Digital Disruption

00;00;02;07 - 00;00;21;01

Maurice Conti

Technology is changing weekly. Culture takes years to shape. It's not a sprint. It's not even a marathon. It's like the Lord of the rings. It's this massive transformational journey that's going to be exciting and full of opportunities, full of danger and pitfalls.

00;00;21;03 - 00;00;44;16

Geoff Nielson

This is a show about the future of tech and the future of work. I'm Geoff Nielson, and today my guest is Maurice Conti. He's a long standing AI futurist working with organizations like Amazon, Nike, Lululemon and Mercedes to take their businesses to the next level. Insights and brainpower aside, Maurice has walked the walk and has a pulse on what's going on inside fortune 100 boardrooms the good, the bad and the ugly.

00;00;44;18 - 00;01;04;10

Geoff Nielson

He thinks we're looking at AI all wrong, and that the future of the technology isn't big or sexy. I want to ask him how he sees this technology playing out, what we should be paying attention to, and what we need to do to get ready. Let's find out. Maurice, super excited to have you on today. Thanks so much for joining me.

00;01;04;12 - 00;01;28;02

Geoff Nielson

Maybe to jump right into it. I mean, you've been talking about AI and you know how we leverage AI for a long time. You've talked about things like us entering into an augmented age, how we use generative AI, humans and robots sort of coexisting. And, you know, given that you've been talking about this for over a decade and we've we seem to have recently crossed that threshold from kind of imagination and reality.

00;01;28;05 - 00;01;35;22

Geoff Nielson

How is it shaking out relative to what you expected? What's the same? What's different? And, you know, what do you have kind of top of mind right now?

00;01;35;24 - 00;02;10;12

Maurice Conti

Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. And, yeah, I mean, we started thinking about generative AI more than ten years ago. I had the privilege of, being part of one of the teams that that invented the technology, at Autodesk focused more on design at the time. I, I'd say largely so this idea of the augmented age is humans and technology in this case, AI and robotics working together to achieve things that neither could do on their own.

00;02;10;15 - 00;02;31;16

Maurice Conti

Before which I still believe is sort of the golden promise of, of these technologies. And I think largely it has played out the way that we imagined it. I'll share a little story with you. So back then, we were we were thinking about this technology and sort of how how to describe it because it was just in our imaginations at the time.

00;02;31;16 - 00;02;52;13

Maurice Conti

And there's this clip from a Star Trek movie. It's, it's the fourth Star Trek for The Voyage Home. They go back in time to save the whales. It's one of my favorite films. And, in it, there's the scene where, Scotty is in a, manufacturing plant here in the Bay area, and, has to use a computer.

00;02;52;13 - 00;03;18;25

Maurice Conti

Happens to be an old Macintosh. In order to show this, this engineer from from the past, some formulas and basically tell him how to make transparent aluminum. And so he walks up to the computer and, and he says, computer and expects the computer to engage in a, in a conversation in a, basically a design and engineering conversation to build, to build this, this thing.

00;03;18;25 - 00;03;46;28

Maurice Conti

And the computer obviously doesn't do anything. It's a macintosh se and so he goes, computer, computer doesn't do anything. And so bones is there with him and he, like, hands him the corded mouse, and he goes, and he goes, computer. And the computer doesn't do anything. And what's going on in Scottie's head that that expectation is exactly what I've been most excited about with generative AI and is what's happening.

00;03;46;28 - 00;04;11;23

Maurice Conti

It's now you can actually have a conversation with a computer. So like sci fi, is now totally real. And it's that ability to have a conversation in, in human terms, within a human interactive context that I think is one of the most amazing parts of this, this technology and is kind of the part of the vision that has totally come true.

00;04;11;25 - 00;04;33;18

Geoff Nielson

The word I've heard, he used to describe that, which I think is, you know, pretty encapsulated in that story, is intuitive, right? That it should just be intuitive to us versus you know, just, you know, having to to write lines of code. Any interaction is just, you know, you can say computer and tell it what you want. We've obviously come a long way in the last handful of years, but I'm curious, like, have we arrived?

00;04;33;18 - 00;04;43;11

Geoff Nielson

Is this now just we are here at the age of, you know, intuitive, you know, I intuitive, you know, computation or you know, what is the road ahead look like.

00;04;43;13 - 00;05;15;29

Maurice Conti

Yeah. I mean, we've arrived at today, by definition, but and and the journey into the future will be a journey. We haven't arrived there yet. So, I don't, you know, I don't think about the future or the the sort of progress of this technological journey as these moments of arrival. I mean, certainly there are some highlights like, you know, when OpenAI opened, ChatGPT to the general public was certainly a moment in November 22nd,

00;05;16;02 - 00;05;40;24

Maurice Conti

And maybe that moment was when the majority of the people on the planet were able to, to experience this, this intuitive interaction. But I tend to not think about the progress as being a sort of series of arrivals or these major milestones. It's much more diffuse than that. And, and it's just sort of progress and evolution and it's more complicated and messy than you think it's going to be.

00;05;40;27 - 00;06;05;12

Maurice Conti

And where things are going, you know, I think no one really knows. Number one, you know, futurists, are not actually supposed to predict the future. We're sort of supposed to model the possibility space and the probability space and the desirable space and kind of, think through what those would look like and then help, like, what I do is help my clients make strategic decisions based on those those models.

00;06;05;12 - 00;06;28;16

Maurice Conti

Right. Kind of where you want to place your bets. But, you know, there are ways to, to think about the future of AI one. I'll share this, frustrating moment for me. So this is 2 or 3 years ago, we, you know, we're having our annual call with our, financial planners, and that sounds way fancier than it actually is.

00;06;28;16 - 00;06;49;14

Maurice Conti

But, and, and so it's like they're responsible for investing, you know, small, sum of money for us. And having the conversation and, and I say, so how do we have any Nvidia in the portfolio? Because I think this is going somewhere and they're like, yeah, no, our analysts are not looking to buy Nvidia.

00;06;49;14 - 00;07;05;16

Maurice Conti

We don't think that, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This was maybe enough. Three, three, three and a half years ago. I was like, okay. I mean, like we this is what I do for a living. We live here in, you know, Silicon Valley. Like you go to Chipotle and order burrito. And the people on this site are talking about AI.

00;07;05;17 - 00;07;23;01

Maurice Conti

The people on this side are the ones building the stuff. Like we kind of have our finger on the pulse, but you, you know, you had a very convincing speech about all the analysts they have and how smart they are. And so I was like, okay, maybe it is risky and we want to, not be too risky with our little nest egg.

00;07;23;01 - 00;07;47;11

Maurice Conti

And fine year goes by, Nvidia starts to do what it's doing, and we have, you know, the, the check in and you. So how much Nvidia do we have. Well we still don't really think that it's a buy you know, yada yada yada. And and then I think six months later we had another, check in and there was a same story.

00;07;47;11 - 00;08;08;27

Maurice Conti

They were starting to change flavor on it. This is like a big, you know, on a for anybody on the big bank, right. Like they, they, supposed to be clever. And I was like, okay, how about I put it to you this way? Occam's razor. In the future, is there going to be less AI than there is today or more AI than there is today?

00;08;08;29 - 00;08;29;10

Maurice Conti

And I think, you know, kind of light bulbs went off, for them, but also for me, like, even though I think about this stuff every day, when I heard myself say that, I was like, oh, this is a fundamental kind of principle that to me is not about really predicting the future. I think this is a tautology today that in the future there will be more AI than there is, versus less AI.

00;08;29;11 - 00;08;57;00

Maurice Conti

There will never be less AI than there is in the world today. And I think, you know, you could say, well, that's sort of trite and obvious, but, but I think that's an interesting just kind of background, reality to, to to ponder. I'm fond of Occam's Razor. You just kind of cut all the, all the extra fat and discourse out, and you just kind of get to the, to the core of it so that that's one thing.

00;08;57;02 - 00;09;20;23

Maurice Conti

This other, way. And I, you know, I'm sure you know it amara's not amara's law. If you don't know it in name, you certainly know it in in content, which is we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and radically underestimate the impact of that technology in the long run. And I think we're super guilty of that when it comes to AI right now.

00;09;20;25 - 00;09;44;20

Maurice Conti

I think there's so much heat and discourse and attention and and money and so forth focused on this narrative of what's going to happen with AI from today to, you know, six months, 12 months, 18 months. And, I think some of those claims and, and, and enthusiasms are overblown.

00;09;44;23 - 00;10;08;13

Maurice Conti

But at the same time, I think there are very few people thinking about, AI in a much longer term. So in terms of degree, like in, how far in the future and how fundamentally important and impactful it's going to be, I think people underestimate I think it's going to be much bigger than anyone thinks or most people think, and it's going to take a lot longer than most people think.

00;10;08;16 - 00;10;54;04

Maurice Conti

I think that's another one of the sort of fundamental, I think we're not doing a good job of, of, proving Amara wrong or, being aware of Amara's law. And then recently I've, I've, I kind of had a, an experience, working with, a team. I have a client I work very closely with, and I'm engaged with kind of the daily life of of a team and, and I had an moment and, and it made me think about the future of AI, in terms of these four waves, like, there's these four waves of AI that are going to, come through the first wave of

00;10;54;04 - 00;11;23;09

Maurice Conti

AI. I'm calling it blue IBM. You, and it's it's all of the things we've gotten very, very excited about, sort of the sexy output of, of humans using AI. So one example might be, I recently saw a music video, the entirety of which was created with a series of different AI. So the song was written, the lyrics were written by an AI.

00;11;23;16 - 00;11;44;21

Maurice Conti

The music was written by an AI. The music was then produced and performed by an AI, and then the characters in the video were produced by another AI. And then the whole thing was put together in an amazing video. It looks like, you know, a pretty darn good, music video. And, it's impressive, like, you see, and you go, wow, this is this is amazing.

00;11;44;24 - 00;12;12;10

Maurice Conti

But to me, it's about it's interesting, but not useful. Right. And so we've we've gone through this whole last couple of years where a lot of the discourse, a lot of the attention, a lot of the excitement has been around things that are genuinely interesting, no question, in lots of ways socially, creatively, technologically, very interesting. But in the end, not that useful, not that impactful, not a lot of ROI and so forth.

00;12;12;12 - 00;12;31;02

Maurice Conti

I think we're broadly tapering off of that now. I think, you know, a year ago I was saying these things and people were like, no, no, like there's so much going on. I think, you know, generally people are getting that, that's not where the the interesting stuff is coming. Where we are right now is the second wave, that I'm calling grassroots.

00;12;31;04 - 00;12;57;02

Maurice Conti

And this is where I had that light bulb, go off. And this grassroots wave, this grassroots, movement kind of came to me as a result of, a series of conversations that involved, this question that CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, were asking in these boardrooms that, I sometimes get to hang out in and going, well, where's the ROI?

00;12;57;05 - 00;13;16;25

Maurice Conti

Like, I'm getting this bill, the subscription bill or this, you know, you know, all these tokens I'm spending or, what have you every month. And it's huge and growing and accelerating. Where's the ROI, where's the ROI? And folks were having a really hard time, like pulling up the spreadsheets and going, well, we don't we don't see it.

00;13;16;25 - 00;13;47;03

Maurice Conti

There's like the line item is not there. And intuitively, you know, I didn't I didn't, sometimes feel confident enough to, to push back then and until I had this, this kind of moment. But intuitive is like, yeah, I feel like there is value being generated here. But for some reason it's not making its way to the, to the boardroom or to the, you know, to the executive staff and, and then something happened.

00;13;47;05 - 00;14;09;17

Maurice Conti

I was working with this team, at a at a client closely enough that I was sort of observing the, the work processes, of these folks, like, I was, I was seeing how they were doing the work that was being asked with them. This team is young, mostly people under 30. Very bright.

00;14;09;19 - 00;14;39;19

Maurice Conti

Folks work fast, like, you know, high performance team. And, you know, we we'd sit down, say, okay, we have to put together a narrative around, this new thing, like, we have to we're working on this new thing, this new idea. We got to start to build a narrative around that. First thing one of these young folks does is they spool up a cloud code instance and go working on their ideas, strategy, you know, things like this.

00;14;39;22 - 00;14;55;25

Maurice Conti

And you're pulling up cloud code very. And they go, wait, wait a minute. Like, we're not we're not building anything yet. We got to like, figure out what we have to go build first and go, yeah, I know, but this is like, this is the way I'm going to gather my thoughts and so forth. And to me, that was a huge moment.

00;14;55;27 - 00;15;23;25

Maurice Conti

Like that same week is a big week for me. That same week somebody said, oh, you should go check out Replit. And this was not like Replit V1 is maybe like two, two and a half, still early. It was new to me, so I sat down with Replit later that week. I had to, communicate this sort of concept around, a data set, that I had in a particular way of using that that was kind of creative.

00;15;24;01 - 00;15;49;14

Maurice Conti

And so I needed to visualize that data in a way that was unique. And so I sat down with Replit. I worked for maybe an hour and had a fully functional, beautifully designed. It was like Star Trek themed, you know, l cars interface, visualization of this data set that was fully interactive. I could, I could have sounds as the as the your radar plots change shape and so forth.

00;15;49;14 - 00;16;17;20

Maurice Conti

Took me an hour and on the one hand you could say, oh, yeah, that sounds like it new to me. Like, you know, big deal. Like you have a data set and it's all Star Trek looking. Who cares? But the the click for me, the kind of eye opening moment was, I went, oh, suddenly I've gone from being a tool user to a tool maker, so I don't, I don't know how to code any modern languages.

00;16;17;22 - 00;16;38;25

Maurice Conti

So I couldn't have coded that, the old way. And, and yet I was able to be, I was able to build a tool that could do exactly what I needed to. In the moment, I'll probably never reuse that tool. Took me an hour. Absolutely. To this job. Blew away the. Wasn't about blowing them away.

00;16;38;28 - 00;16;59;09

Maurice Conti

The folks I presented it to understood deeply what I was trying to get across. And that idea then went on to have legs. So, you know, mission accomplished. There. Now, the big takeaway for me on this, on this transition from being, a tool user to a tool maker is that you back to this question of like, where's the ROI?

00;16;59;09 - 00;17;25;29

Maurice Conti

Where's the ROI? If you look in an organization, let's say this particular organization has 400,000 employees, but that's that's huge. Even our organization with thousand or 10,000, people, and each of those people now kind of overnight has the has has been empowered, to be a tool maker. So each of those unique people, they're all different and they're all doing if they're not doing different jobs, are certainly doing them differently.

00;17;25;29 - 00;17;44;01

Maurice Conti

Like, you and I might be on the same team kind of doing the same stuff, but we probably have very different intimate work processes, like inside of, how I, you know, you might, you know, our boss might come and ask us to like each deliver one of these things. And she's kind of a kind of a hardass.

00;17;44;01 - 00;18;08;07

Maurice Conti

And so we're stressed out, and you're going to go about it one way. I'm going to go about it a slightly different way. And I might I now have the ability to build a tool that works the way I want to work in order for me to deliver this thing maybe 20% faster and it's 20% better looking, let's say, when I hand this to our boss, she's going to look at and go, oh, well, you got that done faster than last time.

00;18;08;07 - 00;18;23;19

Maurice Conti

That's good. Good job. And look, this looks great. You know, I haven't seen this level of quality. Good job. Right. Fortunately, just not using AI. Not using Replit. He's not doing as well. But.

00;18;23;21 - 00;18;49;23

Maurice Conti

What, what is invisible to the organization is the fact that I built a tool to do this better. All they see is a slightly better result. And they they they don't see how I did it. And individual, the individual impact is it's maybe not new, but it's certainly not groundbreaking. All I did was deliver this, you know, TPS report, slightly faster, and it's a slightly better report.

00;18;49;25 - 00;19;14;28

Maurice Conti

But in aggregate, if you multiply that times a thousand employees, 15,000 employees, 400,000 employees, the impact is profound. It's huge, almost incalculable. Right. And at the same time, it's completely opaque to the organization. There's no way for them to to measure, to even see this happening unless you because every instance is different from the next. And so the data set is ginormous.

00;19;15;00 - 00;19;48;01

Maurice Conti

Each cell in that data set is not very big because the the impact was relatively small. But in aggregate, the thing is, is profound. So that's kind of this grassroots wave where the value, the ROI of AI is coming from the bottom up. It's coming from these, you know, young folks that are radically changing the way that they do their work and producing better, faster and more efficient, more creative, more insightful output, in ways that are, again, in aggregate, hugely impactful, but at the same time invisible to the, to the organization.

00;19;48;06 - 00;20;10;00

Maurice Conti

So I thought that was an interesting, sort of duality. The next wave, kind of the third wave, in the future of AI is, and not a lot of people. Sorry, not not a lot of people are talking about this grassroots thing happening. I think that's, that's not as observed out in the, in, in the discourse sphere.

00;20;10;03 - 00;20;35;04

Maurice Conti

The third wave is what everyone is talking about. And that's, agent X kind of this agent Dick wave. If I, I'm a, totally on board with it. I think the the value, the impact, the ROI, is going to be huge compared to the, grassroots wave. Not to belittle the grassroots wave, but this is this is where I gets even bigger and more impactful.

00;20;35;07 - 00;20;56;23

Maurice Conti

I think it's super early days. I'm starting to hear people talk about, you know, sort of a antics and, and so forth as here now, I think it's it's super early days. I think, where a lot of the energy, should be is on not just, agents, not just agent enterprises, but the giant tech ecosystem.

00;20;56;25 - 00;21;24;15

Maurice Conti

I think by definition, you know, for me, I like simple things. An agent is simply a machine system that has agency can take action on a system outside of itself. Whether that's another agent or a non-genetic system. It can it can go do stuff that isn't inside of it. Simple. In order to do that effectively, you have to have an ecosystem at the same time, as soon as you have two agents that can do stuff, you by definition have an ecosystem, small, low population.

00;21;24;17 - 00;21;48;17

Maurice Conti

But it's the beginning. And, and, that's one of the things I'm most excited about is this is thinking about this as an ecosystem. And then the last wave, which is kind of, so the eugenic wave, where in the middle of it, where it's the beginning, there's still a ways to go, but it's potentially, going to have a lot of, of impact, both positive and negative.

00;21;48;20 - 00;22;13;20

Maurice Conti

The final wave I'm calling electricity. And it's where, AI in the future is going to feel a lot like electricity feels to us today. So it's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Broadly speaking, there are some exceptions, but, it's everywhere. You pretty much can't do anything without it. Like you and I can't have this conversation. I couldn't have heated my tea this morning.

00;22;13;20 - 00;22;34;12

Maurice Conti

Like pretty much anything for most of the world. Can't happen without electricity. And no one really much cares. Like, there's a relatively small group of people that are involved in generating and distributing that electricity. Like, they care a lot. But the rest of us, you know, you don't wake up this morning like super stressed out or intensely thinking about electricity.

00;22;34;12 - 00;22;51;13

Maurice Conti

It's just there. It powers everything, that you do. And I think that's kind of the final stage of this, I, revolution. So if you ask me how I think about this future, that's kind of the four, four waves that are that are coming.

00;22;51;15 - 00;23;18;19

Geoff Nielson

If you work in it, Infotech Research Group is a name you need to know no matter what your needs are. Infotech has you covered. AI strategy covered. Disaster recovery covered. Vendor negotiation covered. Infotech supports you with the best practice, research and a team of analysts standing by ready to help you tackle your toughest challenges. Check it out at the link below and don't forget to like and subscribe!

00;23;18;21 - 00;23;34;21

Geoff Nielson

I really like that model. And I've got, you know, no shortage of questions or things I want to unpack. You know, about each of them. And I was kind of processing them as you went through it. And I mean, I'm thinking about, I guess broadly the ROI question and the value question, because that also seems to be on a lot of people's minds.

00;23;34;21 - 00;23;52;27

Geoff Nielson

And it's interesting to me because, you know, you're in a new level where it's like interesting but not useful to me. In some ways, that layer is almost destructive in the sense that I think it can turn people off AI because they say like, I don't want this. Like, like this is gross to me. If this is what AI is all about, like, count me out.

00;23;53;04 - 00;24;03;28

Geoff Nielson

Like, this is not the future I sign up for. But to your point, it's really interesting to contextualize that as you know, a single layer. Are you seeing the same thing there?

00;24;04;00 - 00;24;37;12

Maurice Conti

I totally agree it had some downsides. This new, wave, maybe the the upside is that it got picked because it's interesting that AI enabled is it's interesting. It does draw you in right. And it drew people in enough to start using to start experimenting. And it, it enabled the transition to the grassroots thing where right. They started, you know, folks became tool makers and they started making unlike my data visualization tool is not sexy, right.

00;24;37;14 - 00;25;05;28

Maurice Conti

Not nearly as sexy as the music video. But did add value to my, you know, to my to my work. So, Yeah, the dark side of it was, not delivering on the promise, this big vision of AI. At the same time, I think it drew in the masses, with this excitement. Then people started to experiment, and and that's really where I do your earlier point, like this intuitive exchange, like, that's that's the beauty.

00;25;05;28 - 00;25;24;14

Maurice Conti

And so when people even now but certainly like over the last couple of years, you know, I would talk a lot about AI to folks and you sort of get head nodding. And at the end I would say, look, if there's one thing I could tell you, go use it, go to ChatGPT and just use it for 15 minutes.

00;25;24;14 - 00;25;52;03

Maurice Conti

It will be it will be way more valuable than the 45 minute talk I just gave. That'll be like garbage compared to the 15 minutes that you would spend actually interacting with it nowadays. People are like, yeah, you know, you know, people have have sort of adopted, the use of these things and, and again, it's a personal maybe because that exchange is more human like more, more, more intuitive.

00;25;52;06 - 00;26;15;27

Maurice Conti

The use cases are also more personal and and intimate. Right. Largely everyone kind of uses Excel more or less the same way to do more or less the same things. AI is really different and even day to day the way I, you know, I as the same individual day to day, use it in radically different, different ways.

00;26;15;27 - 00;26;46;04

Maurice Conti

Right. The same way that I would talk to different people and get their opinions on different things, like you're a magician in the kitchen and suddenly I have people coming over tonight and I'm like, Jeff, this is what I have in the fridge. What do I do? Like, they're foodies. They're super snobby. You know, help me out here and then, you know, and then I switch to a medical situation and getting, you know, diagnosis and treatment recommendations that are really good.

00;26;46;06 - 00;27;09;14

Geoff Nielson

So, you know, with that and we've we've kind of honed in pretty precisely on this grassroots phase. And that that makes a lot of sense to me. And I you know, I'm curious in your opinion. But to me, I think most organizations, if we're being honest with ourselves, are probably still in that grassroots layer. Maybe they aspire to get to the a genetic wave and maybe, you know, we'll cross the hump over the next handful of months or, you know, next year or two.

00;27;09;14 - 00;27;36;18

Geoff Nielson

But it feels to me like most organizations are in that grassroots layer. And it's it's interesting to me. And I see there's a lot to unpack about this specific moment. I mean, you mentioned the fact that, it makes productivity gains or value really hard to capture and that that really resonated with me. And the other piece I was thinking about is like, that's if they capture it at all, right?

00;27;36;18 - 00;27;53;08

Geoff Nielson

Because there's a world to me where the only people who capture it are the employees. And, you know, if you, Maurice, are now able to do something, you know, 20% faster and 20% better, you know, you don't tell your boss and you just handed in at the same time. And, you know, congratulations, you've just gotten the deal. Every week.

00;27;53;08 - 00;28;12;28

Geoff Nielson

You have one day, you know, to to, you know, go to the beach or do whatever you want. And so, you know, organizations have to wrestle with that. And by the way, that's also creating some conflict between employees and employers as we think about, you know, what? What's in it for the employees if it's all just sucked into expectation?

00;28;13;00 - 00;28;37;23

Geoff Nielson

And then the other piece I was thinking about there, and this is one that's given me a lot of heartburn lately with a lot of the CIOs, CTOs and tech folks I work with is if everybody is not just a tool user, but a tool maker. Now, that's a that's an explosion of tools in the organization that you would think in some way, you know, corporate it has their arms around, which I'm positive they don't.

00;28;38;00 - 00;29;02;10

Geoff Nielson

And suddenly like, what data are you feeding into that tool? Is it the wrong data? What does it have access to? What if it has some level of agency and starts not playing nice with other tools? So to me, there's a lot of, there's a lot of consequences of being in this, in this layer that maybe not if you've just kind of had it sneak into your organization at a grassroots level, you may not be ready for.

00;29;02;10 - 00;29;16;07

Geoff Nielson

So I'm curious. I mean, first of all, do you agree with that? You know, kind of, you know, state of the nation? And then what advice would you give people who are trying to, I guess, operationalize this, this wave a little bit more effectively?

00;29;16;09 - 00;29;44;27

Maurice Conti

Yeah. I mean, broad strokes, I totally agree. I think you're, you're absolutely right in, in, in shining light on that, that nuance. So again, one of the fundamental qualities of this grassroots thing is that it's it's invisible to the organization. And so, it's not even companies are not gathering that data. They can't it's just there's a, there's a, hard blind spot, there.

00;29;44;29 - 00;30;15;19

Maurice Conti

And so what they can do is, you know, listen to folks, that are saying, like, hey, this is happening. There are some risks that you absolutely need to get on top of at the same time, it's probably worthwhile leaning into it. In order to get more, more of that value. And what I think that looks like, is this I think that the, the CIO CTOs that I work with are put in a hard position, just as you described there.

00;30;15;22 - 00;30;41;06

Maurice Conti

You know, they're hearing, well, this is this is where the value is. So make it happen. And at the same time, it's it's a proliferation. I've been thinking about it, kind of like the, the Cambrian explosion. So like 530 million years ago, there was this explosion of life on Earth. And it wasn't just the quantity of life, but it was the, number of different species exploded.

00;30;41;06 - 00;31;05;13

Maurice Conti

There were there were many more different, species suddenly on the planet. And I think that's with this kind of tool user to tool maker transition. That's, that's one of the things that's happening. To, to your point. So what is the, the IT department do in a big organization? Well, in order to empower that, they, they need to figure out the security, the safety, the access.

00;31;05;15 - 00;31;28;18

Maurice Conti

I think it's about removing friction and and reducing risk. And it's a tough, you know what I, what I haven't seen work is, Well, here you have copilot. Nothing against copilot, but, like, this is what you have. Copilot is great, but it's one of the many tools. And then one week it's the best, and then the next week, there's something else that's better.

00;31;28;18 - 00;31;51;14

Maurice Conti

Like, you know, every week we get something that's, new or slightly different. Slightly better. And the those 400,000 individuals down in the ranks want to use the best tool available. And so the ones that are savvy and are using, the tools are like, good work. Yeah, but I need replit, and it's like, well, we that's not.

00;31;51;14 - 00;32;15;16

Maurice Conti

You can't for good reason. I mean, they're not just being crabby. For very good reason. And what happens is they go figure out a way to get replit on their machines, or they bring their personal machine to work and and they're using replit. And, I mean, that's I've seen that, you know. Right. And, you know, on, on the teams called sums of all replit and it's like, well, I don't have red button somewhere to be like I do.

00;32;15;18 - 00;32;40;19

Maurice Conti

I mean, you know, I'll do it. And so, because this technology is like highly democratized, these aren't these like massively deployed managed systems, right? I can just go to the website and download it. That's the reality. And it's a tough reality. And some CIOs like totally get it. Other CIOs like, yeah, no, we're not you know, we're not allowing, that particular, model.

00;32;40;19 - 00;33;09;12

Maurice Conti

And it's like, dude, yeah, it is, it is allowed. Like, it's, it's it's being used broadly. So the, the challenges, building the foundation that is flexible, smart in the way it manages risk, smart in the way it, it collects and manages data. And I'm sure we'll talk about data. I think that's the the big hero of value that that, the i.t organizations can bring today.

00;33;09;14 - 00;33;33;17

Maurice Conti

Not an easy task because it's kind of antithetical to the whole, you know, principles and responsibility of these organizations. In the past and not only is it sort of in the opposite direction, but some of the challenge, like the risk is even bigger than it was, before. So it's like more risky, more scary, more desperate and less able to be managed.

00;33;33;20 - 00;33;55;04

Maurice Conti

And you're being told to do it anyway in, you know, in a responsible way. So, absolutely. I mean, I think that's the that's the kind of the big action scene for, for, these teams, that's the big the big challenge. And I've seen a few organizations get it right. Not many. I can really only think of one.

00;33;55;06 - 00;34;19;16

Maurice Conti

And they're actually in your neighborhood. And, it's brilliant because they're like, yeah, no, we we've got to layer and whatever people want to use. It just goes through that layer. And, and we're good. And and we turn around. I mean, it's not there is a delay. It's like a handful of days you model comes out, takes them a couple days to get it all, you know, into their sort of pipeline.

00;34;19;16 - 00;34;30;27

Maurice Conti

And it's available to anybody in the company. They spend it. They invested a lot in that early on. They put a lot of time and work in that early on. You can imagine how it's paying off now.

00;34;30;29 - 00;34;45;19

Geoff Nielson

All right. Well, that's what I that's what I was thinking. I mean, it's it's very easy for you and I to say, you know, you put anything in the layer and, you know, magic comes out and I think we we've both been in the game long enough to know that you have two different awful lot of work to make something seem that simple.

00;34;45;21 - 00;35;14;05

Geoff Nielson

But that's really exciting. And it's nice to have even that sort of direction, I guess, in terms of how you should be conceiving of this at that sort of, operationalized layer. I do want to maybe take us a step up, I guess, in the organization and just ask more broadly, based on what you've seen in the organizations you're working with, if you have any guidance in terms of where to invest in AI versus where to not invest in AI, where are you going to get the most bang for your buck?

00;35;14;10 - 00;35;33;03

Geoff Nielson

Where are you going to, you know, end up farther ahead? And whether that's, you know, tools that are more grassroots, whether that's a gigantic whether that's, you know, trying to use it to create new products and services or experiences. You know what, how do you how do you answer that question?

00;35;33;06 - 00;35;40;09

Maurice Conti

Yeah. That's, in many ways, that's the big question for for leadership teams.

00;35;40;12 - 00;36;06;05

Maurice Conti

So the way I would think about where to invest, first of all, I would start with not investing in sprinkles. And what I mean by that is, again, as time goes by, leaders and companies are getting better at this. A couple of years ago, this was rampant. I think it's it's still an issue. But a lot of.

00;36;06;08 - 00;36;30;09

Maurice Conti

Leadership teams, a lot of companies are thinking about AI, in, in, in this way, they want to sprinkle AI on the organization, different parts of the organization just kind of this magic AI dust and then sit back and expect radical, change radical new value, to come out. And, that's not as you know, that's not the way I works.

00;36;30;09 - 00;36;53;22

Maurice Conti

Like AI is not this magic general purpose dust that you can somehow magically deploy onto, or product development folks or our, supply chain, like, we're going to we're going to put AI in our supply chain like that doesn't actually make any sense. And, in a lot of companies, we're kind of approaching AI that way.

00;36;53;22 - 00;37;14;10

Maurice Conti

They were just sort of spending on AI without having clarity on the problem that they were trying to solve. And so two years ago, one year ago, I would be spending an inordinate amount of time with my clients just trying to get to the problem. They're trying to solve, you know, be having a conversation with a CEO and saying, okay, like, I understand you want to do AI, but what's the problem you're trying to solve?

00;37;14;16 - 00;37;36;11

Maurice Conti

So, well, we're going to transform our business, blah, blah, blah. I was like, that's not even a problem statement, right? Let alone the right one. So, yeah, I'm thinking of one. CEO, this is a big, consumer apparel brand that's a household name. And, and this conversation started with CEO, like, well, we need to do I, I said that.

00;37;36;18 - 00;37;57;28

Maurice Conti

That's great. You probably do need to do that. What's the problem you're trying to solve? And it's kind of like water, you know, it was answers like, we're going to reinvent this and that. And so that's not our problem. And over the course of the next six months, like, he actually got pretty annoyed at times, like, okay, now you're going to ask me what's the problem we're trying to solve?

00;37;58;01 - 00;38;20;00

Maurice Conti

And I just wouldn't, you know, wouldn't let up on that. And finally, about six months later, and maybe it took that long because of my own shortcomings, but, he, you know, he said that. Now I get it. You've changed the way I run my business, right? And it's this discipline of having real clarity.

00;38;20;00 - 00;38;43;27

Maurice Conti

It's not just kind of the marketing problem, kind of the marketing corporate speak, but it's true clarity on the problem you're trying to solve. Then we can go figure out what the best, tools are to solve that problem, and whether I would be good at doing that or not good at doing that. And I think the companies that have done a good job of of getting clarity on the problem that they're trying to solve, these are big strategic level things.

00;38;43;29 - 00;39;04;07

Maurice Conti

Are the ones that have gotten or will get the most value out of, deploying these, these tools. Because then, first of all, you're much more likely to get to get a good tool, solution or a problem tool fit. And then much more likely to once you deploy the tool to actually apply it at the thing that you're, you're trying to solve.

00;39;04;07 - 00;39;22;00

Maurice Conti

I mean, it's kind of like we we go into Home Depot and we're like going down the tool aisle and just like, you know, putting stuff in the cart, it's so exciting. And we're going to spend so much money. And we walk out of there with this, like super one of those big flat carts that, you know, has like 6,000 pounds of stuff on it.

00;39;22;02 - 00;39;41;27

Maurice Conti

And there's power tools and electrical, you know, electrical stuff on it. And we get out to the parking lot and we go, oh, we're working on gardening. You know, where we've just wasted a lot of time and excitement and energy, and we're totally unequipped to to solve the actual problem. Which was we're out in the garden and we have to, you know, plant a lawn or something.

00;39;41;27 - 00;40;04;15

Maurice Conti

So, that, you know, that that, over the last couple of years has been, you know, the primary, the primary piece of in, of sort of invent, like where to invest and, and so forth. Then of course, it gets more specific given like once you have clarity on the problem, then we can get super specific and go, oh, then, you know, you probably need to do, this or that.

00;40;04;17 - 00;40;27;22

Maurice Conti

The other thing, you know, I've been, I've been using this framework for a while now, more than a decade. When trying to, to, to break all of this down, and I'm sure you've heard it, it's, it's tool set, skill set and mindset. And the toolset part is the technology, like our technology is simply our tool set.

00;40;27;22 - 00;40;55;14

Maurice Conti

Like there's a lot of excitement and hubbub about it, but really, it's just, our tool set and it's where like 90 a year ago would have been 99%. Now. Now it's probably 90% of the energy and focus and money is on the tool set. Skill set is about sort of bridging the gap between the humans and the technologies, like getting the humans to adopt, the technology.

00;40;55;17 - 00;41;13;12

Maurice Conti

You know, you've been in it for a long, long time. What's the what is the, like, ultimate rate limiting step on the deployment of a new technology in an organization? There's like this one thing, like you go to the we've been working months and months. You go to turn the switch, you deploy the thing. There's this one thing that is like, always screws things up.

00;41;13;14 - 00;41;14;23

Maurice Conti

Do you know what it is?

00;41;14;26 - 00;41;22;08

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. Well, it's I assume it's the what some people affectionately call the Pidcock problem. The the person. Right. The the user.

00;41;22;11 - 00;41;43;21

Maurice Conti

It's the humans. Right. Yeah. It's it's the humans for whatever we, you know, depending it will for whatever reason. And so in many ways the humans are, more important, even just in sort of an it, headspace than the technology, because you could do whatever you want on the technology. If you don't get the humans right, it's going to go nowhere.

00;41;43;23 - 00;42;12;03

Maurice Conti

And so that's the second piece now, I would say. So technology. Yes. Super important. Like without the technology you can't do technology stuff. Okay. The humans I think more important just in that, I mean, not even in a broader societal context, but just in the context of getting value out of technology. The humans are more difficult and more important than, than the technology as a, as a thing in your, in your, kind of pipeline.

00;42;12;05 - 00;42;45;25

Maurice Conti

And then finally there's the mindset which, you know, you could translate to culture, and you could think about mindset as culture. You could think about it as, leadership vision. And to me, that is the most important. Again, only in the in the context of a technology deployment. I'm not talking about the broader picture, but just in terms of getting value out of a new technology, that mindset is more important, more valuable, and and remarkably more difficult than the than the other two.

00;42;45;25 - 00;43;16;20

Maurice Conti

So like everyone's working on the technology, which is hard. It's the easiest thing that we have in front of us. That mindset is this is the transformation piece. Like it's the responsibility that leadership has to think about the future of their organization in, in, in a place where we have this disruptive, massively powerful, highly democratized technology that, that makes possible things that were impossible before.

00;43;16;26 - 00;43;41;26

Maurice Conti

And so you need to think about your business like, well, what do I do? Where do I take this business in this future where things that are not possible today are become possible? You know, there's a there's a bit of a debate now going on between to do we focus on these technologies to, to get efficiency, to take cost out of the business.

00;43;41;28 - 00;44;01;00

Maurice Conti

Or do we use them to do things that we've never been able to do before? And I think if you focus on the I mean, you know, there the realities of doing business and sometimes you need to take cost out. That's fine. But if, if the focus of taking advantage of AI is to reduce cost, I think you're in a race to the bottom.

00;44;01;03 - 00;44;28;12

Maurice Conti

Again, everybody has access to the stuff, so you're not special. And so if you use these groundbreaking things to take cost out, then the next year you're taking more cost out, accept less of it, and then the next year you're taking a little less cost out and you're just racing to, you know, trying to get a quarter of a percent, out of, out of a process which I, you know, is not a race I would want to win.

00;44;28;15 - 00;44;51;25

Maurice Conti

Whereas the, the value side, the upside is, you know, reimagining. It's like, you know, Amazon going from selling books on a website, you know, groundbreaking. But now, you know, being responsible for some large percentage of the, of the internet traffic in the compute on the planet that's reimagining like as new technologies come, you just reimagine the whole business.

00;44;51;25 - 00;45;15;18

Maurice Conti

And I think that's one of the the big opportunities and responsibilities that's facing, leadership teams and where I would, would invest. That's the mindset, part. It's also like we're saying culture like, and you, you, you touched on it, which was, you know, as employees have access to these tools, do I just get my work done faster and, you know, stop working at three in the afternoon instead of five?

00;45;15;20 - 00;45;37;11

Maurice Conti

And not tell anybody. There's all of these new norms, which is a big part of culture, that are still being explored. Like, should I tell my boss that I used I and get a kudos because I'm clever and using the new technologies? Or should I gloss over that fact and, just get a kudos because I did good work.

00;45;37;14 - 00;45;57;29

Maurice Conti

Should I share? You know, should I share my, my little, you know, the tool that I created with my coworkers? Or should I keep it and be more competitive? The young folks, not even young folks, but folks who are in organizations using it, like, don't know the answer. Very uncomfortable. For for people very, very stressful.

00;45;57;29 - 00;46;20;13

Maurice Conti

So, like investing in that and figuring it out and having a clear vision and a clear voice for, you know, for, for your workforce to guide them through this, you know, period of change that's going to be, rough, I think is, is an area for investment and focus that is largely overlooked right now, will pay off in spades in the long run.

00;46;20;16 - 00;46;39;20

Geoff Nielson

Well, the culture pieces, it's really interesting to me. And it's interesting not just because it's so important, but because it's one of these things that it's not. It's not just a problem to be to throw money at right? Like it's not investment in that sense. It's an investment of brainpower and of, you know, organizational effort to be able to overcome.

00;46;39;22 - 00;47;01;01

Geoff Nielson

And, you know, the to me, the subtext of what you're saying is that an awful lot of organizations are getting this piece wrong, and there's an awful lot of different ways to get it wrong. Right? Like, you can there's so many different minds you can step on here, whether it's, you know, just focusing on, you know, everybody has to learn AI.

00;47;01;01 - 00;47;22;21

Geoff Nielson

And this is about AI versus about an outcome, whether it's about, you know, we need to make you more efficient or you know, that this is all about just cost cutting or, you know, whether it's a lack of vision, there's there's so many unique angles here. And I'm curious, you know, in your experience, if you have maybe recipe is too strong a word, but any any guidance for getting this right.

00;47;22;23 - 00;47;36;06

Geoff Nielson

What what is the culture that's going to thrive with this technology. What are some of the messages and I guess what are some of the more, you know, common pitfalls that you recommend people avoid?

00;47;36;09 - 00;48;04;14

Maurice Conti

Yeah. I mean, when it comes to culture and, and building the culture for the future, for an AI future, I, you know, like I said earlier, like I'm a fan of keeping things very simple. Kind of Occam's razor. Your question? Just pay attention. Pay attention to culture. Like, actually, you know, turn the the spotlight on that and figure out what you need to do to, that's the low hanging fruit.

00;48;04;14 - 00;48;28;24

Maurice Conti

Like companies are not thinking the they're not even that's not even a thing like we're so far, broadly speaking, we're so far from making progress against that that, already just paying attention and starting to deploy some resources and, and some brains and some creative people to, to thinking about what the problem actually is or what the series of problems is going to be it.

00;48;28;24 - 00;48;48;04

Maurice Conti

This is a system of systems that are going to be many interconnected challenges, what those are and then how we might, how we might prioritize them and then go about solving them like, that's, that's like we don't even need to get into the details if we just do that. That's that's already a huge a huge win. Also, it will differ greatly from organization or organization.

00;48;48;04 - 00;49;33;14

Maurice Conti

I think that, you know, culture is a by its very nature, a, you know, an individual thing, something that is that is unique to, to each organization, I will say some of the common threads are this apprehension and stress that this particular kind of change is, is bringing about. And there are probably some quick wins that, a leadership team could, could deliver, which is, which, you know, among them are here's what we think about AI, here's our expectation, here's, here's what I do, personally and just be super clear about that and keep delivering that that message over and over.

00;49;33;17 - 00;49;49;04

Maurice Conti

Again, pretty basic, not seeing it happen a lot with, the level of clarity and intensity that that's required to shift. Culture. And by the way, here's the have you ever heard of the pace layers?

00;49;49;07 - 00;49;50;11

Geoff Nielson

No, I don't think so.

00;49;50;14 - 00;50;17;06

Maurice Conti

This is, super interesting, model that was developed by the Long Now Foundation. This is a group of folks, based here in San Francisco that thinks about big societal stuff on an extremely long, timeline, sort of 10,000 year. You know, we're talking about two years in the future. They're like 10,000 years from now. And so they, have this framework called the pace layers, which looks like a, you know, concentric circles.

00;50;17;08 - 00;50;41;03

Maurice Conti

And, it's the, the rate of change. So the outside circle is the thing that changes the fastest. And so fashion is one of the things that in society changes, most quickly, I would sort of put technology in that outer ring. And then you have things like, you know, governance, like, you know, governments are slower to change and so forth.

00;50;41;05 - 00;51;06;27

Maurice Conti

And, the second most inner ring is culture. Culture is one of the slowest after that. It's, it's, evolution in nature. Right. So like nature change very slowly, but just outside of that is, is human culture. Culture change is super slowly, very difficult to change. Humans don't don't like change. And we're in a period of a lot of change, very multidimensional change.

00;51;06;27 - 00;51;33;15

Maurice Conti

And that's part of the reason I think people are broadly stressed out. What's interesting, the reason I like this model is we're dealing with two things in that diagram at the same time, and they are technology, which is among the fastest in culture, which is among the slowest. And we have to manage these two things concurrently. And yet they are on radically different, time scales.

00;51;33;15 - 00;51;48;20

Maurice Conti

So I think that's, you know, broadly applicable to, to leaders that are trying to focus on, on culture. They just need to have this in mind. Is that the the technology is changing weekly culture takes a years, to, to shape.

00;51;48;23 - 00;52;07;26

Geoff Nielson

One, I think, you know, in some ways it it just comes back to building an adaptive culture, right. Like, can you build into the DNA of your company or your organization? Yes. Change is part of who we are, versus, you know, we do the same thing forever the end. Right?

00;52;07;28 - 00;52;30;22

Maurice Conti

Yeah. I mean, trying to trying to bake in tolerance for changes, would certainly be an amazing solve to to this problem. When I was at Frog Design a couple of decades ago, during kind of its golden age, hard mode wrestling or the founder had a, actually made a bumper sticker and put it on his cars.

00;52;31;00 - 00;53;10;15

Maurice Conti

And that said, change is fun because a lot of the I think his big challenge, with clients sort of the, the, the challenge he took on was all about change, and guiding, you know, his clients, like Apple and Hewlett-Packard. Through through these moments of change and internally like it was a lot. So not only were these designers designing things that were new and so embodied, change, but, the way that they were doing their work was constantly challenged and constantly, put under stress of change.

00;53;10;15 - 00;53;33;20

Maurice Conti

And, that was a big, big dynamic. It was very tough for people to, to live through. And so like, no, no, no changes used. He was trying to build change into the culture. Really tough to do. That is a fundamentally, you know, human were evolved to

00;53;33;23 - 00;53;55;17

Maurice Conti

How would I say this? I think humans are evolved to not deal with change. Well, there must be a survival, mirror to that. But I, you know, I don't know what that is, but I do know that we are we deep down, we just don't deal with change. Well, we're just not wired for it, so it's very stressful for us.

00;53;55;19 - 00;54;21;21

Maurice Conti

So I think a strategy that tries to build, a tolerance for change into the culture would be, would be really tough. That would be a tough challenge. So, I might instead try and, take the the variables, take the unknown, take the change out, of the experience for, for the workforce and, and give them as much as possible.

00;54;21;21 - 00;54;41;01

Maurice Conti

Well, yeah. We don't know a lot of what's going to happen. We know it's going to be really different, but at least we do know these. We, you know, 2 or 3 pillars, these touchstones, like at least we have that, and we can use those as our North stars to, to guide us. It's going to be stormy weather on the way.

00;54;41;03 - 00;54;55;26

Maurice Conti

And we're, you know, we're going to have some detours and so forth. But broadly, we're going we're all going in this direction now, because of, I think, again, that that's so simple. But broadly absent, I think, in, in organizations.

00;54;55;28 - 00;55;18;04

Geoff Nielson

I really like that. That's, it's an interesting and I guess, different approach than I had in mind to like, you know, try to maximize the certainty and minimize the feeling of change versus just say, you know, love change, damn it. So let's deal with that. That's a yeah, yeah, yeah. Good deal with that. Exactly. I want to switch gears a little bit from, culture back to, the tech piece.

00;55;18;04 - 00;55;38;23

Geoff Nielson

And, you know, as you said, you've had a lot of experience, you know, in boardrooms with the hands on keyboards teams as well, dealing with a lot of these initiatives and, whether it's cool projects or cool problems that you're solving. I was wondering if you could share, you know, maybe some of those that have caught your attention in the last handful of months.

00;55;38;26 - 00;55;55;20

Maurice Conti

Yeah. So, like, I get asked, like what? What are the cool projects you're seeing? And I, I, I think that makes us guilty of new or like pushes us towards the, the IB new thing. So if you asked me to come up with like the cool sexy thing that's exciting, I'm going to start thinking about these things that are interesting.

00;55;55;20 - 00;56;02;20

Maurice Conti

But my focus will not be on generally, on their use depending who, who's asking. So,

00;56;02;23 - 00;56;06;23

Geoff Nielson

So let's reframe and talk about impact I guess, rather than yeah, the cool factor.

00;56;06;26 - 00;56;31;18

Maurice Conti

Yeah. And because the cool factor, like, I think a lot of people think that the future of AI is going to be like Biggie Smalls, right, the notorious B.I.G. Like, AI is going to be big and sexy. And and I don't think it's going to be like that at all. I think it's going to be lots of little small, humble AI's doing not very sexy, not very visible things.

00;56;31;20 - 00;57;01;15

Maurice Conti

But in aggregate, the impact is going to be, phenomenal. So people you know, in asking that question are looking for the big, you know, superstar thing. And I think in the fullness of time, the real value will be from, lots of things that are, again, the result of the Cambrian explosion that are, that are many and disparate, running in the background, doing their thing, kind of like, electricity.

00;57;01;18 - 00;57;26;04

Maurice Conti

But to answer your question, like, what are the most impactful things? I would go back to these, these young folks that I've had the privilege of watching were kind of standing over their shoulders. If you want to see the most interesting things up to the minute, go watch these folks work and pay attention to the delta between kind of the old way of doing it and the new way that they're doing and and tease that Delta out.

00;57;26;04 - 00;57;54;28

Maurice Conti

That's the the interesting bit again, like, you know, folks, spooling up cloud code to work on a narrative or, the content for a dex or not, the design of the deck, but really the ideas which, you know, at first sounds pretty dissonant, like, why would I spool up a, you know, a generative code tool, to work through some, some ideas and then you watch them do it and you're like, wow, that's, that's a very different approach to solving problems.

00;57;54;28 - 00;58;18;05

Maurice Conti

I think that's the most. So I guess my, my short answer to your question is like, what's the, you know, exciting, you know, deployment of the technology. It's actually in, in its use, not in the end result. It's the way people are are, are internalizing this this toolset.

00;58;18;08 - 00;58;46;26

Geoff Nielson

There's a few, you know, implicit, maybe even explicit lessons in there that I want to, you know, push on a little bit more and more. Each one of them is, that it seems like that grassroots piece that like not being top down and just saying, this is how you use AI, but actually watching people listening, figuring out where they're getting value is a more useful approach to, you know, actually getting real change out of this and real impact.

00;58;47;03 - 00;59;13;21

Geoff Nielson

The second piece that that you've come back to a couple of times now and I wanted to push on is, you've mentioned that these are young people that you've been most impressed with using it, and that caught my attention. Do you do you think that there's, you know, a special role here for young people and that we that we should be bringing them into the fold or looking to them to help us, you know, craft our our new way of doing business?

00;59;13;23 - 00;59;38;25

Maurice Conti

Yeah. And first of all, like, I don't want to hate on the old folks like me, but, it just in my experience, it happens to be this team is made up of of more junior folks. So I don't think it's really necessarily, age related, although I'm sure there's a curve, where where more young folks are doing more, cutting edge stuff also because they're, they're, they're, they're still learning.

00;59;38;25 - 00;59;56;18

Maurice Conti

And so they're, you know, they're still learning their, their craft, their, their profession. And so I think much more likely to because they don't know how to get it done, like they're being, you know, the mean bosses asking them to deliver this thing again. And they don't they've never done that before. So like oh shoot, I gotta I got to crank this out.

00;59;56;21 - 01;00;26;23

Maurice Conti

How am I going to go do that? And so they, they just grab the, the best tools that they can in order to do that. So, And not sure I was going to go with that. So the, the lessons, lessons that we could learn. So, yeah, so I don't, I don't think it's just about young people necessarily, but they're, they're sort of primed, because of their situation, to be more likely to experiment with these tools and, and draw value out of them because they need it.

01;00;26;25 - 01;00;36;28

Maurice Conti

They, they actually have a problem. Again, the beauty of this actually having a problem to solve is quite powerful. So,

01;00;37;01 - 01;00;43;09

Maurice Conti

And the lesson learned, sort of how we could,

01;00;43;12 - 01;00;56;03

Maurice Conti

Yeah. I'm I'm, I'm not sure what the takeaway sort of the deep learning, the profound learning is, but let's let's,

01;00;56;05 - 01;01;22;14

Geoff Nielson

Let's maybe zoom out a little bit and, you know, reframe a little bit because we've, we've covered a lot of really, really interesting insights here that have spanned, you know, technology to culture leaders, to frontline staff. And so let me frame it. This way. For for any business leaders or technology leaders who are listening to this, what's kind of the capstone piece of advice, of advice you'd want them to walk away with?

01;01;22;20 - 01;01;27;02

Geoff Nielson

Having listened to this?

01;01;27;04 - 01;01;52;02

Maurice Conti

So I think the, you know, if I had to synthesize this all down to kind of a few delectable nuggets, I said, first of all, this is not about technology. Like everyone's talking about technology. We all have technology in our titles. Technology, technology. It's not about, technology. It's about reinventing your business for a future that happens to be powered by AI.

01;01;52;04 - 01;02;15;18

Maurice Conti

And thinking about this future business, or the future state of your business to take advantage of the things that today aren't possible, that will be made possible by this technology in the future, like what are the doors that AI unlocks for your business that today are locked or yesterday were locked like these? These unlocks, I think are the most interesting, space.

01;02;15;18 - 01;02;39;05

Maurice Conti

It's the opposite of going for the, you know, cutting, taking out cost. It's opening these doors that have previously been been closed to us and so, you know, taking advantage of this, this amazing new tool set, and getting away from this purely technological, techno centric, vision. You know, I don't think we have a shortage of technology.

01;02;39;05 - 01;02;59;19

Maurice Conti

I think we have a shortage of imagination when it comes to, to to leadership. That's where I would, focus. And the other the only other thing I would say is a lot of people, a lot of leaders, a lot of leadership teams think that this is a sprint. We've got to deploy X or Y in the next six months.

01;02;59;19 - 01;03;20;08

Maurice Conti

We've got to, you know, achieve this in the next 18 months. It's not a sprint. It's not a sprint. Some more clever folks are saying this is a marathon. We've got to dig in. We've got to have a clear strategic, vision and plan for where we're going to be going over the next handful of years.

01;03;20;08 - 01;03;37;27

Maurice Conti

You know, 3 to 5 years. It's not a marathon. It's not even a marathon. I've been thinking about it. It's like the Lord of the rings, right? It's like nine hours of movies, and that's this journey. You can't even see the destination. You kind of can. There's, like, the Eye of Sauron off in the distance.

01;03;37;27 - 01;03;55;08

Maurice Conti

But, there's all these adventures that happen on the way. Some of them are good. Some of them are dangerous and scary. You're going to make new friends along the way. You're going to learn new things. Establish new alliances and so forth. That's the way I think, that we need to be thinking about it.

01;03;55;08 - 01;04;22;19

Maurice Conti

It's this massive, transformational, journey that's going to be exciting and, full of opportunities, full of danger and pitfalls. It's messy and complex. Difficult to predict. But again, at least if, you know, like we are going to Mordor, like we hey, we're all going in this direction, and get ready for epic battles and, and, and triumphs and so forth.

01;04;22;21 - 01;04;28;04

Maurice Conti

Then I think you, you know, you actually stand a chance of of of succeeding.

01;04;28;06 - 01;04;50;08

Geoff Nielson

I love that, very poetic, very, you know, imaginative, and you know, it, on your note, something that I think we're lacking here, so I, I really appreciate that. So with this framing, Maurice, of, you know, augmentation, the augmented age, to me, that's one of the narratives we're hearing about the future of AI. Right? The other one being more, I guess, automation.

01;04;50;10 - 01;05;15;20

Geoff Nielson

And the way I kind of process the difference is, is it people? And we're doing things better, or is it instead of people and, you know, depending on where we end up in either of those camps, it could have very dramatically different impacts on jobs, on the job market, on the economy. I'm curious what your take is in terms of where where you see this landing and how you recommend organizations look at that.

01;05;15;23 - 01;05;16;07

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. I mean.

01;05;16;07 - 01;05;45;28

Maurice Conti

When it comes to jobs, Jeff, I, I I'll give you a short cut answer. I'm generally pretty optimistic. But let me let me explain why. Because I, you know, this is a serious, a serious question that that I actually have a lot of hand-wringing, over you talked about automation. I think one of the things that we started talking about this maybe almost 20 years ago, is that technology is good at automating tasks, not jobs.

01;05;46;01 - 01;06;18;03

Maurice Conti

And most of us, most people are involved in jobs that, that require lots of different tasks, often very disparate tasks. And so technology like one technology, tends tends to be very bad, or it tends to be very difficult for a technology to automate multiple tasks, even for something as powerful as generative AI. And so I think a more nuanced approach is to think about which tasks are going to be, automated inside of jobs.

01;06;18;10 - 01;06;40;27

Maurice Conti

Now, if your job involves only one task, then it might be ripe for complete, automation. That's kind of the first thing. The second thing is people tend to think about the future one dimensionally. And the reality is that the future is in dimensions. There. And by dimensions, I mean like different facets to it, different things going on.

01;06;40;29 - 01;07;01;03

Maurice Conti

Think about all of the things going on for you today and then multiply that by, you know, eight plus billion people are on the planet that there's a lot going on and people don't tend to think about the future that way. They pick one detail, one facet, and projected that one out into the future. Also happens when people are thinking about the future of jobs.

01;07;01;03 - 01;07;27;25

Maurice Conti

They sort of pick 1 or 2 details and kind of forget the rest. But there you don't even need to think about the the trillions of of different things going on. Just think about slightly adjacent, you know, if your job involves one task only, it's pretty easy to automate. If I had to think about a job that for that, that fell into that description to be like truck drivers, truck drivers do one thing.

01;07;27;25 - 01;07;48;06

Maurice Conti

They bring the big rig from point A to point B, and we know we have like, you know, Waymo's all over the place here, that that is a small version of a truck that can go from point A to point B, all by itself. But if you zoom out just a tiny bit. So it turns out that in the US, there's today a shortage of 100,000 truck drivers.

01;07;48;09 - 01;08;12;16

Maurice Conti

So, just today, like, we need 100,000 more truck drivers, than we have. If you thought about, you know, automating, schoolteachers, we have a, shortage of 400,000 school teachers, in the US today, I I'm not certain it's us. It might be global, but, there's a there's a deficit of that particular thing, so those are just two examples.

01;08;12;16 - 01;08;41;19

Maurice Conti

But, just zooming out a little bit makes the conversation much more complicated. And for me, much more, much more interesting. The other thing is, so the future is n dimensional, not one dimensional. And and guess what? The future happens over time. Like, the future doesn't happen on Tuesday 2031. You know, November, 16th.

01;08;41;22 - 01;09;07;21

Maurice Conti

It happens, you know, every day. So, and all of those dimensions transform, into that future. So, you know, what does that all mean? While we are automating tasks? Time goes by, and because of Amara's law, it tends to be more time than we think. Takes longer, right? What happens while people age out of the workforce?

01;09;07;21 - 01;09;29;18

Maurice Conti

They retire naturally. So suddenly, all these people that we, you know, all these people that we thought were threatened are no longer, in the job market. People change careers, organically. New workforces coming in. They get trained differently because they see the stuff happening and, and so forth. So sometimes people ignore the, the, the, the time access.

01;09;29;18 - 01;09;58;15

Maurice Conti

Right. In, in making these arguments, the other is related to this time thing. So I was trying to quantify a little bit, how long it takes, like we're talking about culture and it being slow and taking a long time. Well, how, you know, is we look historically is there, you know, can we get some sense, around how long it takes for for folks to change, for things to change.

01;09;58;21 - 01;10;23;12

Maurice Conti

And so I thought about past revolutions, and I thought about the Industrial Revolution. So the Industrial Revolution took about 70 years, to, to, you know, kind of, follow its course. I thought about three things the duration of the revolution, the, sort of the penetration of the technology, kind of. It's at its peak, what was going on.

01;10;23;15 - 01;10;48;06

Maurice Conti

And then time to impact. And I made this one up. You could totally poke holes in it. I'm not a statistician, but, sort of. How long did it take for the technology to impact 100 million people? And so the duration of the Industrial Revolution, about 70 years at its peak, we were generating something like 30,000 horsepower, from from steam.

01;10;48;08 - 01;11;12;04

Maurice Conti

That's kind of a measure of of productivity in the time to impacting, 100 million people was the full duration of the of that of the Industrial Revolution took about 70 years for for it to be broadly distributed, kind of the, the norm. Then there was the personal computing revolution. It took I don't remember the numbers. I have to look at my cheat sheet, but I can't see with my glasses on.

01;11;12;09 - 01;11;43;24

Maurice Conti

So, 1977, big year you might have owned, was a Commodore 64, Apple two or a Atari 4400. There's like a trinity of of PCs that came out, started this revolution. It lasted about 23 years to its conclusion. There were, 500 million personal computers, at kind of the peak of this, of this revolution.

01;11;43;26 - 01;12;11;25

Maurice Conti

And the time to impact, to, 100 million people was, 18 years. So we went from 60, 70 years down to 18 years in order to have that, that impact. Right. Then, the internet revolution, which were still, kind of we're not in the revolution part, but we're still, certainly very fond of, of these technologies.

01;12;11;28 - 01;12;41;16

Maurice Conti

It took 25 years start to finish. So the, the, personal computing, 23 years in a revolution, 25 years, at its peak, by 2015, I would say all humans impacted. So, at the peak of the thing, everyone on the planet, because banking systems, communication systems were all, on that backbone. Everybody on the planet impacted, it took about three years to touch 100 million people.

01;12;41;18 - 01;13;18;28

Maurice Conti

AI revolution. We're in the middle of it. We're about ten, ten years in the just, arbitrary date. Google publishes transformer, 2017, right? So we're about ten years into it. We're still in it. Time to impact to 100 million people on a month and a half, right after ChatGPT released, and, sort of degree of impact, I'd say today, there's probably about a billion people directly like using AI and about 3 billion indirectly impacted, every day.

01;13;19;05 - 01;13;47;03

Maurice Conti

So that, you know, number of people impacted as has been going up, the speed to impact of 100 million people has gone from 70 years to 18 years, to, let's say, about a decade to a month and a half. So that's, speeding up. What hasn't changed is that first number, the Industrial Revolution took 60 years, but the three revolutions after, including AI, take about 25 years, because I think we're in the middle of the AI thing.

01;13;47;06 - 01;13;58;03

Maurice Conti

We got another decade to go. So it seems to me it takes about a quarter century for humans to absorb a new disruptive technology. Interesting.

01;13;58;03 - 01;14;01;03

Geoff Nielson

There's an upper limit to our metabolism for this stuff.

01;14;01;10 - 01;14;27;02

Maurice Conti

Metabolism is a great way to put it. I hadn't I hadn't thought of that. It just takes us 25 years to metabolize these, these revolutionary, technologies. And there's just no way, like everyone talks about. Oh, things are happening so fast, so fast, so fast. Which they are is the toolset is happening really fast. But the skill set in mindset, we're just programed and maybe there's no way around it and maybe we don't want to find a way around it.

01;14;27;04 - 01;14;50;04

Maurice Conti

It's about it's about 25 years. So I thought I thought that was interesting. And I'll say one more thing about jobs. This is a framework I came up with, some years ago because I, I felt like there was this dimension that wasn't being addressed when we were talking about new technologies displacing things, jobs among among other things.

01;14;50;06 - 01;15;15;10

Maurice Conti

And it's, it's a model that I call the curves of opportunity. And so if we think about, technological capabilities has this first curve, our technological capabilities have been going up since 3.5 million years ago. We invented our first tool. It was the stone hand ax. We've been we've been building better and better tools and better tools equals, better capabilities.

01;15;15;10 - 01;15;35;20

Maurice Conti

Right. And that curve has been getting steeper and steeper. And you might think that when it gets vertical, when our tools are so good, they can kind of do anything that all kinds of weird stuff happens. Maybe we become like the humans in the movie Wall-E, where we just kind of go around and floating chairs drinking huge soda pops.

01;15;35;22 - 01;16;02;10

Maurice Conti

Or we have sort of massive unemployment and there's nothing left for the humans to do. I don't think that's going to happen because there's this other curve that I haven't really heard anyone else talk about. That is the curve of expectations. So as soon as we are capable of something new because we have a new toolset, let's say, or we've developed a new skill set that uses tools in a new way, whatever it is, we're able to do something new immediately.

01;16;02;13 - 01;16;32;29

Maurice Conti

Society, humanity expects us to do more. And it's just like hardwired in us. So like the world's tallest building gets built, there's a ribbon cutting ceremony. It's amazing. It's exciting. We cut the ribbon. World's tallest building. What's going on down the street? They're building a taller building. Right? It's just kind of this mechanical thing. And so this other curve, this this curve of expectations or really the curve of opportunity is in lockstep with the curve of capability.

01;16;33;00 - 01;16;58;06

Maurice Conti

You can't the sort of a tautology. You can't unlock these two things. And so the day that we're able to, deflect 60% of our tier one customer service calls, because we've deployed an identical, I, that becomes the expectation. And the result is that as a, as a customer, I'm not waiting for 45 minutes. I'm waiting for zero minutes.

01;16;58;09 - 01;17;19;16

Maurice Conti

That's now the expectation. Like, that's table stakes. Everybody should be doing that. So the first companies to do that have a, have a chance to differentiate for a certain amount of time, and then everybody's going to be catching up. And then that's table stakes. And so the headroom sort of the new abilities made possible by these technologies are about, well, what what's the new competitive differentiation.

01;17;19;24 - 01;17;38;20

Maurice Conti

Because a zero minute wait time is not competitive differentiation. It's now the new expectation. Right. And if you're not if I am waiting 45 minutes, I'm not doing business with you. I'm going to fly with someone else because I don't want to wait for 45 minutes to, you know, figure out my canceled flight or whatever. So I think I think that's also useful model to think about.

01;17;38;20 - 01;17;55;08

Maurice Conti

Well, what's going to happen with jobs is, yes, we're going to be able to automate some things and therefore, do new things, do things more efficiently and so forth. But the market is going to expect more of you the next day. And that's why we have to continue to like there's no end to to, you know, the innovation.

01;17;55;08 - 01;18;15;21

Maurice Conti

That's why like there's no one I've talked to that's like today forget at like no AI today. They're like it's 4:00 on on Friday. Yeah I'm pretty much done with all my work for the week. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm going home like everyone I talk to, regardless of what they do for a living, there's always stuff that they don't get a chance to get to.

01;18;15;21 - 01;18;37;02

Maurice Conti

There's always stuff that they'd rather be working on than the stuff that work. Like there's plenty of problems to solve in the world, that we are, you know, spending enough time working on. And so I think, broadly speaking, there's more opportunity to do that than displacement of, of humans. Like, there's plenty of stuff for the humans to do.

01;18;37;04 - 01;18;55;11

Geoff Nielson

I think that's well said. I really like the framework around, expectation and the nature of competition. They're basically just driving us to do more and better versus just, you know, less and less and less. It's interesting. I, I'm inclined to agree with you. And, I mean, it's a more optimistic perspective than you often hear in the media.

01;18;55;11 - 01;19;03;19

Geoff Nielson

So, Maurice, on that note, I want to say a big thank you for joining today. You've given me lots to think about. And I really appreciate your insight.

01;19;03;21 - 01;19;08;13

Maurice Conti

It's my huge pleasure. Jeff. Thank you so much.

01;19;08;16 - 01;19;33;27

Geoff Nielson

If you work in it, Infotech research Group is a name you need to know no matter what your needs are. Infotech has you covered. AI strategy covered. Disaster recovery covered. Vendor negotiation covered. Infotech supports you with the best practice, research and a team of analysts standing by ready to help you tackle your toughest challenges. Check it out at the link below and don't forget to like and subscribe!