0:00:02.7 Wayne Brown: Hello, I’m your host, Wayne Brown, and welcome to The ET Project. We’re delighted to be delivering this live episode for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. Today we’re back in Melbourne, Australia to have a conversation with our guest, Mr. Tony Gruebner, a seasoned executive with over 15 years of global leadership experience. Half of this time has been in c-level roles across fast growing competitive B2C industries. Most recently, he served as chief marketing officer at a leading global FinTech company, driving year on year customer acquisition growth. Tony has also played a pivotal role in the development of AI powered customer engagement strategies, scaling international teams and transforming organizations through data-driven decision making. As the author of AI for CEOs, Tony’s combines his deep expertise in analytics, AI, and digital transformation to simplify complex concepts for senior decision makers.
0:01:11.6 WB: His insights empower leaders to harness AI’s potential to enhance customer experiences, improve efficiency and drive sustainable growth with a proven track record of working alongside boards, global organizations, and elite teams. Tony is here to share actionable advice on navigating the rapidly evolving AI landscape. So team, in this episode today, we are delving into Tony’s new book and discussing some of the essentials that all leaders need to be aware of as we find ourselves plowing ever deeper into automation, robotics, AI and the whole digital space. It’s a great conversation and one that any leader who has ever found themselves confused or overwhelmed on this relatively new journey, will take an enormous amount away from we hope you enjoy.
0:01:56.6 S?: Welcome to The ET Project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor Wayne Brown as we unpack an exciting future together.
0:02:14.2 WB: Welcome team to today’s episode, and today we’re going to dive into the world of artificial intelligence and the whole impact it’s having around the business landscape and in particular senior executives and the CEO. And as you’ll all know full well by now, AI is no longer just a buzzword, right? It’s the game changer, it’s enhancing efficiency, innovation, it’s driving strategic growth. It’s pretty much come from the heavens and it’s empowering everything that we do. And we’re going to explore how you the leader, can harness that power and learn how to navigate some of the complexities around it and even align it with your organizational goals. So I’m hoping with our guest, and through our conversation, we’re gonna be able to demystify some of what AI is and how it all operates, and give you some practical insights and frameworks to help leverage the technology and perhaps even give you that competitive advantage. So we have a wonderful guest with us, Tony Gruebner, and Tony’s written a new book that he released just a few months back called AI 4 CEOs: The least technical book you’ll ever read about AI. Now that’s not me talking, that’s Tony’s title of the book. Tony, welcome to the ET project.
0:03:34.2 Tony Gruebner: Hey Wayne, thank you. Thank you for having me, thank you for the intro.
0:03:41.5 WB: Now you’re a product of the long white cloud, otherwise it’s known as New Zealand, but you’ve been on quite the adventure. So I wonder if we could set the scene and learn a little bit about how you came to be doing marketing and interested in digital and all things tech.
0:03:57.7 TG: Right. Yeah, so like you said, I grew up in New Zealand, and spent most of my formative years there, through till my 20s and like many New Zealanders. I started to look further abroad, and spent some time in Dublin, spent some time in London, and then I’m ultimately, I’ve been in Australia for the last 13 years so I’m in Melbourne at the moment. Through that time, I’ve always had an interest in, funny enough considering the topic and whatever. I think that I struggled at maths at school, and I did alright at school in generally, but maths wasn’t really a strong suit. But I think it was one of those ones where I think I had a street smart for maths as opposed to a academic understanding of maths.
0:04:44.3 TG: And I think in some regards there is great value in having a academic shaping in maths, and a lot of stuff we’re gonna talk about is really built on maths. But at the same time, having an understanding about how the practicality of maths and how it works and especially works in businesses is I’ve found to be a really great skill for me and so I’ve worked across marketing, like you said, books across product and digital sort of, realms, but very much with an analytical background, or analytical sort of understanding as to how those things operate. And so which is a very useful place to be at this point in time in history. I think that while there’s still a definitely an arts to maths and things… Sorry, to marketing and things like that, there is a growing sort of science component to it as well or mathematical component to it.
0:05:31.7 TG: And at the end of the day, it’s not just about any of those in isolation, it’s about how you bring those together, and I think that if I was to talk about my strengths, my strengths are probably in how you bring that together, and that’s really where some of the book comes from. And that title around the least technical, book you’ll ever read about AI. I’m a massive advocate to go, well, yes, the technologies that are being used and everything is incredibly complex and everything but at the end of the day, unless it’s practical, unless it’s usable, unless it serves a commercial purpose, then what are we doing all this for. And I think the most, I talk about it quite a bit in the book, the most valuable people in the future will be those people that can join those dots together. The multipliers, I call it the people that can actually make they take one on one and they make more than two and that’s a little bit of my history and really hopefully that explains a little bit as to the angle that I come to this topic on it is…
0:06:30.5 WB: Dive into the book and unpack it a little bit. When I first read the title, I thought, gosh, this guy has written this book just for me, the least technical book you’ll ever read about AI. What inspired you to write from that angle, specifically aimed at the non-technical leaders?
0:06:45.5 TG: I mean for starters, I’ve led a lot of teams that are obviously incredibly technical and here is what they do and what they build and the way they build it. And so I know a lot of people with really strong backgrounds in this and AI is, that goes without saying, but AI is a very technical thing. But at the end of the day for starters, knowing those people, I know that my limitations in that space, I mean, I’m never gonna understand that the technical elements of how to sort of really create really complex models. But at the end of the day, that’s, as I said in the intro, that’s not really what I think is important. It’s important to have those people that know how to do that stuff.
0:07:30.1 TG: But at the end of the day I’m very passionate about this point of we need to be… I’m a very big advocate for AI and I think that, while it’s being turned to a bit of a buzzword or a massive buzzword there’s a lot of nonsense in there as there is with any buzzword. But at the end of the day, unless it’s actually useful, unless you use it, unless you get commercial results out of it, then it’s pointless. And following on from that, I’m a massive advocate of the fact that I don’t think that AI means you have to completely change the way you think about your business, I think it means it really can, if used properly, it’s something that can amplify your business. And I think for the CEOs that I was writing for in my head, are the person that really knows their, they might not be technical, but they really are good at what they do.
0:08:18.5 TG: Otherwise you wouldn’t be a CEO otherwise, but they really know what they’re doing in terms of running their business. And then AI is fundamentally just a tool that can be used to run it even better, to offer a better customer experience to create some operational savings or whatever. I think you’ve gotta think about it from that point of view, and I’ve seen so many instances where, and this is what I talked about in the book quite a lot, and it frustrates me a lot, is people think, oh, we’ve gotta do AI, now what are we gonna do with that AI? And it sort of goes without saying that you should think about it the other way around, but so many people don’t, it’s a real bugbear of mine. So really at the end of the day, it’s gotta be an understanding that this is what we wanna do for our business, and then can AI be the tool that actually helps us to do that? And that is a strategic question, it’s not a technical question.
0:09:13.6 WB: I like that you have one of the simplest definitions of AI that I’ve seen, you say AI equals adding thought to task performed by teams. That just brings it back down to ground level for me. AI equals adding thought to task performed by teams. If we think about that and we dissect that further, you’re really saying that AI has the capacity to think?
0:09:39.6 TG: Yeah, we are getting into dodgy territory in terms of when we sort of say think. But I think just, the simplest way I think about that so, sorry I think the definition is adding thought to task performed by machines. I think that in the past, if you think about where automation or where any sort of machines have been used in business to think about factories or the industrial revolution, those machines have had a set, those machines have have given us incredible gains. I mean, there’s no one that now puts a… That has sit in the factory and put a top on a toothpaste lid to use it, that’s all done by machines and plenty of other things, more obviously. But I think the thing is that all those machines were built on the premise that they performed the task and they were told exactly how to perform that task.
0:10:28.4 TG: And they were built with that purpose. Now, AI opens that paradigm quite a bit in terms of it’s touch and go as to whether or not it thinks for itself. And it doesn’t necessarily… And we are getting to the stage. There are certain models out there that at that set their own goals, if you will, but I think to just take it back to that, toothpaste analogy a machine without AI has to be programmed exactly to know what to do in order to put that cap on the toothpaste, whereas a AI driven machine, not that you probably would use it for that purpose, but it wouldn’t necessarily need to be told exactly how to put the cap on the toothpaste, but what it would be told by a human is it would be told, what we need to do right now is we need to put the cap on the toothpaste.
0:11:12.0 TG: So it’s still got the human setting the goal as to what we wanna achieve, but the thing is it, the AI can think about what is the best way to do that, or how can I do that? I think where you get into the next, the extra round, which probably gets a bit scary and probably is further on from where we are now. And is, I’m not saying that we should even go there, but that would be that it doesn’t even… The machine sets the goal to work out, while I should be putting the machine, I should be putting this on the toothpaste, or I should be doing something else. That’s where it gets into that sort of singular type thing, but I think for now, we’re very much in that realm where we as humans set the goals.
0:11:52.0 TG: And this is that point around we as humans set the strategy, we as humans especially the CEO still sets the strategy of the business and executive leaders still say, this is how we wanna do it [0:12:02.9] ____ This is what we wanna do and why we wanna do it, but these AI machines have the ability to then either perform those tasks in a way that traditional machines that were just programmed very much to perform one task, it opens up the realm of what we can actually get machines to do.
0:12:24.9 TG: You have a great example in the book talking about Excel spreadsheets and the capability of the Excel spreadsheet is still down to the coding, the programming of that software versus AI, which as you just explained, I think that’s a nice distinction. I wonder if we could… We can go back a little bit and look at the journey of AI before we get too deep into the current world. You mentioned in the book that the term itself goes all the way back to I think a convention or a meeting or an event or some form back in the mid ’50s. And we sort of built gradually or progressively from there. How much did events like IBM’s Deep Blue, winning the chess over Casper of I think it was, or Watson winning Jeopardy or even more recently with Google’s AlphaGo beating the world champion. Like how much have all of those highlight points really shaped or driven the impact with the development of AI, do you think?
0:13:30.3 TG: Yeah, I think you mean, you said at the top that the AI feels like it’s being dropped from the clouds on us recently, and in some regards it sort of has, and that’s very much around the release of ChatGPT and whatever. That was really what brought it to the… That’s what really brought it sort of to the sort of masses, it almost gave like an interface to AI. So from that regard, it definitely felt like as a end user, it felt like, well this is now accessible to me. I can now type natural language and use AI. And so from that point of view, yes, it did drop from the clouds. But in terms of what led up to that event sort of late 2022, you’ve mentioned it, there was so much building blocks that were built in order to get to that point.
0:14:15.9 TG: And yeah, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that happened along the way. One of the things I talk about in the book, which was a huge event that happened that not many people would know about and it relates back to things like ChatGPT and the conversation we’re just having about AI’s ability to think was, there was, back in 2011, there was a challenge that went through in terms, that used to be happening every year, this is the early days of AI or machine learning, or whatever you want to call it, or relatively early days, not early days, is image recognition task, so the task was for a, to get a machine, so academics would submit their machines to try and recognize what was in a raft of images.
0:15:02.3 TG: And it got to the point where, for many years it was getting to the point where people, the machines were about 80% accurate. So 80% of the time they were able to an avocado would show on the screen and I’d say, this is an avocado or whatever, and they’re getting this right about 80% of the time but it plateaued around that point. And then it wasn’t until a group called AlexNet, came in and they used what’s, essentially, a predecessor to the ChatGPT models, which was based on deep learning, which best way to describe it ’cause I am not technical, but I’ve also given the preface that I don’t want the audience to think this is technical, but the best way to describe it was the machine learning models up to that point were very linear, in terms of the way that they thought these machine learning models were built on.
0:15:52.8 TG: There was much more, sorry, this is very layman’s, but there was much more sort of thought going in with these deep learning models, and they were able to really think more like humans in some regards. If you think about the way that a human interacts, and for the first, I mean, it’s amazing how quickly a child can actually start to do that same task around, “No hey, this is an avocado, this is” and they don’t do that task because they’re told, Hey, this is exactly what an avocado looks like, it has to have this exact shape, it has to have all these things, there’s something in our mind that can conceptualize things and work out, even if you’ve got an avocado that looks a certain way, this is still also an avocado. And so that deep learning model that was created, and it was such a step change, it went from like I said, it plateaued around about 20%, inaccuracy so 80% correct.
0:16:40.4 TG: They got that down to overnight in a step change, they got that down to about 10 or 8% inaccuracy just with that type of model. And that’s where a lot of the stuff’s come around, around ChatGPT and those types of large language models. Whereas they are, you can imagine there’s no world where I could be typing into ChatGPT and just have sort of a very linear machine learning model that’s you’re trying to program to say, do exactly this, do exactly this, what it’s doing is infinite almost, almost like a human, our brains are very infinite in terms of the things that they can come up with and the creativity and everything. The only thing about ChatGPT that humans can’t mimic is that, it could access so much more information and so it’s got that advantage, but there’s still, don’t get me wrong, there’s still many plenty of ways that, humans have an advantage over the machine and I think a lot of the premise of the book is around how do you make that work together? How do you take the advantages of what a machine can do or AI and then combine that with what a human can do.
0:17:40.4 WB: There’s a couple of terms that are used fairly commonly now, generative AI and you’ve mentioned, natural language. Let’s start with the latter natural language. So natural language meaning our everyday speech versus having to sit down and code or create a program to get the computer to do something. Is that correct?
0:18:04.7 TG: Yeah, that’s a really good way of describing it. And that’s what I talk about when I say that when, ChatGPT, the game changer for ChatGPT was the fact that it gave, that the barriers to using AI was literally, I just needed to know how to, I was gonna say, say English, but it doesn’t need to be English, obviously. I just need to be able to talk, and then I can all of a sudden use AI, and it’s such a, that’s the interface to using AI and that’s where it changed and that’s where it went from being a very select few that can actually use it to pretty much anyone on the planet can actually use it. My 7-year-old daughter is, using ChatGPT supervised obviously, but that’s where the game changer was in terms of that just ability to use natural language.
0:18:48.4 WB: And the term generative AI is there a simple definition? Why generative? Like what’s the grounding of that?
0:19:00.8 TG: Yeah, I mean, Generative, it’s under that same sort of realm as, I mean it’s a bit of a… It’s that same sort of realm of generating, and in most cases, when you’re talking about generative AI, you are talking about the natural language stuff, so the biggest use case of that is the ChatGPT use case of, being able to have speech and have speech come back to you or have you’ve obviously got things like, not just speech come back to you obviously, but things like images or, getting into a realm of plenty more things other than just images and texts that you can generate. But fundamentally, it’s… And this isn’t strictly the definition, but if we think about it from a usability point of view, it’s things that I can now generate, by natural language.
0:19:45.3 WB: Got it, thank you for that. You make a really good point in the book talking about the fact that we think of AI as this be all to end all, but an actual fact, it can’t physically manifest things, right? And you need this peripheral set of components around it. It’s like the brain, but it needs the arms and the feet and the legs to, in many cases, to bring things to life. Could you explain that a little bit better? A little bit deeper than what I’ve introduced about what you mean.
0:20:20.6 TG: I reckon the easiest way to… I mean it is easiest way to describe it, is we all of a certain age watched, things like The Jetsons when we were kids and thought that we were gonna be sitting here with a robot maid that was gonna be doing everything for us. Ironically in terms of we could create the brain for a robot maid, we now have the AI that’s, just that capability, but the ability to actually do a lot of the things that we might want it to do in terms of folding laundry, and things like that. Now there is advancement being made in robotics and whatever. I think that it’s an interesting dilemma around things in the digital world are quite easy to automate through AI. So this is why I mentioned things like, ChatGPT can give me text, obviously on the screen ’cause that’s very easy to output and we can do images, we can do, it get to point where it can create your PowerPoint presentation for you or things like that. But if you ask, obviously if you ask it to do something in the physical world, a bit more of a challenge. But this is where businesses are trying to digitalize more things and as an example of that, and it’s probably not a good example, it hasn’t actually worked very well is McDonald’s has, tried to digitalize a lot of their sort of customer experience around touch screens and things that they’re doing at the drive-through and whatever to bring that all into screenage.
0:21:44.3 TG: And it’s had some challenges, but things like, maybe a better example would be shopping, supermarket shopping, things like smart carts and things like that. I think that those smart carts have your thing on, have a screen on them. So when you put something into the cart, it registers and it basically does your checkout basically happens right at that point in time or you’ve got Amazon Go stores, which are more… Amazon Go stores you literally take something off the shelf and as you take it off the shelf it registers to your app using a lot of smart AI and those things, all those examples I just gave you, none of those are all, those are interesting ways of tackling the problem, none of them are overly successful at this stage, and it just goes to show the challenge of bringing AI into the real world. But there is some interesting things happening there, and I think that, I think it’s an interesting area to explore around, how we are gonna actually utilize AI in the real world given those physical challenges more so than, yeah, like I said, we could build the brain for the what was The Jetsons ‘s robot name? I think Rosie for some reason or was it.
0:22:46.7 WB: Rosie.
0:22:48.7 TG: Was it really?
0:22:49.6 WB: Yeah.
0:22:51.4 TG: We could build Rosie’s brain, but we couldn’t get her to put the, fold the sheets or even do that kind of stuff. But like I said, there’s a lot of stuff happening in that space, it’s just clunky at the moment. But I think the most important thing, and I talk about this quite a bit in the book, is that we need to think about some of those things differently to the way that our bias is that we would think, okay if we want the, robot to be folding these sheets, we would do it exactly the same way that a human would do it. But we need to think about, well hold, hold on, if we’ve got machines in the process here, we need to rethink that. And I’m not saying that every house should have like conveyor belt or anything like that, but if you are literally trying to get a machine to fold things, it’ll probably come through a conveyor belt and it would go through all those things. You need to think about the different paradigms as to how that works. And you need to think about that this is where innovation has to come in and you almost have to take away what you already knew and to apply new processes to these things.
0:23:49.6 WB: Right. For me, that almost raises the philosophical question around customer convenience through the technology versus the role that technology’s going to play and you quote about delivering humanity at scale, the fact that AI is the brain, but can it add the heart into the process? I think that’s a great philosophical question that we’re probably grappling with as a society at the moment. So your key point around it, I guess, is that AI should enhance or supplement and not detract from that experience.
0:24:23.1 TG: Yeah it’s something I’m very passionate about. And this also plays back to the thing of AI and its application needs to be a strategic commercial thing rather than a technical thing. ‘Cause a lot of things you can do technically, but does that offer a better experience? It’s not really AI related, but you think about, I don’t know, when you go through a supermarket checkout, do you go through the self checkout or do you get through and talk to a person? And then for some people like it almost feels like there’s two people in the world, half of the people like going, through the staff checkout and half people like going through the other thing. But I think how do you build that? Are you building convenience in the process?
0:25:04.2 TG: Are you actually building… Are you building these things? One of the examples I talk about in the book is, and it’s not really AI driven, but I think it just goes to prove that point more is so Howard Schultz the founder of Starbucks. I listened to a podcast that he was interviewed in recently. And the mobile app for Starbucks has been huge in terms of the revenue it brings in and other things it does and in some regards, it’d be easy to think about it from a, that mobile app is fantastic, I can now order through the mobile app, it’s so much more convenient than having a lineup and do all those things. But he bemoans that like quite strongly. He sort of says it’s taken the essence and the soul of what Starbucks actually is.
0:25:42.9 TG: I mean, Starbucks was designed to be this place where people met, people talked, people did those things. And so what is the balance here? Like what are you trying to achieve? Even if you use technology, AI or otherwise to create this great convenient experience, are you actually solving the problem or are you actually creating other problems? I think getting that balance right is gonna be, once again, that’s gonna be answered, not by the people writing the code, the AI people, that’s gotta be answered by the strategic people, the people that understand the customer, and understand those experiences. And I think it’s an interesting dilemma for everyone to sort of grapple and get their heads around it. Is this tool gonna actually improve the customer experience or is it actually gonna take away from the customer experience?
0:26:29.4 WB: I’ve been very outspoken about that mobile app. I’m a Starbucks drinker and have been for eons, and I can still recall walking into a Starbucks, let’s say a decade ago when it was fairly recently released for the first time in my life, there was a queue waiting to be served for coffee because the baristas were so fully engaged fulfilling the mobile app requirements that they’d forgotten about the experience of the people that were still in the shop itself. And I’ve been a huge critic of it ever since and I was hopeful that, Schultz would have that opportunity to come around and crowdsource some feedback because, and I still find it today, by the way, the level of service due to the mobile app and the need for the people behind the counter to service those couriers that are just constantly coming and going has really increased the waiting time for people that are walk-ins. And I think that’s around the point that he’s making is the whole experience has been impacted.
0:27:36.8 TG: Yeah that’s 100% where we need to get, that we need to, you need to… The only answer, there’s no real answer to that ’cause the mobile app in some regards, I mean, it’s fantastic for the business and it’s just really driven the business. And I think I’m getting this number wrong, I think it’s in the book, but I think there’s, well, more than half of the orders of Starbucks now are mobile app, related. So it goes to show that there is that demand for it. But at the same time, like, yeah, it’s a balance and it’s making sure that you are not losing the essence of what the business actually is. And the only person that can really answer that is the people that the CEO and executive leaders or people that work in the business that know, this is what my brain stands for, this is what we are. And I think it’s a key question as you start to think about AI. I mean, AI has a lot of ways where it can make things less, we’ve definitely been down this, the app we’re talking about is not AI driven, but it’s just an example of technology. But we’ve definitely been down this path where technology has made things a lot more faceless or we’ve lost that thing.
0:28:44.9 TG: AI has the ability to personalize a lot of that, a bit more and make that experience a little bit better, but it’s not gonna happen automatically and so it could make the dilemma that we’re talking about better, but if used wrong I think it could definitely make it worse. And I think what people, that’s a key thing that people need to think about when they think about using AI to improve the customer experience.
0:29:06.6 WB: You mentioned three main reason that businesses are interested in AI, increased revenue, reduced costs, and building sustainable competitive advantage, particularly the last one, the sustainable advantage against our competitors. How does that play out with AI?
0:29:19.9 TG: I mean the reason why you can see that, if you look at any stats around the investment that large businesses are putting into AI at the moment is staggering. And whether or not there is return on that investment is very debatable. But I think that… I think a lot of those businesses have got into a situation where it’s become, they almost have to put that in because they need to, if they don’t put that in, it’s gonna, it’s less so about can I actually drive revenue and ROI and so much more about how can I protect my business? I talk a lot about, SaaS businesses and software businesses that I think are gonna become, there’s so many of these startup AI businesses around, and not all those startup AI businesses are gonna be successful, but they’re building these great technologies, these great softwares, these great user interfaces that a lot of those old tech, and when I say old tech, I’m talking about things that probably were built like five, six years ago that weren’t built on AI.
0:30:22.8 TG: A lot of those will become obsolete very quickly. So take something like a Salesforce or a some of the other tools that we’re very used to using. I mean, a good example of that is, and I don’t know exactly how this will play out. I’m not a futurist unfortunately, but a lot of those tools, everything that I do is very drag and click so I’m using Salesforce or whatever, I drag it and I click it. But in this world of generative AI, in some regards, it might be better for me to be just typing away and just going, can you please do this? And I think that will create software that hopefully will be the way I would describe it is that that drag and click interface that we’re very used to is very much I, as the user need to change my behavior to fit the tool.
0:31:17.9 TG: I need to, Salesforce says this is the way that I should, I shouldn’t be picking on Salesforce, but Salesforce says that this is the way that I should do this, so click here, click here, click here. This is a generative AI interface, which is much more, I as the user, I wanna do it this way. So I’m gonna tell you how I wanna do it now now can the tool do that for me? I think that there’s gonna be a real challenge to and you see, I mean, Salesforce and plenty of these other SaaS companies building AI plugins, a lot of the AI plugins into their tools that they’ve got the problem that is, they get stuck into this, and this happens with any sort of disruptive technology, they get stuck into this world where they’ve got their existing customer base that they don’t want to alienate, and they’re trying to also have their cake and eat it too, by living in this AI world as well.
0:32:08.8 TG: And so it becomes a bit of, being half pregnant on these things. So that becomes ripe for some of these other businesses, these startups, to really create something that’s AI native. And that’s just an example where how does, Salesforce or monday.com or any of these other tools that we are really used to using, how do they protect their businesses and build that sustainable competitive advantage? And that’s why you see so many of them investing in AI. The obvious one that we’ve got at the moment is Google, we’re so used to searching through Google, that’s pretty much what 99% of internet users on the planet outside of China, I suppose do. But with generative AI. And you can see ChatGPT recently released ChatGPT search, and it’s still clunky.
0:32:54.7 TG: But am I gonna wanna type something into a search box and get a raft of results that I then sift through and click through or am I gonna just wanna talk to the machine and tell me, hey, answer my problem, or come up with the solution for me. And so I think that’s and Google is very much on the forefront of that AI investment because they’re living in this world where they’re massive cash cow. I wouldn’t say it’s massively under a threat at the moment, but they realize that they need to get on the forefront of knowing that, well we need to be building something that if something does disrupt this whole model, we need to be the one disrupting ourselves. I think it’s a key thing that, to be honest when I started doing the research on AI for building the book, I very much thought about the first two that you talked about in terms of it’s a great way to increase revenue through improved customer experience, or it’s a way to reduce costs through better operational efficiency. But this point about building that sustainable advantage became, very apparent and it became a bit more clear as to why some of these big companies were investing so heavily in AI, without necessarily knowing exactly what that ROI would look like or thinking about a different way of actually measuring what the ROI is rather than just short term revenue.
0:34:13.3 WB: As you say, companies spend a lot of money putting a system in place, it becomes their legacy system, and then they have to put these patches in place through AI to try and build on that without losing everything they’ve invested in and the customer usage, convenience aspect, and now AI is kind of causing us to rethink that whole dynamic. Our listener base are leaders and I’m wondering, is there some particular skillset that we leaders need around AI to be successful in the application?
0:34:55.9 TG: Yeah, I mean it’s a tricky question to answer and I talk quite a lot in the book around what things that you need to think of, and I’m also conscious the fact that I’ve given, I’m sure that I’ve given a lot of examples around sort of technology businesses and talking about Google and Salesforce and whatever, and I’m sure that some of your listeners will be in that realm, but some of your listeners will be in probably non-technical realms, and they’ll probably sitting there going, well, yeah, is AI really gonna impact my business? And the answer is maybe in some of those circumstances. But I think that in terms of what they need to do is, I think that, and this is once again goes to the purpose of the book, is that you don’t need to become an AI expert, there’s no I think the thing I was trying to hopefully, which sounds sort of comforting to leaders in this world that seems very complex and out there is you just need to be continuing to, continue to do what you do in terms of understanding the customer, understanding the strategic problems of the business. And we talked a lot about that thing around how technology improves or sometimes decreases the customer experience.
0:36:06.7 TG: And that being a strategic problem, not a technical problem, the best person to answer that is probably yourself or your leaders that you got around you, not the CTO or the technical person. But I think in that sort of realm, I think, and I mentioned at the start as well, and I talk about it quite a bit and quite passionately, is that the greatest skill I think of the future is the person that’s the multiplier, it doesn’t matter where you are in the business, if you’re the CEO or, at the bottom rung of the hierarchy, the person that can actually bring all this together and can sift through the jargon, and really put this into… The person that can actually take that from going, “Hey, this is the customer experience that we actually wanna offer for our customers, because I know the customers so well can then actually work through two tech teams to actually make that happen, the people that can bring that together, and that’s leadership at the end of the day that that’s the most valuable skill you can have, it’s not necessarily knowing how to code, it’s not necessarily knowing, exactly what the definition for generative AI actually is, or large language models and all those kind of things, it’s really about, it’s the same questions you’ve already got for your business.
0:37:12.1 TG: How do I improve the customer experience? How do I create these operational efficiencies? And then it’s just, it’s so happens, you’ve got this really potentially handy tool, a very handy tool that can amplify that. But you still gotta come back to thinking about it in terms of business doesn’t change the way that you have to fundamentally think about providing a product or service for your customers and making sure that you do this so, and the unit economics are sorted and all those kind of things that are non-technical questions, that strategic commercial questions.
0:37:35.0 WB: On the topic of strategy you originally posted about your brand, if somebody is now using ChatGPT or generative AI in whatever form and they’re searching for your business, what is it actually saying about your business? And you make a great point that you can actually correct it if it’s incorrect. I’d never thought about this. I mean, we’re all very focused on SEO and optimizing SEO etcetera, and making sure that when people use Google, they find us in the right light. But now we have a slightly different angle. So I’m just wondering if you could explain that a little bit more.
0:38:15.2 TG: Yeah, I think this might be the next, well it’s not necessarily the next evolution, but it’s an extinction is the way we probably need to think about SEO. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I was thinking about this the other day. My usage of things like ChatGPT like I am doing a lot of research about businesses and I was just thinking the other day, there was a business that I was thinking of signing up for and I just had to have a few questions. And what I would’ve done about historically is I would’ve gone through the website, read through their stuff, and tried to work that out. I was just going straight to ChatGPT and saying, tell me this about this business. Tell me this about this. How does this work? How does that work? And I was thinking, okay, obviously ChatGPT, they’re using your website as a guide for that. But they’re using a raft of different things. They’re using things that are written on forums, they’re using all this information.
0:39:04.2 TG: And I think it’s just, if there’s nothing else, I think it’s really important for a business to go and just go type your business. And as if you were a customer that was thinking of signing up or had a question about the business, what is ChatGPT actually saying, is it saying the correct stuff? Is it saying those things? And then there are methods, and probably too far, probably I’m not gonna go into it in detail now, but there are methods of making sure that gets changed, work out what sources that it’s actually referencing. ‘Cause ChatGPT can actually tell you the references, the sources it’s referencing and then change those. So it’s very similar to SEO. It’s just a very much a different way of thinking about there is this growing place where people is finding out and talking and getting information about my business that’s not necessarily on my website. And I don’t have full control of it but I can have some control over what ChatGPT is saying about me.
0:40:02.7 WB: I know you said you’re not a futurist, but I’m not gonna let you get away that easy. You gotta make some predictions. So the moment of truth, what are the industries that we should be thinking about and watching and where is this whole thing going?
0:40:18.2 TG: Not only am I not a futurist, I’m not an investment advisor either way. I wish I was, I don’t know. I think there’s obviously a lot happening in the, it goes without saying a lot happening in the tech space. And the key example there and the ship’s already sort of sailed a little bit, is that often with the gold rush, it’s the people that are selling the picks and shovels that are the ones that come off best. So, I talk about quite a bit in the book. You only need to look at the likes of NVIDIA, who essentially sell the chips that a lot of this machine learning runs off. Their market cap is just crazy, and very fascinating company.
0:41:00.7 TG: And there’s others along alongside NVIDIA, but they’re the poster child for it. They obviously stand to be very profitable no matter, ’cause they’re not really industry specific. They just want people using AI. I think a really interesting one though is around that whole thing that we talked about at the start. I think people will continue to crack that whole thing around bringing AI into the physical world in some way. And I talked about the false starts that McDonald’s has had or that even Amazon Go, those stores are, still around, but they’re struggling, haven’t had the pickup and traction that they thought they would, but I think there definitely will be something around that. Going back to NVIDIA and I talk about this, I think one of the areas and whether or not it’s exactly right, I don’t know, but NVIDIA’s got this concept called the Omniverse, which shouldn’t be confused with, the metaverse of Facebook, which I’m slightly less bullish on.
0:41:54.0 TG: It sounds a little bit more fanciful. But the omniverse in NVIDIA’s world is very much around how do I, how do we simulate the, how do you simulate activity in the physical world and understand what’s gonna happen? So the most obvious example of that, and this has been happening for years, is simulating a plane, in terms of the, this is exactly what would happen to the plane in certain weather circumstances and all these kind of things. And the ability to, our ability to do that and test those things in a digital realm is much more, it’s better than actually just putting the plane up there and actually testing those things, which is what we do on before those things. That’s the obvious example of it. But how far can you take that?
0:42:35.9 TG: And it comes into the world of, and the ideal vision of the Omniverse is anything that we could test and we could know what’s probably gonna, well get a really good understanding of exactly what’s gonna happen if we perform this action rather than having to perform it and then wait for the results and see what happens or whatever. I’m pretty sure that anything about marketing, this kind of thing you can do with marketing campaigns, what happens, what will happen if I release this marketing campaign? I’m sure the people that the latest rebrand for Jaguar would’ve liked this tool beforehand to understand a little bit about what would their reaction would’ve been for that. But I think that’s where understanding what will happen in the real world before it actually happens, I think that’s a really interesting use case for AI.
0:43:20.0 TG: And then the other one, which I wax lyrical on, now you are based in China, so you’ll know a lot of this that’s going on in China. And I think that China’s really on the forefront of what’s happening in AI in a really good place to look at. But I think, and it plays into this whole ChatGPT generative AI piece, but conversational commerce, I think it’s one name for it. I think that is gonna be massive. I had a friend, she’s Chinese and she, but she lives in Australia, but she went back there recently and she came back. First thing she said to me was, there are no websites in China. Which is not strictly true, but what she mean was, she was just amazed that whatever I do, I’m not gonna do it through a website.
0:43:55.3 TG: I’m not gonna do it through all those things. I’m gonna do it through basically my messenger application, on my phone. So, she’s like, if I’m gonna book a haircut, I do it on my messenger and I’m talking to a robot that’s basically, putting those things and it’s sort of that next evolution of ChatGPT or generative AI in terms of it’s almost my digital assistant in my pocket. And I think that we, in the western world, we’ve probably been a bit slow to really think about those things. I think China’s been on the forefront because it’s very mobile first. And also micropayments are much more of a thing in China than here. And so, and also sort of the social element of commerce as well is much bigger in China, which plays into really well. But I think that one way or another, I think that the whole ways that we as users are gonna use our phones or our computers is gonna become very much more natural language, conversational and tasks gonna be performed that way as opposed to point and click or as opposed to, needing to code, all those kind of things. So, like I said, I’m not a futurist, but those are some of the areas that I think are particularly interesting.
0:45:06.0 WB: Well, I think you’ve been holding out on us. I think you’re much more of a futurist than you’re letting on, but thank you for that. Anything we haven’t touched on, in our conversation that’s important that you wanna share a message about?
0:45:18.7 TG: No, we’ve covered a lot of bases. I mean hopefully I’ve gone across that point around AI is not a technical, it is obviously a very technical pursuit, but at the end of the day it’s the application of AI and you don’t need to be an expert in understanding about how models work or how all those things come together in order to be able to really use it really well. And I think one of the things I’ve also talked about, there’s an interesting dilemma with AI that, I’ve talked about these big companies investing heaps to build these moats and sustainable competitive advantage, which raises the barrier as to where, we can compete on an AI perspective. But at the same time, there’s this second economy where AI has really reduced the barrier as well in terms of I as a user can use, ChatGPT for essentially free, and get the massive benefits out of it as well. And so any business can do that. And so, I think even if someone is thinking, and this is the way that I’ve started using AI quite a lot recently, even if someone is sitting there thinking, well, I can’t use AI in my business.
0:46:16.7 TG: Depending on what your business does, it might not sound like the kind of thing that is very AI related, but one of the things you can do is just start using ChatGPT as almost like a sounding board, almost like an advisor to you, go, Hey, I’m thinking this. Tell me why this idea might not work. Or tell me, give me a bit of a sounding board and whatever. And obviously I don’t wanna bypass using people to do those kind of things, but same time, like it’s really handy to have this in your pocket and just almost at the very least, I think there’s every business in the world or every leader in the world can at the very least start using chatGPT as almost like a, that advisor type role. It might not be the most there’s plenty of other things you can do with AI, but at the very least, I think every business should be thinking about or every leader should be thinking about how I can actually do that to, at the very least make myself a better version of what I am or more educated version of what I am in terms of, what I can bring to bring to market.
0:47:12.2 WB: Where can people get the book to start with?
0:47:14.0 TG: Here is the book. I don’t know if anyone can see that, but Amazon, it is all on Amazon. You can get obviously the Kindle version like you did Wayne, or you can get the physical book if you’re like me. And probably, I’m not that great on reading on the Kindle. So go to Amazon, look for AI 4 CEOs, so four being the number four.
0:47:35.0 WB: And it’s a sizable book. You just showed the spine there for a moment, but it’s 330 pages or so.
0:47:40.1 TG: Yeah, it’s decent. I probably should have chopped down some of it, but yeah, there’s alot of information in here, so, yeah, hopefully there’s lots here you can take away, but there’s, it’s also the book that you don’t have to read cover to cover. You can chop in and out of chapters and whatever for people like me with short attention spans that, just need to know something at a certain point in time.
0:48:01.8 WB: Are you interested in people connecting with you?
0:48:04.5 TG: Yes, please. I’d love to, if anyone does have the book, I’d love feedback on that. I can be found at, LinkedIn under the name Tony Gruebner and hopefully there’s not many other Tony Gruebner, so I should be quite easy to find. But yeah, I’d love to hear thoughts from anyone. I think the thing is this is such a complex topic, and I think probably very overwhelming for a lot of people. Myself included, and I work in it, I’ve tried to synthesize things to make them as simple as, or not as simple, but as practical as possible. But yeah, it’s really important. I’d love some feedback on either your thoughts on it or just anything like people thinking around how, “Hey, I really understood this, but I don’t quite understand what you’re saying there” Anything that can help me understand as to what is the best way to talk about this so that people can understand what is a very complex topic.
0:48:58.2 WB: Tony, thanks for being a guest on The ET Project. Great conversation. Look forward to staying in contact.
0:49:04.1 TG: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Wayne.
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0:49:07.6 S?: Thank you for joining us on the ET project, a show for executive talent development. Until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars and blogs at coaching4companies.com.
