Infrastructure is Sexy & Fun: Nokia’s Top Trend Scout on Enterprise Innovation - Leslie Shannon

Please join me in celebrating the 44th, and final episode of Season 1, with a very, very special guest. We'll be back soon with more stories of innovation and entrepreneurship from founders, CEO's and Product Leaders of disruptive and innovative products. - Nathan C. 

Leslie Shannon, Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting at Nokia, reveals how a 160-year-old company continues to lead by relentlessly adapting, trend-spotting, and cultivating innovation. 

From sawmills and rubber boots to Bell Labs AI and immersive virtual meeting agents, Leslie shows why the “pipes and infrastructure” backstage of global connectivity are more innovative—and more fun—than most people imagine.

Key Takeaways

• Reinvention DNA: Nokia constantly reinvents itself by leveraging core expertise, enabling pivots from sawmills to global telecom infrastructure and beyond.
• Enterprise Innovation: Leslie’s trend scouting bridges the worlds of customers, executives, and technologists by bringing outside insights directly into product and network strategies.
• AI With Safety Nets: Nokia’s unique approach to generative AI—using models for internal efficiency while assuring staff they’ll never be replaced by AI—demonstrates a future-forward, humane corporate playbook.
• Infrastructure as Opportunity: True innovation—whether in network tech, XR, or AI—is built on the patient, modular assembly of “building blocks” and is tested through customer feedback, not just internal enthusiasm.
• Tools for Human Collaboration: Shannon spotlights Arthur, a VR meeting tool with an AI moderator that streamlines feedback, crystallizes friction points, and helps teams focus on creative solutions instead of wasting time on consensus-building.

Leslie’s journey weaves together Nokia’s multi-generational legacy with modern foresight. She surfaces blind spots, diffuses hype with real customer needs, and ensures Nokia (and its customers) make bets that prepare them for what’s next, not just what’s now.

About Leslie Shannon

Leslie Shannon is the Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting for Nokia. A Silicon Valley-based futurist, she focuses on identifying connectivity-related tech disruptions and opportunities, including developments in robotics, drones, visual analytics, cloud gaming, generative AI, and especially augmented and virtual reality, the foundations of the Metaverse. 

Leslie has a BA from the University of Virginia, a Master’s Degree from Yale University, and was a five-time champion on Jeopardy!. She does all her daily fitness work in virtual reality. 

Leslie is the author of Interconnected Realities, a look at the current and future development of the Metaverse, and, with Catherine D. Henry, Virtual Natives, an examination of how Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s use of digital technologies is revolutionizing how humans relate to both computers and each other.

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Transcript

Nathan C: 0:00

Hello and welcome to The Tech Glow Up Fabulous conversations with innovative minds. I'm talking today with Leslie Shannon, Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting at Nokia. Leslie, it is a distinct pleasure to chat with you today. Thank you for joining me on The Tech Glow Up.

Leslie Shannon: 0:17

Thank you so much for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to have a chat with you.

Nathan C: 0:20

Oh my goodness! This is going to be such a juicy conversation. I feel like we need to just jump right in. If our topic today is trends, innovation and solving network scale problems at 160 year old company, can you first, start us off by introducing yourself and the work that you do at Nokia?

Leslie Shannon: 0:40

Yeah! Sure. Well, actually, since you mentioned the age of the company, I guess I will start with Nokia. Nokia is 160 years old. It started with, sawmills in the Finnish woods. And then it went into, rubber products in the 1890s. And then because they were doing rubber, they started getting into, the insulation for electrical wires in the 1920s. And that's actually got the bridge to them to electronics. And so they actually got into, building TVs and computers and all kinds of things until 1990 when, the wall came down. Finland at that point was, walking a delicate balance between the Soviet Union and the West. And so most of their products had actually gone to the Soviet Union, which is why we in the West had not really heard of Nokia before that. But then the wall came down, the Soviet Union collapses. People in Russia have no money to buy anything. Nokia's business collapses, and they ended up selling off all of these different things. They made car tires, they made rubber boots, all these different things. They sold them all off. Double down on mobile phones at that moment,'cause it was a new industry. The reason I mentioned this is that Nokia is a company that has reinvented itself every few decades for the last 160 years. And, not everybody could do this, but it is possible. So Nokia today, you might not have heard of us lately because after we sold the mobile phone business more than 10 years ago to Microsoft, we continued making, network infrastructure equipment. So we make the fiber optic cables, the base stations, the routers. All that kind of stuff to build the telecommunications networks. Our main customers are the phone companies of the world. I have been with the company for 25 years and I've always been on the network side so the question is, how do you actually innovate in a world like this? Because infrastructure doesn't sound all that sexy, and maybe it doesn't sound like you need to innovate very much. But as we saw with mobile phones, and like I said, I've been with the company for a long time. And I was actually based in Finland when the mobile phone business kind of blew up. I could see in my, firsthand experience that part of the problem was that the mobile phone guys got arrogant because they were at the top of the world, Nokia was the leading mobile phone. They had all the market share and they poo-pooed the arrival of Apple on the scene because they were a computer company. It was a terrible phone! If you look at it as a phone engineer, it's like, this is a really crap antenna. Voice quality is not so good. It drops calls all the time. You know, this is not a threat. But what we missed was that this device that looked like the same kind of thing we were doing, but was coming from a computer company. It wasn't a phone, it was a computer. What Apple did was they changed the device that was in our pockets from being a telephone to being a computer, and we couldn't see it because we were so blinded by our success and by the paradigm that we had of"We build telephones, the thing in your pocket is a telephone." And Apple reimagined that, and everybody listening to this probably right now has a computer in their pocket. And right now, yeah, this is an Apple that I carry! So seeing that, and again, seeing that process from upfront, it made me realize that okay, even though network infrastructure is big and heavy and very capital intensive, that doesn't exempt it. Because things can come from another industry that we are not paying attention to'cause we're busy focused on our fiber optic cables and the, the paradigm of today. And so we need to be constantly alert to what could be better. And that means looking outside our industry. So I kind of self-appointed myself, and this is the brilliance of Nokia as a company. Once I started doing this and showing the value, they made it my full-time job to look outside the telecommunications industry at things that are happening in other industries. And it first came from a defensive place, right? It was like, we don't want to get completely knocked out by somebody coming in and solving connectivity in a different new way. I was working in that defensive kind of mindset for only about six months before I realized, wait a second. I'm coming at this with fear, but what I'm seeing is opportunity by looking at other industries and understanding what their developments might mean for our industry. They're actually telling us the roadmap that we need to be developing our products for, and so that's what I do. I go out and I look at other industries that have something to do with connectivity, which is kind of everything. And so I look at new things that are developing that might need connectivity to be delivered in a different way. And so I look right now very much at XR technologies, at robots, at drones, at AI. How are these being developed by other industries with other products? And what does that mean for us and our product development and what does that mean for our customers who are buying our equipment to build networks to then serve these other industries?

Nathan C: 5:30

Oh my goodness! There's this very fun, comparison of timelines that you described. In the 160 years of this company's journey from like sawmills you know, XR, AI and robots. There is this interesting long-term thread of embodying that in a gold rush, sell shovels, right? There's this connection to the moment. What is the world doing? What is the region doing in this moment when people are building and growing and like, we're making houses and, you know, when we're starting to roll and fly, you know, we're making wheels and tubes and I love that historically the company has this, kind of DNA and culture of meeting the moment and adapting.

Leslie Shannon: 6:25

And the next big thing, the roots were embedded in what we had done previously. The sawmill work gave us the expertise to move into rubber because we knew trees. The rubber gave us the, expertise to move into electronics because we had been covering rubber cables. So, it was never like, oh, we're gonna now make lollipops. It was always rooted in what our expertise was.

Nathan C: 6:48

I think it's really important and this equation of how do you, mine your moat and I'm mixing metaphors amazingly today. How do you really take advantage of your moat while also take advantage of opportunities that are coming far down the horizon and, this kind of nexus of your role, this idea of contemporary trend scouting and innovation, for Nokia also being a bit of a revelation, right? Like coming from a pain point, coming from a missed opportunity. You had this ability to, highlight some data, bring in some pains, and, luckily had leadership and others who could see this vision, allowed you to start innovating within the company. So it's neat how, like, on a short term, maybe some of that forethought and, DNA had been forgotten or wasn't as loud.

Leslie Shannon: 7:43

The way that it happened was, that I just started doing it. I saw that there was a need for it. I'm located currently in Silicon Valley and I had just moved from Finland in 2015. I came to Silicon Valley from Finland. I was still working for Nokia and I was doing another job, but I was like, oh my God, there's all this Silicon Valley stuff! And also I was like, you know, oh, I don't want us to be disrupted. So that was really where I started bringing this information. But the key, if I had just been like, Hey guys, I see a bunch of stuff. Do you wanna hear about it? Nobody at Nokia would've bit, and I never would've gotten executive sponsorship. Being the innovation person, being the trend scouting person, there needs to be a little more oomph to it before somebody says yes, that looks really good to me. So what I did was I leveraged my customer facing role because I do have a customer facing role and I was getting in front of the customers on a very regular basis. And so talking to the CEOs, you know, of our phone companies all over the world. And I would go and I would give the presentation, which was my previous job, just, you know, here's this thing. And then at the end I would say, hey, you know what? I recently moved to Silicon Valley. If you've got an extra 10 minutes, I could show you some of the things that I'm seeing, if that would be interesting? And everyone said,"Yes, absolutely!" So then I'd show them the high level of, at that point it was like how Silicon Valley thinks differently from the telecommunications industry,'cause there really is a pretty big divide there. And so then what would happen is like six months later, the CXO level would get in touch with our account people and say,"Hey, can you bring Leslie back?""But I don't want her to talk about the Nokia stuff she was talking about.""I want to hear more about what she's seeing in the outside world." And it was the customer leverage. It was because the customers were asking for it. And because in the end what I'm doing, yes, it gets put into, or it gets fed into these things we consider for the Nokia roadmaps, but even more so, it helps our customers, the phone companies of the world, it helps them get ideas about what they're gonna do with the network. And so it's this really weird place. I haven't actually met anybody else who's in like trend scouting or foresight who's in this kind of, interesting place where actually I end up serving the customers almost more than I serve my own company. But the thing is, it's remarkable for relationship building and it helps generate brand awareness and brand trust and develop the brand relationship because we are investing in helping our customers be successful by doing this work.

Nathan C: 10:10

You just gave me about an hour and a half worth of questions I wanna follow up on. I love this! I'm having a hard time not just like taking everything that you mentioned about building value for innovative ideas within like a large enterprise and like how you tell a story by like speaking to the executives' needs and fears and desires. There's sort of a marketing masterclass in, any technology that's just out there shouting that it's a new technology."Hey, we made this new technology!" Right? Like, you're like, so what? That extra mile of explanation of contextualization is just a perfect corollary for like how so many technologies get excited to tell you that they exist, but don't give you any entry point into why you should care that we exist. That you just sort of instinctually knew or that you were able to build that into your work at Nokia. It really sounds like and this is just me being impressed with the work that you do, that you kind of act like, you know, a three or four letter consultancy, within this partner relationship, you're kind of like an internal Deloitte or you know, PwC for the network.

Leslie Shannon: 11:32

Well and, we do actually have an internal consulting arm, and I work with them all the time, but they are definitely more focused on the ins and outs of the networks. And I'm, I'm much more big picture. Because what's vital here is that I do have an understanding of how the network works. And so when I do see new technologies I know that's something that is interesting, but it doesn't change anything. So it's not relevant for our industry. But that thing over there, oh, that one might change how we build or deliver our networks. And so that's something that I need to share. The mental image that I have for the work that I do is when I'm finding these things that, okay, this is a potential input for how the network might need to develop. To me, that becomes a building block. And so I'm always out there looking around and scouting around for new building blocks, and I'm kind of mentally putting them on a table. And then it's like, okay, I've got all these building blocks now. So if I put these together, if company A is doing that and company B is doing that, and company C is doing that, what is the larger message that I can get about how things are developing and what's the big picture for how networks need to develop long-term? Long scale and large scale. And that's the kind of value that I can bring because I'm able to start with the physical examples. These things are actually happening! I'm not making stuff up. I'm not imagining, I'm starting with reality and then using the reality to be the stepping stone into where do we wanna go? If this is happening, is that way the way we wanna go? Do we wanna help this? Do we wanna not help this? it gives us a guidance.

Nathan C: 13:01

Thank you for that. This is the value of understanding what's coming, the value of being early in a trend, the value in like finding where the moats might be based on the institutional skills and background that the company has. Are all very important and they seem like almost anybody would be like, yes! Like you're looking sometimes very far in the future.

Leslie Shannon: 13:23

Yes!

Nathan C: 13:24

At next, next standards Network development

Leslie Shannon: 13:27

cycles run decades, right?

Nathan C: 13:29

How do you balance that, like long-term strategic with making sure that you're measuring what you're doing today so that leadership understands the value so that, you know, these clients can also be, leveraging it and learning. How do you measure the value of insights and trends and this long-term plan?

Leslie Shannon: 13:48

Several years ago, a colleague and I worked together and we measured, if I presented as part of a sales cycle, to a customer did it make a difference? And yes, if I was part of the sales cycle, it was statistically significant. We were statistically significantly more likely to win the deal. That's a badge I always proudly wear but I think ongoing, what people are seeing and why I'm continually in demand is that our customers keep asking for me. And that's really the draw. In fact, it becomes a problem'cause sometimes the customers contact me directly without going through our salespeople. Yeah, it's making enough of a connection with the customers. Customers are requiring this. And that's the thing that is always going to make our executives say, okay, this has value. Because what happens is, sometimes I get a call from some of our account manager, like, okay, we wanna bring up this new network functionality, we wanna bring it to the top of this particular customer. Can you come in and give a presentation about what you're seeing? And then that will get me in the room and at the end, I could give a 10 minute presentation about this new network feature. And that's win-win because, it does help our product guys get better visibility with the customer. Basically I come in and I talk about the why, and then the network person comes in and fills in the what, you know, here's what you have to do to accomplish what she was just describing. And so yeah, it's really powerful! But I'll be honest, there are actually some, within the company, there are some sales guys who are like, I don't wanna put her in front of my customer because she's not talking about Nokia products. So that's useless. So, you know, some get it and some don't. So I just, you know, over time you learn who gets it and you work with them.

Nathan C: 15:24

That's so juicy. This particular area of like how you place value and how you make bets. Where does that input and data come from? The quality of your sources often, relates to the quality of your follow up products.

Leslie Shannon: 15:40

Yes!

Nathan C: 15:40

It seems like you've got smart clients who want more! One of the things that you mentioned, that I was just really struck with was that Nokia is always sort of a little surprising that this old kind of pipes and infrastructure company is like always blowing up, always exploring and building on these new trends and opportunities. And you've noted that the internal use of AI, which is like the thing everybody's trying to figure out now, like, do we? Don't we? How do we? Where do we? That you've actually got some really, interesting things going on in Nokia's institutional.

Leslie Shannon: 16:17

Yeah! So, in 2017 we acquired Alcatel-Lucent, who is another network equipment provider. But with that, because Lucent used to be with AT&T, we got Bell Labs. So Bell Labs, you know this story, which is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year, this storied place where the transistor was invented, the first television stuff was developed. Bell Labs is now part of Nokia and it's Nokia Bell Labs. That means we have in-house, a whole bunch of really smart AI researchers. That was part of what gave us the confidence to move confidently into using generative AI. I didn't realize how different we are from other companies until I was at an innovation conference, you know, cross industry innovation conference in Boston back in May. And there are, you know, several hundred people at this conference. And then they had this big round table, you know, everybody kind of in the room contributing. How is your company, using generative AI or encouraging employees to use generative AI? And person after person stood up and said, my company blocks generative AI. I had no idea this is happening. These people were saying, if I wanna use generative AI at work, I have to bring in my private computer and use it on that, because they don't want it anywhere near any of the corporate stuff. And I was like... oh, this is terrible! So the things that Nokia has done to encourage and leverage the use of generative AI among the employee population. So there's two key policies that they set at the very beginning. The first one is that no generative AI code should ever be used in the creation of an actual product that we're taking to market or any patent that we're filing. Because we have partnered with OpenAI and we have developed a RAG. NokiaGPT, which is an open AI base, and then we have the Nokia information on top of it. It's the open AI training, but when we ask it questions, it goes to the Nokia data center. That's how RAGs work. It's still OpenAI's code is the basis of this, and we don't want OpenAI or anybody else to ever be able to come back and say,"Hey- that's our code.""So that's our patent." Or"That's our product." So we have to like, you know, strong, strong, strong guardrail there. So we create this limitation, so everybody, you know, understands where to do it and where not to do it, but for internal things like for coding and for testing, for you know, non-product coding, for all this other kind of stuff, the second policy that's in place is, an assurance, a promise that the company has made to employees that Nokia will never fire anybody, and replace them with AI. That means that you are, as an employee, encouraged to use AI without the fear that you're training the system up to be able to replace you. Now, of course, it may be that Nokia hires fewer people in the future because of efficiencies gained with AI, but the focus is not on that. It's how can you, as individual employee 89,627. How can you personally figure out how to use generative AI to improve your work process so that you can do more? Because if you and all the other 89,626 employees are using generative AI and improving your own work and improving your own processes, the entire company benefits. That's the way that Nokia views generative AI. Working carefully with trusted partners, having guardrails, making them very clear for employees, and then encouraging employees to use generative AI to make the company better and to do more. Yes! We love the work that you're doing. Now- be creative! Try to figure out how generative AI can help you do more. That's really the message and the vibe that's communicated out to the employees.

Nathan C: 20:02

From the perspective of somebody who's had to ask, like,"Hey, do we have an AI policy?" Do you have security concerns about my use of it?" I've had to have these conversations as a consultant. Or from somebody who's been shut out, but knows that everybody on the sales team is writing most of their emails with it.

Leslie Shannon: 20:20

Yep!

Nathan C: 20:21

This idea of having very clear guardrails and like, some cultural, you know, some psychological safety and encouragement to explore, I think is like a lovely model for transformation in general. I was actually just this week, and I'm curious if you've heard or seen this, somewhat related, and maybe not at Nokia, but other companies that you've been, privy to. Cory Huff, who's a marketing and a product, thought leader, who I adore, had done some research recently and had found that a number of marketing leaders are being asked to try to fill in with AI before they add headcount.

Leslie Shannon: 21:04

Oh! Wow!

Nathan C: 21:05

Can you fill this role with AI support? Is a question that they're being asked to sort of prove before, as part of like requesting headcount. Have you seen, either AI mandated, before headcount is allowed, or other digital tech that's been used in a similar preemptive way?

Leslie Shannon: 21:26

No, I haven't. But I think what you're describing, it's a very similar kind of approach to the Nokia approach. Especially if the emphasis is on have you tried using your existing team to come up with creative uses of generative AI? The emphasis here needs to not be on job shedding. It's how can you reengage your existing team to get their skills upskilled and to deepen their engagement and thereby into the whole process. And so if the messaging is like that, then I think that is actually a pretty good approach or a potentially good approach, depending on what you're looking at. But if the emphasis is on, nah, nah, we're not gonna hire any new people. I mean, the tone really matters here. Right? You know, we're not gonna hire any more people. Get AI to do it! That's a different thing! And of course, we need to think about, the jobs of the future. What are the jobs of the future going to be? I've got two sons in college. What are they gonna do? But getting internships while you're still in college. Summer internships is like, what's going on there and what you have to do. And he's going to a good school, but it's not Ivy League. And so he is having trouble getting interviews for internships. So he took a step back and he said, all right, I'm dealing with financial services firms. He himself is a computer major and, and he's like, they don't know what they don't know, so they don't know what AI could do for them. So he created a proposal for what AI could do for these private equity companies. He segmented the market. He thought to himself, okay, this is probably gonna be taken up by younger people. So I wanna find a company that's been founded relatively recently, that, you know, has a bunch of cash and you know what, whatever. But then he created a proposal and he went out to his shortlist of private equity companies. And the first one he talked to said, oh my God, this is amazing. Yes! Come work for us for the summer. And now they have actually, after his example, they've said, we've realized we need to hire a software person full-time and we want you to onboard them. So for those who are concerned about what AI is gonna do to jobs, you need to learn AI so you can use AI to get your next job.

Nathan C: 23:33

Absolutely! I think one of the differentiators that like I cannot overstate is this idea that if you are a company with a gigantic data set, with a gigantic workforce, with like global-sized problems, using AI to understand and activate and socialize your own data is a first level problem. That's like organizing and sharing data.

Leslie Shannon: 24:06

Yes!

Nathan C: 24:06

It's the same thing Google Docs was invented to do. That's the step that everybody should take is start to understand your data. The idea, right? That AI is taking jobs. I've actually built AI workflows for my content production, like how I produce the podcast and do all the social media that I have, and I've actually hired people to run my workflows because they were so easy to hand off. I don't need to give all the context to the person. I need to give it to the workspace that we're sharing. I need to teach the model what I want, and then the tasks and the connection and the processing that all happens with the people. So I've actually used AI to optimize my workflows and allow me to better empower people to help me do what I want. I hadn't considered that like AI for training, means that like AI just kind of understands and works with that context, the institutional knowledge in a way that kind of just is input through the act of chatting and building the prompts and the space. So I've seen it how it makes jobs, rather than just replacing them.

Leslie Shannon: 25:18

Absolutely! And this is true of all new technologies. The technology that we are surrounded with now is nothing like the technology that was in play 50 years ago. And every single thing that has come in has, yes, it has destroyed things, but yes, it has created things. And this is no different.

Nathan C: 25:35

From the perspective of The Tech Glow Up, right? And the kinds of values and advice that we try to surface here, this idea of, that AI is a fantastic way to do business research, to build out concepts quickly, to grow in areas that you may not be strong in, but be able to act enough so that you can learn and get that feedback and in the hands of a curious person, you can literally build companies, build value, there's so much you can build beyond funny videos or, hyper-realistic future portraits of yourself. You can learn and test and grow, in very impressive ways.

Leslie Shannon: 26:18

Well, and I would tie that back to, the lesson of how Nokia has evolved over the years in that every single, new kind of step up to a new plateau, a new level was based in the expertise from before. And taking that personally. As you're developing your use of AI, start with what you know. Start with what your expertise is, or if you're, very early in your career, if you don't have expertise yet, at least, what's your interest? Start from that. Passion matters! Passion matters. And, I'm passionate about new things and about developing new technologies in a positive, inclusive kind of way. My son seems to be passionate about venture capital, private equity, but hey, you know, whatever floats your boat! When you're passionate about things, AI and then using AI as the tool to let you take it to new directions that you have never thought of before on a personal level, that can be super exciting and supercharge your career and your engagement with your career. And then on a corporate level, if you can actually encourage and harness all of your employees, or most of your employees, or even some of your employees to be thinking and acting this way within their jobs, then that's how you take the whole company up to the next level.

Nathan C: 27:28

Amazing! Leslie, this has been a fantastic conversation! We're coming down to some of the last questions. And we always like to make an opportunity to give a spotlight or give a shout out to somebody or a group that you think is, doing great work, whether it's a nonprofit or anybody else focused on impact. Is there a spotlight that you'd like to share?

Leslie Shannon: 27:48

I would love to spotlight, a virtual reality meeting company called Arthur. What Arthur has done is they have added an AI moderator into the virtual reality meetings, which can happen either on a VR headset or on a laptop. The idea is that especially for kinds of meetings like brainstorming, where you wanna hear from everybody in the room, and then you need to make a decision based on all those inputs. For that kind of meeting, what they do is they use their AI moderator to interview everybody simultaneously within this virtual world. It's like, you're talking to your version of the AI moderator and I'm talking to mine at the same time, right? So instead of taking 50 minutes for the meeting, you get 10 minutes where everybody gives their inputs, and then Arthur creates a board where they say, here's what I heard from everybody. Here's where people agreed. Here's where I heard different things from different people that needs resolving, and here's what I suggest as next steps. So for things like,"Hey, what should our next project be?" This is brilliant! I cannot, cannot emphasize enough how transformational this is, and it's one of the first uses of AI that I've seen transforming an existing process that we've had forever and making it significantly better and more efficient. So shout out to Arthur!

Nathan C: 29:11

Heck yeah! Shout out to Arthur. I use this example quite frequently. The folks at Arthur, love to call out, you know how much time you spend agreeing in a meeting.

Leslie Shannon: 29:22

Oh my God, yes!

Nathan C: 29:24

Right? Listening to Leslie, listening to Nathan and everybody says like, I think the secret project is a really good idea. And you wait until the last, you know five minutes of the meeting. And you know, a very smart developer or marketer is like, do we have the domain for the, you know, for the website? The most important question, in the meeting only gets five minutes. There are a couple things about this that I love that I have to get into. I initially thought like, is a faceless robot asking me questions, going to like make me feel like I'm not heard?

Leslie Shannon: 30:00

Right.

Nathan C: 30:00

And I actually witnessed several meetings where people took their time and you could tell that they enjoyed the opportunity to have one robot's attention and the ability to say everything they were thinking about. The cool thing is I got that all summarized in post-it notes. I only spent a few moments, with all of that information and when I got it, it was already contextualized. I felt like I could really contribute. I felt like the agent was helpful,

Leslie Shannon: 30:33

It's a great agent. And that

Nathan C: 30:34

it was so focused on one task, I think is just a really good example to remind anybody working on cutting edge technology, you don't need more features. You need to do one task incredibly seamlessly, helpfully well.

Leslie Shannon: 30:50

Great call!

Nathan C: 30:51

And that will win people over, over and over.

Leslie Shannon: 30:53

Oh, a hundred percent!

Nathan C: 30:54

And like there's very few things that I'd prefer to do in VR.

Leslie Shannon: 30:58

Within my own team, when we did an Arthur session, I was demoing it really to the rest of the team. We realized when we saw that summary of here's the things we agree on, and here's the things we disagreed on, we realized in our regular meetings, we spend almost all of our time on the, the topics that we agree on because it's so pleasant. We spend almost no time on the, here's what we disagree on,'cause nobody really wants to bring that stuff up. But Arthur, by doing that, it flips the script completely because yet we agree on that, we don't need to talk about it anymore. So then the whole meeting becomes about how do we resolve these sticking points? What are our genuinely good next steps?

Nathan C: 31:36

There's real human stress about even labeling something as a disagreement.

Leslie Shannon: 31:43

Right!

Nathan C: 31:43

So having a third party who's like, I think these two ideas don't match. You know, not saying, I think Nathan and Leslie are fighting. But like, hey guys,

Leslie Shannon: 31:53

I heard different things! This needs resolving, you know?

Nathan C: 31:57

It takes you so much further down the line.

Leslie Shannon: 31:59

We humans are very fabulous, but we also very primordial. Emotions matter. Yep!

Nathan C: 32:04

And, isn't it great when technology can help them not get in the way? We often worry that like technology might dehumanize, but like in this particular alignment session, it seems like the opportunity is for technology to make difficult human things much easier to approach.

Leslie Shannon: 32:24

Great observation! In fact, it helps us navigate ourselves.

Nathan C: 32:28

I mean, heck yeah! Leslie Shannon, for several years now, you have been, one of the people that I go to, to help me untangle and demystify, what's going on in the worlds of technology and innovation. It's been such a lovely journey, to listen to the ways that your research, your connecting with customers and, looking at future possibilities has allowed you to both embody the DNA of this 160 year old enterprise, as well as, remind some of the leading technologists out there the importance of, research and, learning and, always keeping your eyes at what's coming next. If people wanna know more or connect with you, what's the best way they can follow up?

Leslie Shannon: 33:19

The best way is LinkedIn, Leslie Shannon and I work for Nokia. So, that's that! And I also have an irregular newsletter that I send out, over email. If you are interested, when you connect with me on LinkedIn say,"Hey, I'd like to sign up for the newsletter." I send it out kind of every other month, and it's just the latest, here's the stuff that I've seen lately. If you're interested, I'm always happy to add more recipients!

Nathan C: 33:38

That list of insights is one of the few emails that I look forward to. Highly recommend there. So many great lessons here for innovators, both small and globally sized. Leslie Shannon, once again, thank you so much for joining me on The Tech Glow Up. Really, fantastic conversation!

Leslie Shannon: 33:55

Thank you for having me, Nathan!