INSIGHT: How Chemical Leaders Approach AI, Cybersecurity, and Talent | Day 2 at the Chemical Summit - Ep. 285

Cybersecurity, digitization, and talent took center stage on Day 2 of The Chemical Summit. Victoria Meyer recaps the most urgent issues shaping the industry, from treating cybersecurity like process safety, to harnessing AI for business value, to redefining leadership development. Hear from leaders including Bill Clark, Shelly Linkerhoff, and more. 

This episode breaks down key takeaways for leaders looking to strengthen their organization’s resilience, unlock new business value, and build a thriving workforce. 

Victoria covers: 

• Cybersecurity is the New Process Safety: Learn why third-party vulnerabilities and supplier risks are now top concerns for the industry, and what it means for your customer relationships. 
• Measuring Real Business Value from AI: Hear practical approaches to assessing ROI, from reducing task time and improving customer response, to optimizing the customer journey and boosting brand visibility in an AI-driven market. 
• What Talent Wants and How Leaders Can Respond: Find out why employee wellbeing has dropped nearly 30%, and how organizations can move people from struggle to growth. 
• Leadership is the Talent Advantage: Hear how SCT’s in-house leadership program breaks the mold, cultivating managers and fostering accountability from the plant floor to VP roles. 

Killer Quote: "Your biggest customers are more concerned about you than you are."  - Bill Clark 

Creators and Guests

Host

Victoria King Meyer

Founder & Host of The Chemical Show + The Chemical Summit; Victoria brings 25+ years industry leadership experience including Shell and Clariant and a Victoria brings a practical, business-focused perspective to conversations about leadership, strategy, innovation, and the forces shaping the future of the chemical industry.to

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Each week, host Victoria King Meyer sits down with leaders from across the chemical industry, from Fortune 50 companies to mid-sized businesses and innovative startups. You’ll hear how they’re navigating today’s challenges and opportunities, the experiences that shaped their leadership, and the insights you can apply to your own business and career.

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Victoria Meyer:
Welcome to The Chemical Show, the podcast where chemical means business. I'm your host, Victoria Meyer, bringing you stories and insights from leaders driving innovation and growth across the chemical industry. Each week, we explore key trends, real-world challenges, and the strategies that make an impact. Let's get started. Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where leaders talk business. This is part 2 of my recap from the Chemical Summit. Today I'm focusing on day 2 of the Chemical Summit, which was all about cybersecurity, digitization and AI, and talent. Such a critical thing.

Victoria Meyer:
The Chemical Summit, as you guys know, was 2 powerful days of leadership conversations, building connections and insights. As one of our attendees, Brian Chase from Pilot Chemical, who by the way is also one of our 40 Under 40 in Chemicals honorees, shared with us, The Chemical Summit is a great opportunity to network and understand how chemical industry leaders are thinking about the most pressing topics. This year, AI, talent, and economic outlook. Thanks, Brian. And I agree, it is 2 incredible days of leadership connection, insight on all the things that you and I and we are dealing with and talking about across the chemical industry. So if you're wondering what happened on day 1, Go listen to last week's episode. I'll also connect to that in our show notes. We published a recap of day 1 of the Chemical Summit last week, and we are publishing next week our fireside chat with Pete Coral, who is the Chief Commercial Officer of Solstice Advanced Materials.

Victoria Meyer:
It was an excellent conversation. You don't want to miss it. So let's dial in on day 2's focus. Cybersecurity, digital and AI, and talent. Now, a highlight of day 2 as well was the recognition lunch for the 40 Under 40 in Chemicals leaders. Oh my gosh, guys, great talent and great impact across the industry. These are people making a difference both inside their companies and in their communities, inside the community across the chemical industry and in their local communities. We had a panel of leaders in the industry that were the selection process.

Victoria Meyer:
And as a couple of them said, oh my gosh, I'm not sure if I did all this under the age of 40. So you are going to want to check those guys out. One place to do it is head on over to thechemicalsummit.com. And if you look at our news section, we've got information about all 40 leaders. The better spot that you're going to get a chance to learn more about these leaders is our new podcast, which is launching in January. That is called Next Gen Leaders. And It's going to be featuring those 40 leaders and more. So go check it out, get on the list so that you know when it's happening.

Victoria Meyer:
The website for that is nextgenleaderspodcast.com. And we will also link to that in the show notes, but you definitely want to follow along. We're going to be sharing some great stories, some great insights about leadership and how we can continue to cultivate, grow, and develop the leaders around us. So stay tuned. Now onto today's episode and really talking about day 2 of the Chemical Summit. So I'm going to do again, like I did last week, guys, a mix of themes, and then you're going to hear directly from some of those leaders and what they said at the Chemical Summit. So theme number 1, cybersecurity, and really the importance of treating cybersecurity like we do process safety. In fact, Bill Clark, one of the leaders that spoke, he is former State Department, former head of head of cybersecurity or part of cybersecurity at Chevron and is now leading a new startup.

Victoria Meyer:
He brought this frame to the table around cybersecurity is process safety for the rest of your business. We also had Ben Hyman from the FBI talking about, again, some of that vulnerability that comes in, particularly through business email compromise. And I think the critical piece on this for me is, and for you, I hope, is that we often think we're safeguarding our systems, right? And so everybody's got spam filters, we've gone through phishing tests, we've done all these things. And yet sometimes it's second and third degree vulnerabilities that show up. And it's when you look around and something just doesn't seem right, it probably isn't. So I'm gonna let Bill share some of his insights with you here.

Bill Clark:
Here's what I see from my cybersecurity counterintelligence perspective. That discipline that you all have built on the plant floor, it is law and audit and pride. Step off of the plant floor and it stops. The system that schedules the plant, the one that pays for feedstock, the Excel macro— oh, you know the one— the spreadsheet some brilliant engineer wrote in 2009 that half of the site quietly runs on? Who walks that circle? No one requires it, which means your competitors aren't doing it either. Boring is your advantage. That same discipline executed with plant seriousness but aimed at a different part of the business. This is how we can be different. So why did— what does it look like? When we make a different decision, when we— when process safety and safety culture meet security.

Bill Clark:
Because what the quiet years hid was something really important: fraud, espionage, extortion. It's a business. Agent Hyman just told us all about it. It is a profitable, innovative, global business. By the FBI's numbers, That Asian Hyman just shared. Last year, reported losses were over $20 billion. $1.8 billion of that was Texas alone, and $300 million of that was the BEC that we just learned about. When we and companies like us raised the price of the front door, this business didn't just pack up.

Bill Clark:
It found a new way in. Same crews, same techniques, but going after the companies that we trust doing honest work but without a 9-figure security program behind them. We had spent decades raising the walls and building a moat, and the criminal side just went around. This is, this is my story, but how about the industries? Verizon, the same report that they've been publishing since 2008, in this year's report, Their investigators looked at over 20,000 break-ins, and they found that nearly in half of those cases, a third party was involved. 2 years ago, that number was 15. 15 to 48. It's the fastest-moving number in my field, and it points at the space between companies. Yesterday, we talked a lot about supply chain.

Bill Clark:
Everyone in here supplies someone. Most of you supply giants. Well, the giants have seen these numbers too. At the World Economic Forum this year, they did a survey of the largest companies' executives, and they found that the single greatest challenge to their resilience was third parties. In the cybersecurity questions, they found that the most sophisticated companies ranked supplier and third-party risk first. Everyone else ranked it about fifth. Let's just sit with that gap for a moment. Your biggest customers are more concerned about you than you are.

Victoria Meyer:
The second key theme that came through was around the importance of understanding how to measure and realize value from AI, which really depends on where you're sitting in the business. And frankly, the fact that AI isn't taking over your business, it's enhancing it. We as companies and as leaders, we hold the data, we own the context, and we understand the nuances of our business. And the challenge and the opportunity right now is really to harness it, harnessing the data, harnessing the power that AI brings, and boosting both your ROI of your business and as well as enhancing the customer journey. You're gonna hear from a couple leaders here. Alex Bilevsky from ExxonMobil, who brings in that commercial and sales perspective. Ben Thurecht from Vessa Nautical, who is a service provider to the industry. They are leaning in heavy to data for shipping and marine logistics and bringing in that aspect of it.

Victoria Meyer:
And then Shelley Linkerhoff, who is Head of Communications in the Americas for Clarion. She brings in some really unique perspectives around customer journey. All 3 different perspectives, and yet Completely relevant to where we are today.

Alex Bohovsky:
We measure the things that are important, and then when we implement the AI solution, we look at what improvements we have. So for example, we will absolutely look at either time it takes to complete tasks for individuals in our organization, in terms of response time to customers if they, if they need an answer, in terms of customer satisfaction. And so, but we don't measure the actual impact of AI on it as a discrete metric. What we do is we look at that measurement, we will launch a pilot program, we'll reevaluate what things look like after the pilot program, and then make a decision on whether it's worth it for broad deployment.

Bill Clark:
Cool.

Alex Gruebele:
Yeah, the question of ROI and KPIs I think is actually a really big and interesting one. So I don't know, Shelley, Ben, if you guys also have maybe a concrete example or something you want to throw in there as well. I would agree completely. I mean, whenever you're rolling out any program, and especially with AI now, you need to be able to measure the ROI on your investment to understand, is this actually achieving the objectives that I set out to go after? For us at Vesson, before we invest in adding new AI solutions, we want to step back and really consider the situation and figure out what are we trying to get out of it.

Shelly Linkerhof:
In marketing communications, we look at 3 things. One is content creation. And we all know that AI does that. And we know it can either be effective or it's slop. So then you'll know if your campaigns are good or not, but probably based on that. So that's one area that we would look at. The second area we look at, and we already know this, is the customer journey is now collapsed. The time it takes for the customer to find suppliers out there has been significantly impacted.

Shelly Linkerhof:
And if you have not talked to your customer lately on how they're trying to find you, please make that next part of your conversation. And we can get into that later. The other part of that as well is your brand visibility. If your brand is not visible out there to the large language models, you pretty much don't exist anymore. I'm being a little bit accentuating in that, but it's coming. So again, we can go into that as well. So that's also commercial value lost if you don't know your buyer's journey has changed and also if your brand isn't visible out there in the marketplace. And the third and last one is we now have a customer digital profile more than ever before.

Shelly Linkerhof:
And if you're not utilizing that through strong sales and marketing architecture, and I can go into that later if you want to, and also if your digital marketing platforms are not mirroring up to that architecture and there's disconnects there, value leakage across the board, you're, again, your commercial value is lost. So all of that can be measured through hard ROIs if you need to, but those are the 3 buckets that you really need to look at when you go back to your organization from a sales and marketing perspective.

Victoria Meyer:
The third theme was around talent and workplace advantage. And the reality is, and this is from Jeff Smith of Mercer, now known as Marsh People, employees aren't thriving. This is what they're telling us. This is what they told Marsh in their most recent people survey. But they're also clear on what they're asking for. And one of those things is that they want to grow and to be developed. And this is squarely in our control. We can do something about that.

Victoria Meyer:
We can move our employees from feeling like they're just struggling because let's be honest, there's been a lot going on across the industry over the past several years and to helping them feel like they are thriving and they're thriving through gaining greater control of their careers and getting more development and learning and performing and impacting the business more effectively. Listen to Jeff.

Geoff Smith:
So we ask employees How are you doing at work when it comes to health, wealth, and career? So, right, that's your benefits. How are you doing from a health perspective? How do you feel about your wealth accumulation? How do you feel about your overall career trajectory? We saw almost a 30% drop over from '24 to '26. This is concerning. So we went from close to 70% in chemicals down to 40%. That's a significant drop. Again, I know that's feeling. This is different than engagement, But that tells us that our employees are tired, right? And we as leaders, we have the ability to influence that. How do they feel? 'Cause the other thing they told us when we asked 'em is, what needs to be in place for you to feel like you're thriving at work? Starts with that work-life balance at the top.

Geoff Smith:
Middle is flexible working. So they'd love to be able to work when and where they want. Know that that's not always the reality of our business. And then the abundant opportunity to learn new skills. This is what I wanna really highlight. Employees are telling us they want to be developed. They want to learn new things. They want to do that.

Geoff Smith:
So this bottom one for leaders and managers in the room, this is one that I think is squarely in our court to help our employees through.

Victoria Meyer:
The 4th theme is also around talent, and that it's our talent problem is a leadership problem. And that EQ, our emotional quotient, emotional intelligence is so critical. I've got 2 angles for you here. The first is Kathy Patillo from Boyden. She highlights the 5 characteristics that companies are looking for in their leaders. So critical. Kathy brings data and perspective into that. The second perspective is Cameron Whaley, who is the president and CEO of SCT, small midsize chemical company.

Victoria Meyer:
And they've really taken a unique way to embed leadership throughout their organization. And I'm going to pre-stage Cameron, listen for this, where he says, We're getting ready to promote people and we realized we actually haven't trained them to be a manager. And what are we going to do about that? And by the way, I don't think Cameron and SCT is alone in this. I think we face this. Each of us has perhaps faced this personally in our own career that you've gotten promoted to something that you weren't fully ready for. Or you look at your organization and realize, oh my gosh, we've got great people. We need to get them ready for the next level. And so listen to what Cameron has to say about how SCT is tackling that.

Kathy Patillo:
And the things that I see and hear every day, talent problem is now a leadership problem. And 5 years ago, I'd say executives in this industry were more concerned about finding talent with engineering skills. And now I say it's the leadership skills, it's EQ, very specifically driving AI adoption. We spent all morning on that. Being able to transform operations, we just talked about that. Leading through workforce transitions, retirements, we've hit on that the last couple of days. And having strong EQ. And I can't reinforce the strong EQ enough.

Kathy Patillo:
How many times have you as a leader sat in a room and thought, this person is great, they have every skill I need, every technical skill I need, I should say, but they don't have the right EQ? More often than not when I'm brought in by a CEO or a board to look at a leadership team, and I ask the question, you don't have anybody internally developed? Nope, they have the right technical skills, but we don't have anybody with the right EQ. Over and over again, I hear that. I want to give a little shout-out here to Cameron. We were talking early this morning about leadership, and he put a program in place 4 years ago to start teaching that to his team. So I'm hoping you touch on that a little bit more in your speech.

Victoria Meyer:
Thank you.

Kathy Patillo:
speech here in a little bit, but I can't reinforce that enough. That's something that can't be taught quickly. It takes time. And that's something y'all should be investing in your leaders of tomorrow. So I'd say that the 5 attributes that a winning executive would have is technical credibility, commercial acumen, digital literacy, change management capability, and last but definitely not least is the EQ piece.

Cameron Whaley:
In 2020, you know, we took a hard look because retention was difficult.

Kathy Patillo:
Mm-hmm.

Cameron Whaley:
In Georgia, we're in a pretty high manufacturing area in Northwest Georgia. And, you know, everybody needed workers. Everyone needed operators in the chemical space. And so we had threats of, you know, someone, a competitor, trying to snag, you know, half a dozen of our operators at one time. So what, you know, took a hard look, and at the same time, we had a lot of folks on our team that this was their first job they've ever had. We've got a real strong internship program through the local college. And, you know, we've been fortunate enough to retain them and they've moved up the ranks. Kaylee Gray that just got one of the 40 Under 40 awards, and this is her first job and she's our quality assurance manager.

Cameron Whaley:
And as before she got that role, I was understanding that she's going to move into a managerial role and, oh, by the way, I haven't trained her to be a manager. That probably hits close to a lot of other privately smaller-held companies. What are we going to do to retain these people? And we brought in a couple of leadership coaches.

Cameron Whaley:
And we adopted the SCT Next Level Leadership Program. Kaylee was one of the original 11 or 10 or 11 that went through that program, including myself. And most of the executive team went through that. So everyone— and it wasn't just a 3-day-long weekend. We did it for a year, 3 hours once a month with one-on-one coaching for an hour.

Geoff Smith:
Yeah.

Cameron Whaley:
And it stuck. Then we did it again. And after the second one, I realized, hey, we want to keep doing this. We need to make this sustainable and bring it in-house. So we picked 4 of our graduates that we felt had leadership training capabilities, and then we trained them for a year. And then 2 weeks ago, we just graduated our first internal— internally trained group of 11. So about Almost 45 or 48% of our employees have gone through this now, and it's self-sustaining. It's a self-sustaining model, and it goes as far from the operator on the floor to a global VP of sales.

Cameron Whaley:
And in the training room, there's one rule: there's no titles. Because we had a subordinate training her manager. But there's no titles. This person's been through the training. She knows what she's talking about. Shut up and listen to her.

Shelly Linkerhof:
Yeah.

Cameron Whaley:
And so that's— it's for culture. We're defining and creating our own culture. And it's almost palpable when you walk in the door. So everyone's holding everybody else around them accountable. And it's pretty cool to watch.

Victoria Meyer:
And that's it for today's episode of The Chemical Show, a recap of day 2 of the Chemical Summit, where the theme was all about cybersecurity, AI and digital, and how to harness and develop the talent in our organizations. Because at the end of the day, our biggest advantage is our workforce and our people. So next week we've got Pete Coral from Solstice Advanced Materials, who is our fireside chat. That is an excellent conversation as well that you're going to love. Thanks for listening today. Keep following, keep sharing, keep listening, and we'll talk to you again soon. Thanks for joining us today on The Chemical Show. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and most importantly, share it with your friends and colleagues.

Victoria Meyer:
For more insights, visit thechemicalshow.com and connect with us on LinkedIn. You can find me at Victoria King-Meyer on LinkedIn, and you can also find us at The Chemical Show Podcast. Join us next time for more conversations and strategies shaping the future of the industry. We'll see you soon.