Digital Disruption

00;00;00;23 - 00;00;21;13

Geoff Nielson

Hey everyone! I'm super excited to be sitting down with Deloitte's chief futurist, Mike Back Doyle. He's the guy who the leaders of some of the world's biggest companies go to, to make sense of what's new and next in tech. What I really want to know from Mike is not just what tech is coming next, but what he's been telling CEOs about how AI is going to impact our jobs and our workforce.

00;00;21;15 - 00;00;33;21

Geoff Nielson

Who is safe and for how long? And by the way, as a professional advisor, is there an existential threat to him and Deloitte? Let's find out.

00;00;33;24 - 00;00;39;12

Geoff Nielson

I'm here with Mike back door, who's the chief futurist at Deloitte. Thanks so much for being here today, Mike.

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Mike Bechtel

Jeff, what a treat. Glad. Glad to be had.

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Geoff Nielson

Amazing. So let's I mean, let's jump right into it. You know, you're chief futurist at Deloitte. What are the biggest, you know, kind of tech disruptors that are on your radar right now in terms of impact that you think that they're going to have in the world to organizations? You know, what's what's, you know, on your radar?

00;00;58;11 - 00;01;25;05

Mike Bechtel

Yeah. Well, you know, one of one of my conceits. And I think our team's approach to, to this space of foresight future is emerging tech, if you will. Jeff, is is this idea that futurists are not so secretly historians? And when when we try to make heads or tails out of what's new next in tech, our first move is always to look for precedents, right?

00;01;25;05 - 00;02;00;21

Mike Bechtel

Trajectories, patterns from the past. And, you know, I think on one hand, if I were to say, you know, Jeff, this AI thing has legs. It's really something you'd think, like, oh, boy, you know, Captain Obvious over here. But when you look at the AI moment through the historical lens. Right? And you say, okay, the whole history of enterprise, it has more or less been a story of simpler interfaces, smarter databases and more performant, number crunching places.

00;02;00;23 - 00;02;29;07

Mike Bechtel

Right? You know, kind of a three tiered internet architecture, if you will. You say, okay, AI isn't new, right? It's always been machine intelligence, on the make for for nearly 100 years. But but there's a heck of a lot new in AI. And so to me, the biggest disruptor right now is the fact that that AI water line his his raised right up to that point of not just human cognition but executive decision making.

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Mike Bechtel

Right. The creative, arena and and so I think the reason we get so many think pieces about AI right now is because AI's just hit the point where it, too, can write a think piece, and that understandably freaks people out a little bit.

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Geoff Nielson

I, you know, I'm glad you went there. And I love the I love the water line analogy and it feels like it feels like. And I'm curious on your perspective that we're at this sort of inflection point where it's more and more in the news. The water line is continuing to rise. And I don't know, maybe in some ways rising more rapidly than like we're floating.

00;03;07;18 - 00;03;27;12

Geoff Nielson

I guess if I can use that analogy, like it feels like we're watching it rise and we're not quite, you know, above the water necessarily as individuals or as organizations. I mean, do you buy that analogy and you know, where do you expect to see the water line, you know, in the next handful of years? Is it going to you talked about AI's moment.

00;03;27;12 - 00;03;33;05

Geoff Nielson

Is it going to slow down? Is it going to increase? I know I'm asking you to prognosticate, but but where's your head at?

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Mike Bechtel

It's it's it's all good. It's all good. It's it's in my job description. What what kind of futurist does a dare? Future a little bit, you know, Jeff, I think a lot about this idea of, the water line and our, sort of sinking, swimming or rising above. In fact, it probably consumes most of my in my team cycles these days.

00;04;01;24 - 00;04;10;17

Mike Bechtel

And here's, here's our best educated take. Okay.

00;04;10;19 - 00;04;43;17

Mike Bechtel

Automation is a Trojan horse for elevation. And what I mean by that, what I mean by that is, if you think about this rising water line as the end of today's work, the disappearance of today's jobs and the rote automation of today's best practices, it can feel pretty bleak, right? I use this notional protagonist, this little cartoon character, in my mind, and I call him Toby.

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Mike Bechtel

If it's okay. Water lines come for Toby. Stinks to be Toby. Like, oh, no, that's not good stuff. But here's the deal. David Packard of Hewlett Packard, he had this line that that I love. He shared it a few years ago, and by a few, I probably mean like 40. He said, you can't shrink your way to success.

00;05;07;11 - 00;05;11;01

Mike Bechtel

Well, here's where I'm going with this, Jeff.

00;05;11;03 - 00;05;34;02

Mike Bechtel

If you look at all this, automation is a license to do today's work with fewer people and fewer dollars. Right? You'll please your shareholders, your stakeholders for a couple quarters, but eventually, somebody with no business being in your business comes around. They put you out of business. Why? Because they've hired Toby, and B, they're not worried about speeding up today's work.

00;05;34;03 - 00;06;05;24

Mike Bechtel

They're getting busy cooking up tomorrow's work. And so to me that the narrative here is okay, best practices are going to get automated left right and center. Good news. That frees us up to cook up next practices to get busy building tomorrow. And that's a different ball of wax that that requires imagination. It requires ambition and courage. It does not require, you know, traditional double ledger accounting and, you know, cost takeout.

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Geoff Nielson

I love that approach. And the, the idea of building tomorrow is like, yeah, it's like a corporate capability. Like, we're getting really good at building tomorrow. I mean, first of all, it's making you reflect on, like, how many how many companies, how many government agencies are actually good at that right now. And, and the idea that it's something we should be good at is, is really exciting.

00;06;27;21 - 00;06;47;05

Geoff Nielson

And I love that. I love the optimistic take on it. I want to come to like the pessimistic take on it in a minute. But I want to I want to focus on on the optimistic piece for now. It sounds like for the tobys of the world, your messages, hey, you may not have the same work tomorrow that you had yesterday, but you're gonna have cooler work.

00;06;47;06 - 00;07;07;27

Geoff Nielson

You're going to have more impactful work, and work that can actually make more of a difference with with this kind of rising water level. What do we need to get right to get there? How do we how do we learn that like it's, you know, and I, I don't mean to to dunk, but like it's for us on a podcast.

00;07;07;27 - 00;07;22;19

Geoff Nielson

It's very easy to say like, oh, what you need to do is like, you just need to build the future. Like, like what what how do you unpack that for the, you know, the people and the leaders that you're speaking with? Like, what do we need to get right to be able to do that? Right?

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Mike Bechtel

I'm with you. I'm with you, Jeff. I want to not only acknowledge, but honor your great question, because there's that classic comic strip popular among geeks for the last 30 years were the sciences had a chalkboard. And they have all this math for step one. And then step two says, then a miracle occurs, and then step three has, you know, a QED and a happy ending.

00;07;46;09 - 00;08;21;25

Mike Bechtel

And and you're right, a lot of these sort of pithy, pardon the expression, but Pollyanna takes on, I presume, that some rainbow laden miracle will occur and make everything right. I think it's a little more nuanced and when we talk about the opportunity for beautiful, better work for for the tobys out there, I think it's imperative to recognize that the tobys need to participate in their own rescue.

00;08;21;27 - 00;08;51;24

Mike Bechtel

And and what I mean by that, right. This isn't some, you know, table pounding curmudgeon talking about personal responsibility and bootstraps, though. There's pieces of that. Because what what we're seeing in our research, Jeff, is historically not just in this AI moment, but again, back to historians and deep time, the greatest breakthroughs, right? And in the steepest parts of histories is curves of, you know, progress.

00;08;51;27 - 00;09;27;09

Mike Bechtel

They've typically come from cross-pollination between domains, right? People who can mash up a little bit of biology and a little bit of engineering and, and then, you know, just like good old Leonardo da Vinci, that becomes the basis for an elevated understanding, right? Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood actress, glamorous as it gets, figuring out that a little player piano, engineering mashed up with a little bit of mathematics could create a frequency hopping spread spectrum technique that went on to be the basis for torpedo tech.

00;09;27;11 - 00;09;57;04

Mike Bechtel

What? I think the point that I'm making here, Jeff, is the tobys of the world have the opportunity to go wider, cross-pollinate historical silos, and create tomorrow's breakthroughs. I believe that breadth is going to be the new depth. That wide is going to be the new deep, and that connectors are going to have a much better time over the next 20 years than than, say, Dot perfects.

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Mike Bechtel

I think expertise is going to be sort of overrated in this world where machines come, come in hot for all the known siloed disciplines.

00;10;07;06 - 00;10;28;07

Geoff Nielson

So when you when you look at the impact that AI is going to have over the next few years, you see a first and foremost coming for like deep expertise in specific areas. And and the value to us becomes, how do we provide that context? How do we provide, you know, ask the right question, understand the framing that's going to help harness that.

00;10;28;07 - 00;10;29;26

Geoff Nielson

Is that is that a fair summation?

00;10;29;29 - 00;10;55;07

Mike Bechtel

It is. It is because you know, Jeff, to a machine, the difference between, say, tic tac toe, you know, the a child's game from a logic standpoint. Well, the difference between tic tac toe and the Chinese game of go, right dramatically combinatorial is more complex. It's to a machine. The difference between those two is just a matter of, chips and discs.

00;10;55;14 - 00;11;15;13

Mike Bechtel

Right? It's the difference between a matter of degree and kind is they say in the legal field. And so that's all to say machine intelligence. Good old Gary Kasparov said that he was the first human who ever got licked by a machine at a uniquely human task. Right, chess? Kasparov said, anything we can do, and we know how we do it.

00;11;15;15 - 00;11;41;23

Mike Bechtel

A machine will do it better. And so if you think of your your professional role is that you're a, a master of something, good luck bringing that carbon to a silicon fight, right? Because. Because the robots are indeed coming for your known niche. But if you're a connector, if you are a curiosity filled cross-pollinate or game on robots.

00;11;41;23 - 00;11;44;12

Mike Bechtel

Haven't seen that yet.

00;11;44;15 - 00;12;05;13

Geoff Nielson

How do you see that? I'm very curious, because you're, you know, you're you're chief futurist. You've, you know, you've got a research function. I imagine you work with a team. You said something really interesting, actually, I think at, South by Southwest, this year that caught my attention, which is that AI is now starting to get better than your best people was, I think, what you said.

00;12;05;15 - 00;12;24;04

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. And like, you know, keep me honest. If that's if that's not it. So I'm curious. Like what? What does this look like in your world and how has it I don't know if the right language is it's forced to your team to evolve or it's, you know, just pushing you to, you know, to all be better and helping you raise the bar.

00;12;24;06 - 00;13;04;27

Mike Bechtel

Yeah. It so so you did here. You did hear me correctly. You know, when I say I better than our best people that certainly isn't to to just to besmirch, you know, my, my friends and colleagues rather, you know, I'll, I'll anchor this in a little bit of personal history. Jeff, I remember, I remember in, you know, before that ChatGPT moment, you know, before November of 22, I was showing one of my clients a an early general pre-trained transformer.

00;13;04;29 - 00;13;30;28

Mike Bechtel

So think of it as Frodo ChatGPT. And I'll never forget the demo I showed him involved. Shakespeare. It's like it's like, Randy, look, this thing, this thing fakes Shakespeare at a level that would foolish Shakespeare scholar. And he was a West Texan with literal cowboy boots and a literal cowboy hat. He says, Mark, we make we we do not make poetry.

00;13;31;02 - 00;14;10;26

Mike Bechtel

We make hydraulic systems. And I got to thinking like, oh, okay, this, you know, this isn't going to amount to much, but that same guy Jeff. Right. God bless him. He comes back to me in roughly 2023. Right? This is after the ChatGPT moment. He says he says he's found this tool that will answer tactical and strategic questions for his hydraulics business and his his quote to me, which which killed me at the time he says, so, as you know, it's not as good as my best people, but between you and me, it's better than the rest of them.

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Geoff Nielson

And right.

00;14;12;08 - 00;14;47;20

Mike Bechtel

Right at it, Jeff, I thought, this is that classic moment where pride of place, right? The human condition is such that we need to feel like we're just, like, one step ahead. All these things were building. Right? Well, the difference between 23 and 25, right, 2023, 2025 is that you can now kick off a world class, you know, 25 page research report, 35 sources in about six minutes.

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Mike Bechtel

And I showed one of these is a proof of concept to my own team. And they all looked at me and they said that it was complete in seven minutes is a mechanical miracle that I don't think this is them talking, that I don't think they I could, you know, get get that banged out given seven weeks. That's the real revelation.

00;15;09;20 - 00;15;23;28

Mike Bechtel

And so again, that doesn't mean yikes, pack our bags and give up. I think what it means is that sort of depth of expertise, Sherlock Holmes treasure hunt, that's a machines game now. I mean.

00;15;24;01 - 00;15;48;03

Geoff Nielson

So so I mean, it makes complete sense. And I think I can envision two different frames of mind for your team. Right. Like if you're a career researcher and that's what you do, you're, you know, you're Sherlock Holmes at, you know, I love I love how you put that. Like, you think, okay, well, I like I either need to brush up my resume or I need to go back to school and, you know, learn how to be a plumber, like, on the negative side.

00;15;48;05 - 00;16;07;02

Geoff Nielson

Or you can kind of ask the question, like, if this is the case, if I have this tool available, what do I need to do that's going to elevate what's going on here. So what is if you're going to take the happy path, what does that look like. And how are you starting to have that conversation.

00;16;07;07 - 00;16;50;12

Mike Bechtel

Well, this Jeff is where we can get pretty practical. And I think I think pretty tactical with, with this idea of automation is is a Trojan horse for elevation. And, and as this stuff being an opportunity for good news. Okay, I'll give you an example of what this is meant for my team. My team prior to this AI fueled moment, you know, 5 to 15 people, depending on the way we've been composed over the last call it 5 to 10 years doing annual flagship reports on a handful of topics that matter most to our enterprise clients.

00;16;50;14 - 00;17;16;24

Mike Bechtel

Great. Yeah, that was right headed right and right minded at the time. Well, when we saw that we could bang one of these out every hour on the hour, you know, helping these robot brains, we didn't pack it in. Rather we said, okay, we've gone from hammer to jackhammer, what our clients actually want. They don't want hammers or jack hammers.

00;17;16;24 - 00;17;45;27

Mike Bechtel

They've got nails, right? They have itches in need of scratching. They're thirsty for insight, direction, somebody to stamp out ambiguity. And so what we've learned, Jeff, is okay so what you want are more frequent lighter weight steers. Right. And by steer I mean you know tiny coarse corrections as opposed to big annual Swamp Book reports. Cool. All right.

00;17;45;27 - 00;18;12;26

Mike Bechtel

We got you. How about a cheap and cheerful subscription? How about the time we've saved in producing the word craft? What if we build workshops and collaborative calls where we talk it through and we roll up our sleeves and we help you turn the talking to walk. And so behind this all, Jeff, I think, is it's a need for that entrepreneurial spirit to say, hey, let's lead with need.

00;18;12;29 - 00;18;28;13

Mike Bechtel

What do our customers want now that we can give them anything? Oh you want X cool. We can do that. And then be realizing that yeah what got you here won't get you there. Right. So so let's let's go build cooler stuff. Let's not make the old stuff faster.

00;18;28;15 - 00;19;01;03

Geoff Nielson

It's such, It's such an interesting story, Mike. Like the the reason to me, it's so interesting is like when I process the moral of it, when you tell me the more you're doing, it's it's it sounds like it's more time with people, right? Like, it's it's pulling people out from, you know, behind their keyboard, behind the desk, behind the, you know, the dark cavern where they're researching and saying, you know what the value that we bring here is eyeball to eyeball, right?

00;19;01;03 - 00;19;17;17

Geoff Nielson

Whether it's in the same room physically, whether it's in a meeting, it's being able to help people to understand their needs and actually give them something ultimately more human. I don't know, does that resonate with you deeply?

00;19;17;19 - 00;19;22;09

Mike Bechtel

I mean, honestly, Jeff, I know.

00;19;22;11 - 00;20;06;28

Mike Bechtel

You know, halfway through my life's journey between optimistic geek and pragmatic geezer, I know that I'm I lean techno optimist, right? That it's it's who I am because it's what I've lived and seen. But but I tell you the thing that I've seen firsthand, both on my team, with my clients, and then more broadly, over a nearly 30 year career, up to my eyes and all things new fangled, is that technology is just a puffy chested four syllable synonym for tool, and tools are force multipliers for human ambition.

00;20;07;01 - 00;20;32;14

Mike Bechtel

And so when I look at AI, I look at it is it as the latest, greatest opportunity to automate muck so we can get busy doing more magic? And okay, so what does that mean? I think it means stuff like you just said, right? Sitting with our fellow humans, understanding like in an empathy field way, where are you stuck and how can I help?

00;20;32;16 - 00;20;56;17

Mike Bechtel

Right. Because. Because I've got a genie lamp full of full of hammers for any of any of your needs. But let's spend more time sitting with each other's needs. I had the opportunity to give a speech to my high school a couple weeks ago, and I told these young folks, I said, listen. Cool it with hyper specialization at a young age, right?

00;20;56;17 - 00;21;27;29

Mike Bechtel

Because as we just discussed, the robots are coming right up pollinator. But the second thing I said was it's the it's the revenge of the humanities, right? Synthetic thinking, conceptual cross-pollination. I chuckled, Jeff, prompt engineering is a term. It makes me smile because it's exactly what an engineer would call the humanities, right? Like asking thoughtful, synthetic questions with a variety of colorful language.

00;21;28;04 - 00;21;35;00

Mike Bechtel

Oh, you mean reading and writing? I think humanities strikes back in a big way there.

00;21;35;03 - 00;22;00;04

Geoff Nielson

I yeah, I'm, I'm laughing because I saw I don't know what form goes on, but I saw like a post, you know, on some sort of social the other day that where someone had posted something saying while I was trying to formulate my post by my prompt properly for ChatGPT, I ended up actually figuring out the answer to my question and someone responded, oh, I see you've discovered thinking, right?

00;22;00;10 - 00;22;03;11

Geoff Nielson

00;22;03;13 - 00;22;37;00

Mike Bechtel

Oh, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, one of my dearest friends is an English professor at the University of Notre Dame named David Griffith. We we played in a school band together in the 90s, so it doesn't get a lot more authentic lived experience that two trombones and a guitar. But Dave and I have been having this discussion, this pen pal discussion for the last three years because his thesis, which which I think he saw earlier than anybody else in my social or professional network, he says.

00;22;37;02 - 00;22;58;19

Mike Bechtel

And I don't mean to make him sound too much like Jack Kerouac or anything, but he's got he's got sweet vibes in that way. He goes, yeah, I don't think these geeks realize that writing is thinking. Thinking is writing. You can't outsource that. And I remember thinking, you know, don't be a curmudgeon. Don't be a Luddite. Two years in, I can see David.

00;22;58;22 - 00;23;16;07

Mike Bechtel

You've heard it here. I was wrong and you were right. The the way we believe, what we believe and think, what we think comes from the activity of stringing those thoughts together and chewing on that pencil and running your fingers through your hair in that frustrated way. That's thinking.

00;23;16;10 - 00;23;31;08

Geoff Nielson

I, I completely agree, but I'm curious, as you say, that it sounds like implicitly in that there's kind of a a right and a wrong way to use generative AI.

00;23;31;11 - 00;23;49;05

Mike Bechtel

I mean, at the risk of flipping the script, Jeff, just because I'm such a chatterbox, I would ask you, you know, maybe tell me a little bit more about what you've seen and or what you mean there, man. Like, do you feel like you've developed a bit of a moral sense of what icky looks like versus righteous?

00;23;49;07 - 00;24;11;20

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm happy to be the guest for like, 90s or so. Sure. Why not? Sounds good. So yeah. I mean, let me let me tell you what I mean. I'll give you a personal, illustrative example. We're having this conversation today. If I want, I can open up, you know, a generative AI tool and I can say, hey, I have a technology podcast and Mike Beck tools coming on today.

00;24;11;25 - 00;24;32;17

Geoff Nielson

What are a bunch of great questions I can ask him? I hit enter and I copy and paste and I, you know, I absorb the answers and I ask you those questions. And honestly, I think they'd probably be half decent. But if you do that, I really believe, you know, assuming I'm just not like a completely useless host.

00;24;32;17 - 00;25;00;21

Geoff Nielson

I really believe you lose something. Yeah. To me, there's there's a whole exercise involved in what are we trying to accomplish here? What do what do we want to talk about? Who is Mike? What? Like, how can I conceive of this? And at some point, if I want to, you know, if I've got my outline of story and questions and I say, hey, you know, ChatGPT, now that I formulated it, I want your opinion to synthesize into my.

00;25;00;21 - 00;25;09;17

Geoff Nielson

By the way, I didn't end up using chat. I didn't end up using ChatGPT you this this is this is all organic today, baby. But but to me, there's just.

00;25;09;19 - 00;25;09;27

Mike Bechtel

There's.

00;25;09;27 - 00;25;28;15

Geoff Nielson

Do you think first or do you outsource the thinking first? And I've heard a lot of between you and me, I've heard a lot of stories corporately about. I didn't know how to tackle this. And before I even thought about it, I just parroted the question into, into, you know, copilot or some sort of generative AI tool and copy and paste it, what it said.

00;25;28;15 - 00;25;35;14

Geoff Nielson

And I just, I don't know, there's something that icky is the word you used. And I'll, I'll parrot that. Yeah.

00;25;35;16 - 00;25;40;00

Mike Bechtel

Icky. It feels,

00;25;40;03 - 00;25;45;00

Mike Bechtel

Icky and inauthentic and,

00;25;45;03 - 00;25;52;14

Mike Bechtel

You know. Okay, so first of all, I thank you for being the guest on the, definitely awesome show. Great.

00;25;52;14 - 00;25;53;27

Geoff Nielson

Thank you. There you go. Yeah.

00;25;54;00 - 00;26;00;28

Mike Bechtel

But, Jeff, I think I think what you what you just taught me there.

00;26;01;00 - 00;26;06;18

Mike Bechtel

Is this this recognition that.

00;26;06;20 - 00;26;10;00

Mike Bechtel

I think intent.

00;26;10;03 - 00;26;25;16

Mike Bechtel

Matters so greatly here. Because when you're when you're out to when you're out to accomplish a particular end. Okay.

00;26;25;19 - 00;26;52;15

Mike Bechtel

There's typically this, I think this calculus that most companies do where they say, okay, there's going to be a set of differentiated approaches that we take that, that make us who we are and, and, and make us great. And then there's a set of supporting capabilities that are the cost of goods sold and the context. Right. And so if I'm thinking about, you know, let's say you're a rock and roll band, right?

00;26;52;15 - 00;27;18;10

Mike Bechtel

You want to play sweet licks and you want to deliver goosebumps to the audience and you want to, you know, you have, art and poetry to, to get out at high decibels, but contracting. Right. Venue selection, audio visual cabling regulations. Clearly that's the the necessary context that supports your core mission. Where am I going with this?

00;27;18;12 - 00;27;56;01

Mike Bechtel

I feel like right headed business people, right or not for profit leaders or or government civil servants, I think. Right. Padded people are suddenly facing this decision between what is it that you're out to do? What is your meaning, your core, and what subset of your of your week has just been been noisy context. And I think a whole set of people are starting to realize, okay, if I can automate the muck and repurpose the cycles on my core, then maybe that's a high order ethical use of AI.

00;27;56;03 - 00;28;19;04

Mike Bechtel

But if my job is to be a corporate strategist and I spend my week asking the robots, hey, what's the strategy? I think we have a 21st century ethics problem there, or integrity problems. So these are fresh thoughts that you've helped catalyze. And me Jeff, but I do I think it maybe comes down to intent. And what's your core versus your enabling okay.

00;28;19;07 - 00;28;39;25

Geoff Nielson

I was just I was just chuckling because the it's such a humanities answer. And I have a humanities background to, to to to like take all of this tech stuff into like an ethics problem. But no, I, I agree with you. And frankly, I think in addition to being an ethics problem, it's probably at some point going to be a business results problem, because if your company outsources the thinking, you know what's left.

00;28;39;25 - 00;29;03;04

Geoff Nielson

And I, I don't know, maybe I just don't have as much fear of this technology as some people do. But I think if you have a human thinking and, you know, I thinking at least for the next handful of years, the human is probably going to win at that abstract. Or I think, as you said, the interconnectivity in the integration thinking part.

00;29;03;07 - 00;29;28;02

Mike Bechtel

You know, I mean. If we really pull back from the the existential dread and the future shock and the financial everything, you know, the the little kid in me marvels that we now have the Star Trek ship computer. I mean, it's here it is. It's ready. It's there it is. I don't even feel like it's an alpha anymore.

00;29;28;03 - 00;29;51;02

Mike Bechtel

There you. There it is. And you can ask for whatever you want. Short of an actual Earl gray tea compiled before you. That's probably come to. But, you know, one of the reasons I've always thought science fiction is not just folly, but but useful is it allows you to think about these sort of a world beyond the typical constraints.

00;29;51;04 - 00;30;23;23

Mike Bechtel

And and you know what? Gene Roddenberry and, and his successors in the Star Trek universe, they always, they always thought about was things like, what? What would the human experience be like? Post information scarcity, post economic scarcity, post material scarcity. And he very consciously went into the belief that it's just going to be about human relationships, about right versus wrong, about inclusivity versus exclusivity and stamping out knucklehead free and ignorance.

00;30;23;23 - 00;30;43;26

Mike Bechtel

And so I choose to believe we live in a world that's going to be elevated thanks to the automation of these things, not some crass utopia where people are, you know, faking long winded emails so that the counterparty can decompile them with their own bot.

00;30;43;29 - 00;31;16;02

Geoff Nielson

Right? Yeah, I could I can read the book and write the performance review and read the performance review. Right. Like that's the yeah. So I, I love that vision. And by the way, I buy into that vision as well. There's, there's a question that's being asked implicitly or explicitly lately, Mike, that I'm sure you faced in some capacity that I want to put a fine point on and I want to get your reaction to, which is, you know, you and I both have these kind of professional services backgrounds or are working for professional services organizations.

00;31;16;04 - 00;31;47;03

Geoff Nielson

There's there's a voice out there right now that says, like Deloitte, who needs Deloitte? I have I what, what what use could I possibly have for you know Deloitte and you know, consultants and professional services. When I have I like I have the ship's computer. I don't need anything else. Yeah. And I'm deliberately asking that a little bit facetiously, but, and I don't expect you, you know, to say, you know, they're right, you know, abandoned ship or anything like that, but, but, but but tell me, like, in your own words, why?

00;31;47;05 - 00;32;03;28

Geoff Nielson

Why are they wrong? What makes you know, what makes the value an experience you get of an organization, of a professional services organization so important in this, I think you called it I moment right now. Yeah.

00;32;04;00 - 00;32;31;09

Mike Bechtel

Well, I, I would be intellectually dishonest if I didn't admit that I, I've been wrestling with different altitudes of this question for the last couple of years because, you know, I'll never forget I had a mentor years ago to couple couple firms ago as well, who and I remember, you know, not that he not that he was a cigar chomping boomer, but the image is better if we pretend he is.

00;32;31;09 - 00;32;59;27

Mike Bechtel

Just imagine you imagine, Got it first and see how vibes from Gilligan's Island. But he said, you know that he's never not going to be a market for smart people. And I thought to myself, well, that that's reassuring, sir. Right. I mean, the smart people business think, goodness. Well, then, as we've been discussing the, you know, electronic Einsteins showed up and oh, goodness gracious, what do we do?

00;32;59;29 - 00;33;12;28

Mike Bechtel

Well, here's what I've come to learn. Right. And I believe this both objectively and as a bit of a daily affirmation.

00;33;13;00 - 00;33;49;26

Mike Bechtel

I had no business partner when I was a venture capitalist, Jeff. He had this great line. I probably use it weekly. He says. You can't read the label when you're sitting inside the dark room. It's kissing cousins with the old line, you you can't see the forest for the trees. But but what makes it different is he's arguing with that line that our expertise can sometimes get in our own way, and our knowledge of a given domain blinds us to breadth, to cross pollination, to pattern recognition.

00;33;49;28 - 00;34;23;10

Mike Bechtel

One of the things that I've seen that Deloitte is so good at. Right. And I think that that professional services firms provide is there's a court vision, a pattern recognition that says, you know, government level logistics. Have some curious things in common with the production of Hollywood movies, which in turn have some unintuitive things in common with the way we build LCD panels in Southeast Asia.

00;34;23;13 - 00;34;48;13

Mike Bechtel

Right. And I think that idea of having someone Margaret Mead in the, in anthropology, here's, here's an orthogonal, reference. Margaret Mead famously said that to be a good student of a culture, you needed to be what she called a participant observer, right? You needed to be have enough critical distance to be able to dispassionately and objectively write about and think about them.

00;34;48;15 - 00;35;25;20

Mike Bechtel

But you needed to be close enough to it where you weren't, you know, a charlatan or a dilettante either. Right? That's what I think Professional Services is right now in 2025. It's that one foot in the jar, one foot outside the jar. Participant observer mojo, where you can say, okay, yeah, there's an increasing share of detailed thinker that will hand off to the bots, you know, as opposed perhaps to that, you know, wizened veteran or scrappy young analyst, but that willingness to think broadly.

00;35;25;22 - 00;35;40;07

Mike Bechtel

That skill set is better held outside the four walls of the organization, in my opinion. Then as someone who has to live in the organization and feel, you know, feel like they're they're pretending to be objective and dispassionate.

00;35;40;09 - 00;36;13;14

Geoff Nielson

Got it. So so you see, all of that is sort of a and feed this back to me if it makes sense or not. You see, this more is kind of like a, a role than just necessarily an individual skill. Because if I, I'll use like a very simplistic example, but if I'm just Toby and I work inside and, you know, I work inside an organization, I work inside the bottle, and I just say, like, hey, I tell me, look broadly and tell me what you see.

00;36;13;18 - 00;36;14;14

Mike Bechtel

Right?

00;36;14;16 - 00;36;34;03

Geoff Nielson

Your your ability to, you know, affect change inside the bottle. Your, your ability to still, you know, see the forest for the trees, see the label is, is in some way impacted by that. What you like is, is it that is it that the tools we have are not good enough to see at the bottle? Is it that your position is still inside the bottle?

00;36;34;06 - 00;36;36;13

Geoff Nielson

What what's the magic there?

00;36;36;16 - 00;36;46;24

Mike Bechtel

Well, there's I think there's a couple of things. And by the way I appreciate the, the double click. Right. Because because we're we're learning together here as we as we hash these.

00;36;46;26 - 00;36;48;05

Geoff Nielson

These are the fun part, right?

00;36;48;11 - 00;36;58;03

Mike Bechtel

Yeah. I mean it really is I honestly, if you're looking for, a reason why people still mattered, this is the Socratic discourse. We need,

00;36;58;05 - 00;37;30;02

Mike Bechtel

Lived experience and breadth and cross-pollination. Like I mentioned, it is certainly a a feature of, you know, a card carrying consultant or professional services person. Great. I think the other side here, and I want to be I want to be thoughtful and not even remotely cynical. So please know this is all said constructively and not, you know, in a in a career limiting way.

00;37;30;05 - 00;37;57;00

Mike Bechtel

There's this old classic, you know, line, right? That that no man is a prophet in his own town. And I mean, it's a Bible verse, but but if you if you fast forward, I've heard versions of it said where, you know, when you're when you're an outside expert, you're part of the solution. And when you're an inside employee, you're you're part of the problem.

00;37;57;03 - 00;38;21;06

Mike Bechtel

And, and I think the idea politically or maybe to get a little less again cynical anthropologically or socio culturally is if you're of the machine, you're going to be burdened with all of the stuff that all the great business writers have talked about. Porter's Five Forces, right strategy is called your Culture Eats Strategy for breakfast or Clayton Christensen Innovator's Dilemma.

00;38;21;06 - 00;38;59;13

Mike Bechtel

The whole nine yards because organizations exist to protect the cash cow and protect orthodoxy. Right. And so I think Toby, just by virtue of being Toby LLC, as opposed to, you know, Toby W-2, the US tax code for employee, he carries a different mojo because he's being asked to show up, be objective and get out there as his opposed to like hang out, justify your existence and sustain the enterprise.

00;38;59;16 - 00;39;05;06

Mike Bechtel

So so I do think there's something about where where one sits regardless of one's roles or even skills.

00;39;05;09 - 00;39;26;21

Geoff Nielson

That yeah, that's it's very much aligned with my thinking. And I mean, I, I know that neither of us are necessarily completely unbiased in all of this, but I, I agree with you. Right. Like it? It really feels like there's something structurally valuable here, right? It's not literally just okay, well, there's this cool tool, and technology makes this whole thing obsolete.

00;39;26;21 - 00;39;42;23

Geoff Nielson

There's something structurally valuable about how organizations and people are positioned to, you know, affect change to, you know, tell truths, prophesies, if you will.

00;39;42;25 - 00;39;45;11

Mike Bechtel

I mean, even.

00;39;45;14 - 00;40;09;18

Mike Bechtel

You know, even auditors, you know, Deloitte is a is a big four, you know, firm with its heritage and tax and audit as well as consulting, advisory. You know, I remember learning about the audit function later in life because I didn't grow up in that world. I grew up as an inventor and a geek. And I remember my first hearing of the tale was like, wait a minute, you double check math?

00;40;09;18 - 00;40;36;03

Mike Bechtel

Really? That's what like, like. But what about these other guys? They did the math. You just double check checking. And then I realize, oh, wait a minute. This isn't about mathematical wizardry or deep, you know, fields medal grade math. Math. Medical genius. Yeah. This is about to your point. I like the way you said it, Jeff. The structural need to have independent entities say this is true.

00;40;36;09 - 00;40;44;15

Mike Bechtel

This happened this we believe now that opens up a whole other world of.

00;40;44;17 - 00;41;06;16

Mike Bechtel

Frankly, cryptography, blockchains, Bitcoin and a post sort of post state post counterparty future. I don't know if I don't know if your listenership has as the time or brain space to go into, you know, crazy talent within math we trust or any of that.

00;41;06;18 - 00;41;28;26

Geoff Nielson

Well, let's I mean, let's, let's dive into it. I mean, we've, we've we've spent a lot of time talking about what I can do today, you know, cryptography, anything in kind of this cyber space. What what's on your radar and what in the spirit of the future, being here and not necessarily evenly distributed, what what are some of the trends you're starting to see?

00;41;28;28 - 00;41;36;11

Geoff Nielson

You know, the best organizations start to adapt in this space that maybe we want to, you know, keep our eye on.

00;41;36;13 - 00;41;39;03

Mike Bechtel

Well.

00;41;39;05 - 00;42;04;26

Mike Bechtel

You know, I think it's it's appropriate and representative of, of the moment, Jeff, that, you know, 40 something minutes in we've it's been I with a side of AI right. And again I mean let the record reflect that's what 2025 felt like for all of those of you listening in the archives 11 years from now. Yep, that's how it felt.

00;42;04;28 - 00;42;44;07

Mike Bechtel

But I do think there's a handful of other meaningful movements afoot. The first just sort of foreshadowed it a titch, but it felt like decentralized platforms. Okay, distributed technology, things like, but not limited to blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, all that, all that. It felt like that was a flash in the pan. That was a, you know, unique, a uniquely frothy memory from, say, right before or during Covid.

00;42;44;10 - 00;43;11;03

Mike Bechtel

Right. And I know that in polite business circles, there's a very common trope where it's like futurist, well, tell me about something you got wrong other than blockchain, which we all got wrong. Hahaha. Right. It's like the scapegoat for for hype. Right and wrong, right? But I'll tell you what. Back to this futurist is historians frame. If you really pull the lens back, let's just say Bitcoin.

00;43;11;06 - 00;43;37;02

Mike Bechtel

For argument's sake, if you pull the lens back on bitcoin, you realize that yeah, there's been highs and lows. But over a log scale with both the price of bitcoin and the time it's taken to get to that price, that train has been up and to the right. The whole flip in time. And I don't share this as a curious get rich quick or slow scheme.

00;43;37;06 - 00;43;50;16

Mike Bechtel

Right. There's no investment advice anywhere in here. Rather, what I think this represents is this recognition that.

00;43;50;19 - 00;44;17;18

Mike Bechtel

A lot of smart technologists are starting to say, I don't know if I can trust institutions as much as I used to. And in case that sounded soft, it's me trying to not be binary and say like, run the state is dead or anything. Rather, Thomas Hobbes, the political scientist he wrote, he wrote this work called The Leviathan.

00;44;17;21 - 00;44;41;28

Mike Bechtel

I remember studying it back when I studied political science, and it was this argument that the modern nation state exists in a world that has no longer believes in, you know, a traditional monotheistic God smiting you with lightning. And so what you need is a state, the Leviathan, that can come and be that, you know, that big stick that that the US president, Teddy Roosevelt, would talk about.

00;44;42;00 - 00;45;03;23

Mike Bechtel

Well, that was sort of a move from in God we trust to in state we trust. I think what we're seeing more broadly with, with Bitcoin, with, with blockchain and with decentralized cryptographic technology is we're starting to see a third chapter. It's I don't know if we can trust in state anymore either. Maybe it needs to be in math.

00;45;03;23 - 00;45;35;04

Mike Bechtel

We trust them. Maybe it needs to be cryptography or it didn't happen. And so if you think of Bitcoin as the digital transformation of capital and the recognition that this is perfectly scarce and physically sort of, you know, digitized perfect gold, you start to say, okay, maybe this isn't as harebrained or white owned as it feels when you hear certain evangelists talk about it.

00;45;35;05 - 00;46;04;22

Mike Bechtel

Maybe what we're actually saying is, in a world gone mad, where I can't tell deepfakes from real or AI from people or this country I used to trust from this weird acting country, I don't know, you know what they're doing. You say, oh, I can believe in the Sha 256 algorithm. And so I do think companies that are starting to think of cryptography as a post trust base layer, they're really at the bleeding edge.

00;46;04;25 - 00;46;09;10

Mike Bechtel

I'll take a breath and let you probe there, because I know this is a totally different brain space than we were in five minutes.

00;46;09;10 - 00;46;40;24

Geoff Nielson

No, no, I it's super it's it's super interesting. I mean, I love the I love the framing of it and yeah, I, I don't have any, you know immediate you know, I've got all sorts of thoughts on, you know, crypto in general. But but that's not that, that's not necessarily where I was going to go with that. Where I was going to go with that is, you know, I love the I love the framing of it and the framing of how do we start to have these, you know, these digitized trust systems that take us beyond what human institutions are capable of?

00;46;40;26 - 00;46;48;00

Geoff Nielson

I mean, do you have any more stories you can share about any specific organizations that you've seen this at in some capacity or another?

00;46;48;00 - 00;46;53;12

Mike Bechtel

Yeah. Well, I mean, and,

00;46;53;15 - 00;47;29;15

Mike Bechtel

With slight redactions, I can give you some really good crunchy ones, please. Let's take let's let's not say the B word Bitcoin at all. Let's not talk about, finance. Let's talk about, deep fakes and sort of digital truth and trust in, in, in the, in the deepfake era, I was talking to a newspaper in, Scandinavia who told us that one of the things driving them batty was that they would publish pictures.

00;47;29;17 - 00;48;02;22

Mike Bechtel

Right? War photos from, a place like Ukraine, right? You know, places including, but not limited to the Ukraine and some plurality of their readership would, would throw up their hands and say, this is agenda driven, it's fake news. And, you know, regardless of what quality of the picture, it was clearly that you had sort of a, a radicalized readership that felt like, you know, this this was about, you know, left versus right or up versus down or something.

00;48;02;24 - 00;48;50;25

Mike Bechtel

What they did was they began issuing their photographers cameras with special chips embedded that in addition to recording the time of the shot, the latitude and longitude, it added a simple cryptographic hash. And that hypocrite cryptographic hash basically said this picture actually came from this time and place, and I can prove it through the hash. Well, what was so interesting was that creates what in legal circles is called a chain of custody, digital providence, so that if that picture is printed along with that digital hash, that watermark, regardless of what you'd prefer to believe, who you personally believe are the good guys and the bad guys, that picture was taken on that camera in

00;48;50;25 - 00;49;12;17

Mike Bechtel

that place at that time in the math says so and so for me, I thought, wow, this feels really early, right? Really early in the movie. But in the same way that me as a Gen Xer, I used to use that old phrase picture, it didn't happen. The we might be seeing the emergence of a new generation that says to change.

00;49;12;17 - 00;49;39;07

Mike Bechtel

That didn't happen, right? Like like I because if you can't believe your own eyes and ears anymore, what do you believe? You believe that you believe the hash, the code. There is a story, another story. I'll give you, a finance employee at a large organization wired something like 25 or $2.5 million, a non-trivial amount, substantial out of the corporate treasury.

00;49;39;09 - 00;50;07;22

Mike Bechtel

And it turned out it was because they accidentally gave their boss a password to, like, a PowerPoint presentation that he asked for over zoom. But it turned out the boss wasn't the boss. It was. You know, if you remember the old Nigerian prince who the boss was the, you know, the artist formerly known as the Nigerian prince. But instead of a poorly worded AOL email, this cat was coming in hot with believable 4K video and audio.

00;50;07;22 - 00;50;35;06

Mike Bechtel

Yeah. And so I think similarly, you know, really interesting organizations like Reality Defender and others that used mixed model approaches, some involving the blockchain, some using AI that are really trying to say, listen, in a world where you can't trust your eyes and ears anymore, you're going to have to trust the math. And so, you know, back to elevation, you know, a lot of jobs for math savvy.

00;50;35;06 - 00;50;38;03

Mike Bechtel

Toby's in that space.

00;50;38;05 - 00;51;00;23

Geoff Nielson

Well, and yeah, I'm again I'm processing that. But I it feels just to kind of dovetail this with our earlier conversation. It feels like the moment for in some ways. Right. Because if you look at what some of these tools and capabilities can do in terms of the fakes, you know, up into the right, maybe, you know, exponentially asymptotically.

00;51;00;23 - 00;51;16;04

Geoff Nielson

And so the demand for prove it to me is also off the charts. Right? So I yeah, I know I can appreciate why, you know, today, tomorrow and every day after, it's more and more valuable to be able to demonstrate what's real.

00;51;16;06 - 00;52;00;04

Mike Bechtel

It's, there's a, there's a, entrepreneur and, thoughtful, thoughtful, entrepreneur and writer in the space by the name of Balaji Srinivasan, whose newsletter is, in my experience, a pretty good read. And he recently, talked about this idea that, all property will become cryptography, the idea being that, you know, if you if you take this family of concepts we've been discussing and run them fast forward for the next 15 years.

00;52;00;06 - 00;52;22;16

Mike Bechtel

The only verifiable proof that your you and your stuff is your stuff will be delivered in that sort of on chain, like in math we trust framing. And I thought, goodness gracious, you know, to think that we thought this stuff was written off with NFTs and, you know, SBF, I think it's only just begun.

00;52;22;19 - 00;52;43;17

Geoff Nielson

It's yeah, it's a really interesting thought experiment. And it's not it's not hard for me to believe that there's like some sort of, like tipping point where once enough is proven with cryptography, like the old fashioned way or, you know, oh, yeah, there's something at city Hall or, you know, a bank said so like it, it almost feels quaint, right?

00;52;43;17 - 00;52;47;24

Geoff Nielson

Like, how could you possibly, like, trust that?

00;52;47;27 - 00;53;28;15

Mike Bechtel

I like your frame of tipping point, Jeff. That's right, that's right. I think Malcolm Gladwell is probably smiling somewhere because you're you're you're completely right. I mean, having worked with some of the biggest organizations in the world, I know how early distributed solutions felt quaint to them. Right. Like, if you're I will not name names here, but if you're a super well-known global household retailer and you're experimenting with, you know, blockchain based supply chain systems ten years ago, you throw your hands up, you go, let's just use ours.

00;53;28;17 - 00;53;55;06

Mike Bechtel

And that made a bunch of sense. But again, this is the trick with the future, right? We as humans, we struggle with the exponential function. And so is is that little acorn network grows to sapling, grows to oak, grows to sequoia. Then all of a sudden the idea that one company could be the master data management system for the entire human race, that's the quaint one.

00;53;55;08 - 00;54;21;24

Mike Bechtel

And so you're right, it's it ain't tip yet. But when it tips it, it it tips big in the Bitcoin community. They call that moment hyper. Bitcoin is Asian. And again it can feel a little fever dreamed in that space. But but the argument is there's going to be a moment where fiat currencies suddenly stop feeling like gospel and start feeling like monopoly money.

00;54;21;27 - 00;54;28;06

Mike Bechtel

Yeah. And that's going to be a heck of a two week ride for the valuation of yet versus, you know, digital.

00;54;28;08 - 00;54;50;09

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. No, it's yeah. It's a it's a really interesting thought. Probably not one we'll have to earmark that for our, for our next conversation. Oh, I, you touched on something that I did want to come back to though, Mike, which is, you know, you have a really interesting gig in the sense that, you know, you're in the boardrooms of of these, you know, household name organizations.

00;54;50;09 - 00;55;20;10

Geoff Nielson

You talk to the leaders, you, you know, hear about their hopes and dreams and darkest fears and, you know, tell them your vision, you know, you know, of the future or something like that anyway. And I'm curious, like, why when you talk to these people, is there a particular piece of advice that you find yourself giving them lately, like, is there something you find that they're overlooking or underestimating that probably needs a little bit more emphasis?

00;55;20;13 - 00;55;23;06

Mike Bechtel

00;55;23;08 - 00;55;42;06

Mike Bechtel

It's a really it's a really nice question, Jeff, that, that that question speaks well of your humane and artisanal creation of today's question. Yeah. The robot didn't give you that. You know.

00;55;42;08 - 00;55;53;18

Mike Bechtel

The two things I find, the two things I find myself sharing most frequently with boards of directors. So people at the Tippity Tippity top.

00;55;53;20 - 00;55;56;12

Mike Bechtel

Thing one.

00;55;56;15 - 00;56;03;09

Mike Bechtel

And it has to be said first, because I think it's the big one. It's that.

00;56;03;12 - 00;56;27;15

Mike Bechtel

Regardless of the sort of complexity and velocity and turbulence that we feel is, is, is, is increasing in all of our sectors and all of our lives. It'll never be calmer than it is right now. Right. And.

00;56;27;17 - 00;57;08;23

Mike Bechtel

The fundamental precepts of business are the same, right? We're in business to serve others right. And so what I'm often always reminding the top people at our top clients is start with your customers, lead with need. Right. What are their itches in need of scratching? Where are they stuck? And if you work backwards from there, you'll find that the future has never been brighter, you've never had better tools, and you've never had a shorter, a shorter sort of, connection between imagination and impact.

00;57;08;25 - 00;57;31;10

Mike Bechtel

Right? Yeah. You can use Zeitgeisty words like vibe coding, but what it's really all about is dream it, do it right. That used to be a two year thing. Now it's a two minute thing. Go get it right. But what are you going to do? Lead with need. That's thing one. And then I think thing two at the Tippity top of the biggest clients is

00;57;31;12 - 00;58;10;23

Mike Bechtel

Think of technology as a tool set that allows you to, to grow and play offense, not not just as a risk source. That has to be constantly thought of as, threats and defense because something I've seen, Jeff, is most boards understandably right. They're populated by former CEOs or CFOs, most CEOs or former CFOs. So what you tend to get is this financial mindset that doesn't look at tech as a thing they grew up with and have affinity for, and is a growth factor.

00;58;10;23 - 00;58;32;19

Mike Bechtel

They look at it as the cyber thing that presents risks. And I think I you know, again the primary is lead with and customer. But I think the secondary is usually, hey, you know you spend so much time worrying about what might go wrong. What if you spend a little bit of time imagining what could go right. And it's tricky, right.

00;58;32;19 - 00;58;49;28

Mike Bechtel

Because these people have seen a lot and they're smart and they're accomplished. But a little dose of healthy, constructive optimism right. Delivered is pragmatism. It goes a long way.

00;58;50;00 - 00;59;18;11

Geoff Nielson

It's yeah I love both of those answers. And they got me thinking. What I got me thinking about is, and I'm sure you talk about this all the time, but specifically in that context, I was thumbing through, Deloitte's trend reports for the technology trend reports for this year. And what caught my attention first is, you know, I'm not going to I'm not going to belabor this, but there's six trends.

00;59;18;13 - 00;59;38;10

Geoff Nielson

And if I'm reading it correctly, basically three of the trends are all about corporate it. If you look at, you know, and there's things like, I'm going to screw up the wording of your trend, so I apologize. All good. But there's something like, you know, how it can be amplified, you know, modernization and then something about cyber security.

00;59;38;10 - 01;00;10;21

Geoff Nielson

But the notion that we're talking about, like, you know, 50% of it is this thing that probably for most boards, CFOs, CEOs, you think is this boring, you know, line item that, you know, represents somewhere between, you know, necessary evil and a catastrophic risk can unlock things. I don't know that that caught my attention. Is that something that you've been that you've been talking about, like, is that related to the the point you were just making?

01;00;10;28 - 01;00;45;27

Mike Bechtel

Yeah, kind of it kind of it is. And the reason I, you know, verbally caveat with the kind of is, you know, Jeff it's interesting Deloitte tech trends. It's we're heading headed into our 17th year and when it was originally conceived, but by my friend and and partner Bill Briggs and, and Mark white, man made him feel old, but.

01;00;46;00 - 01;01;16;22

Mike Bechtel

The idea was, hey, we as Deloitte are more technical and get our hands dirtier than you, dear clients might might suspect. Behold our command of the zeitgeist. And and so the implied audience, the explicit audience. Was it leaders, CIOs. Right. Well, what happened in those intervening 17 years, Jeff, was that I call it rising sea levels. Right.

01;01;16;22 - 01;01;37;05

Mike Bechtel

Suddenly you had this doppelganger character, the CTO. What what what she all about? Well, she's focused on product, technology and growth factors. Unlike the CIO. He's focused on, you know, keeping the blinky lights blinking. Right. Then there was the CSO. What are they in charge of keeping us out of jail? Right. Then there's the CDA. What are they in charge of?

01;01;37;05 - 01;01;52;18

Mike Bechtel

Databases, analytics? Hadoop? Well, the punch line is this the audience broadened and in parallel with that, the.

01;01;52;20 - 01;02;10;16

Mike Bechtel

The when you talked about the sort of I it is kind of necessary evil or cost center, you started to hear a little bit more about it is strategic for growth, like from the CEOs and all that. And so during my tenure leading our Deloitte Tech Trends.

01;02;10;18 - 01;02;51;20

Mike Bechtel

We started broadening the the explicit readership goal and saying, listen, we want something that speaks to the C-suite and gen pop. You know, it's a very old language from pharma, right? The general population, but still has enough, as we call it, crunch for that traditional it, you know, leadership and managerial layer. And so I, you know, I'm grateful that you kind of see it, which is to say, if it's all high level strategic, the engineers are going to wonder, you know, if it's snake oil, if it's all it white paper, you'll never get the meeting with the board.

01;02;51;23 - 01;03;04;25

Mike Bechtel

And so Deloitte Tech Trends really tries to walk that balance between the boardroom and the server room, knowing that if anybody can get those two groups into cahoots, it's it's Deloitte.

01;03;04;28 - 01;03;15;14

Geoff Nielson

Okay. That I appreciate you sharing that lens. It makes a lot of sense to me. And I'm curious from your perspective, because I know you have you have somewhat of a background in this. Mike.

01;03;15;16 - 01;03;32;12

Geoff Nielson

It seems to be a place where AI is kind of front and center. Yeah, obviously all new tech is sort of front and center there sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons. But when I say AI is front and center, I both mean because they often hold the keys to AI, or at least they hope they do.

01;03;32;12 - 01;03;53;27

Geoff Nielson

Sometimes they don't. And that's, you know, that's that's a whole separate conversation. Yeah. But also because I for a long time, again, in the, in the eyes of senior leadership has kind of been I'm curious in your perspective, but at least from where I sit, there's this battle of, well, why don't we just outsource the whole damn thing like it's not a value center.

01;03;53;29 - 01;04;20;17

Geoff Nielson

And so what I'm starting to see is conversations around, well, how much of it can we just AI ify, right? Do we need all these pesky expensive people anyway when we don't really understand what's going on? And there's, there's this tension. And by the way, there's this other trend that's out there, and I think it ties to your your rising sea level, which is, as you said, it used to be there was the CIO and they held everything.

01;04;20;24 - 01;04;43;29

Geoff Nielson

And then all these shadow roles started popping up. And the moral of the story is, and CIOs frown when I say this to them, but the other roles got all the cool stuff and the CIO was left with like the the blinky like lights to use your words. Right? And so I guess my question is, in your eyes, what's the future of it?

01;04;44;01 - 01;05;03;11

Geoff Nielson

How do organizations need to be thinking about this and structuring it, assuming that their goal is exactly what you said? It's how do we, how do we get more intimate in terms of client needs? How do we build the products of the future, build the future if we want? What role does it play in that?

01;05;03;13 - 01;05;33;06

Mike Bechtel

Well, at at the risk of sounding a little bit, I don't know, commercial slash performative, I would say, I have a heartily recommend my colleague Lou DiLorenzo, who who leads our, our technology, AI and data strategy function, who's really all in on this idea of the future of the IT function for, for our clients around the world.

01;05;33;09 - 01;05;57;11

Mike Bechtel

But I'll do my best sort of poor man's retelling of of of Lou's great work and vision here. You know, I think the future of the IT function, it's really about showing up arm in arm with what what IT teams call the business. Right? I'm sure you've you've had plenty of gas and they talk about the business as though it's this other thing.

01;05;57;13 - 01;06;26;24

Mike Bechtel

Well in a lot of companies it it can feel that way right. Where like it as a service provider to the business people where that's headed. Right. The future that is is the elevation of it into strategic partner. And the way that the way that's made manifest is if you show up less as an order taker and more as a change maker, and okay, that, you know, it rhymes, it's got that going for it.

01;06;26;24 - 01;06;48;29

Mike Bechtel

But what's it really mean? What it means is a rich command of the art of the possible, as opposed to sort of stewardship of legacy systems. Right? That that's one reason why some folks felt relegated to the blinky lights. Right? Your arcane knowledge of, of of, you know, the old Bessie in back ain't going to do it, right?

01;06;48;29 - 01;07;16;02

Mike Bechtel

You got it. You got to be aware of the latest and greatest second financial fluency, third business model acumen. Taken together, what we're seeing is that the future of the IT function tends to be sort of it amplified. That's why one of our trends this year in Deloitte Tech Trends is, is really all about this idea that we did a study as part of our trends.

01;07;16;02 - 01;07;41;27

Mike Bechtel

We said, are those I.T groups who are using AI shrinking or growing and headcount. And in curiously, I thought I thought it was interesting, companies who are leaning into it found themselves with growing it headcount. Why? Because they were surprising and delighting the business stakeholders. Right. Shades of that. That first, you know, the old Michael Keaton Batman. Where does he get these wonderful toys?

01;07;42;02 - 01;08;08;00

Mike Bechtel

They would say, wait a minute, you can do X? To which the IT folks could say, yeah, in with ever so incrementally more resources, headcount and capability, we could do y like done. And so I think it as being more generative, more entrepreneurial, more strategic. That's where it's going. And they're going to do that in large part with the help of AI.

01;08;08;02 - 01;08;23;13

Mike Bechtel

What you're going to see less of is that kind of reactive stewardship of legacy systems, right. Because that stuff, just like when we open our conversation, Jeff, that's going to be automated and quick.

01;08;23;15 - 01;08;50;18

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. It's exciting. It's really exciting. And let me, let me maybe play that back to you, Mike, and see if I captured the spirit of it, which is, yeah, the organizations that are really good at this, whether it's good with AI or, you know, good at kind of developing the business models of tomorrow, we'll probably actually have bigger IT or corporate technology teams than they do today, but they won't necessarily look like the teams they have today.

01;08;50;18 - 01;09;15;19

Geoff Nielson

It'll be a different set of skills than they've had so far. It's not necessarily like, oh, we've doubled our number of coders or database administrators. It's we've built more connective tissue around, you know, to use your words, you know, finance and business model and art of the possible. And with that, we've created this newly shaped, newly resourced organization.

01;09;15;19 - 01;09;18;03

Geoff Nielson

Am I am I somewhere near the mark there. Yeah.

01;09;18;05 - 01;09;23;26

Mike Bechtel

Yeah. And and with a much greater economy of words than me because I, I filibustered it pretty seriously.

01;09;23;26 - 01;09;29;18

Geoff Nielson

I, I had the benefit of listening to you say it first. So, you know, shoulders of giants and all that.

01;09;29;20 - 01;09;57;13

Mike Bechtel

No doubt at all. I mean, Jeff, I, I, I think you captured it. Well, I mean, if we want to bring things full circle, Nicky knowns and that's more easily maybe read than said, but you know, no known known craft in deep arcane niches. Okay. That's the stuff that I, that that I automate in a big way. Right.

01;09;57;15 - 01;10;28;21

Mike Bechtel

And so application maintenance roles. Right. Operational staging roles. Right. The the artist currently known as dev sac fin ops, once merely known as dev ops or something. A lot of that stuff becomes increasingly automated. Right. And and again, back to our open. That doesn't mean that all these people are, you know, in for a really bad Tuesday.

01;10;28;24 - 01;11;00;16

Mike Bechtel

Right? What it means is like good news. You know, Janet, we have the opportunity to focus now on the new capability building that our customers are asking for, right. And so think of it as a mixing board, less time on app mate and DevOps, more time on customer needs analysis, prototyping and app dev. And I think for years my clients have said, yeah, we'd love to get to that.

01;11;00;16 - 01;11;13;27

Mike Bechtel

But 80% of our budget goes to keeping this old rust bucket ticking. Well, well, the good news it need no longer being redeployed that way. In an age of AI.

01;11;14;00 - 01;11;33;00

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. No, it's it's it's really exciting the possibilities that can unlock and yeah, the, the leaders in the organizations that I work with, even the ones who will, you know, swear a blue streak up and down about it. It's not when you really get into it. It's not like I hate the people. It's typically not even I hate what they deliver.

01;11;33;02 - 01;11;52;22

Geoff Nielson

It's. Could they go a little bit faster, please? Like, I've got this laundry list of things I need and for whatever reason, delivery is the issue. And so, you know, the idea that you can deliver more and have tools that help you deliver more, it's, it's an exciting prospect. If you can get it right.

01;11;52;24 - 01;12;17;12

Mike Bechtel

I think so, I mean, I had this discussion, Jeff, this is adjacent to your your point you just made, but it feels right to share it right here. I was talking to a AI fellow in a in a board meeting. He was the only former chief technology officer in a room full of former executive officers and financial officers.

01;12;17;12 - 01;12;44;01

Mike Bechtel

Right. So he was, in his own parlance, the only geek at the table. And somebody was talking about, something, something cyber something. He says, well, yeah, but that's, you know, that's Bob's thing. And I don't, I don't really we don't understand Bob's thing. And they they just moved on. And he looked over to me after that microaggression, if you will, and he said, he said it.

01;12;44;04 - 01;13;20;09

Mike Bechtel

He said, see how they joke about that. If I joked about not knowing finance or legal, it would be a career limiting move. And, the reason I bring that story up here in our in our visit, Jeff, is I think that's beginning to change. I think there's, there's a, there's a, an emergent. Right. We're not late in the movie early innings, but there's an emerging recognition at the tippy top that this isn't, that.

01;13;20;12 - 01;13;47;21

Mike Bechtel

That it is no longer perceived culturally as plumbing and as a cost center, but as rocket fuel to do work with radically less in the way of cogs in a and radically more in the way of, growth potential and margin potential. And so I'm bullish I'm bullish on it groups that can position themselves as rocket fuel and not ballast.

01;13;47;23 - 01;14;11;06

Geoff Nielson

I love I love that framing. I love that story. And it's you preempted my question any way which is I, I you know I'm glad to hear that you think there's going to be more CTOs on the board. And I think so, too. And frankly, I think it's, it's a really good thing. And if part of what this, you know, new wave of technology can do is, you know, siphon off the plumbing in some way.

01;14;11;06 - 01;14;32;23

Geoff Nielson

So not everybody needs to understand it. I think that's yeah, that that makes it more accessible. And we all went out for it. One one more detour I wanted to take us on, which is as I was thinking about this and these skills, you're, you're a professor. Of innovation. And, you know, I was thinking about that as you were answering a lot of these questions.

01;14;32;23 - 01;14;40;28

Geoff Nielson

I've got a bit of a background in innovation, and I could, you know, kind of check. Yeah. Yeah, that's. That does sound like something in innovation, I would say, which is great. Well, wait, wait a minute.

01;14;41;03 - 01;14;42;26

Mike Bechtel

Oh hell yeah.

01;14;42;29 - 01;15;06;27

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. What's, you know, what's kind of your posture? What do you tell students who are this next generation coming into the workforce these days? You know, there's been this thread in this conversation of the importance of innovation, maybe a decreasing importance in some of the technical skills. What are you what are you bullish about? Where should they not be?

01;15;07;02 - 01;15;14;16

Geoff Nielson

You know, thinking of taking particular paths. What what's your guidance for the next generation to to be successful in this new world?

01;15;14;21 - 01;15;49;00

Mike Bechtel

And what I tell my students at the University of Notre Dame, there's been a 25 year tyranny, in my opinion, of hyper specialization. A and I'll give you some data to back this up. I've sat on the advisory board at the University of Notre Dame. It's business school for nearly 20 years, and I remember when I graduated from ND and Notre Dame in 1998, I was an anthropology and political science major with a minor in philosophy, in economics.

01;15;49;02 - 01;16;12;21

Mike Bechtel

But the time I spent coding doom configs in the campus computer cluster in the HTML I learned in the background made me the right kind of guy. It made me employable enough. So I became a techie. By 2020, companies like mine at that time were saying, well, could could you be a business major right by 2020 or 2005?

01;16;12;24 - 01;16;38;05

Mike Bechtel

Sorry. Did I say 2020 2000 was like that? By 2005, it felt like I don't finance specifically. Can you be a finance major by by 2010 it was. Can you kindly double major in finance and computer engineering. Right. And in five years ago, honest to God, Jeff, it felt like, you know, if you don't have a Nobel laureate, you need not apply.

01;16;38;07 - 01;17;07;02

Mike Bechtel

And so when I talked about the tyranny of specialization, think of this generation long musical chairs game where there's one less seat every five years and God help you if you don't end up in the tech one or the banker one. Well, I believe the AI moment is changing that because for the reasons we've discussed, Jeff, suddenly your arcane knowledge of Python don't matter, right?

01;17;07;02 - 01;17;36;18

Mike Bechtel

You're you're deep understanding of glitch trading strategies. You ain't going to be faster than a robot. And so what does matter? I think it's breadth. It's it's cross-pollination between disparate. Right. Even radically unrelated disciplines that that that that's going to help people differentiate. And so what I tell the students is I say, listen, don't just be yourself, right?

01;17;36;18 - 01;18;09;14

Mike Bechtel

Oscar Wilde has this great quote be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. Love it. I think it's be all yourselves, right? If you can be the polymath, the Renaissance person, who shows up at an interview and says, yeah, my unique knowledge of how to bake scones, combined with my ability to write a unicycle and everything I learned from there, combined with my understanding of ethnographies from my time in Cambodia, you know, on the surface it feels like just the kind of jack of all trades master and none that nobody's been hiring for 20 years.

01;18;09;16 - 01;18;37;19

Mike Bechtel

But I'll tell you what to me, Jeff, that sounds like exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary, prompt engineering, right, generative, courageous polymath that I'm going to want. Right. Because the genie lamps, they're waiting for interesting wishes, and you're not going to get those from somebody whose entire book of lived experiences just finance, just capacity for just anything.

01;18;37;21 - 01;19;04;04

Geoff Nielson

It's such an optimistic message, which is, you know, so refreshing from so much of the doom and gloom you hear about, you know, there's not going to be any jobs or, you know, what are you possibly going to do with all this stuff? And yeah, I'm such a big advocate for that. And I love the I love the notion that you can just go and learn and learn what you want and collect these experiences, and that those can be a source of strength.

01;19;04;06 - 01;19;23;06

Geoff Nielson

It seemed to me for a long time, and your story completely resonates, that there's this narrative of you're supposed to take a path, and if you find yourself on detours, if you find yourself. I thought this was my path, but now I have to go this way. Well, now you're behind. And what I heard you say, Mike, is you're not behind.

01;19;23;08 - 01;19;37;20

Geoff Nielson

You've collected experiences. You've collected abilities. Now to cross-pollinate that are unique to you and help, you know, help extend your own value in a way that nobody else is going to have.

01;19;37;22 - 01;20;03;09

Mike Bechtel

And and, Jeff, you said it so beautifully. And you've taught me something, brother, because, your distillation, your distillation sort of elegantly captures what, what I've resorted to video game language to use, namely, you know, my my boys and my daughter too. All three of them have taught me about this idea of an NPC. Right. So you're playing a video game and like, who's that?

01;20;03;09 - 01;20;36;20

Mike Bechtel

That's my friend Bobby. Who's that? That's an NPC non-player character. They're not real. They're an AI. Right. Well, in this world where we're going to be dealing with more and more NPCs, right, right. We got this far in the discussion. Well, I haven't talked about agents, but yeah, that too. Right. But in a world where I excel at all of the known wrote everything, the only real value prop around is, yeah, your unique, differentiated bag of experiences.

01;20;36;22 - 01;20;46;07

Mike Bechtel

What makes you you and it feels, you know, it feels a little maybe hippie. But again.

01;20;46;10 - 01;21;08;25

Mike Bechtel

If you're going to stay a step or two ahead of the AI, it's going to have to be by bringing things to the world that the AI hasn't seen yet. And so I think it's stock up novelty, imagination, cross-pollination. And yeah, stock down, repetition, emulation. Right. And, you know, grinding.

01;21;08;28 - 01;21;32;10

Geoff Nielson

The other piece that's cool about that is that this is not like, not not like lifelong learning is not a skill that, you know, you lose as soon as you graduate. Right? It it makes the case for why you should be continuously cross-pollinating and continuously learning, which, which I love. And I think that's, that's an awesome, awesome message to end on.

01;21;32;13 - 01;21;48;08

Mike Bechtel

Well, Jeff, what what a what a treat it it is as as Hangouts go, this was an absolute privilege. But as first Hangouts go, it was sublime. I mean, thank thanks for thanks for reaching out and for having me, sir.

01;21;48;10 - 01;22;07;15

Geoff Nielson

Hey, thanks so much for sharing your insights today, Mike. A lot of ground we covered today. Really, really appreciate your insights. Lots of cool stuff. Whether it's the tech stuff, whether it's the mindset around that you know, I feel like from students to the suite C-suite, we kind of covered it all. So that was really awesome. I really appreciate you coming on.

01;22;07;18 - 01;22;08;00

Mike Bechtel

Thank you.