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The Digital Executive
Matthew Kael Swanson on AI That Gets Paid for Performance | Ep1237
00:18:05
In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, Brian Thomas sits down with Matthew Kael Swanson, a longtime AI entrepreneur and founder of StaffAI, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping business models and the modern workforce. Matthew explains the shift from traditional subscription pricing to outcome-based models, where AI is paid based on results—like revenue generated—rather than usage. He shares real-world examples of AI employees taking over repetitive desktop tasks while enabling human workers to move into higher-value, more meaningful roles. The conversation also tackles growing concerns around data security, with Matthew առաջարկing a novel approach: treating AI like a contractor, complete with controlled access and clear ownership structures. Finally, he dives into the concept of “flow,” describing how AI can free humans from rigid, repetitive work and allow them to focus on creativity, collaboration, and real-world problem-solving. This episode offers ...
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- [00:00]
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Podcast Host
Technologies Home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Matthew Cale Swanson. Matthew Kahl Swanson has spent more than 15 years building and deploying artificial intelligence systems in real world commercial environments. His work in AI began at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute where he helped develop self driving technologies before moving into entrepreneurship. He went on to found Speaker Text, a Google Ventures backed AI company that pioneered crowdsourced approaches to scaling enterprise workforces. Speaker Text was acquired by Cloud factory in 2012 and in 2016 he founded Augment CXM which developed some of the earliest large language model based tools designed specifically for enterprise contact centers. The company was acquired by Sutherland Global in 2022. Well, good afternoon Matthew. Welcome to the show.
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
A pleasure to be here.
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Podcast Host
Awesome. Thank you Matthew. I really appreciate it. And I know you're hailing out of the Bay Area there in San Francisco. I'm in Kansas City, so I appreciate you making the time. Just a two hour time difference today, but still appreciate that. And Matthew, if you don't mind, I'm going to jump into your first question. Most software vendors charge a flat subscription whether the tool works or not. How do you see this changing with AI?
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
Well, there's a kind of bigger change happening right now in business models and this happens every so often. We saw back in the day software vendors charge license fees and then Salesforce showed us a better way with seat based pricing not too long after that Amazon showed us usage based pricing. And here we are yet again with another shift. And really what the Silicon Valley circles are talking about is outcome based pricing. And really what that's all about is trying to align on value. At the end of the day, how can a vendor work with a customer and provide roi? That that's why this shift is happening. So getting back into your question, what we've seen happen is because AI can now do labor and not just be a tool for employees, it can start to take on higher value tasks and it can start to share in the risk and upside. So what does that translate to for us? Outcome based pricing is commissions. Right. In a sales environment, that's what we do at staff AI, we provide an inside sales rep. And so that's how our AI charges. It's not about how much the AI works, it's about how much gets produced through revenue, which we then share in commissions.
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Podcast Host
That's pretty cool. And I saw that initially when we reached out with your team to get you on the podcast here. I thought that was interesting. I'm glad you're breaking that down for our audience. But you're right, licensing has been all over the board. I don't know who does it worse, Microsoft or others, but always changing the game on us, right? From seats to subscription based to, you name it. But I love the outcome based pricing and I'm glad you kind of broke that apart for us today. Really, at the end of the day, you are trying to align that value with that type of pricing. So. Thank you. And Matthew, a major workforce concern involves AI taking jobs. What are you seeing happening at companies hiring your AI employees?
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
Yeah, I mean this is absolutely the conversation of the workforce right now. AI is obvious at this point. You know that it's going to keep improving and accelerating how much of a task it can do. So we see this a lot. It's in our name, staff AI. Right. We are, we're definitely seeing that trend of AI being able to do end to end tasks that normally people would have done it. And so just what we're seeing inside of the workforce is that that employ staff AI is absolutely. The AI is now able to do desktop work not just as well as better than people can.
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Podcast Host
Right?
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
Clicking around screens, updating CRM records, golem gathering leads. That's all AI territory.
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
What we're seeing is we recently deployed into a company, into a 12 person department and yeah, there was some displacement. The AI came in and did all of the back office type of clicking around but more interestingly the on the team of 12, eight people or less. And what the company did is repurposed those people to start having more high valued interactions with their customers to make this a little bit more tangible. This is a property broker and so some of those people are now going on site to the properties to take better pictures of the properties that the customer was providing. As one example where there's no way the AI could ever do that. Right. They can't move around and robotics is a long ways off. So basically going to the customer, having a closer read on what's really going on in their world, translating back into the AI. Those are emerging jobs that companies didn't really have the business case for. Well now that you can automate the back office work they do and that's what we're seeing.
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Podcast Host
That's awesome. Really love that. And you're keeping really a cohesive machine and human together, not necessarily cutting jobs like we're seeing lately in the news. And again, I don't know if that's some of it's clickbait, some of it's an excuse to downsize companies. We all know it's coming. But I liked your example there of we know AI is coming in, continually improving and doing desktop work. But your example of that property booker company where they were able to reap with your technology, they were able to keep the people repurpose those four out of 12 so that they could do higher, more critical tasks that AI couldn't do. So again, appreciate that. And Matthew, every CXO is under pressure to deploy AI fast, but they're also worried about their proprietary data ends up in someone else's training run. How should mid market companies be thinking about that trade off?
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
I was just saying that the AI taking my job is the conversation of the workforce. Well, AI taking my data is the conversation of management is what we're seeing right now in the marketplace. And so yeah, it's a huge question and this is an age old question that's just become a lot more pronounced because AI can now do so much more of the business process. And so what we're seeing and what we are leaning into with staff to address this is the idea that if you really think about AI as labor, you can start to contract with it differently too, right? And this is going to get into the data protection issue, which is, you know, if you look at the data terms in a, in a legal contract, you look at it from a software services agreement, there's so many opaque terms, right? Like, yeah, what the heck is metadata? Right. It's intentionally ambiguous for the vendor because they can now do a lot more with it. Well, if you compare that to an independent contractor agreement, you know, how you work with a person, it's a lot clearer. It's a lot easier to understand who owns what. And that's what we're seeing. And what we're doing actually with staff AI is our customer actually signs an independent contractor agreement with their AI employee. They don't sign a software services agreement. So they have data protection terms covered from that front in a. In a relatable way. But also from that point onward, everything is the same as working with a remote contractor. When you bring on a person to your company, you give them a machine, you give them a desktop, you give them software licenses, and that's your protection, right? If you offboard that employee, you retain the machine.
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
right? And that's what can now be done with AI employees. You can give them a dedicated desktop that they can use in staff AI case, our AI actually just with computer vision clicks around the screen. There's no API access going into the database. They're using the same access control layer of operating and accessing data, just like. Just like a human would. So that's one way to address the data protection issue is treat the AI like an employee. And it just simplifies the process.
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Podcast Host
That's very cool. And I never even thought of it that way, but it makes sense. And I'm sure it works here in your case. But with data protection, I did think it was interesting about an AI employee, like a human employee, and you set them up with your own device so that you have control over that. But an independent contractor agreement I thought was very, very interesting for sure. So thank you for sharing that. I know the big talk today is about employees losing their jobs to AI, but the data protection piece of it, which the executive team is always looking at and I really like your insights there. So thank you. And Matthew, the last question here I have for you. In your work, you express an interest in the concept of flow and how it is missing in so many work settings. What is flow and how would AI staffing help people experience it more often?
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is definitely something personal and a journey I went through as a roboticist and creating different technology companies and just seeing this challenge over and over again of the limits of conditional logic. Right. There's only so much you can program about a situation that is natural to how a human would operate in that same environment. Right. When you break it down into if then else, you miss a lot of the natural way you might go about handling a task. There's so many nuances that you can't cover an if then else statements. So that's what was kind of a realization that came at some point in my career and what got me excited about technology again is what we're seeing now with Gen AI, what we're seeing now with these large language models where in more particular reasoning models where they don't do if then else, they take prompts, they take these very abstract sentences. We're all used to this now, but this is pretty novel that it can take something general like that general like something a person might say and then reason through it and handle all those different ambiguous situations correctly. And what that allows people to do is stop having to try to fit everything into a box. If you can have your AI handle things like you would experience a membership
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
up to stop one stop thinking about all those different situations in these really confined ways, but also free you up to go out into the real world. And that's really what human beings where we thrive, right? We like sitting at a desk behind a computer clicking on boxes. That was not how our bodies were built. So I'm excited about the world in which people get liberated from behind the machine, going to go out into the field, out in the real world, interacting with other people. I think there's just so much demand for it and I think people will be a lot more satisfied with their lives when they get to do it.
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Podcast Host
That's awesome. And you're absolutely right. I don't care who you are. And some people do like their office job, but it seems like we are in a box. We've got a square computer, a square device, a square office, a cube for an office, square for a desk. And it just, it's kind of cliche, but I liked how you talked about that flow, your journey as a roboticist. You've learned a lot along the way, but using reasoning is where AI is headed. And if we can get folks out of these boxes, so to speak, and moving, doing more fun things, interacting with other humans, getting out of the box and doing some higher critical level tasks is where we need to be. We just got to make sure we keep the guardrails on this stuff. I've talked many episodes this past year about the guardrails and kind of where we're headed with the acceleration of AI. But thank you so much. I appreciate your insights, really do well.
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
I'll add on to that with let's liberate people from boxes, but keep our AI in them. Right. You just talked about how do you protect your data by putting AI onto a machine, putting it onto the box. There is this concern about giving all of your data, all of your interactions to some cloud AI model. Right. This is kind of what most companies are doing right now. That's super scary, it's super risky. There is a pathway here where people can house agency over AI by following this model of put the AI onto a machine. The machine is localized. And then the flip side of that is if the AI is operating inside of the box, the people can outside out, operate outside the box. And that is a positive direction we could all look forward to.
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Podcast Host
Absolutely. And I do appreciate you again highlighting that. Again, let's get that mundane, boring work and give that to AI and let us go do the fun stuff and make the world a better place. So thank you, really appreciate that. And Matthew, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
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Matthew Kahl Swanson
All right, thank you for having me.
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Podcast Host
Bye for now.