Coaching AI Leaders: Episode 2 of 7 with Mark Rehborg, Thong Nguyen, and Corey Ruff

Dan Mallon, who was on the first podcast, has been working on with IBM Watson technology for 20 years.

But it's only recently really changed how we work.

So I'm curious, Corey, let's start with you.

How has it changed how you work?

Yeah, probably not to the same extent, but we've been trying to automate as much as we possibly can really since day one.

So I started here about nine years ago, and there was a lot of just manual processes from a data reporting standpoint.

And we've worked to really automate that and free people up, which will be a theme certainly of AI enablement.

But it's made us so much more efficient where we can build pricing models or football decision models that used to take weeks to build and validate and gather all the data.

And that can be done in hours at this point in time.

So we're able to repurpose a lot of that time to be more efficient or tackle other projects and try to create more of that work-life balance.

Yeah.

Okay.

So Mark, how's it changing how you work?

Yeah, this is a great place to start, Paul, because for me as a sales leader, AI is less about replacing what the team does and more about tightening it up.

In sales, execution is everything.

And I'm always constantly thinking through questions like, are we following the same process? Are we asking the right questions? Are we showing up prepared every time? So AI becomes an enabler for that discipline.

It flags those gaps and it makes the sales team even more prepared to have a sharper read on what the customer's actual needs are versus that assumed need.

And honestly, going through the master's program forced me to slow down and separate the hype from what actually happens on a Tuesday morning when I'm meeting with a customer or the account team to go through the business.

The tools are less important than the habits that are being built.

Okay, so Thong, you're on sabbatical, so the work question might be a little bit different, but how is it changing how you work? So

I'll reframe back to my product development work from a day-to-day execution perspective.

I mean, AI fundamentally changed the pace of software development.

Work that used to take weeks or months could be done in days or sometimes even hours.

And honestly, it's enabled teams to move from ideas to validation much faster.

But when you take a step back and look at it more strategically, some of the horizon capabilities have me really thinking, a little bit less about productivity and more about what is going to happen when AI moves from software we use than becoming an actual collaborator that we work alongside.