Digital Disruption

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Geoff Nielson

Hey everyone this is Jeff Neilson with Digital Disruption. Joining me today is Steve Brown, AI futurist who's actually worked with Google DeepMind and Intel in the role of futurist. Steve, thanks for joining me here today.

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Steve Brown

Yeah. Pleasure to be here. Trust me.

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Geoff Nielson

Likewise. So you, you know, literally wrote the book on emerging technologies. A handful of years ago. The innovation ultimatum, it was called. And you covered up. Awesome. Yeah. There it is. And you covered six emerging technologies at the time. I think it was at 2019, which, you know, in hindsight is kind of a fun time to be, you know, making prognostications on, on, you know, technological change.

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Geoff Nielson

And I'm curious just kind of revisiting that now. You know, do you have, you know, kind of an updated viewpoint on those technologies, which ones, you know, took off, exceeded your expectations? You know, maybe you've been slower to adopt. You know, where are they now?

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Steve Brown

Yeah, I wrote the book in 2019. It dropped, February 2020 right before we got down. Yeah. It's like, really amazing timing for a book. Yeah, it's things that came out of that book. So, I mean, I was the largest chapter in the book. Yeah. I'm glad about that because it turned out. Yeah, that was most important thing to be talking about.

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Steve Brown

Blockchain. You know, I it was. I wrote the book with a ten year time horizon. Right? So it was designed to be, you know, what's going to happen in the 2020s and what we're halfway through. So, yeah, I think blockchain is doing what I expected, which is it has some applications in supply chain. But beyond that, I mean, yes, crypto is going crazy, but it's just, you know, is it creating business value.

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Steve Brown

No. Not yet. Which is kind of what I called. The things that I thought would go a bit faster than they have. Autonomous vehicles. Turns out that some much. Not your problem that any of us expected. And robo taxis aren't in among us. Quite yet, but, you know, it's looking like that will be on track.

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Steve Brown

The thing that that I leaned into, that I'm glad I did, and that has turned out to be the most prescient, was this notion of process orchestration. Thinking about the the looking at the major business processes inside a company, breaking them down into tasks, and then figuring out which task is best done by a human, which is best done by an AI, which is best done by a robot, which is best done by an AI, and a human working very closely together.

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Steve Brown

I've had some version of a slide that shows that in my presentations for, I know, 6 or 7 years now, and now that's that's the core of what I think every I.T. person, every line of business person is having to think about how do you re-engineer your business, given the capabilities of AI now and where it's going to be in the very near future?

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Geoff Nielson

So let's talk about that one for a minute, Steve, because, you know, I agree with you. I've heard a lot about process orchestration, and it completely makes sense to me. I'm curious, though, you know, from an adoption standpoint, are you seeing people doing it? Where where are most organizations on the curve? Are, you know, 80% there or 20% there?

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Geoff Nielson

And, you know, where do we go next?

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Steve Brown

I think it's very early days still. You know, I work with clients in a wide range of industries, and they're all panicked because they're behind. Yeah, now they all think they're behind and no one's really back behind. I think people are starting to have to confront all the, some of the fundamental stuff that they didn't quite have right in their organizations in the first place, before they can move forward.

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Steve Brown

So where's my data? Is it well organized? Is it clean? Most. For most companies, the answer is no, it's not. It's not quite ready yet. So most companies I work with are in that position, but they are starting to map out their business processes and start their experiments. So they're doing, you know, proof of concepts, particularly in, I mean, the two main areas are sales and customer support.

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Steve Brown

So partnering a human with an agent that helps them to seem smarter on the phone about your products or services you're trying to sell, helps them be better informed about the person they're about to call. Yeah. And what's been happening in that company in the last six months and guides them on maybe one of the right products and services to sell, and just automating away the stuff that salespeople hate, like filling in CRM forms and, you know, having to do those follow up emails.

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Steve Brown

And most of that is now automated by some of these platforms. So those are the areas that I think people are working on first because they they're easiest to do right. You just build a database and pulling your ticket information, or you're pulling your product information and off you go. Beyond that it gets a little bit harder.

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Geoff Nielson

One and then sales can be, you know, a particularly sexy place to start because there's this, you know, there's this belief that, you know, well, if we start with sales, like, you know, touching the money's going to follow here. It's going to drive, you know, revenue. But you talk more about, you know, efficiency. When we talk about sales, our organizations are you finding actually able to use this technology to, you know, improve sales, increase revenues, or is it more of an internal efficiency play at this point?

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Steve Brown

I haven't seen any numbers that show me that you're actually increasing revenue per person. Yeah. But I, I suspect that that is what is is happening. Right. Because you're just increasing the efficiency of that person. They probably can make more calls per day if the AI is helping them. So in a lot of these, I was just listening to a call.

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Steve Brown

And then they surface information on the screen for the salesperson to say, hey, you know, there's an objection here. Why don't you pivot your strategy and try selling these? I have to imagine, but that is going to give some sort of uplift, on, on the sales process. But I haven't seen numbers yet.

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Geoff Nielson

Right. Right. So, yeah, I guess if you if you kind of untangle that, it can, it can juice the individual, you know, pieces of the sales equation and you would, you would hope that that would, you know, lead to better sales. Right. On the other side, yeah.

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Steve Brown

If you can make more call, more calls in a day, just kick my like this. If you make more calls in a day and you're able to, close those calls more effectively, you should be closing more business.

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Geoff Nielson

Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned, you mentioned blockchain, as an area that, you know, it sounds like it's just kind of quietly doing its thing in the background. Now it's got its applications, but it's something that, you know, maybe doesn't make the same news cycles as it used to, you know, exempting all the conversation happening now about, you know, the price of crypto.

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Geoff Nielson

And have we reached, you know, peak blockchain, is it no longer, you know, an emerging technology or do you see more kind of, adoption and innovation around the corner there?

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Steve Brown

You know, there's still there's still potential in the supply chain, a lot of potential, like one of the biggest things that people, you know, whether you're a brand manager, a regulator, a consumer, you want to know where things came from and how they were made. That's I'm a co-founder of a startup so small plug for the Providence chain network, trying to figure out how to move from a system of claims where I'm selling you something like claim that it has these features and this provenance, you know, that it was a t shirt that's not sewn by tiny fingers in a Vietnamese factory.

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Steve Brown

It is palm oil that didn't come from a dodgy place. It is, leather from hides that were not from cattle. Where land was cleared in the rainforest. Right. You want to be able to move from a system of claims to a system of evidence. And I think blockchain is really good at helping to do that by locking in this evidence.

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Steve Brown

So you can be more confident when you're buying products where they came from. I think that's the biggest and most powerful application. The other one is distributed systems. Being able to create value in a distributed way. And, you know, you've seen that start to happen with AI, with people being able to run distributed models, basically renting someone else's computer to run models, and do training runs.

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Steve Brown

That's an interesting collision between AI and blockchain and watching.

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Geoff Nielson

Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting to me that the supply chain piece Steve and the claims piece and it's, you know, it's it's so I don't know, for me, it's just intellectually interesting that like literally any object or consumable in this modern world, you know, I can point at this microphone and it's like, where did any individual piece of this come from?

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Geoff Nielson

Like, I have no idea, right? Like, I don't know what it's made from. I don't know how it was sourced or what that supply chain looks like. And, you know, the idea that you can have this, you know, this record with evidence of where it came from is, you know, kind of transformative. But I don't know, is this really on top of mind for a lot of organizations or a lot of consumers?

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Geoff Nielson

Like, how do you how do you cross that hurdle and what does adoption look like to start putting something like this in practice.

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Steve Brown

On the organization? If you are the US Space Force? Yeah. And you're putting a $100 million spy satellites into space, right? You need to know that not a single component came from China. Yeah. And you have a roomful of people running that information down. You use a product like the Providence Chain network, and suddenly, you know, you can do that automatically.

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Steve Brown

So if you're a brand manager and you've had maybe a few, incidents, this is not reflected well in your brand and they're in the press, you can be more interested or you're just a good brand manager, right. Who worries that you're going to be the next person in the press? So those are the sorts of companies that are leaning into this stuff earlier.

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Steve Brown

I think consumers are a little bit further behind. There are plenty of conscious consumers, but there are not enough of them yet. And they're not demanding this stuff enough yet that it's happening is being deployed more broadly. I think what may happen is you'll see, you know, the next generation of food safety. Yeah. Requirements. And they may cause at least the food industry to move in that direction.

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Steve Brown

So they know, you know, when there's some contamination in lettuce is that seems to be on a, on a regular basis. They don't have to take every romaine lettuce off the shelf everywhere in the country. They can trace exactly where it came from and not have to throw all that lettuce away.

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Geoff Nielson

Right? So, I mean, whether it's whether it's lettuce or spice satellites and I don't think I've ever put those two in the same sentence before. You know, it sounds like regulatory bodies may be kind of a key ingredient in this. Do you buy that or is this still going to, you know, kind of proliferate without it being a compliance requirement.

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Steve Brown

But compliance is part of the thing. But I think it's if you care about your brand, you're going to want to have eyes on your supply chain. I mean, a lot of brands have supply chains that are quite deep. They can go back three, four, five, six steps, and you can tell your immediate suppliers to behave. Yeah.

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Steve Brown

But, you know, E.coli pressures mean that people are always looking to save a buck here and there. And so 2 or 3 steps down the supply chain, you need some incentive mechanism built into your supply chain so that you can incentivize or penalize people if they don't comply with what you're requiring.

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Geoff Nielson

Right, right. So I mean, it sounds like overall you're still pretty bullish on this whole use case for blockchain.

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Steve Brown

Yeah. Yeah very much so.

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Geoff Nielson

Yeah. Oh it's interesting. I want to you know, I was thinking about just your list of technologies and one of the ones we haven't really talked about yet is, you know, VR and AR and just kind of this notion more broadly about spatial computing and, you know, as recently as, like a year ago, it seemed like this was kind of on the tip of everybody's tongues.

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Geoff Nielson

And, I don't know if it was, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, not having anything new to show or, you know, Apple having their, you know, their roll out. But it feels like it's fallen off a little bit. Is this just that point in the cycle? Is it going to come roaring back? You know, what's next in this space?

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Steve Brown

You know, I think with VR particularly, you know, the use cases are relatively limited. Yeah. Because when you put on a VR helmet, you're cutting yourself off from the physical world. So in an enterprise situation you need your workers going to see what they're doing. So that's why augmented reality, mixed reality was always going to be more interesting than virtual reality.

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Steve Brown

Virtual reality is fine for simulations and training for games. It has thousands of applications, but it's not until you have high quality, low cost, lightweight, long battery life, mixed reality particularly a mixed reality that is paired with an AI assistant which is spatially aware. Then it gets to be the kind of use cases that everybody will want. But the technology is just taking a little longer, to develop.

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Geoff Nielson

So you still see it as, you know, if I, if we talk about the 2020s, you know, the next five years, you're still predicting, you know, pretty interesting advances in that space. Once I can kind of unlock that. Is that is that fair?

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Steve Brown

Yeah. I mean, you look at what Microsoft is doing with the dynamic 365 platform and comparing that with HoloLens two. Yeah. You know, putting on a pair of magic glasses that then shows you how to fix something or how to now build something in the moment just cuts down training times, makes it easier for somebody to, you know, get up and do something.

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Steve Brown

And ultimately, I know I'd love something like that to help me build Ikea furniture or or fix my washing machine. Right. YouTube videos only go so far to be able to just put on a pair of glasses and have an AI converse with me and talk me through. What I need to do is a very powerful use case.

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Geoff Nielson

Yeah. And I'm, you know, there's there's so many it just in this constellation of kind of technologies. And, you know, I use the word constellation deliberately because they all, as you said, they interact with each other, right? Yeah. You know, this is maybe an unfair question and it's specificity. But, you know, obviously, a couple of years ago, we had that watershed moment with ChatGPT.

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Geoff Nielson

Do you have any predictions, Steve, for like, where are we going to see the next one? And is there another, you know, emerging technology watershed moment coming within the next 2 or 3 years?

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Steve Brown

Yeah. Don't worry. I get asked that question all the time. What what's the next ChatGPT moment? Yeah, I think there's a few that we can imagine. I mean, the first time there's an assistant that you can give quite a complex task to and it goes away and does it for you. Right, which I think is coming next year.

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Steve Brown

And that's a pretty big one. The first time you see a robot walking down the street, I think it's going to be a big moment. Yeah. And then, you know, within a year, like, whatever, you know, it's just getting getting groceries for Lane down the street, you know? So I think it's going to be moments like that which surprised us all.

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Steve Brown

And then they're just going to become normal.

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Geoff Nielson

Yeah. So, so robotics, I mean, the, the robots walking down the street and I think I saw, like actually in LA or something, it seems like that like that is starting already. And I'm curious because robotics is not, you know, in in innovation, ultimatum robotics was not one of the big technologies. And so I'm curious, you know, halfway through, you know, the 2020s or the ten year time horizon, are there any technologies that you're starting to look at now that didn't make the cut five years ago?

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Steve Brown

Yeah, robotics was in there as autonomous machines. But yeah, I don't I didn't see the speed of development of the humanoid robots. I've been very impressed with companies like figure sanctuary up in Vancouver, BC. Agility Robotics down in Oregon doing good work. And Boston Dynamics are pretty good. So I think we're going to see big leaps forward there.

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Steve Brown

And and it's the combination of these robots and, you know, advances in motors and batteries. But combining that with developments in large language models and vision systems, that's really provided these breakthroughs. What do I see coming next? I deliberately didn't write about quantum, as one of the six technologies, because I was writing about a broad application in the 2020s.

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Steve Brown

I think quantum is still a 2030s technology, but that's the one I'm starting to watch closely. Are there is there an intersection between quantum and the future of AI? We cannot scale up AI in the way that we're scaling it now indefinitely. You know, you just you're going to hit a wall. I mean, we're starting to get there in terms of the amounts of power it consumes, the water.

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Steve Brown

These things take, you know, it's not environmentally sustainable. So we're going to need something different. And, you know, there could be some analog AI stuff, quantum AI, those are the ones I'm watching closely.

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Geoff Nielson

So with that, with that application of quantum, you know, it's, you know, I, I talk to people about quantum, I hear about it. But most of the conversations are still fairly academic in that space, it seems around quantum. Are you starting to see any more kind of applied use cases of quantum, even, you know, kind of conceptually that are emerging?

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Steve Brown

I mean, again, this is why I didn't write about it, but because it's out there still. Right, though, it's interesting in sort of why macular chemistry research? Look at the interactions of complex organic molecules, making and doing doing bleeding edge scientific research. It's a great tool in some specific areas. Yeah. But are you going to have quantum in your next smartphone.

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Steve Brown

No. So, I think there's some interesting areas where you might be able to do AI in a different way. Right. The brute force matrix multiplication, transformer model transformer based model, approach that we're using for large language models today uses enormous amounts of compute. All the other ways to do it now. And there are some interesting companies out there who are looking at different approaches, and they're using quantum techniques at the foundation.

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Steve Brown

Are they using quantum computers? No, but they're using quantum, properties. Yeah.

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Geoff Nielson

So, you know, you mentioned compute. And, you know, certainly I don't think it's controversial to say there's a bit of an AI kind of arms race going on right now, especially with kind of the big tech organizations, you know, using as much compute as possible to, you know, get this next big thing. And, you know, we're talking earlier, Steve, about the fact that, like, everybody's behind an adoption right now.

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Geoff Nielson

And so so I'm curious, like in your mind, how big is the next big thing? Or you know, do we still have our work cut out for us with the existing technology?

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Steve Brown

That's a very good question. I mean, there's so much opportunity with adopting AI across the enterprise, but doing it right and doing it at the right speed. Yeah. And figuring out the right use cases to go after is the challenge right. And what's the foundation you have to put in place? Yes. There are existing technologies that will still be able to get some things out of I'm not saying no.

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Steve Brown

There's still value in whatever the next rev of the SAS software is you use, you know, this thing with new features. But I think the transformation stuff transforming the work force, elevation, the performance of your workers and that's AI. So performance and not productivity. Yeah it's productivity is a big one. But elevating the creativity of your workforce, the intuition, the workforce, the decision making abilities of your workforce, figuring out how to do that with AI.

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Steve Brown

That is where the real opportunity lies. So maybe completely differentiate versus your competitors. So I think that's where at least enterprises I'm working with, that's where they're focusing most of their energy. There's some sustaining work. And yes, we need to keep doing the stuff we used to do, but figuring out where to lean in. Yeah. And where to focus.

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Steve Brown

Where am I going to run my experiments? One of my pilots going to be where are the areas of most opportunity and that's something I help a lot of clients with.

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Geoff Nielson

Yeah. And you know, on that, who who do you see and what do you see as being the, the biggest indicators, I guess, of, you know, an organization that's going to be a disruptor versus one that's going to be disrupted.

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Steve Brown

I mean, there's three main areas that people are using AI and that there's and this first one is customer experience. Second is employee experience. Third is operational excellence. Right. How do you elevate your offering, whether it's a product or service to the user interface, to an existing product? How do you elevate your offering to improve customer satisfaction and, improve utility and differentiate in the marketplace?

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Steve Brown

That's a fairly obvious path. The one that I think people are not spending enough time focusing on is how do I elevate my workforce? So that's the process orchestration stuff we talked about. And you're trying to boost performance. But there's another reason to do that too. We are moving into a period of time when we're going to have not enough people in the labor force, and that is a demographic certainty.

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Steve Brown

The only way you fill that gap is with automation or immigration. Yeah. And immigration is probably not on the table for at least the next four years. Yeah. Or not. Not in the ways it wasn't perhaps in the past. So automation is going to be a significant part of making sure that we can fill the jobs that people have.

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Steve Brown

So when you are competing for that scarce labor, think about, you know, when you think about what's your next job going to be, do you want to work for a company that has invested in AI tools, services, assistance so that when you go into work every day, the things that you don't enjoy doing are all offloaded to an AI and the things that you do enjoy doing that you get satisfaction from.

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Steve Brown

You have support, elevate your performance. So you going to go work for that company? Are you going to go work for the company that's not invested in creating that? Amazing. I supported employee experience. So just the access to the best talent. I think companies need to think about that very carefully.

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Geoff Nielson

Right. And I you know, just reflecting on that, there's what's in the hands of the organization versus what's in the hands of the employee as well, who's trying to use AI. So for you, for you, Steve is like, a total lockdown of AI in your mind, like off the table for organizations. And, you know, in some cases, I guess, where there's, you know, regulatory reasons to do that is that creating just an environment where these organizations are making themselves, you know, kind of, you know, prey to be leapfrogged by, you know, someone who's going to take that chance.

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Steve Brown

Absolutely. I mean, there are good reasons why people don't want an employee just randomly using ChatGPT, because when you do that, you know, everything you type in is going into the training data set for the next round of models. And it's not good if you cut and paste. Okay, confidential information, and send it to the AI to train on it.

00;23;14;24 - 00;23;51;23

Steve Brown

So yeah, there are good reasons to do that lockdown. And that was a that was a fair initial response, but that was a fair response two years ago. It is not a fair response now. There are plenty of options to be able to give to expose employees safely to these types of tools without compromising confidentiality. You know, there there are ways to interact with with Google, with open AI, even on an enterprise plan, so that, you know, you can keep your data safe and to use Rag and other techniques so that you can reduce the average knowledge.

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Steve Brown

Worker spends 32 days of the year just looking for the information they need to do their jobs. So taking all of the corporate information and safely surfacing it, making it available through a vector database, to your employees is going to save a lot of time and help them be more effective. It's an easy thing to do. And companies should all be looking at that.

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Geoff Nielson

Yeah. And, you know, speaking of easy things to do, I mean, there's there's, you know, clearly a spectrum here from, you know, the low hanging fruit and some of the like, oh, this is easy to adopt right now to you know, I have to imagine that this, this conversation around like, you know, process orchestration. I mean, this is transformative, but I don't think we'd use the word easy for that one if I had to guess.

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Geoff Nielson

Right. Like, that's that, that's like fundamentally re-architecting, you know, the organization. And so, you know, I'm curious. I know you've been doing some AI workshops, with various enterprises. What does that look like? How do you recommend they get started, and what kind of journey do you take them on?

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Steve Brown

Yeah, I so I get hired by lots of companies to help them figure out what's their AI transformation journey. And, and it usually starts with me going in and talking to their board and management suite. Give them a briefing on AI, help them understand what are the opportunities that lie ahead. What are the challenges they should know? How do they avoid the pitfalls?

00;25;10;13 - 00;25;28;25

Steve Brown

Then they bring me back, usually to talk to the next level down. I give them the same kind of spiel, and then they bring me in to do the hard work, which is an AI innovation workshop. I come on site for a couple of days, and I use the future casting process to help them ideate future use cases for the organization.

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Steve Brown

So they bring people into the room. We get about 40, 60 people together, work in small teams, an idea, potential use cases for the future. And then we map them out in time and figure out which of the ones are the priority and what are the. By looking at all of these potential use cases, what are the things that we need to do to get there?

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Steve Brown

Do you have the talent that you need? Do you have the data that you need? Do you need to acquire that data? Is that through a partnership? Is it through M&A? Is it something that you have but you have to clean up, you know, what's the IP that you need to generate? What are the infrastructure requirements as a, as a make versus my conversation.

00;26;09;06 - 00;26;27;05

Steve Brown

So I walk them through all of that so that they can start on that journey. And even though you will be building a five year roadmap or three year roadmap, you know what you're going to do when you go into the office on Monday. How do you start on that journey? So that's probably the most, popular, workshop I run right now.

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Geoff Nielson

Right. And you mentioned you mentioned there make versus buy. And I have I have a suspicion I know what you're going to say, but, you know, what percentage of the time are you recommend recommending make versus buy? And, you know, what are the what are the cases you see, if any, for make.

00;26;43;28 - 00;27;04;28

Steve Brown

It depends what kind of problems you're trying to solve. You know, if you are, wanting to use a generative AI to, accelerate your sales team. Yeah, I'm probably going to recommend that you you buy that in because building your own large language models from scratch. Not something I recommend for people. Yeah, right. That cost a lot of money.

00;27;05;00 - 00;27;24;27

Steve Brown

And you're not going to be competitive with what you can rent in. Essentially, if you are building a model in an oil company to help you figure out optimal gas uplift, so you're forcing gas into the ground to get oil to come out, you know, that's something you're going to do yourself because it's going to give you a competitive advantage.

00;27;24;29 - 00;27;43;28

Steve Brown

And that's a model that you are going to be able to to create in-house. So it really depends on what is it you're trying to solve, what's the problem you're trying to solve with AI and what's available out there. And what is something that gives you a sustained advantage versus it's just something that you need as a base capability for the enterprise.

00;27;44;00 - 00;28;01;23

Geoff Nielson

So, you know, on that note, do you have any more stories maybe you can share about, you know, really good. You know, I use cases or ways you've seen organizations take advantage of this technology that's, you know, kind of caught your attention is like, wow, I never thought of that.

00;28;01;25 - 00;28;21;29

Steve Brown

It's amazing where it shows up, you know, like one of my clients is a uranium mining company up in Canada. When you're mining uranium, you have a spinning head. And the rate of the spin and the pressure of the water coming out, you vary it over time to get the uranium or to come out. All right.

00;28;22;06 - 00;28;47;05

Steve Brown

I'm not an expert on uranium mining, as you can tell. But the speed of spin and the pressure changes, you optimize that process with AI, and you increase the yield by get ready 1% and you say, well, is that worth having turns out. Yeah, because that's worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Interesting. So it's looking for that.

00;28;47;06 - 00;28;55;21

Steve Brown

What are the areas where you can get biggest return, even if it's a 1% bump? By using AI it's worth doing in some cases.

00;28;55;23 - 00;29;14;22

Geoff Nielson

Yeah, yeah. No, it's funny and it's just that the 1% I guess, got my attention because it's just taken an isolation. It's like such a who cares number. But right. You, you apply it to any big enough, you know, big enough sample and suddenly you start to, you start to have a real impact. Yes.

00;29;14;22 - 00;29;22;20

Steve Brown

If you're operating at scale. Yeah. And you can go after 10 or 15, 1%, that's going to be transformative to your business results.

00;29;22;22 - 00;29;37;07

Geoff Nielson

Yeah, yeah. Are you working with many organizations, Steve, on that kind of, you know, the process orchestration, or do you find that's like fair that's reserved for the most advanced organizations right now.

00;29;37;10 - 00;29;54;23

Steve Brown

But I'm not. So my role as a futurist is to go in and help them understand the possibilities to build that roadmap. And then I step out of the way. So I then hand off to other organizations to going to help them actually get into execution. But they're their partners. I mean, companies like slowness, who's a client of mine, actually.

00;29;54;26 - 00;30;08;00

Steve Brown

Great to work with, by the way. They are a company that helps you do that, mapping that map out your business processes, which is the first step. So then figuring out which of these tasks I'm actually going to automate right.

00;30;08;02 - 00;30;33;21

Geoff Nielson

And and you know, just thinking about the org, the organizations I assume you're working with are, you know, not not super different from the organizations I'm working with, which is to say, it's probably not the startups that, you know, were founded in 2024. And it's probably not, you know, for the most part, the Amazons of the world, it's, you know, that that kind of you know, middle of the economy, you know, bread and butter organizations.

00;30;33;24 - 00;30;54;10

Geoff Nielson

And I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, like, how big is the risk right now for these organizations that they're either going to, you know, get displaced by, you know, founded in 2024 organizations or that, you know, their business model or something that they're doing is going to get absorbed by, you know, The Magnificent Seven.

00;30;54;12 - 00;31;29;06

Steve Brown

That's a great question. I mean, most of the my clients, you know, medium sized enterprises or big enterprises. So. Right. My clients recently included Bank of America. I worked with Disney, Nike, JP Morgan. Lots, lots of big journeys. But you're right, that's the the question writ large is what's the risk of disruption from upstarts. Yeah. When you have a powerful technology, if you if someone else is able to harness it better than you because you have the innovator's dilemma or what you have an organizational torpor, you just not able to move fast enough.

00;31;29;08 - 00;31;53;18

Steve Brown

What's the risk? I think the biggest risk is going to be in education. You know, I talked to people in higher ed, and they're either la la la la la. I'm not, you know. No. Not listening. You know, the more you've got, you've got teachers who are more worried about, the kids cheating using ChatGPT than they are thinking about.

00;31;53;18 - 00;32;21;12

Steve Brown

Well, how do I prepare my kids to thrive in a world of, you know, mass automation? What's how do I give them a differentiated advantage to survive in that world? And how do I use AI and embrace it to amplify my ability to teach them? You know, that's where people need to think. And the risk is to your point, you know, okay, I'm I'm Harvard University, I'm XYZ University.

00;32;21;15 - 00;32;46;26

Steve Brown

What happens when Microsoft Academy or Google University comes along and offers a really great accreditation? And and the turning point is when businesses in corporate America say, you know what, I agree, or whatever the rating is from Microsoft Academy is worth more or equal to something from a bricks and mortar university. You know, suddenly then they have a real problem.

00;32;46;26 - 00;32;54;21

Steve Brown

It's hard to charge 2 or $300,000 for education. If I can get the same one from Microsoft for 2 or $3000.

00;32;54;24 - 00;33;24;21

Geoff Nielson

I love that you went there. And you know, I do a lot of work with higher ed, and it's, it really feels like if they're kind of at that pivotal moment right now, they're facing this, you know, enrollment, cliff, due to demographics, you know, as you said, integration. The model itself is changing. Like, I don't know, it seems to me like we're in this weird kind of liminal space where everyone agrees that the old model isn't really suited to the present, but we haven't found anything yet.

00;33;24;24 - 00;33;47;05

Geoff Nielson

That's clearly, you know, the answer. So yeah, I don't know if you if you are like and, you know, to me, Harvard is probably in a better spot than a lot of the, you know, next year or two rungs down from Harvard because of global brand. Yeah, yeah, because they've got the brand. But, you know, is this how do you avoid watching from the sidelines?

00;33;47;05 - 00;34;01;11

Geoff Nielson

I mean, do these organizations have an opportunity to disrupt themselves to partner with the Microsoft academies of the world? You know, where to where do we go from here? You know, to make sure that we're not just kind of, you know, in the dustbin of history?

00;34;01;14 - 00;34;28;29

Steve Brown

Yeah, yeah. So I think there is a huge partnership opportunity because the benefit of going to university is not just information transfer from, you know, faculty brains to my brain. Right. It is. That's a big part of it. I'm learning some of the knowledge and skills that I need to thrive in the workplace in the future. But it's also about learning to be a well-adjusted human to interact with other people.

00;34;29;02 - 00;34;44;18

Steve Brown

There's a huge networking component, right? I still am in touch with people I was at university with. And sometimes we help each other out. Yeah, right. I certainly if you want, if you're into Harvard, it's amazing that work there. That's a big part of why you go to Harvard. It's not just a brand and the cachet.

00;34;44;20 - 00;35;07;17

Steve Brown

So I think the opportunity is, how do you have this blended model? And it comes back again to process orchestration. All right. What what are the things that I can deliver best with an eye I tutor that adapts to my style. That is very good at teaching me anything I want to learn and pair that with the human connection of a tutor.

00;35;07;20 - 00;35;29;27

Steve Brown

You know, being in on a on campus with people who are like me and we're learning, we're talking about the ideas that we are, would being exposed to, and building that network for the future. How do you combine those two? So maybe I can do a degree in a year, instead of three, and get the same high quality education, the same networking, and pop out the other side and and at a fraction of the cost.

00;35;30;01 - 00;35;54;18

Geoff Nielson

Right. And you've got you've got the gears turning for me right now, Steve. Because, you know, I see a few things coming together and one of them is, you know, I'm a I've got a business background, but I'm a self-proclaimed apologist for like a liberal arts education. And, you know, I've always believed that one of the main benefits to to schooling is, like, it teaches you how to think, if that makes sense.

00;35;54;18 - 00;36;14;20

Geoff Nielson

Right? Like it's not necessarily about the answers you learn there. It's about asking the right questions. And the gears you got turning in my brain are like, to me, in the age of AI, that's actually more important than ever, right? Like that. The answers like, you know what happened when we get calculators, like, you don't need to remember how to do long division.

00;36;14;22 - 00;36;27;26

Geoff Nielson

And something similar may be happening in AI. So, I don't know where where does that kind of take us? And does that become a skill that's, that's more needed in the work in the workforce? Is that something you're seeing?

00;36;27;26 - 00;36;49;21

Steve Brown

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was an article, I think it was in the Atlantic about a year and a half ago, which the headline was the most insane. Learning to talk to an AI could be the most important skill of the 21st century. They are going to be the tools that we use to help us do all the things that we do in our personal lives or private lives.

00;36;49;23 - 00;37;09;02

Steve Brown

Work lives, learning, constantly growing. AI is going to be a partner for doing that. And the same way we all had to learn, if you old enough WordPerfect and Lotus one, two, three if you're younger than that and you know Word and Excel or the Google suite, you had to learn how to get the most out of those tools.

00;37;09;02 - 00;37;27;21

Steve Brown

We have to learn to get the most out of our eyes, and that is going to happen through a process of trial and error and being taught. And yeah, I think we're going to need to teach kids how to get the most out of their eyes. But at the same time, people always ask me the number one question I get.

00;37;27;23 - 00;37;50;22

Steve Brown

Probably number two is the one you asked me about was the next text chat GPT two moment. The number one question is some version of what do I need to do to become robot proof? Or what do my kids need to do? What my grandchildren need to do? What should they do in school to make sure that they're robot proof in the future, that they're going to be relevant in the workplace?

00;37;50;24 - 00;38;16;08

Steve Brown

And I tell them the same answer every time. Double down on your humanity. The things that make you uniquely human your empathy, your communication skills, your intuition, your creativity. I can do some creative things, but humans are better for a while. Okay? So figure out what are the things that make you uniquely human leaning to those because the future is still human.

00;38;16;10 - 00;38;19;24

Steve Brown

It's just supported by amazing AI.

00;38;19;26 - 00;38;44;23

Geoff Nielson

So thinking about like, I love the optimism that that comes with that. And I was going to ask you on balance, like, what is your excitement versus fear? You know, looking out at the next ten years and, and, you know, maybe more than anything, you know, what it means for, you know, children and grandchildren and you know that the future of AI somewhere between humans and the human workforce, I guess.

00;38;44;25 - 00;39;10;28

Steve Brown

Yeah. I mean, we're getting into a huge question space. Guilty. You know, if you ask the question, you know, should I be excited or afraid of AI? The answer is yes. You know, it's both. We need to be cautious about it. It is a very powerful technology. It is an amplifier, so it amplifies good behavior and bad behavior.

00;39;11;00 - 00;39;32;03

Steve Brown

So we could live in a world of, you know, huge misinformation and disinformation, created, you know, pumped out from AI factories at scale. At the same time, there's a good chance that somebody listening to this podcast will have their life saved by an AI, a drug that was developed or co-developed when AI is going to save someone's life.

00;39;32;05 - 00;39;57;23

Steve Brown

If not you, then your kids. So you know it's good and bad. I my biggest worry, you know, I'm, future boy, right? So when I play things out, I don't know how long it will take, but AI's probably going to get good enough that it can do most jobs, most economic activity will be done by machines, freeing us up to do something else.

00;39;57;26 - 00;40;18;22

Steve Brown

And I'm not sure that we all know what to do with ourselves. Let's say we can fix the economic side of things and make sure that people have what they need to live. And if we live in a world of abundance fueled by AI, because the cost of laborers cost of goods mostly is about labor. So if you crash the cost of labor, then the cost of goods comes down.

00;40;18;24 - 00;40;39;12

Steve Brown

You live in a world of abundance. Everybody can afford what they need. So you figure out some sort of economic distribution model, then what? What are we going to do with ourselves? And so I, I think we all have to start asking, answering questions to prepare ourselves for whenever that comes. And, you know, maybe it's a generation from now.

00;40;39;12 - 00;41;06;01

Steve Brown

Maybe it's two generations from now. Maybe it's never maybe it's 15 years, I don't know. But when it comes, we have to know who are we, what's important to us and what makes us happy. And it's never too late. Never too early to start thinking about the answers to those questions. Now we will found out during Covid when you know the universe sent us back to our bedrooms to think about what we've done for a few months.

00;41;06;01 - 00;41;16;06

Steve Brown

Yeah, yeah, people turns alcohol and drugs and they were miserable. So when that happens in your toes, you don't need to work for the rest of your life. What are you going to do?

00;41;16;08 - 00;41;19;12

Geoff Nielson

Yeah, well, that's the biggest worry.

00;41;19;13 - 00;41;21;22

Steve Brown

Is we won't make that transition elegantly.

00;41;21;22 - 00;41;41;12

Geoff Nielson

Well, and that's that. There's, there's there's something implicit there to Steve, which is to what degree we answer that question ourselves versus someone answers that for us. Right. And in some ways, maybe that was the scariest part of, of the pandemic is that there was no one there to answer that for us. Right? We because we didn't know.

00;41;41;12 - 00;42;05;04

Geoff Nielson

And it feels to me like we're just at this kind of historical inflection point where there's just more unknown unknowns than ever, you know, and that the number of people who can tell us what's next seems to be dwindling. You know, you and I, you know, try our best, but it's just I don't know, I feel like we're still and kind of watch and see mode as we kind of grapple with these bigger questions.

00;42;05;04 - 00;42;13;24

Geoff Nielson

So I don't know, what should we be waiting for somebody to tell us what's next or should we be empowering people to to come up with those answers by themselves?

00;42;13;26 - 00;42;37;17

Steve Brown

I think we all own this, right? I mean, society is constantly changing. We're about to see more change in our society in the next 20 years than perhaps the last 100. Perhaps the last 200. You know, that's a big deal. And we all need to help each other through it. And I think businesses will pop up that help people figure out what's your life?

00;42;37;17 - 00;43;01;09

Steve Brown

2.0, right. There'll be people to help with that. But I'm encouraged by the fact that, yes, some people turn to alcohol and drugs and didn't do so well and came out of Covid depressed. And I feel very bad for them. But there are also people who figured out a love of making bread and, yeah, you know, getting out and in nature more and just giving arts and crafts that they've carried on to this day.

00;43;01;12 - 00;43;20;02

Steve Brown

And so I think that that little glimpse that 2 or 3 months where we were all in lockdown, was a test and some didn't do so well in it and some, some did. So we need to help people who who didn't do so well in that, as this becomes something we face on a, on a grand scale, help them make that transition.

00;43;20;07 - 00;43;41;18

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. And and with that transition, do you see I as a risk to people finding meaning. And what I mean by that is, you know, there's this kind of talking points going around now that like, you know, I was meant to do all the administrative stuff so that people could do all the creative stuff. And lo and behold, suddenly I is writing songs and it's creating paintings.

00;43;41;18 - 00;43;57;14

Geoff Nielson

And, you know, if people who are left, you know, doing the dishes, which I can't do, does that have merit? Or do you see that is just kind of, I don't know, an easy talking point that that won't bear itself out in the long term.

00;43;57;16 - 00;44;18;20

Steve Brown

I mean, it's a fair critique of AI today, but at the same time, people who who don't have the ability to draw amazing images, but they have an idea in their head that they can't realize and they've been impotent up to this point. While people who wants to write a song and they have, they know what they want, but they they can't sing.

00;44;18;20 - 00;44;44;18

Steve Brown

They don't play an instrument. Now they have access to that. AI is going to help them realize the dream. So I think in some ways it is unleashing people's creativity. They just using these tools to create the output rather than picking up a guitar or, you know, and some people will argue if you don't have calluses on your fingers, you're not a musician, you're not creating music, or there's some truth in that, but not everybody wants to take that path.

00;44;44;20 - 00;45;04;20

Steve Brown

And I suspect that we will have. People will want artisanal things. Things were made by humans. Yeah. It doesn't mean there won't be a marketplace for things that, were made by machines guided by humans. So I think you'll see both. There's a place for all of it, I think.

00;45;04;20 - 00;45;42;09

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. It just becomes kind of a two speed, you know, economy or a two tier. You know, there's there are you willing to pay the premium for, you know, the, the bread made by human hands or, you know, whatever, whatever, you know, use case, you want to use one of the, one of the other potentials I see here is, you know, when we look at what AI is able to unleash for people, there's the creative side that we discussed, but there's also there's also the productivity side, and there's also the ability, you know, in my mind, of if people want to start their own enterprise, their own company, the ability to do that

00;45;42;11 - 00;46;12;21

Geoff Nielson

now seems like it's an order of magnitude easier than it was ten years ago. And it seems like to your point, Steve, it's it's only getting easier. It's I mean, is is this the direction we're going in and, you know, is that something that, you know, enterprises of, you know, 50 or 100,000 people should be worried about if suddenly, you know, any individual can, can run their own organization and, you know, play in their space.

00;46;12;23 - 00;46;37;18

Steve Brown

I mean, it's empowering of of change. Jensen Huang I mean, he's running the most valuable enterprise on the planet right now. And he famously was asked a couple months ago, you know, what's your plan for the future of Nvidia? And he said, well, we've got about 33,000 employees now. We're planning to head to, you know, maybe 50,000 human employees supported by 100 million agents.

00;46;37;20 - 00;46;55;04

Steve Brown

Wow. And that tells you what the workforce of the future is going to be. It's going to be humans, digital employees and robots working side by side, you know, and people are throwing around the idea of, you know, when are we going to see the first unicorn, first billion dollar enterprise with one employee? You know, it's possible.

00;46;55;04 - 00;47;17;09

Steve Brown

I think it's more likely you'll see a group of a few, you know, basically a C-suite supported by agents. But yeah, it's it's going to unleash an enormous amount of opportunity and creativity, and that's a good thing. But yeah, if you're a big enterprise that's kind of stuck in the past, the average life of a company is, what, 40 years?

00;47;17;12 - 00;47;30;13

Steve Brown

So maybe it's your time, which means you need to start thinking now about how are you going to scale your operations using digital employees, right. Employees who work for electrons, not dollars and cents.

00;47;30;15 - 00;47;55;08

Geoff Nielson

Right. And and, you know, just just on the point there that you mentioned about, you know, or maybe it's a C-suite and then, you know, down from there, it's I, it's it's I was going to use the word risk. I, I don't want to use the word risk. Do you see us moving toward a world where there is AI, C-suite, where we get to an AI CEO, or is that too fanciful?

00;47;55;11 - 00;48;25;15

Steve Brown

I don't think it's too fanciful. It's not going to happen right away. You know, it starts off where as these digital agents start to come on the scene, and OpenAI is rumored to launch their operator agents, in January of 2025. So that's when we'll start to see this happen. You know, we're going to move, move quickly into a world of 100 billion software agents, which means that every one of us will be a manager.

00;48;25;17 - 00;48;48;19

Steve Brown

We will all manage, you know, really smart interns that we can have. They act like remote employees. But the question is, when do we then start to be managed by an AI? In some circumstances, and I may be more capable as a manager, will they move to CEO level? You know, once we get to AGI, or ASI, maybe all bets are off.

00;48;48;19 - 00;48;58;05

Steve Brown

And yes, we will have an AI that is going to do a better job of than than a human. But will we accept that is the real question.

00;48;58;07 - 00;49;19;00

Geoff Nielson

And I'm glad you brought up AGI because, you know, that's that that's another question I'm sure you get fairly regularly. Is, you know, is AGI something we're going to see in the next five years? And for a lot of the conversation we've had today, Steve, like, do we need AGI to get to these places or is it, you know, just one, you know, potential?

00;49;19;02 - 00;49;21;10

Geoff Nielson

You know, one potential innovation.

00;49;21;12 - 00;49;44;09

Steve Brown

You know, I don't know if you need AGI to get to these places. What you need is a highly accurate AI. The accuracy of AI is not there with hallucinations. You know, there are some techniques you can do to improve that. The reasoning capabilities you see in models like 01I, one Pro, particularly, using Rag so that you're operating off, you know, the source of ground truth help a lot.

00;49;44;11 - 00;50;04;12

Steve Brown

But reasoning and, and rag stuff only get you so far. It needs to be more accurate than it is today, so it's reliable. Once you get to that level. I mean, these eyes are already operating it sort of PhD level. You know, a digital PhD employee that I can hire for $0.50 an hour because I'm just paying for electrons.

00;50;04;12 - 00;50;22;26

Steve Brown

Yeah. That's interesting. I don't think it needs to be AGI to do that. When does AGI happen? So implicit in your question, the smart people I speak to in the industry, the, the range I get is from next year to never. And it's kind of somewhere in.

00;50;22;26 - 00;50;26;02

Geoff Nielson

Between nice and nice. Nice and precise. Yeah.

00;50;26;05 - 00;50;38;28

Steve Brown

But the smart people, it's, you know, I'm, I'm hearing 20, 28 2029. Ray Kurzweil bless him as has been saying, 2029 for 40 years. Yeah. It would be kind of nice if he was right.

00;50;39;00 - 00;50;50;05

Geoff Nielson

Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. What are what are you seeing people get wrong about conventional wisdom around AI right now?

00;50;50;07 - 00;51;13;29

Steve Brown

I think the adage that Bill gates uses is right, which is people always have. They always overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimates it in the long term. I think that's the most likely with AI. Yeah, there's a lot of fear about AI right now and was excited about it. And, you know, you had me on this podcast because everybody's excited about AI and rightly so.

00;51;14;01 - 00;51;34;01

Steve Brown

But we're probably going to see some sort of a dip coming as people's expectations fall in. It fall short of what's delivered. But in the long term, I think we're going to see a wholesale transformation of our society because of AI. So that's probably the best one. So are there specific things that.

00;51;34;03 - 00;51;48;19

Steve Brown

I think there's just so much hype and excitement over AI and it's well placed, but it's just going to take a little longer than people think in the short term for it to have true impact on the enterprise, but then once it starts to find its way in, I think you're going to see dramatic change.

00;51;48;22 - 00;52;10;27

Geoff Nielson

Right? So, you know, thinking about that dramatic change, Steve, you know, you mentioned before we started recording that you're actually working on a new book right now, kind of revisiting, you know what, what the future looks like from an emerging tech landscape. Can you maybe give us a sneak peek about, you know, what's in there, what you're excited about and what we should be thinking about, you know, over the next 5 or 10 years?

00;52;10;29 - 00;52;34;23

Steve Brown

Sure. So the first book I wrote was called The Innovation Ultimatum. And the premise of that was to, to, business leaders with the right questions they need to ask so that they understood the technological level where they could work with vendors and figure out how to use this past of six technologies to innovate in their organizations and the imperative to do that, hence the ultimatum.

00;52;34;26 - 00;52;57;00

Steve Brown

The second book is going to be creatively titled the AI ultimatum, and it is really leaning in on that one technology. And I'm trying to do roughly the same thing. So help business leaders equip them with the right questions, to ask some frameworks to help them think through how and when might I use AI, and what kind of areas might it help me move my business forward?

00;52;57;03 - 00;53;11;09

Steve Brown

And then empower them to participate and and build a roadmap for an AI transformation for themselves personally and also for their organization. So that's hopefully coming out next year.

00;53;11;11 - 00;53;23;04

Geoff Nielson

Amazing. Looking forward to, to reading it and, and diving into that. Steve, what technology or implication of a new technology is most keeping you up at night these days?

00;53;23;06 - 00;53;32;23

Steve Brown

Ooh, I mean, other than AI potentially challenging our role in the world and giving us a lack of purpose.

00;53;32;29 - 00;53;33;24

Geoff Nielson

Oh. That one.

00;53;33;24 - 00;53;54;17

Steve Brown

Yeah, that's that's a long term worry. And I think we will rise to it if we start planning for it now. But that's a long term work. What am I most? Keeps me up at night? I just I worry that we're not ready for the speed of change that's coming. It's going to come out so quickly.

00;53;54;17 - 00;54;18;05

Steve Brown

And I think we've already seen over the last two years just how quickly the AI roadmap is moving forward in terms of its capabilities. It should prepare us somewhat for the speed that things are going to run. But I just once this starts to bite and it starts to be deployed broadly in enterprises, and that has implications for the workforce.

00;54;18;07 - 00;54;31;02

Steve Brown

I'm not sure that as a society, we're ready to handle that speed of change. That's my biggest worry. But if we can start talking about it now, then I think we have a good chance.

00;54;31;05 - 00;54;38;16

Geoff Nielson

Right? So how it how we make sure that it like, it doesn't just happen to us, which is like the risk right now that we're just right. Yeah.

00;54;38;22 - 00;55;04;03

Steve Brown

Yeah. I did a Ted talk in 2012 or something. I think I still had a bit of hair then. And the title of my talk was Why Machines Must Make Us Better Humans. I think we need to have that mindset of rather than figuring out how to use machines to automate away talent, how do we use it to amplify and elevate human talent?

00;55;04;06 - 00;55;24;00

Steve Brown

And I think that just that makes more economic sense in the long term. But it also is, again, in that it's going to enable us to be all much happier in what we do. It's not all just about a bottom line. And, and making short term profits. So that's I hope that people will figure that out.

00;55;24;03 - 00;55;24;22

Steve Brown

Yeah.

00;55;24;24 - 00;55;33;03

Geoff Nielson

Yeah, it's, it's a lot to unpack and, yeah, it's, it's going to be really interesting to see where the next few years go.

00;55;33;05 - 00;55;39;14

Steve Brown

Yeah. I mean, buckle up. 2025 is going to be exciting year. Yeah. And I think 2026 beyond that.

00;55;39;17 - 00;55;45;19

Geoff Nielson

Absolutely. Steve, do you want to do, just grab a sound bite of doing a quick plug for your website?

00;55;45;22 - 00;56;10;03

Steve Brown

Sure. So easiest way to find me is at my website, Steve Brown. I, I do a range of different keynotes for public audiences, for C suite and everything in between. I do I innovation workshops to help people figure out use cases of the futures AI and coming soon will be an online training course on all things I designed for business leaders and anybody who's interested to learn about AI.

00;56;10;06 - 00;56;15;10

Steve Brown

On how you can use it to actually build your AI transformation journey. So stay tuned. Coming soon.

00;56;15;12 - 00;56;22;24

Geoff Nielson

That's great. Yeah. And anyone we can get ahead of the curve and not just slapped in the face by this thing is, is a win in my books.

00;56;22;27 - 00;56;27;14

Steve Brown

Yeah. Make this make the future happen because of you. Not to have the future happen to you.

00;56;27;16 - 00;56;34;15

Geoff Nielson

There you go. Steve, thanks so much for joining today. I really appreciate it. And, really, really insightful conversation.

00;56;34;17 - 00;56;36;28

Steve Brown

Yeah. We enjoyed talking with you. Thanks for the great questions.

00;56;37;00 - 00;56;37;27

Geoff Nielson

Amazing. Thank you.