Beyond the Buzz: The Real State of Artificial Intelligence, and 9 Insights To Move Us Forward

From boardrooms to classrooms, AI is making waves—but what do organizational leaders really think of artificial intelligence?

In this episode, host Matt Kirchner goes beyond the buzzwords to share real data and insights from a groundbreaking research report on artificial intelligence. From industry leaders to educators, discover what people at the forefront of AI are saying about its impact—and learn what it takes to turn potential into progress. Packed with trends, challenges, and actionable takeaways, this episode is your playbook for navigating AI’s transformative era.

Listen to learn:

• Why 62% of leaders say identifying AI use cases is their biggest challenge
• The surprising sector that’s leading the way in AI adoption
• Which industries are bracing for the most disruption—and why
• The top three traits of successful AI leaders (and the one that has nothing to do with numbers, coding or data)
• 9 actionable insights to drive your AI journey forward

Quotable Moments:

“The biggest mistake you can make, in my opinion, is not getting started.”

“We didn’t have a single respondent that said their organization or market space was not going to be fundamentally changed by artificial intelligence.”

“Artificial intelligence isn’t going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job.”

“Limited use cases were their number one impediment to pushing ahead with their artificial intelligence journey. And to that, I say, are you kidding me?”

“Curiosity is the number one personality trait leaders are looking for in those who will drive AI transformation.”

Resources in this Episode:
Click here to access the State of Artificial Intelligence in Wisconsin report.

Other episodes mentioned:

• Mary Snapp - Microsoft
• AI Expert Panel
• Todd Wanek - Ashley Furniture
• Barbara Humpton - Siemens

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Transcript

Matt Kirchner: 0:00

Welcome into the TechEd podcast. I am your host. Matt Kirchner, it is just me this week. Every so often we have a topic that we want to do a deep dive on and just chat about it with our audience, share some insights. That's exactly what we are doing this week. I'm going to begin the episode by asking a question a lot of us whether we're in education, we're in industry, we're in public policy. We spend time going to trade shows. We go to conferences. We go to events. What is the number one most common topic that you hear discussed when you are attending a conference this year here in the year 2024, for that matter, what is probably the most common topic that we've had here on the TechEd podcast this year. Think about that for a moment. What is that theme? My guess is everybody is narrowing in on it. I actually went to perplexity my favorite AI platform, if you haven't used it, it is awesome. Just read in The Wall Street Journal this week, I think they're targeting a total valuation of like $8 billion for the next round of capital raise, but just a phenomenal, phenomenal platform to use, similar to chat GPT, but has some other benefits that I really like. At any rate, I asked perplexity that same question, what is the most common topic at conferences in the year 2024, and it came up with the exact same answer that I expected, and that is, you guessed it, artificial intelligence cyber security was right up there as well. So if you guessed artificial intelligence as the most common topic that we're hearing about at all of these conferences that so many of us attend, you would be spot on. Now this topic is nothing new for the TechEd podcast. We talk about artificial intelligence all the time. Have been for a number of years, and even before the TechEd podcast came into existence, I was fascinated with what we called predictive analytics for a long, long time, the whole idea of using the data that we have available to us in our organizations to predict the future, and if we don't like what that information is telling us, then we can change the future before it ever comes to pass. So nothing new at the TechEd podcast when it comes to AI, but certainly it is the topic du jour all over the country and around the globe. Ai seems to be all anyone is talking about. For starters, we should probably share that the TechEd podcast is owned by a separate company. That company is called the TechEd Media Group. Your humble host, myself, I am a part of the ownership group of that organization, as is your faithful producer, Melissa Martin, some other folks, but we have this company called the TechEd Media Group, and certainly we produce the TechEd podcast every week, and it's a key part of what we do, but not the only part of what we do. So earlier this year, we took it upon ourselves to put some quantitative and qualitative analysis behind this whole idea of artificial intelligence. The result, by the way, was a 40 page report on artificial intelligence. We'll make sure to link that report up in the show notes. If you're interested in the topic you're hearing about today, you can go to those show notes and take a look at what is in that 40 page report, fascinating stuff. A little perspective on the scope. First, my home state of Wisconsin is a key leader in artificial intelligence. That fact was underscored earlier this year when Microsoft announced a $3.3 billion investment in a data center in a whole bunch of educational initiatives and really leading in so many ways here in Wisconsin when it comes to AI. So we've got this, this huge data center that's going in. But that's not the only thing. We have the nation's first bachelor's degree in artificial intelligence here in the state of Wisconsin, that's at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. We have the first Associates Degree in artificial intelligence at Waukesha County Technical College, we have the most innovative baccalaureate degree, by the way, in the nation, the automation leadership degree at the University of Wisconsin. Stout embedded in that degree are plenty of artificial intelligence related concepts and competencies. So we've had this huge focus here in my home state on artificial intelligence. We're leading in many, many ways. But I want to make one thing clear as we start out this episode, and that is, while the report that I'm talking about and that we're covering in this episode was titled The state of artificial intelligence in Wisconsin, the nine recommendations that we made apply to every single community, every single educator, every single business, every single everything across the United States and around the globe. What's more, the data and the research results that we received here in Wisconsin, I think, are typical of what we would see in most places around the country. So regardless of whether you're living here in the state of Wisconsin or you're anywhere else on the globe, there is going to be plenty in this episode for you. So part of the reason that our report is really, really broad, and you'll hear about the broad research that we did, is that our research, in fact, was very broad. We had a research team work the entire summer of 2024 working and meeting with thought leaders, conducting surveys, reviewing publications and. Yes, using artificial intelligence to comb the Annals of the TechEd podcast for references to AI, which added to their qualitative research that work validated some of our assumptions on artificial intelligence, and it tore apart some of our assumptions on AI as well the insights that we're going to share today, you're going to want to stick around to here, because we really disrupt, I think some of the ways that many of us are thinking about AI, we dealt first with the question of why Wisconsin? Why would Microsoft, one of the largest companies in the world, certainly a company that is our key leader on artificial intelligence, to side to make this huge investment? We dove deep into that on previous episodes of the podcast with people like Mary snap, the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for Microsoft, people like Dale coyenga, who heads the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and also the m7 the seven county regional economic development engine here in southeast Wisconsin. So we will skip spending a whole bunch of time on why Wisconsin, if you're interested again, that'll be in the in the report that we link up in the show notes. So let's get on into the data. Let's get on into what it is that we learned about AI here in Wisconsin, around the country, as I mentioned earlier, the research was performed by our team over the course of the summer, and they talked to manufacturers, to healthcare institutions, to educators, to public policy makers. They engaged with organizations large and small and in the middle to inform their research. So what are some of the questions and the conclusions that we drew we looked at to what degree are various industries affected by artificial intelligence? So what economic sectors are going to be most affected by this advent of AI, we looked at how small businesses, mid sized businesses and large businesses and organizations differ in the way that they are thinking about artificial intelligence and the way that they are applying artificial intelligence, and in what they are actually expecting going forward From AI we looked at the greatest challenges to continuing an AI journey. We looked at the biggest impediments to embarking on and completing that journey. And we looked at what leaders around the state of Wisconsin are expecting and what personality traits they're looking at in terms of the individuals to lead their AI transformations within their organization. Of course, the biggest question that we answered, and it's one that is on the lips of anybody who is looking and considering the future of artificial intelligence, is, what is this going to do to overall employment? We hear a lot about AI taking jobs and about the world of work changing fundamentally and and so a key question that we answered, and we'll get to that in a little bit, is, Will artificial intelligence be accretive to employment? Are we going to see huge and mass layoffs and reductions in our workforce? We explored that in depth. So let's start here. The first question that we really looked at was, to what degree individual industries and individual market spaces would be affected by AI. And here, I think it's important to point out, is what we're looking at is, what are our organizational leaders expecting in the future? Not so much. What's happened so far, but what are they expecting? And so we said, how many of you are expecting, like, no change at all from artificial intelligence in the next five years? How many of you are expecting some change? How many of you are expecting major change, and how many of you are looking for and expecting fundamental shifts in your markets? Here's what we found out, the degree to which organizations will be affected and industries will be affected by artificial intelligence. Think about this. How many of our respondents Do you think said there would be no change in their organization or in their market whatsoever? The answer to that question is actually none. We didn't have a single respondent that said that their organization or their market space was not going to be fundamentally changed by artificial intelligence. About one in 420. 8% said they were expecting some change. We had 42% of our respondents, the largest percentage overall said, Look, we're expecting major changes and major enhancements to processes and production. And we had 30% so almost a full third of our respondents said, Look, in this age of artificial intelligence, we are expecting fundamental changes in our business or in our markets. So that's pretty it's pretty crazy. That's pretty insightful. When you think about it, one in three organizational leaders are expecting that their market is going to be completely transformed by artificial intelligence in the next five years. So as we sit here in 2024 by 2029 fundamental changes in at least 30% of our markets, and at least in terms of the way that these leaders who responded to our work and our research are thinking about their particular market. But we dove a little bit deeper. We dove into in terms of what sectors in the economy are expecting major change. How do they differ? One of the biggest differences that we found is. Is in what manufacturing is expecting, as opposed to what the education space is expecting, as far as major shifts as a result of artificial intelligence. So let me ask our audience this to think about for a moment when we think about manufacturing and we think about the world of education and whatever paradigms and whatever assumptions you might have about those specific market spaces. Which of those two would you think the leaders of which are expecting large, wholesale, fundamental changes in their space? Would that be education that's expecting huge, huge change in the Advent or in the wake of artificial intelligence? Or would it be manufacturing? And the responses and the results really, really surprised us. So if you look at who is expecting fundamental change in their space over the course of the next five years, believe it or not, 11% of our manufacturers said we're expecting fundamental shifts in our market. Anecdotally, I would tell you, I think that's low, but that's what our manufacturing leaders are seeing. Is about one in 10 are saying, Look, we're going to see fundamental shifts in our market, where we look at education, and we look at the educational leaders that responded to our survey, and we said, hey, look, how much do you expect your space, the education space, whether that's a university, a technical or community college, a K 12 School District, for example, how much are you expecting fundamental changes in your space a full 56% so almost six in 10, more than half of the respondents said we expect not just some change. About 40% said they expect some major changes, but another 56% of respondents said they expect major, major changes in the education space in the next five years. I think they're right about that, but I think it's also really, really interesting, and credit to our educators for having that foresight and recognizing that their space is going to change as significantly as it is, and preparing their institutions for the change that is to come. We also looked even more deeply at different market sectors, and so what sector of the economy overall is going to see the most significant shift in the age of artificial intelligence? The different sectors that we looked at included government, included education, manufacturing, as we've already talked about, and education, both of those two we've covered already. We talked about the world of finance, we looked at healthcare, we looked at construction, Agriculture, Transportation. You think about the things that are happening transportation, with self driving cars in the age of artificial intelligence, what's happening in the world of agriculture, as we like to call precision agriculture, where the way that we are preparing the soil, the way that we are seeding, irrigating, fertilizing and harvesting our crops in the world of agriculture, that is all changing in the age of artificial intelligence. So which of those markets do you think are respond is expected to see the most significant change? And we're going to go in in order of the top three, and I'm going to go from number three to number two to number one. And what our respondents said is, of all of the markets that we're looking at, we think that the third most likely to be fundamentally changed by artificial intelligence is education. And 19% of our respondents said we think the education space is going to be the area that's most significantly affected in the second space was actually manufacturing so interesting that our manufacturing respondents, only one in 10 said that they are expecting fundamental changes in their market. But as we looked at the entire scope of all of our respondents to are the survey work that we did, 26% or about one in four, said manufacturing would be the most significantly affected by artificial intelligence, the very top item, number one on the list, with a full 36% of respondents saying this is the space that is going to be the most transformed by artificial intelligence, was the world of healthcare. And we have talked about this with several guests on the TechEd podcast who are doing business and operating in the in the field of of healthcare. Dr Ajay Sahaj Paul is somebody that comes to mind. Dr Brian Kay from Rogers behavioral health is somebody that comes to mind. And so certainly, the world of healthcare is thinking really keenly about the changes coming as a result of artificial intelligence. But at least as far as our respondents were concerned, they are saying healthcare is going to be more affected than any other space in the market, followed by manufacturing in second place, and as we suggested, education in third place. Another interesting way of looking at this information for those of us that run businesses or run organizations, for those of us that are running institutions of education or nonprofits, or we're in the public policy or government space, is thinking about the departments or divisions in our companies or our organizations. I think about our ed tech companies, and we have a marketing function, and we have an accounting function, and we have a tech service function and a business development function. And. Uh, you know, all of these different areas of our organization that we have, we don't typically call them departments, because I think that that sounds a little bit like we're dividing our people into groups. We're one team, but you think about these different areas, which of those are going to be most affected by artificial intelligence? And here again, we'll cover we'll cover the top three. I'll start by mentioning the different areas that we looked at, which include Human Resources, Finance and Accounting, the marketing function, the sales or business development function, customer service, legal and compliance, operations, R and D, logistics, IT and engineering. So those were the areas that we looked at. And we asked our respondents to choose the three areas in their organizations that they thought would be most disrupted by artificial intelligence. So we had a tie for second place actually. So our second and third items are actually tied for second place at 43% and again, that's possible because our respondents were invited to choose three options, so tied at 43% for the departments within our organizations that are going to be most affected and disrupted by artificial intelligence, number one is marketing, and thinking about the way that we are marketing and presenting our brands to the market. And number two is customer service. And when I think of customer service, I think, for example, of the folks in our manufacturing plants who are dealing directly with customers, who are taking the information from the manufacturing floor and communicating that information to customers and other facilities and so on. That's just one example. Customer Service looks different depending on which market spaces we are looking at, but customer service and marketing tied at 43% the winner, if we can call it a winner of the department in our organizations that is going to be most affected by artificial intelligence, and that winner has a total percentage, by the way, of 57% meaning 57% of our respondents picked this area as at least one of their three departments or divisions in their organizations where they expected the most disruption as a result of artificial intelligence. Number One On The List is operations. We think about operations, at least I do, again, mainly from a manufacturing paradigm, because that's where I spent 23 years. Actually, 23 plus years making my living is in manufacturing. And we think about operations being the folks that are responsible for managing production, responsible for supervising production, supervising the production team and machine operators and machine tenders and maintenance technicians and material movers and so on. The operations area is the area that is expected to be most fundamentally impacted over the course of the next five years as a result of the advent of artificial intelligence. How did they see this disruption happening? Let's share some examples. These are anecdotal. These are qualitative examples or quotes that were shared with us either through the the survey that we did or through the research that our research team did during their interviews, interviewing thought leaders and other experts in artificial intelligence. Here's just a few quotes. Number one, we are implementing AI driven customer support systems that can handle routine inquiries, analyze customer feedback and provide personalized solutions to enhance customer experience. Another respondent shared one from the world of healthcare, which, again, we're expecting huge disruption in health care. Quote, the ability to reduce the time of documentation for clinicians, the ability to have them focus more on the patient rather than the documentation, is fundamentally positive for patient care. I agree with that. The advent of AI is going to actually make the life of clinicians. So whether that's a whether that's a nurse, whether that's a doctor, whether that's a PA what have you, it's going to drastically improve it. They're going to spend a lot less time doing paperwork and mundane tasks and a lot more time focusing on patient care. In terms of education, we had somebody say, quote, educating the traditional age student across all disciplines in applied AI and upskilling and re skilling the existing workforce in a more nimble, real time manner that meets them wherever they are in their careers, way more flexible education, so plenty and plenty of applications for artificial intelligence. We've got quote upon quote stacked up in that 40 page report I referenced earlier. So check out those show notes. But we ask also how far along individual organizations were in deploying artificial intelligence. So the truth of the matter is that the results of our survey, perhaps not surprising, show that we have a long way to go in terms of deploying artificial intelligence. So the fewest respondents, 15% of our respondents, so somewhere between one and two and 10 are at a point where they are fully operationalizing one or more artificial intelligence projects. So so 15% of our respondents are saying, Hey, we've got fully operate operationalized AI projects in our organization. The rest of them fairly evenly split. We had 30% or just less than a third, working through the pilot phase. So 26% are busy identifying use cases. We're going to talk a little bit later about this identification of use cases and the challenges that some companies are having and doing that. 28% still in initial discussions about their AI strategy. So if we look at that data, about one in four are in initial discussions. Another one in four are busy identifying use cases, a little more than a quarter, 30% working through the pilot phase, 15% at a point where they're actually fully operationalized. So if you haven't gotten started yet, you're in that 28% that are still in initial discussions. It's time to get going, but you've got a little bit of runway, because only 15% of our respondents said, Hey, we've really got this. This figured out. It's interesting to note that, you know, we talked about the education sector being ahead of other sectors, including manufacturing, in terms of deployment of artificial intelligence, here again, in terms of where they are with their AI projects, education is way far ahead. Just to give you a sense, we said 15% are at a point where they're fully operationalizing, another 30% overall working through the pilot phase. So those numbers are for all of our respondents together, education, a majority of educational institutions, as a matter of fact, 57% are in the latter stages of putting their identified use cases into action. So think about that. 57% in the latter stages, significantly, 19% have already operationalized one or more projects, nearly four times more than what we're seeing in the manufacturing sector, where that number looks more like 5% if we look solely at the manufacturing sector. So here again, education, way, way ahead, when we get to our recommendations, we're going to tie some of that back together and talk about what our educators can do in this age of artificial intelligence to support their constituents and to support their employers along the way to operationalizing their AI projects. A few other interesting anecdotes that we pulled from the data as we analyzed this section number one, the larger the organization, the less likely the CEO is the one to be leading the AI strategy. Small organizations tends to be somebody at the top of the food chain, if you will, who is responsible for the AI strategy. Larger companies have identified somebody other than the leader of the entire organization to lead the AI strategy. Smallest organizations, interestingly enough, have the greatest percentage of artificial intelligence projects operationalized. So in Kate, if we look at a small company or a small organization versus a large it's actually our smaller organizations, in many ways, that are further ahead on operationalizing their their projects in terms of identifying somebody to lead the AI effort. As we mentioned, the larger the organization, the less likely it's the CEO. But it's important to have somebody identified only. The largest organizations that we surveyed, those with more than 1000 employees and larger, had unanimously identified at least one person or a small group to lead their AI efforts, and in every other case, we've got some work to do in terms of even identifying the person within the organization who will be responsible for figuring out how AI is going to transform the organization and what to do about it. Largest organizations had by far made the most progress across the board on their AI implementations. That means that you're our large companies are saying we're either in the pilot phase or we fully operationalized, and so they're ahead, in general, of our smaller companies. But again, we do have the smallest organizations in that final category that fully operationalize, that are ahead of our larger companies. There's also a much greater significance of the Chief Technology Officer role, the Chief Information Officer role, in the larger organizations, probably, we think because those are the organizations that are most likely to have people in those roles, whereas our small to mid sized companies less likely to point to a CTO or a CIO as the person Who's key or responsible for the artificial intelligence transformation. So let's turn our attention now, and I know we're throwing a ton of data at you on this episode of The TechEd podcast, but such fascinating information, we didn't want to pass up this opportunity to share it with our incredible audience. I want you to consider this question, what are the largest impediments to an AI journey within an organization. So just take a moment and think through what those might be. Some examples could be lack of knowledge or expertise. Maybe that's standing in the way of making a lot of progress on AI. Maybe our data isn't quite ready, maybe it's just too expensive, or we're getting resistance from members of our organization. Could be we just haven't identified the right use cases. Maybe we're worried about the security of our data. Maybe our executive leadership team doesn't quite see the light and isn't doing anything on artificial intelligence. You know what? About the ethics and regulatory concerns related to AI in lack of sufficient return on investment by. Might be something that that you're looking at as well. So of examples like that. Where do we think the biggest impediments to organizations are in terms of getting the AI journey going or continuing down the road of the artificial intelligence journey? Here again, we're going to talk about the top three on the list. And the list that I just gave you is actually the list that we also presented to the respondents to our survey and to the respondents to our analysis, and we're going to go three, two and then one. In this case, our survey respondents were again invited to choose three, which is why the percentages will not necessarily, or were not, will not actually add up to one, because they they all chose three different options. But the third most common impediment that folks noted was data readiness and saying that, look, we've got disparate sources of data. We're gathering information, but we really don't feel like that's in a format that we could leverage AI tools in order to make any sense out of it, or to use it to benefit our organization. So 53% believe it or not, of our respondents, targeted that item as at least one of the three most common impediments to their AI journey. That of course, being data readiness, the second most commonly answered factor on that particular list was a lack of knowledge or expertise. I don't think that surprises any of us is especially as we talk to small and mid sized organizations. That are really trying to figure out who is supposed to do this. How are we supposed to do this? Where do we start? So lack of knowledge or expertise noted by 57% of our respondents. So we look at what is the number one impediment to AI journeys, at least here in the state of Wisconsin, and as I mentioned earlier, I think we'd see a similar trend across the United States. What's your guess for the number one item on the list? Believe it or not, and this one surprised me, is people say we have 62% of people, by the way, say that the reason that they feel their AI journey is being impeded is limited use cases. And to that, I say, Are you kidding me? I mean, really, you can't find a use case in your organization. And all those departments that we just talked about, in customer service and operations and finance and accounting in marketing, you can't find a single use case where artificial intelligence could benefit your organization, I would suggest that the risk of sounding a little bit too blunt, that those are the people that just aren't thinking about it, because it is not hard to find a use case for artificial intelligence in our organization. It is, it is a continuous improvement tool, just like we would think about Lean, just like we would think about something like six sigma or a Kaizen event or Polka yoke, or honry, any of these things that we consider in terms of continuous improvement in an organization. That's the same way you look at how do I bring AI to bear on those projects and on benefiting the organization? But yeah, 62% so limited use cases were their number one impediment to pushing ahead with their artificial intelligence journey. So then we asked a related question, but a little bit different question, and that is, as we look at the state of Wisconsin, and again, thinking this is probably similar across the country, what is the greatest challenge as we seek to be a leader in artificial intelligence, as I suggested earlier, for a variety of reasons. Our state is one of several leaders in the in the country on AI and why, or what do we need to make sure that we are getting passed as a significant challenge if we are going to continue to lead? I'll give you the examples that we offered to our respondents, and one was talent shortage. Another one was technological infrastructure. We looked at things like research funding, whether or not our state was properly regulating or overly regulating, artificial intelligence, collaboration within industries, public awareness, the education space, the innovation ecosystem within the within the state, competition from other states that are also trying to lead on, AI, adoption rates, ethical concerns, workforce, re skilling. These are the kind of things that we ask our audience, or our survey respondents, I should say, to consider, and I'm going to name again, the top three. In this case, they were asked to choose just one. So these are actually real numbers that any one of these, any one of these items that shows up, that's the percentage of the percentage of respondents that said this is our number one greatest challenge. So in third place, actually tied for third place was both public awareness and workforce re skilling. So I'm going to focus for the moment on that workforce re skilling, 9% for both of those identified both public awareness and workforce re skilling as their number one challenge they feel the state of Wisconsin is facing in terms of leading on artificial intelligence. So keep that number in mind, 9% for both public awareness and re skilling education, 13% so more than one in 10 of our respondents said we think that the. Education, and educating on AI is going to be the biggest challenge that we face in terms of leading on artificial intelligence, the number one item. More than a third of respondents pointed to this item for the greatest challenge, and that is talent. And having a talent shortage, a shortage of talent in artificial intelligence, so workforce re Skilling and public awareness. Forget public awareness for the moment. Workforce re skilling, education and talent between those three, between those three, more than two thirds of our respondents pointed to one of those three, talent, education and re skilling. What do they all have in common? It's pretty easy for us to recognize that what they all have in common is this whole idea of making sure that we have the right kind of talent, whether it's just saying we have a talent shortage, whether it's saying that we don't have the right education solutions in place to prepare the next generation of the workforce, whether it's saying that I need to re skill my workforce around artificial intelligence, and that's our biggest challenge. Two thirds of us are talking about people. Two thirds of us are talking about our team members. When we look to what our biggest challenge is here in the state of Wisconsin to lead on artificial intelligence, I think that's really interesting, and it points to the importance of some of these educational initiatives that we've already talked about, and the fact that the state of Wisconsin is leading in many ways in AI education. We're going to come back to that in a little bit. But on this topic of people and individuals that we need to lead our organizations, again, there's only the largest organizations in the state have identified specific individuals to lead their AI journey. We did ask this question. We said, for the individuals that are going to lead on AI, what are those personality traits that are most important? This is a topic I love talking about, because so many times in industry, so many times in our organizations, when we're recruiting people, we're thinking about, what are the skills and abilities and competencies that we want to hire for our organizations? We don't spend enough time thinking about, what do we want those people to be? What kind of people do we want them to be? What are those personality traits that individuals have that make them successful? Whether that's goal orientation or sociability or a sense of urgency or attention to detail, you get the picture. So in terms of the Top four answers that we received from people in terms of what personality traits they were looking for in their leadership teams. It's interesting. Three of the four don't surprise me much, and I'll share those with you. And in this case, our respondents were allowed to answer multiple items as well, but let's stack up these three. The first one is problem solving. 45% of our respondents said, I want problem solvers. 55% said they want an analytical thinkers. Not surprisingly, 57% said they want strategic thinkers. So analytical thinking, strategic thinking, problem solving, not surprising at all. The fourth one surprised me, the fourth most common answer, and it was, it was provided by more than half of our respondents, more than half of our respondents, 51% said, when we're looking at the personality traits that are important for leading in artificial intelligence, they named Curiosity, curiosity as the number one personality trait. And as I reflected on this, you know, I think back to an episode we have, we'll link it up with Todd wanick, the CEO of Ashley Furniture industries, who said that he looks for curious people. That's the number one personality trait he looks for in his AI transformation and the people to lead it. When we talked to Mike Bigley, the superintendent of the White House School District, he said when he looks to his team and the people who are going to disrupt around artificial intelligence. He looks for curiosity. We invited Barbara humpton, the CEO of Siemens, $20 billion company, 45,000 employees, into the studio of the TechEd podcast. Not long ago, another great episode, and she pointed to this whole idea of curiosity. In fact, her quote was, if you've got curiosity and initiative the world is yours, and isn't that the truth? So curiosity is a really, really important, important topic when we think about this age of artificial intelligence, and who are we going to put into positions of leadership? Make sure you're finding those curious people, those diamonds in the rough, in your organization, to help lead on your AI journey. We're getting toward the end of the data analysis, I've got one more of our questions that I want to analyze with our audience, and then we're going to roll into the nine recommendations that we made to the state of Wisconsin, and recommendations that I think apply to the entire country and the entire globe in terms of artificial intelligence. But here is the big money question, and this is the one that we hear all the time, and a lot of people are thinking of, and that is, will AI take my job? And many of you have heard me say before, artificial intelligence isn't going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job. But here's what we heard. It's interesting when we went out to the employers and said, Look, what's AI going to do to your work. Course, what's it going to do? Your head counter, you're going to be way smaller in five years. Are you going to lay off a bunch of people? And do we have to worry about what happens to all these people as we lay them off? Are you going to be steady state, and you're not really expecting you to cut anybody, but not going to grow employment? Or, you know, a would you actually like add employees in this age of artificial intelligence? And here's, here's what we found, in terms of the organizations, the number one most most popular answer to that question, more than 70% said we don't expect any change to our workforce. We're not going to grow, we're not going to shrink. We think we'll stay steady state in this age of artificial intelligence. The second most popular answer was, believe it or not, and we'll go through first, let's talk about how many people said they were going to decrease employment. So how many people said they were going to trim their staff in the age of artificial intelligence? And should we worry about unemployment and like issues in this age of AI only 13% so a little over one in 10, less than one in five, said they were going to trim their employment that they expected to have fewer employees in the future as a result of artificial intelligence, and 15% said they expected to grow employment. So think about that for a minute. We literally have more people who are saying we think AI is going to add to our employment than we think is going to shrink it. So if we look at this data, you know, at a minimum, at least in terms of what our employers are expecting, they're expecting to have more employees as a result of AI, not fewer. And I think that's really good news for the workforce. I think it's in line with our way of thinking on artificial intelligence, and it's really good news for the United States of America. I believe that this age of AI is going to be good for employment. So as you can tell from this discussion that we've had here on the TechEd podcast, plenty of insights and plenty of data we were able to gather about how AI is going to transform the world of work and transform the world in general here in the state of Wisconsin, one of the states in the US that is leading on artificial intelligence. All of this great work by our research team, and I have to credit our producer, Melissa Martin, who is also really key in this research. We had Ben Bremer, who was with us all summer and really kind of playing point on gathering all the data. Hannah Hart helped us visualize it and put the report together. So those are the individuals that deserve the lion's share of the credit for the research that we did, and here are the solutions or the recommendations that we came up with as a result of that work. Number one is adopting a just start attitude. So in other words, we have a lot of folks that are saying we're not quite sure where to go. We haven't figured out our use cases yet you're gonna you're not gonna get it perfect. Todd wannick said that on the podcast, you're not gonna get it right. You're gonna make mistakes. The biggest mistake you can make, in my opinion, is not getting started. So get going on that. Ai journey number two, and education in the state of Wisconsin could drive industry. They're way ahead. You look at the number of cases and projects that they have operationalized in their organizations, 51% Intelligence in the state of Wisconsin was workforce. Get on it. Get your incumbent workforce, the people already working for you, trained on artificial intelligence and using these amazing tools to make them more efficient, more productive and create more enjoyable jobs for all of them. Identify those use cases. I was shocked, as I mentioned that 62% of our respondents said they thought that was the biggest impediment. We just can't see where artificial intelligence would be beneficial to our organization. That give me a break. I mean, we should be able to identify any organization. Should be able to identify a multitude of different opportunities within their organization, where AI can be transformative, where it can be accretive to value. Pick that area and get going on implementing artificial intelligence tools. It's not complicated. You just have to start, as we said, find those use cases. Let's get going on solving problems and advancing our organizations using artificial intelligence next. Prepare your data. We have data in our organizations from our CRMs and disparate spreadsheets that exist on the cloud. We and we've got all of this data, all over finance data, included customer data, you know, take that data, prepare it, get it ready to use artificial intelligence. We've used Microsoft Azure Data Factory in our organizations to do that. Format your data, collate it, collect it, so that you can use the AI algorithms and tools and platforms available to you to analyze that data, find patterns and figure out how you can improve your organizations. Larger organizations in the state of Wisconsin and across the world should be pulling along the smaller organizations by and large, while our smallest companies were actually furthest ahead in operationalizing AI projects that was still a relatively small percentage of them, our larger organizations are further ahead overall in piloting projects. They've identified use cases. They're operationalizing AI. They need to bring their supply chains along. They need to bring their partners along. They can set an example. They can provide resources so that we can continue to have a robust industrial base here in the state of Wisconsin and around the globe. Our final recommendation for the folks in Wisconsin, and I'm going to say this, is for the folks all over the country and all around the globe. There are a lot of people doing really, really interesting things in this age of artificial intelligence, improving their organizations, experimenting with it, bringing in equipment that is already utilizing embedded smart technology, example after example of things like that. We have our educators doing incredible things in terms of standing up new programs and new degrees and new certificates in and around artificial intelligence. We have organizations like a company like Microsoft investing $3.3 billion here in the state of Wisconsin. We have organizations like Titletown tech in Green Bay who are partnering with educators in Microsoft to upskill the next generation of talent around artificial intelligence, all of these great things that are going on. And yet, as I walk the streets of Wisconsin as I meet with people across our great state, very few people recognize how we are already leading in artificial intelligence. This is our moment. This is our time to lead the world in this most advanced technology that anybody is talking about. We can do that here in the state of Wisconsin. We can do that here in the United States. We are going to leave our recommendations where we started. Just start, start now, identify a person, identify the use case, and get going on artificial intelligence, and then tell that story to anyone who will listen. We are glad you listened to this episode of The TechEd podcast. I've had a lot of fun one on one with our audience, just sharing some insights of some incredible work that's been done by some people that I'm really, really proud to call my colleagues here at the TechEd Media Group and the TechEd podcast. Thank you for listening in. Thank you for checking out those show notes. Because, as I mentioned and I talked about a bunch of previous episodes. I talked about this 40 page report that will be available to you free of charge as a listener of the TechEd podcast, and once you do, let us know what you think. Let us know either via email, hit the website or check us out on social media, let us know there, and be sure to leave a review as well. That is the greatest way that we can reach as many people as possible. So whether you're listening to us on Spotify, whether you're on Apple, let us know you're out there. We would love to hear from you. We can't wait to see you on next week's episode of The TechEd podcast. Thank you so much for being with us. My name is Matt Kirkner. I am your host. You.