Abdicating your judgment, wisdom, your advisors to AI is a horrible idea.
SPEAKER_01You might say, oh yeah, that's good, and not really necessarily think it through, but just take the output from the model and say, that's pretty good.
SPEAKER_02Treating AI today as a decision tool, probably not great. As a thinking partner, as a research tool, like lots of great ways to use it.
SPEAKER_01Not specific to a technology, but do you see any pattern shifts that are going to occur in knowledge work in US industry in 2026 because of these tools?
SPEAKER_02Figure out how to make AI normal, get comfortable with change, and lean into this time.
SPEAKER_01Even if the technology could replace people, the missing piece is going to be the execution of that technology.
SPEAKER_02Maybe you're worried about it's going to replace you or your work. Fine. Replace yourself. Because if you replace yourself with a tool like AI, you'll end up with a new job. You're now an AI implementer.
SPEAKER_00Bill Gallagher is a global business coach and host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. With four decades as a CEO and a power user of AI, he helps ambitious leaders scale fast without burning out or handing the reins to the robots.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Using AI at work. I'm your host, Chris Dave. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI? If this is you, ChiefAIOfficer.com has the answer. We give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day-to-day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. And we'll also guide company-wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Greetings, esteemed listeners. This is Chris, and welcome back to another episode of Using AI at work. And we're going to be taking a kind of a broader perspective of AI in the workplace today with our guest Bill Gallagher, who is the CEO of Scaling Coach. I met Bill through a blossoming relationship with the Scaling Up organization. If you're familiar with uh their work, I think their original book was called The Rockefeller Habits. It's now called Scaling Up. But Bill uh does way more than just as a scaling up coach. He actually hosts their podcast. They're up to almost 700 episodes, I think. Getting close. So they've been doing that since 2016. Um so he's had a lot of conversation, a lot of uh consideration, a lot of investigation into the dysfunctions inside of businesses, the constraints inside of businesses, what's keeping them from growing. And obviously with generative AI playing such a big part in uh the question that all businesses are having today, those perspective is going to be extremely valuable for our listeners, whether you're a solopreneur or you're leading a, you know, an enterprise company at an executive level. Um, with a background as a CEO tech and with a family connection with generative AI, which we might talk about today, his perspective on things is way more than just like, oh, I'm I'm seeing what's happening in the marketplace. This is something that um is this is a discussion that's happening at the dinner table when his kids are home, I would imagine. So with that, Bill, um before we get started with this, what would be and I'm gonna borrow from Greg Eisenberg, who I spent the weekend with, um, he's got a fantastic podcast. But he opens his podcast with this question By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? And I know that that's kind of a curveball, and I this first time I've asked it. Um But if if the ideal outcome from this episode and our conversation together, what would you want the listeners to to understand to to walk away with?
SPEAKER_02Well, I guess two things really. I'd like people to uh have an idea or a like something new for themselves personally, but then uh because the kind of people that you have listening, watching this show, I think that um we want them to have things they can take to their teams uh as well. Right? We want to have some access to making your teams more competitive and getting through the the natural sort of adoption curve um that people are seeing right now.
SPEAKER_01So I think as we get into the com conversation, we might want to set the the context of the scaling up framework with people, strategy, execution, and cash. And can you just take a moment for those um who maybe they've heard of it but they haven't really had much exposure to it, the like just the the the paradigm of scaling up?
SPEAKER_02Well, so scaling up is a best of business growth framework um that was originated by Vern Harnish, who's been my friend and mentor for decades. And Vern, um so Vern uh you you mentioned Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. He was teaching a program at for entrepreneurs at MIT years ago, and he read this book about the life and times of John D. Rockefeller, and he he inferred, intuited, uh discovered in there some habits that were useful in it in any time, not just in olden times, but uh but in modern times and in into the future, like enduring things that we now enable with technology, but like basics around alignment and focus and prioritization and rhythms and uh like all that. So all of that is distilled into the first book and then expanded into these four decision areas: people, strategy, execution, cash. And strategy is about getting a simple differentiated strategy that's actually driving growth. So growth is needed to have a good strategy, simple enough to communicate and use, um, and differentiated, not just like every other company. What is it about you that's unique and different? And and the uh you know that so how do we figure that out is part of our work, and that's greatly enabled with and accelerated with AI today. And then people is getting the right people on the bus, um, working together well, recruiting, retaining, developing your people, the whole people's, and not just the people on your team, but the people, your customers and suppliers and like that kind of thing too. And then um, so all the people you interact with, and then execution. Like, what are the basics? And and to be honest, I see this with some of the AI companies today where they want to sort of say nothing uh of the basics applies to us. We're gonna do everything differently, and that that clearly uh spanks you at some point. Um, so how do we dial in and then not work so hard? Like keep things running well and smoothly and that kind of thing, uh, and not drown in meetings or drama or so that's about consistent, repeatable, scalable things. And again, there's a whole bunch of places and ways that AI touches that to make your execution easier and better than ever before. And then cash um is uh, you know, is the kind of thing that people lie about more than anything else or they avoid looking at because they don't understand, or that kind of thing. And again, AI has uh a great uh opportunity to simplify and help us gain access. You know, people in finance and banking, that kind of thing love to throw around terms and intimidate others with uh with their knowledge and use of jargon, but they can't even agree on uh what to call things, just like a lot of the world of business. So is it OpEx, is it GNA, is it all those things mean the same thing, right? Like um so they throw around terms and they try to intimidate you. And if you don't come from a finance background, then it can be uncomfortable. And so you look away or whatever. AI can cut through that BS and help you to be smart about your cash. And then, and then the even before AI, our simple tools around what do we actually need to focus on here so that we have a business that's worth more that isn't like running to the bank all the time. Um, so those are kind of core things around. And and and then taken broadly, people strategy execution cash scaling up is a best of open framework. So unlike some others who put a trademark on every single thing and put their spin and make it really rigid or whatever, we're like, look, let's let's keep evolving it. So, you know, I was just having a conversation with Vern, who's uh, as we talked today back in Sitjust Spain outside of Barcelona, and uh over the weekend, and he was grappling with something, wanted some feedback on that, and then I had something that I need to share and that kind of thing. And but we're talking about the evolution of our tool framework that is not static. Like, okay, how do we expand this one? How do we revise that one? What what who wrote a book now that changes the way we think about things, you know?
SPEAKER_01Interesting. And I know that the the relationship that chief AI officer is having with scaling up is just gonna further accelerate the integration of uh AI thought into how these things are structured. So I'm gonna start with something, we'll call it a hot take, I guess. I was on the phone with senior senior leadership at a a well-known uh business framework, business operating environment, right? And we were talking about AI. This was just last week. We were talking about AI, and his position was that AI in the planning phase was not good.
SPEAKER_02That it's I'm gonna call BS on that one.
SPEAKER_01You know, but so I was a little like, well, maybe we're not using the same tools. Turns out he's he's a an avid user of multiple models, so he was very capable, but his position was that the kind of the soul of the conversation of um the important things related to culture and and and core values and things like that, that you might find a situation as listeners, if you're using this in your planning, his position was that you might say, Oh, yeah, that's good, and not really necessarily think it through, but just take the output from the model and say, that's pretty good.
SPEAKER_02Abdicating your judgment, wisdom, uh, your advisors to AI is a horrible idea. Horrible idea. And and here's a simple experiment. Come up with some cockamy fakakta idea for a business, and then uh ask AI how to make it work, and it'll tell you, wow, that's a novel take on things. I think putting a cannabis truck next to a middle school is a great idea, you know. Here's there are some things to worry about, but let's make it work, you know. It yeah, I it probably won't do that one, but but like really close to absurd nonsense, it'll it's sycophantic in nature, it wants to please you. And you could ask the same thing a couple times with slightly different prompts, and you'll get really different answers. So treating AI today in the current things with that with primarily thinking about LLMs, not small uh specialized models and that kind of thing, as a decision tool, probably not great. As a thinking partner, um, as a research tool, um, as a process, like lots of great ways to use it in your planning and strategy work, but to abdicate it, like tell me what to do, bad idea.
SPEAKER_01So, and I know that scaling up like they do a lot of work with Jeff Woods and his positioning on using it as a thought partner, everything. So totally concur there. I'll tell you though, from the experience that that I've had with with working with because we come in not necessarily on the the people strategy execution cash side like you die guys do. We come in on the strictly okay, we're assuming you've got that framework in place or a framework. How do we introduce generative AI into you know elements of that, right? So what what we're seeing is the executives, they've probably got one tool that they're using, and it's either going to be co-pilot or chat GPT, and they haven't had a voice tell them, like, no abdication, right? Use it as a thought partner, but don't say, okay, write this for me and now make our you know, make our core values or make our strategy.
SPEAKER_03Bad, bad, bad.
SPEAKER_01Are are you seeing kind of the same thing, at least with initial in engagements and conversations, that that's where the executives are, or are they past that in the people that you're working with?
SPEAKER_02Well, look, uh, let me just walk you through some examples instead of talking about it theoretically. So somebody is thinking about working with me, right, or curious about what it looks like. First thing that I do today is I send them to a questionnaire. Now, we used to have some different questionnaires or highly guided, structured assessment. I have a a beta kind of an assessment today that's entirely AI driven, and it's not fully automated yet because we're still iterating on what it looks like. So we ask you a bunch of questions. The questions we ask you, I would ask them verbally, I would ask them in writing, lots of different ways I've asked them in the past. Today we're collecting with uh just a web form, right? You empty your brain. Then I uh have those things processed with a specific prompt and a set of questions, like, okay, based on these answers, what do we think about this, this, and that? And go look at these competitors and go do this thing. And then I look at it and then I massage it a little bit. So there's a still a fair amount of manual today. There is a template, there's some some a sequence of prompts, not a single one. Yeah, and then some manual review, and then when I feel good about it, we send it along to you. Then we have a conversation about what does this say? What is you what were you thinking and that kind of thing? We talk about um the different pathways to growth and what you might consider. Maybe you haven't even thought of some of them. And we explore them. We look at your competitive positioning, we look at the risks and strengths um relative to growth and things you might want to consider. We consider areas we might focus on first. So all that happens with less than 20 questions, and then a really rich conversation emerges. It's not about getting the answers, it's about speeding and expanding the reference in that rich conversation that then happens between a potential coach and a potential client, and whether you whether you work with me or not, or you just take that thinking and go on. That's like step one. Then I start. So you know, we start, I don't know, uh a few clients all the time, and we're start so, and then in the beginning, uh, especially with at our private client level, um, I uh I'll interview all the senior team. And I'll interview the senior team, I'll talk with them in depth, open-ended, exploratory. I take handwritten notes, which is my brain filter, what I'm noticing. Sure. But then I also record the conversation in most cases, and then I feed both of those things from the whole team and I say, okay, what do we need to do? What's working here? What's not working here? What's the split between the CEO's view and um and the rest of the senior team's view? Where are they divided? There's almost always a uh a split there. Um now let's look at the competitive environment. Let's consider what areas we might focus on and why. So I'm using it as a thinking partner in an ongoing conversation then about that. I mean, like, okay, now give me a write-up to share back with the senior team to reflect back to the things that I heard. So now I get a particular, maybe a more sanitized version because I don't want necessarily it to just dump on the sport between the CEO and the senior team. I want to manage that, finesse that in the background. I don't want that. So there's a there's a whole looks, you're starting to see a sequence. Now I'm gonna have my first off-site with the team. We've interviewed them, we've chosen a sequence of things we're gonna work on. I will then say, um, okay, everybody answer these questions. We always did that. Like 20 years ago, yeah, we would say, here's some pre-work for the senior team offsite, go do some thinking. And they might uh answer a survey, they might send emails, they might do handwriting, they might just bring it could be done different ways by different coaches. I always gave people like either an email or a web form and I would collect it back. And then I would pre-read it. And uh, and sometimes we would summarize it, anonymize it. We used to have to do all that with an assistant fairly manually. Yeah, and then I would have to read through a lot of things, took a lot of time. Today, I can say, hey, AI, summarize this, give me some thoughts about it. Okay, now create a version to share with the team. I can send to the team a day or two before the offsite. The team now is already getting the shared view. They see, they start to get aligned. They did their pre-thinking themselves individually. Now they see kind of the we haven't even met yet or begun discussion yet. Now we meet, we start to expose some of those things. I'll have AI create a set of slides for me based on the summary, and then I'll throw that up and then let's talk about this. What do you see? What's missing? What do you, what do you see of your voice? What did you, what surprises you here? So we can have a thoughtful conversation about all that. And then we get through to, well, what should we do? Right. So then we start to brainstorm in the room. And sometimes that'll be discussion based, it'll be pretty obvious. Other times we'll go to sticky notes or whiteboards or that kind of thing, and we'll build models and prioritization. I'll send people to take a walk and discuss in pairs. Um so we'll use any number of things to get like really great thinking going. And then we often will take a picture of handwriting notes. Yeah. And and through the whole meeting, we're we're record we're capturing an AI transcript and a summary of the meeting using Zoom or auto or some other tool. And then and then we will go and we'll say, okay, summarize this for me and give me this back. Now the the ideas usually emerge and we might even explore some things. Well, how does that look like? Or let's boil this down. I did a session recently where we were trying to work on core values with um a senior leader. And he's like, you know, we created these core values. We've now had them for three years. We did them with you in the beginning. I feel good about them. I think they are, and yet there's something cringy about these for me. I'm like, oh, tell me more about that. He's like, I'm afraid to ever sort of talk about them because I just feel like they're awkward and artificial. I'm like, oh, I'm hearing that the language of the core values that you wrote with your business background doesn't resonate with your more blue-collar team. And he's like, bingo. I said, Great, let's just go. So we we drop his core values, which are technically correct describing things, but not in the language that fits his team, right? And so I said, okay, break this down for me for a company in this industry so that we could talk at every level, at line level, all the way up to the the boardroom. And uh, and then it gave us back a draft, but yeah, it wasn't done. We well, we were like, ooh, that's kind of good. All right, I like this one, I don't like that one. This word is giving me. So now we're having iterative conversation. It's not an answer, it's a thinking partner that speeds up. Now, could he and I have worked through the language on each of those, rephrasing it? Yes. Uh, he would struggle to do it on his own. Uh, but we're getting biased and background and all that. Yeah, sure. And and just like being stuck, one perspective, right? Yeah. Partner with an outside coach, it's gonna get better. With some peers, it's gonna be better. AI can bring all of that on up level, all that. Now, if you have a coach or a peer and a CEO and the AI tool, boom, we accelerate that stuff. And then in a matter of minutes, we produce something that's awesome. It's still not done. We say, okay, now go socialize this with the team and say, hey, team, we did a I know the values, we don't talk about it too much because I never like whatever. We did this new version. What do you think? And then socialize it and then hear what people say. First time he did it, they were like, that's awesome. But there was like one word that was a little like, what do you mean by that? And uh, and then there was another word that was sort of like mixed for some people. In one situation, he he took it as uh like an opening to go back and and refine further. And the other one, he used it as a teaching moment. Like everybody needs to know this word, it needs to resonate with you. We're gonna lean into this one and and build on it. So all none of that AI is advocating. We're not advocating AI or letting AI be decisive, but it's accelerating the whole process, right?
SPEAKER_01So if I was gonna feed this back to somebody, you know, like one of my peers and everything and say, hey, listen.
SPEAKER_02Oh, wait, wait, wait, one more. Then we're come to the end of the meeting. What are our next steps? What are the action items? Who needs to do what by when? And we'll create a list of things that needs to then get calendared into people's calendars so we follow up because people say lots of things they mean to do, they're capable of doing, and they just eff and forget to do them. Like it just disappears because we're busy and distractable. And yeah, this case, we're like, okay, good, I like that list. Now put that into my calendar for me at the next available time at least once a week, 30 minutes, right? We'll do a thing like that. So it'll take the action items out of the meeting and it'll sequence them over the next 13 weeks, throwing them into calendar either at a set time. In some cases, it's like put them to Mondays at 11 a.m. or that kind of thing on a recurring thing, it'll give you a new task every week. Or in other cases, it'll throw it into the next available time, favoring early. It can use more judgment. Sure. And we can say either if we're connected. So if you're if you have like Gemini, uh maybe, or I I I'm not clear how co pilot might do with this, but It could actually put it in the calendar for you. Or you could say, um, hey, just give me a.ics file um with all those tasks, and then I just drop that thing, boom, now it's in my calendar. So we've created uh all thinking partner through the thing, a summary, a conference report, insights, action items, and we've even calendared them. That is planning with AI assist.
SPEAKER_01So I think any executive that's been to an off-site, they'll say, like, none of that was oh, I've never heard of that before. But the missing piece from the way it used to be done to the way it's done now is that by leveraging AI, none of that gets missed. Like it's not like well, we we don't have enough time to do it all, or we got some great ideas, but we didn't capture everything, or we ran out of time, so we weren't able to fully flesh out the like the action plan for everybody. So and and this was what you just explained was a combination of both the strategic and like really digging in and going back and forth and back and forth. And oh, we need human input here, and here's some synthetic output. Let's see what would the the humans think about that. But also you introduced some of the like the tactical usage, like plugging it into the calendar. So if if you're a listener and and you guys were using AI in your annual planning, maybe back before the turn of the year or even now, one of the things I bet some of you did was, wow, this didn't take very long. We just put everything into AI, and there you go. You missed the part that Bill's talking about, which is looking around the table off-site with the rest of your peers and saying, What do you guys think about that? Like, does that land with you?
SPEAKER_02Rather than just going, push back, don't just accept look, AI's first output often looks good, sounds good. But it also, if you if you scratch the surface of it, you're like, yeah, it's kind of BS, it's kind of fluff, it's kind of filler, or maybe it made some things up, or or maybe there's another way to think about it. So uh I think surrendering your wisdom, your judgment, your creativity to it, not a good idea. But having it be an accelerator, a partner through the whole thing, um, powerful.
SPEAKER_01So, Bill, if somebody said, What's a standard company that you work with? Who would that like what would what would their industry size, age, all that kind of stuff?
SPEAKER_02The the defining characteristic for there's three main things that that are true for the companies I work with. Um but the biggest thing is some hunger for growth, right? There's some ambition for some unusual growth. It's not just like I want to grow five, 10% a year. They're like, I want to double, triple, 10x, 20x this thing. I want to be number one in the world. I want to own my state. I want to like there's something more like that. So the the driver and the ambition for the people that work with me, you could run a business lots of different ways. And maybe you have a multi-generational thing. You just don't want to get eaten up by AI. You want to stay relevant. That you might not work with me and that kind of thing because it's not about growth. Very often those companies also are thinking about um some kind of a transition. Like they want to sell the company and retire, put some money into their retirement. They want to um exit, they want to sell it to the team, they want their kids to take over. There's some kind of a an exit anticipated, even if it not clearly yet, but like at some point off in the future. So uh, and then um coachability um is a tough one. It's really critical for my work, but it and it's not like we all think we're coachable, and yet mostly we're not, right? And and I think like as a coach, I can point to evidence where I'm exceptionally coachable on a comparative basis, and yet my wife and my mom can both tell you about areas in pregnancy where I am exceedingly uncoachable. So even if I skew higher overall, there are definitely places and and listen, when I think back to my history as a CEO before being a coach, um, across multiple companies, when things were going wrong, I really wanted to find anyone else to blame but myself. When things are going wrong, my first instinct, like most of yours, is not to look in the mirror, not to go, how did I fuck this up? Yeah, and what am I missing? And how did I set this up? It's like, which SOB can I fire?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01They should have known. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I think that's a really common um kind of a thing to phenomenon. So um I'm looking for coachability and I'm testing, are you willing to try things and are you willing to look in the mirror? And I re- I I frequently get people who think they are, but uh it's gonna take a lot of artful approach on my part to get them to actually do it because we're all we all have egos. And yeah, if you're a leader of a company or the owner, founder, CEO, you probably even have a bigger ego, right? And so it's more sensible. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So uh the coachability and and I used to when when I lived in LA, I used to go to this restaurant, it had this big mural, and it was two kind of like stick figures sitting at a table, and one had the name, one had like the label growth, and the other one had the label comfort. And they were sitting at the same table, and growth was standing up and pushing away from the table and saying, I don't think this is gonna work. Yeah, right? Because growth and comfort don't live in the same house. Right. So you're dealing with these individuals who have ambitions for growth, um, they need to be coachable, but as as we know, like def those definitions are um malleable, let's say. But now you're introducing something that is kind of sweeping the business landscape. There's not a lot of really true experts on it. How is how is AI I don't know, exacerbating the the I don't know, the skepticism, the the fear, the the resistance to growth? Uh like what are you seeing with the executives?
SPEAKER_02Well, people are worried about their own incompetence, whether they're up to the challenge, people are worried about failing, and and sometimes when you're really worried about things, you you avoid even looking at it, right? Like I I know people that um are behind in their bills um and having money problems and they don't open the mail. Yeah, that's there.
unknownYep.
SPEAKER_02Um it's funny. I have a stack of mail over here. Uh corrupting. Be careful. Things I need to add. There's nothing I know pressing, pressing there, but they're all things that I can't just throw away. Um, so I I look, that's a a real thing. We know people are are afraid to look at it, they help, and yet they're just bombarded with it on the daily. So I think uh you you point out something great. Uh um, and I've thought about it a lot over the years, right? Uh I have worked with people who love having breakthroughs. Depending on the kind of work that I'm doing and that kind of thing, people are like, I really need a breakthrough in this area. I want to breakthrough. Ah, it was a great breakthrough. Wow, we really had a breakthrough around our marketing or this kind of thing, right? So everybody loves a breakthrough, just like everybody loves the idea of growth. A breakthrough is an interesting word, though. Breakthrough implies a barrier. Yes. So you want to have a breakthrough in something, start running at walls. Right? Nobody wants to go run at a wall. No, come on. You know, unbuckle your seatbelt and floor it now. Head right for that wall. Nobody wants to do that. We know running at a wall is gonna be painful. Running at the wall is gonna be uncomfortable. And uh the first couple times you might hurt yourself pretty good. Eventually, you know, if you don't die, um, you'll break through, right? And but we're actually more interested in not suffering than we are dying. Like, you know, at some point we all face our mortality. If you've been around people who are uh grappling with a serious disease uh and facing their mortality, more often they don't want to suffer. More often they don't want to be in pain and they they want to live, they want to live well. They know that they won't live forever. We none of us are getting out alive so far. So we we mostly avoid that. You're right, there is a tension there. And some of us, just by our nature, our drive, we're restless, and we get out of bed and we're thinking about things and and we can't just leave it well enough alone. We will open up a can of worms and then and start to deal with the consequences. But a lot of times we'll be like, oh, I don't want to look at that one. I don't want to let that person go. I don't want to scratch that thing because I'm I who knows what you know, that's the it's like the Pandora's pocket. Open something up and then I can't get it back in there, right?
SPEAKER_01So in that vein, then what are some of the now we already talked about and I think that was fantastic, the the distinction between abdication and support and using the models, not to say, hey guys, we're done. We got our Chat GPT did our annual plan. What are maybe some other areas that that you would encourage executives who are they're probably using Chat GPT or Copilot? They're doing something, right?
SPEAKER_02But they're not uh like a stat that I saw all the way through it every step. Look, I'm using multiple AI models. My son works for anthropic. My son, uh the the early versions of Midjourney were built on the front deck of my house um before it was a thing. So he was the principal AI scientist for uh Midjourney, then he did a little work for Cursor. Now he is working on one of the problems as an AI scientist at Anthropic for the Claude tool. I'm using Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, other things every day, almost every hour. And sometimes I'll open one thing. I'll use Claude for a lot. I love the way Claude's language and reasoning works. I don't love the way it's difficulty in looking back and sort of learning me broader that might get fixed. I like the researchability and the math capabilities of OpenAI. And Gemini is, you know, got is getting better and better all the time, but is really integrated with the whole Google Suite. So if you're a G Suite user, oh my God, it can be fantastic. So I'm using all, but I might open one uh and I might say, you know, I might give some particular business or even a personal challenge. Hey, I'm trying to figure out to get to this country using this thing and this thing. Like, where could I go nonstop? Like, how could I do that? And uh I'm thinking about uh I need a venue that looks like this and analyze this for me. And then I go over to the other one and I'm like, I need to find all of the academic papers that relate to the research topic for my PhD. Uh and I'm do I'm doing like my literature research, competitive review, all that stuff, uh often with open AI because of its research ability. Or if I'm gonna run a math, hey, I want to run uh this company's numbers against this target. I'm looking to get to evaluation of this, help me uh create some scenarios. Open AI is great. Yeah, so a lot of different kinds of things, but I might have those going on because I'm a scatter brain entrepreneur, right? I got three things going across an hour user, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Often, especially like morning, middle, and end of the day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I'm with you, man. And I think that if you're listening to this and that's not how you're operating, first off, don't feel like um I don't know, that it's too late, although the window is shutting for sure. Um, but I can tell you a stat that I saw back in December.
SPEAKER_02This is the beginning. Look, this is more like this is less like the beginning of the internet. Okay, and this is more like the beginning of the personal computer world, right? Okay. Tell me more. Well, the first practical computer that I had was a CPM system, right? And there's a whole different nobody even remembers that anymore. And we did command line stuff on that, it was all command line, right? And we're looking at uh green uh letters on a black background. And uh we had, and if we wanted to connect into some other system, we used um acoustic couplers and 300 baud modems where you scan thing down. And so, and then in the beginning of that, like I remember my uncle's law firm, they they're like, Yeah, we're getting computers now, and they got the pet Commodore machines and they had cassette drives and things like that. And you know, that people were like, I'm gonna put this in home and put my recipes on it, and that kind of thing. And uh today I'm like, okay, I have these three ingredients. AI, tell me what can I make with this? I feel like there's some kind of a braised chicken thing I could do here. Great, you have a Dutch oven, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, man, it's interesting. You mentioned command line, and here we are again with CLIs with Claude and things like that.
SPEAKER_02It's like I don't use it enough. My son's like, oh, stop being a wimp. You know, you open your terminal and use Claude code there, um, and it's better for you. And I I do have it, but I don't use it that much. Um maybe because I'm 61 now, but there was a time. I mean, I look, I learned uh uh I learned COBOL, Fortran, uh BASIC. Um, I mean, I even wrote some stuff with hex, right? Like a long time ago. Um, do I want to do that? No, I kind of left that pretty early on because I realized there were people better at it than me. But understanding both and being able to, yeah, but you don't need to. And and to do like quad cowork, um, I don't know a lot of people know about this, but you can open uh on your desktop and you can give it some access to your computer, you can let it just run stuff and go take off, right? So I've been experimenting with some prompts around a daily news brief for myself, yeah, right. So um, you know, I I don't like necessarily the way the news is written and and I don't love to go around a lot, but I but I want to be informed and entertained and simulated. So I've been trying to rewrite my own thing there, right? And I have it building over there as a as a recurring kind of a thing. There are certain situations I'm monitoring. There are some commodities I uh hold positions in I'm monitoring uh very closely thinking about do I want to get out of this or do I want to hang around how like so there's a whole range of or look, we got a contract in a proposal to invest in a company. Um, should I do this? Like uh what are the terms of this contract? Aside from the just the fundamentals of this thing, help me look at this contract. We did a a multi-million dollar deal, um, I don't know, it was a little uh couple months ago. And um, and it was the weekend, I don't know where my attorney was. He was like off camping or whatever. He he certainly didn't answer my text, but I had to get some shit done before Monday morning. And uh, because there was an event. And so we went through and we didn't just say fix this contract, rewrite this contract, or whatever. We said, what are what are the worst things that could happen? Okay, how would we change this? So we're not just asking for a work product, we're having an ongoing conversation. Given the situation, here's the background, here's the thing, ask me some questions. All right, what now let's let's do some scenarios. Okay, and what what we change? Do we really need to worry about that? So two of us are talking about the deal, and AI is our third partner acting as a consulting attorney in the whole thing, and we're going through and we're iterating. In the end, we decided pretty much to just take the contract as was, that the risks were fine and and weren't worth the time, with one little exception, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01So this is interesting for for those of you that are listening and you're like, whoa, I never thought about that. That's probably pretty common. The the thing that I hear a lot, or would love to use it more, I just don't know where, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So like obviously, yeah. Bill's a power user, like he's he's using it, as he mentioned, multiple models multiple times all day long. So for you, if you're listening to this, what I would suggest is if you're not sure, go to the models and say, Hey, I got a contract, I'd like some help with you know from AI, yeah, but I don't know what to ask. Right. Right.
SPEAKER_02And that should I think about what are the possible situations? Here's why I am here. Let me give you another like a meaty one. We didn't go here, but I think it's good before we get too long in this show. This is a really a great one. Process work is core to any business. Yep. And there are across any industry and category, there are process consultants who will spend months, sometimes years working on your processes to refine them, improve them, automate them, that kind of thing. Right? Things that would take at least a month or longer in the past, I can now do in an hour. And here's what it looks like. So we bring a team together, either an operating team or a senior team, we say, what's a key process that we need to work on? And they'll lay it out. Okay, great. So, like a process consultant would do it in the past, we start to diagram it. A quick uh way to level that up is everybody do your own version of it. We all go stick them up on the wall, and then we start to merge them till we have one common view. Now we have the current process mapped. Then as a team, we flag the issues. Now we're I'm talking about sticky notes and handwriting. Yeah. Old school. I now have some flip chart paper or a whiteboard, and I'm moving sticky notes around until I have a diagram of process and I've identified the areas, the gaps, the uh mistakes, and the delays. So of what our best thinking is of either of some team in the room. Now I take a picture of it. I take a picture of that thing and I upload that to my favorite AI tool and I say, okay, transcribe this and clean it up, create a summary of what we've done so far of our current process, then write me an uh an SOP, a standard operating procedure in a in a consistent traditional SOP language, and then create a checklist for me uh so that I confirm conform to this process consistently that can be used and operationalized. So now I have the the just the write-up, the raw thing uh cleaned up from handwriting notes. I have a standardized SOP, I have a checklist, and tell me the differences between this process and best practices in this industry. What are we missing and what should we go to work on? Give me five recommendations or give me 10 improvements or get like whatever, prioritize it for me. Tell me what do you see. Now I get all that done in the space of an hour. And now it's still not like it's not um perfect or it doesn't matter. Go use it now. Go spend the next month not trying to get to this point, but actually testing it, refining it in practice. So now that lives as like a Google Doc or some kind of shared doc. We print out and laminate the checklist, we start using it in a department, we see, okay, that's worded wrong. That's not actually what we do. And then we start refining it. And you think about it, go use the aviation checklist as a great comparable, right? So an aviation checklist, if anybody of you pilots you'll know and understand this well, but like it starts one way, and then over time they're like, oh, an airplane or two crash, and then like, oh, well, we need more drainage things. And then you end up with a Cessna 172 Skyhawk that has like 17 fuel drains uh all over the wings and body because they are some places with some sediment and water and things like that accumulate. So it starts to refine and iterate and improve over time, but then you end up with something that's highly reliable and better and better and better. So it just keeps getting better because now it's like a living document that we keep improving on. But I didn't spend three months working on this thing.
SPEAKER_01Or, you know, $150,000 on the process documentation team to come in and take three months doing it.
SPEAKER_02Here's what we're not talking about here. We're not talking about in any of this in this conversation about wiring in AI to your core decision making and customer process. I'm not talking about handing over your customer service or you're thinking, I'm not talking about firing people. I'm just talking about supercharging all of the thinking and work in the business. At every department, somebody's like, well, who should be involved in AI in our company? Everybody every day should be thinking about where to use it. Love it. That's your challenge. Yeah play with it. Keep it growing and changing, it'll keep growing. There will be places, it may get smart. I you know, I happen to know that Jack and the senior team are like, are we going to be out of jobs? They are all thinking about maybe this thing gets so smart that it trains itself at some point and we aren't really like they don't even, you know, as the senior AI scientists for you know one of the leading companies in the world, they don't think of themselves as immune from the possible future of it. But, you know, who knows? Like I personally, I I wouldn't worry as much about that. I think we will find things to do as human beings. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And you know, it's interesting back to some research I did in December. I think I heard it maybe on the artificial intelligence podcast by uh Paul Reutzer. It's a great show if you haven't listened to it. Listeners, go catch, add that one to your list. They were talking about how some research that MIT had done, maybe across 900 different careers in the US, primarily knowledge workers. And they said that the current capability of the tools could replace about 12 to 14 percent of what what's being done in the economy. And I thought, man, but that's not happening because just because the technology is there, it's sitting on the shelf for a lot of people. They don't know that it exists. They're hesitant to use it, they're slow adopters, they're going to get around to it or whatever. So even if the technology could do a lot, you know, like could replace people, the missing piece is going to be the execution of that technology, like the introduction of that technology. So for those of you who are still um uh cautiously investigating AI, I there's some time, however.
SPEAKER_02Well, maybe you're worried about it's gonna replace you or your work. Fine. Replace yourself. Yeah because if you replace yourself with a tool like AI, you'll end up with a new job. You're now an AI implementer. Yes. Yeah, 100%. You got a lot of somebody else, right?
SPEAKER_01100%.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I guess let's kind of like this year, you know, it's still early in the year. Do you have some predictions? Because man, like in the course of a month, especially now, so many new developments can occur with the models and new tools can come out. And do you see or anticipate any big shifts in the business landscape? Maybe not specific to a technology, but do you see any pattern shifts that are going to occur in knowledge work in US industry uh in 2026 because of these tools?
SPEAKER_02Well, I have two big trends um or a couple that I think are worth paying attention to. One is I I think we can expect to AI to become basic, normal. The the generative AI tools today that feel new are gonna just become kind of standard. Use it to write your proposals, use it to manage things, use it to identify prospects, use it to identify uh parties. Like you want to find a company to buy, do your AI research, look for acquisition opportunities. Hey, what companies could we buy with owners who are in their 60s that fit this profile? Give me a list. Hey, who are the 10 companies that could bid on our company? Give me a list. Hey, who could I sell to for this area that has this need? How do I find these people? What's an approach? It'll give you stuff. So I think you can go again and again and again across a whole variety of things like that. Make it the normal in your business. And I think you can expect that it'll just become normal in background in some way. It'll keep developing and surprising with new tools and capabilities. Uh but I think it just becomes baseline. What's um then rising in value are all the personal human contacts and experiences. So if if people are just generating AI slop content and your customer services filled with like silly AI, find ways to bring the humanity and to elevate the actual human touch and human interactions for when you are, right? So I think that becomes better. Use it to bring real people together for real things. And then uh and then know in the background, one of the things that's like chaos, people are getting comfortable with chaos. So instead of getting triggered by tariff threats or international conflicts, we're getting it like, okay, yeah, there's a conflict happening there and there's a threat, and we don't know what's going to happen with that. Like getting comfortable with chaos feels like it's part of the next period. So figure out how to make AI normal, get comfortable with change, uh, and lean into this time and how to elevate in real life experiences for people. I think those are a few like oh, and then one more like big call out. I this doesn't apply for everyone, but if you look around you, what's becoming exceptional is like basics. Everywhere around, from governments to uh like basic utilities, things like that are breaking uh from neglect, from any number of reasons, things are breaking down. And we end up being surprised. Hey, I went to a city the other day and everything wasn't broken there. Wow, that's awesome! Yeah, yeah. Just it just actually worked, it just wasn't like filled with homelessness and broken roads and crap. Like yeah, uh so getting competent is now, so just go do the job to figure out where you're losing competence, where things are eroding, where things are breaking in your world. And I and look, everything's breaking, right? In the in the you in a universe with entropy, in a universe filled with entropy, everything's always breaking. So you're gonna work at things, at fixing, repairing, building, tuning until you die, sell the company, retire, whatever. So just lean into it.
SPEAKER_01Like, well, I think what's very encouraging for the listeners is guys, if you if you notice, all of those kind of trends that were just forecasted, none of them require you being an expert at AI today. Now, the introduction of it and accepting it as part of just the day-to-day, certainly we did talk about that. But the rest of that stuff was more about the authenticity of the experience as compared to how do I squeeze the you know AI to get more stuff out of it. So I think that's very encouraging, especially coming from somebody who's got optics on so many businesses that are focused on hypergrowth, focused on maximizing valuation at exit and all those types of things. So um, Bill, fascinating conversation. I'm looking forward to uh more of these as Chief AI officer and scaling up continue to uh integrate. But for those who want to find out more about maybe uh you've got a fantastic podcast that you've been doing since 2016. Scaling Up with Bill Gallagher. Just go look for that. Yeah. Where should people go to just like plug in with what Bill's up to?
SPEAKER_02Uh so wherever you get, uh like we're virtually everywhere, the Scaling Up Business Podcast with me and Bill Gallagher, you'll find that. And then uh my personal website in the world of scaling up is scalingcoach.com. Scalingcoach.com. And um that's where like my world and workshops and newsletter things like that are. So um you can go to the broader scaling up world or you can come to me there. Either way.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Dude, thank you so much for taking the time. I know how busy you are, and I know that um you're at the apex of the scaling up world. So to get a few minutes with you has been fantastic. And it's really helped me kind of see uh like what's the what's the conversation going on in the scaling up businesses and coaching world, and that was very helpful for me. So um I guess any closing remarks or anything before we call this one around?
SPEAKER_02I look, I know we're gonna we're gonna have you on our show. We're gonna I'm gonna uh thank you give some thoughts on elevating your your curriculum tool set, that kind of thing. So yes, um I'll be around with you more in the next little bit.
SPEAKER_01Thanks. And everybody, um, so we'll be back with another episode next week with some more fascinating conversation related to uh using AI at work and all of the the fun and fear that comes with that. So with that, Bill, thanks again. And um, everybody we'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.