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Greg Shove
The agile brand.
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, E commerce, and whatever's next for the omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. 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 to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show.
Interviewer
AI is no longer just a tool.
Greg Kilstrom
It's reshaping business strategy, workforce morale and even personal productivity. But are executives truly prepared to treat
Interviewer
AI as a strategic thought partner? Or are they still viewing it as just another tech trend? Joining us today is Greg Shove, CEO of Section, an AI company on a mission to train the next generation of AI leaders. With a goal of educating 100,000 students in AI in 2025 and 1 million by the end of next year, Greg
Greg Kilstrom
is here to share his insights on
Interviewer
AI strategy, workforce impact and what businesses of all sizes need to know about integrating AI effectively. Greg is a seven time founder and CEO and has hired and managed lots of CMOs in his B2B and B2C companies with with small marketing budgets and millions of dollars of marketing spend. Greg, welcome to the show.
Greg Shove
Great. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Interviewer
Yeah, of course. So I know I mentioned a little bit about your background, but why don't you start by telling us a little bit more about your background and role at Section?
Greg Shove
Sure. Well, first of all, seven time founder and have worked with marketers my whole life either in the B2B or B2C space, sometimes with limited budgets, meaning I wasn't able to raise a lot of money for the idea for the company and sometimes with a lot of budget because we were able to raise a lot of money. Section was a company where we raised a lot of money. Frankly back in the moment where it was easy to raise money, which was 2020 and 2021 and at the time we were funding an online executive education business school. That was the initial mission of Section. It was founded by a Guy named Scott Galloway, you might know him, sometimes referred to as Prof. G. He's a co host of Pivot. So Scott started the company. I'm a longtime friend of Scott's. I came in to run it. We launched our first online business class the week of the US lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic. And so sales went from zero to $10 million overnight. I thought I was a genius because I thought it was because of our amazing product which was a two week online sprint where we had live lectures, a slack community homework for students in a single cohort where the students kind of started and ended on the same day. So that product was great. And we know we had high nps, high completion rates, high engagement rates. Demand plummeted when the pandemic ended. And that's when I realized, oh, I was, I was misinterpreting the signal. That incredible growth that we had was fueled by a lot of capital that we were spending. That was a mistake. But it was really fueled not just by our, not by our great product, but by the demand because people were sitting at home with nothing to do and frankly worried about their jobs. So they were upskilling. So I had to right size the business, right size the team. That was painful. Reduced the marketing budget almost to zero. And there were months where we'd been spending, you know, probably half a million dollars in marketing in terms of customer acquisition marketing and sort of stabilized the company. Then February 1, 2023 came along, now about two years ago, where I played with ChatGPT plus and that's when I had kind of one of those aha moments both for myself and for section the company. And the AHA moment was this will be the new accelerant. So Scott and I had always thought that business education, strategy education, helping people in their mid career kind of think like a leader. What was an accelerant or is an accelerant? And it is, that's why people go back to business school. That's why people go back to exec to get executive MBAs or you know, or do sort of one week at Stanford Business School and pay 10 grand for that. You know, that learning's meaningful. But then we realized in that moment that the new accelerate accelerant would be AI and that knowledge workers, leaders, managers, high, high ambitious ICs use AI to their advantage because it would take a while for the rest of the knowledge workforce to figure out, figure it out. It's not easy to work with AI as you know, it's not easy to play around with ChatGPT and get good outcomes from it. So that's when I thought, okay, this is the new accelerant. And I wanted to be the company that enabled as many people as fast as possible to get into the AI class. So we pivoted pretty much on day one. I could give you the whole playbook on how to pivot because I've done it too many times. But, you know, that was a good pivot for us. You know, we caught that moment, I think, pretty well in terms of understanding what people needed, building product, meaning our curriculum, as fast as we could. I had to teach the first AI class, Greg, because there was no one to teach AI, you know, two years ago, particularly in the context of business. Right. A lot of classes and stuff going on and teach engineers how to use AI software engineers, but not really much for marketers or for leaders or for people in finance or, you know, hr. So that's what we did at Section. We've trained probably 20,000 people the last 18 months on AI, and our goal this year is to train 100,000 people and a million next year on how to use AI in their jobs so they can get that acceleration.
Interviewer
Great, great. Well, yeah, let's dive in here. We're going to talk about a few things. Definitely you're the right person to talk with about this topic here, but I want to talk about a lot of the conversation around AI is, you know, it's an automation tool, it can speed things up, it's an efficiency play. And that's not untrue. But you know, executives should also be thinking of AI as a strategic thought partner. And you know, how, how can business leaders kind of move beyond. Again, it helps kind of automate a few things and it accelerates. Again, not untrue, but how can, how should executives shift their mindset to use AI more effectively?
Greg Shove
Yeah, sure. I think, I think my second aha moment was asking AI to play the role of a board member. So we've now done this for six straight quarters. We just did it actually last week because we had a board meeting. So when I first did this, and we do do it kind of the same way today, I just took the same board deck that I send to our board members. And by the way, I, I have a great board, probably the best board I've ever had in terms of all my startups, in terms of their experience both as investors and operators. So, you know, I get good advice from, from this board. But so I took the same board meeting pre read that I give the Humans. And I gave it to AI six quarters ago, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and so on and said basically, you know, act as a board member, act as a conservative board member, act as an aggressive board member, act as a cfo, you know, minded board member. And so we did that before the board meeting to get ready for the board meeting. And we've done it every board meeting since. And I can't imagine any entrepreneur going into a board meeting and not doing that. I can't imagine any CMO going into an executive meeting or you with a boss or with a board or investors and not doing this, which is role playing with AI as a thought partner. And we grade Greg, the AI in terms of its performance when compared to the human board. We don't record board meetings for kind of governance and legal reasons. But I do have my chief of staff sit in the board meeting and take really great notes. Board meetings are typically an hour and a half to two hours. We do them every quarter. And so we have a pretty faithful kind of record of what the humans tell us and their, you know, their advice and insights. And then we compare that to the AI and AI scores really well over the last 18 months, AI has scored between 85% and 93% of the humans. So we compare the output of the humans and we compare that to output of the AI, our favorite AI. And the highest performing AI every quarter has been clawed from anthropic. Now GPT is close behind. It not used to be, but now it seems to improve as a thought partner. So those two AIs are far and above the best for this kind of work. We think so. They're kind of my strategic SWAT team. When I think about my AI would be Claude and GPT and Copilot is decent Copilot. Microsoft Copilot has, as you know, GPT inside and Gemini is a long way behind. So that product in my opinion is not ready for knowledge work or for serious knowledge work at least as relates to thought partner kind of work. So again, that was an eye opening moment for all of us. Of course I show, I showed the board and I said, listen guys, you know, we all got to bring our A game from now on because if, you know, if this AI can get, you know, 90% of what you can tell me and it takes like 30 seconds and you know, you know, AIs got no prima donnas, you know, in terms of AI board members, right? You know, no email follow up. And by the way, I get to ignore the advice when I get it from AI harder to kind of ignore the human advice. Now of course, AI, AI doesn't have a network. AI can introduce me to, you know, potential prospects or, or, or other funders, you know, so, so I'll need the human board for a while and probably forever.
Interviewer
Right?
Greg Shove
And there's something about as a human getting good feedback from other humans. You know, it feels good, especially when it's positive feedback. So we do need these human moments. But particularly if I was a first time CMO or first time, you know, founder, CEO, you know, why not role play, why not practice before you go into the real thing, before you step in the ring and a board meeting is a high stakes step in the ring moment. And I think, I just think that we should be using AI in that way. So AI's thought partner, Greg is medium to high stakes decisions. Take the same inputs that you're using yourself for that decision and partner with AI. And the most important thing is ask AI to adopt your Persona and really ask AI to push you into these different kind of parts of the decision. You know, we all have blind spots as humans. We all make decisions kind of a certain way, way over time because we've learned a groove in terms of our own decision making. And you want AI to kind of get you out of those blind spots, right? And get you out of those grooves and have you think about things you don't normally think about. So I think it's easy in terms of how to get started, right? Just take a decision and start talking to GPT about, you know.
Interviewer
Well, and I think what, what I like about that is, you know, I think a lot of people think of it as, okay, let me, let me get chat GPT to help me with the board deck or with some talking points or whatever. And so, you know, I think, I think a lot of people are thinking, but I like that there's feedback loop there. And you know, you're, you're not just taking AI and the output for granted, but you're, and you're also qualifying it against the real human output. So in other words, there's an opportunity for improvement. I assume that's also probably guided the way that you prompt it for the next board meeting and the next board meeting after that. In other words, like it's a, it's continuously improving based on both human and AI output. Is that, is that accurate?
Greg Shove
Yeah, I'd say sort of. I mean, I think this, I think we need better AI for that. I like the fact that we now have like the concept of Projects inside of Claude and inside ChatGPT, where you can begin to sort of build more of a, you know, body of work with your AI. And they kind of find it and collect it in one place. You know, there's a lot of cutting and pasting right now into Google Docs or something like that. So I think projects, memory, you know, you can see where we're going here. Right. To your point, we want this to be an ongoing conversation with AI as the Persona, as a board member. Then we want another project or conversation that's ongoing and that, that over time, you know, connects the dots with AI in a different role. Right. Maybe as a second opinion as a doctor. Right. I mean I have had cancer and it's always top of mind for me in terms of being cancer free. So I use AI pretty regularly and thoughtfully as a, as a stand in for a Mayo Clinic oncologist. And I share a lot with my AI in terms of making it, enabling it to do a better job of that. So I'll share, you know, cancer reports and tumor reports, you know, MRIs and so on with my AI. So I get good advice. Just like I'll share the board deck, you know, and the business plan and the financials of the business with AI. So I think about it as our mental framework for AI should be this grunt work and there's sort of brain work and for grunt work, that's where most of us go to. Yeah, we think AI is going to help us, as you said, you know, write the tweet, write the social media post or whatever, summarize the email, summarize the report. That's good. We should absolutely be doing that in aggregate. We can save some time outsourcing grunt work to AI. We also need to think about brain work. High stakes decisions where they're not that frequent, but getting them right matters and we'll get, we can optimize that decision a little bit, not have the AI make the decision, but again, optimize that decision for us, cover our blind spots, think about things that we don't think about. Think about unintended consequences, like that whole conversation with yourself about unintended consequences of a decision. We don't do that well as humans. We tend to be optimistic and think about what's going to go right. Well, think about what's going to go wrong and do a little bit of contingency planning maybe, or at least have that as an input into this decision. AI is great at that. AI crosses Greg, all domains. It crosses disciplines, crosses geographies, Crosses time, crosses languages, crosses markets and industries. Like we don't do that as humans, right? We, we've, again, we've got our expertise, we've got our experience that, really important experiences, but AI can cross kind of so many domains that I think that, that, that's kind of underestimated or undervalued by most of us in terms of how we work with AI.
Interviewer
AI can work across domains, as you're saying. And yet, you know, you mentioned a handful of the, the AI platforms. There's, there's, there's others out there, of course, course. But there's kind of a small, there's a handful of tech giants, let's say, that are controlling a lot of the AI and the models and all those kinds of things. Are we at risk of AI dependency on a very small handful of these giants?
Greg Shove
Greg, I'm terrified by this, frankly. Let's step back. What's going on? Big Tech or Big Tech plus OpenAI, which are the players as you refer? It's a very small number and my guess is there'll be even less of them in a couple years just because the capital requirements to build sort of frontier models and maintain them and improve them and so on. So I think we're going to have a very small number of companies who we're going to outsource our cognition to. So that can sound very exciting in terms of the breakthroughs that might come from that when we are partnering with a cointelligence and hopefully discovering new drugs for cancer or other disease or discovering new proteins or discovering ways to solve for, you know, climate change and so on. But that's not the intent of these companies. Meaning big tech is telling us this might happen. You know, we'll fix medicine, we'll fix healthcare, we'll fix education, you know, we'll fix climate. But, but no, they're not going to do that. You know, entrepreneurs hopefully will, you know, building on those models and innovating on those, on, on those AIs. Big tech just wants to make a ton of money and they're in an, they're in a race to win. And I think the prize is huge. I think the prize will be the most valuable company in the world. It will make Amazon look like child's play. I, I, I really think that meaning, you know, we outsource our consumption to Amazon. We outsource or we rely on Google for understanding our intention, our attention. We rely on Meta and of course TikTok for communication. I'd say Apple sort of won the, the Kind of digital communication game. So what's up for grabs? Cognition. What is more important than to humans than cognition, how we think and what we think. So yeah, and I think about this moment as an exciting one and a perilous one for all of us. Meaning at one level, we're all lab rats in a giant experiment that's being run by big tech, mostly out of Silicon Valley, financed with currently unlimited amounts of money, really just staggering amounts of capital chasing this prize. And this prize is who's going to win the battle for our cognition with no government oversight at this point. There'll be some state regulation. There are about 12 states that are moving, I would consider meaningful AI regulation, but not from the federal government at this point at least because the Trump administration rescinded the Biden executive order. So with really little oversight. So that's could be really good for all of us. But you know, there's going to be some unintended consequences here. And I don't like the idea that just one or two companies can end up kind of controlling the models, controlling the technologies that absolutely will influence how we at least how we work and maybe how we think. Yeah. And we will cognitively offload to these, to these technologies. We will. We lost our minds as it relates to our attention and absolutely. I'm concerned about losing our minds as it relates to our cognition and that we lose that to just a couple companies. I hope not.
Interviewer
Yeah, I mean I think you could look at it as Google being dominant in search results. It made things very convenient for us to find the answers to things very quickly without doing a lot of digging around a lot of places. I wonder with agentic AI, you know, we're right now without that, without multi step things happening, we're at least we're, we're outsourcing the cognition, but we're outsourcing like one step at a time in the cognition. We're still prompting, but with agentic. Do you see that as kind of just more of the same or does that kind of exacerbate this issue of now we get from, you know, start to finish with a lot. I mean, you know, enterprises talk about a lack of transparency in AI models, but now we're talking about this in our personal lives and other things.
Greg Shove
I think this is, I think agents accelerate all this. Absolutely. If we are, if we can get to a point where we can trust the agent, we're not there yet. Right. This idea of being sort of a single step black box for us to make the request and the agent to complete the request. You know, for that to really happen at large scale, we're going to have to trust the agent that they've actually found, you know, the right information or the right, you know, the right ticket to buy or the right hotel to book, whatever it might be. But, but if our, if we get there, and I think, I think we probably will, we'll have one or two or three companies that are providing these agents where we do trust them, like we trust Google sort of the vast majority of the time. We think a Google search result is a good search result. Right. So, yeah, I think this will accelerate this sort of cognitive offloading and this sort of mental laziness, quite frankly, that I think we could fall prey to. I think there are a lot of people that really, you know, they want to get their job done, but they really want to get home and, you know, put the kids to bed and binge on Netflix. And so when you think about the knowledge workforce, the most ambitious will use agents in a way to accelerate themselves and augment themselves. A lot of other people, quite frankly, might use agents just to offload the work too. And I'm not sure that's a good thing. We'll see if it means I can book my ticket, you know, faster and easier, that's probably a good thing, right? I do think one outcome here, Greg, and I think it's relevant to marketers in particular. It was clear to me that the first one when I played with chat GPT and it's really clear to me now, using OpenAI's deep research product, which is arguably the first meaningful agent released obviously just in the last couple weeks, that interface friction for consumers will not be tolerated. This to me is one of the biggest. So the outcomes of this first phase of generative AI, when you get it, when AI does it well, so it doesn't hallucinate and you have high trust in the answer, you get an answer without interface friction, you're not, you know, not a lot of clicks, not a lot of, you know, browser tabs open, not a lot of poking around, trying to sort of do the second level research yourself does. That's because that's what happens with Google Travel, I think is the best way to think about this or the best category to think about travel research today in a browser, Google World is still of work, you know, on the human. A lot of cognitive load on us, a lot of friction on us. Travel with AI, if you trust it, is amazing. I use, and I'm sure a lot of your audience uses AI for travel planning. It's just so much better. Assuming you trust the answers. It removes all that friction that is going to be, I think, consumers expectations for everything, every consumer activity, digital consumer activity. I think we'll expect it to be like an AI conversation, almost no friction to get to a great answer. So if you're building websites or building consumer experiences or building inside enterprise experiences, I think the same expectations will come from employees around interface friction. They won't tolerate it. They're going to expect the enterprise system to kind of work internally like an AI experience, which is, here's my problem, Give me my answer. Yeah, yeah.
Interviewer
And to kind of follow on to the employee aspect of that. I think the optimistic way of looking at it could be, okay, all of this grunt work and this repeatable stuff that I used to have to do, now I can automate that and my work can be more valuable. You know, I think there's many flavors of how this could go. Do you think that's where we're headed, you know, in the, you know, humans have more meaningful work or, you know, where do you think this is headed with knowledge workers in particular?
Greg Shove
Yeah, I mean, I think, Greg, first of all, I don't know. And I think all the pundits have no idea. I mean, I've read everything from, you know, they're going to be running the world. World. They meaning the AI. Right. The two, you know, we're going to be sitting at home, you know, collecting UBI checks because there'll be nothing for us to do. We'll be all working harder because we'll, we'll give up all the grunt work, but we'll still have lots of other work to do. I don't know. I think that what I do think is the only way to figure this out individually is to get our hands on AI, is each of us and really in a meaningful way try to use it in our work and personal lives. Having done that for the last two years, I would, I think about this as the bottom 25% or the bottom 50% of most teams in the knowledge economy will be at risk in the next five years. That's how I think about it. So the advice I give people, and I have got three kids working the knowledge economy, two in the Bay Area and one in New York. That's my advice to them. Be in the, you know, be in the top half of your team. Be in the top 25% of your team. I don't think there's going to be room for weaker performers by the way the amazing thing about AI is a weaker performer who adopts AI can suddenly accelerate themselves. And there's research that supports this in terms of knowledge worker using AI. So I think the way we think about our teams will change, meaning who are the stars and who are the weaker performers? I think in a couple years we'll see different people kind of in that top group of our team. But I don't want to be in the bottom half of the team. I think everyone will be augmented by AI and they'll be the strongest performers. Absolutely. Will we see job loss in functions? Maybe every function? Yeah, I think we will. We'll certainly see the way, you know, the job we're doing change, Right. The tasks that we actually are now responsible for and where we add value, those will change. And I think engineers are the canaries in the coal mine, Greg. So what I try to talk more to engineers these days in terms of how they're using AI. I'm not an engineer. Obviously, we've got engineers at sections because we're building an AI product ourselves. But I like talking with them to understand how their jobs have changed in this moment, because they're the fastest to adopt AI in terms of getting their job done. And those jobs are changing very quickly. They're not seeing layoffs yet. What we're seeing is engineers just are doing different things and becoming more productive and having to learn to be better at different tasks.
Interviewer
So, as we mentioned at the top of the show, you've, you've trained a lot of people on, on AI so far. You have some aggressive goals not only for, for the rest of this year, but for next as well. What's the biggest knowledge gap that you're seeing in AI education today?
Greg Shove
Yeah, I'd say, first of all, it's not a knowledge gap. Actually, the biggest challenge is anxiety. That's, I think that human nature, right. And frankly, probably a lack of trust in corporate America, which is, I think, the sense that I'm being asked to work with AI. And what I really hear you saying as a leader is, well, why don't you train the AI so we can lay you off, you know, in a year? I think that's, that's not surprising to me. Meaning I think if people think that's going to happen, in some cases it will. And so I just think the number one barrier right now is anxiety and this, and, or this sense of AI can't do what I can do, I'm special, or, you know, the things that I do. AI is not going to be able to handle. I think that's just a mistake. I think that's, I think it's human nature, but it's a mistake. I think these AIs are going to get pretty performant, very performant soon. And I think a good example of that is thought partnership. You know, that's very sort of high cognitive work and AI does it pretty well. So I just think that we've got to. Don't bounce off of it. Don't be deterred by hallucinations, don't be deterred by, you know, it's kind of weird to work with AI. It doesn't behave the same way. By the way, we've never had software before, Greg. That gives us a different answer to the same question, you know, ten minutes later where, you know, if we're in marketing, we're used to a pretty complex Martech stack of software that kind of behaves the same way every time we use it, right? And now we've got this tool that doesn't behave the same way. It's not software. I mean, that was the first mistake for people thought it was software. The second mistake was they thought it was a Google replacement. It's neither. And so when you come with those two mindsets, I think you're going to have a bad experience with AI. And I think the mindset to come with is it's a co intelligence. It was like a summer intern, I think, with deep research from OpenAI and we've been using a lot at Section and I've been using a lot personally. We now have an MBA analyst or research analyst sort of at our fingertips, which is OpenAI deep research. So we should update our mental model. It wasn't the tireless Internet, which was sort of what everyone was talking about as terms of a way to think about AI, you know, that would make surprising mistakes, but also, you know, kind of do anything we asked them to do. That was a good mental model, I think, for AI until until now. I think now we should update that and say no, we've got a pretty good sort of analyst, you know, junior version of myself, available to us certainly in certain, in certain roles or tasks. So we'll see what we have a year from now. But don't bounce off, don't be deterred by some of its sort of unreliability or, you know, it's not software like behavior and know that all of us probably have at least a few tasks that we can optimize with AI. So find those few tasks, whatever they might be you know, writing headline, copy or thought partnership work, and just begin to build AI into those tasks, into your workflows. You know, I've got a third screen now, Greg. I've got this AI screen. I really, this year wanted to understand how do I reduce friction for me personally to work with AI and also preserve my own workspace. So this would sound at odds in terms of a setup. But what I've done at home, in my home office is I've got my main monitor, which is kind of my workspace. So I've taken AI off of that monitor and I've added another monitor on a vertical kind of orientation. And I've got just one, you know, one browser open there, three tabs for me. Those are, you know, ChatGPT, Claude from Anthropic and Perplexity. And I do my AI work there. So I've got it always present visually right by the, you know, kind of on the side of my main monitor, but I'm not working with it in my main workspace, if that makes sense. So I've reduced friction in some ways, but I've also moved it off of my main workspace. My use of AI has gone up because of this, just because it's that much easier to see it and look over to it and begin to kind of work with it. I also, of course, use advanced voice mode for chat GPT on, on the phone. And I would encourage everybody to do that. I would encourage everybody to take one hour of podcast time, not your podcast, but take one hour of some other podcast and talk to GPT. Yeah. You know, just like again, you're in the car, you're out, you're out for a walk, whatever it might be, you're commuting, start talking to AI and, and so manage your own knowledge acquisition because you get to control the conversation, you get to control the direction where it goes. So start to do that and just make it easy to work with AI. So think about a dedicated monitor that'll cost 100 bucks. Or just make sure that when you open up your browser in the morning, you open up your two or three favorite AI. Just have them close at hand. Nice. Nice.
Interviewer
Love it. Well, yeah, love the advice and the insights. One last question for you before we wrap up here. I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Greg Shove
Greg? I'm just naturally anxious person. I mean, I'm a naturally scanning the horizon, worrying about, you know, what's coming next. That might impact me, my livelihood, my ability to be relevant, economically productive. I worry about my family. So I just if you know, the enneagram, I'm an enneagram6 and that enneagram type is someone that is sort of a scanner of the horizon, you know, worried about what might happen. So, you know, it's kind of baked in my into my DNA, quite frankly, that it's just top of mind, you know, where's the next kind of risk slash opportunity coming from. So I just kind of, I do it naturally. It's not a great way to live. I don't recommend it. It's hard for me to live in the present. So, you know, I need to fix for that. I don't need to fix for what, you know, what's what. I you know, worrying about what's next or scanning the horizon or thinking about sort of, you know, what innovation might come along. I just kind of naturally do it. So yeah, for me it's been easy. But again, not a great way to live.
Interviewer
Well, thanks again. I'd like to thank Greg Shove, CEO of Section, for joining the show. You can learn more about Greg and Section by following the links in the show notes.
Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Texas Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H HL S T R O M.com 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 curious and stay agile.
Greg Shove
The agile brand.
Guest: Greg Shove, CEO of Section
Host: Greg Kihlström
Date: May 5, 2025
This episode explores the profound shift in how AI is viewed within organizations: from a tactical automation tool to a strategic thought partner. Host Greg Kihlström sits down with Greg Shove, CEO of Section, to discuss the realities and misconceptions of AI adoption in business, how leaders and teams can best integrate AI, and the importance of continuous education and curiosity amid technological upheaval. Shove draws on his experience both as a serial founder and current AI educator aiming to train a million professionals in AI by next year.
"I had to teach the first AI class, Greg, because there was no one to teach AI, you know, two years ago, particularly in the context of business... That's what we did at Section."
— Greg Shove (04:53)
"I can't imagine any entrepreneur going into a board meeting and not doing that... role playing with AI as a thought partner."
— Greg Shove (07:44)
"Our mental framework for AI should be: there’s grunt work and there’s sort of brain work."
— Greg Shove (12:38)
"We’re all lab rats in a giant experiment... the prize is who’s going to win the battle for our cognition with no government oversight at this point."
— Greg Shove (16:52)
"When you get it, when AI does it well... it removes all that friction. That is going to be, I think, consumers’ expectations for everything..."
— Greg Shove (20:52)
"The amazing thing about AI is a weaker performer who adopts AI can suddenly accelerate themselves."
— Greg Shove (23:20)
"Don’t bounce off of it. Don’t be deterred by hallucinations... It’s not software, it’s a co-intelligence."
— Greg Shove (26:08)
"I’m just a naturally anxious person... so it’s kind of baked in my DNA... I do it naturally— not a great way to live!"
— Greg Shove (30:06)
End of summary.