S1:Ep76 Dreaming Big with AI: Driving Growth Through Innovation & Leadership

In today’s episode of Digital Transformation & AI for Humans podcast, we are going to Dream Big with AI. I'm sitting down with my brilliant guest Dr. Alex Heublein from Atlanta, USA, to discuss how to Drive Growth Through Innovation & Leadership.

Alex is the Chief Innovation Officer at Netsurit, bringing extensive leadership experience from senior executive roles at Oracle, IBM, HP, Red Hat, and more. In addition to his corporate career, he serves as an Adjunct Professor of Business & IT at Clayton State University. As a human-centric visionary, Alex is deeply engaged in advancing how Artificial Intelligence can drive meaningful and sustainable business growth.

Netsurit has earned international recognition for its ability to stabilize, innovate, and optimize complex IT environments. With a strong belief that shared purpose and core values form the foundation of great partnerships, Netsurit is committed to Supporting the Dreams of the Doers — both within the organization and across its global client base.

🔑 Key topics we discuss:

• What “Dreaming Big with AI” really means at the leadership level - moving from vision to execution
• The intersection of AI, innovation, and leadership in creating transformative business opportunities
• Real-world case studies where bold AI initiatives drove growth, beyond just efficiency gains
• The critical mindset shifts leaders need to embrace AI as a growth catalyst, not just a tool
• Essential leadership and personal qualities for steering innovation responsibly in an AI-first world
• Upcoming AI trends, paradigm shifts, and market signals that will shape sustainable business growth
• How to design human-centric AI strategies aligned with long-term value creation and trust
• Practical advice for ambitious leaders and innovators on turning AI-powered visions into sustainable reality

🔗 Connect with Dr. Alex Heublein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexheublein/
🔗 Netsurit: https://www.linkedin.com/company/netsurit/
🔗 Netsurit: https://netsurit.com/

Chapters

• 0:00 Episode Introduction and Guest Welcome
• 2:51 Alex's Journey into Technology and AI
• 5:24 Dreaming Big with AI at Leadership Level
• 10:11 AI as a Transformative Business Opportunity
• 15:31 How AI Creates Human-Centered Growth
• 22:28 Mindset Shifts for AI-Driven Growth
• 37:40 Leadership Qualities for Responsible AI Innovation
• 47:26 Future Trends in AI and Business
• 51:54 Building Human-Centric AI Strategies
• 56:23 Final Advice and Episode Wrap-up

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host, amy. In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation and, most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams. Set fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams. Let's dream big with artificial intelligence and dive into driving growth through innovation and leadership, together with my fantastic guest from Atlanta, united States, dr Alex Hubline.

Speaker 1: 0:39

Alex is the Chief Innovation Officer at Naturit, bringing extensive leadership experience from senior executive roles at Oracle, ibm, hp, red Hat and others. In addition to his corporate career, he is an adjunct professor of business and IT at Clayton State University State University. As a human-centric visionary, alex is deeply engaged in advancing how artificial intelligence can drive meaningful and sustainable business growth. Natura has earned international recognition for its ability to stabilize, innovate and optimize complex IT environments, with a strong belief that shared purpose and core values form the foundation of great partnerships. Natured is committed to making a real difference, supporting the dreams of the doers both within the organization and across its global client base. Welcome, alex, great to have you here in the studio. How are you? I'm good.

Speaker 2: 1:44

How about yourself? Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:47

I'm great. Thank you, so happy to have this conversation with you today, really looking forward to it. Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies, but our ways of thinking and leading. Interested in connecting or collaborating? You can find more information in the description. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes. I would also love to invite you to get your copy of AI Leadership Compass Unlocking Business Growth and Innovation the Definitive Guide for Leaders and Business Owners to Adapt and Thrive in the Age of AI and Digital Transformation. You can find the age of AI and digital transformation. You can find the Amazon link in the description below. Alex, to start with, I would love to hear more about yourself, about your journey, about your passion for your professional growth and everything what brought you into the topics of innovation, artificial intelligence and the future insights.

Speaker 2: 2:53

Yeah, no, absolutely, to give you a little background. I mean, my journey on this road started when I was fairly young. You know I think we talked about this in another episode I got my first computer when I think I was nine or 10 years old and I was just fascinated by it. I was fascinated by the idea that you could program these things to do just about anything, and so I kind of decided at a young age this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to focus on technology, I wanted to focus on innovation, and then I kind of got into AI.

Speaker 2: 3:22

And it was funny because AI when I got into it, I went off to university to go get a computer science degree and I thought you know what I'm going to get into AI? And I was really disappointed because you couldn't do very much with it at the time. So I kind of backed off that I've been working with AI for close to 35 years now, as well as disruptive innovation but decided that you know what I'm going to go off and I probably spent 20 years or so as a software engineer, as an architect, et cetera, for a lot of different companies, like you said IBM and HP and companies like that, and then, sort of in the middle of my career, I've sort of decided to pivot a little bit. I went more over to the business side of things. I realized, you know what, I've probably gone as far as I can as a pure technology person. Now I need to figure out how to take this technology and apply it better to businesses.

Speaker 2: 4:13

So that's been a great journey for me. I've had the great opportunity of being given the opportunity to play a lot of different roles within the companies that I work for, and now I'm at NetShirt as the chief innovation officer and I'll tell you, it's one of the most intriguing companies I've ever worked for and it's also one of the most intriguing roles that I've ever had. So it's a ton of fun, and I get to see this digital transformation thing really happen right in front of my own eyes. I get to be a part of that process with our customers and as well as how we use these technologies internally. So it's a tremendous amount of fun.

Speaker 1: 4:46

Amazing and lucky you to be in touch with the practical application and real life success stories for your clients, and here, probably, you feel that finally, you can sum up all the experience and apply it in a completely different way to create something truly impactful, truly beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Sounds fantastic as someone with vast executive experience from the major tech companies. What does dreaming big with AI really mean at the leadership level?

Speaker 2: 5:24

Does dreaming big with AI really mean at the leadership level? Wow, that's a great question. When I think about AI and I've told people this a lot and I say this quite often to people I don't think the challenge with AI right now has anything to do with the limitations of the technology. I think it has everything to do with our imagination for how to use it. And people say, well, you know, are these things going to keep getting more powerful and smarter and better? And I'm like, yeah, they probably will. That's a reasonably good bet that these things will continue to get more intelligent. We'll continue to see breakthroughs, maybe not quite at the pace we've seen over the last months, let's say. I mean, we've gone from almost nothing to some very, very smart, large language models and some very intelligent ways of thinking with these. But even if that progress stopped now, I think we in the business world and in other realms, I think we could spend the next 10 years trying to work out how to use just the technology we have today. And so I think you have to dream a little bit big, because we know this is very likely to continue this pace of change that we're seeing. The improvements that we're seeing, will they slow down in terms of their rate of improvement? Sure, most likely it happens to virtually every technology. Nothing keeps going up exponentially forever.

Speaker 2: 6:33

But at the same time, I think we have to think in different ways about it as well. You know, on one hand, you can sort of look at AI as a tool, and I think it's a very valid perspective. This is a tool that can take a lot of the things that maybe only people did some of the boring, repetitive, redundant, difficult tasks and automate those and make those faster. And we see that every day. It's amazing how much AI I use just on a daily basis within my own job and within the company that I work for. But when you sort of look at the possibilities going forward, you look at the rate of expansion. You have to dream a bit bigger If you're just dreaming, for right now, you're going to be locked into the thinking of what these systems and what these technologies can do, right, this minute, right, or maybe a little bit in advance. But what we're seeing is we're seeing new technologies come out almost monthly and they just blow your mind. You know, six months ago or a year ago, I don't think we could have even dreamt of these sorts of things. So, to me, dreaming big part of it is about understanding that this growth will very likely continue and there's many, many ways we can apply the technology.

Speaker 2: 7:40

I think the second part of dreaming big is thinking about so what are the longterm ramifications of this? What are the long-term things that are going to happen in the industry that you happen to work in from now, and also, at the same time, looking at what are the implications of that. What is that going to mean to my business? What is that going to mean to my organization? What is that going to mean to my industry? What we're finding is that people, most organizations aren't there yet. Right, they're kind of looking at this as I think I need to do something here. I think I need to. I think I need to do something here. I think I need to know more about this, because I think they're starting to see that hey, wow, this is going to be a big thing.

Speaker 2: 8:30

You know, you always have these technologies that get hyped up, right, like let's take cryptocurrencies, for example. When that came out a few years ago, like everybody was saying, oh, cryptocurrency, this is the next big thing, this is going to replace money and it's going to do all these things and for the most part it didn't right. I mean, it's, it's cool and all. But when I look at ai at least the way it ends today I see it truly as the next big thing and maybe the next the biggest thing you've ever done, at least in 20 or 30 years. So I'm personally very excited about it. But you have to dream a bit bigger. You have to dream about what could these things do and what are the implications for my business or for my organization or for the world that I live in?

Speaker 1: 9:09

I love your vision and your mindset and, speaking about cryptocurrency, I think it's coming. The more AI will develop, the more the world will move towards that type of financial system. But there are many surprises which are going to come into our life and rather sooner than later. It's super exciting. I agree with you we need to open up for seeing the broader picture and getting that helicopter perspective in order to be creative and navigate in a powerful way, to really see that difference through the technologies, but also through how we as humans navigate these times with so many incredible opportunities. Alex, where do you see the intersection of artificial intelligence, innovation and leadership, creating the most transformative business opportunities right now?

Speaker 2: 10:13

Wow. Well, so I think there are a few, and I think there's sort of you can categorize them broadly. So, if I think about artificial intelligence and leadership and people, right now, what we're seeing is a great sort of a great wave of automating things, right. So, so a lot of the AI usage that we're seeing today is largely around taking things we used to do, identifying the things that are sort of just, you know, things that that only a human has previously been able to do. But, but, wow, it's kind of a waste of human brainpower, really, right, we just didn't have machines that were smart enough to do. But, wow, it's kind of a waste of human brainpower, really right, we just didn't have machines that were smart enough to do a lot of this. So I think there's a big wave right now of working out how can I use AI to automate these repetitive, boring, whatever you want to call them functions. So I think that's kind of the first wave, and people are using it very effectively, right, people are writing emails with it, they are drafting documents with it, they are creating slide decks with it. I came across this great application a couple months ago, and the crazy part was that I'm pretty good at making slide decks, right. I spent 25 years learning PowerPoint and all the cool little features and this thing just made my skills obsolete in like five minutes and I was like, are you kidding me? I spent 25 years. This thing builds better slide decks than I do in literally two minutes. So I think there's a lot of that going on. It's sort of what I'll call personal productivity gains.

Speaker 2: 11:34

What we're really starting to see is a much bigger focus on doing things at a more organizational level, right? So instead of me using AI to automate the production of slides that I need to produce, now we're starting to see AI start to automate business processes In that business process automation. We've had business process automation for a long time. It's just that you couldn't handle really complex processes that needed someone to make a judgment call, someone to make a decision about do I go this way or do I go this way, based on a lot of perhaps incomplete data. Computers in the past have worked very, very well. If you had all the data, it was clean data and you fed it into it, it all worked perfectly.

Speaker 2: 12:13

The beauty of AI is that it gives us the ability to make these decisions that aren't straightforward, they're not clear, they're not completely deterministic and someone has to say what should we do here? So I think we're starting to see more and more of that, and I think we'll see more and more of that as we go forward, and so that starts to take processes that maybe many people were doing and we can automate some of those processes. So, instead of having 10 people processing invoices, now I've got one agent that processes all the invoices, and maybe I have a couple of people overseeing that AI agent right, to make sure that it's doing it correctly, to make sure that it's actually making the right judgment calls in each step of the way. Now, if you're looking at 10 people, that's an interesting automation situation. When you scale it to a hundred or a thousand people doing something that I can now automate with AI, then it makes it really interesting, right, because the economy of scale kick in and I can free up those people to do something useful, to do something that is more, I guess, appropriate for a human mind to go do and invoice processing, right? I don't think even the people that process invoices like their job, right. I can't imagine that they do it like okay, next invoice. So I'm going to go buy a thing, someone made that thing and typically they made it end to end All right, they made the whole thing for you. So if you wanted to go buy a new table to put in your living room, there was one craftsman who made that table a carpenter that would make that and make all the legs of the table and the whole thing.

Speaker 2: 14:01

And when we moved into the kind of industrial revolution, I think it dehumanized a lot of jobs, because now 10 people would build a little part of this thing and then someone would put all those parts together.

Speaker 2: 14:11

So your job went from being someone that could craft the whole solution to someone that was just focused on I need to screw in this or I need to nail these two things together and that was your whole job, over and over and over, every day. And so I think we lost something there. I think we lost something as people, as humans, when we kind of got into these jobs where my job at a car factory is literally I take the power wrench and I screw in a screw or a rivet or something, over and over and over again every day, all day long. I can't imagine anything that is more dehumanizing than doing that. So I think there's a tremendous opportunity. Some people are pessimistic about AI, but I'm very optimistic about it. I think it can remove a lot of those things that when the industrial revolution happened, they started to dehumanize it. People became much more specialized in their jobs. I think we can remove a lot of those things and sort of re-humanize our jobs and give us maybe a greater sense of purpose.

Speaker 1: 15:10

I agree with you that some jobs are truly dehumanizing and they are so hard for people that they are just surviving from day to day. But my logical question is what are those nine out of 10? If one remains with an agent and those nine, they have nothing to do in there anymore. What will they do then? How will we create new opportunities at such a pace so that they have something to eat and to take care of their families as well? So that's the question how can we transform our systems so fast so that we match the pace of development of those AI solutions and all the technologies which are coming together with robotics and everything to replace our human presence?

Speaker 2: 16:08

Well, you know, I watched I think it was a TED Talk a long time ago and somebody kind of painted this very scenario. Except they said you know, 100 years ago, 120 years ago, the vast majority of people in the world traveled around. If they needed to get somewhere quickly, they traveled on a horse. Instead, they would get on a horse and they would, they would go, and there were people that were employed, like people that put horseshoes on the horses and people that fed the horses and people that made saddles and people that made all the equipment you would need to ride a horse boots and hats or whatever, right. And, and you know, I can't imagine that that 100 years ago, people thinking, wow, all these jobs are going to be eliminated. When we invent automobiles, I don't need to put horseshoes on my horse, I don't need the veterinarians to take care of it, because I'm going to have nearly as many horses as I have today, 50 years from now or 25 years from now, right? And every technology revolution has been through that phase 100% of major innovations. They are both job creating and job destroying. So to me, it's not a matter of are there enough jobs, it's more a matter of what jobs are there, and so what we've seen is that, at least over the last hundred years or so, technology revolutions have sort of moved humanity up right. We've gone from doing these very boring, very repetitive, very dehumanizing jobs to doing jobs that add more value to the system, and I think that's where you see economic growth, right, you see economic growth not when everybody's employed.

Speaker 2: 17:34

Everybody was employed as a farmer a thousand years ago, just about right. I mean virtually everyone on earth a thousand years ago is a farmer, right, and almost no one is a farmer now, relatively speaking, right? Farming is hard, so we created all these machines and we created these techniques to improve our crop yields, to make it easier to harvest the crops, and eventually most of those jobs went away. And so what are all those people doing now? What about those poor farmers that all got unemployed over the last hundred years, right? Well, no one thinks that way, no one actually says things like that, because you know what? They all found jobs, but they found jobs adding more value, using our minds to be able to do things that we couldn't do with machines, and I think that will be the case for quite some time.

Speaker 2: 18:15

There are a lot of people you know, you get the Sam Altmans of the world and others running around saying oh, we'll have AGI in a couple of years, we'll have artificial general intelligence that will be every bit as smart as humans on a couple of years. I don't buy that. I think we're going to get to a level of intelligence that's pretty amazing and in fact it already is but I think we'll still be able to create jobs and grow the global economy tremendously, because think about it A hundred years ago, the global economy was 2%, if that, of what it is today. Right, in terms of the value and the wealth generation that a bunch of farmers were creating. How much wealth and value can you generate growing corn or soybeans or whatever? Right? And the answer is you know your economic progress is always going to be limited.

Speaker 2: 18:57

So I view this as something that, yes, will people lose their jobs. There's no question about it. It's already happened, right? The question is will those people be able to upskill themselves to provide even more economic value to the world? And I things only applied to farming. They didn't apply to other areas of the world. I think the difference with AI and things like generative AI is that they can be applied across many, many domains. So I think that's the tension right now. Those are the things that I'm going to have to answer over the next five to 10 years.

Speaker 1: 19:50

Definitely. And actually it's very interesting that you mentioned it because just a few days ago I've had a conversation with Chad Gepetti around the difference between all the previous revolutions and this revolution and this transformation, if this is going to impact humanity in a similar way or be something completely different, and I can tell you that that conversation impressed me deeply. I'm looking forward to what's ahead and what's coming next, but the conclusion, long story short, was that it's not going to be as any other revolution, because it is impacting everything and everybody on all the levels. So the level of transformation and the shift is going to bring us to a completely different world and in a very, very short period of time. So it is really interesting what's ahead and I'm looking forward to it. Probably we'll get even more dehumanizing jobs who knows?

Speaker 2: 20:59

But I think one of the interesting things and I think one of the things that AI truly lacks today, even though it can pretend sometimes, is it sort of lacks creativity. And people say, oh, no, no, it can generate cool paintings. No, no, it can generate cool paintings and images and it can even write songs and stuff. And to me that's not creativity. That is just taking something someone else has done and making something like it. Right, that's a little bit different and I think there's a fundamental difference there. If you look at economic progress over the last well, however many thousands of years you want to talk about, since the dawn of civilization, most of the economic progress we've made, but particularly in the last hundred years as a species, has been due to innovation. It hasn't been to well, do we have the right ratio of labor and capital and things like that? Right, everybody was really worked up about that a hundred years ago. Right, you had this sort of the capitalists over here, the greedy capitalists, and then you had sort of the leftists or the Marxists or whatever over here saying labor's the most important thing and the capital guys are like no, money and capital are the most important things. And it turns out they were both wrong. What was really important was innovation, and so we've seen that drive economic progress throughout history. It's sort of that third variable that dominates the equation that most people don't realize. So I think that the more innovation we can do, the better we'll be as a people, as humans.

Speaker 2: 22:20

But I think what will uniquely separate us going forward is our ability to come up with cool new ideas, meet things, fund another, and I think that capacity will remain uniquely human, at least for the foreseeable future. So that has huge implications. There's a really great TED talk I watched and it was all about education and how in most educational systems I think we talked about this a little before most education systems just beat the creativity out of children. They want them to learn this curriculum and they have to learn math this way and we don't focus enough on the education of our kids. We don't focus enough of that on adults as well. So teaching people how to be more creative, teaching people how to think creatively, to solve problems creatively, I think that's what will make us uniquely human and I think that's how we'll thrive in an era of AI as we go forward human and I think that's how we'll thrive in an era of AI as we go forward.

Speaker 1: 23:13

I couldn't agree more, really. And this educational system. I think about it quite often and I see that the gap is getting just bigger Reality versus the systems which are applied to the younger generation. They don't match other and it creates a lot of conflict. It creates also many problems which are going to impact their future, unfortunately. So it is also a great reminder that maybe those who are working with those educational programs and systems, they should wake up and change something so that the majority and the real needs, the real world, and engage this younger generation in a completely different way, in a way which is relevant to them, so that they start speaking their language and show the future they want to participate in as well.

Speaker 2: 24:13

Yes, definitely.

Speaker 1: 24:16

But I love this conversation around innovation and its importance and meaningful change and growth, so let's dive a little bit deeper into it. What are some real-world examples where bold AI initiatives have driven meaningful growth, not just efficiency gains? Could you refer to some cases from your own or others' experiences, alex?

Speaker 2: 24:41

Yeah, I think there's a lot, and I think a lot of it you're right has been focused on efficiency, right, it's been focused on just how I improve the productivity of my people, focused on efficiency, right, and focused on just how I improve the productivity of my people. And what we're seeing in the market right now is, you know that there's this trick of sort of getting people to rethink some of the things that they may have decided just weren't, they weren't cost effective to do in the past, right? So you start thinking about maybe you're a small and medium business and you would love to go do this thing for your customer, you'd like to improve your customer satisfaction levels, but to do that you'd have to employ 100 humans, right? And so you're like I can't make that work, I can't make the profit margins employing 100 people to go out and survey my customers and make sure they're happy with the customer service that they're getting, and do that interactively as opposed to just sending them a survey. That, to me, is something that people just wrote off a long time ago. They said we're never going to do that, that's, they'll never be cost effective. And and and you kind of don't you tell them what, if? What if we could make that cost effective? What if we could have an agent that actually goes off and surveys your customers and talks to them and enables them to do things right? That can lead to very meaningful growth for an organization. Right, because I retain more customers. My customers are happy, but I know when they're not happy and I don't have to employ a whole bunch of very extensive people to be able to do something like that, right.

Speaker 2: 25:59

So that's kind of a trivial example, but there are many, many examples where we're seeing organizations kind of move past the how do I make my people more efficient to how do I actually drive growth within my organization, how do I service my customers better, how do I take advantage of market opportunities that just maybe weren't there, and how do I even create services that I simply could not have created cost effectively in the past, right? So I think it's really neat when you see organizations starting to build applications using AI software applications, and it's fascinating to watch it happen, because they don't actually have to know a lot about how to write code or anything else. They can take those ideas and they can build brand new applications that they can then go sell on the market and we're just seeing an explosion of that right now. I think the term the cool kids use for it is vibe coding, right, where you're not actually writing any code. You just tell them the AI I want the app to go do this and I'll tell you. I mean, I've worked with a lot of this and I spent a lot of my life writing code and it's kind of like the PowerPoint thing. All those skills are useless now. Right, all this stuff that I knew even 10 years ago is almost completely useless now, because I can use these machines to go build out applications that not only can improve productivity but I could potentially go sell those applications out in the market. So I think that's a lot of how you can do it. It's taking that creativity and using it to drive entirely new products, entirely new services into the marketplace that either were too difficult to get out into the market or too expensive.

Speaker 2: 27:34

The capital costs of building software that's always been the limiting factor in writing software, by the way. It's the capital costs, because if you think about software, there's no incremental cost to production, right? I just have to write the software and then each copy I make of that software costs me zero. I'm just copying around a bunch of ones and zeros, right? I just have to write the software and then each copy I make of that software costs me zero. I'm just copying around a bunch of ones and zeros, right? So, unlike a factory that produces cars, all those raw materials I have to have, you know, I have to have steering wheels and engines and tires and wheels and stuff. I assemble those things together and then sell a car. So my profit margins are never going to get above a certain point, right, they're always going to be fixed at a particular point.

Speaker 2: 28:14

Whereas the software one of the reasons that the richest people in the world are software. People like the Bill Gates's of the world and the Larry Ellison's of the world, like a large percentage of them, are in high-tech industries, and it's because that cost of production is so low, that incremental cost of production, right. The problem is building the software in the first place. It requires a lot of money, right? And I don't know how many copies of that software I'm going to sell, right? If I sell one copy, I go out of business, right, unless it's really expensive software. But if I sell 100,000 copies, all of a sudden I'm a millionaire, or I'm a millionaire, or if I sell a million or a hundred million copies, I'm all of a sudden a billionaire.

Speaker 2: 28:50

So so I think that the ability to take what's in our heads and get it into into the world is it's just a tremendous, and you see this happening all over the place, right? I just read about a startup that was started a couple of years ago, like last year, and they they helped software engineers engineer their software better with ai and they were at a I think they were at a hundred million in revenue in january of this year. They've doubled that in two months. It's just like, really and this is a small startup, this is like 50 people and they've got a 200 million dollar revenue stream because they were able to get this technology out in the market very quickly. So I think, I think one of the fascinating things to me is that I don't think anyone knows where this is going to go.

Speaker 2: 29:38

I don't think anyone, even the nobel prize winning economists I don't think they've worked out like, how is this going to affect the, the economy? If you think about economics, it's all about adding value. It's all about how do I add value into the process. So if I reduce those capital costs, if I reduce the barriers to entry, guess what? More people enter the market, and then you end up with better products and you end up with better services, because more and more people and more and more organizations can get those products to market faster, and those services market faster. So I think that's where we're going to see the economic growth.

Speaker 2: 30:13

The trick, as we talked about before, though, is how do we make sure that all that wealth doesn't end up in the hands of a very, very small number of people, and I think the good news there is that when you reduce barriers to entry in a market, you reduce the concentration of wealth, right?

Speaker 2: 30:30

So, if you think about it, some of the most profitable companies in the world, outside of software companies you know what they are they're oil companies, right, and they have been for the longest time Some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world are oil companies.

Speaker 2: 30:42

Why? Well, it's really hard to start an oil company. You can't just start drilling in your backyard and think, okay, this is great, I'm going to strike oil. It's so capital intensive that it's very hard to get into the oil drilling industry, and, as a result, those companies are very, very profitable because there's limited competition based on the number of people that you get into the industry. But when you open up an industry to literally almost anyone that has a great idea, now all of a sudden you're actually taking that wealth and you're redistributing it out to a lot more people. So I think we'll see this balance between sort of how much wealth gets concentrated versus how much wealth gets distributed and I think in the long run maybe not in the short run, but in the long run it will actually help us distribute wealth much more easily as we go forward.

Speaker 1: 31:27

I'd love to hope for it because it sounds magic, sounds great, sounds great, but only time will show how it gets in reality. And you know, I really appreciate all those great questions you referred to as example, and I think it's a lot about the mindset. So what mindset shifts do leaders need to make to go beyond AI as a powerful tool and move toward AI as a powerful growth catalyst, because so many are still considering it as a tool, just a tool, but it's so much more.

Speaker 2: 32:06

Yes, they are, and I think when we start thinking about AI being a growth catalyst, it really does require a different mindset. Right, it requires this. I mean, thinking about how to automate things is, I mean, it's a great step and it's very valuable. So don't get me wrong, that's not I don't. This is what I do for a living. I help organizations get more productive and more efficient, and we automate a lot of things for our customers, right? I think it's a great first start because it proves out the technology. It lets organizations get experience with it.

Speaker 2: 32:37

But to really get into that growth mentality, you really have to shift your mindset focus from making the things that I do today better versus doing entirely new things. And that's the difference between incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation or disruptive innovation. Right, disruptive innovation is all about doing things in a very, very different way than we've done them in the past. So I think that that, to me, is mindset shift you have to make. Right. It isn't about just small incremental innovation. When you move into this new world, you have to think differently about the bigger picture. What products and services could I bring to the market? How can I go out and capture more customers. So instead of I guess, to summarize it it's less about looking inwardly and more about looking outwardly to the opportunities. Right, when you're typically doing incremental innovation or incremental progress, you're looking internally how can I make this invoice processing that I do go faster so I can improve my profit margin A very valid thing to go do but you're looking inside, you're looking at yourself, you're looking at your own company when you're doing those sorts of things.

Speaker 2: 33:48

Right, I think, to really make the mindset shift, you've got to think externally. You've got to go look at the market. There is the white space in the market. Where are the underserved needs? Right, because we've all had the situation happen. Right, we've all been doing something and thought there's got to be a better way of doing this. Like this is terrible, this is an awful way of doing things and and there's no, there's no solution in the market. Right, lots of great companies have been started by one person saying this is ridiculous, there's got to be another way of doing this. And they went off and they invented something to go do it, because they were just tired of doing it the way they were doing it, right, so so I think that that's kind of mindset shift and now going from there's got to be a better way to doing this to actually creating something that can do it.

Speaker 2: 34:32

I think that gap is narrowed tremendously, and so I think that's the mentality you have to have. You have to have the mentality of looking outward, looking for opportunities in the market, and you know what. They may not even be what your company or what your organization does today and be what your company or what your organization does today. There are plenty of companies over the last century or so that started out doing one thing and ended up doing something completely different, and so I think that's really important for organizations to realize there's opportunities out in the market that maybe aren't exactly what you do today, but you should consider moving into those spaces right, because now you can move into those spaces much more quickly and much more cost effectively than you've been able to move into those spaces in the past. So so I think if you, if you were to take the, the total sum of all the things that we as humanity want to do and our aspirations that we could do, we've probably done like 1% of those things. There's the other 99% of the things that, like, there's got to be a better way of doing this, like that happens to me all the time. I think there's got to be a better way of doing this particular task or this particular thing, and so I think it's going to be the people that have those inventive minds, those people that are true entrepreneurs, that are willing to go beyond the confines of their own thinking and are what their company does today, or what their organization does today, and say to themselves and I think this is the most important question what else could we be doing? What are the other markets we should be considering? What are the other products we could potentially bring to market using this technology to accelerate that time to market? I think those will be the winners as we go forward.

Speaker 2: 36:12

I think that that mentality of looking outwardly and asking what if and those are my two favorite words in the english language, I mean is what if? What if? We did this right? And there's a. It's funny, my eight-year-old son, he used to watch this little cartoon, this right. And there's a. It's funny, my eight-year-old son, he used to watch this little cartoon and the little cartoon had a dump truck and a backhoe or like one of those, those machines that scoops dirt out right. These two guys would go around and their favorite little saying in the cartoon was if and then they would invent something, and that was every episode. They would do something like that right, and that kind of became my little tagline in my what if? Those are the two most powerful words you can say, and I think more people need to think that way as we go forward I totally agree because there are so many opportunities, but once again, we need a broader picture.

Speaker 1: 37:04

Because there are so many opportunities, there are so many unexplored connections and new ways of doing something, of seeing something, of implementing something and running things in a different way. Those unique individuals who are coming and saying what if? What if we do something different? And why is it this way when there is a better way to do this? What are the most critical leadership and personal qualities required to steer innovation responsibly in an AI first world Well?

Speaker 2: 37:40

yeah, so there's two answers to that question. The word responsibly is the tricky part of that, right? So I think if you sort of take the word responsibly out for a second, we'll put it back in in a minute, right I? I think that I think we've the maybe the most important characteristic is curiosity, right? Um, there are people in this world that are just curious people and and a lot of people.

Speaker 2: 38:04

A lot of times people don't value people that are just naturally curious, that they ask a lot of questions like why are we people that are just naturally curious, that they ask a lot of questions like why are we doing it this way? Like almost every company I go into, I'm looking at what we're doing and I'm like why are we doing it this way? And you get these, you get all these ridiculous responses, right? Um? So I think this notion of curiosity being able to go out and probe the market and be able to go out and think very differently about it I think that's sort of the first characteristic that you need going forward. I think that's one of the most valuable personal traits that you can have. But it can also be a corporate trait, it can be an organizational trait, it can be part of your culture always be asking why, to always question why are we doing things this way? Or how did we get here and why are we going to do it this way in the future? So that level of curiosity I think needs to be more rewarded in organizations, the people that ask why. They're not just asking why just because they're trying to be difficult. They're asking why because they're curious, because they have that innate curiosity right. So I think that's one.

Speaker 2: 39:10

I think the second one is a very high degree of open-mindedness. Like I said, a lot of people had ideas 20 years ago that they wrote off and they said it'll never work. We can never afford to do that. You have to have that sort of open-mindedness to say, when someone comes to you with a crazy idea, one of your employees comes to you with a crazy idea, don't just dismiss it right, it might actually be the best idea your company's ever had, right? So that open-mindedness and thinking outside the box, I think, is the third one.

Speaker 2: 39:40

And, interestingly, one of the things that AIs are really terrible at right now is lateral thinking. I give these things lateral thinking puzzles all the time and some of them I have to make up, because I know they've already seen them in their training data. But it's really fascinating when you give them one they can't solve and then you kind of ask them wow, you couldn't solve this one that most humans can. Most humans can eventually get the answer, but they'll never get the answer because they can't think laterally. So I think this notion of thinking outside the box, trying to take a different perspective on things right, coming at them from a different angle, I think that will also be a critical characteristic as we go forward for both again, both for individuals and for organizations. Now you take the word responsibly and you put it in there, then I think there's a whole different set of characteristics that you need right.

Speaker 1: 40:25

Alex, now, when you mentioned those questions which you can't answer, what are just a few examples of those questions?

Speaker 2: 40:35

well. So one of the um, one of the one of the questions or one of the problems I like to get into it is that, look, you have a cake, all right, and it's a rectangular cake that you would eat, and I'm gonna cut one of the corners off the cake with a circular, like a circular implement. Right, except I'm not going to do it right on the corner, I'm going to do it offset from the corner. So I can't just then, and the question is making one slice with the knife how can you most evenly distribute that cake? How can you most evenly split it in half? Right, and so you can't just make a diagonal slice through the cake, right, because the corners offset a little bit and there would be less over here and more over here, right, and so it's fascinating to watch the AIs do it. They're doing all this geometric ninja. Well, take the cosine of the angle of this and the tangent of that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they come up with a solution, right, and the solution is wrong. The way you solve that problem is you take the knife and you cut through the cake laterally, right, so you divide the cake in half, not trying to make a slice vertically, but you make a slice horizontally through the center of the cake and then you take it apart. And now you is not good at math. I will tell you right now, and she will tell you that she is not a mathematician at all. And she got the answer to that in like two seconds. She's like oh, you just take the knife and cut it like that.

Speaker 2: 42:10

So it's interesting when you see some of the problems they can't yet solve and it's because they think in a certain way. They think in a way that we've programmed them to think and, ironically, we as humans think in a way that we've been programmed to think. If you think about it right, you think about education, you think about you know, when you go out into the business world, there's standards of this and standard here's how we do things right. We program people honestly to think inside the box and we've got to deprogram people. We've got to get people stop thinking that way, stop thinking about these very rigid, very formal, very precise ways of doing things, and we've got to get them thinking what if there's a better way of doing this right? How do I think three-dimensionally, analogously, three-dimensionally? That's the kind of thing I think we have to do with people, to really harness what makes us uniquely human, and I think that creative problem solving, that thinking outside the box, that curiosity, those are some characteristics that I think it will be very hard to replicate with artificial intelligence. I could be wrong. We may have an AI in a couple of years that can think outside the box and super creative. I don't know. But what I do know right now is they can't do it, at least not consistently.

Speaker 2: 43:26

So we kind of moved in into the sustainability part, and I think there's a lot of different ways of defining sustainability, right. There's sort of environmental sustainability, there's sustainability of sort of when you look at it from an economic standpoint, from a job standpoint, you know, are we going to put everyone out of work, and so on and so forth. But I think the real trick to me, the way I look at it from a sustainability standpoint, is that if we can free up people to really use their minds, to really be creative, then I think we have a huge, huge opportunity to advance where we're going as a species. And so to me, doing it sustainably we have to think about the impacts, though I'm not worried about the long-term, I'm not worried about what happens 50 years from now, because I suspect we'll have AIs that will make our lives so much better. Right, they'll cure every form of cancer, they'll figure out nuclear fusion and we'll have completely sustainable energy, and so on and so forth. Right, all of that I think that they will be able to solve for us one day.

Speaker 2: 44:33

It's the short term that worries me, because we are governments and our corporations don't think particularly well when it comes to Right. We don't look at the impacts of oh wow, 20,000 people just lost their jobs because we automated this thing or we put AI into this particular industry and it wiped out most of the jobs. What happens to this people? So I think we have to come together. I think governments are going to have to come together. I think that organizations, corporations, nonprofits are going to have to come together and we're going to have to figure out an answer. I don't know what that answer is. There are a lot of people that think they know. I honestly don't think anyone knows, again, even the Nobel Prize winning economists. I don't think they know what the right answer to the solution is, but what I do know is it's going to take collaboration. It's going to take us coming together as humans to be able to come up with an answer that's going to work in the short run for us.

Speaker 1: 45:23

Definitely going to work in the short run for us, definitely, and I so agree with you that there is a lot of conversations around sustainability. But what about the short-term perspective? What about here and now? And that's about responsibility what are we doing with this responsibly in order to create this path we want to see and the impact we want to create, instead of just discovering that it probably was sustainable but the outcomes are really not at all what we can accept in the long-term perspective? So I totally agree with you what upcoming trends and paradigm shifts should leaders be paying attention to in the new era of AI in the next few years, when it comes to AI and sustainable business growth?

Speaker 2: 46:13

Well, you know, I think there's some things that are happening right now and this is one of those problems that's very, very hard to predict. Right, it's very hard to speculate because things are moving so quickly, but I'll try. How's that? I'll do my best to try. So I think one of the big trends that we're seeing right now is that there's a handful right. One of them is agents and agents.

Speaker 2: 46:36

I think of agents as like little virtual people. Right, they're not as smart as most humans, but it doesn't matter, because the task we've given them doesn't require you to be super smart. Right, like you could be an average human, or maybe even a below average human, and still do the job. So that's cool. Right, you take these. So I almost think about them as like virtual workers maybe not virtual humans is maybe the wrong word for it, but virtual workers that can go off and do things.

Speaker 2: 46:59

Now, the challenge is how do you coordinate all those workers? You can't just have a bunch of digital workers going off and doing things on their own. You have to coordinate them. So we're seeing a very big push right now into not just how do you create these virtual workers with AI, but then how do you coordinate their activities? How do you manage them? So it's almost like we're creating this You've got the workers and you've got the managers, and then you've got the executives or whatever. We're almost sort of creating that framework within AI today, these agentic frameworks that we're working on. It's funny how they very closely parallel what's happened over the last couple hundred years in terms of management hierarchies and things like that, and that's probably because that's the way we think and we sort of designed it that way. But I find that part fascinating. So I think we'll see a lot more there.

Speaker 2: 47:47

I think we'll see also a lot more in terms of the types of problems that we can solve with AI. So, if you think, about a year ago, there was a very limited number of problems we could solve right Because we just didn't have the level of intelligence. We released a bunch of models that could do chain of thought reasoning. So, instead of just the large language model, you ask it a question or give it a prompt and it comes back with whatever came into its head all of a sudden. Now it's thinking through step by step, and I can't emphasize to you how big of a change that's been and how, how much more capable a chain of thought reasoning model is than just a? Here's the answer. This is the best I got, and I'm probably going to make a bunch of it up right, if I don't know so. So I think we're going to see more and more movement towards these chain of thought models that can actually reason the way humans do. So I think that will also be a big trend and these models will get better and better at it.

Speaker 2: 48:42

I think a third trend that I'm seeing right now and I think it's a it's an emerging trend is the ability for ais to do things right, like so, if you use chat tv today, you can ask it a bunch of questions. You can say what do you think about this? Or you know who won the 1972 world series or whatever the world cup? Right, and, and it can tell you right, it's got all this, this vast knowledge. But now these things can go do things like I need you to go book a reservation at this particular restaurant for this particular date. I'd prefer 6 pm, but if they don't have 6 pm, I'll do 7 pm, right, and then these things actually getting on a telephone calling the restaurant, talking to a human, saying I'd like to make a reservation for 6 pm on Tuesday for three people. And then the person says, well, no, 6 pm is not available, Would 7 pm be okay? And it says, yeah, yeah, perfect, here's my details. Give them my details. Off we go.

Speaker 2: 49:32

So that kind of autonomy we'll see more and more of, and it all involves the use of tools, right? So in that case it needs to use a telephone, some sports, you know, some kind of virtual telephone voice over IP type of thing. But you start to think about that, the things that these things can do to manipulate our computers, to manipulate a web browser, to go off and do that. So instead of calling the restaurant now I want you to go to OpenTable and I want you to book it with my user ID and my password for OpenTable. I want you to go book this reservation for me without me having to do it.

Speaker 2: 50:03

So I think we'll see a much, much greater deal of autonomy. But this is where it comes down to sustainability and responsibility, right, because what you don't want this thing doing is going off to amazoncom and ordering 8,000 rolls of duct tape. Right, because you end up with this crate of tape that you don't need, right? So I think we'll see a lot of really challenging circumstances the more we give them autonomy and you've got to limit that autonomy, though and that's why I think a lot of the responsibility and sustainability comes in is when you start making them autonomous and you start giving them the ability to go do things on your behalf or on your company's behalf. The number of ways that can go wrong are countless, so I think that's something we've got to be very careful of because there's always unintended consequences.

Speaker 2: 50:47

With new technology and this is proven out on virtually every technology revolution we've ever seen there's always unintended consequences. They are very hard to predict in the future. So we've got to be able to react to this in real time. We've got to be able to do things much more quickly. And the problem is, if you try to regulate this from a governmental standpoint, I don't think there's any organizations in the world that are slower to react to change than governments are. I mean, let's be honest, like they're not efficient organizations. They do a lot of good things but they're very slow. So I don't think we can just depend on sort of the government or our respective governments to fully regulate these things and make it. We're going to have to do it ourselves. We're going to have to be smart about doing it If it's going to be responsible and it's going to be sustainable as we move towards this greater level of autonomy.

Speaker 1: 51:35

No doubt you are so right about that, Alex. How can companies design AI strategies that are not only visionary but also deeply human-centric and aligned with long-term value creation, Now when we spoke already about those digital humans, or maybe workers, creatures, workers? So how can we still keep it human-centric, but in a meaningful way and in a sustainable way, so that we help our businesses grow?

Speaker 2: 52:11

well, I mean, I think the first way you do it, you can start with the people, right? So, uh, you know, somebody asked me not too long ago. They're like well, so when you go work with companies around AI, like, do you go in and like, with the traditional consulting methodology, we're asking, like the CEO, like what's keeping you up at night? What are your biggest problems? Right, and I told the person I said, no, that's not, that's not what I do at all. Right, I talked to those people, but then I'm like I want to go talk to your people. I'm going to go talk to the people actually doing the work and the first question I asked them, amy, is what do you hate about your job? Right, what's the one thing you hate about your job? And let's focus on that. And I think that's how you build trust, right, that's how you build an ai strategy. Right, it's not trying to come up with some grand vision of the future, because none of us know what that grand vision is.

Speaker 2: 52:59

I, I don't care who tells you they know they don't, right, they're just thinking very well of themselves that they can tell you what's going to happen in five years, right? So I think you start with the people, you engage the people and this isn't about hey, I would like to know what you're doing so I can eliminate your job. I go in with the idea of I want to make your job better, I want to make your job better, I want to make your job easier, I want to free you up to do things. And I've found it. You know, amy, those conversations that you have with actual people. When you really get in there and have that one-on-one conversation, tell me what you hate about your job. What are the things that if you could wave a magic wand, you wouldn't have to do that tomorrow. And we start there and we build the case up from there. We build on that foundation, and it's little things. These aren't big, massive. Well, if we rolled this out to all 10,000 people in the company, it would be perfect, right? It's about how do we start with the little things, incrementally improve them for people. That gets people to buy into it, right? Then they see the value. But if you try to do this top down with some visionary strategy of here's what we're going to do here and here's what we're going to do here, I don't think those strategies are going to work in most cases. That's.

Speaker 2: 54:08

My recommendation for businesses is if you want a human centric AI strategy, start with the humans, don't start with the AI, because the humans are the important part of it, right? And people still are the bedrock of almost every company. They're the foundation upon which virtually every company in the world is built. And if you don't engage with them very early and up front and then you get their ideas right, so I can go in and ask you amy, what's the thing you hate about your job? Well, I hate video editing, right, because everybody looks different on the camera or whatever.

Speaker 2: 54:37

Well, okay, what if I can build you an ai that'll automatically video edit your, your stuff and you take out all the parts where we mess up on a podcast or whatever You'd probably be like? That is fantastic. I'd love that. Alex, that's not replacing your job. That's making your job easier so you can go on to do more podcasts. You've got more time to think about these things, so that, to me, is the core of it. Start with the humans, understand where they see value, and then the amazing thing that happens is if you can get them to buy into it, amy. They will then start thinking what else could we use this technology for? And the wheels start spinning in their heads, and I think that's where the magic happens is when humans are dreaming up new ideas for how we can use this technology. That's where it all comes together.

Speaker 1: 55:21

For me, so inspiring Dreams truly come true, and that's exactly the right approach. I'm sure this part it will be so useful for our listeners and viewers, because it is brilliant how you're approaching it in a realistic but also very hands-on, impactful way. Start where it will give roots, where it will create some kind of true change and then move forward from there. I absolutely love it. Amazing, Amazing. What powerful advice would you?

Speaker 2: 56:11

give to ambitious leaders and innovators who want to dream big and actually turn those AI-powered visions into sustainable, bright realities. Well, you know, I'm going to cheat here. I'm going to use somebody else's. I don't remember where I read this, but I loved it. Right, and the tagline was start small, move fast, but dream big right, and that's kind of the philosophy we've taken in that shirt around this right. How do we start small? How do we start with those little problems companies have and we quickly solve them and then and then that leads to dreaming big right, and I think most companies have it the other way around.

Speaker 1: 56:38

Incredibly inspiring. This is a perfect wrap up to our today's conversation. I'm so grateful for it and it's been a true pleasure having you here. Thank you so much, Alex.

Speaker 2: 56:51

Thanks for having me, Amy. It's been a real pleasure as well.

Speaker 1: 56:53

Thank you. Thank you for joining us on Digital Transformation and AI for Humans. I'm Amy and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature how we think, feel and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing a winning mindset and leading with empathy and insight. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes where we uncover the latest trends in digital business and explore the human side of technology and leadership. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections and leading with heart.