← Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
AI vs The Invasion of Work: Could We Take Back Our Lives?
01:05:15
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The digital debt of it all is just incredible. Where do we even find information? Literally? Which channel do I go to? Email, chat, text? The invasion of work has never been higher or greater. This is when we have the opportunity to say, look, if we design it the way we want to design it, leveraging this new sort of valued intelligence, it definitely fills the gap of where just human capacity is at.
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This is a show about the future of tech and the future of work. I'm Jeff Nielsen and today my guest is Matthew Duncan. He's Microsoft's resident expert on future of work and AI. As a longtime thought leader, he leads the annual Work Trend Index and partners with Harvard and Fortune 100 leaders on
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the future of work.
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Matthew thinks that today too much white collar work sucks and is getting worse. He doesn't think AI will kill these jobs, he thinks it will save them. I really want to know how we can make our jobs less crappy, what he thinks the real future of work is and what we can do as professionals and as leaders to completely rethink the way that we get things done. Let's find out. Hey Matthew, super excited to have you here. Thanks so much for joining today. Really excited to jump into it and I want to talk today about, you know, your take on the future of work and maybe just to kick things off, you know, there's so many competing narratives out there about the future of especially white collar work and you know, everything from writing the obituary of white collar work and like you know, 90 or 100% of these jobs are going to be wiped out to status quo to on the other end, actually there's going to be more demand than ever for these jobs. So I'm curious from your perspective and what you're seeing, where do you see the next handful of years playing out for the type of kind of office jobs that we talk so much about?
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A
Yeah, I mean, we definitely think about it and study it from a historical standpoint. Look, been through a couple technology revolutions and absolutely each time there have been jobs lost and jobs gained. How that evens out and in which areas, a little bit to be determined. But there's no doubt that there's going to be some entry level type work that's going to be sort of displaced. But with that we think there's going to be an onslaught of new opportunities and new roles and jobs and it's just going to be a shift and we'll have to see how that plays out. But yeah, I'm not thinking this as a doom and gloom. I'm Thinking this as an opportunity for sort of a reimagination of what information work could be going forward. And yeah, we kind of firmly see this as human led agent operated. So there's going to be humans leading this. It's not going to be an all agentic army of workforce.
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Right. So it's more, I guess in your view, it's more augment than completely automate and replace.
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I would, yes, absolutely.
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Yeah. No, it makes sense. One of the pieces that I found very interesting, I was looking at the, you know, the work trend report that you and Microsoft put out each year and one of the things that caught my attention, there's this theme right now, there's a lot of, I hate to say fear, I guess, about the future of work and as you said, sort of doom and gloom. And one of the things that caught my attention is that we talk about, I guess the future of work as, oh, it's going to destroy the present of work. And we talk about it almost as though like the present of work is sacred and every job is amazing and perfect and should be protected at all costs. And what caught my attention specifically is some of your stats about the reality of white collar work right now. And some of the stats you've got here is that the average person in an office has 275interruptions a day, 60% unscheduled meetings, a 15% increase in meetings and chats happening outside of core hours. So the, the picture that paints to me, and by the way it resonates very, very concretely with me in my life is it's kind of grim. It's not like, oh, everything is perfect, we have these utopian jobs, nothing could possibly get better. And I'm curious if you had the same reaction.
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Oh, absolutely. I mean, I don't know if there's a moment in my career that I feel just like so, you know, overwhelmed. The digital debt of it all is just incredible. Right? Where do we even find information? Where do I literally, which channel do I go to? Email, chat, text. I mean the invasion of work is never been higher or greater. And so yeah, you ask a really great question like is it really spectacular? No. Am I getting paid a lot just to do email? Are you really actually leveraging my God given talents or the fact that I studied and really have honed expertise that just isn't getting applied? Because I'm just trying to make it through the minutia. And I think this is a great opportunity. I mean this is the half glass, full version of an optimist who's saying, look, we could actually change work, which by the way, has been around for decades in almost the same form or fashion, and we could actually rethink how it could be done. You know, in fact, our report this year really talks about human agency. And I've never felt more sort of like poignant on this moment that this is when we have the opportunity to say, look, if we design it the way we want to design it, leveraging this new sort of valued intelligence, it definitely fills the gap of where just human capacity is at. And yeah, I think it's a great opportunity.
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You use the phrase human agency, which to me is very deliberately kind of juxtaposed against the notion of AI agents. What do you mean by human agency? What's the piece there that you see as being so important going forward?
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Yeah, I mean, our research absolutely shows that we're at a capacity of human productivity. Right. I mean, we've been throwing technology at it, but we just have reached a point in. In which we can't do anymore. So when I think agency, I think, well, great, take the work that's, you know, less valuable, that is a bit more mundane. I mean, we could talk about what type that work is and give me the agency to do two things to actually leverage what I think is more valued output and let me redesign. Right. So I think this concept of an individual, I mean, we've seen this massive shift in the recent just cowork era of the last three months of like, how can you as a human now take a horizontal look of all the activities that need to get done? And you can actually, you know, through a very quick turn using these agentic tools, create all the pieces of getting something done from left to right. And that just hasn't been the case. Right. We've been sort of reliant on other people and processes. But it also means, like, which I always love to ask people, like, what about your job? Do you just not like that you're frustrated with the operations of it? Now you have the chance to actually change that. You could redesign it because you have these capabilities with agentic, you know, sort of tools to make that happen. So I do think that there's an agent, as opposed to, like, for fear and sort of frustration and doom, like, let's flip that on its side and say, hey, this is an opportunity to work the way you want to work.
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So let's talk about that opportunity for a minute. And, you know, one of the questions that I'm interested in is just, I guess, what the what? The people who are doing this best and have figured it out, what are they truly doing differently? And I think, you know, you use the phrase kind of frontier workers, frontier professionals, that fractional group of people. What makes them different?
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Yeah, yeah. I think there is this new category we're calling frontier professionals. And when we went out to like 20,000 individuals and did our survey and really started to stratify who they were, like we came up with about 16% of that AI workers in our research. And so what do they do? First of all, they don't outsource judgment. So this concept of like use it as a tool and an enabler, but don't just say, great, do my work and I'm going to let you do whatever you need to do. Judgment is still paramount and centered at the where the way work needs to get done. But a couple of things we found in this group is we sort of analyze them. 80% said AI lets them produce more work than they did last year. So they're starting to see a throughput that they hadn't seen before and that's exciting. 53% deliberately pause before they think about the work to get done and say what can the agent do and what should I do as a human? So I think there's a new responsibility of understanding how that works. This concept of delegation we could talk a little bit about what are those characteristics. And then 43% intentionally do some of the work with out AI to keep their own skills sharp. So yes. Is there opportunity for sort of lazy and, or just people who just want to not work and push it all off to agents? Sure, there's going to be that class, but what we're seeing is those that are actually very intentional, keyword there, intentional about how they're doing it, you know, are going to succeed and they're going to be the ones that are going to rise up, you know, in the career setting. They're the ones that are actually going
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Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that's, I think that's a great question because it really is a similar context. I remember when we first started this journey three, three plus years ago, when it was when ChatGPT came on the market. And we're really looking at this and saying, okay, what is different about this generative AI? I mean, it's, it's no doubt that like we all started utilizing it just as another sort of search engine, right? And there is value in asking it information. We call that sort of this asking. You know, you look up a fact, give me some feedback, tell me where to get the best, you know, Mexican food in said place, and you can do it in this great sort of natural language, which is better than search in that, in that regard. But yeah, that was very tactical. And then we really switched into this mode of like, I'm just going to, you know, utilize it to do all the administrative things that I don't want to do. But the fact is, at this moment in time we see these four categories, right? One is delegation. And guess what, not every person is really good at that. That is not a muscle they've created. But to actually delegate, as you pointed out, to like an intern or a lower, you know, sort of entry level worker, you have to give context, you have to give sort of like specific specificity of sort of how it plays out. And so that's a muscle that if you don't have, you need to learn. And that's why we saw early on that those had actually managed. Humans were actually better at figuring out how this AI works. But if you have delegation, you have asking of simple questions, you also have collaboration. So this switch that we see turning on right now is that these individuals, in fact 49% of the people we surveyed are utilizing agents now to do sort of collaborative work, analyzing really good, heady information worker type of sort of factors in their daily job. And so the collaboration, using it as a thought partner is really great. And then I think there's going to be this new element of just exploration, like I need to get this work done. What if I could get this agent to start to do these tasks and then rewrite this and then send this here. And so we see the sort of process of it all happening, but they are unique. And to your point, very specifically, yeah, you have to think about it as another teammate. Right? I mean, respect that it's technology and not a human. But you do need to think about giving it. And the more you actually create the context, the more value you get.
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I'm glad you brought up the notion of agents, of AI agents, because, you know, you could listen to some of this and say, oh, it's just generative AI. It's just like, you know, it's writing an email for me. But it sounds like it's more than that and that these frontier workers are actually finding ways to, I guess, sort of build their own agents to automate their work. What is that looking like? And what is the real frontier there?
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Yeah, I think there's valuable for just generative AI, your co pilot, helping you organize your calendar and get sort of you in a better position to get the work done. There's definitely an emergence of you being able to use agents to start to do the work on your behalf. Right. With your guidance and oversight. But do the work. That means, yes, take this transcript of information, these reports, start to put it into a report, but then actually update every other place in my sort of ecosystem of work where this needs to be changed by this data point or this factor. Reconfigure that into becoming a new presentation that we could take out to market or what have you. And you can start to see, like, if I was to accomplish that in current state, I would have to connect with a bunch of people, have many steps make that happen. But if I can build an agent that actually gets that work done for me, and I'm checking in here before it gets like pushed out to this, you know, audience or I'm getting response back and then I can improve it. Yeah, it starts to like, change the way I get stuff done. And that's huge value that starts to change work. And more importantly, as I talk to leaders every day, it starts to prove out the impact. Like this isn't just, you know, Bob or Mary having 20% more time to, to do work. This is about changing the way you work that creates better outcomes.
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I want to talk about that impact and those outcomes for a minute because so far the lens we've been taking here is all through the lens of the individual worker and professional and how they can automate more, how they get more done. And it seems to me that when we talk about this impact right now, in terms of the stage we're at with this technology, it feels like a lot of that value is still at that individual level. It's grassroots, there's a lot of people talking a big game about whole organizations transforming themselves and becoming AI first. But it feels like there's still, when I actually look at what's going on out there in practice, so much of the value that's being captured is at that individual level. And so I'm curious what you make of that. Are you seeing the same thing? And I guess what is the landscape and where do we go from here?
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Yeah, I mean, that's the meaty question that we get asked all the time, like, where's the roi? And I think leaders have contemplated it as just another technology component and we basically are very clear, like if you just think about it just as a next gen technology and you send it over to your CIO and you ask for a bunch of pilots to be done and approved out, um, it's, it's not going to work. You're not going to wake up in a better place in two, three, five years. Down the, down the line. What you need to do is do two parts, two parts of the coin. One is you need to build awareness and understanding across your entire organization. And I think that's starting to be the case where organizations started in a pilot mode and said, look, we just need to give everyone the access to this so they're finding value on an individual basis and they're actually assimilating to it so that they can actually understand what is the greater value that you can get from it. On the flip side, yes, those organizations, those frontier firms that are actually finding one or two core processes, building teams to reimagine that outcome, they're trying to achieve and work back from that and say, look, this process might have had 17 steps, you know, through six different organizations to get from point A to point B, which whether that's financially closing your books, doing a different sort of sales, engineering, process, marketing, you know, campaign process, whatever that is, breaking that down and reimagining how that work gets done to that outcome. Yeah, that's starting to really have meaningful impact. It's starting to show that we can leverage agenta capabilities to drive to market faster, to actually get, you know, revenue growth. And I always love to ask this one question, like what can you do that you couldn't do during. I mean, everyone wanted revenue growth five years ago or you know, or sort of acceleration in their go to market, but what is it about now? And this new technology that gives you a whole new way of doing that. And I think that's something. I basically see AI natives all the time. Startups have a blank slate so they can go and run. I just got back from Europe where we had a CEO summit. Mid cap companies that are working with PE firms that are getting really precise on like, if we just could fix this one part of our business, let's just apply and focus with agentic technologies. They're starting to see meaningful impact. And then large organizations, yeah, those that have the discipline to say, like, we're going to be in this one function or one process to work through it. It's starting to work, it's starting to show payoff. But you know, we have, we have a ways to go.
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And just to make sure I'm understanding that correctly, it sounds like, it sounds like the key piece in that second, you know, scenario is starting by asking what function is kind of mission critical or what, what will give us the most leverage? Like if we can actually turbocharge one piece of the business, what's going to have the biggest impact on, you know, on revenue, what's going to have the biggest return and then figure out how we can apply the technology there. Is that, is that what you're getting at?
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I am, I am. And precisely, like, here's what I would say. You know, a thousand flowers bloomed, right? I walked into a conference room and one of the leaders is like, hey, you know what, we're ahead. We are using agent capabilities. In fact, we have 14,000 agents built with proud, with pride, and sort of their, their chest puffed out. And I'm like, wow, that's amazing and crazy. Like, what are you doing with all those agents? Right? So if you're using it to give people agency to go and start to experiment, great. But on the, on the other side is, no, no, no, you're trying to run a business. Let's get really pragmatic, you know, your business. Let's find the one or two processes. If we could alter them, then that is going to have meaningful impact here to your business. So let's use agenda capabilities to make that happen. And that gets, that gets exciting. It does.
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I want to follow a little trail there around. You mentioned a case of 14,000 agents and set as a point of pride. And maybe it's just the fact that I've spent my career working with an awful lot of CIOs, but I hear that number and a part of me panics about what does it mean to manage an organization that has 14,000 agents, how do you govern that? How do you make sure that the processes are right, that you're not just having 14,000 new cowboys that are going to break everything traditional working in the organization. So I mean, I wanted to ask you, I guess first off, do you see 14,000 agents as a good thing? And if an organization is just letting 1,000 agents bloom, what do we need to do to make sure that it actually, you know, creates benefit?
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Yeah, I mean I think there's, there's two parts I would, I would, would, would, would sort of look at. One is what is the role of leader in this new agentic or AI age? Right. We think it's re architecting work. Like when you sit down with a C suite, we have this really great program that we do with Harvard Business School's AI Institute. We bring the C suite and one extended to a two day workshop of just understanding the impact and what is AI and putting hands on keyboard to build stuff. What I see is a light bulb coming on like wow, you know, what we need to do is we need to actually re architect the way we work organizationally, systems wide and actually like really a process how the work actually gets done. And that's, that's really important. And, and guess what? There's a lot of leaders that wake up every morning, little do they think that they should be actually using an agent. And they should, because to under, to use it is to understand it. And two, wow, I'm not really doing the work. I'm just like setting the culture and guiding the organization and making the hard decisions. But no, you actually need to say like how are we actually moving, you know, denim Levi jeans from the design of it, the production, through it, the manufacturing and how it ends up in the retail. Like if, if that's our core tenant of actually growing our business, we need to focus. And so yes, I will say I think there's little downside in giving people the agency to use these tools and really understand them because they will innovate in their own way. I think though, there has to be some structure. So we create like a365 Asia365 that helps people manage and monitor governance understanding. So you're absolutely right, there needs to be some governance to this. We're actually doing some really interesting research to understand, you know, are people more effective building their own agents? Are people more effective using a centralized system of agents that are built for them? You know, how do you think about this type of, you know, sort of structure and sometimes it's just as we talked about, the capability of the individuals themselves. But I do think we're starting to come to an era like, great, you have a lot of innovation and you've got culturally this experimentation mode starting to happen, but you do need to put guidance in it so it gets structured and applicable to the business goals.
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I'm curious if you have any kind of initial findings from that research on the spectrum from let everybody build it themselves to have some sort of like central office or central, you know, program that builds it for them or whether the answer is just it depends.
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Yeah, I think, I think we're learning our research isn't totally completed. I think what we're finding is there are capabilities of the people who are good at building agents, right? So they have to have some kind of understanding of how the actual tool works and its capabilities, even though it's brilliant, because it can make even someone like myself, who's not a coder by nature be able to like do pretty incredible things, build a website, make these things happen. I think it's also understanding the work. So there's definitely an importance of understanding and having expertise in the work to be done, how do we want to bring the product to market, et cetera. So the combination of those two, I think is effective. I mean, one example we're always testing inside of Microsoft. And how do we do that? We have a really cool group called Air Camp that goes in and does like a three week sort of reimagination of how the work could be done with a said team to really start to get them to the other side to make that happen. That seems to be good. When we're thinking about process redesign, I think there's this concept of, I like to cleverly call it the book club. How do you take like people with similar roles, but maybe even in different groups and talk about what's the commonality of things that are happening at work or in the work that we do, what is important and then what do we want to make sure humans so keep their hands on and where can we use agents to make that happen? Because I will tell you, I think one of the most complicated things about this moment and information work is we actually don't know the work that we're doing. Like, what did you do yesterday? Are the things that you're doing in information work actually moving the ball forward to the goals that you're trying to achieve? And so we get structured in meetings, we get, you know, barrage of emails where we think we're Productively moving forward. But what is the work we're actually doing and taking time to pause and understand that work, not to automate it, but to reimagine what are the pieces that we really need to do to actually get to the goal?
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I completely buy that. And it comes back, I guess, to what you were saying about our jobs, especially as leaders being re architecting and being able to see the big picture. I'm curious whether it's the rearchitecting side coming from leaders, whether it's professionals using kind of agentic tools, if you have any, I guess, kind of war stories or specific cases you've seen in the last handful of months that have really impressed you.
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Yeah, I think that. Well, in our latest research, interestingly enough, I'll start there. When we actually look at this sort of two by two, you know, spectrum of like, is our individuals actually taking sort of initiative and driving on that? That can be a cultural thing. And then on the other side, is the organization set up to really actually make that sort of initiative happen? And only 19% of all those that we surveyed and studied really have what we're calling both this frontier mentality have both individual capabilities and organizational readiness to absorb it. Right. And I just want to pause there for a second because that's not much. We're on a journey. I feel like we're doing a little bit of a disservice to always look at organizations on adoption. That's been a metric. So how we set the metrics to measure, I think is a bit of a challenge. And so it is not about adoption. Right. This goes back to the point of like, is all those. Are the creation of all those agents really important? Yes. We want people to assimilate and understand what the technology and capability can do. And making it happen in your personal life, in your business, your work life, is really important. But it's absorption. Is it actually getting into the work flow? Is it actually being part of the work? And I think that's what we're calling this transformation paradox. Right. When employees sort of see the capabilities, but the organization as a system isn't ready to actually absorb it, like to really make it happen. And I think that's one of the challenges we're at, is that organizations are not structured or set up. There's a lot of hackathons, but there isn't an orchestration of how this work is going to have to change. And that is not on the shoulders of a CIO solo. Right. This is like just a tech. It needs to be in the C suite across these lines of business to say, okay, how do we need to get work done? And frankly where we forecast the fact that over the next years definitely silos of functions will become blurred and that it's going to be not about the org chart or how it's structured, it's going to be about the work chart and how the work is getting done. Very cross functional. And so if you can see that playing out, it really then becomes okay, if we need to have this cross functional process, what are the skills required to actually get that done? And those skills lie in humans and those skills lie in agents. And I think that that's hard to imagine. I see it all the time in AI native startups that are orchestrating what they do by the work to get done without all the layers and just this agility. I mean we've used these terms in the past years and decade, but I do think this configuration around almost this, what we called a Hollywood model, where you take sort of the best skills and apply it to get this work done. You have a project and an end date, it's very easy to imagine that way. But I think that's where it starts to get interesting. And what I'll tell you is if you have the willingness and the intention to actually do that, what becomes interesting is the surprises. So if you take sort of an accounting process in your finance organization and there's many steps that happen to close the books or whatever that might be, what we start to see is bubbling up individuals along that process that say, wow, now that I see this and I'm more participatory in the design of it. Yeah, we're actually noting that risk and risk tolerance is off. Right. And so now that group is starting to become a risk management group because they see different things happening in the way that sort of accounting is being processed through. And so this is going to be what the light bulb comes on where we actually rearchitect to find the new value, the new way. And yeah, I think that's where the opportunity is.
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B
I'm going to ask you a difficult question, just a heads up on that. So the way you've kind of framed that out Matthew, is there's out there these AI native organizations that have what I'll call, I guess the org design, the operating model, the culture to absorb this and to be architected specifically for these tools available. And then there's an awful lot of other firms and if I'm feeling not generous, I can call them legacy firms where there are more silos and they do things more traditionally. And I guess the question is, how do you bridge that gap if you're not an AI native firm? Because my gut tells me that the CEO pounding on the table saying use AI more, get better at adopting AI. Just saying that over and over again is not the answer. You need to have this kind of deeper structural reform, as you said, to move away from these silos to think more about how the work gets done. What does that look like in practice? And do you have any guidance for C suite leaders or boardrooms where they have an appetite to take this on but maybe don't know how to go about doing it?
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Yeah, I think there's a couple great examples. So I have the opportunity and the pleasure to work with a cohort of 15, you know, pretty large Fortune 500 brand name companies. And we are learning and examining with, with, with our sort of collaboration at Harvard Business School's AI Institute. We, we bring these companies together and start to understand like what's going to unlock and, and where that sort of opportunity for, for leadership to, to really work. I, I think it, first and foremost we have to look at culture. Culture. So Lumen, which is a telecommunications company that's reinventing themselves in the, in the age of AI, to really be the sort of the wire behind, you know, the AI future. It starts at the top where Kate Johnson, the CEO, talks about sort of a learn it all mentality. We will experiment, we will learn. And this is, I'm telling you, an old school, cable driven type of corporation that has a totally breadth of new kind of culture to say like, we can change the world and do anything. And when we brought him to campus at Harvard, yeah. 42 leaders across the organization in multitude of different functions came together to try to find alignment and debate about what is fundamental of this culture. And then how does that change the business? And that's where it's got to start. In fact, they're a really interesting example because who's leading their AI initiative but Anna White, who is the chief HR officer and agent officer of the company. Right. So what better person to think about what does this mean for humans and agents to come together? How do we get incentivized by this? What does that mean for reviewing and understanding sort of how this work needs to get done? We need to think about it as that sort of collaboration. So I start to see the culture as a factor. I start to see systems thinking like how do we actually build a whole new way of working in systems so org Design and what does that mean to be more fluid in the work to get done? And yeah, and I think, I think there's a imperative for senior leaders to model. Right. Exactly what they're talking about. This can't be some random mandate without modeling and showing and being very profitable present about it. I, I don't think this can be, you know, something you can't coach through. Like, you have to bring people along. So middle managers are really needing to be responsible for thinking about how to manage both agents and humans and really model that. And then, you know, we have to give some grace to the people and, and care for them to really bring them along as well. So, um, and, and understand that this is, we're asking you to change. Right? You don't have to. The opportunity is in front of you, but the there, it's inevitable, change is happening. And I think that sort of mentality state really, really matters. Uh, I, I mean, I, I'll give you one other quick example. We work with DuPont and they went through another sort of interesting leadership and their CEO had sort of, you know, wanted to figure out how to think through being quote, quote, unquote, a frontier type firm. Like, what does that mean for us to really take what is a very high risk, you know, sort of business and try to translate that into this AI age, you know, bring it forward. And what she realized was as she had, you know, sort of the AI initiative under the cio, she actually said, no, no, no, no, you know what? I'm going to lead this. You know, several days later, calls an entire company meeting and says, we are going to understand how this AI and I'm going to show you because I built an agent and I'm going to show the rest of the company I could do this. And that starts to sort of like really set a tone and drive the board meeting the strategy and make that happen. So it's got to be top down and bottoms up at the same time.
- [39:14]
B
I, I find that really interesting and it's different from a lot of the, a lot of the guidance I've heard traditionally around how to do this. And one of the pieces I want to hone in on. Matthew, one of the pieces you didn't say, like deliberately, which is that this is cultural, this is org design. And so it makes sense if HR is involved in this. It makes sense if the CEO is involved in this. What you didn't talk about is the technology piece. You didn't say this should be the cio. This has to be treated like a Traditional technology initiative. And I'm curious what the implication is there, like what role at all does the technology of this all play? And I guess what does it mean for the future of enterprise technology if these are more sort of cultural and you know, operating model oriented shifts versus just, you know, this is a piece of technology we're bringing in.
- [40:09]
A
Yeah, I mean let me be clear. I think it's a combination of both. Right. So I, so yes, I'm overemphasizing the fact that where we see it sticking the best is where there's actually a C suite team that's contemplating sort of how together we need to, I mean it is like you know, you know, quite a quote unquote, like sort of incredibly important for this team to rethink what is their, where they're going to emphasize where their AI strategy is. I mean it and CIO has a really important part right to think about the governance. How is this going to map into a new system of, of how we're going to operate the business? But yeah, you know, I find it fascinating when I take 15 corporations and I look around sort of who is been quote unquote, you know, has a little bit of the mantle of who is going to be leading AI and individuals in the room are chros CROs, Chief Revenue Officers, COOs. I've seen a couple CFOs even because they're thinking about sort of like new or strategy officers. They're thinking about the new business models this is going to create for us. I mean it's not good enough just to like get the growth. We have to think about new business opportunities to make that happen alongside of CIO and some of these other functional areas. So yeah, I mean I, I, I think the task at hand is how are you going to transform, you know, work at your organization and the outcome better not just be efficiency, although that's valuable. And it just can't be just straight up growth. It has to be what are the new business models and business opportunities I'm going to get from this because yeah, it's going to get disruptive. There's lots of small AI natives like we saw on the Internet. Boom. There's lots of mid size cap companies that are going to try to figure out how to like find their creative advantage. And yeah, large organizations are semi well positioned in their market but it's going to be those that try to find new offerings and new ways of doing business. Yeah, it's changing fast. And so back to your point, the speed in which the technology is advancing and moving is imperative for the CIO and the CTO to understand where that's going both from, how it changes our business and what can it mean for our offerings like we've never seen before. So that is intense. In addition to just how do you play that out?
- [43:11]
B
I want to come back for a second to just the prominence that culture plays here versus the technology or the speed of technology, because it really sounds like, and I've heard this from a number of experts, that the culture, the mindset is kind of a key ingredient in the stew here that's going to make this successful. One of the, one of the implications there for me is that if it's culture, if it's mindset, if it's, you know, experimenting and transforming, that metrics can sort of be a friend or foe here, I guess, especially in the short to medium term. And if you're like laser focused on just getting value and obsessing over that question, that you might risk not making some of the bigger changes you need to make, you know, to, to actually have a long term impact. So I'm curious, you know, we talked about absorption, we've talked about a few different metrics here, we've talked about long term value. What do you see as the role of metrics here and, and how important should they be, I guess, in that short and medium term versus building kind of the, the key building blocks?
- [44:20]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think business metrics. Yeah, I think the metrics need to shift, shift a bit, but they're still very important. I think to your point, from a opportunity, cultural wise, I think there needs to be some measurement or some pressure to say, look, I need you to start to rethink the way you run your team, run your organization, run your division in this new agentic world very acutely. I think more than ever, the outcome we always use, you know, this was a classic sort of consultative term. Right. Like, oh, we're going to be outcomes based, you know, doing that. I don't know, it always felt like, okay, yes, I'm trying to reach this goal and, and I'm going to move backwards to try to figure what, what that is. But I don't know if we actually reinvented the process to get there or reimagined. Okay, there's probably several or many different ways we could actually get to that outcome. We just tried to like refine the way we were already doing it last year or the year before. The year before to improve it a little bit better. We took the learning. Sure. And we just improved. And so I think that's the challenge. I think outcomes are really, really important. In fact, I think if you just start with that and say how do you get to those outcomes? I think that's great. Great. I've seen, yeah, I've seen some leadership say, you know, ABC customer service organization, you're going to have to save $250 million, go figure out how to get there. Right. They're putting a stake in the ground and then you're going to have to redesign how you're actually going to make that happen. So I think people will, based on the culture, based on the company and what business they're in, the considerations and externalities that they have to deal with. Sure, they're going to make slightly different decisions. But yeah, I know in my, sort of, even at Microsoft we have a very, very strong culture around model, coach and care to really understand sort of like how to lead and be learn it alls. So Satya instills it at every level that we are, we don't, we are not know it alls. We're going to figure things out and it, and it's very much applauded to be on a journey of, you know, learning and mistakes and understanding. Absolutely. And sharing that back through. I think on the, on the flip side of that, yeah, we're feeling lots of, you know, opportunity to say, look, here are your outcomes. Go figure that out. What does your team of humans and agents look like? How will you reimagine your process from a startup guy? This is exciting because I think like we could do so much better if we had the opportunity to like reimagine what that is. I'll leave you, I will mention this one thing. So with all that said, it's easier said than done. It Absolutely. I get that there's just this ingrained ways to do it and it's going to feel sometimes a little radical. But I do think we need to start to move to those examples and start to challenge people to move that way. I will share that. I think there's this concept of a learning system that's important. So this is what we're not accustomed to culturally, that if you push out this opportunity and agency to all the players on the team or what have you, how do you bring that learning in this democratized world as a part of a system, not just a one off hackathon or what have you, but how do you become part of a system and bubble up learning that is going to be able to help the strategy and Sort of how the organization moves forward. I think that's, I mean, I don't know if necessarily know if I have that exact answer, but we really see this kind of learning system as incredibly, you know, entrepreneurial and sort of innovative. Experimental mindset is really important, but also the learning sort of like process of it all is going to be critical.
- [48:50]
B
And that, you know, that, that makes a lot of sense to me based on the conversation we were having earlier about the, the individual level here and people, you know, kind of doing that bottom up, rearchitecting and I mean, for me, and I've done some work in like product development teams and innovation and it feels like, I don't know if this will resonate with you or if you've seen it play out, but like almost the idea of like a survival of the fittest of ideas that if you're actually listening to, you know, what people on the front lines are doing and they're all experimenting, that hopefully the best experiment wins. And you say, yes, that's great, and you can take that to the book club clubs or the, you know, the road shows and actually, you know, improve some of the, the processes that way.
- [49:31]
A
Absolutely, yeah. I hear this all the time. Like, well, but is this really applicable to like frontline workers? What have you. And I think this, here's what I know, that this democratization of it is going to be a value and that if we could bubble up the thinking that is found in the most unique places, not necessarily stratified by it coming down this hierarchy of leadership, but it could be anywhere. How do you capture that, use that and improve in a more iterative and fast space, this is what changes. And maybe even as the technology which gives us natural language and reasoning allows, you know, Carol on the front line to imagine something and go, actually build it out, you know, in 20 minutes at a lunch break show the idea that she's thinking about because of this technology advancement and how sort of enabling it is. And then great. That idea like surfaces better faster in a new way versus just a suggestion box. Right?
- [50:46]
B
Yeah, no, I really like that use case for it as well. And you used the word earlier, Matthew. Surprises that there's like just gonna be surprises along the way when you do this. I'm curious whether, you know, working with the Fortune 100s through Harvard or, I mean, you live this stuff day in and day out. And I'm curious if you've had any times recently where you've talked to, you know, either a business leader or, you know, someone who's been playing with these tools and, and just had a moment of genuine surprise or awe around like oh, I didn't think about that approach or I didn't think that you would actually be able to do this.
- [51:24]
A
Oh yeah, I mean I think, I think, I think the ability to go build a website in like 10 minutes, like something that seems like so foreign, I think just starts to create light bulbs and individuals themselves. I think I'll share one sort of. Yeah, I think there's surprises and ahas I my I get excited when, you know, some systems thinking is changed in that we, this group used to do these sort of tasks and now they see an opportunity to like I think I mentioned this before, manage risk or they see an opportunity that they could sell a different product because, you know, they didn't realize that they had sort of this go to market component to it. I. Yeah, I think that's where it's going to start to unlock value that we didn't expect to create. Right. What could you do that's different because this agentic take capability is, is so powerful in making that happen. The reasoning behind it, the deep research, getting the, the deep researcher understanding in the hands of people that, you know, didn't necessarily. That don't just need to parrot that out but actually could contemplate it and come up with a better idea in the moment because they actually have that at their fingertips and it's not some dashboard. I mean the paradigm is definitely natural language, me being able to ask questions and go back and forth and be iterative in it and that is going to actually unlock other things that we didn't even suspect. Right. So yeah, I think that's, I think that's there's some really interesting things there. I will tell you one, one project that we're working on from a research standpoint that I think is fascinating is tacit knowledge. Right. So this is classic. I have this role as a sales engineer and I get trained as a sales engineer and over time my expertise and experience grows. Right. So how do you how that happens and where that goes? Yeah, interestingly enough, you need to think about sort of, you know, well, what, what's unique about the job and why am I good at this? This. Right. Is it because I was trained and learned these steps or was it the sort of ad hoc nature of the things that I came about? And so there's an organization and we're working with them and saying like, look, it takes us because we're very technical, it's very detailed and deep Learning takes like, 18 months to get. Get these sales engineers up to speed and really productive in being, bringing value to the process. Like, can't we change that? So we sat down and the researchers have been understanding sort of like, okay, what do you do every day? And really understanding sort of. What is that? Tacit knowledge. Ironically, what we found was that when you ask someone what you're good at, oh, I'm just good at this because I really understand the science behind it or what have you not, is not necessarily shown in the way that they actually get work done. Right. The task of knowledge might be something special about what they're doing. They don't realize they're even doing it. So as researchers, they pulled and extracted what that was and started to build that out. And so the question becomes is, can we take tacit knowledge that's sort of gained over all these years and then pull that together collectively and then actually utilize that for new people coming on board to ramp them up faster and be more proficient faster? And that's kind of interesting. That becomes really valuable. And you could sort of start to extrapolate that across a lot of different organizations, a lot of different businesses. How do we help bring that sort of inherent understanding to people faster? And you're still going to have your own lived experiences, your own expertise in that way as humans, but we could pool that sort of really great knowledge, and that's just going to make us all better.
- [55:55]
B
I really like that use case for it. And when I think about tacit knowledge, I guess I think about it in a couple of different flavors that I wanted to talk more about. One of the flavors is, I guess, just like information retrieval, I guess, if I can call it that, abstractly of like. Well, I've been here for 10 years, and I know how our systems work and I know who does what. And I've found ways to, like, navigate the maze organizationally, if I can call it that. Right. Like, I know, you know, where to find things. I know all the little gotchas about the fields and the systems and, you know, where just like all these. These tricks, which is a little bit different, I guess, in my mind from, like, I'm a sales engineer and I know all this undocumented stuff about our customers or our prospects and what they're looking for and about the nature of their work that just nobody's ever taken the time to kind of, you know, document or systematize. And I'm curious when you think about, you know, tacit knowledge and the role that some of These, you know, AI tools can play. Is it more on the information retrieval? Is it more on the being able to document, you know, some of the softer undocumented stuff, or is it a combination of both?
- [57:09]
A
It's both. It's both. Yeah. No, it gets really exciting because you know the doc. So let's start with part one. You think about the documentation of that and, and yeah, it's like, okay, what, what and who and how can this sort of agent really help me get better at that? Well, yeah, they can. I mean, we, we pride in a big organization knowing, like, who to call on you. We call it like this concept of a potato network. How do you actually know the people to get stuff done? And you rely on that and you build and spend time to build those connections and that's a value. But the fact of the matter is, it's like, yeah, like if you had an agent that could actually take. Tell you, like, tell me everyone in the organization who has expertise in A, B and C, and you could call on them, it just gets you to point A that much faster and say, hey, I really have a question for you. X and Y, can I get this done? That's, that's very valuable. And I think the capabilities are going to be immense in helping people just get to the right information at the right time faster. That's of huge exponential value. On the other side, it goes back to, yeah, like, I just have expertise. I've learned this. I've never documented it. I've never really, like, took the time. But if we could figure out how that could be captured and create value back for others, I think, I think that's super powerful. Right? How did, how did we actually take that sort of unique way of thinking about it, those like, learned practical sort of angles of like, getting the job done and pull that together? You know, one might say, well, wow, that sounds like you're taking all the goodness of what I do out of this. Or it could be flipped on the other side. Like, if there was a collective pull of that, that might make me that much better to like, actually get to point my outcome faster or better. And so, yeah, I, I find that to be pretty fascinating. If we can unlock a methodology on how to get that tacit knowledge and then start to show how it gets applied inside of agents, I think that could be, I think, pretty powerful for business.
- [59:38]
B
Absolutely. Well, and I feel like in some ways we've kind of come full circle on this conversation because we started talking about the toil involved in all this kind of Fractured, fragmented work and how it's not ideal. And now we're talking about, well, this is maybe some of the use cases, if we can use agents to do that for us and paint that more kind of compelling, valuable picture of the future. So I guess, I mean, on that note, Matthew, parting thoughts for business leaders, for technology leaders who are interested in building that future, who are interested in AI, in the future of work, in kind of, I don't know whether it's restructuring the culture of the organization or bringing in the tools of the future. What's kind of your best advice for what's going to be most impactful?
- [60:29]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I would probably say, you know, stay optimistic and get your hands on keyboards, like learn what it truly could be. Right. So to understand it and its implications, if you're sitting in a board meeting and really wanting to, you know, explain like how this could change our way of working, like really start to understand the technology, at least in your own context, in your own, in your own way. I think that's, that's part one and part two is it's, it's takes a new operating system. Like, let's not underestimate that. So being eyes wide open by the fact that it needs to be part of our culture, it needs to be part of our organizational design and it needs to, we need an operating system that actually gets us to bring all these in a more systematic way together. And I think approaching it that way is, is, is going to be critical for organizations to really create advantage. And then I would just say, like, and push the limits of what you think is going to change in, in your business. Don't be satisfied with X percentage of efficiencies or don't be satisfied with just saying like, yeah, we could increase growth in this product line by X or Y. Be satisfied like we're going to create a whole new business opportunity or business like, be so curious of like, where do we get advantage in this if we could actually, you know, be, you know, on this frontier.
- [62:16]
B
I love that. I find it, you know, super interesting and you know, actionable guidance. So Matthew, just before we kind of wrap things up here, anything else? We didn't discuss any other projects you're working on that have you super excited right now.
- [62:28]
A
Yeah, I think there's an opportunity as we all make our way through this is to hear from those that, you know, are sort of carrying the AI mantle on their back and really trying to understand sort of how to the trials and tribulations and the opportunities ahead. So I'm working on a project that I'm pretty excited about. It's called on the Frontier. It's going to be a social show where I'm interviewing leaders, these individuals across the organization who have been sort of anointed to be sort of leading the AI initiative and getting a perspective of what does that mean and what are you learning and how does actually, you know, your approach, your mindset need to be aligned to the opportunity. So that's, that's, that's coming out here this spring and. Pretty excited about that project and just learning. Yeah, pretty excited about learning. As you know, no one really. I always, I love to share this. No one has a playbook. This is not a moment of like, just follow this playbook and you'll get there. It's a moment of you need to have a certain attitude and approach and a mindset to get there. But I see a positive and opportunistic and optimistic horizon ahead.
- [63:53]
B
No, I love that. I think the show project sounds really exciting and it makes complete sense in the absence of a playbook. Just actually hearing from the people doing this and what they're doing, you know, to your point about the book club is, is very exciting and it seems really valuable. And, you know, I think we talked a little bit about it today, but yeah, I look forward to checking that out myself.
- [64:16]
A
Yeah. And I appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you today. You're doing great work, just bringing different perspectives to the market and so keep it going.
- [64:27]
B
Awesome. Well, Matthew, I want to say a big thank you for joining today, for sharing all your insights. It's been super interesting and yeah, looking forward to connecting again.
- [64:36]
A
Yes, absolutely. See you next time.
- [64:38]
B
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