to be collaborating, you know, in a Slack channel or however you communicate with colleagues, you're gonna be collaborating with AI colleagues as well, AI, quote unquote, employees.

Uh, your day is gonna be spent in all these different platforms, and that's not that different than what we see now, right? We spend so much of our time on a variety of SaaS platforms, uh, handling, you know, documents and, and going on Zoom calls or Teams calls, you know, collaborating via Slack.

Give, give everybody your favorite tools.

Mm-hmm.

So I think of it as small- starting with a lot of small incremental wins and using...

The good news is you don't have to build much.

There are so many tools emerging on a daily basis that can help with your day-to-day workflows, and you can start by using those tools, many of which are $20 a month for a license.

Um, and I'll give one example of a company that I talk about in the book.

It's a company called PetLab.

Um, it's a, it's a pretty decent sized company.

Or w- what are the hardest industries in your experience, or [laughs]

How do leaders figure out what customers will, will like, what's not creepy? Like, any advice for that?

Yeah, I mean, I think all of the tools in the toolskit, toolkit for that product management customer journey have evolved to the point where you can create surveys and administer them to customers very quickly, very easily, right? To get feedback.

The, the speed with which you can iterate on a new feature, functionality, web page on your site is insane, right? Using these design tools now that I just described, you can mock up a web page without using a developer.

You can then pass that along to a tool like Claude Code or Cursor or Devin, and it'll build it out, and it'll deploy it.

So if you imagine that product manager or that chief customer officer, how long would that process have taken a few years ago, right? You'd have to get the team together.

You do scrums, scrums.

You do sprints.

these leaders be?