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AI First with Adam and Andy: Inspiring Business Leaders to Make AI First Moves is a dynamic podcast focused on the unprecedented potential of AI and how business leaders can harness it to transform their companies. Each episode dives into real-world examples of AI deployments, the "holy shit" moments where AI changes everything, and the steps leaders need to take to stay ahead. It’s bold, actionable, and emphasizes the exponential acceleration of AI, inspiring CEOs to make AI-first moves before they fall behind.
Andy Sack (00:01.809)
This is AI First with Adam and Andy, the show that takes you straight to the front lines of AI innovation and business. I'm Andy Sack and alongside my cohost, Adam Brotman. Each episode, we bring you candid conversation with business leaders, transforming their businesses with AI. No fluff, just real talk and actionable use cases and insights for you. Welcome back to AI First with Adam and Andy. We have a special guest, Keith.
Berlo from CABI. Welcome, Keith.
Keith Fairclough (00:34.188)
Hey, thanks, Andy. Thanks, Adam. Thanks for having me.
Adam Brotman (00:37.293)
Good to see you, Shh! Quiet. Sorry.
Keith Fairclough (00:38.424)
Good to see you guys.
Andy Sack (00:41.809)
Keith, we have a dog on the episode. Keith, do you want to introduce yourself and your company to give our audience a little bit of background and context?
Keith Fairclough (00:58.19)
Sure. Keith Faracle, I've been with Cavi now for just under four years. I came in as the CIO with the goal of modernizing our tech stack and a number of other key strategic projects on the IT side. But Cavi, the brand, we've been around for 23 years. We are at Women's Apparel. We are a nine-figure business. We have 240 employees across our home office.
warehouse, retail stores. We do business predominantly in the US, but we do have small businesses in Canada and the UK. But we are in the direct sales world. So we predominantly sell our clothes through what we call stylists who are independent sales reps. And we have about 2,000 stylists, just over 2,000 stylists that we support. And they're out there and they in essence are like, of them as like a...
Andy Sack (01:44.093)
you
Keith Fairclough (01:54.088)
wholesale showroom. They have a sample collection that they use to sell and they do it through a network of hostesses that they have within their within their circle and then their clients. And we're cross between, I guess, direct sales and direct consumer e-commerce because we ship directly to the client. So someone purchases something from one of our stylists. The stylist doesn't take that, they do the transaction, but we ship directly to the client. But we are in a we're in a
Andy Sack (02:09.405)
.
Keith Fairclough (02:22.574)
know, a growth period right now, we're really focused on growth. We have the large scale Shopify re-platforming project that we're working on, a number of other key strategic projects, but AI came up, you know, over the last year and has, in essence, become a core part of our overall strategy here at Katnipp.
Andy Sack (02:40.641)
And so just to orient people, you're sort of, I mean, you may take offense to this, but just to orient people, you're broadly in the Mary Kay cosmetics. When you say direct sales, it's you have parties and home parties and people are selling clothing to people that they invite to their homes.
Keith Fairclough (02:54.144)
and
Keith Fairclough (03:01.038)
That is correct. I think that Arbonne Herbalife Beauty Counter when it was around, that's the business. Yeah, great.
Andy Sack (03:07.846)
Yeah, great.
Adam Brotman (03:11.575)
Well, Keith, it's great to have you on for a number reasons. First of all, you're just a great source of inspiration for think a lot of people are going to listen to this around how they can put into practice some of the things Andy and I are constantly talking about in our book, on our speaking tour.
Let's, you know, and I'm, I'm intimately familiar with most of the story of your AI journey, but I, I don't know all of it. And I, I'm actually eager to sort of ask you some things. So let's go back to the beginning. So you in 2024, you actually approached Andy and I and our firm. And we're like, you know, I'm, I really want to double down on my passion around generative AI and how to, how to, how to use it to help propel cabi in a transformative way to.
improve its business, improve its customer experience, its stylist experience, et cetera. And so you took that initiative. And so bring us back to that moment about what you were thinking about Gen. AI and sort of what you wanted to get out of both working with us, but more importantly, like what you wanted cabi to get out of becoming an AI first organization. And just go back to that moment and let's talk a little bit about how your journey's been going.
Keith Fairclough (04:34.35)
Yeah, and I think it probably started in 2023, like most of those that jumped on the chat GPT train early on after they launched in November of 2022. For me, it was a lot of experimentation on my own. And I knew other people within cabi were using it on the marketing team. And the models clearly weren't as powerful then as they are now. But there was a lot of experimentation going on. And throughout that year, I
Andy Sack (04:39.581)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (05:03.154)
I think on the IT side of things, the CIO, I started to get concerned around, well, hey, everyone has these personal accounts out there. Everyone is experimenting with these tools and they're likely putting company information in there. How do we get some control over this? So there's, that was like sort of the yellow flag. We added it to do something, but I could also see that it was a capability. Like this is something that we had to teach our team members, but
Not everyone was using it. There was still the concern of like, I can't use that. I don't want to use AI. can write my own thing kind of world. And we, we wanted, I wanted to do something, but I wasn't sure how to do it. I think if I was to just go out and do it on my own at that time without getting any support, I probably would have tried to find a project to do or tool to build versus building it as a capability. And that's sort of where working with you guys.
Andy Sack (05:37.053)
you
Keith Fairclough (05:58.764)
and talking to you Adam around what Boot Camp could offer so we could potentially get our executives and get them to see what I was seeing, what some others were seeing, was really the point. And I think the Boot Camp, I didn't even have a frame of reference going into the Boot Camp of what we would do after. I think the Boot Camp is what really helped us create that structure of what we wanted to do based on what we learned.
Andy Sack (06:06.141)
you
Adam Brotman (06:20.311)
So at the time that you approached us, we did the boot camp, tell us a little bit about, because you're CTO, CIO, how did you interact with the CEO of cabi? And tell us a little bit about her role in terms of sponsoring what you were doing.
Andy Sack (06:35.965)
you
Keith Fairclough (06:44.75)
Yeah, Katie Malone is our CEO, former chief marketing officer and was promoted to CEO. And Katie and I have a really good working relationship just in general. think she trusts not just not my judgment, but the team's judgment here at Cabbie on the IT side of the direction we want to take the organization. And while she was not part of the boot camp, we did
Andy Sack (07:03.997)
Hi. Hi.
Keith Fairclough (07:10.328)
three, if I remember correctly, it three C-suite executives and three director VP level executives. If there was a lesson learned there, I, there are many lessons learned to share with the team, I would include the CEO in that, you know, in that bootcamp if I could do it over again, for sure. The good news is that we had that relationship. So when we came out of that bootcamp, myself, the COO and the others,
Adam Brotman (07:28.717)
Yeah.
Keith Fairclough (07:36.716)
we were able to bring it to Katie and Katie was kind of experimenting as well. And we all have our, I know you guys use the phrase, the art holy shit moment in that session. And we sat down with Katie, like we have, we have to do something here. And we had the buy-in from the six and that's, that's what.
Andy Sack (07:37.085)
Keith, I ask two questions? Why was the CEO, why was Katie not invited?
Adam Brotman (07:52.78)
Yeah.
Andy Sack (08:01.745)
Was that because she was busy with other stuff? thought it would, like, what was the thought as to not inviting her, including her?
Keith Fairclough (08:08.462)
I think I can't say for sure. I'm pretty sure I invited her, but I think she's just so busy with things and we kind of... I wanted to take the win just to get the bootcamp. I think us to just get that is the first step, but yeah.
Andy Sack (08:15.963)
Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, makes total sense. And my second question is, you talk about the holy shit moment. What was the holy shit moment for you?
Keith Fairclough (08:27.772)
Holy shit moment.
Keith Fairclough (08:32.258)
the holy shit moment for me was, was way back when it was just the fact that I could, I grew up as a management consultant in the first half of my career and I lived in PowerPoint, right? That's all he created deck after deck after deck and it's it there forever. You'd come up with the strategy and you'd have to lay it out and what all the talking points were going to be. And the fact that I could do those types of things now in a matter of minutes in my office.
I've had many holy shit moments since then with image generation and video and talking to my phone in the car while I'm brainstorming, driving to work. And by the time I get to work, my thoughts are organized for me for the meeting I'm about to walk into. But the first one I think was very simple. was like, thing that used to be the bane of my existence, creating PowerPoint decks. The content of it is something I can do pretty seamlessly. And it was thinking the way I wanted to think, even though I technically
Andy Sack (09:01.978)
Yep.
Andy Sack (09:16.989)
Yeah.
Keith Fairclough (09:27.554)
didn't always think that way. I don't know how to explain that, but yeah.
Adam Brotman (09:31.551)
You know, those are, I love the holy shit moment. Actually, we had somebody, side note, now that our book is officially out, I'm starting to see people posting photos of themselves reading the book or reading the Kindle version of the book. And that was exciting, you in this chapter, the first chapter is titled the holy shit moment. And so it's funny how like that.
Andy Sack (09:42.103)
Thank
Andy Sack (09:50.229)
Okay.
Adam Brotman (09:57.601)
When somebody first opens it and starts, like that's the picture they take. So Andy, you'll be happy to know that that it's becoming the subtitle of the book in a weird way that the, now going back to the executive sponsorship from the CEO. So one of the reasons I asked is I know that Katie was your CEO was very supportive of the bootcamp, even though she didn't participate. It's interesting to hear you say that in hindsight, you would have sort of strong armed her to participate. But I remember after the bootcamp, we ended up.
Andy Sack (10:24.893)
you
Adam Brotman (10:27.981)
And that's gone well enough that you were like, let's do the workshop for the entire company. And I drove down and led an all, not an all day, but a most day multi-hour session with the entire company. And Katie stood up before you and I talked, it was really your and my show, but like she stood up and was like the cheerleader, know, cheer, you know, person sponsor of this thing to say, like I'm, a big fan of what we're doing here.
Andy Sack (10:38.109)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (10:53.774)
like I'm
Adam Brotman (10:56.801)
She was almost a prototype of what we like to see in terms of if CEOs aren't going to be the person, which they rarely are, being the person in your position that's actually catalyzing the whole effort for the organization, having them at least, you know, be the sort of the key sponsor behind the scenes of the person that's catalyzing. Like that's so effective. And I just want to give a shout out to her and you for like leading in this way. Right.
Andy Sack (11:16.813)
Okay.
Adam Brotman (11:25.013)
I feel like it really allowed it to be effective. So I wanted to call that out. mean, do you have any other thoughts on like leadership and executive sponsorship that you want to comment on?
Keith Fairclough (11:35.01)
No, I agree. think having her in my corner as we were doing this was a huge advantage as we tried to push this out. And we even had the support of the overall executive team, which was great. But where I think she really got on board, which one of the key lessons that we learned in the boot camp, which kind of hinted at before, if I had just gone out and tried to do it on my own, I might have just tried to execute a project.
Andy Sack (11:36.637)
Okay.
Adam Brotman (11:48.695)
Yeah.
Keith Fairclough (12:02.508)
or tried to build some tool or bring in some tool. But we learned, I think you guys have the Moderna use case that you share in the bootcamp. I believe it's in the book as well, maybe as a chapter, but learning how it's about creating a capability and upskilling the organization and creating like an AI literate organization. And that's the approach we took. I think we kind of mimicked them. Clearly we are not at the scale of a Moderna and what they're doing, but
Andy Sack (12:14.459)
Yep.
Keith Fairclough (12:32.142)
that structure made a lot of sense to us. And when we explained it to Katie, like this is the way we want to do it. We want to train the organization. We want to lift everyone up at the same time, whether it's for the benefit of cabi or just the benefit of the team member, right? This is a skill that they could take anywhere with them if they start to learn how to use the tools. But she was a, once we shared that with her, it made it even easier to get her on board and to do that org training.
Andy Sack (12:33.18)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (12:58.262)
I'd love to dive into the work training at some point, but that was just that it's the next step in our journey.
Andy Sack (13:02.409)
Okay.
Adam Brotman (13:02.495)
Yeah, so let's continue on your journey a little here. Let me ask you. You said that going into the boot camp, you and the other five or six colleagues that went to the boot camp were already kind of excited about AI, but this was a moment for you guys to go to the next level and to sort of become almost a de facto AI counsel of sorts for a moment for the company. Tell us about like,
Keith Fairclough (13:13.688)
the other five or six columns.
Keith Fairclough (13:26.458)
source for me.
Adam Brotman (13:30.669)
What surprised you in the boot camp? how did you propel out of the boot camp and out of the all company workshop? Let's talk about what were some of the things that you were hoping to accomplish that you did or didn't accomplish? And what were some of the things that surprised you and now that you carry on as an AI first company?
Andy Sack (13:30.973)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (13:49.826)
Yeah, I think for the bootcamp, the great thing that came out of that is we all heard the same lessons at the same time. Yes, we had our own opinions based on how we were using AI in our own personal life and at work, but we all heard the same messaging. I think we also heard that the importance of sort of the AI council or your AI use policy, you guys helped us with that. You had a framework for that and we kind of took it and made it our own here at CABI.
Andy Sack (14:00.797)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (14:19.694)
we, another lesson learned, didn't, we didn't create the council. It kind of became myself and another person. But we did have a use policy. We published that use policy. So I think what came out of it that helped us that we wanted to get, and I think we got even more, it was structure. We, we took, I it part bootcamp, part other lessons. We created like this, this journey for us, which was going to be awareness, adoption, collaboration, and then optimization and scaling.
Andy Sack (14:30.013)
you
Keith Fairclough (14:49.102)
That's the way we kind of look at it to kind of measure ourselves where we are on this journey. And all of these things came out of the bootcamp for us heading into the orbit training.
Andy Sack (14:59.953)
Okay.
Adam Brotman (15:01.687)
So let's get into the meat and potatoes as some examples. Like, what are some of the things at cabi coming now out of all that, like, that you would point to as things that, barring the effort that you and the team led, wouldn't have happened and now are happening with AI that you want to kind of give some examples.
Keith Fairclough (15:22.52)
Yeah, we, you know, even before we got to that, I think this is important because before we got to the team's building, we, as we came out of our org training, which was we trained just under a hundred team members at cabi. We needed to follow up with something. So we did the weekly AI open office hours. did monthly AI org, org-wide meetings of which we did very similar. We had competitions for GPTs. We were giving out $250 gift cards for
Andy Sack (15:28.349)
Thank you.
Keith Fairclough (15:51.704)
the best GPT based on the teams voting for it. And some of them were just creative and fun. Some of them were maybe potentially operational. And we've had early adopters. We have people that aren't using it as much even today. But the things that have come out of it that were almost immediate benefits to us were the communications team was using it to help with, we do a ton of content, whether it's written content, video content, live content.
Andy Sack (15:53.597)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (16:20.286)
a ton of communication out there. Everyone in every organization is writing an email or writing their script or writing something that they're going to be, they're going to potentially be on a podcast. They get it over to communication team. The communication team has to go through and work through all of our nomenclature, the words we use, the acronyms. Now everyone runs it through a GPT. The GPT cleans it up first and everything. Then the communication team takes off and runs with it.
Andy Sack (16:22.717)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (16:47.904)
Another example, more recent example is the marketing team. pretty, they've become strong adopters of AI and they're collaborating across their team. But they've worked within Adobe and they've learned ChatGPT, they understand the tools that are out there. We spend a lot of money today on retouching photos. So we'll do a photo shoot and there will be hundreds if not thousands of photos. But we can only afford to get
Andy Sack (16:52.765)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (17:17.41)
let's say 64, I think the number is 64 photos retouched. That's the only budget that we had. And traditionally those would become the photos that we would use for everything, whether it was e-com, whether it was retail store posters, whether it was something that we're gonna do at a live presentation, whether it's going on social. You could use those 64 and those other photos became almost useless. Now what they were able to do is there's a tool that forget the name of the tool, but
Andy Sack (17:22.717)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (17:47.342)
they can take these extra photos, take two reference photos from the original 64 and give it to the AI tool and say, I need to retouch these photos I'm about to give you to be like these two. It doesn't make them 100 % the same quality, but it makes them good enough where we can use them in some of these other channels. So it's not that we're saving money, because we wouldn't have spent that money anyway, because we had a budget, but we're actually getting significant more use out of the
Andy Sack (17:52.702)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (18:16.534)
investment that we made into all of these other photos across different panels for marketing. Those are two, I mean, I could go on. We have a number of examples that the team has done really well on everything down to production and how we deal with duty and tariff assignments.
Andy Sack (18:28.477)
you
Adam Brotman (18:33.005)
So it's hitting every function. do you feel you're an AI first organization? Do you feel like you're on your way to becoming one? Kind of give a sense of, I'll call it, now that you're kind of a year into it, would you say try to, I don't mean to put you on a spot to quantify sort of how much more productive or capable you are, but kind of give some color to like,
Andy Sack (18:59.171)
Okay.
Adam Brotman (19:01.961)
stepping back like these are the kind of things as a company that we're able to do that we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.
Keith Fairclough (19:03.957)
These are the
Keith Fairclough (19:08.494)
Yeah, I would say we definitely brand our journey as AI first. We want to have that mindset. Do I think we are there yet? And I think we're still in this, know, adoption, late adoption phase slash some teams collaborating, some not. I even before, know, and when we look at where the benefits are, we
Andy Sack (19:28.261)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (19:35.694)
talking to the teams, they're regularly, you know, 50%. They're cutting time to do things by 50%. We would really like to look at it as a force multiplier for us, right? How do we get to every person doing, you know, twice as much work as they can do today with, you know, this tool or tools that they have in front of them? But we've, we are in that process now, Adam, of measuring. Like I for sure could come up with, you know, we talk about this sprint mate within our IT team.
Andy Sack (19:57.181)
Okay.
Keith Fairclough (20:04.898)
They've figured out a way to look at historical sizing of tickets previously, understanding those and then running new tickets through the system to understand what effort it might look like in order for us to work on a ticket. have...
Adam Brotman (20:19.681)
That was a custom GPT that your team came up with. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. I love it. Sprint made.
Keith Fairclough (20:22.41)
It was, yeah. The IT team came up with that one. The IT support team, so we have multiple support teams. have a support team that supports our stylists, which we call CANs. They're also early adopters. They are, I think, a success for us because they were tooling around with it, using it, and then we launched our enterprise version of ChatGPT. They started using it as helping turn around responses and work on their communication with stylists.
And then they used Zendesk and then Zendesk came out with its AI tools. And what I feel, I like to think that, and Ann, who leads the team, that they now have the confidence to vet that tool to see if it would even be worth it. Because there's so many tools being thrown at us that they say are AI or I have this AI thing. They were able to vet it, know exactly what it is that it did. And they ended up purchasing it. We haven't used it yet, but we're about to implement it.
Adam Brotman (21:09.462)
Yeah.
Keith Fairclough (21:19.47)
But they made that call and they brought it back to us. They pitched it. They said this is why we want to do it. This is why it'll take us to the next level from just using chat GPT. So that kind of those types of things have been I can't measure them yet, but we will measure it some.
Adam Brotman (21:35.487)
I love that example. What advice, sorry Andy go ahead, jump in.
Andy Sack (21:37.725)
Good night.
Keith, I'm curious what the most unexpected positive aspect of CABI using AI and the most unexpected negative thing is of CABI using AI, CABI employees.
Keith Fairclough (22:02.534)
Unexpected, positive, I think the adoption for us. I know that's not a very exciting answer, but that was a goal for us. We did a survey when we first started, and we did a survey about seven months in. We tried to measure two things. It wasn't the most scientific survey, but it was, we asked them adoption, like how we're using it today versus how we use it in the future. And then we also documented what process
processes do you think you want to use it for? And we asked a similar question seven months later, like, hey, did you use it for those processes? And what benefits did you see? We've got the results from the adoption stuff. I could read off some of them to you. I think they're pretty interesting. We haven't done the full measurement yet of the processes, but we will. We just got that out to the team. I'm going to just read it here. have it because it's easier for me to do that.
Andy Sack (22:36.125)
Yeah, yeah.
Andy Sack (22:45.849)
Yeah, share if you're willing to share.
Keith Fairclough (22:59.886)
So, regular frequency of, well, overall adoption rose from 59 % of respondents having ever used AI to now 98 % using it in their current role. And then within both groups, at the beginning we had, you had some that were never using it at 28 % or so, that dropped to about 7 % once a day. And then we had...
Andy Sack (23:11.953)
care.
Keith Fairclough (23:26.062)
Frequency three times a day, that was at 23%, that jumped to 49%. Those that were using it six times per day was at 5 % was now at 23%. We had confidence go from 30, feeling they had higher, very high confidence, 30 % to 43%. The skill rating of one to four, beginner to advanced, a 1.9 to 2.5.
Andy Sack (23:37.664)
That's pretty amazing
Keith Fairclough (23:53.506)
you know, are they excited? they talking about it within their departments? Went from 68 % to 83%. So we, it's again, not scientific, but it helps us understand if we're doing the right things. And don't get me wrong, we did a lot wrong. Like I, we meant to do an AI.
Andy Sack (24:11.433)
We'll get to that in a sec. Unexpected negative thing from the AI transition.
Keith Fairclough (24:20.622)
I think we still have some individuals who are concerned about AI and how we might use it. You know, as things become more prevalent, especially on the video and image generation, the fact that it can create an image of me wearing this product. I think there's some people concerned of would we ever actually put that into market? We don't think the net benefit is there for us to ever do something like that. We will use it internally for inspiration.
Andy Sack (24:43.869)
Yeah
Keith Fairclough (24:50.106)
we, we've had some team members just be concerned of what AI means, you know, holistically to the, to the world. but I, there, there haven't been a ton of negatives. I think I lost some people at the beginning that were hoping it could do more. so when I took like my BI team and the finance team, the, at that time code interpreter wasn't that great when we were doing our initial GPTs nine, 10 months ago.
Andy Sack (25:19.54)
Yeah, and 03 wasn't out.
Keith Fairclough (25:22.51)
Yeah, in 03 and now with deep research. I wish I had worked with them maybe three months ago and started getting, but we kind of lost them for a bit and they kind of were like, hey, it's just not for us. It's not going to work for us. And when they did that, they threw the baby out with the bathwater because they didn't use it for anything. So I would say that was a negative, but that's part of the evolution. Yeah.
Andy Sack (25:25.682)
Yeah.
Andy Sack (25:42.663)
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Adam, now you're going to ask for advice.
Adam Brotman (25:46.733)
No, that is interesting. was going to say, mean, Keith, you just touched on it a little bit, almost implicitly in what you just said. what advice? So if someone's in your position, they don't have to be CTO. They could be a leader at an organization that kind of the wherewithal to say, want to be the catalyst leader at my organization.
Keith Fairclough (26:06.382)
to say I want to.
Adam Brotman (26:12.075)
to help my organization adopt AI, leverage AI, be AI first, whatever you want to say, what would it, now that you've gone through this, like what advice would you have for that leader? And by the way, you're not allowed to say call Adam and Andy and hire Forum 3, although we appreciate the intuitive plug, but in all seriousness, what advice would you have, executive to executive, about what you've learned from this last year?
Keith Fairclough (26:27.31)
I
Keith Fairclough (26:36.046)
Yeah. I mean, jokes aside, I would go to you guys again. think there's it. And the reason being is you need to take the swing. You need to go for it. Right. It's happening so fast. So I think the first thing is just get started because I don't think everyone has the perfect playbook yet. I think you can do that, but you have to have structure. And I think that's where you, Adam and Andy and Forum 3 stepped in and helped us create that structure.
we know treating it like a, I think I mentioned earlier, like a capability versus a project, like something that's never going to end. Like how do we just infuse this literacy across our organization? And then I would say measurement and consistent third party support. there was a lesson learned for me, I can't do this on my own. I can't even do it with those that are early adopters because there's so many other things going on.
We, you know, the AI Champions program, would suggest whoever does this, that's in a position that I'm in now, that's just about to kick off their journey, definitely have AI Champions. I promoted it, I had it in the deck, I didn't execute on it. And I think that was a mistake. I think that's kind of held us back from doing more collaboration within the departments. And if it's not that, get third party support or bring in someone that can really help run it and be that day to day person because what
Adam Brotman (27:57.108)
That's interesting. Yeah.
Keith Fairclough (28:05.902)
I see is our teams have all of these great ideas for GPTs and they're using GPTs and they're using it in their daily work, some more than others. But we haven't really sat down with the marketing team and said, all right, what are those two to three things that you think are enterprise grade that we should invest in as a company and do, or sit down with the field sales team or the design team and have those discussions? And I imagine if we had those things in place.
Andy Sack (28:20.989)
That's excellent. Thank you.
Keith Fairclough (28:34.86)
we probably would have been having those discussions already.
Adam Brotman (28:40.93)
Yeah.
Andy Sack (28:45.671)
I had a question, but I just lost it. Adam, you have a final question for Keith?
Adam Brotman (28:51.327)
No, I actually, this has been really helpful, Keith. Go ahead. Yeah.
Andy Sack (28:54.153)
I remember it now. I remember my question. Keith, when you look ahead, where do you see CABI's utilization of AI in the next six to 12 months? Like, what are you excited to tackle yourself on behalf of CABI?
Keith Fairclough (29:10.016)
I think it's something similar I shared before is getting us, what are those one to two key enterprise grade projects where we are actually scaling, where we're doing something that's helping the overall enterprise that has some visibility. I think second would be really working with the individual orgs and understanding what their needs are and how we can work there.
And I think just continue for the adoption for those that aren't using it. Coming back to the BI and finance teams, finally, you we put out a ton of Tableau report. We did, put out, they put out a ton of really great Tableau reports. They're really pretty. They go out and then you go out and ask someone in marketing, did you see the sales report? And they're like, I didn't look at that report or I don't know what it's saying or anything. said, well, try deep research and just put the report in and.
Andy Sack (29:46.861)
Swing them back, swing them back over, yeah.
Keith Fairclough (30:06.402)
give the report in the chat and have the chat tell you the prompt to write for deep research and then click deep research, upload the report again and you'll get a coaching through it of what's happening on there and you'll have some insights as a marketing analyst. So I think leveraging that a bit more, democratizing BI, predictive analytics would be really cool. Adam, I don't know if you remember, it was probably a year ago.
Um, we were trying to, was trying to take it's raw data, Andy, where we were trying to predict why a hostess might cancel a show. And if we could predict that we could potentially build a program around it to coach our styles. Like, Hey, this style, this host is might cancel a show on you. You might want to reach out to them with this messaging or something. And I, we, I gave it the raw data and we were, I was prompting with it, asked it to be a data scientist and it did all of the right things.
Andy Sack (30:52.929)
That's great.
Keith Fairclough (31:03.852)
Right? It was being a data scientist. was creating things I'd never even heard of before and was constantly trying to correct itself, but it got lost quite often using the raw data. And I imagine if we started to do more of these predictive analytics things today, we actually would see some success. So I would add that to the list as
Andy Sack (31:21.16)
Yeah. That's awesome. Well, Keith, thank you so much for participating. I'm curious, as we're running out of time, Adam, what jumped out? mean, you've been working, leading on behalf of Form 3, collaboration with cabi, and you've heard Keith's comments today. What jumped out at you from
Keith's comments or from the journey that you want to highlight for the audience.
Adam Brotman (31:48.653)
Three things from today. One, I thought it was interesting how Keith, you started this journey as almost coincidentally that you were the CTO. And so many times people think of this as a tech implementation versus a capability, like you said. And so they'll give it to the CTO, which is fine. But if the CTO is not the person that's inspired,
to help the company become AI first at a capability level, then that's not going to work. And you need executive sponsorship. You need someone that's inspired to help the organization transform. That happened to be you. You happen to be CTO. And I loved as CTO, you said, because you couldn't help yourself, you know, well, I want to play a little defense and a little offense. Like the CTO in me wants to play defense, which is like, I don't want people putting confidential information into like personal versions of chat, GBT and the like.
But the transformation leader in you was like, I want to play offense. I want to know how do I up skill and up level the entire organization. So I thought that was an interesting takeaway. The second takeaway is I loved your example of your support team because they had gone through an AI first workshop and they participated in your council's activities. By the time a vendor came to them and said,
I've got this whiz bang AI integration that they had the confidence to know how to like filter that and screen for that and not just hand it to you and ask you what to do. They had their own opinion on it and they were either excited or not excited. In this case, they were excited and then they want to take ownership of implementing this. So I feel like that.
Andy Sack (33:31.165)
you
Adam Brotman (33:34.061)
that level of AI literacy, right? And they had used the technology because of what you had done. They put them in a position to be AI first as their own department. That was a key takeaway. And thirdly, I loved your last point, which you kind of reflected on as a lesson learned, but you said, man, I wish I had created a champions team, not just a little council because
Keith Fairclough (33:53.142)
as a less.
Adam Brotman (34:03.051)
because I, you know, council almost as reactive to like, we need an AI policy. We need to be like holding some office hours and doing some things, but you, you were sort of now you're saying you want to be able to do an AI impact assessment and think about AI roadmaps and experimentation prioritization for each of these key functions. And that's what you're going to get on now, which is great that you're going to do that. But that was a good lesson learned you shared with us. So
I thought those were my three takeaways, Andy. It was really good conversation.
Andy Sack (34:33.831)
That's great, Adam. Yeah, I'll share my three. No surprise to you. The first, I think we really should have called the podcast in the book, The Holy Shit Moment. I was reminded of Keith's Holy Shit Moment. I still, you know, I may advocate one day for changing the name. I still think we, I love that term. I'm glad that they allowed us to.
Keith Fairclough (34:44.648)
Shit.
Andy Sack (35:00.699)
at least call the first chapter, the Holy ship. So that's thing one thing too. I actually thought that Keith summary was really the playbook that's in AI first. And, the thing that he highlighted, which is they, they started with a bootcamp and they really started with not going after the big apps or the big, AI applications or cost cutting things. They started with sort of egalitarian employee productivity.
Keith Fairclough (35:27.374)
I was very, very pleased.
Andy Sack (35:30.173)
and getting as many of the employees up to speed. And you could see that in the numbers and that basically built enthusiasm and support for the AI transformation. so I thought that, which we cover in the book and we preach and it really, the wins and productivity come from all sorts of small places.
And that ties in with the AI champions. then the third thing that I would say is, you know, I thought that Keith's point about having the CEO involved is something that we've harped on that AI first starts with AI first leadership that in this case started with Keith, who is, you know, enthusiastic about it. But I think, you know, having Kate come on board and have their own, aha, I literally just got off a phone call with another company in which the CEO
is literally at the top of the leaderboard. Like he chats more with ChatGBT and it's incredible what's happened as a result of his engagement and leadership with the tool and his understanding. So for me, those are my takeaways. On behalf of Forum3, Keith, thank you for your partnership. Thanks for your time and coming on and sharing your story with our audience. To the audience, thank you all for listening.
to AI first with Adam and Andy for more resources on how to become AI first. can of course visit forum three.com. You can download case studies there. have an email newsletter and executive summaries from case studies. we have lots of amazing material on our website for leaders looking to expand their knowledge on AI. We truly believe you can't over invest in your AI learning. Onward.