Transcript
A (0:01)
I think many companies have seen that it's time for them to revisit the legacy systems, to revisit the old way of doing things, to basically prepare not just for the current benefit of being able to use like AI in its current form, but the expectation is as AI agents do more and more complex things, then they're able to then lay down the foundation to be able to respond with all of the great innovations that are happening today.
B (0:22)
Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. This episode is sponsored by Box. I'm Kamal Ahmed, Executive Editorial Director of Fortune. And today we're back for part two of our series in partnership with Box, all about the world of AI in the workplace. Now, it's not the hype, not the empty promises, but the practical steps that actually make a difference. Organizations are experimenting with AI, but many struggle to turn ambition into measurable business impact. The question isn't just what AI can do in, it's how companies get ready to do it safely, efficiently and at scale. If you're listening to this episode, I know one thing about you. You care about staying ahead. You want to understand not just what AI can do, but what it should do in your organization. And if someone shared this episode with you, they think you're exactly the kind of leader who can take bold ideas, turn them into action and help your team thrive. And don't worry, we don't have to do all this. Al to help us navigate, I'm joined by Ben Kuss. Ben is the Chief Technology Officer of Box, the leading intelligent content management platform. He spent years helping organizations unlock the potential of their data and build AI powered workflows that actually work. Today, he's here to do the same for you. In this episode, Ben will be walking us through the five essential steps every company needs to take to get AI ready, from auditing data to measuring real business value. Welcome, Ben, to the podcast.
A (2:03)
Happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
B (2:05)
Now, as I said in the introduction, five key steps. We're going to take you through this in the next 40 minutes or so around the issues of audit, single source of truth, starting small, pushing beyond the chat, and measuring value. These seem to be the five key issues that people who are considering how AI can work for them have to really think through as they approach their new projects. But let's start at the beginning. I think still for many companies, AI adoption feels a bit scary. It feels something for the future, but you have to do it now. Where should you start when you are thinking about AI and what it can do for your organization?
A (2:50)
This is very much a common question that many companies are dealing with. And I think it does take a little bit of a difference for every company that looks into it. But in general, one of the things that we sort of see where people who are successful is when they're able to take different tasks or different processes they do internally, and they're able to start to have AI helping with them first on those tasks, and then being able to then add AI more and more into the mix. One of the big examples that we've seen over the last year across many industries is their ability to use AI for software engineering. It started out that AI was like an assistant for developers, and it quickly moved into the world where you started to have AI agents taking more and more of the coding tasks. So instead of just having to complete a function for you, it would actually start to create more of the software, do more of the edits. And so instead of when you're programming, having like a pair programmer, you started to go down the path of asking AI to do more and more, like almost like an assistant or almost like somebody who worked for you. And we think that this approach is something where you start to see this in more parts of business, that different people are able to not just have AI that helps them, but then also turn around and have it do more and more tasks for them as the agents become more and more complex.
