AI Today (Aired 10-29-2024) : Leading Change: Embracing AI in the Boardroom and Beyond

[00:00:00] Speaker A: SA Foreign, welcome back to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Badot. We are extraordinarily lucky to have as our next guest Ms. Jen Go Day. She's been a friend of the show since we first started, as everybody remembers. And last week we talked about, you know, really introduced the concepts and, you know, some of the basic principles around how as an executive, you can start to bring AI in at a pace that is comfortable for your employees. You're communicating the right way, you're doing all those things that you need to do from a management perspective that is not technical. And we're going to expand on that discussion this week and see where it takes us. Jen, it's great for you to be here. Thank you. [00:01:20] Speaker B: Absolutely. Always a pleasure. [00:01:23] Speaker A: So we talked about, you know, some of the decision making processes around how executives can think about AI, the strategies and those pieces. You know, let's dive a little bit deeper from really the decision perspective. You know, how are executives being trained? How do they think about trying to use AI to make a decision and not either alienate the rest of their leadership team or at least, you know, have their leadership team even embrace AI? What are your thoughts on, you know, executives being able to do that? [00:01:57] Speaker B: Well, we're seeing the biggest challenge that we're seeing is resistance. And resistance is because of fear. Right? And right now we're seeing the most resistance in the knowledge based professions. So think about not to pick on our CFOs, but I'm going to pick on our CFOs. They are traditionally the ones that are resistant to change, especially if there's any spend and they don't understand it. But from an even deeper standpoint, as, as some of our executives are leveraging technology to make smarter decisions faster, with more data points, which is one thing that you and I have talked about on my show as a, as leveraging AI. In order to do that, people feel threatened inherently and they're asking themselves, not in, not in, in the room, but they're asking themselves, am I obsolete? And when we have created that internal dialogue where we're wondering, am I obsolete? Am I still going to have a job or a role moving forward? It kicks up an immediate resistance. And so we've talked about seeing it at our front line, that resistance, that fear, but it's happening in the boardroom as well. And so one of the ways that we have sort of gotten around that or mitigated that, if you will, with our clients has been to get the board together and to say, hey, listen, we've never had a technology advance that has threatened knowledge based professions before. And so those of us who we did the things, we went to, the schools, the graduate schools, we've done all the work, we put this in. Now we are in the same situation that maybe some plant workers were in when they brought in automation. We've never had to face this threat before. And if we open up in that vulnerable space as seeing CEOs and founders and express our fears and how we leverage that in our vulnerabilities, I mean, that is what's opening the conversation. And so I think, just like we talked about, how do we get our brand ambassadors and how do we start the process with our front line and our middle managers, we must also do that in the boardroom because there's going to be certain personnel who are going to feel threatened. And I'm going to, I'm going to point to CTOs as well. CTOs who have been in for a while and don't have that AI background, they feel like they have to be the one who knows. But truly good executives, what makes us great is by hiring people smarter than us with the information that we don't have. And so it's, it's creating that conversation in the boardroom where it's, listen, I feel threatened by this too. I'm, I'm the first to raise my hand and say it was scary as anything to let it do some due diligence for me in the investment world. And I didn't trust it and didn't trust it and did double work for I can't tell you how long until I started to realize, you know what, this isn't replacing me. What this is doing is it allowing me to do 40 times the amount of work than what I was doing before? So, so it's learning to leverage it even within the executive mindset. And it's a process. And I strongly recommend you bring someone external in. Because if we're only sitting there in a board and we all have some reservations or most the team has reservations because we have financial ties. This is a paycheck, after all. It's a little harder to get to the true nitty gritty as opposed to bringing someone external and who could talk about other experiences so they don't feel like they're, you know, on an island alone. And that facilitation by that external source gives different perspective and takes kind of the, the stress out of it. Because as a board, we've all had our own fights and battles before to move powerfully forward. That's a good board. Every good board has those debates. But in this, we really need a unified approach where we're supporting one another and moving through these fears. [00:05:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, I think that brings up a little bit of even a bigger topic on, you know, from, from my perspective, you know, perspective is everything. And we've talked about it some, but, you know, it's hard for employees to get on board of whatever the AI decision is. Use it internally, show it to your customers, those kind of things if folks that are managing you don't use it. And so what kind of advice would you give? Even the, you know, like the middle management layer that says, well, wait a minute, I'm being asked to do this, this and this, but my board and my direct manager is not doing the same thing. And I think AI is going to exacerbate that. [00:06:34] Speaker B: So I, I believe that you're right. And really, it's getting back to the fundamentals of business. If we get to the fundamentals of leadership and executive leadership, we must practice what we preach. If we are expecting things of our, our middle level managers, we must demonstrate the same thing. So you're absolutely right. We can't be afraid of it in the boardroom. We must be showing how we leverage it. And one of the things that we've really been successful with with some of our clients is we record the fumbles, all of the mistakes we make as we play with the technology and look at the technology, we actually share that downstream. Because when we share that, hey, look, we had challenges with this too. What it does is the middle managers kind of like, instead of being up here and stressed about it, they take a brass and like, oh, they had a hard time. So they understand that this is a learning process. And I think it's very, very important for us to be completely transparent that this is the direction that we are going. We are integrating it in every step from contingency planning and scenario planning and crisis management all the way to frontline operations. And if we're messaging that and truly demonstrating that down the chain, I think that's going to go a long way. And we've seen it go a long way with our clients so far. The other thing that I actually was talking about with one of our clients is we have to redefine our job descriptions. We have to redefine our job descriptions. Because if you're a frontline worker or a middle manager or a cto, it doesn't matter if the company's direction is to leverage technology we must redefine job descriptions to include leveraging that technology. And what that does is messaging very clearly, clearly throughout your entire org chart that this is where we're going, these are the expectations. We are going to provide the tools and everything and we're going to involve you in the process and we're going to give you the time to learn this. But it is going to be a minimum job expectation by 12 months from today, 18 months from today, whatever your time frame is for you to be leveraging technology in this way and then having some sort of a reward program in place has been very successful too, because those who are really up taking this and learning and doing the work and they're going to be ambassadors, there's going to be roles that are going to be created for, for, for those employees that you're going to see the reward. You're going to see the improvements along the way by getting the buy in. [00:09:13] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think, I think exactly what you said is a topic that we can talk and expand on or hours because it fundamentally changes every single layer of your organization. How you hire people, that skill sets that you're looking for. That's a, that's a topic for, for another day, you know, of course, but it's, it's really, it really is a game changer and I think it's an opportunity a lot of executives aren't taking advantage of. We've got about a minute left. How can folks get a hold of you? [00:09:46] Speaker B: Well, the easiest thing they can do is to tune in to Power CEOs and now Media TV. We talk business all day, every day with industry leaders and what's working and what's not. I would love to point everybody to LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Jen Goade. G A U D E T. I'm there, you'll see. You'll see me there. That is the best way to communicate with me. Slide a dm, send me your questions. I'm more than happy to answer them. And we do offer a LinkedIn Live weekly on this, on AI, what's happening in AI in business from the business perspective. So I encourage you to reach out in any way and send your questions. I'm an open book. [00:10:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. I appreciate you being here, Jen. Look forward to speaking with you again soon. I want everybody to stick with us. We'll be right back after a short commercial. Welcome back to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Bideau. We have been talking about, you know, the different ways and tools and, and how, you know, how really to look at what your next big purchase could be around AI and how you're going to deploy it, what that tool set could look like and what some of the technical costs are going to be and if, if you're ready. Of course, however, like we always do, we want to bring that executive perspective into play. And we are lucky enough to have Ms. Jen Goade back on our show who is a resident expert on, you know, really all things from the executive perspective on down to, you know, AI and technology itself. Jen, appreciate you being here. [00:12:01] Speaker B: Pleasure as always, Alan. [00:12:03] Speaker A: Yeah, so, so, Jen, you know, on the show, we have, we have, we've dealt with, you know, some of the technology costs and how to budget and how to build up for some of those things and the number of pilot projects potentially you need to do. But from an executive perspective, there is so much more that goes into allocating funds and, and trying to keep the resident egghead like myself, you know, you know, satisfied that he's getting enough budget to play. From that executive perspective, what are some of the key factors that you look at as you are building up what that budget is going to be in aligned with everything else that you're trying to do? [00:12:43] Speaker B: Right, so that's an excellent question. And the first thing as, as an executive or an executive team that we look at is what is our strategic initiative? What are we hoping to achieve? And is this the route we want to take? So it's a very high level. Is AI the route we're going to take? News flash, if we're not on the AI train, we better get on the I train because that train has left the building and it's not an if we want to do this, it's going to be a when. And I think sooner than we think. So the conversation then turns to, okay, what applications of the technology are going to actually help us to achieve our strategic goals and initiatives? So we look at it from a what do we want to do? Where are we going? What are our goals? And where can automation or technology help support us to achieve those goals? How can it be better, faster, more effective, more efficient? So we look at that first and then we step back and we say, okay, do we have the budget for this implementation? And I want to put an asterisk here because I've had this happen. I can't tell you how many times in the last two weeks where a company is looking at exiting. If you are an entrepreneur or an executive team looking at an exit in the next 12 to 18 months, stop. Do not Press go. Do not do a capital expense and a major integration right now because most people think it's going to raise your valuation. But the reality is it takes time to recognize the roi and buyers and investors, such as myself and such as the fund that I help, you know, raise, like we help give money to, to startups we're looking at, okay, where's the roi and if it hasn't happened yet and there's not a defined path forward, it's detrimental to the valuation, we're going to put a ding about that. We're going to say, okay, well you made this big capital expense, but we don't see it in the cash flow and we don't see it for long enough time in the cash flow to give you that, that bump back to where you thought it's going to be. So if you're looking at exit and you're exiting this year in the next 12 months, if you're exiting in 2025, this is not the year to do a major change. It is the year to consider that change and to think about what needs to happen and what readiness needs to be done. Because it will make you very attractive to either a strategic looking to buy or private equity. When they say, oh, you've already kind of done the legwork and know where we're going to go with this. And then when you exit, use the exit. If you're, especially if you're staying on to grow the company and you're partnering with private equity, look, use that money to put this in and show that and tell that story. So it's really important for those of you thinking about this that you press stop if you're looking at an exit this year because it could be detrimental to what you're hoping to achieve, that's really long winded. I'm going to backtrack a little bit and tell you that if you're looking at your budget, you cannot only think about the project. Cannot think about, only I'm going to put in this AI integration. It's going to cost, I don't know, $1.4 million. Yes, I just yanked that out of a prior project and it's going to have a $200,000 a month improvement in my cash flow by month six. Right. We can't think about that in a hard line, dollars and cents, without considering what are the costs after the project cost, what are the extra team members that I'm going to need, what is the maintenance, what are the long term costs and expenses associated with this, both from A financial standpoint and a personnel standpoint. And I'm going to leave with one more thing. Add 20 to whatever you think the budget is going to be. Because something always goes wrong. It's not what's going to go wrong or when it will go wrong. Something will go wrong. Is it always 20%? No, not necessarily. But that's a pretty safe cushion most of the time. And so that's kind of like the high level things that we look at from an executive standpoint. [00:16:37] Speaker A: Yeah, and I know, I know, Jen, and I've heard this a lot and you've probably heard it even more than I have. You know, these, these technology, you know, dabbling, you know, CEOs of these small businesses, they're saying to themselves, well, if we do AI, even though we're not an AI company and you know, but it'll make us look cooler, it'll make us look like we're doing something technology forward and you know, they will jump at an opportunity or a vendor and usually they run into some issues around that. What is your advice to executives who are really, you know, on the outside looking in and they are prepared to jump and they may jump the wrong way. [00:17:25] Speaker B: Oh, so stop, pause, take a step back. That's called shiny object syndrome where I come from. And somebody's done a real bang up sales job. I'm going to start with. And the AI space. There's a lot of companies that promise a solution that they cannot deliver. A lot of companies. [00:17:46] Speaker A: Oh yeah. [00:17:46] Speaker B: And if you're paying attention, a lot of these companies have run out of Runway. No one's lending them any more money. So we want to make sure that. And we talked about this on another show, we go with the company that shows you they can solve your problem, not just tells you so. We want to make sure we're being shown a solution. We want to research the company and make sure they're going to be along the rock for the long term because you don't want to get halfway through an integration and all of a sudden they're belly up because that's happened to some people as well. So we want to vet our companies very, very well. But also we want to look at the tool as what it is. It is a tactic, it is a tool. Does this align with my strategic vision? Is it solving a problem in a meaningful way? Not, oh, it's tech forward and it's really cool. I've got a I he he know. Is it moving your business forward? Is it making your business faster, more effective, more Efficient. Is it helping you to scale in some sort of way by improving productivity and allowing excess extra volume or capacity. Know what your goals are and if the tool aligns to your specific goals and the vendor shows you that they have solved this problem, not just tells you, not just gives you a slideshow before and after, but can walk you through an actual solution for one of their clients that they have done. And then you do your due diligence. If you still want to proceed, then we've talked about the other steps for readiness and everything, but we want to plan a budget accordingly. Stop with the shiny object syndrome. And for those who want to be tech forward but want an off the shelf solution that maybe might, you know, be they think is going to be that it's not just stop. You know, you can wait around for this and hope for an off the shelf solution that's actually going to bring you the results you want. And after really playing in the space for years, the past few years, I have yet to see a company that did an off the shelf integration that achieved the goals they thought they were going to achieve and were happy with it without any negative impact. So that's kind of, that's kind of my advice to those Shiny object syndrome. It's great. Get on the train, don't get run over by the train, but do your diligence and think about this strategically so that you have the right metrics in place, you know where you're going, you know it's going to solve a problem and you can follow that trajectory and be proactive instead of reactive. [00:20:15] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that is the best advice right there. Be proactive. That also means, you know, having your teams take a step back, look at some things, dabble in some stuff. Dabble in a lot of stuff. Try out a whole bunch of things before you, you commit. And also don't be afraid to go get a consultant to help you. I mean you don't need to go to the, the big guys for some of this stuff. Go to, go to, you know, a bunch of different folks that can help you along the way. Jen, what's the easiest way for folks to be able to get a hold of you? [00:20:46] Speaker B: That is a great question. For starters, you can watch my show Power CEOs. It airs on Monday nights on Now Media. You can also follow me on LinkedIn. Jen Goday very simple. You'll see me there. It looks like me. There's a lot of Jen go days but I've got a picture up there, I think with Dr. Phil on my cover page and I respond to all of my messages. So shoot me a message. If you've got questions, I like to answer them. I'm a big fan of educating. And there's always, we do a weekly AI on LinkedIn that's live or audio as well. [00:21:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. And, and like always, please, you know, if you're, if you're juggling and you aren't sure what to do, this is one area. Don't jump, don't do it. Take a step back, think about it and get some help. That's the, that's going to be the best advice. Jen. Thanks as always for being here. Everybody. Stick around. We'll be right back to, to finish out around our, you know, how do you pick the right tool to, you know, move forward and deploy into your enterprise? So stay with us. Here we go. Welcome to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Badot. You know, we've talked about data really, from a technical side. How are you using your data train to train large language models to fine tune them to, you know, to really optimize what your solution is trying to really provide to your users or your, your own employees. But what we have not talked about the data strategy. How do we get, you know, to the point where we're using the data that we think we have the way that we think we should? And that is a, that's a huge problem from government agencies down to, down to small businesses. And we're, we're lucky enough to have an expert in the field on that. With Our returning guest, Ms. Jen Godet, really, you know, a mover and shaker in the AI strategy space. Jen, thank you for being here. [00:23:18] Speaker B: Completely a pleasure. [00:23:21] Speaker A: So, Jen, strategy data, oftentimes they don't go together. You know, it's usually, oh, get the, get the CTO to go do that and call me when it's done. It doesn't work that way, does it? [00:23:35] Speaker B: No. And I'm going to speak to this on two levels. I'm going to speak on the small business level and then on the more, more the larger company level, let's talk about small business first. Please make sure that you are cleaning your data regularly. What does that even mean? Regularly remove duplicates, errors, inconsistency. I can't tell you, Alan, how many times I get in with a client who's like, I want to integrate AI into my operations. Fantastic. What do you want to do with it? I have no idea. But here's my data and it's a Google Drive and it could be a Microsoft, it doesn't matter which. But it's this drive that's filled with PDFs and workshops and, and trainings and like a bunch of stuff that's from the last 20 years. Lots of it is completely obsolete, some of it's duplicate, it's not organized in any way, shape or form. And, and they think that, oh, I've got all this stuff and I'm just gonna put it, put an AI to it and it's gonna sort it for me. Yep, it doesn't work that way. So one of the things we talk about, and no entrepreneur wants to hear this and no executive wants to hear this either, quite frankly, I didn't wanna hear this when I had to learn this either. We must have a process for cleaning and ensuring our data is quality on a regular ongoing process. If we don't, then it doesn't matter what we put in. AI to garbage in equals massive garbage out. And that's right. So it's really important that we have clean data that's up to date, new processes, process that are, that are being done today, not 10 years ago, so that we can utilize the, the model to do what it is that we wanted to do. Hopefully that answers your question. And I spoke to small companies, but big companies have the same problem except it's exacerbated because they've got data coming in from all of these different AI APIs. They have, you know, there's CRM and they're, they have a bunch of different tools and, and none of them really communicate properly together and the fields don't necessarily match. And so if you try to feed that in and the name in one, in one spreadsheet converts to, I don't know, a date of birth in another. It's a complete mess and it's not quality. So it's really important for us to make sure that we're consolidating those data silos. We're ensuring that we don't have errors and inconsistencies and duplicates and that things match in a way that makes sense. Otherwise we're going to get massive garbage out of whatever we're trying to do. [00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, and the conversations I have with folks, you know, they believe that if they go buy this tool it's going to solve all their problems. And this has been around for, for a long time. But you know, we all know tools do not solve the problem. You know, how do you get small business leaders, you know, executives to spend as much time on the strategy around their data as they do on trying to pick a darn tool. Because that, that is something that I think would be a very quick win for, for folks. [00:26:58] Speaker B: So you're assuming that it's easy to get them to do that. I'm going to share with you that it is a fight every single time. Not once, not no one, not once. In all the companies that we've talked about this in the last couple of years, not once has anyone wanted to focus on the data. They're like, yeah, yeah, we've got it. It's done. No, it's not. So it really is an education process. And, and what I do is I bring experts such as yourself to come in when we're looking at what's the problem we want to solve, and then we get to looking at which AI tools to leverage. I interview the vendors and bring the vendors in and have them help me with that education process because I'm a strategist. So people are already going externally and they're trusting me to help them with this process. And in turn I'm going to bring someone else to help validate what I'm saying on the data. And the reason is, whether we're trying to do this internally with our own teams or not, no one, it's not sexy. Data management is not sexy. Data collection, none of that is sexy. Nobody wants to talk about it, but it's a necessary evil in order to get the job done. And the reality is it's a lot more costly on the budget side of things than what people think. If you've never looked at data management, if you have no process and you've just been dumping everything in a drive and API, everything into a master spreadsheet and it's a mess, then you must have that indexed and cleaned up and make sure that what you've got is good data before you go. Like, it's kind of like Monopoly. Do not press go, do not move forward, do not collect $200. Because what you're really doing is magnifying exponentially the cost to fix the problem once you've, once you've gone through without doing it in the first place. So relying on other people to come in and to enter, sort of be that third party. Yes, that's exactly what we need to do. And this is what it's going to cost, and this is why. And then we project out. So I'm going to speak to all of my CFOs out there. They hate the spend associated with this. But if we project out if we continue in kind and we continue down the path, this is what the cost is actually going to be to fix it. Two years, five years, 10 years projected. And of course, what does it do? It goes up exponentially because we're collecting more and more and more data. And so generally that combination of the other experts saying the same things, plus the projections of if we fix this now, cost this, and yeah, that's kind of scary and we don't want to budget for that. But if we wait, it's going to be this other number. That's usually when people's eyes are open and they go, oh, and then looking at, of course, to the problem they want to solve. [00:29:34] Speaker A: Yeah. What do you have an example? You don't have to give names, you don't have to give company names, but what's your best example? Maybe you got a little kick out of it, but you could definitely tell when either the CEO or the business owner, when they did have that aha moment, was it always around budget or was it around some other driver that caused them to say, holy cow, I really have to change how I'm doing things? [00:30:09] Speaker B: So, yes, it happens regularly. And I'm going to use the example. And this is, I mean, this is, this is scary. I'm not even going to tell you what industry it is because it's really scary in the industry that it's in. So I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but they were sold a bill of goods on an AI integration. They did not clean up their data, and their data is protected information. So what does that mean, folks? Protected information means you need to redact things if you're going to send out mailers or whatever, whatever you're operationally doing. And they wanted to, they wanted to leverage the tool for messaging and, you know, like marketing and sales. And guess what? They didn't have proper fields in their data. And protected information was sent to patients and clients. That's not supposed to be there. So you can imagine what that oh, poop moment looked like. [00:31:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You know, I, I thought, oh, it can't be that bad. But then you said patience. And then I was like, oh, it is that bad. [00:31:16] Speaker B: It's that bad. And guess what I'm here to say, in business, when something like that happens and it's a violation of, for example, HIPAA or another governmental issue, ignorance is not a defense in court. [00:31:32] Speaker A: It is not. [00:31:33] Speaker B: Because you didn't know your data was not appropriately. That's not a good excuse. And the fines are quite Large. And the reality was I got the phone call with please help, I'm about to go out of business. And it's somebody who has a phenomenal practice. So yeah, it matters. [00:31:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it matters. Yeah, yeah, it matters. You know, it's, it's such a challenge, you know, and we've seen this for a long time anyway, when big data even started to become a thing, that it was a challenge for folks to embrace it. Well, the problem now is with AI, it's so accelerated. You don't have an awful lot of time in some cases to do the right things and to handle and manage your data and have a strategy. How do folks that have been in business a while take a step back and hit the reset button and then start to get down the right path. [00:32:35] Speaker B: So I'm going to say something and it may be unpopular, but my favorite is hire somebody who knows what the heck they're doing to come in and outsource that. Even if you have an internal team. Because the reality is we're blowing and going in business and if we're going to do an integration, that's going to be a change or we're going to have something like this happen. Leave these things to the experts. Unless you have an internal team of processes that are already doing this, which, news flash, if we're having this conversation, you don't bring in a consultant, bring in a vendor to do this for you so that you're not interrupting operations and revenue cycles while you're having this clean out happen. And is it going to cost money? It's going to cost money, but you can't afford not to do this properly. And, and it's really scary. Some of the people are going to sell you a big bill of goods out there, specifically in the AI space and they're just going to take whatever data you give them. So if you have somebody who doesn't know what they're doing, compile it. And you end up in a big wad of poop where something protected gets out in an outbound marketing message. You're kind of in a lot of trouble. [00:33:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's a problem. That's a problem. And I think it's unfortunate though too, because all this is preventable. It really is. If folks would bring in a strategist like yourself or they would at least hit the pause button, they can save themselves so much trouble from, from an advice perspective, Jen, if I was bringing you in for for example, where is the first place that you would have an executive start to say this is where you got to go. Call me when you, when you get through this. [00:34:14] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I could answer that really quickly. When people come call me, they're like, I want an AI integration. And the first thing I say is, okay, what are your business objectives and what do you want the AI to do? What do you want the tool to do? And then the next question is, what does your data look like? When's the last time you had it optimized? And most of the time I get deer in the headlights and I say, great, I can help you with the strategy, but we're going to call in an expert who's going to help you with the other side of this, the data management piece. Because we can move together simultaneously if we know the data is going to be good once we get to training. Because the strategy does take time. Sometimes there's budgeting involved, but it's always bring the right people in and make sure you are set for success from the beginning. Because you only want to do this once, you don't want to go back on repeat, it becomes infinitely more expensive. [00:35:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And a great example, you know, if anybody's ever done any carpentry work. Measure twice, cut once, right? Data. Data is the same way. If you spend more time on your strategy, your outcomes are going to be significantly better than if you just try to wing it and go willy nilly with your, your data and see where, where it takes you. It's not going to take you to a happy place, I can promise folks that. Jen, where, where's the easiest place for folks to be able to get a hold of you? [00:35:31] Speaker B: Thank you for asking. I encourage you to check out my show here on Now Media TV Power CEOs. It is designed for executives and entrepreneurs such as solve these kind of problems that bring in industry leaders. And LinkedIn is the best way to get me. Hit me up on DM. Follow me on LinkedIn. I'm constantly dropping information, strategy and how to optimize your business. And AI is a big piece of what we do on LinkedIn. So shoot me a DM. I'm always answering questions and guess what? Questions are free. [00:35:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's great. I do encourage the audience to go out, follow Jen on LinkedIn. There's so much information that she puts out there that, you know, I would be shocked if you cannot find something that is going to help you in your business. And so embrace it, take advantage of it and really go, really go get that, you know, advantage that you're looking for. Jen, it's great for you to be here as always. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. And you know, audience, stick with us. We'll be back after a short commercial break where we are going to expand on the discussion on not starting with a tool first. Be right. [00:37:08] Speaker B: Foreign. [00:37:17] Speaker A: Welcome back to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Bideau. And we have been talking about, you know, really taking that first step decisions from a technical perspective. How do you plan your roadmap? How do you start to align your tool sets with what your customers are looking for? And how are you not just buying a solution because it looks cool? That doesn't, doesn't ever work. What we haven't talked about is really from an executive perspective or from a business owner that, you know, it's more than just saying, yeah, go ahead and go spend that money. It's a lot more difficult than, than that. And we are lucky enough to have Ms. Jen go day with us who is really one of the, you know, experts in this field who is, you know, really helping executives, strategists, you know, you know, those, those sort of people really refine what their path is going to do and how to, how to stick to that. Jen, it's great for you to be here. [00:38:18] Speaker B: Pleasure to be back. I, you know, I love talking about this and I know our topic today is going to be complete fire. [00:38:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. We're going to get some emails probably. So, so Jen, when you, you know, are working with companies, small businesses, large businesses, it really doesn't matter what advice at the, you know, really when you start from an executive perspective, do you give to them to say, hey, you know what, you've, you've got a long road ahead. Don't, don't just think that you're done when you, you know, allocate the funds to the project. [00:38:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So the first thing that I always go to is there's multiple types of capital. There's financial capital, which we've already crossed that hurdle. There's human capital, which is your people, and there's relational capital, which is the people outside of your organization that you can bring in to help you grow. And so I always ask, what is the human capital piece of this equation? Like who is on the bus? Who are my team members? And so when we think about AI it's a paradigm shift. We have to look at it like virtual employees. We've talked about this on the show before, but we really need to take a hard look at who's on the bus. [00:39:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:30] Speaker B: And this is how I like to phrase it, we're either AI negative, which means we're totally against it. We'll never get on that bus. We'll never get on that train. We're AI neutral. We're like, could go either way, not so sure. Maybe I'm living in a little fear. Maybe I'm just happy and content to do as I've always done. And there's AI positive. We're like, yes, this tool's going to help us. We're going to be more effective. Let's go. When can we start? Okay, so when we look at our teams, the AI negatives, they've got to go. They've just got to go. It's time to have a conversation with them and say, hey, look, we're moving in this direction. This technology will be a part of your job requirements moving forward. Not tomorrow. We're going to set you up for success, but if you're not on that AI train, and then it's time for us to part ways and we thank you for your service and we'll take care of you, but this isn't going to move forward. And if we do that in the beginning, it saves us a whole lot of headaches because those AI negative folks are the people who can really kill it on the integration and implementation side after the fact. So we want to get those AI negatives off the bus and then we look at who's still on the bus and we say, okay, what skill sets these people have soft skills as well as hard skills. And we want to shuffle them around and make sure everybody's in the right seat on the bus. Because when we have change and change management, we see this all the time. Sometimes people are really excited about AI and we want to make them the leaders in this. And so we may need to shift what their job role is in the company to look towards where we're growing. A lot of times we look at what we have and we think about it in the company that we have today. But if you're integrating AI, you're evolving how you do business. It is a complete evolution. I mean, we talk about it before in other ways. So we want to put the people in the leadership seats of the future of our business. We don't want people who are AI neutral leading this charge. We want people who are AI positive leading this charge, even if they're not currently in those roles. So shift the people, put them in the right seats on the bus, talk with them, talk with the managers. If you have middle management, what skills do they need training on Both soft skills and hard skills through the process because there's going to be a large skill gap. This is a big thing that we've talked about, we've talked about this on my show too. This is a, this is a big gap and we recognize this. If we recognize this in the front, we can figure out what's, who needs what training and what tools to be successful and we set them for success. How do we do that, Jen? We create a psychologically safe space where they know they can express their concerns, where they can fail. They can try the tool and fail and come to their manager or the tech team and say, hey, this isn't working. What am I doing wrong? And when we have that, we get buy in, we get used and they're learning the tool and the tool is learning them and we can have a training timeline. Because the reality is this isn't something that we integrate tomorrow. And in two weeks everybody's got it down. For some people, this is a six month process or even more than that, especially because technology is going to evolve. So we want to make sure we put into their schedule and their job expectations a training schedule. It might be an hour a week, it might be a whole day a week, whatever needs to happen. We want to devise a training schedule that's going to set our people for success. Because when our people are successful, the integration is successful, everyone wins. [00:43:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I remember know I was working a program over in the UK and you know, first time the company had deployed an AI model and you know, I got the results back and the AI only got 50% of the questions right. And I was ecstatic. I was like, yes, we ran our first model and it, it works, it works. You know, we got a lot more to do, but it was, it works. And our, our CEO was like, what do you think? It only got 50%. [00:43:28] Speaker B: That's awful. [00:43:29] Speaker A: What, you know, how are you celebrating this? Well, different expectations and different, you know, different communication mechanisms we have to, you know, go through. So from that perspective, at the same time though, Jen, you know, using technology, it's become easy for us, right, to just send a text, send an email, do something else. I don't think that's really a good idea when you're deploying your AI for the first time. What, you know, from a team perspective, what do you, you know, do to help, you know, enhance communication? Get back to the ways that we used to do some stuff and that you had regular meetings, you did those kind of things. So that you can get, you know, really make sure everybody is successful. [00:44:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And so this might be a popular, an unpopular response, but be transparent with your people as executives. A lot of times we make a decision in and of, you know, a vacuum, and then we dictate from on high. This, this, thou shalt do this. This is the way of the world. We can't do that with this. Before we decide on what tool we're going to integrate, it is essential for us in our preparation to be integrating and talking to our frontline workers, because they're going to be using the tool. How do we as executives at our little glass box know that the frontline worker hasn't made a process more effective or efficient in the last six months? And so we, we want to be transparently communicating with everyone from the get go. And we want to, we don't want to sell them a bill of goods, that this is gonna be all roses and rainbows because it's not even the most successful integrations have challenges. If you think, and you're watching this, that you're gonna have a seamless integration where nothing goes wrong, everything goes according to plan, you're living in a dream world, fantasy land, always something. So we're gonna talk about that transparently. Like, when I come in, a lot of people bring me to come in to be the bad guy to have this conversation. I'm good with it. I'm totally good with it. That's why people utilize my consulting services. Fine. But it's bringing me in and I come in and I say, listen, I'm not going to tell you this is going to be perfect. I'm not going to tell you that you're going to fall in love with this immediately. But what I am going to tell you is we're going to take away some of the things that you hate to do every day and make your job better. [00:45:47] Speaker A: Yep. [00:45:48] Speaker B: Would you like that? What would it look like if you didn't have to do the pieces of your job that you absolutely hate and instead could focus on your growth and where you're going? So it's about getting them engaged from the beginning and saying, listen, this is going to be a sticky process. It's going to be a frequent communication, and every step of the way, we're going to communicate with our teams. Hey, look, this is the tool that we were thinking about. This is it. Here, check it out. Research it. What do you think? And let our teams be involved. Now, is everybody going to take us up on that? No. But the people who do they become? Our brand ambassadors. They're our AI positive people that we want leading the charge. And so we're going to put those people in those seats on the bus and we're going to continue that conversation. And when it gets real, when we've already done with the project and they're like, it becomes a part of their job expectation to leverage this new technology, this new tool, then we're going to give them even more support and we're going to show a lot of FaceTime. Maybe not face to face, it can be like zoom or, or whatnot, but we need to take that time. Each manager needs to meet with every front end employer. If we're a small business and we only have 25, 50 employees, as the entrepreneur, I'm meeting with every one of them to make sure they feel heard, because people need to feel heard, they need to have their concerns validated and we need to come up with a plan so that they feel supported, so that they can learn what they need to learn to be successful. So I think it's a, it's a lot, it's a high touch process and we don't like that when we think about technology. But the reality is, is that's what makes for a successful integration. Because we are training a virtual team, we are integrating technology in with our teams. It's not different than forming a human AI collaboration where our virtual employees and our physical employees or our human employees are working together towards a goal. So it's really important to have those touch points. [00:47:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And one of the things that I tell the technical folks, because we get beat up all the time with this kind of stuff, you know, oh, it didn't do this, it didn't do this. You know, I tell my teams celebrate the failures as much as you celebrate the success. And the reason is, is because, you know, with AI, unlike any other software, any other tool set, you can do everything right and get the wrong answer. And you know what you learn from it, you move on. And you know, you have a, you have a very short memory that is not easy for executives to hear. And, and so, you know, how do you, how do you coach folks and, and get businesses to understand that they're going to have a lot more failures than successes. [00:48:30] Speaker B: So I liken it to sports and lately it's been to Olympics because we all watched the Olympics as a world. And so do you think that Simone Biles, the first time she attempted one of those amazing aerial moves, nailed it the first time? No, she failed and she failed and she failed. And she failed, and she failed, and she failed. And she broke down the skills into little bitty piecey parts and nailed each piece, nailing the launch onto the apparatus and over and over again until she landed it 90% of the time. Then what happens next? And piece the skills together, piece the pieces of the puzzle together until you have one beautiful beam routine, for example. So I liken it to that. We, we. We can't expect. We don't expect a baby to walk the first time they try. They don't. What do they do? They fall in their butt. They fall in their butt. They're falling in the butt. Same thing with learning a new skill set. Learning how to deal with AI is a new skill set for everyone. Anybody who tells you that they got it on the first leg is lying to you. It's not true. It's a completely different way of interacting with technology. And as such, there's going to be failures. But in order to move forward, we need to learn from those failures and we learn more from that and it helps us to fail forward and find those successes. [00:49:46] Speaker A: Yeah, and the great thing about AI is, is that you can fail a lot really fast and get to the success, you know, faster than you've ever been able to do and, you know, before and have a lot more confidence around that. And, you know, you said, you said something important that I want folks to really pay attention to is the transparency piece. It's really making sure everybody understands along the way, you know, how you got there, why you got there, and how you're going to, you know, go and do whatever you're going to do. From an executive perspective, how do you communicate that down to your teams? [00:50:24] Speaker B: Well, I start with, with talking about my failures because when I get vulnerable, they. Look, I made the same mistake. It took me two weeks. And you've done this in a day. Let's learn from each other. So it really is about being, being vulnerable and then making sure that our metrics are not all end result, but they're milestone metrics. I want you to be successful X percent of the time. And, and we're not comparing you with everyone else on the team. This isn't a sales leaderboard where we're in competition. We are truly here. Your competition is with yourself. And so we're going to set metrics based off of where you are, because everybody's going have a different baseline. And so we're going to, we're going to set the pace so that you're trending forward. And this is our goal and we're going to support you along the way. So it really is about being vulnerable, being open and honest about our own, our own challenges and the things that we've done. Because sometimes we forget things that are easy to us because we've been playing with it for two years and then we decide to bring it into an organization. It's not fair for us to expect the same of our frontline workers. [00:51:26] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a, that's a great point. Jen. What is the, what's the easiest way for folks to be able to get a hold of you? [00:51:33] Speaker B: Always LinkedIn. I am, I watch my LinkedIn. I answer my DM. Shoot me a DM on LinkedIn. Follow me there. We have an AI conversation every Tuesday on LinkedIn, either live or audio. And then here you can come check out my show, Power CEOs Truth behind the Business, where we are talking to industry leaders and successful entrepreneurs so we can all grow our businesses further faster. [00:51:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And I really encourage everybody in the audience, please go watch. You know, Jen shows because the perspective that she's providing you is something that you really can't get anywhere else. It's, it's, it's one of those things where you learn to think and, and really start to be able to proactively take some of these steps as you're trying to deploy technology into your, your business to, to gain that advantage that everybody wants to gain. So don't be afraid to take that first step. Contact Jen if you need, you know, some, some help with that and you know, everybody will be successful. So thank you for being here. We'll, we'll see you all next week. Jen, thanks again for being here. Appreciate it. As always. [00:52:39] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:52:44] Speaker A: This has been a NOW Media Networks feature presentation. All rights reserved.