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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#563: Harnessing technology for good with Larry Weber, Racepoint Global
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- [00:01]
Larry Weber
The agile brand.
- [00:09]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season six of the Agile Brand where we discuss marketing, technology and customer experience, trends, insights and ideas with enterprise and technology platform leaders. We focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make brands successful, scalable, customer focused and sustainable. This is what makes an agile brand. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com before we get started, I wanted to let you know that my latest book, Priority is Action seven Principles for Better Strategies, Decisions and Outcomes is now available. In it, I give ideas and insights for leaders and teams that need to make meaningful progress on their priorities. After all, our priorities are what we do, not what we say we'd like to do. You can find Priority as Action on Amazon or learn more on my website, greggkilstrom.com now let's get on to the show.
- [01:17]
Today we're going to talk about using technology for good in a new age of reason driven by data, artificial intelligence, and people utilizing these tools for the right reasons. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Larry Weber, founder and chairman of racepoint Global and author of the new book A New Age of Harnessing the Power of Tech for Good. Larry, welcome to the show.
- [01:38]
Larry Weber
Hey, it's great to be here.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Looking forward to talking about this with you and congrats on the new book. Why don't we get started with you giving a little background on yourself and your inspiration for writing the latest book?
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Larry Weber
Sure. Well, I'm mostly known in the PR world. I had originally started my own company, the Weber Group, which grew to be the largest tech PR firm in the world. It was acquired by Inter Public in New York, at which time I bought about 21 companies, which is today Weber Shandwick, which is, I think the largest PR firm in the world. I've done a lot of things, but I've mostly been focused on watching technology evolve over 40, 45 years. And I've written seven books now this is my seventh. The six before were mostly about marketing and marketing theory and earned media, owned media, paid media. But I thought I'd do something different this book because I was starting to notice that like the old age of Reason, there was a lot of technology that had matured enough and was crossing to integrate into different vertical markets that I think it offered a Huge opportunity to start to address some of societies and the world's biggest problems in a more innovative, positive, optimistic, thoughtful way. So I got sort of inspired and like most of my books, I let it sort of cook in my head for a while. As I walked, I talked to people, colleagues, friends, clients, reread Thomas Paine's Age of Reason and looked at my journals on some of the technologies I respected most over the last 40 some years. Things like voice recognition, HTML search and many others. And I sat down and we researched and I wrote the book and I'm actually really pleased with it. It's. I think it's really good.
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Greg Kilstrom
So that's great. That's great. Well, yeah, we're going to touch on a few of the, of the themes within the book and you know, first, as you just said, you know, you were seeing some parallels between current times and the original Age of Reason. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that? You know what, what are the parallels that you're seeing and why do you think it's helpful to think in these terms?
- [03:52]
Larry Weber
Well, one thing is that I was seeing was there's a lot of doubt today about technology and its effectiveness and that are things like AI going to take people's jobs. And, you know, there's a lot of consternation there. Back in the original Age of Reason, there was a lot of, you know, religious fervor around not believing the scientists, not looking at what the facts were about changing things. And they got together, the scientists, and came up with things like the vaccine and obviously Newton's theory of gravity and many other things that sort of help move society along on a fact basis and on an optimistic basis. I looked around today and I saw again, similar conditions only in a much modern world. And I thought, you know what, there needs to be more technology optimism. I'm not naive. I know there needs to be guardrails and some understanding of keeping technology under control. But I believe that if looked at optimistically and used properly, that technology can solve a lot of issues from climate, in health care, in agriculture, in education and other places. So those are sort of the alignments. And I also saw again, for the first time, technology becoming almost a horizontal discipline and less of a vertical orientation. So you had technology and innovation servicing agriculture, health care, all the categories that I had just mentioned. So that created some excitement for me.
- [05:34]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, and to dive in a little more on the horizontal aspect too. And I agree on the optimism. I mean, I think there certainly are some things to keep an eye out for and that people need to be looking at. But I think it is helpful to take an optimistic look as well, to look at the. This from a horizontal aspect. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? I mean, I think there's, I think there's a lot of power in that. And I think AI is in particular, you know, something that people, a lot of people are talking about, but they tend to talk about it in silos. Right?
- [06:12]
Larry Weber
Yeah. You'll see in the book, I mean, my whole first chapter, which is sort of, I think, interesting, people go, why did you start with John Deere and company? And the reason was they had bought an AI company, Blue River Technologies, in Silicon Valley, well over five, six years ago. And they're applying AI for a number of reasons, to help farmers get better yields on their farms in a sustainable way. And examples would be picking out weeds, picking out disease in plants, and taking them out without hurting the soil or the healthy plants. There's autonomous tractors and driving using the latest satellite technologies. Way before even Google or others came up with autonomous cars, deer had come up with this. So figuring out a way to work with these technologies to create in a sustainable way, better outcomes for farmers that in hopes of that they could feed 2 billion more people by 2050, that we're going to have. Another thing is another example would be a good friend, a physician, Catherine Moore, who started Da Vinci Systems. This is using AI to help create robotic surgeries. We have less and less surgeons in the world, especially in third world countries. And to be able to have an adjacency of good surgeons working from a computer base that's, you know, flavored with AI and other technologies to get a result like taking out a gallbladder or fixing eyesight or something like that is a. Another healthcare example that I have in the book. So that's. Those are two examples, and there's many more, from, you know, taking plastic out of the ocean to, you know, using CRISPR and other OpenAI applications, quantum computing, how to take a whole physics look at computing versus just a mathematical look and the opportunities that can come from that. So the middle of the book, I dive deep into those technologies. So AI, from when it really started to appear in 1944, seven, I believe, was Alan Turing's, the first paper on it all the way through to today. Quantum, which goes back to the 60s, early 70s, which is the physics base, we look at CRISPR, we look at a lot of those technologies. So, and then I get, you know, plain spoken about it, what are the kinds of things that problems can they solve and what can they do? So.
- [08:57]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah.
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Larry Weber
Well.
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Greg Kilstrom
And so, you know, for those, for those, there's a lot of leaders and aspiring leaders listening to the show out there and probably in some of the industries that you've mentioned, as well as many others. For those leaders and aspiring leaders out there, how do they stay, how do they balance, I guess, the optimism with the realism and adopt some of these, even if some of the examples that you've mentioned don't apply directly to them, how do they take this and kind of think in this optimistic way?
- [09:31]
Larry Weber
Well, two things to just make it simple. One is to there should be at the C level, chief Innovation Officer or Chief Technology Application Officer that is constantly looking for other technologies to partner with to use, as well as what you build in house. No matter the category you're in, every company is a technology company. So you know how, how they manage that and make sure that they're looking at new developments. Also, what I learned in my career in the book is certain technologies evolve over a long period of time. Take voice recognition, for example. The Bakers founded that out of MIT well over 40 years ago. And some of its code is still in Siri and Alexa and other voice recognition as it gets refined and used in hundreds of applications. The other area corporations should look at, and young CEOs especially, is maybe having a chief ethics officer or how do you strive to be the moral corporation? Again, don't mean to sound Pollyanna here, but it's how do you make sure you're using technology properly and in the best interest of society? And what kind of guardrails do we need? And I talk about, like many have, that every time the government's tried to sort of intercede and try to manage technologies opportunities, they don't seem to get very far. And that's why I think corporations need to take that on themselves and build a trust between them and their employees, their customers, their markets, their peers, and set an ethics level and a moral level and a guardrail level that helps apply these technologies in, in the most thoughtful and safe and ethical way. So those are sort of two areas. But I do dive big into one of the chapters into how you can construct sort of the new C level. When I started out in business, Greg, it was just a CEO and a cfo. And now it seems that every time there's an issue in business, we slap a C on it, right? You know, from chief marketing to chief operating to chief, you name it. And. But I think we've never quite gone and explored the more important things that are how do you build and protect the soul of a company to make sure it's a good company? Because I believe that's part of a behavior that needs to be embraced. Yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
And to, to dive a little bit into this, the ethics piece as well. So you know, definitely agreed that government intervention, I mean, you know, there's been some examples I think in the EU like GDPR has been, has kind of charted a nice path and stuff but, but many other examples where governments haven't been as successful and then we've got the platform companies that are kind of self regulating and doing, sometimes doing a good job, sometimes less than good. And then we've got the brands themselves. So in other words, you know, it's. To oversimplify, there's three players here. What do you see the role of the brand in, in all of, you know, you kind of, you kind of touched on this. But how much should brand rely on platforms and government? I guess.
- [12:59]
Larry Weber
Well, I, I think brands have to realize that their brands are only as strong as their relationship and experience with their constituencies. So how you make those stronger in every way, including the use of technology and how you approach the use of technology is important also to understand. Like you mentioned the eu, they've at least gotten a little further respecting technology and they're more interested in the monopolization of technology it seems than most others. But the government of the United States seems to be more like the teacher that wanted to slap you with a ruler on your hands. That's really incentive building, you know.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Larry Weber
So I think you know that branch and try to work with governments. You know, I also remember when I was first starting out in my own business and we worked for a lot of startups, you know, they would get funding from all the famous venture capitalists back then, Kleiner Perkins Greylock and Charles River Mayfield, et cetera. But you know what? Always next to them was some division of the American government or the British government saying yeah, we want to invest right alongside you in those platforms. I don't see that as much anymore. So I think that's where the distrust start to come in, where there isn't as much deep involvement in trying to create new innovations and use of technology. One important book was in the 1980, which was called Made in America by Michael Dertouzos and the Nobel Prizer Prize winner Robert Solow, both from mit, who basically said don't worry about Japan and Germany having a bit of a lead right now because we understand software, we've invested in it, governments have invested in it, brands have invested in it, and America knows how to write software. You know, whether we like it or not, software is the thing that has changed everything.
- [15:08]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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Larry Weber
And so it's important that brands try to build into their relationship with governments and peers and, and others the idea that together we can create things that can be of societal use and help. Also, I think you can't think in platforms anymore. I think, as I mentioned in the book, we've been through seven eras of computing, and the sixth era was the social media era, and that still viewed itself as platform creation. So here's my platform, Facebook. You use it how you want to use it, you know, well, you can't do that anymore. That's the. That's like the NRA argument that we make guns. That doesn't mean they're bad, you know.
- [15:57]
Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Larry Weber
But you've got to have some kind of ethical and moral fiber to look at how you're going to use platforms. Because in this next year of computing that we're in right now, it's computing and humanity. And we are completely intertwined now. And there's no way to separate computing and humanity anymore. So we've got to live with it. Whether you're a brand, government, individual, company, competitor, that's my opinion.
- [16:31]
Greg Kilstrom
Along those lines. I mean, you talk about several aspects of society and culture in the book. One of those is climate change. And I know you briefly touched on this already, but wanted to dive a little deeper in there. There's the famous Marc Andreessen quote, software is eating the world. That's applied to business often. But is the solution to some of these things like climate change, that's driving wildfires, health issues, food insecurity, all of the above and many more. Is the solution technology? Is it part of the solution? Like where, you know, where does the role of technology play here versus other aspects?
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Larry Weber
Good question. It's also one of the ones that surprised me the most. After finishing and researching the book, I thought I was going to find what I'm calling the Amazon of climate, where there was a company that was striving to be, you know, sort of the everything by using new technologies to solve climate issues. You know, from, you know, the heat warming of the planet to plastic in the ocean, to, you name it, rising sea levels. And what I found was there isn't right now any company that's trying to do that. There are dozens among dozens of small startups that have interesting technologies to help you with carbon, reducing carbon and doing some other Other things to help save the planet. But there isn't that concerted sort of big company dedication. And I say in the book, don't be surprised in 10 years if a company like Microsoft becomes the largest environmental company in the world. The way they're looking at carbon, the way they're using their software, the way they're using AI now, especially OpenAI, you know, that software becomes just sort of a generic offering that helps you manage businesses and tasks and things like that. But where the real value is coming now is in putting that all together to solve a problem, you know, like a huge climate problem. So my guess is it's not going to be climate.com that saves everything. It's probably going to be a Microsoft or, you know, maybe an Amazon. But this is more of a proactive approach. There also is a reactive approach, you know, and I bring up Amazon to be a reactive. Think of the fires that are happening right now in the west again. You know, they have some of the best drone technology in the world. Why isn't Amazon using or offering their drone armies to help get supplies into the areas that have the California fires or help with the extinguishing of the fires with their drone armies? So the technology exists. Why aren't we banding together to use it in that kind of way?
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. I mean, is this a matter of, at least for the time being, incentive. Right. I mean, to rule the E commerce world, there's billions of dollars in it. I mean, you would think to put out wildfires, there's billions of dollars worth of cost savings. But is it, is it maybe just the fragmented nature of things and that's inevitably going to get less fragmented?
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Larry Weber
Yeah, I'm hoping, and I'm also hoping that, you know, corporations start to understand that their brands are going to have to stand for something good.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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Larry Weber
And that maybe it's not about all the paid media budgets, but maybe it's about becoming a good corporation. Because then like I say in the book, marketing sort of disappears because you're reaching an audience right now, a younger audience that is going, hey, I want to work and deal and buy from good companies. So that's becoming a huge marketing message and positioning. And if you want to retain and recruit the best people, which is going to get harder and harder, then it's imperative that you be a moral corporation.
- [20:47]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. One last topic I wanted to explore from the book and I think you touched a little bit on this at the beginning, but you use the term adjacencies and just wanted to maybe Just first explain what you mean by this and give an example.
- [21:03]
Larry Weber
Well, most of the, I'd say more advanced users, especially of AI and Quantum right now, kept using the word adjacency when I was interviewing them. And what they meant was, this isn't like magic. It isn't. You just buy the technology and it works. You have to have a person who is expert adjacent to that technology, making sure that there's data integrity, you know, the old garbage in, garbage out cliche, but to also make sure that it's doing the right things in the right way. I go back to the example of Da Vinci systems and surgery with robotics and AI and there's no way they would let the robot just be on its own. It had to have an adjacency with the surgeon who kept watching, checking, making sure that it got better. Because the best software learns from itself and rewrites its code on its own. So the adjacency helps through that management system to create even better offerings over time. So that's what I mean. And by adjacency, and you can pick any application of these technologies and you can't, again, just leave it alone. That's why this myth of it taking jobs away from people or things like that is. Sure, maybe the mundane things like there's already long time been robots that vacuum your, your apartment or, or cut your lawn. So sure, they're going to do sort of manual things, but the more complex issues that are vexing society, you know, that's going to need human intervention for a long time to make it the best it can be. That's what I mean by adjacency.
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Greg Kilstrom
Got it.
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Yeah. And I think, you know, given the, you know, I know a lot of people are not able to, you know, they don't have the luxury of dealing on a longer scale. But, you know, it's been, it's been shown many time over time that technological advances end up creating more jobs and wealth and all those things that then, you know, remove it and, and stuff like that. So, you know, we may lose a few jobs over the, over the coming years and, and certainly that will affect people.
- [23:23]
Larry Weber
But, but then they, but then they change.
- [23:26]
Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Larry Weber
You know, who knew that Nuance would become, you know, a $500 million company and get bought by Microsoft and represent leadership and voice recognition in a variety of categories, you know.
- [23:38]
Greg Kilstrom
Right, right. Yeah, definitely. I, I, and I think that speaks to the, the optimism and the reason to, to move forward with all this stuff. Well, Larry, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up here.
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Larry Weber
Sure.
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Greg Kilstrom
Greg, as a fellow author, I always like to ask at least one question about the process of writing. And so this is not your first book, but in Writing A New Age of Reason, what did you learn through the writing process and what might you do differently?
- [24:09]
Larry Weber
Well, one thing I learned was that what I've been doing to write books was good for me and everybody's different, but I work from a deep, deep outline. So I don't really write right away. I don't. Even though I like Jack Kerouac and the origins of sort of just, you
- [24:28]
Greg Kilstrom
know, stream of consciousness.
- [24:30]
Larry Weber
Stream of consciousness writing, that's not what I do to come up with books like this. I keep looking at table of contents, changing it around deeper outlines, and then doing the research and making sure that there's a logical flow and a lot of storytelling. I'm telling more stories than I ever had in this book than I have in the other books. People get stories. They learn from stories easier and faster. So I guess that's what I've learned a lot about. And then that research is really important and and that factual and validated research and knowledge is really important to make sure that things are accurate and moving forward. That's all.
- [25:17]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, that's great. Well, again, I'd like to thank Larry Weber, founder and Chairman of racepoint Global and author of the new book A New Age of Reason Harnessing the Power of Tech for Good, for joining the show. You can learn more about Larry racepoint Global and his new book by following the links in the show notes.
- [25:35]
Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.greggkillstrom.com. that's G-R-E G K-I H L S T R O M.com While you're there, check out my series of best selling Agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. The Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay Agile.
- [26:24]
Larry Weber
The agile brand. Modern Enterprise has a lot of moving parts. Comcast Business helps you orchestrate it all with SD Wan working at scale to keep 150 hospital locations connected and working as one plus SASE and zero trust Security. Protecting financial data across a bank's 2,000 branches. And AI powered networking that optimizes traffic across five continents. No one does business like Comcast Business. To realize the future America needs, we understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.