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What does authentic leadership look like in today's rapidly evolving business landscape? In this episode of High Octane Leadership, Donald Thompson sits down with technology executive and AI thought leader Greg Boone to explore leadership lessons learned from firing toxic clients, championing workplace respect, and staying ahead of the AI revolution. Through personal stories and practical insights, they discuss how leaders can create environments where teams thrive while maintaining a competitive edge.
Whether you're an aspiring leader or seasoned executive, this conversation offers valuable "cheat codes" for building trust, driving innovation, and leading with conviction in an AI-powered world.
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. 172
Why 95% of AI Pilots Fail: How Smart AI Adoption Drives Business Growth
With Greg Boone
00:03
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 EY, Forbes, Fast Company, and others. Not as a boast, but as milestones on my entrepreneurial path. From growing multi-million 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.
00:34
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.
00:51
What's the funny story? had a client that was just acting reckless towards a team and they had this leader that they brought in, this male leader that was important to the woman that was the head or whatever. He would just talk down to the team and it was very clear that he was talking down to the women on the team so much. Right. And it was the only time in my career I've ever had to just actively fire a client. I was like, and it was some significant dollars and I had to call the P.E. folks and I was like,
01:19
Hey man, this don't fly with me the way that they're talking to it. they were doing it to uh Divya. She even told the story earlier this year at one of our company meetings a while back, but she was like, she's uh followed me from company to company ever since. And so then the funniest thing happened. That individual reaches out to me last week asking me, do I have any job openings? And I immediately texted, I screenshot it. It was a LinkedIn.
01:49
I screenshot it and said it did me. I said, is this not the same person that was the reason why we fired them? Let me ask you something about that story though that's really good. Was that a hard decision, a clear decision? No, no, it wasn't hard. was very... But why was it clear? Why was it clear? But it went against everything, all my values. Like, you you joked with a long time ago when I came into the office, that's how I demand respect. Great. But I have to give y'all some context on that.
02:19
That's a different story. It my first week. Like, they were parading everybody around the office. And you could tell. Back then, you had a very male-dominant culture. That is true. But I realized there was a lot of folks. was a lot of tech bros in there. And there was a lot of tech bros that were very fearful of leadership. And I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Like, I wanted to make it clear. Like, hey, now, I didn't say the right words. Right? But what I was trying to get across. But anyway, the point of it is, and I'll bring it back to it, is just I grew up in a...
02:48
a pretty rough environment. You see a lot of bullies. And when I, you said that before, you and Tony, when you guys were in leadership, oh when I first came to work with you and you like, we're not gonna let somebody just lean on us like that. And so when I saw this happen, because one, you created a culture in which I could be comfortable doing that. Right. But I was just like, man, so now this ain't gonna fly. Now I did give them an opportunity to change their ways. I did call the guy's boss and was like, hey,
03:17
You know, I said, this is going on. She didn't seem to have a problem with it. I was like, oh, you're condoning this. That's just like right. I said, okay, we're going to exercise our right to terminate this. And it caught her off guard. I don't think it ever happened to her in her career. Because you know, you taught us a long time ago, it like, people believe that they have so much leverage over you when you're the vendor or the partner. Because I remember we were jokingly talk about like Time Warner K was like, we got like 15 people on there. What happens if we decide that we don't want to work tomorrow? That we don't want to show up? And so basically that's what
03:47
She put her whole company in that position by doing that. Because when I told her, was like, yeah, we're going to exercise this. She's like, wait, are you firing us? I said, yeah. But why? was like, we've had this conversation for two weeks. What you talking about? And I said, and this continued to happen, I said, I'm not going to lose my good people over this. We'll help you transition to whomever. So I'm going to share a story similar to that. But a lot of business leaders talk about people are their greatest asset. But then when it comes down to it,
04:16
they're purely financial actors. It's only about the dollars in the bottom line. But we were working with this large pharmaceutical company, and AstraZeneca is a great company. They were a great client for us. But there was a bad actor within the account that was talking down significantly to our team, and in particular, the women leaders on our team. And somebody brought it to me, but they still didn't even really tell me directly because one, they didn't know how I was going to react.
04:45
They were paying us a lot of money. And so it was a significant risk to do anything to blow up this account. But I was sitting in a review meeting and someone was like, man, I just don't know if I can do another meeting with Carl, just for lack of a better name. And I was like, what do mean you don't think you can do another meeting? Well, he's just sometimes a little over the top. I was like, well, I'm a little over the top sometimes. What does that mean? Different magnitude. Yeah, right. I said, what does that mean? And she gave me a few examples of what.
05:12
over the top men and the belligerence and some of the talk down. I said, we got two things. said, one, we got to work on how this didn't bubble up to me faster, right? So I have to do something as a leader to make sure you all are comfortable bringing these things. And I said, two, I'll be right back because I need to make a phone call to Carl's boss's boss's boss. And what we ended up finding out in our situation, we didn't have to fire the client. The client was great.
05:38
is that this individual had that same kind of rapport with a lot of different groups and it was becoming a significant problem. And so a lot of times things are perpetuated because no one actually speaks up when actually a lot of people are experiencing bad actors in the workplace. And so it's a lessons learned and to your point of building loyalty and trust, is that something that occurred? Because people want to see their leaders willing to sacrifice the financial outcome.
06:07
to live the values of the company. And those things are super important. So I appreciate you sharing that. That's pretty, you we come a long way. People wild out there, man. They wild out there. Now, the flip side that I want to ask you about too is if you heard the concept of, you know, the toxic manager. And so was talking to somebody the other day and they were describing somebody in their circle as toxic. And they were really animated about it and really upset about it. said, quote, can you unpack this to me?
06:34
What does that toxic mean to you? Because I'm hearing that word a lot and are you using the word toxic manager just because you had a bad meeting? Are you using the word toxic manager because somebody didn't like your work product? What does that mean to you? And then I also had a conversation with my daughter. What I'm finding is, now this is the flip side, is that people are using extreme language in everyday situations. And so you just can't listen to what people describe something and take that on face value. You got to let them unpack it.
07:04
15 years ago, you said trust but verify everything, right? Like people are gonna say a lot of things when out of context, it becomes challenging to even understand the situation. That same individual that I told you I had to fire the client, we were at a different company together and we had a similar situation where the client literally made this person break down and cry. She texted me, I said, just drop off the call, I got it from here. She dropped off the call and it got wild. No, I warned.
07:30
This is when we're part of uh inside of the emphasis ecosystem. It was a massive account. And I told them, said, they do this ever again. said, shit is going to get wild. And I'm talking about people way above me inside the organization. They were like, we just need to come down here. I said, I don't think you understand me. Like, I don't know what the culture is here, but this shit ain't gonna fly with me. I said, they do this again. And I'm in this meeting. It's going to get wild. I said, you've been warned. Right. And then they had to do the same thing where
07:59
It's like, okay, well, we need to escalate this internally and talk to that boss's boss's boss. And so then they had to show up and was like, hey, let's be better about this. But then at the end, we delivered this great product and all these people like, this is amazing. You guys did great work. We couldn't have got there without you. Like, yeah, but it didn't have to be that painful. It didn't have to be that way. That's exactly right. But this exists in every arena. In every arena. And then it became this pack mentality though. It was like five of them. It wasn't one individual. And so the people were just piling on and just, but this was in like 2021.
08:28
So part of what was happening, my mom is a big influence for me. You know, you were there, she passed away two years ago and she worked in mental health for a long time and she was a caseworker and things that she worked in Durham County. But she would always say, son, you need to understand why someone is behaving a certain way versus just reacting to, because people have a lot going on in their lives and their worlds. So I try to always explain and what I try to explain, I said, the reason why these people are acting this way.
08:56
Because I had to get to the heart of like, why are they doing this? Why are they beating this team? It was 2021, nobody was going into stores, they were in retail, they needed to get their e-commerce lift faster, people's jobs were on the line. There were just so many other factors that were going on. And then they were putting that weight and that pressure down. And it was the most unhealthy environment I've ever been in. I actually lost a few. Let's now, we're gonna work the script a little bit in chat. so...
09:23
I've been looking forward to catching up with you in this forum for a while. We talk all the time and worked together for a lot of years on different projects and really proud of the success you've achieved. We'll talk about technology, we'll talk about AI, we'll talk about these things. But what are some of the things that growing up family, life experience that is defined, right, how you view the world and how you treat people as a leader? A lot. I think go back to my childhood. I grew up in a relatively
09:52
Rough neighborhood in Durham, low income neighborhood, all black. were like, my coming up into the world, I didn't see a lot of diversity until I started playing sports, right? Which was kind of the next stage. So you grew up, when you grow up poor, you don't know. It's just like, oh, I was like, man, I don't know what that mean. We mean poor. I don't know. was Tuesday. I got stuff. I'm not hungry. I got clothes and toys and things, right? Just another Tuesday. But once I started to get into sports, I started to like create a kind of a different environment. So I'm the youngest of
10:22
effectively five, I say effectively five because we have two foster brothers that came to live with us in our teens. And so what I saw was a lot of the challenges that might, in my entire life, my parents worked either two or three jobs, not one job, they worked at least two jobs. My parents actually met driving the school bus and my dad's a retired truck driver. And so for me, I saw how hard, they were both intelligent. My dad, think he went to North Carolina Central for about a semester or so in the county. He's like, you should get in the county. I was like, I don't know about that.
10:51
The point like I was the first person that my first I was all of my siblings had a child in high school Well, four of them had a kid in high school, right? And so people asked me they're like I didn't become a dad till I was 40 I was like, yeah, I've been an uncle since I was eight So There's a reason for that. I mean they would never change it, know, sure But the reality I saw how challenging it was how their path went differently And so growing up like that and you have no one, you know, I was the first person in my family
11:21
to graduate from college. And actually, a fun fact, my mom graduated a year after me. She went back to school. So I graduated in 2000, and then from North Carolina A &T, she graduated from Shaw in 2001. So she got to come to my graduation, I got to go to hers. That's awesome. The reality, though, is that I didn't have a lot of views on college. My only view, was jokingly and seriously, the only thing I knew about college was watching a different world. I came on out of the Cosby show. I didn't know a lot about college.
11:50
I knew about Aggie Eagle Classic, Central and the team, because we'd go to the games. I was like, man, college is all about football and bands. I like this. But then when I got into sports, I started to get to see a different kind of view and a different path. For me, college was another vehicle to keep playing basketball and baseball. I I played both basketball and baseball my freshman year in college. So that competitive spirit was always there too. And I always tell people, it like, back then, you your coaches just told you whatever you majored in.
12:18
So we have five freshmen come in and Howard and 95, four of us were all in business school and had the exact same schedule because it was their easiest way for them to keep track of us. They're like, when are you going to major in? I like, I don't know, Coach just told me. So I was in business. I stopped playing. just too much. Played both basketball and baseball. And I left midway through my sophomore year and went to the North Carolina A &T. I was hoping to play basketball there and then the coach left. Ended up playing baseball like a year or two later. But like, what are you interested in as far as
12:48
And at Howard, they had computer-based information systems. I had a buddy that used to hang out with. Like, I was always the person that was trying to hang out, not with, the Superstar. I had this weird kind of dynamic. My friend group, when I was playing ball, were the freshmen players and the managers. The people that had to bring in the water. And those were my best friends with the managers. They hung out, and they were like, why are you always hanging out with them? was like, because they're real people. They're cool. Like, there's no positioning in...
13:12
You know, we just like same stuff. We hang out. Why not? We play video games together. We all sitting in a room watching Lion King together, not telling anybody that we were people in the corner just kind of sniffling a little bit. And I'm like, that kind of shaped me. So when I got to 18, I said, all right, do you have computer based information? Says they're like, nah, computer science is kind of similar. It is not similar at all. It is like radically different. But I fell in love with it. Once I realized. I could create things, I was like, oh.
13:40
So I'm talking to this machine and then on the other side, I can build something that someone else can use and get value at scale. So now, like my whole kind of thesis is I want to be helpful. So now I have this vehicle, now I can help a lot more people. It's like, all right, this is interesting to me. So once I, I'm the type of person where once I understand the end goal, I can map back as to how to accomplish the goal. And so I don't know if that's from the sports or whatever, you tell me like, hey,
14:07
the defense is doing this, we need to do something different. So it just helped me kind of think differently about different situations. No, that's, I appreciate that. And the backstory is good because, you we're all shaped by our experiences and that doesn't mean our experiences dictate our future, but our perspectives are shaped that way. And, you know, one of the things I wanted to ask you is when you go into a room, when you're introduced, how would you want people to introduce you? What would you want people to know about Greg Boone as you hit the room? In an ideal world,
14:37
What I want to net down on is that Greg is here to help. Like he is a supportive leader that helps us achieve our goals personally, professionally, wherever he can help. Right? Like that's what I ultimately want to do. When I played sports, I was a point guard mostly basketball. I was all about trying to distribute the rock. How do I make other people shine? I was playing ball early this morning. I kept telling this other guy, I was like, man, when you play on the other team, you lift all of them. They all play better when you're on their team. I said, when they play on my team, they miss everything.
15:06
I don't know what that's about. They say, well, you put too much pressure because you've actually played the game. And so fundamentally, what I would like to abstract out the technology or business or the successes, like where I want them to understand is I'm just here to help. So in an ideal world, and I do have some folks that will say that. I used to always say to the team, especially when there was a new hire or someone that didn't know me, I said, whatever you do, I can undo. Meaning that whatever, you get into any kind of trouble, I said, the only thing I can't do is if you go.
15:34
punch a client in the face, man, that's on you, you're going to jail. But outside of that, I'll rock with you, I'll support you, I'll be there for you. When you and I started working together 15 years ago, you used always say, there's no such thing as bad news, it's just news. So just give the news and then we'll react and do whatever. And you stayed true to that. Didn't mean you were happy about every situation, but how long can you dwell on that before you start to make some changes, right? What is it, Bill Belichick, or at least they said that he said this, which is, if you wait till halftime to make an adjustment, you've already lost the game.
16:02
And so just be more proactive and just making sure I'm there to help and support. So ideally, that's how I would like people to introduce me. Abstract out title, abstract out everything else. Trying to be helpful. In the end, I'm just another human trying to be helpful, help me achieve my goals. One of the things that's interesting as we think about business and that intersection really between the personal and professional, it's very different than it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. We've encouraged people to bring their full self to work. We've encouraged
16:28
work-life, I don't really like the term work-life balance, I like the term work-life integration. I don't think you're always gonna be able to balance it, but anyway, to be able to integrate that work-life, and there is a heightened responsibility on business leaders to be that trusted source of inspiration, trusted source of leadership, trusted source of protection. Because all of us would probably agree, right, our economic environment, our politics is crazy right now. And so a lot of times when I look at
16:58
for example, the Edelman Trust Index, something I read every year. Good friend of mine is the former CEO of Edelman Canada. And we were talking about building organizational trust in an environment where people are untrustworthy at a very high level in terms of our leadership and different things. And one of the things that we netted out in the podcast is be the example that you would want to follow. And so my question to you
17:24
is what are some of the things that you've learned as you've progressed from being an individual contributor to managing a small team, now being a multi-exit CEO, serving on boards, all the things that you do, what are some of the things you've learned in your leadership journey? I've learned a lot of things. I've learned that there is a fundamental difference between having similar interests and aligned interests. And I tell people this all the time. I said, there's a fundamental difference between having similar interests and align.
17:54
And what I try to describe for folks, a lot of times organizations get a little bit twisted. They believe that they are the same thing. It's like, well, our interests are aligned. I was like, they're actually not. Because at the end of the day, the way that you're trying to get to the goal is radically different than how they're trying to get to the goal. And you get to a point where they don't actually merge together, they're going to become competing forces. Now, if I know the problem set, I used to think wrongly that everybody had a line of interest inside of organization. And I always thought...
18:22
You know, so for me, one of the things I learned is, there's a few things I learned that I take to heart every single day I come to work. One, I can't have the same expectations of everyone around me that I have for myself. I always tell people, I can't choose how you feel about something. And so what may motivate me, you know, I had a team sometimes, they asked me, were like, do you sleep? I was like, I do, I just sleep, I do it differently. Right? And so I think part of that too, I saw how you managed it over the years as well. I used to ask you the same question that people ask me, because I get an email like two in the morning, it's like,
18:52
Come on, and then you're in the office at six and I'm like, hey man, I don't think this is healthy. But then what you did, you gave the space and I try to pay that forward too, which is, hey, just because I send you something at this time, does not mean you need to interrupt family time, personal time. I do not expect, if I expect it, I will text you, I will call you, or I would say explicitly. And so I think one of things I've learned though is this fundamentally, don't believe that everybody's gonna run as hard and it's okay.
19:18
Don't believe that everyone has the same skill set you have because we all have diverse set of skills. Just because I'm good at this thing doesn't mean that person should also be good at it. Their background can be radically different. Their value to the organization, to the company culture, right, is radically different. So I think that part of, for me, just what shaped me a lot from a leadership perspective is tamping down certain expectations, but then ramping up certain expectations also. Because you also get the folks who are like...
19:43
I want this big title, I want this big thing. Like, all right, my expectations are going to be significantly higher. And you have to be good with that. But I try to address that on the front end. And then, so this going back to kind of the whole similar interests and the line interest piece, you know, I used to think that uh everything was just business and technology. You try to choose a technology based on business, and you do business based on a certain set of technologies and factors. And what I didn't really account for was the P that's in the middle, which is the politics of things.
20:11
Like, hey man, why ain't you doing this good thing that would be great for everyone? Well, because it's not great for me. I told someone before, I said, hey, you can't just keep this person at this level because it's convenient for you. But like, she's crushing it. was like, you mean she's crushing it by keeping you prepared and successful. What about what their future looks like? Now I learned that lesson again, I hate to keep bringing it back, but we've been working together for 15 years now on and off, but.
20:39
You did something early in my career where you saw something in me, moved me into this role, regardless, you're like, yeah, the person I was reporting to at the time, still friends, we all kind of worked together, but you moved me from under this person. And I'm certain they felt a certain way about it, but the reality was you knew that it was the right thing for me and the organization, even if it created some temporary pain for that individual. And so a lot of times people need to understand that sometimes you're a leader, sometimes you're...
21:07
person next to you, your interests are not actually aligned. They're similar, but they're not aligned. And that becomes a difference. I now use that a lot when we're consulting with clients. I say the same thing. A lot of times we do these first four hours of a consulting session afterwards. Hey, one of the leaders would come up to me and they always say the same thing. I feel like that was a therapy session for us. I like, it was, because you guys never focused on having aligned interests and understanding the nuances and the differences. think you hit on a lot of key points and I want to extend on the aligned interest. A lot of times
21:37
We don't align with one another because we don't actually slow down to talk to one another. We talk at one another. We're in meetings where we're working agenda bullet items, right? But we're not really understanding the points of pain and opportunities for progress for that other individual in the room. And sometimes you have to slow down to grow. And one of the things that I've done a lot of stuff over the years and improving, but you have to give people space in meetings to share their point of view because
22:05
Otherwise, you'll get a lot of false alignment with people head nodding. And then you got meetings after the meeting that are unwinding everything you thought got accomplished in that 60 minutes. And so it's better to really go around the room to make sure people understand how the decision that we're making as a leadership aligns with the job they need to do and then the support that they'll get to do that job. And that's a lot of fun. So now I appreciate that answer very much. Tell me last thing and then we're going to flip and we're going talk some tech a little bit.
22:35
When you think about your career arc and different things, one of things that I would compliment you on as an individual, and I share this, but you take it to another level, you're a competitive learner. And that's a phrase that I use for myself, but I use it sparingly. You're very curious, even though you're scary smart, you always want to learn more. And so here's my question. How many AI certifications do you have? 233 at this point. All right, stop. You've been a CEO of an AI machine learning company?
23:05
You're a computer science graduate, so you have technology just in your educational DNA, right? You've worked in technology for the last 20 plus years. Why are you still hungry to, question is not the certifications. With all of your background, with all the things you've seen, why are you still so hungry to be on the front edge of this AI revolution and going into the learning mode, right? So that you can be the best that you can be. Why are you doing that? Because that's aggressive.
23:33
There's a few reasons. One, personal motivation. A long time ago when you moved me into a role, we had a group, a business unit called the Emerging Technology Solutions or something. I get this because the point was we're not going to be a fanboy of any technology because technology is going to keep changing. And at every turn, it changes a more exponential rate. That's some of the things that they call it Moore's Law. you know, just in, I think it was more attributed to like chip manufacturing, but people will use it for technology in general, which is the idea that in Moore's Law,
24:03
the speed or the cost, basically they're doubles every two years, not necessarily cost, but the speed doubles every two years. Dr. Westerman at MIT earlier this year, he was like, every time someone tells me that Moore's Law is dead, something else like AI or cloud or 5G or metaverse reaffirms it. He said, so for the last 30, 40 years, people keep telling me Moore's Law is dead and then something else comes up. He said, at some point, I wish people would just stop saying the phrase. But the point of it is,
24:31
I want to be on the cutting edge of emerging technology for a few reasons. One, I like to always be like I've grounded myself for last 30 years in technology. But also I realize it is the competitive advantage for me, my family, my friends, my colleagues, my team. If you don't understand how the world is radically changing, how can you compete? Like if you don't watch the game film or the competition before you show up to the game, then shame on you for losing. That's exactly right. Like you didn't do the research.
24:59
Now the other part is, does matter what my title is? It matters even more so than my title because I got to lead by example. There's too many leaders out there that are telling these people just go be curious. And I say this all the time. They're like, oh, just be curious with AI. Just go be curious. And I say the same thing over and over again. I say, got three kids that are four, six, and eight years old. That's like me telling them about fire by throwing matches and gasoline on the floor and say, go nuts. They're either going to get burned or they're going to do nothing. You have to stop doing that. You're to have to lead by example. You're going to have to get a certification.
25:28
And so I always tell folks the greatest thing I learned in college was how to learn. Once I realized that I could learn at a rapid pace based on the ways that I want to learn, then it was game on. And now you got more tools and technology. You put me on the podcast. Now I listen to stuff. My colleague, Divya, we were driving up to lunch the other day. wanted to talk about some things. My podcast, because the one I was listening to was on, but I listened to it at 1.5x speed or 2x. And it was kind of throwing her off. She was like,
25:57
you listen to is 1.5x, I was like, yeah, I don't have time to be listening to people talk slow. But the weird part is I listen to all these people at 1.5x. So when I hear them in other mediums at 1x speed, just, sound, I was like, man, something's wrong with them, man. I don't know what it is. That's not how they sound. But the point of this is though, like, I wanted to lead by example. I want to stay on the cutting edge of emerging technology. Every business, you know, my dad said a long time ago, and a lot of people said this, he said every business is a computer business. Every business.
26:25
from now to the foreseeable future is an AI-based business. It's just how you're going to use an interface with technology. So how am going to lead folks in technology? And I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. The other part of why I got so many is the speed and the exponential curve of change in AI is so radical. It used to be in technology and transformation, you only had to reinvent your tech stack or your thought process every five to seven years. Now every five to seven months, there's just so much advancement.
26:54
I was joking on LinkedIn with someone that I follow in AI and she was talking about, she's kind of the same journey. was like, she's like, I haven't listened to actual music. I've been listening to nothing but podcasts and stuff for the last year. And I was like, yeah, me too. Last 10 months. I don't listen to music anymore in my car. I literally don't. She said, I want to take a break. I said, me too. I said, I'm going take a couple of days off. And Sora 2 just dropped this new open AI video model stuff and it's going bananas. Like it's about to disrupt a lot of shit.
27:20
I say, yeah, I'm to take a, it just dropped last week. I said, I'm going take a probably a week off and I'll come back. Maybe SOAR 3 will be out by then. Because these things keep dropping and keep changing. And now there's a lot more competition in technology that didn't exist before. And so you have to start to learn because right now what's happening, the barrier to entry to create software is so low and it's so easy that there's so much noise because there's a thousand of everything. And so I need to boil down and synthesize what is actually the commonality? What is the through line?
27:49
And to make it more, for me, I think my superpowers, I try to make the complex simple. People say, use a lot of analogies and this and I was like, yeah, because I'm trying to equal the medium and make sure that everyone understands what I'm talking about. Like, I'm not just trying to be some standup comic. What I've realized is that if you can't, I always tell folks, I was talking to some software companies lately, I said, you can't sell something that people don't know how to consume. They don't know how to consume it. Like, what does that matter? It's the consumption, right? And so when I think about,
28:19
We're going to talk about AI for a little bit and your leadership position there and really what you're doing in the space. But education reduces fear. I'm not afraid of something that I understand. I'm not anxious about something I'm educated on. I'm the son of a football coach. I grew up in sports. I've run and exited a couple of businesses. So I'm not afraid of starting a new business. I'm not afraid of the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur because I'm educated on that. So if we can educate people on AI and how it applies to them.
28:48
Then we give people space to experiment and play. It's fun. Experimentation you're learning. Then once you experiment and then got some education, now all of a sudden you can figure out where you're going to execute. And then you can get the economic value. So that's the way I think about adopting things. What are companies getting wrong with AI these days? I'll take a step back and I'll follow on what you just described. When I tell folks all the time, say, look, I said, first and foremost, as a business leader, I started calling them out more recently the last couple of months.
29:18
I said, you need to stop just blankedly like talking about your business outcomes. Like you're excited like 2026, we're to be more profitable. We're going to do this, this and this. I said, it's fine if you do that, but you've not even told the rest of the employee base where they fit in this story arc. I said, this is the most radical technology that humanity has ever seen. It impacts every human on the planet, which means it affects every single employee in your organization. And so historically you would only have one or two people in IT.
29:46
that are going to potentially sabotage your digital transformation efforts. I said, now you didn't even bother to tell the people where they fit in the story arc. Now you've got 90 % of your people rowing against you. And you seem to be surprised that people aren't adopting this or that you're not making advancements in this and that. I was like, so what you have to do and what we've done here at Walk West, I said, you're to do three things. We make AI learning and adoption personal, fun, and safe. I said, once you've netted down on how you've increased every individual employee's quality of work,
30:16
I'm not talking about their quality of life, but their quality of work, things that they want to do, they're going to run hard with you, whatever the outcome, because now they see a path. They see and understand the excitement. They see how they're going to fit into the overall story arc. So part of what they're getting wrong is they're not actually training their people. Again, they're going back to go be curious. Like, how curious are you? What do you learn? We talk about this, you're the chairman. We talk about you got a couple of certifications, right? And we talk about this all the time from the chairman to the person in finance to the intern. Everybody needs to have one.
30:47
Not just because I'm trying to dictate this, we're trying to give them the skills, knowledge and expertise to be successful wherever they go. We used to call our old company almost like a teaching hospital. And we would celebrate people when they went off to go to the big company to do this and that. We didn't say, oh man, that sucks. You're like, man, that's good, man, you should go do that. One, because we couldn't afford. It's like, man, they're going to pay you 50 % more? That is awesome, man. I wish you luck. But we said it, and then we had some boomerangs. For the last 15 years, I don't know, I've lost count of how many boomerangs people have come back.
31:17
to work because you can't always replicate that culture in that environment. Someone is going to invest in me to grow, whether I leave or not. We didn't take it personally. At the end of the day, that's another thing that I learned over the years is like, at end of the day, he used to joke me. He's like, oh, you think you know all these people because you play basketball with them on weekends or in the mornings. He was like, they go off to some other company and they tell you. And I say, I get it. I agree. I say, at the end of the day, we're all going to do what's in the best interest of us and our families.
31:44
And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. once you get your mind, and I see so many leaders though they get so, I mean can't believe they did this, but is this a life-changing thing for them? Or are they out of new family? Or are they moved? What you want them to do? So, no one's beholden to the organization. I think to lean on that thread, part of building trust and loyalty is helping people see themselves in the story arc that you're describing. To your other point, I think that leaders are measured
32:13
by financially driven goals and results. But the health and wellbeing of your team drives those results. And where I think we've got it a little off center and we're getting some rebalancing, that doesn't mean everything's a kumbaya moment at work. It doesn't mean every day is a party. It means you're gonna be treated fairly. It's gonna mean if we have some healthy tension, we're gonna look at it as a two way street and figure out how we can get better. And then we're both gonna grow and win in the end. That's where.
32:42
right, the new world of work means to me. I think that a lot of times people have an expectation that leaders are gonna solve all your problems versus my philosophy is we wanna create an environment where we can solve these problems together. And I see you smiling. You got your phrase he used to say. No, man, cause you were like, back in the day, Donald would say, he said, look, if we're going into this account or going into this situation,
33:10
together, then he's like, we share the risk and you take all the upside. He said, but if you told me that you got it and you don't want my help, just bring me my fucking money. Like, I don't know if I said this exactly like, but I have an amazing memory. And that was something that will always stand out for, and I got people that I can call up right now. Hey, did he say this? Look, he always tells me now, he always says, I've softened that a little bit. Right? I've softened it a lot. Yeah.
33:37
But the point was well taken. But what I loved about the phrasing though, that was the first part of it for sure, which was you would always say, look, I'm not trying to take your shine. I'm trying to make sure that we are successful. And you say, you get the ride in front of the flow, take all the glory. That's right. And we share the risk. And that's the part where people think that they think they got to go do it by themselves. And I always try to remind people that we don't get individual grades anymore. Like if we don't win this deal because you chose to just go out by yourself, that impacts everybody. And I always tell my...
34:06
Executive team our number one goal is to keep everybody gainfully employed and promoted that is our number one set of goals compensation continuation compensation Continuation let's do that as a baseline Yeah, and then when we win bigger then everyone can talk about their individual rewards and different things But let's keep the thing afloat and keep moving but I equals promotion, right? If you're not running I say how am I gonna promote anybody if we don't make any profit? All right, let me get back on task because the story he tells stories about me
34:36
For 5 % of the companies where AI actually works, what are they doing well? What examples would you like to share? I think the first thing to that question, basically that's coming from that MIT, I would say that misquoted MIT. People took the headlines of the MIT research, which basically said 95 % of the pilots or whatever AI pilots are failing. And they went there, but they didn't really dig into what they actually said in there. And actually some of the people from MIT had to come back out later and say, hey, let me just unpack exactly what we were.
35:03
saying here, right? But what they were saying was that, and this relates to the 5 % they get theirs, first and foremost, these people are actually actively training their employee base on how these tools work, how they can use them. Not go play with this or that's an IT initiative or this. They're like, look, this is going to affect every single organization. mean, every single unit, every single person in this organization. Let's make sure everybody's coming along and being educated. Doesn't mean everybody's going to accept it, but first and foremost, like you described earlier, which is
35:33
You fear things when you don't understand them. So let's give them their aha moments. So first thing is invested in training these folks. The second thing was they weren't trying to build everything themselves. For whatever reason, through history, and I always call it this kind of weird kind of a buyer's journey where, and this is even predates AI, like the first step is always, all right, DIY, we're going to do it ourselves. Like, all right. And then the second step is, all right, well, we just need to get somebody to train us up.
36:03
on this stuff. Then the second step is, okay, well, we just need to hire a few contractors or a few experts. And then we got, and then the fourth piece is maybe I should get an implementation partner that actually knows what they're doing in this space because this ain't core to my business. Now, the problem is they've burned through the entire budget doing the first three things and it's speed of market and all this. So what these other folks have also done is they brought experts in that understand this is what's core to your business. This is what we can do to accelerate your business. So they got accelerated time to value.
36:32
They got accelerated time to market, which is important because I always try to tell folks like we're in this world where it's you got to be much more agile. You got to get something out there, test message, test the market, get the insights and then refine it from there. So these people are doing this big bang. We're going to go the people that failed and now come back to the people that are successful. The people that failed trying to do it themselves. And if you look in that MIT report, one of the things they say is try to buy commercially available domain specific things that someone else has already invested in. right. Commercially available domain specific. So that is a
37:02
powerful phrase. So let's even break that down simpler. There are AI platforms that are specific if you're in content generation for marketing. There are AI tools specific if you're looking for data harmonization and cost savings and finance. There are AI tools if you're looking at strategy work. And so what happens is the AI tools have already been tuned to your industry.
37:27
So now the only layer you have to work on is the specific elements of AI in your industry to your particular company. And that's a big thing that I agree with where people, they use AI in Chad GBT, they use AI in Gemini and all these different things. These are broad construct tools for the masses. And for you to train and tune those tools by yourself for the specific use cases in your industry and organization, you set yourself up for.
37:57
Pain and problems. Pain and problems. Every problem doesn't need to be solved with a large language model, right? Like as you described, the large language model by definition was to create it to be more horizontal in nature, to be more broad. And I think that what we're going to see is a natural trend that's going to happen in 2026. You're going to start to see a lot more small language models or open source or even the foundational model, the big companies, the Anthropics, the Claude or Google's Gemini or OpenAI's, ChachiPT. They will take some of the older models and then make them more
38:26
There's a debate whether it's open source or open weights, meaning there's some element of it that you can see, but then there's still some black box stuff that they're not going to share. But you can take those things and more fine tune these things. The problem is, and it's just wild to me, like I saw it in cloud days, saw it in like a lot of more tech. So you're to say the most game changing technology advancement in our humanity, the most complex thing ever, them three dudes in the corner just going to go replicate that. My man Sam Altman trying to raise a
38:55
trillion dollars to do deeper research to get to AGI and super intelligence. But Bob and his boys over there are going to build this thing. That makes no sense to me. Now, the data is playing out also. 95 % of y'all are failing trying it that way. And so I think what people are going to start to realize, and then also it's like, why don't you learn to apply these, again, commercially available tools versus building, replacing things that already exist? You mentioned also time to market and time to value. The more you're trying to build something custom,
39:24
for yourself, for us configuring something that's available, is going to allow you to test it out and grow. And I think we learned that by necessity in businesses we've built because we didn't have a lot of financial backing. Most of our things we've done and exited were bootstrapped in the beginning, right? And then after we were successful, people came and brought some support. One of the things that, let's pivot a little bit to AI, but AI related to the lead flow crisis. Because I've heard you use that phrase. So I want you to talk about the lead flow crisis.
39:53
And then some of the things you're learning on how to address it using these tools. the lead flow crisis, I really started to net down on this last year, late last year when I started to see this fundamental shift. I always tell folks all the time, say, in May of 2024, Google will turn the lights off on a lot of companies that were relying heavily on SEO traffic. And people ask me, what do you mean? say, well, once they start to move to the AI overviews and to AI mode, effectively, there was this rapid drop off, especially because a lot of companies have been taught this idea of that.
40:22
If you just talk about stuff on your blog and put out a lot of uh cool things and talk about cool things on your site, then you're going to get all of this, you know, trapped because there used to be this uh unwritten contract between Google and the rest of the world. And people didn't realize that they were actually renting space on Google. And effectively the contract used to be for every two pages that they scraped, you would get one visit. Then it was six pages. A few months ago it was 18 pages. I don't know what it is now. That's on the Google side of things, right? In the fundamental
40:51
point of this is that if you can't start doing the math, whatever your traffic that you were getting, it is exponentially going down to the point where almost, what is it, 60 % of all Google searches end without a click. 60%. Without a click means they ain't going to your site. They don't know who you are. So that's thing one. Now you start to throw in the large language models getting into the search game. All this data is from Cloudflare, who's basically their CDN that does all of this. They track and monitor the entire web.
41:20
And they said that for OpenAI, for ChatGPT, you're doing a search. 1,500 scrapes for your website for one visit. So Google 18 to 30, 1,500 times before you get one. Claude, that's on my Anthropic, 60,000 scrapes for one visit. That is a massive drop off as it relates to if your business was built around, if FCO and organic traffic was 80 % of your lead flow.
41:49
You got a problem. Now you add in email. Email, I tell people, say, cold email you, say, you'll never convert me because there's only two forms, scam and spam. You talk about we're in the era of trust. Right now, cold email, you spend more time trying to figure out if it's a scam or if it's spam. Either way, you're just like, I'll just delete and block it. I don't know what this is. I don't know you. Don't know if you're real. And so those things, now you said, and then so what ends up happening naturally, and I fell into the trap a little bit earlier this year, it's like, all right,
42:18
We'll just move the paid media, something we know and understand that we can control. Until I realize, oh, you can't control the costs. If the other two things don't work, everybody's gonna play over here, which means the cost of AvCak is gonna go up. And it's significantly, last year I think it had already gone up over a two year period, like 25%. I can't imagine it doesn't double in 2026. So let me jump in here.
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Part 2
If traditional search is not producing the same effective results, if the machines are now starting to pick the winners,
42:47
Right? So a phrase I borrowed from you. What do I do about it as a business leader? How do I think about it differently? Now, so this is the doom and gloom, or not even doom and gloom, this is the business reality. As a business leader, how do I think, act, behave differently? I always get that question, and it's the right question. And I'm glad people are finally asking the question. Someone I know and trust and respect was talking to me recently, and I'm actually forwarded, I reposted somebody that's an expert on SEO and all these changes, and he keeps talking about these things. We're going to meet.
43:16
I guess next week and start talking about doing a podcast episode together. But people kept debating with me because Google still owns 90 % of all search traffic. Right? I just want to put a fine point into so people understand because I got tired. Like last night I was like, I'm done debating this with you guys. Right? But Google, because I talked about how scary it is on the chat, GPT and Claude. mean, but Google still owns 90 % of all search traffic. I said, I agree. I said, but they went to AI mode. I said, you're you're debating on who's eating your lunch. And I'm simply telling you lunch has been eaten.
43:46
I was like, I didn't say that Google doesn't own 90%. I'm saying it's still not getting to your fucking site, so I don't know what you're talking about right now. Because Google is in a fight for their life. Netflix meets blockbuster moment. And so Google said, instead of sending them to your site, I'm going to send them to another page on Google that has the data from your site that I've pulled, and they're going to stay in my platform. 100%. And so understanding that reality is hard because people have started to...
44:14
And I get why they say that because they were trying to conflate and make this analog of, well, still the regular search, because Google on search is like, yeah, but Google changed, man. They had no choice. I said, you guys got to follow what's happening. I said, well, one of the co-founders of Google comes out of retirement to come back and work. It probably should have been a signal that some radical changes are afoot, right? And so they're continually going down to AI mode and within the last few days, and that's why I reposted something last night.
44:44
Google's getting more and more because at end of the day, they want to own the entire customer journey. That is their survival. They want to own from search to research to checkout. And that is a fundamental change. And I get it, right? There's like the future loss and the loss aversion. But that's like the lead flow crisis side. So what to do about it? You still need to do SEO. I'm not saying you don't. I'm simply saying, if that was 80 % of your lead flow before, it may be 10 to 20 % in the very near future.
45:13
And if you don't understand that, where are my leads? I do want to say, so what I netted down on and we came back to is like, what are we going to do? And you and I brainstormed on a lot of stuff late last year on like, what's going on in the world beginning of this year? And I was like, all right, we have to show up in a lot more places and a lot more often. Right. And then, so I say, and I start to understand, I registered the domain, what is AEO last November? What is answer engine optimization or AI uh optimization, however you want to think about it.
45:43
And now people are like, yeah, man, we need to figure that out. I was like, and I started going down this rabbit hole and then I stopped and I realized and I used my computer science background. I was like, how are we going to optimize for something that could change every five minutes if the AI decides that there's a different way to view authority? Oh, how am going to do that if every one of these foundational models, because you're not having to just optimize for Google, OpenAI looks at it or chat GPT looks at authority differently. Claw looks at it.
46:13
differently because the sources of where they're pulling this. If you ask all four or five of these large English models, give me the top five or something, they're going to all be different. How does one optimize for a world like that? And because the people want to keep doing the analogs and say, well, this is just like, I'm going go on a rant about it. That's going to be a part of my new, like, my keynotes. If you come to me with, it's just, oh, it's just this. I'm like, it's not, it's just this. But people can say, well, they say, oh, it's just this thing.
46:43
You just gonna go out of business. You just gonna get left behind. And I just don't have time for this shit. Right? Like it's, it's just fundamentally. You just gonna get left behind. You just gonna go out of business. Right? Because you're literally trying to compare a bicycle to a space shuttle. Right? This isn't the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle. It's the bicycle and a space shuttle. How many people did a central layoff? 11,000.
47:11
And one of the things I interject at is because sometimes people try to debate things that are measurable. And if you look at the amount of money, and you mentioned this, I'm just recapping it, the hundreds of millions of dollars that Metta is investing, the hundreds of billions of dollars that Google is investing, hundreds of millions of dollars that Apple is investing in AI. And then that doesn't even talk about private equity and different things and Nvidia that's working on the chips and
47:40
Yeah, hundreds of billions. That's right. $20 billion bet, and Mark Zuckerberg flat out came out. He's like, it may work, it may not. But what choice do I have? The numbers are getting so big that Sam Altman is trying to raise a trillion dollars on a business that is not turning out low billions. So the way I think about things is like, all right, so there's that piece of the investment of people who have a lot more data than I do. And then there's the impact of people more like you and I.
48:10
people that are working that are no longer working. So why is a center letting go of 11, think about what it takes to get a job at a center. You gotta be pretty smart. You gotta be pretty articulate. You gotta be good in front of clients. You gotta go into a good school. And 11,000 of those people are unemployed. And they have specifically attributed it to them not being AI ready. And so when I share with people, I actually try not to debate a lot.
48:39
I'm just not as passionate about it. I was just like, hey, listen, if you want to do it, great. You can be on the front end or in the mid tier, or you can be on the sidelines and watch. The only thing that you shouldn't do is complain about your personal outcome when you do nothing. I mean, you asked me earlier this year why I named the podcast AI Vorse a Victim. And I said, first thing, my flipping answer was like, just wait six months. Because what I was trying to get across is that there's going to become this moment where people are going to feel like they're left behind.
49:08
I scream into the camera sometimes just trying to get people like, please just lean in and try to do this stuff. You know, I joke all the time, it's like, in DC they say, you know, if you don't have a seat at the table, then you're on the menu. And I said, nobody's gonna be cutting up my future. Like when you talked about why do I keep learning? I'm like, shit man, because these people making plans and I wanna be a part of the plans. And so I always talk about the tsunami that's coming and I say, look, I get the folks that when you see the tsunami, they've run for the hills.
49:36
I get the weirdos like you and I that want to go ride that wave and we see it coming. I said, what I don't get is the people that just stand in there and see this giant-ass wave. Make no decision. They're just going to stand there and get crushed. I don't get that. I said, my dad is a retired truck driver and when he was teaching me about driving, the thing that he said to me, he said, son, just keep it between the ditches and don't stop in traffic. Keep between the ditches, don't stop in traffic. If people can fundamentally just understand, you got to keep it moving. I think at Metta they had this like image or they show it's a rocking horse.
50:05
I think the premise is don't confuse motion for progress. That's good. When you're rocking back and forth, you're moving, but you're going nowhere. And I feel like that's what people are doing. They're rocking back and forth. And it's like, come on, man, you got to go do this. But the central piece, though, the 11,000, they basically say they can't get right. They basically can't do the things that they need in the world of the company that they're building. Let's do one more pivot, because I could talk to you all day. We cut up. You talk a lot recently about
50:34
personality-led growth for C-suite leaders. What does that mean? Yeah, I I always tell folks there's two dynamic forces that can help you grow to combat against the lead flow crisis, right? And that's how we ended up with our four piece strategy here at Walk West. Those two dynamic forces are personality-led growth, right? It used to be what you know, then it was who you know, now it's who knows you. And right, if you go back to the lead flow crisis, people are to have a hard time getting awareness and cutting through the noise. Who knows you, right? And so if you've not invested in your own personal brand,
51:04
Like, I'm case in point. A year ago, I did not invest in my own personal brand, partly because I didn't make time and understand it. But the other thing is I felt like it made me look like I was trying to be on the front of the float. But then once I realized that if I don't do this, there going to be a lot of people that can't even be on the float. My float is going to get a lot smaller. So the personality-led growth is, how do you lead by example? think it was Forbes had some data that said 49 % of your brand's reputation is directly tied to your reputation. And the smaller you are as an organization, the bigger that is.
51:33
So if you're a small organization, call it sub 100 people, it's probably 80 % of the brand's reputation. And I always tell folks, the idea is like, okay, if you do nothing online or in the public, you know, not good. If you do something negative, it's actually 10 times worse because you can't separate that. And what are some of the tactical things that you've done? Once you have the awareness that personality growth mattered, and then you needed to go through a brand building kind of exercise and process yourself.[a]
52:01
What are some of the things that you've put into practice as the face of Walk West, as the face of AI adoption and growing your brand? Well, there's a couple of things. One leads into the other side of the Forbes personality growth and community led growth. You know, I always tell people, said the ocean that was Google has dried up. What ponds are you going to fish in? And what I try to get across is you got to find other communities. And so what I'm doing is trying to align myself with other communities that may be a publication, there may be tech organizations, there may be community colleges, people with
52:31
at least similar interests, if not aligned interests, people that have newsletters. How do I get, you know, I said at the beginning of this year, and I'm sure I confuse a lot of people at Walk West, I said, we're gonna do three things really well. We're gonna be, sure that you're seen, heard, and cited, C-I-T-E-D, by humans and machines alike for maximum results. I've been saying this since January. And people are like, what does that mean? I was like, we're in an era now, you've got to show up everywhere your customer expects you to show up. You have to be in so many, I've quantified it for folks, said, you need.
53:00
To survive and to thrive right now, you need four to six new roles across eight to 10 capabilities or technologies to deliver 10 to 100x more content twice as fast across four or five different new channels. If you start adding all that up, the people cost of it is too enormous for you. So you're going to have to lean into technology. And so what I'm just trying to get across to folks, I'm like, you've got to be to so many different places. So you're going to have to, we got a team, we got our communities, whether that's writing, because some people don't want to be on camera.
53:28
I don't want to It's like, not because I don't feel like I can write, it's one, I respect other people that are much better at it than myself. But also I don't want to be judged. Things get lost in translation. Right? I put something like, oh shit, I ain't mean it that way. Right? But being on podcasts, right, we create our four piece strategy, podcast, partnerships, PR, and publishing. The point behind that, and people are like, man, you're a bullish on podcasts. It's the perfect medium. We have multiple cameras set up. That means that we can do audio.
53:56
We can do video, we can do long form, we can do short form, we can put things on YouTube, YouTube shorts, you can have LinkedIn, you have these Instagram reels, all of these different form factors, TikTok, whatever you want. The other part is I also understand that we can translate that into text form so we can end up in blogs, articles, know, one of the pieces, PR, press releases, start talking more about what you're doing. Right, people have reserved PR and all this stuff for times of crisis.
54:25
versus using it as, again, seen, heard, and cited. You can't just talk about, always jokingly say to folks, you can't just say that you're the shit on your own blog and think that the whole world should now believe that because it's on your blog. Someone else has to cite you. And that's why they call them citations in these large language models. They're pulling this, and that was the other reason why I stopped going down to drive a hole of AEO. I said, if I were to search and say, tell me, is Donald Thompson Jr. expert in this thing?
54:52
I wouldn't just go to your site, well, of course you're going tell me that you're the best at this thing. I would start cross-referencing it across all these other things. A human doing that is going to take days. The machine can do this in milliseconds. And so once I realized that, I was like, oh shit, we've got to show up everywhere, right? So then how do I do that at scale? Oh, well, we use a combination of technology and people. So we had our 4P strategy. And then how do I start to curate partnerships? That's community-led growth.
55:22
How do I get other people like, hey, put me over here, I'm gonna put you over here, we're gonna create our squads and our pods. The powerful thing you said on that, Greg, to extend, right, is people and technology. Yes, in that order. And so want you to expand on that for a little bit because we are talking a lot about tech, but we don't want people to understand that we're doing that in independent, we're doing that intertwined with the power of people in unified. I think what you're describing holistically,
55:50
is a term that we've coined on content supply chain, right? And so give them, our audience, a little bit on what content supply chain means to you in kind of a snippet that an executive could understand. So we talked a little bit about the lead flow crisis and I described some of the things, again, going, you need 10 to 100x more content. The reason I talked about the Cloudflare data related to how many scrapes the sites, because what I'm trying to get across is like, you have to have so much more content to show up all these places.
56:19
It makes no sense. When I say 10 to 100 days, you're going to hire 100 more people? Now, I'm not saying you don't need to hire some people. said, but that's not practical. Or you'll go out of business. The economics doesn't make sense. But then on the other side is the productivity crisis. So the lead flow crisis that's been driven by AI, then you have the productivity crisis that can be mitigated by AI. And so the idea being, and I say this, these are actual data points, almost, as a knowledge worker, about 50 % of our work week is comprised of searching for things to do our job, copying and pasting, and reformatting data.
56:48
50 % of our work week. I ain't hiring for that. I'm certain people didn't sign up and think that was gonna be their job. And so when people come to me and they was like, well, there's no humanity AI. It's like, how is it humane to have your great colleagues spend 50 % of their time doing administrative work? And so I said, let the machines handle the routine and let your humans handle the remarkable. You have to flip the time equation. What do the young people say now, bars?
57:13
Bars. Bars. Say that again. But I said, know, the machines handle the routine and let humans handle the remarkable, right? The idea is you flip the time equation and you ain't go like this as a sales leader. You know, the average salesperson spends 70 % of their time doing administrative work. That means only 30 % of their time are they in front of customers and prospecting and trying to actually draw. They are in CRMs, they are in emails, 70 % of their time.
57:43
I'm talking to 60 sales professionals in the insurance space. They're in the employee benefits broker space and property and casualty insurance. And we're talking about AI. And that is a powerful, powerful number. 70 % is administrative work, 30 % actually selling. What could you do with your best people if they were selling 80 to 90 % of the time? You flip that time equation, now you got super individual contributors. We were talking off camera before. That's the whole point.
58:13
We're going to evolve into a world where people are going to superpower, know, some people will jokingly say it's like Jarvis is uh the Iron Man suit and Jarvis that he wears, right? You're going to give people superpowers. Not only that, it's not just giving them superpowers, you increase their quality of work. Salespeople hate all of the administrative work they have to do. They're in the role because they wanted to talk to people. Now you've told them to just spend time talking to the machine.
58:39
And so people talk about sales burnout. Yeah, I'd be burned out too if I spent 7 % of my time not doing the thing I wanted to be doing. In the most competitive business environment in history. so... Just one last point on that thread though, too. The other part of what people have to do, and you've seen this influx of IRL or in real life, in events. So if you're going to cut through the noise, so we're in this era of taste and trust. And because there's so much of...
59:06
I always tell people AI gives you lot of speed and optionality and because of that it creates also a lot of noise. So it's hard to kind of break through anything. And so if all your lead flow came from organic traffic, this and that, the problem is people don't trust things that they don't know, can't touch, that's too abstract. So if you're an era of taste and trust, what I would predict is you're going to see a lot of hyper local, that people are going go back to plant and sales people directly in places where they want to grow those markets. Which means that people are going to be more in person, people are going to be doing more events. Well.
59:34
How many events can you go to if you spend 70 % of your time doing administrative work? I can't get in front of the people, I had to go update the CRM on the deals we just lost. You spent 10 hours updating the deals you lost? We talk a lot about AI losing jobs. Let's talk about AI creating jobs, creating the opportunity. Think about the new products and offerings you're doing at Walk West. You can spend a little time bragging there and then move it upwards. So that's one. And then the second one, and I'll restate them.
01:00:03
And the second one is, as you're on this AI series path, what do you want to be known for 10 years from now? Like, what do you want your story to be? So Greg, we're going to land the plane. This has been, again, we're business partners, we're friends, like we could talk all day. But I want to finish with two things, and I'll start with this one. We've talked a lot about the disruption of artificial intelligence. We've talked about how it's impacting the roles in different ways. What are some of the opportunities? What are some of the jobs that are going to be created?
01:00:32
What are some of the things you're seeing at Walk West as a business leader that is moving the business in a new way? How do we go on offense with artificial intelligence? And I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I get this question all the time, right? Which is, well, is it going to change this? Is it going to replace this or that? Like, we were doing a training session a few weeks back, and there was a young person, and she was asking, she was in kind of the creative space. And then she was like, do you think it's going to kill creativity? say, the analogy I always give folks, I'm like,
01:01:00
When the photography and when the camera came out, didn't kill painting. It created a new medium for a group of folks that wanted to see the world and think about it differently. When motion pictures came along, it didn't kill off painters and photographers. At every advancement, there's going to be new forms of art and business and technology. And one of the beautiful things that people, if they understood, again, going back to the, it's just this. I'm like, if you just understood what you could do with some of these things, you
01:01:30
Right now we don't have any, we don't have ability to imagine, like our emotional identity a lot of times is tied to our job title, especially in the US. Other countries not as much, but in the US one of the first things people ask you, what do you do for a living? You don't really get that in a lot of other countries. So that's part of like that future law stalker, that loss aversion is real and it's challenging. But if you could open your mind and expand to understand what are the new things that I could do with this, because what it's done is it's significantly reduced the costs
01:01:59
I jokingly use from a cultural reference, it's little outdated, but I tell folks all the time, I say, you know, it was one of the greatest technology, I said, Soulja Boy. And they're like, Soulja Boy. I said, that young man created a whole album in his damn bedroom and put it on YouTube, right, using different medium. YouTube didn't exist, right? If YouTube and Fruity Loops and Reason to make beats, if those things didn't exist and you still have to have everybody in those big ass...
01:02:25
Machines, and that was the only way that you could put out. It limited access for creators. limited access. And so what now you have to keep thinking. If you want to use an analog from a business environment perspective, understand with the advancements of technology how it's opened up for things that we didn't think about. That's what's wild to me is like, you know, folks that are like content creators or these social media influencers, they're like, oh man, it's gonna take this and that. And like, you know that there were also people that thought you were taking from them, right? Like this is a cycle and you have to keep evolving.
01:02:55
know, Hollywood's now really mad at the first AI actor. I was like, I don't know why they put that out there, but whatever. What did I think about it? So that's on a much grander scale, but from a practical business perspective, what's happening is that this technology is now, it's democratized intelligence in your pocket. And that's one of the things that's very challenging for folks, right? Because it used to all be about what you know. And that was the thing that you could elevate yourself because I know more than you. Now what happens when we all know the same? Right now it's going to be about...
01:03:25
How do you execute? How do you mold? How do you change? And so what you're to see from a business environment's perspective, someone that was only able to do one, maybe two things, can now do 10 things at once because they have all of these things. And what they're going to see is Sam Altman calls it, we're in the age of the idea guy or gal. It used to be that only people like me that used to know how to write code, because it used to be, this is just a stat from a few years ago, less than one third of 1 % of the world's population can write code, pre-AI.
01:03:53
less than one third of 1%, which meant that there was so few people that could actually build anything that it limited access. Because Soulja Boy was able to create his own beats and then had his own channel to push it out. And then people started like, no, no, no, no, you got to go through this. You got to get licensed. And then they got to distribute. he's like, I don't need to all this. I got my own audience. And I can go straight to my audience. I can go straight to the consumer. And that's what happened when you fast forward down to podcasts where people realized, I can go straight to my own audience.
01:04:22
I can curate my own pond. I don't have to worry about what Google is going to give me the crumbs I get from this and that. And so what's going to happen in Sora 2 just dropped from OpenAI, the world is about to get bananas. I'll just give you a quick kind of overview. They basically, Sora 2 is, Sora was one of the first video models to come out. And it was a little janky and it didn't make a lot of progress. Then V03, Google, Kling, some of these others came out. They're way better coming out of China and other places.
01:04:51
And then SOAR 2 drops a few days ago. And SOAR 2 got all the bells and whistles, but then they did something that's very unique. You can now, you use HeyGen, you introduced me to HeyGen. You can now load your image and likeness and your voice and everything, put it on there, and now it's a social network. You can decide who gets to use the rights. So you can basically create a contract. You can say, all right, I'm going to give access to Greg and Kia, they call it Cameo, to use my...
01:05:20
video, synthetic me, for whatever they want to publish and do with it. And they're creating this social work, this social network in that way. And so some of these influencers are just going to give it, so right now they're saying that Sam Altman is the most memed person of all time because they just dropped this, because he gave access to everyone. So you and I could go on Sorts who right now leverage Sam Altman, the digital, and have him sitting in here having a conversation with us. That's cool. And monetize it. So you could say, now I give access.
01:05:51
So now I give digital twin, Donald access, these 10 people, and now you go do, I don't, you don't have to, because also it creates a contract. It's almost like an NIL kind of deal situation. You can use this. I get royalty kickbacks. However you use it, I ain't got to show up everywhere now. I ain't got to be in all these different environments. Go off and go nuts. Now some people are out there, now they're using that to meme, say I'm all in and do all these other things, but the adoption is already bananas within under a week. And so that's something that did not exist before.
01:06:21
So now you're going to have, so think about this, if you were a small, going back to the personality lead growth, if you are a CEO that didn't have a big platform, couldn't be in China tomorrow, New Zealand the next day, now you can theoretically, because now someone can put this campaign together and now I have you saying this thing and this, like, hey, if I'm Ryan Reynolds, I can't really show up to do this Coca-Cola commercial. How about you use Digital Ryan? I licensed that. It's going to be a little bit cheaper than having me actually show up.
01:06:50
And now you're starting to see the volume and scale. The world is about to get nuts. And so you asked me why I learn all the time, because if I don't understand the problem set, I don't know how you do to mitigate it or to use it to my competitive advantage and my team. So I think, so that's like a different example, but think about, go back to your productivity crisis. What I didn't describe was how much time credibly you can give back of that 50 % to 70%. You could get upwards to 40 or 50 % of that time back or more. Now,
01:07:19
going back to why people failed also from the AI adoption in these pilots is what they didn't do was change the process. I always talk about people processing platforms in that order. Right now, we've got all our people, we've got them trained in adopted AI, personal safe fund. Next step is the process. What's happening is people are spending, they're saying, all right, I got a 10 step process. I'm going to bolt AI on the end of my 11 step. That's the wrong way to view it. I had 10 steps. How can I use this to get the three steps? How do I shorten that?
01:07:49
again, let the machine handle the routine so that my humans can get to the remarkable, my colleagues can do the more strategic, high value work. And so what you're going to see is the people that were only hired to do this administrative work, but had great ideas, I call it executive vision charades, where there used to be, was like, hey, you're trying to tell somebody what you want or what you're trying to get. And it was like, oh, it sounds like this, it's two words. And then six months later, he's like, no, that's not what I was thinking. Now you can vibe code, vibe market, vibe research, whatever the phrasing you want.
01:08:18
Now the person that has a great idea but could never actually build a prototype. Now they can show you, now it's like, no, I'm not going to whiteboard this. I'm going to vibe this out in lovable or I'm going to use Figma. And then we talk about also these tools should be able to expand your, you know, how, a lot of people call this the Renaissance era now. We're in an age of generalists, right? We've all been structured and programmed to be very vertical specific. Like I only do this one thing.
01:08:46
You only did that one thing because that's how we were trained. It goes back to the Rockefeller days of all this kind of factory work. And I used to joke at a couple of different stops on my journey. I said, feels like every pencil requires two people. One of you can write and one of you can erase. That is problematic in building a business. And so now we finally have technology where the person that had the idea, the person that was creative, can get 60, 70, maybe 80 % of the way of building this thing out and then hand it over. To the experts.
01:09:15
And so when they pass the baton, it's like in track. It's not like they're just standing there waiting. Now there's people they can take off and now you're running together and you're handing this off. And so that starts to be able to allow you to create things faster, get more aligned faster, prototype and produce a lot faster. Because what ended up happening is having all of that factory kind of mentality, you're creating latency between every stop, which means you're creating friction, time loss. There's no accelerated time to value, no accelerated time to market.
01:09:43
Now, a lot of folks say because it's so easy to build things, the true moat of a business, the invisible moat, is around speed and execution. Now, one other side of, I would say, that I'm hyper-focused on as far as kind of the new world is there's this paradigm in the last two years I've been focusing on, which is, you know, there's traditional SaaS software as a service, but now there's service as a software. The idea, because these tools make it more economically viable to help all types of organizations of all sizes try to do things that you've never been able to do.
01:10:12
If you're a small company trying to put together a commercial, you couldn't do that. Only a few companies got enough budget to do a Super Bowl ad. Only a few companies, even local, have enough budget to do a local commercial. Imagine a world in which now the HVAC guy, the five-person company, can do a commercial, a high-quality commercial. And, oh, by the way, they can license Sam Altman to talk about them in their commercial. And if they want to put it out on the local news, they can. If they want to use uh CTV or Connect TV and...
01:10:41
So I can interview Sam Altman with his technology and have him on my podcast? The game is about to fucking change. I want to interview Sam Altman. That's why I'm saying people don't understand this didn't exist two weeks ago. Right? So when I keep people like, why you keep getting started? Okay. I don't think you understand how fast this is moving and changing and what people can do. And so what I'm trying to also figure out is what is possible. Great. Because I have the type of buying where I'm very open to anything being possible as it to technology. When people say it'll
01:11:10
The number times people have said something, we'll never do this, I'm like, oh boy, definitely now. Yeah, never is a trigger word. The thing I want to wind down on is that point you made towards the end, the speed and execution. Because when technology starts to normalize knowledge expertise, right, and that's what you're like, right, then it really becomes how aligned is your team to be able to work together quickly and then to be able to execute. Years ago, we used to have this triangle, right? You can have something
01:11:40
Fast. Yeah, or good. Fast, cheap, or good. I remember that, yeah. And you can only pick two out of three. Yeah. In AJAI, I want it all. I want it all. I want it low cost. I want it fast. I want it high quality. And that's what people are really working to adapt to is that that paradigm shift is here. And I would say that they want it faster, cheaper, and better. At every turn. Every turn. That's the reality of the world that we're in. I try to get this across to people all the time.
01:12:09
I said, people was like, oh, well, I don't feel like that's on brand. I said, let me say it this way, and y'all ain't gonna like it. To be on brand means to be on time in the of AI. Someone told me, it's like, oh, we're thinking about doing something in May of 26. I don't think you're gonna be around in May of 26, if that's your... If that's your timeline. If your timeline is, we're gonna do this in May of 26. I don't know how that's gonna work out, player. They had that conversation a few days ago. I was like, hmm. I tried to give them the information at least. And now my thing is, look, I know I don't have the platform.
01:12:38
to quote, quote, be the expert. So now a lot of times I post them like, hey man, don't take my word for it. Take this expert. Greg is an alarmist. mean, well, these people that are in the room, they trying to tell you. So I just kind of point them to like, if you don't believe me, right? Because what I don't want to do, and this goes back to my values though, and I'll shut up here in a second, which is I don't, at the end of this year, going into 2026, I do have a fundamental belief that there's going to be a lot of job loss. And
01:13:05
What I don't want to be is that person that was like, hey man, why didn't you tell me? I said, man, I had a podcast. I was on LinkedIn. I was at every dinner. All my wife's family members, they were like, man, we love the TED Talks uh that Greg gives us when we're around. Because they'll ask me these questions. And it's not that I'm trying to do that, but what I'm trying to just push on them is like, man, the world is changing, man. And you and I talk about a lot of things in business, and we've been around the block for a while, which, and I try to tell folks, what ends up happening when you don't have a true AI strategy or you don't have a true
01:13:35
kind of gross strategy, what ends up happening in these times of crisis. There people right now, they're working in these back rooms to figure out who's going to be on the boat, who's going to be off. Because what they're going to do is they're going cut deep to the bone and then figure the strategy out on the other side. We're going to cut costs to at least give us some room to do R &D. They're not saying so even essential if you kind of read through some of the things that think is Julie Sweeney is the CEO. And what she said is she said that we're going to take that those dollars and then reinvest into people that can do.
01:14:04
She was saying we're going to net have 11,000 people gone. She's saying, these are the ones that we can't see a path in which they can do what we need them to do. So we're going to go buy... Now, they're not going to hire back 11,000. What's going to end up happening is they'll probably hire back 3,000 super individual contributors and they'll pay them double. And so they still made the gain. They still made the progress. And then those 11,000 will likely take, if they do it right, take that skills, knowledge and expertise and start forming little consultancies, little things over here and there.
01:14:34
And that's the thing we've seen a lot this year, these dynamic forces that are at play, which are, I've never seen so many C-level folks losing their jobs. I've never, in my career, I've never seen so many VPs, directors, senior directors, C-level folks. And then I've also never seen so many C-level folks so excited to start their own consulting. Right? So those two dynamic forces have created this big pool of solepreneurs. Some of those solepreneurs are going to work and they're going to create more jobs. I posted something the other day. said, you can't have an economy without small business.
01:15:03
People keep talking about most people in the US are employed in small business. Like this is just a fact. You can talk about Google and this and that all that. If you just let small business die off, there will be no economy. Then it's a wrap. Then you got a fundamental problem. But I do believe that people that are going to ride the wave are going to start to create new things, which will create new jobs, new ways for us to go to market. And you will also, I would say so polarized as it relates to, I was on stage at the American Market Association in May. I said,
01:15:33
On one side of the equation, if you lean into AI, you will likely make more money. On the other side, if you don't lean into AI, you likely won't have a job. There is no in-between. I say, I don't even understand the choice. Like, start thinking about it this way. Do you want to be employable? You know, there used to be a thing with the arms race, right? A nuclear arms race with Russia. If you follow college sports and athletics, was an arms race for facilities, right? Now it's an arms race for who can pay their players the most in college and different things.
01:16:02
And in business today, it is an arms race with who can execute with AI strategies with speed and execution. And so I've enjoyed chatting with you, my friend. This has been great. I know we got a lot of good information and content and I'm gonna land the plane, but you did great. And I'm excited about what the future holds for you and AI serious. Last thing is tell people about your podcast, where to connect with you, how to reach you.
01:16:29
Yeah. So the podcast AI Vorsovictim, you can see on any kind of podcast platform. Also, there's a YouTube, if you want to see us talk about it and laugh and joke in real time. If you want to connect with me, you can go on LinkedIn. It's just Greg Boone. If you go on X is actually AI Serious. Somehow that was available. So I grabbed it, but those are the fundamental ways. would say LinkedIn is where I'm most found. then enjoy the podcast and AI Vorsovictim should be fun.
01:17:01
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.
01:17:28
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.
[a]@will-h@fame.so which part of this hook needs to be cut at 0:50