The Canberra Business Podcast
A podcast about all things Canberra Business.
The Canberra Business Podcast
What if AI Could Make Us Better Humans, Not Replace Us?
What if AI could make us better humans instead of replacing us? That's the question at the heart of Evolutioned's journey from traditional management consulting to AI innovation.
Joel Madden, Evolutioned's CEO, takes us through his company's fascinating transformation as they developed Ambience, their flagship AI product designed to help organizations tackle conversations they've been avoiding. Rather than focusing on eliminating human jobs, Evolutioned has created a tool that enhances our capabilities by providing evidence-based insights into the messy human dynamics of organisational life.
Listen now to discover how AI might help your organization have its most important conversations and unlock human potential in surprising ways. Then share your thoughts on how you're approaching AI in your business – we'd love to hear your perspective!
This episode is supported by CareSuper.
Thank you.
Speaker 1:What is your business?
Speaker 1:So Evolution started, like many businesses in Canberra, as a management consulting company, a small business with a few people who have worked together over the years, who decided to have a go at something themselves, and we followed a reasonably interesting path of pivots and rethinks about what we're doing and rethink about what we're doing.
Speaker 1:And really what we're about is helping businesses and organisations have the conversations that they need to have. That they probably have avoided because they might be a bit scary and they might not have the evidence for them and they might not feel like they have the confidence to have the conversations that they need to have, and we've really taken a path of supporting that through our flagship product Ambience that we've been developing with AI and some cool data science things in the background, to enable organizations and businesses to have an evidence-based discussion. That might be a bit scary without that evidence base. So that's where that product has come from and emerged, and I guess it's a combination of myself and my business partner Dean's expertise in technology and my expertise in people, dynamics and organisational flow to really try to compartmentalise or to productise that into something we can take to market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you talk about scary questions. What kind of scary questions are we talking about?
Speaker 1:We have a lot of customers who really avoid conversations around conflict, around motivation, around the things that are on the people spectrum that may be not their comfort zone. So we focus on numbers and we just avoid talking about the challenges we have on the team dynamic or the cultural dynamic in a team, and they are the things that really hold back delivery. In my experience and observation over my career. And so you know, in partnership with looking at numbers and looking at critical path and looking at dependency, we really need to look at who's not talking to each other. Who are the people that don't get along? Who are the people within our organisation that should be talking to each other? Who are the people that don't get along? Who are the people within our organisation that should be talking to each other, who have never had the opportunity to talk to each other, and how can we build some evidence around that to have those conversations in a way that aren't personally confronting and that are actually enabling and empowering for the organisation ultimately to deliver value for its customers and stakeholders?
Speaker 2:So a real focus on some of those internal relationships and internal challenges. So tell us a little bit more about your flagship product, Ambienceai. As I understand it is, You're using AI to help unpick and unpack some of those challenges.
Speaker 1:You're using AI to help unpick and unpack some of those challenges. So the journey we've taken with Ambience is that we have worked with UC and ANU over the course of the last 18 months to do a few experiments with AI. We've engaged student teams to work with us as seasoned industry, IT and product professionals to really test where we can go with AI. A lot of the AI talk at the moment is about the lower end of things, and our vision has always been let's use AI to advance our higher-order skills as humans and let's help humans be better humans. Let's not replace jobs. Let's make us better at what we already do and extend ourselves. So with the Ambience product, what we're able to do is take in structured and unstructured data, make sense of it using some advanced data science techniques and connect things up that wouldn't normally be connected up. And what we're finding with that is it's really showing that people can expand their understanding of a domain space.
Speaker 1:In our case, we're focusing on projects and programs case.
Speaker 1:We're focusing on projects and programs to make changes and evidence-based decisions that go beyond your typical thinking around critical path variances, dependencies and budget, but actually take into account the whole domain of stakeholder relationships, motivations and intent within an organizational domain.
Speaker 1:So I think that's really exciting and it you know, the type of thing that we're able to use the product for is.
Speaker 1:So you're going into a project and you you're new to the project or you're in a typical position as a steering committee member that doesn't have the time to read a big wad of documents, so you can go into a committee and quickly query ambience and say things like hey, I haven't had time to read my papers, when are the risks at with the project and what should I be asking the steering committee members and the project team Through to? I've just received this project update from the project manager. Is it on point? And so we're really seeing what we're going to market with as a truth serum and an enabler for projects, where our goal is not to expose people but to give everybody a solid foundation and base to have the conversations that they need to have at the project steering committee and other committees that can course, correct and enable the conversations that are meaningful, rather than everybody just sitting around a table and nodding and nothing really changing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think many people have sat around exactly those sort of meetings, around project teams and so forth, but does this run the risk though, do you think, that an entire project governance group might be kind of falling victim to groupthink because they're all using the tool to produce the same types of sets of questions?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that that is one of the risks, and we have this project or we have this product story that we've built around how we want ambience to work, and that is to not have it replace those conversations but to have it inform, alongside lived experience and alongside natural human interaction and insight and understanding of each other, to really advance the conversations and to help people and help organisations deliver the right sort of value. I think it's really, in the end, a productivity tool and a tool that helps to eliminate and avoid waste from a very humanistic point of view, so where do you see the product going over the next five years?
Speaker 1:say I think the I guess the goal for the product is for it to be used alongside traditional project management as an enabler and insight generation tool. One of the things that we're really excited about is that we can take data and information, turn it into knowledge and query it for insights, and that's the real power that we've got, and the exciting part of it we want to be able to see is a whole range of use cases emerge from that as we start to push it out into the real world and take it to market and testing it against those different things.
Speaker 2:So how are you using AI in a way that's different from other tech businesses? How are you innovating using the tech?
Speaker 1:I think it's hard to say that we're innovating. What we are doing is focusing in on particular use cases and adaptations. One of the things that is really interesting to us is we were an early adopter of AI and in fact, the origin story of this is that we were engaged by UC at one point to assist with some of their teaching, and this was around about the time that ChatGVT was launched. So we were up against it early in a teaching capacity as an organisation delivering services, because we were seeing students adopt chat gbt very early on and that got us thinking about use cases and where we could be using the using the ai and and the power of ai for the better. Since then we've seen people use it as a personal coach, as conflict coach, as a biographer, as a ghost writer and lots of really interesting local, canberra-based use cases that really are only limited by your imagination.
Speaker 1:My favourite application recently is as a tutor for my daughter. So my daughter has a particular phenomenon where she struggles to create mental images. Her mind's eye is blurry and so when she learns at at school, if she's learning about something conceptual or something that has an imagery component to it, or imagine this or imagine that she really struggles with that teaching style. So we've created a little ai um tutor for her using the frontier models using the frontier models like Google and Claude and open AI that really focuses in on how she learns and she can take concepts that she's learning at school and put them through this tutor and it explains to her in a way that she understands so classes for her mind's eye if you like Correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so it really accelerates her ability to learn in a way that hasn't been there before, and so those sorts of applications are really interesting to me.
Speaker 2:So you know, for your business obviously a really interesting proposition. How do you go about identifying your customers?
Speaker 1:That is a really good question, greg, because we've struggled with that in the early stages of business. I worked with the Canberra Innovation Network and one of the things that they're really, really good at is helping businesses identify customers and structure their customer conversations so that they're creating value for the people that they're going to be working with and that they actually have a product to sell that people are going to buy. And when you're talking about going to market with people based services, sometimes those people based services can be confronting, and so we went for a long time talking about our great customer is going to be someone who's you know, bold and open to new ideas and trying to create a customer profile around that, and that was really helpful. But it also limits your market, particularly in Canberra and government clients. So with the segmentation that we're currently doing, we're working alongside projects to demonstrate the insights that we can give them from our experience, as well as that experience distilled through the Ambience product and the insights we can generate there.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of concern out there, in the kind of the commentary at the moment, about AI stealing jobs and taking away from people's ability to earn a living down the track. Now you're talking about your product supplementing people and existing processes, but do you think it's true that AI has the potential to take away jobs?
Speaker 1:Yes, I think it does have the potential to take away jobs, which is why we've taken that design decision to augment and supplement and help humans be better humans.
Speaker 1:I think there are jobs that people are not engaging professionals for at the moment, that they're engaging their AI to do for them. That is, I think, going to impact business dramatically Within organisations we're seeing. You know, you don't have to look far in the tech news to see that some of the big tech giants are shedding types of jobs and replacing them with other types of jobs that are more AI-enabled. And I heard somebody talk about recently that they think their future in software development is not managing a team of people but managing a team of AIs to produce software. And so you're orchestrating AIs rather than orchestrating a team, and there's a number of those future-focused stories around that are to a people practitioner fundamentally, which is what I am quite scary. So, yeah, I think that we need to be AI-aware and AI-savvy and AI-adaptive, because it's going to be the future, Unless it gets too scary and it gets turned off. You know, that is another scenario for the future that we might be looking at.
Speaker 2:Seems unlikely, though, don't you think it does seem?
Speaker 1:unlikely.
Speaker 2:Although you know, I'm of an age where Terminator terrified me in my younger days, so there's always that possibility. Do you think it is really all that scary? Or is it really just another evolution, as we've seen with the development of the woolen mill and the printing press and tractors on farms and everything else?
Speaker 1:I think it is another evolution. The doomsday scenario is a terrible one to think of and I know it's on people's minds, but hopefully we don't have to think about that.
Speaker 2:we'll keep our fingers crossed. Joel, jumping back to your, your business, what are the sort of unique challenges and opportunities that evolution has encountered over the last couple of years, since you've been going?
Speaker 1:look, I think we think we started a business in Canberra that was a services-based business at around about the same time that government stopped buying consultants Great timing, it was perfect timing and that's led to us having a number of rethinks and pivots and repositioning of who we are and what we do.
Speaker 1:Number of rethinks and pivots and repositioning of who we are and what we do.
Speaker 1:I have traditionally not liked being put in a box in terms of what I do professionally, and I quickly learned that to be able to be bought by government and by private sector, you need to be identified as being something. So we've pivoted between being an IT company to being an entrepreneurial company, being a management consulting company to doing contracting and everything in between, with customers from government, federal government, act, government and local businesses as well. So we've done everything in our short time of being around and I think that that's going to continue being the case. What's been really important to us is establishing strategic relationships with the University of Canberra, the ANU and some of the bigger corporates around town and small businesses around town. The work that I do in my governance role in governance roles here at the Chamber at the Canberra Innovation Network have been really important in building those relationships and building those networks as well. So it's really about continuing to have that dialogue with the business community and with the customer community.
Speaker 2:So how important is Canberra to your business's future? Are you a Canberra business here to stay? Are you looking to expand elsewhere? What does the future look like?
Speaker 1:I think for me and where I'm at with family and Canberra, absolutely Canberra is where we're going to be for the foreseeable future. The benefit of living and working in Australia means that you can work anywhere in Australia and remotely is easy to do. So we have had clients, interstate and certainly we would be looking to continue to do that as we grow and as we continue to evolve.
Speaker 2:What about internationally? Do you see a role internationally for your firm?
Speaker 1:With Ambience. It certainly does open up the opportunity to be doing things overseas and internationally. That is internationally, I guess in the Australian context I've had thoughts about using the word international rather than overseas recently, because I think it's a unique to Australia and New Zealand thing. The international market is an obvious one for ambience. Yes, so that would be really exciting.
Speaker 2:Do you think there are particular challenges about getting into other markets? What does that look like for you?
Speaker 1:We haven't really had the need to tackle it, but from the experience of being an Australian and Canberra-based business, there is a very parochial element to it and if I think about the stories I've heard from other colleagues in Australia about a digital and IT entrepreneurial business, many of those businesses have actually had success overseas before they've had success locally. So we're very well aware of that potential dynamic as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic. So I guess, Joel, just taking a step back, I mean you've obviously had a number of leadership roles over time, now running your own business, what are kind of the biggest lessons you've learned through your career that could be useful for other people to be reflecting on?
Speaker 1:I think that's a good question, greg, and one that I wasn't expecting to have. So two things come to mind, because I was trained as a psychologist many, many years ago never registered as a psychologist, but did some, you know, did all organizational psychology and a lot of counseling and therapeutic psychology training. When I was younger, my, my tolerance for discussing conflict and problems was a lot higher than a lot of my colleagues for a large part of my career, and I think that that put me in an advantageous position sometimes and a disadvantage at others. And so that self-awareness component of yourself and your strengths, as opposed to other people's comfort and strengths, was something that I didn't realise until probably 10 to 15 years into my career. If I'd have known that earlier, I think I would have had a better time at times. So that is certainly one thing that I've become aware of is is having a high level self-awareness is good, but you need to compare that level of self-awareness to others, and others will be stronger at some things than you, often things that you didn't even know. That could be a strength, and so the lesson out of that, I guess, is to have human relationships at work.
Speaker 1:In some of my jobs I've had to. Well. I had the privilege of being in a training and education position and the organisations, for whatever reason, were not encouraging but led to a situation where people would check their humanity at the door when they got to work and that leads to really terrible cultures. And so if you can enable people in a leadership position to be themselves, to play to their strengths and to recognise that other people have different strengths to them, then you've got a recipe for some really positive relationships and positive culture. And if we can align effort towards creating value, you're kind of in the mix to having a successful organisation and business. So that's, I think, the top-line lesson that I've taken out of my career.
Speaker 2:So that's a really interesting insight and I guess, to loop back to ambienceai, does the tool help manage some of those?
Speaker 1:relationships? We hope so. If I put the business person hat on for a moment, dean and I have always had this conversation about we can't be the business. We need to be building the business based around our skills and knowledge and interests and capabilities to help other businesses succeed. But separating our time from the business making money is a really important part of that and in some ways we've tried to productise our expertise through Ambience. So that's really been the goal, I think, whether we knew it or not at the time. I think that's the really interesting part. It wasn't until recently that I had the moment when we were working with Ambience and we got to a point where we went actually this is starting to productize what we know and how we go about helping people.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, that's a good insight. Fantastic, joel Medden, CEO of Evolution. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me, greg. Just a reminder that this episode of the Canberra Business Podcast is brought to you by the Canberra Business Chamber which is a supported peer center and industry super fund.
Speaker 1:Thank you.