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Future-proof your leadership with High Octane Leadership, a place where business leaders—whether by title or aspiration—share cheat codes for unlocking workplace excellence, lessons learned along the way, and insider tips for future generations of next-level professionals. With a career rooted in building people and businesses, Donald Thompson is an award-winning CEO, speaker, and author who empowers leaders to scale with purpose. Over the last 25 years, he has helped startups and enterprises alike drive cultural change, unlock performance, and deliver exceptional results through strategic leadership.
Find him on LinkedIn, and listen here to learn how you can become future-proof too.
High Octane Leadership Ep. 171
Why AI Fears Kill Innovation: How Leaders Turn
Resistance into 97% Success
[00:00:03] Donald: Welcome to High Octane Leadership with Donald Thompson. This season, we're diving deeper with more solo episodes, where I'll share the experiences that have led to recognition by Forbes, Fast Company, and others. Not as a boast, but as milestones on my entrepreneurial path. From growing multimillion dollar firms to successful business exits and building high performance teams with a global perspective. I'll reveal the insights and strategies from my journey and share them with you so that we can win together. Alongside these solo episodes, we'll have industry visionaries and thought leaders who will explore effective leadership. Ready to empower your leadership journey with real success stories? Let's embark on this transformational journey together. Good to see you all this morning. I'm very, very excited to be here and not only talk about this subject, but really get a chance to meet you all and really be a part of the Scott Insurance team. I've gotten an opportunity, thank you for this, to meet some of the folks and and really get to know what they do, how they do it, and see a lot of synergies. I'm gonna do a little background on myself. Two reasons. Number one, this isn't the BRAK Fest. This isn't my ego therapy thing. But I do wanna give you some reasons of why you might want to pay attention. And I think that's important when you, uh, come to an event. How can I give you something that you can take away and your business can be better tomorrow? You can be more productive tomorrow. And so I have an entrepreneurial background. I was employee number seven at a small startup in Raleigh, North Carolina called iCubed. The name of the company was Integrated Industrial Information. Right? So as a salesperson, think about saying that all day, every day. On the phone, remember we used to make phone calls? Anybody in here like, you used to dial for dollars. Right? So we went by iQube. It spun out of NC State. The founder, Grant Willard, good friend of mine, actually talked to him this morning, and I'll chat about that in a minute. But I was employee number seven, and I started my professional career in business development. Before then, I had a lot of different types of jobs as I found my right. The reason I share that is I was a part of a team that grew. And, ultimately, after working and being mentored by Grant for over a decade, part of our company was acquired by Adobe Systems out of San Jose. And this was about 02/2005. And I remember sitting with Grant in a little pizza shop off of Mission Valley Road near NC State campus, and this was my opportunity. I was going to become, at 36, the CEO of the spin out company because they didn't want our engineering services business. So it's about 16 of us that needed a home. And Grant looked at selling that part of the business as well. And then he said to me, you know, over a cup of coffee, he said, would you like to buy the balance of the business? And I was like, I would absolutely love to do this. Couple problems. I have no money. Second problem, I have no money. I said, so if you're gonna sell it to me no money down, I'm your guy. Right? Like, I'm I'm your man. Right? And he goes, yeah. That's what I was thinking. And I was like, okay. What now? And so Grant held the note to that business, and we bought that business, about 16 of us, out of the profits of that business, and we paid it back over the first three years. The reason I tell you that is that as we get into technology and different things, everybody's door is opened by someone. Now I ran through that door. I take full credit for my effort and expertise that I developed. But somebody had an open door of opportunity that I had the opportunity to be a part of. And so we grew that company from 16 folks to about a 140 people. And we exited in 2014 to a company called KPIT out of India. And again, it's kinda weird, but cool, they only wanted the engineering services part of our business. And the thing about big companies, they don't really hear you. I said, there's a small part of the company in marketing technology that we're doing some cool stuff with Adobe. We don't care. We don't want that. Stop talking to us about this. We only want the business you're running that has clients like John Deere, Raytheon, Boeing, etcetera. And I was like, alright. Cool. And so we sold them that part of the business, and we spun out a firm here locally called ACI Digital that my good friend Greg Boone became the CEO. I was the board chair. We grew that business from 15 people to another 100 folks and exited that business to Behringer Capital. And ultimately, they exited that to emphasis. My point, Sam, is that throughout all of these successes, technology was changing. And one of the things I've had to learn in my career, I'm gonna bring it back to what we're talking about with AI, is things are always evolving and you have to make the mental model mind shift, if you will, if you're going to follow, lead, or get run over. And AI is a really inflection point about these decisions. Right? And I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about some of the things I'm seeing why. The other thing that occurred during this time is I invested in a small boutique marketing firm called Walkwest. And in fact, on the boards here there, our offices are right across the street in the Fifth And Third Building, right by our friends over there. But invested in that business at $300,000 when the that's the revenue of the business. And it's now grown into a multiple Inc 5,000 winner, multimillion dollar digital agency right here in your backyard. One of the things we're doing at Walkwest, and I'm gonna bring it back to today's point, is every single employee in the business is going through AI training right now. 98% of the staff already has their first level AI training. We already know that that business will be disrupted, so we have to disrupt ourselves first so that we can do it on the offense and not just sit back, so to speak, right, and let things happen to us. So we're either opportunistic or we're really afraid because we're deep enough in technology where we can kinda see what's coming. And so that's on the marketing, the communication, the PR, the comm side. My day job, if you will, and I do a lot of stuff if you look at my LinkedIn and different things, people ask all the time. It's like, Don, how do you get it all done? I said, I don't. I'm responsible for a lot, but I do very little. And so don't worry about my sleep or anything like that. It all works out. My claim to fame is working with finding and recruiting really, really talented folks. I know that we have a very well renowned coach that's following me, and so I'm glad that I'm going first. And so I'll get those things, coach Davis. But I'm the son of a football coach is the last thing that I'll tell you. So I grew up knowing that winning and losing mattered. I didn't grow up where everybody got a trophy. I grew up in a loving family. My dad was a football coach. He coached at Carolina during Matt Brown's first tenure, coached at University of Pittsburgh, all the different things. Right? Been on the sidelines at bowl games, was the ball boy for Dan Marino when he was at the University of Pittsburgh. Right? It's one of the one of my favorite things in my home is I have a signed poster that they only made a 100 of with Dan Marino and his linemen. And so I've been around sports my entire life. Here's how we now wanna cycle it back and think about how does it react to AI. Think of all the analytics in sports. Think about Chris's presentation, and I caught the tail end of it. I'm glad that we're recording it because I wanna catch it all. But here's one of the things that you might have heard. Towards the end, maybe the battery, the mic went in and out a little bit. Do you all hear that? Just went in and out a little bit. No big deal. Here's how cool AI is. Our team here from Walkwest is not gonna panic about that. They're gonna run all the sound through an AI simulation tool. It's gonna bring it up to the best level. It literally doesn't matter. For the quality of the output that we send in the snippets, so that Scott Insurance can share what they did today and bringing you all the debt. All of those things are happening around us, and we don't even fully understand the ramifications of everything we see and we hear. As I now get into our presentation and our and our conversation, I'm gonna talk for a little bit, but I want you to use the pads and pen in front of you. And anytime you have a question, write it down. What my biggest gift to you could be is that because of my role I just recently rolled off the board of, uh, ECU Health, 2,000,000,000 health care system. I've I've been working in health care and seeing how they're managing technology. I sit on the board of Easterseals, which is a $150,000,000 nonprofit. They serve 20,000 lives in North Carolina. And I didn't know that until I served on the board. But a very, very big business in terms of technology and infrastructure. Right? I talked to you a little bit about Walkwest. My day job is I'm the managing director for workplace options for the Center of Organizational Excellence. And so it takes my background as a student, as a coach, as a son of a coach, and I do that with business leaders on a global basis. The reason I'm excited about that is I have a lot of points of view, not necessarily the knowledge I have, but things I'm seeing and the way businesses are adopting AI, the way businesses are making leadership decisions, the way businesses are looking at whether they're going hybrid or not. And so I would recommend, and this may be a little bit on the ego side, you write down your questions and ask them and get as much free consulting as you can. Because number one, people with knowledge love to share it. I'm guilty. Right? They love to like, they love to show you that they got the mental goods. Right? Number one. And so because I want people to gain value. But number two, it just makes good sense if I'm working with all these different companies to get some of the questions you may have, whether it's AI or business trends, while we're here. Final thing before I get into the meat of the presentation. And I'll do that pretty quickly because I do like to get to the interactive point a little bit. The final thing that I'll tell you as we think about artificial intelligence and we think about business and growth, I sat with someone and they said, well, Don, you think AI is a fad and it's scary if you think that? Um, and then then I got to answer the question. I say all these thought bubbles in my head that I've learned that it is financially productive for me not to say everything I think. That was the somebody somebody was asking me, you know the questions people ask all the time, what would you tell your younger self? And and I had to tell myself, like, shut up. People don't wanna know your truth. Let them ask three or four times before you've given them like, give people bite sizes of truth. Right? Because I was creating enemies because I just wanted to tell it to people straight, and, uh, they didn't like it. They didn't wanna hear it. And so now I, you know, I put flowers on things. And, uh, so I'm also a florist. I'm a conversational florist. So here's the thing that I would leave you with. When you think about artificial intelligence and I do have folks that are asking me about how much they should invest in it, how important is it, does it affect my industry? I asked them questions before I even answer it. I said, do you understand how much money Google, Apple, and these major tech platforms are investing in this space? I don't know exactly, but I know that it's a lot. So think about collectively trillions of dollars. And so then you have to step back and say, wait a minute. There's certain things in life where there are there's knowledge layers and there's knowledge levels. Right? So one of the things in technology is I don't assume that I have all of the knowledge levels that I need. So I watch people that have 10 to 15 to 20% higher knowledge levels, and I'm watching what they do. I'm listening to a good friend of mine, his name is Brian, who was a former very senior development leader at Google. He since left in different things. And here's what he said. He's a computer science major, park scholar at NC State, business partner of mine, scary smart is really the background. Right? He could just put that on his resume. You'd need them, and it would work. He said, Don, I've been writing code for decades, and AI is almost as good as I was coming out of school. And it's only getting better. I'm scared for the next generation and how they're gonna survive if they don't understand how AI is changing the game. I'm not concerned because I'm now managing technology people. I'm managing technology strategy. AI is not gonna do that for companies initially. But if you look at the first layer of work that people are doing, AI is going to disrupt that and already has. There's a company that we're working with that all of you probably do some level of the business with, but I won't name drop for fear of lawsuits, and it's just inappropriate. But they laid off thousands of people that were working in a department and replaced it completely with AI. Here's the thing they didn't understand, is it scared the other 30,000 people, and they lost a tremendous amount of productivity that they didn't fully understand for the line of sight productivity that they could get with the technology. And so one of the things we'll talk a lot about is AI adoption. And so hopefully, with my background, with a little bit of a primer on AI, we're at a point to where there's a good use case, right, for your time for us to talk together. The other thing that I'll tell you and then we'll kinda dive in, enough about me and I I cover these slides. I'm gonna get right to it, is I'm a work in progress. So I'm gonna say some umms and ahs. I enjoy speaking in public for a little bit, but anybody that knows me well is I'm a stone cold introvert. And people are like, no, man. You're lying. Alright. I'll tell you this story. I'm telling you this one story. This is good. But then I'll be completely relaxed, and then I'll I'll go because I still get nervous every time I do it. And, uh, someone asked, why do you still get nervous? And that was when I was playing football, when I signed my scholar, all the things. It's because of how much I care. I wanna do a really, really good job for anyone that I interact with. And so those bubbles are because I I wanna make sure I get it right for the folks that trusted me and your time. And so if I have any flubs or different things, I'll talk through it and push through it. But that's where I'm coming from. So I'm on I'm ready to go on the stage. Maybe there's a thousand people gonna be at this meeting. So we do a prep meeting, all of the speakers, maybe two to three weeks before the thing. And the leader says, go around and tell everyone something about yourself. You know, you wouldn't be on LinkedIn that you wouldn't know and and different things like that. So people share their hobby. They just share different things. It's just a cool moment. Right? And I'm feeling like this is a psychologically safe space. I'm like, cool. You know, I don't because if you meet me, like, if you sit across me in business or you hear me talk or listen, like, I mean, I got this money I'm trying to make. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not looking for the psychologically safe moment. I I'm not thinking emotively about how I care. It's like how I win, how I grow. Just the way my mind works. But I'm in this meeting and people are sharing, and I'm like, I'm a share. You know? I was gonna say something superficial or else, but I'm a share. I'm a share. So it gets to my point, and I said, well, I said, independent of my personal persona and different things like that and the branding and what I do for a living, I'm very much an introvert and like to keep to myself, and I get energy from time to to myself and and reading and different things, and that's how I recharge. And the person in the session who's a friend of mine goes, hey, man, this part wasn't for lies. He's like, Don, I've known you for ten years. And he said, there's no definition to you introvert. And I was like, well, I shall not share again. Now my stories have a meaning, and I promise you they do. I just told you vulnerably of something that even as a very strong, high energetic, highly functioning business leader, right, in terms of the way I think about myself, my mental health well-being, my ability to succeed in the marketplace. I opened myself up to something, it didn't go right, I pulled back into my shell. Right? I want you to think about your teams and AI. The fear is real. The fear of it is very real. So if you as a business leader, ignore talking about it. Ignore thinking about it. Don't build out a strategy to where people know how they fit into it. I'm here to tell you they're going back into a shell and you're not getting good information about how it could actually work best in your organization. So as we talk about technology, we wanna make sure we talk about the people side. Five strategic things when you're thinking about artificial intelligence. And we'll go high level, and then we'll dig into some of the tools and different things of of that nature. So one, education matters. When you're educated about something, you're more comfortable talking about it. When you're educated about something, you start to learn what to fear and what not to fear. And that's super important in business because a lot of times we create this false narrative, right, of we're no fear warriors and all this stuff, and it's just not true. And it's just not true. Any business that's made up of people is fear, anxiety, uncertainty, doubt of what the future looks like and what the future looks like for them. And so instead of trying to adapt to that fear, you wanna look at what quenches that fear thirst, which is knowledge. So we do a lot of AI adoption training. And so let's say, for example let me give an example. Let's say we're talking to a group of HR leaders, and they're thinking about AI and how it disrupts their job. Number one, if it makes you faster, more functional, so you can think more strategic, then AI makes you better. So we talk to them about that standpoint. Most employees have employee handbooks that they're trying to keep up to date. AI is beautiful for that. So what we do is we educate and then we start to experiment with very small use cases where people can see immediate value. So again, if you educate me about something and then I experience value, now all of a sudden you're developing momentum with me. You're not sales pitching me. You're not beating me over the head with it. Right? All you're doing is walking me down an information highway in a manner that I can accept it. I was talking with a sales professional the other day, and I love talking to very successful sales people, because they know the only thing they have is time. And I was talking to the sales professional about why AI matter to them. Right? And we had 30 on the schedule, and the salesperson was like, Don, it's great to meet you. I wanna just go ahead and and wire us for success in the call. I was like, my kind of people. Wire us for success in the call. I was like, cool. And so we started talking. He said, listen. Right now, I'm using AI just to do a couple things, so I don't really understand how it matters to me as a as a sales leader at this moment. And I was like, number one, I appreciate the directness and the candor. I said, number two, let me go a couple of thoughts. How long is your sales cycle? You said twelve to eighteen months. So that means you put a lot of time, effort, energy, cost of really corralling this customer, learning their team, all the different things. So it sucked to lose and not know why right after twelve months. He was like, yeah. I said, do you understand that your proposal is going to an AI machine at your client, counterbalanced against four other proposals like yours? And if you don't understand what the machine says about you, you might have a challenge. He said, that makes a lot of sense. I said, you're in the relationship business. He said, yep. So do you form better relationships the more you know people? He said, yeah. What about using AI for research on the companies? Did you actually speak knowledgeable when you have a thirty minute call with the CEO? You don't spend the first seven minutes of every call asking how you do, what you're into, tell me about your company. When I hear that right now, I immediately discount the quality of that sales leader because most information about me, my company, my needs is public. And if you were intentional enough to do the research, use an AI tool about me as an individual, you'd not only know my company, you know where I went to school, you would know that I wrote a book, you would know me, and then we could spend the full thirty minutes talking about how you can help me. Now, because I created an educational pathway of how to make that salesperson better, then our conversation, the last twenty minutes we did this in the first ten minutes. The final twenty minutes was about questions, and we actually were highly productive in that thirty minute conversation. And so when we think about artificial intelligence, don't think about the technology of it. That's actually the easy part. That's actually the easy part. The hard part is getting people to change in a meaningful way with pace, because most people are allergic to change. If you go into your car, and I don't wanna presume, but this this looks like an audience where everybody's got reasonably newer cars. Right? I'm just gonna make that assumption. If you don't, my bad. Right? You might be saving doesn't matter why. Just it's not gonna hit you the same way. Right? But most of us have preprogrammed stations on our dashboard. Is that fair enough? Right? With radio or SiriusXM or whatever things you're using. Now ask yourself, how often have you changed those preprograms? I mean, sit with that for a minute. Like, sit like, literally, like, when you get in your car, sit with that a little bit. That means we don't like change. We're not actually interested in change. I have three or four political stations I listen to, two or three business stations I listen to, two or three hip hop. Yes. I'm still cool. Right? I still I still listen. I still listen to shady forty five. Come on now. Like I mean, let's let's understand who we're talking to now. Like, I I mean, I still got it. I mean, I could do the wobble wobbles anyway. But we don't change them much. So that means when we're talking about these new things, we've gotta get the education right to encourage people why to change, because people will change when they see the personal benefit, not the corporate benefit. People will change when they see the personal benefit. So I went to an event at at UNC, this was about a year ago. And Julius Peppers was being honored by he was in the House Hall of Fame and then also the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And my dad coached Julius Peppers from freshman all the way through when he left. And so we were invited to these things, and then we went to Vegas, and we're at his table at the ceremony for the College Football Hall of Fame. And here's why I'm telling you this. It's cool. So while I'm fine with my dad, I'm always asking you questions because coaching and business and leadership and coach Davis will talk a lot. They're very similar. Not same, but there's a lot of similarities. Right? But I asked my dad. I said, dad, what's the difference between young folks are all talented. Right? What's the difference between the ones that go to the NFL first round draft choice? And there was a period of time where three years in a row, my dad had number one draft choice at his position. He was a good football coach. Make it to the NFL, number one draft choices, and then gold jackets. Another gold jacket and you might not know this football wise, but a guy named Chris Dolan played for the Minnesota Vikings. My dad coached him at University of Pittsburgh. So I've been around this stuff, this sports, all my all my but here's the point. This isn't a sports point, it's a business point. I said, dad, what's the difference between those that get to the pro level and those that are the best to ever do it? He said, two things. He said, one, they're willing to do things they don't fully understand for the outcome that they want. That makes them more coachable. It's number one. And then number two, they love the work as much as they love the limelight. Because they know without the work there is no limelight. And those are people that you can coach. Here's the thing, don't try to adopt every person in your organization. Find the ones that want to help you transform it first. And I'm trying to bring the stories into the nuggets of what I think you all need to consider. I don't know what you should do. Right? Because I don't know your business well enough and all the things, but what you should consider. So people have AI task force and different things. I don't really love the word task force. Just find people that are AI curious and load them up with tools, give them some experimentation projects, and then things that they find highlight to the team they're learning. Because that peer communication is gonna be stronger than top down. Right? And so that's another thing that we're finding with with AI adoption in organization. Then when you execute, you wanna do small pilots, so that the risk of failure doesn't impact today's business. Those of you that have strong technology, businesses, infrastructure, and different things, you'll understand this or your IT folks understand the construct of a sandbox. The sandbox is where you play with the new technologies that have no risk to the current way you're doing business. And you take these experimental projects and you run it in a sandbox. You run a simulation on two year old data, decisions that you made in the past, and what would the decision process have been if we had leveraged artificial intelligence. So you're not taking any commercial risk, but you're preparing for the future, which is derisking the future. And so we have a package where we we work with folks in in doing that. There's a lot of ethical concerns with AI. How do I deal with customer data? How do I deal with bias in AI? And these things are all very, very real and should not be ignored. When I asked AI early on before I train mine, I'll talk about that in a minute, show me the perspective of a business leader, give me an image, x y z. It always shows a middle aged light man. Now, if you understand prompt engineering, then you just add the word, show me a collection of business owners from varied backgrounds. That simple statement reduces its inherent bias. Why does AI have inherent bias? Who built the machines? What do they look like? What schools do they go to? Doesn't make them bad actors. It simply means it is what it is. I'm an emeritus member of the strategic advisory board for computer science at NC State. And one of the times we had Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple, that came in and did some speaking and different things. Do anybody have the Apple card? Well, Steve, cofounder of Apple. He and his wife, all their assets are shared. He said, we do not have separate assets. They each applied for the card. He came back with a higher balance than his wife. He was very upset. But there was bias in the machine. And so when you think about AI and how you implement it, think about ways that you can understand prompt engineering and different things so you can manage bias as a process. But don't let that ethical lens keep you from taking the strategic business lens. Most of us are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. We can think about the environmental impact, the ethical impact. While we're looking at the commercial impact, we can do two things at once. But we don't want to leave any of those on the table. And then the economic value. The economic value is pretty intense in that it allows you to it's almost like magic. I was talking with a business leader the other day and they gave me a challenge, just something that they wanted me to to think on. And they gave me, like, two years worth of data on their leadership team and the different three sixty degrees and all the things they've had. Just a lot of data. And in under two hours, I was able to use AI and crunch that data and then create learning paths across an executive team of about 13 folks. I did in two hours work that would have taken a consulting team thirty, forty, sixty hours. And so the speed of change, and here's the the thing that I will accelerate to you, and then we'll we'll get ready for some questions and just any other feedback, is that I highly encourage prompt engineering certification for any business leader that is using AI tools. And what is prompt engineering? I don't wanna throw out phrases, but I wanna be really, really specific. It teaches you how to talk to the machine. Um, mirror's number two. That's when death do us part. I'm doing reading, training. I'm doing good. Like, Jackie and I have been married, and and Jason, good to see you, you know, my beautiful bride. We talk and grow all the time. We're on year six. And she is one of my writing partners and another gentleman named Bob Bachelor. And, uh, and Bob and Jackie, between the two of them, I have really a world class writing team. Help them with my book. They help we help companies with thought leadership, things of that nature. But here's why I'm bringing the two of them up. They're both phenomenal at building content for commercial organizations. Thought leadership content, research content. Bob is a PhD in communications. Right? He currently is professor at Coastal Carolina and written millions of words, 15 books. Anybody remember the show Mad Men? Uh, he wrote a book on that. Everybody familiar with Marvel? He wrote the autobiography of Stan Lee and around the Marvel Universe. He's a world renowned author. You would think he wouldn't be excited about AI. The reason I use this use case is everything's flipping on its head. The people you think wouldn't be for it actually are seeing it as a career enhancing tool because it makes them faster and their expertise even stronger. And so one of the things that that Bob and myself and Jackie have done is we've gone through our training in different things. If you take an hour a day from here let's just say I help you be more curious. Right? Number one, the free versions are are are trash. You're not using AI if you're using the free versions. Pay the $20 a month. Just pay it. Just trust Just pay it. It's month to month. You can try it, not like it. But they're built as a teaser. They're not built for you to actually see the full performance of the tool. Right? So number one, get the paid versions. Number two, even if you don't get certified, really start studying up on what prompt engineering is. So this is back to Bob and to they've probably shaved 40% of the time off of everything they do in a content path. And in one of the teams we're working on, we're looking to hire a couple of new folks. And here's what's changing. We're not even talking to people that are not AI fluent or curious enough to get the certification and drive forward. If you are looking for a strategic advantage, if you're a CFO, a COO, x y z, think about the amount of time it takes you to close your books. Think about the amount of time it takes you to analyze an m and a transaction. Think about the amount of time it takes you to vet 32 candidates for an executive role. If you're not using AI to automate those processes and give you first level impact, you're slower. And here's the thing about business and sports and life, speed matters. And so these are things that when I talk to people about AI and AI adoption to really get them thinking and thinking through. The other thing that I would tell you and just throw some numbers here, ninety seven percent of senior business leaders whose companies are leveraging AI report positive results from their investment. Seventy five percent of executives plan to invest more than $25,000,000 a year. I don't know what your story is technology in your business. That's not for me to say. But you should think about how AI fits in, who you should be working on to bring in, or who you should be training within the organization. Some people get somebody that that can go train the trainers. But I highly recommend that we move with some reasonable pace to get there. Talked about that already. Last couple of statements, and then I'll open it up for questions because I wanna be thoughtful. Uh, I'm out of time, and I can get going. I look at my watch for those things. You know, we can't outrun kind of our past experiences. But think about a tool. Here's the analogy I wanna use. How many folks cut their own grass? Just bear your hand if you do. How many folks have somebody cut their grass? I know and this isn't a judgment zone. There's just two ways to think about. So now right now, I'm talking to folks that cut their own grass. You cut your own grass, a, because you enjoy I'll tell one other story about my dad in in coaching. So he was at East Carolina before he was at Carolina. And he had two days, and, uh, I had two days at Greenville Rose High School. And this dude decides he still wants to put in new grass. So at 05:00 in the morning, before each one get to practice, we're going to a neighbor who's got, like, an acre, and they've got this zoysia grass, this awesome grass. And we're getting plugs with flashlights, then we're going to put down the grass, turn the water on, then we each go to practice. That is why I do not cut my own grass. I know how to. I can work the machine. I can change the spark plug in it. I got you. Not gonna do it. And so growing up, son of a football coach had its advantages, but it also had some p PTSD. I remember when I this was I used to go to the training camp whenever that's the University of Pittsburgh. You know, that we could go as long as we're willing to work. And so I worked with the equipment people and washed the clothes and stuff like that. As long as we had a job, we could hang out with the team and different things like that. Here's the reason I bring this up and and come back to adoption. On a football team, everybody has a job and everybody has a role. And one of the things the equipment guy said even before I went in the equipment room is, if a guy has wet socks, that's not healthy for him. You could create something that's not important. So you make sure the socks are dry before you put them in the thing. The helmets, the guys take pride in the way their helmet looks, the way it fits. And so you need to get to know the different players on the side of the lockers you're responsible for and understand any quirks. Because when they get out on their field, we don't want anything about their equipment to distract them from doing what we need to do to get to a bowl game to get with it. I was assigned a job, now watch this, but they did a good job of assigning me a job and telling me the meaning of that job to the big picture even though I was the ball boy. You have to teach people what AI means to their job, what they mean to the company, that AI is not here to replace them. If we upskill you in this arena, we're gonna make you more valuable here at our company and more valuable for you career wise, whatever you should do in the future. You've gotta link what you're asking them to change to their personal motivation and then to the motivation for the organization into the business. And that is a super important component as we we think about the things of this nature. I'm gonna open up for questions. I'm gonna refrain from many more stories. I'm gonna tell you how to get in touch with me if I can be helpful. And number one, if you're a friend of Scott Insurance, you're a friend of mine, you're part of our network. And if you call me, I don't charge for virtual cups of coffee. Right? If that cup of coffee is, like, forty five minutes to an hour, first a quick question is different. But if you have a quick question, if you wanna have a ten minute call, if you if I can be helpful, give me the opportunity to be helpful. My brand is built on creating relationships with business leaders that is built on mutual value stop sentence. And so give me the opportunity to share mutual value. And so you can connect with me on LinkedIn, and I'm happy if you reach out, I'll reach back. Maybe a couple days, but I'll reach back or somebody on my team. So number one. So LinkedIn is a great place to to do that. The other thing that you can can do is my podcast is called Hot 10 Leadership. Uh, and we talk to a lot of business owners and CEOs about trends and things that are going on in business, and love for you to listen there. Uh, but LinkedIn and messaging is something that I check on the regular. And if I can be helpful, I want to. Whether it is best practices, whether it's things that we're reading and seeing, uh, whether you wanna have a lunch and learn with your team on AI, we do those really just as kind of helping the community, so to speak, in furthering business and getting to know people. So there's a lot of value that we add. This isn't selling you a thing. This is sharing you a thing, it, if that's the the way I want you to take it. And so final thought, and then we'll open it up to questions and to comments. People a lot of times ask which platform. Right? Perplexity, chat, uh, Gemini, all the different things. I'm not a proponent of anyone in particular. Right? Our team of 25 folks at Walkwest, our boutique agency, have taken over a 100 different certifications collectively. Right? We have some work that we do, but we're very fine with Coursera. There's a lot of free stuff out there. There's a lot of good stuff out there. So we're not really trying to say that we have the best and only education. We wanna encourage and be ambassadors that people get that education. Where we wanna be a value add is helping you in how to use it and implement it in a powerful way in your business, in your marketing, in your growth, all that stuff. If you're not afraid of AI, you should be. And I wanna leave you with this. It doesn't sound super positive. I'm not smiling when I'm saying it. If your competitor is faster than you in this regard, it's gonna be a challenge to compete in anything that you're doing. And you believing that is not really the debate. It's how are you gonna take advantage of something that's truly revolutionizing business as we even know it. And it's just that big a deal and I'm that big a proponent. So that is the kind of the backdrop. I'd love to finish out with some questions and different things.
[00:34:50] Audience 1: What is your insight on when should we still have that governance and security, and then also where organizations are slipping up?
[00:34:57] Donald: Right. Twofold. So thank you for that. So one is the when and around governance and security, and then two, where people are slipping up. So the one answer is is pretty simple. Right? You don't wanna do anything that negatively impacts your stock price, share price, or manages sensitive data. Right? So there's gotta be governance in your core production systems day one. I would not in in talk any different than that. I'm very big on setting sandboxes up so people understand the functional capabilities of the tool, leveraging dummy data, separate systems. And there's ways that you can do really nice simulation tools with AI to where you're really not letting the data sit right outside the business, and and that's a different conversation. But there's ways that you can create a playground. So if you think about a playground as kids and you think about playgrounds that we have that might had cement at the bottom and then went to dirt and grass, and then our kids now have playgrounds with this real cool rubber all throughout. And so they still can get hurt if they fall, but it's not gonna be devastating. And so we wanna create that, quite frankly, in our AI environment so people can play without really focusing on any regulation issues. Because really it's about how do they think different, how can they make some general decisions better faster that don't necessarily require all the specificity of client data. They can have general institutional data that you can get publicly and use that to find trends. So that's number one. The second thing on what people are getting wrong. AI and AI intervention and AI education and adoption cannot be driven top down. This is a tool that is gonna affect everyone in your organization. So, therefore, people are gonna have a myriad of viewpoints on how to adopt that tool, how to get trained on that tool. It's much better to create a bottom up environment and create some little task force teams, committees within your organization for people to just play and practice without penalty. And so what I see people getting wrong is dictate from the top down versus where I've seen people get it right, which is leadership at the top, which is the leader talking about how AI save them time to do x. The leader talking about, I saw in our marketing department where they decrease their external spend for marketing support services, right, because they're now using AI to go through and do a double check on our content, on our blogs, on our website. How AI can go and search different websites and look for ADI compliance issues. If you talk about what you're doing in a small way that is working, that is a messaging thing. And I think that AI is not a technology innovation as much as it is an organizational change initiative in the organization. And so it's people, it's process, and then it's how do we be productive. And so I think we try to do too much too soon, and that's why folks are are failing a little. Then the final thing I'll say on that and I'll go to another question is, people don't support what they fear. And so people are trying to drive AI through the organization, and they want scared people to adopt something. Scared people sabotage stuff. Let me talk to you for a minute. This won't work and why. So you wanna really be thoughtful about how you're introducing this new thing so you get real data of how it can be used in the organization.
[00:37:57] Audience 2: How to take our emerging leaders or young professionals that don't have an experience set and get them using the the tools at a reasonably high level and understanding what is actually generated.
[00:38:10] Donald: So one of the things about experience, and then for those of us that are used to being on the flip of the coin in terms of the younger generation, they know all this new stuff. AI is actually a phenomenal enabler from those of us that have a little gray. I I shaved mine off. I'd highly dig into that tool because that experience plus the machine is a wild thing. Now back to your question. You can accelerate experience except through repetition. And, you know, again, as a son of a football coach, like, if I'm learning something new, you gotta rep it. You gotta do it to where it is habit forming, and then you can do it under duress. You can do it when it's raining. You can do it with 70,000 people. You can do it every single time. So to answer your question is you have to build simulations. You have to build experiences that they haven't had, but that you know they will have at different gates in the career. And you use artificial intelligence to immerse them in those situations where the outcome is not fatal to you or the organization, but it is all instructive. It is all learning. It is all valuable. And as you build those use cases, what you're gonna do is force them to think differently. Right? And then they will become AI native, but then they will also accelerate their experience. There's nothing that separates those of us that have lived through things. Right? So if I'm an entrepreneur and I am advising a company that's going through tough times and tough economic times, there's nothing that can change the fact that I grew a technology company 30% year over year during the two thousand seven mortgage crisis. That experience hardens me. So I'm no longer afraid of the future. Future of chaos is something to navigate and win in the end. Right? If you don't have that experience and it's only something that you're reading about, you can get there in terms of the picks and clicks. The part that you're missing is the emotive nature of how to communicate what they're finding, how to manage that with somebody of a different generation. Those things are gonna be a little bit harder. But simulating the case studies and the different things, you can get most of the way there. That's a really, really good question. Other questions? Comments?
Audience 3: How are companies integrating AI into their learning and development strategies? And what approaches seem to be working well or poorly?
Donald: Our companies that we're working with and seeing using AI in traditional learning and development paths is and how's that working and who's doing it well? Number one, this is something that touches every employee. So doing it department by department is in addition to, right, the initiative you set out as a business leader for what your AI strategy will be and the enablement of every employee in the business. And I'm speaking mostly where you have knowledge workers in different things. It's not affecting manufacturing in the same way or folks that have thousands of frontline professionals in the same way that are doing person to person interaction. But those of us in the knowledge economy, it is a much higher percentage that everybody's being touched. Short answer is you have to do both. And the other answer is it's too early to tell. Right? What we can see is companies that are doing it badly. Right? Because they're running out of the gate and trying to do too much too soon, and they're missing the steps. And they're not managing the fear, so they're getting false positives on all their experimentation versus going through the education steps, the experimentation steps, and then moving to execution. It's no different than anything else that you learn, is that, you know, you have to practice. You gotta be given space to practice before you're gonna put it into prime time. And so there's people that are moving just a little bit too fast there. But that's a great, great question. Other questions?
Audience 4: What are the main reasons some people and organizations resist adopting AI? And how can those concerns be addressed?
Donald: So the question is, why aren't people adopting it? What are some of the counter opt options to all the enthusiasm I'm sharing with AI? You gotta remember, I don't know if it's my enthusiasm or recognizing the fear of not changing. So you gotta in terms of me, I'm a little bit of both, quite frankly. But what are the naysayers saying, and what of it kinda makes sense or not? Right? This is kind of the question. A lot of it has to do with, I've been doing it this way. It's been working. Why do I need to change? It's similar change resistant that you find in any arena, is that we all get into a form of habits. And it's actually most dangerous when those habits are actually producing some level of success. If you're failing miserably, you're more open minded. If your organization's running well, you're doing good things, you're you're moving, you can kinda, like, put things to the side that you don't really wanna deal with or dig into. So that's number one. The second thing that I think is resistant is because people are treating AI as a technology issue versus a people transformation issue. They're getting it wrong because they're leading with the technology first versus understanding what your job is and what roadblocks we can help with automation. Let's talk through that together because we're gonna make you more productive faster, and we're gonna upscale you that's valuable for you now at our company and your future career. See, anytime you can tie a hard thing I have to do to my future growth, I'm more open to do that hard thing. I talked to you all earlier about and I'll talk about Grant. And I wasn't a number one draft choice in football. I was I was a tell people I signed the four year scholarship. That's when they used to have four year scholarships at East Carolina University, and I was a practice team all American. All of my best hits are on the practice team. Right? You know, I'm not one of those guys that's living through their high school glory and making stuff all the time. Like, I'm very real. One of the small percentages that got to college, when I got there, I was like, that guy is playing the same career position as me. He is two inches taller than me, and he's a lot faster than me. And okay. Let me get to know the special teams coach. Because you have to because you have to tell me my future. I I see my future. I got you. And go from there. But it's really a people business. It's not a technology. The technology is actually pretty easy pre once you get into it, it is really cool how powerful it is. But if people don't take the time to work on it together in a way that is meaningful to their job, back to the story. My mentor Grant Willard, I didn't have a technology background. I'm end up doing sales, business development, becoming the CEO of a technology company. But Grant, when I first started, would say, hey, listen. Do you have anything going on for lunch? He would take me and teach me different things that he knew about technology that I could then apply to be a better sales professional in that space. And anytime he wanted me to do something difficult or something he thought I might push against, he would use this phrase, when you're a CEO, this will help you. Word? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me more. He said, Dom, when you're running your own company, you're gonna need to learn this. I was like, mhmm. We did and my dad would do the same thing with Julius Peppers. He would do the same thing with hey. When you're in the NFL, do you want a third round bonus check, or do you want a bonus check from the first round that takes care of your families for the rest of your life? Yes, sir, coach. It it's simple. And here's the thing. We're all wired like that. Who doesn't wanna hear information that makes them better for their personal career and growth and money for their family? People don't talk about AI in terms of the positive benefit for the individual that has to change. They talk about in terms of saving money for the corporation, reducing the job. They talk about all the wrong reasons for the people that you need because AI gets things 80% there. The human centered aspect gets it a 100%. Here's the bad thing about AI. You start pushing out content that's AI driven, you'll look ridiculous. Wanna look ridiculous in business? Push something out without a human centered touch with AI. It'll sound weird, look weird, show weird, you'll lose credibility you were trying to gain. It's not humans out of the loop, it's humans at a different phase in the loop. That's what people get wrong. And it's an interesting thing, but, like, it is a power tool. You don't give your kids a power tool without some education and training. You don't give them a power tool without the right glasses on. You don't give them a power tool without watching them. There's things as parents we don't do that corporations are doing with these new tools. That's kind of the short answer to that. It's a great question, and I appreciate it very much. Please.
[00:45:51] Audience 5: How are universities adapting to the rise of AI and new learning tools? And what challenges do they face in preparing students for today's workforce?
[00:46:02] Donald: So universities are in a tough spot because anything that diminishes your value is hard to promote. I mean, I I just want you to like, if you if and I'm not for or against universities. I'm just trying to answer your question directly in in ThoughtFlip. So it's really tough, right, to talk about these emerging tools that then replace the need to be in a classroom or on a university campus at $30.50, $100,000 a year. My daughter just graduated from UNC Charlotte in marketing. She works with a local company doing great. First year on the job, I love it. It's dad, all four of my kids. Three out of the house, one star of the house, but all working and paying bills. So I am a champion father. But when I listen to my youngster talk about marketing and what the college actually taught her to get ready, my wife, who's a content savant, has been spending an hour a week coaching her for the last year. Because they've not talked to her about AI tools. They've not talked to her about building a marketing plan. They said what social media is, which is different than building a social media plan. So the educational system is a few steps behind, and that's just real. And it's hard to get ahead because most people aren't gonna let you get ahead if they feel like it diminish diminishes their skills. So there's an emotive tug of war in how to do this. And here's the problem they have, is the students aren't gonna wait for the institution to change. Young people don't wait. And their expectations of learning, environment they learn in, the tools they have to learn are all being radically changed by what they use in their free time. And so those educational systems that are embracing change and more unique are gonna win in the long run. But it's tough structurally, the the way they're set up and the class structure and the hour structure and all that, with the way we actually learn things today. We have a quick example on that, and this is the school. So I have a key fob for my vehicle. Right? And it took two years for it to run out, and so I like, I literally could not open it. Right? And I'm not gonna call the dealership and look ridiculous. Like, hey, can you open the key fob? So my ego kicks in. Right? But what do I do? I go to YouTube, I watch a one minute video, and I figure out how to open it with super easy. That's the applied learning that colleges need to get with so that they produce a graduate that can go to work and be productive for me in ninety days, not nine months. And if they don't change that simulation mindset to where these are the kinds of things we go, it's still it's gonna get tougher for employers and and young employees.
Audience 6: How are companies balancing headcount decisions with investments in AI and automation during this economic climate?
Donald: By and large, when people are leaving voluntarily, people are not replacing them. They're looking at automation and consolidation in this economic environment. And the short answer as I look with and I'll I'm I'm thinking of one employer in particular, global brand billion dollar company. AI and automation is in their top five of their corporate strategies, AI and automation, across the business. So it's not just one department, across the business. And so they are adding headcount in terms of people that are more AI fluent in systems and process. But most of the folks I'm talking to are not wholesaling one for one. They're taking the cost saving, and then they're trying to find points of automation to grow from there. Is the is the if I look at the top 20 that I'm just running through in my head, I would say 80% of those are thinking that way. And then there's about 20% that are in growth mode, and they want both. They're growing their private equity back. They don't care just yet. They're just trying to do both. But most people are trying to manage that automation in and around headcount. And another firm I talked to here locally, they're freezing headcount. They still wanna double their revenue over the next five years with the same relative headcount, which is gonna be a significant, now watch this, multiplier effect on their valuation on exit. So another reason that people are thinking like that is because they're looking at the valuation, whether they're publicly traded or they're trying to build a company for an exit. And so now if you can manage headcount and reduce the percentage headcount against the percentage growth, that's why people are making that decision what I'm seeing 80% of the time, because they're managing the outcome. And that feeds back into why some are doing AI wrong, is because they are so excited about the business structural change and how they can value their business that they're trying to implement a little bit too fast because they've got all the money roses. And you know how people like to get rich on spreadsheets? Like, we're all guilty of it. Like, this is my company's worth, and this is my exit. And at every level, right, that thing's real. That people do that. But you have to remember that some things do take a more natural learning and implementation process. I thank you all for your time and attention. If I can be thoughtful and helpful, I would love it if you'd reach out. And, uh, thanks to the folks at at Scott Insurance that invited me, and and I hope it went well. I appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on High Octane Leadership with Donald Thompson. Today's episode is a step in our collective journey towards leadership excellence. Remember, every story we share and every insight we gain is a piece in the puzzle of our leadership journey. For more insight and detail, hit the subscribe button so that we can stay connected. For deeper information and more episodes, go to donaldthompson.com. Continue to lead with vision and purpose, and until we meet again, embrace your role as a high octane leader in the ever evolving world of business.