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Born & Kepler is named after the mathematician and scientists Max Born and Johannes Kepler. This bilingual podcast, offered in both German and English, dives into the expansive world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), exploring its foundations, evolving technology trends, academic search, and its impact on businesses and society.
Born & Kepler will feature a diverse lineup of experts from academia, venture capital, private equity, journalism, entrepreneurship, CTOs, and policymakers. Each guest offers unique insights into how AI is reshaping their sectors and what we might expect in the future.
Our goal is to provide a deep understanding of the core principles and breakthroughs in AI, enabling you to stay updated with the latest advancements in AI technologies and how they are transforming industries. During our episodes, we will explore how AI is influencing business strategies, optimizing operations, and driving innovation. We will also explore the ethical, social, and regulatory aspects of AI in everyday life.
Andreas Deptolla (00:01.713)
Welcome to the show.
w2sk29w5zy (00:03.383)
Andres, thanks so much for having me and inviting me to the show.
Andreas Deptolla (00:07.446)
excited to have you. So we'd love to start with your background, right? You started your academic career in Russia, spent some time, I think a decade in the United States. Now you're in Europe here at one of the leading business schools. Fill us in on your academic journey.
w2sk29w5zy (00:25.23)
So, right, so I wouldn't say that I started my academic journey in Russia. So I grew up in the Soviet Union. You know, I made a decision to go to a medical school when we were still living in the Soviet Union. And then very quickly in my first year, kind of the whole country around me changed virtually overnight. And so I did a lot of interesting stuff and clearly stuff that affected me longer term back in Russia. I finished the medical school, I've never practiced, but I kind of started working.
in the emerging field of business back at that time in my third year. And so this is really what I did in the 90s back in Russia. And then 2000 went to the States and that's where kind of I would say my academic career has its roots. So that's where I studied, my MBA, did my PhD, worked a little bit with startups. And then late 2007 moved to Barcelona, moved to Europe.
to TIESA. That's where I've been since with a quick, I don't even know how to qualify that break, I suppose, of just over two years when I went back to Russia, to Moscow to lead what at the time was the leading private, well, still remains a leading private business school, Moscow School of Management, Skolkovo in Russia, and then returned back to TIESA with the beginning of the war.
Andreas Deptolla (01:54.754)
And how is your upbringing in the Soviet Union influenced your way of thinking?
w2sk29w5zy (02:02.637)
I don't know, honestly, I've never thought about it in this way. know, so I was growing up. Those were the times when the Soviet Union was kind of had softened up, right? And so again, as a kid and then as a teenager,
w2sk29w5zy (02:26.891)
I don't know, I it was clearly a very closed environment. And I remember when it opened up, which was kind of late 80s, early 90s, this was a huge game changer for us. And it was actually extremely exciting. I remember, you know, I grew up in a, it's a large city, Yekaterinburg, at the time it was called Sverdlovsk, which was actually during the Soviet times, it was closed for foreigners because of a lot of military industry in the city. And so I remember that.
late 80s, very early 90s, we actually started to conduct what at the time was called peace camps. And peace camps, peace youth camps. And so we would bring in people from all over the world, North America, Europe, literally, you know, literally from all over the world to just hang out together. And yeah, I mean, the overall umbrella was peace camps, but it was just getting to know the world. And I guess for them, for the people who were coming at the time into their, you know, what initially was the Soviet Union and then Russia,
still very much shaped by their Soviet legacy. Just getting to know each other was huge. And that clearly shaped my view on the world and just that experience of going through a threshold where everything was so closed, right? And then everything becoming open, wide open, right? And with the ability to travel, that clearly had a big impact.
Andreas Deptolla (03:52.97)
You mentioned that you at some point, I think it was in 2020, right? You went back to Moscow to teach at the leading business school. What was your motivation to go back and how did the experience unfold for you?
w2sk29w5zy (04:10.701)
so, to be honest, I had never, up until 2022, I had never kind of lost touch with Russia. Like when we lived in the States, it was more difficult. We were farther away, but we would still, we still had, you know, and still today have family there. So it's still travel. And then when I moved to Europe, you know, I was in touch with what was going on in the country. would actually, I started to teach at Skolkovo just as a visiting.
much, much, much earlier. And so, you know, I knew the school pretty well. I knew the project pretty well. You know, I was working with different companies in Russia during their 2010s quite extensively. And my motivation to go back in a way full-time, I, you know, I had to take a leave of absence from ESSA, so I there full-time. So my position was called Dean for Academic Affairs, which was kind of an odd position because I was in charge of all programs, all faculty.
all research centers, which were very much consulting centers, right, applied research, and then many of their kind of internationalization initiatives within the school. So really the motivation was, and now it's kind of weird to even speak about it because we live in the world that does not look like the world when I was making that decision, or at least it doesn't seem to look like.
But anyways, so their motivation was really to help develop a truly global business school. And by truly global business school, I mean a business school with a global mindset, a business school with as much as possible global student body, certainly global faculty, certainly a business school that has effective and multiple partnerships with
different players, both in Asia and Europe and the United States. But ultimately a business school that would help a lot of the people in Russia, both young and experienced executives, to develop in a way this open mindset that I was alluding to in the beginning. And in fact, it felt very much that that was within reach and we had made a lot of progress in that direction.
w2sk29w5zy (06:39.853)
until all of that kind of suddenly came to a halt in February 2022. But the motivation was really that, right?
Andreas Deptolla (06:49.77)
Fascinating story. Let's move forward to kind of like today in the essay and maybe fill us in in terms of like, your academic focus these days, what excites you, what kind of classes are you teaching?
w2sk29w5zy (07:08.141)
Sure, so in a way, you know, I have been focused on transformation, transformation of, I mean by definition transformation applies to established companies, traditional companies. Transformation in the context of significant technological change, something that in the past would call digital transformation. I think the term has really kind of outlived itself and it doesn't really convey any meaning at this point in time.
You know, over time, I have moved into the territory of just kind of first of all looking at a broader context of transformation and also looking at it more from their angle of the senior management team, the CEO in particular. So the question is, as an executive committee of a large company or the top leadership team of a large company, a CEO of large company, how do you really
think about transformation, how do you communicate the need and the vision for transformation to the rest of the organization, and ultimately how do you set up the framework that would ensure continuity and kind of coordinated nature of the transformation effort. So, and that is very much present in my research, in my work with companies, in my teaching, so little bit of everything.
Andreas Deptolla (08:24.8)
So not if you...
Andreas Deptolla (08:35.83)
If you look at the term digital transformation, said like it has maybe morphed and changed over time, right? Like if you look at the C-sweets of companies, right? Like what specifically do they need to focus on in order to get it right, right? And maybe what's the flip side, right? What have you seen leads to failure or leads to unwanted results?
w2sk29w5zy (09:01.225)
All right, so this is a pretty loaded question. Let's see if we can unpack it. So let me start as still an academic true at heart. Let me start by attempting to give a definition of what it is. So transformation would typically be defined as really profound change in an organization that includes its business model strategy that includes...
the people and how these people organize, organization, design that includes technology. So a little bit of everything. So profound change in what academics would call the firm's deep structure, usually in response to significant shifts in the external environment. So to answer your question about what is important to keep in mind for senior leaders, I think it is also helpful to think a little bit about how are today's different.
And so just building on the definition that I have described, so just think about the shifts in the external environment. mean, some of them are technology driven, but not all of them are technology driven. have a lot of geopolitical shifts that we're living through. We have a lot of social shifts, clearly everything that is related to the broader conversation about sustainability and climate change in particular. So...
You know this environmental turbulence is kind of has become permanent almost right and over all these various external drivers they Combine they interact and so ultimately as a CEO you kind of faced with this world that has multiple plausible futures so then What is the nature of your transformation right because we used to think about transformation as?
a change or a transition from today's state to some future state, from two. But the two part of the transformation becomes fuzzy, right? mean, so we don't really understand the clear destination here. because that's the case, because there are multiple plausible futures, you need to think about transformation. You need to manage transformation.
w2sk29w5zy (11:19.113)
in a different way. And so it really becomes a longer term journey of discovery or of what I would call very much a learning journey. So there's no clear road map. And so you would need to manage it in a more incremental and iterative way where you move forward in kind of waves. And at each wave, you decide on a number of initiatives. You then learn from those initiatives. And that informs what your next step will be. So it's a little bit like you're putting together a puzzle.
and you can complete a piece of the puzzle here and a piece of the puzzle there. And the challenge is how do you keep this coordinated? How do you provide continuity? How do you actually explain to all of the people what are you trying to do? How do you get the buying and the ownership? So all of these things in the context of this transformation become much, much, much more challenging as opposed to, again, what we had before where the to-be state, we thought,
you know, we were able to clearly define it and then you have a clear roadmap. So I would say the main challenges from the CEO standpoint is how do you ensure continuity? Right? Because it's going to take you not, it's not going to take you two years or three years. It's going to take you longer and ensuring continuity is actually a difficult thing to do because the average tenure of a CEO today is less than four years.
So maybe it's not only a question for the CEO, but for the board of directors, right? Continuity is one. The coordinated nature of all of these transformation initiatives is another huge challenge. Because if people don't see these as parts of one transformation journey, you end up with 10 different transformations running in parallel within the same company, which drives people nuts. this, mean, I've seen this at so many organizations.
We have different transformations. No one understands that they're actually part of one whole, right? And it's difficult to do. And then learning does not really become cumulative. the final, which the final, guess, the final consideration, which is not that different from what we had yesterday or in previous transformations is that you need really to manage the interface between your business today because the financial markets expect you to continue to deliver.
w2sk29w5zy (13:41.787)
superior performance and Horizon One today. And at the same time, you know, discovering how your business is going to look like in the future. Managing that interface at the level of people, at the level of investments, at the level of stakeholders is extremely difficult.
Andreas Deptolla (13:56.81)
You mentioned at the beginning that a lot of the complexity comes from the fact that there is not a certain outcome, right? And there are several plausible outcomes. Are there any frameworks that CEOs can use to figure out scenario planning? Or where do even start to see, these are a couple of different pathways for my organization?
w2sk29w5zy (14:23.207)
Right. scenario planning is a good starting point, right? And there are many different methodologies for doing scenario planning. And companies, we know this well, right? So there are companies and industries with significant CAPEX requirements and longer-term planning. They've been doing this like oil and gas. They've been doing this for a long time. So scenario planning, so it tells you what are the plausible scenarios. And I guess from that, which you can...
deduce is what are the capabilities that I need to start building today that actually would be beneficial for my organization regardless of what scenario will materialize, right? so that is, so scenario planning I would say yeah absolutely. Also scenario planning is actually quite good in terms of building ownership among your team and the broader organization. Ownership
in relation to this transformation journey that is highly uncertain. If people have participated, they kind of feel that they understand why this is happening. In terms of established frameworks, so there's a very helpful methodology and way of thinking, which is called discovery-based planning, which was introduced actually a long time ago. think the first book was published in the mid-'90s by Rita McGroth.
So you would have, well, a CEO would have to do a little bit of extrapolation to be able to apply that because they're really looking at how do we, by formulating assumptions and by then testing those different assumptions, rather than having a whole plan prepared from the beginning to the end, how do we grow a single venture, a single new venture? And so the foundation of
thinking in terms of assumptions or being able to identify assumptions, then convert those assumptions into testable hypotheses and then, you know, collecting data and validating or testing those hypotheses. So those fundamental steps are today, you know, instrumental and necessary, right? The additional challenge for CEOs, and this is actually where at least I'm not aware of
w2sk29w5zy (16:45.422)
we're working on one, but I'm not aware of really well established methodologies. As a CEO, you would have multiple ventures within the same portfolio. And how do you coordinate that those discoveries that you make across a portfolio of ventures and how do you make sure that what you learn in one venture actually informs your actions in other ventures? That's what's kind of missing, right? And also,
You would have different assumptions. One important set of assumptions are assumptions about, in a way, my future business model. Will this work? Will I be able to create value? Will I be able to monetize value? Is this what the customers need? Are these the real customers? All of that. But at the same time, you would have a bunch of initiatives aimed at building capabilities, technology capabilities, people capabilities. so coordinating this
largely massive portfolio of different initiatives, this is what needs to be added to the discovery-based planning to make it a little bit more robust.
Andreas Deptolla (17:54.71)
And then from a complexity perspective, now you also have like multiple shareholders and stakeholders, right? You have your investors, you have the employees, you have your C-suite, right? And then CEO's role is really to convince and motivate everybody, right? If you've seen in terms of communication, right? And getting people aligned, are there certain examples that you can think about, CEOs or companies that have done this exceptionally well?
w2sk29w5zy (18:24.597)
Yeah, so these are very different stakeholders, right? And you would need to work to approach them differently, right? So clearly you have, I think the top management team is less of an issue. A good CEO knows how to rally the top management team and how to align it, right? And so I think here, CEOs probably certainly need less advice. Working with the board.
the board of directors is.
hugely important and not very straightforward. And I learned this firsthand during my time back in Moscow. So there's some interesting research specifically on how do you work with boards of directors in the context of digital transformation coming out, for instance, of MIT CSER, Center for Information Systems Research. So essentially, you would need to
If possible, you would need to make sure that you have people on your board of directors that either have gone through similar experiences at other companies or in other industries, or who generally understand the nature of the transformation that you're going through. And so once you have at least one, or they would, believe, the top of my head, they would say you need like one third of directors on your board who are actually able to make those calls.
But listen, so ultimately, if the board is not responsive, you your best case scenario is really 80 new members, if possible, not always possible. You can certainly, their approaches that I have seen work well, sometimes it's a combination of carrot and stick to the extent that CEOs are able to use the stick. So showing very nice performance.
w2sk29w5zy (20:22.904)
in the current business and then using the scare tactics a little bit. And so at one point in time, did quite a bit of work. Work is not the right word. Research actually, we wanted it to be a research project with the DBS Bank in Singapore, Development Bank of Singapore. so Piyush Gupta, the CEO of DBS, and he has been the CEO for, I believe the last 15 years, right? So he's about to step down next year.
But his approach seems to work very nicely where he would show superior performance today, but then as we all know, you
Fintechs in Asia, and these are not even fintechs, these are actually very large companies, you know, the threat in the mid 2000, 2010s was much more palpable. And so using this combination, look at our performance today. Do you want us to continue to deliver that performance? If you want us to continue to deliver that performance, these are the threats that are coming our way, right? So we need to significantly change how we do things. So kind of using this combination of two different approaches, if you can, works.
really well. I can also share kind of my observations when it doesn't work. And when it doesn't, so to be able to say, look at our great performance today, and we would like to be able to continue to deliver in the future, you need to have the luxury of time. And so you need to identify, you need to be able to identify the need for significant change fairly early on. But there's a catch 22 is we'll know well.
Right? So companies don't really have and CEOs don't really have a significant incentive to change until they end up on a burning platform. When you are on a burning platform, there's not much you can do because you, I mean, you can put up, you know, try and put out a fire, but, but you don't really have enough time to, you know, to trigger any profound change or real change. So, so that, that is not a good example.
w2sk29w5zy (22:30.445)
I've also seen examples of CEOs using transformation initiatives as this high risk bet, fundamentally following the logic of if this succeeds, or if we succeed doing that, that is gonna put me on a different level in terms of my relationships with the current board, with the current company perhaps, other boards, other companies and so on and so forth. While if it doesn't succeed,
Wow, I what is the share of transformation initiatives that fail? And any consultant would tell you that it's very, very, very, very high. So, yeah, and I guess just a final point on how do you communicate with perhaps the most important stakeholder audience, which is, you know, your employees, the members of your organization. And so here...
The biggest challenge is ending up with this mindset of us versus them, where there's a small group of people that are driving the change. And then there's everybody else who feels being left behind. And so to avoid that, communication is not enough. Communication is necessary, but it's not enough. And so what CEOs need to be able to do together with their teams is to figure out how to engage people who are currently
driving your established business, generating the cash flow, right? Fundamentally keeping, you know, the ship afloat. How do you engage them in meaningful way in different transformation initiatives? And that's not easy to do, but it is necessary. So communication will not be enough. You really need to find a way to help people from who are running your existing business to provide ideas, to develop new skills and competencies that will be a part of tomorrow's organization and so on.
Andreas Deptolla (24:31.114)
You know, one thing that was super interesting, you provided insight earlier in our discussion about like, you know, that the average CEO these days only has three or four years, right? At a company. How did that all fit into this? Right? Because you mentioned, you know, earlier, Hey, you need more time for, for, for transformation, right? And that the different, you know, shareholder groups or stakeholder groups, right? Pulling onto the CEO. What are the, the forces, right? To, yeah.
shorten the average tenure of a CEO these days.
w2sk29w5zy (25:00.387)
To be honest, I don't really know what the forces are. This is not kind of my area of research. just know that this is data that we have points to the fact that an average CEO tenure is under four years, just under four years. again, I so we all understand that averages sometimes don't tell the full story. We don't know the standard deviation. We don't know kind of the range.
Andreas Deptolla (25:08.331)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (25:29.139)
If we were to speculate why it's fairly short, I think, you know, we would arrive at fairly obvious conclusions, which is a fairly short term focus of the financial markets, which translates into the focus of the CEOs, the boards and so on and so forth. Right. So, so I don't know what's behind it. Again, we can just kind of make guesses about it.
But I do know how it affects transformation programs. And so I have seen so many times, and there are a number of just public cases that we know about very, very well, where a significant investment in a transformation program finishes with the CEO tenure. Listen, mean, there's the story of GE Digital, which
know, everybody, most of us, I suppose, know about. And yes, it's a very complex story and there are many, many, different factors apart from what was happening within GE Digital that kind of, and we know that GE is not the same company at all. In fact, it's not a single company anymore. But that transformation in a way concludes when Jeff Immelt stepped down.
And so this is just one big example that everyone knows about, or most people know about. But there are so many similar examples where the CEO steps down and you see your steps in or comes in, right? And we have a new transformation starting all over again.
Andreas Deptolla (27:12.463)
Yeah, the new CEO needs to have their own agenda. There's a perceived need for change and to put your stamp on the organization.
w2sk29w5zy (27:17.229)
Correct. Correct.
w2sk29w5zy (27:24.163)
100%. 100%. This is all understood, but also just imagine, imagine how people within the organization feel. I mean, there's so much fatigue and there's so much cynicism about transformation, right? Because people have lived through so many waves and flavors of transformation. So when they're being told, I don't know, AI, and so that is going to change everything and we're going to embark yet on another transformation.
I mean, it just goes, I mean, they just don't pay any attention to it. I mean, we've been here so many times, right? And that's actually quite unfortunate because, I mean, we understand that with the external environment changing a lot faster and in lot more unpredictable ways, the need for continuous transformation, and if we can use that term, is...
critical is instrumental for a lot of organizations. I really think that one of the most important things that I see you can do is unite all these different disparate transformation stories and instances into a single narrative and explain that, yes, we're changing many different things. And some of these things concern technology and some of these things concern culture. And some of these things concern our businesses and some of these initiatives concern
competencies that our people need to have, but ultimately these are all pieces of the same puzzle and we need to be looking at them like that. And even when I as CEO step down, you guys will need to continue going down.
Andreas Deptolla (29:04.758)
Yvgeny, how does this apply digital transformation AI to your own world at the business school? I'm sure there are a lot of changes now to executive education. How is that maybe? Good.
w2sk29w5zy (29:14.227)
Yeah.
w2sk29w5zy (29:22.023)
Yeah, yeah, so no, no, thanks for this question. And so it's kind of cutting close to home now. So, you know, I'm a big believer in what Americans would call you have to eat your own dog food. So back in 2014, I was the founding academic director of the learning innovation initiative at Yes, whose high level purpose was really to try and reimagine
management education and kind of the learning offerings that ESSA as a business school brings to the market in a world that is different, in a world fundamentally that, as we defined it back then, where there's no clear boundary between the physical world and the digital world. so back then, 10 years ago, we said, we need to think about how learning would look like, not in this dichotomy of online and offline, but really in a world where
There's no clear boundary between physical and digital. And so everything kind of travels, you know, fairly seamlessly, right? And so how do we build these learning journeys? And so we ended up running a lot of pilots and a lot of experiments and launching some new products. And today clearly, you know, we have new technologies and AI and we have new or old labels such as lifelong learning or whatnot.
And then we also have had COVID and this wonderful natural experiment that basically forced everyone to try out online education. But the bottom line is that it seems that the world of management education at large has just tremendous inertia. And so by and large, it has changed, but not drastically. I'm not saying whether it's good or bad. I'm just saying it's...
It's changing, but just look at what happened after COVID. In a way, certainly most leading business schools kind of shifted back. also shifted back to what they know best, which is face-to-face education. There are good reasons we don't want to go there. And so the question is, so we continue to think about it and clearly there's a lot of focus on AI these days.
Andreas Deptolla (31:33.814)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (31:50.847)
whether the AI will be the game changer or not. So let me try and make it a little bit more tangible, though, rather than just rumbling around this pain of mine. So I think this inertia will continue. It's a world that is very much reputation-driven, brand-driven, and that kind of increases the durability of the current state of affairs. And it will continue to be, you know...
Andreas Deptolla (32:09.526)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (32:19.889)
it will continue to be that. Now, I guess what could be more interesting to think about is not so much how the industry is changing, but how the learning is changing, how the learning process is changing. And so here, a couple of things that I may mention. So number one.
So if you look at education and management education in particular, the main or probably the main bottleneck historically has been how many faculty members, how many instructors you have per a certain number of students, right? Now, if you think about it, why is this very important? Because we understand that reflection as in trying to make sense.
Andreas Deptolla (33:01.237)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (33:13.233)
of the experience that you have gone through is a key part of learning, right? And in a way, faculty and instructors are the ones who facilitate reflection through feedback, by supporting discussions, facilitating discussions and so on and so forth, right? And it's actually difficult to have enough of those people. They need a lot of practice, they need a lot of training and so on and so forth. And so we've always had this bottleneck, right?
What is happening today, and there's a lot of discussion around it, is that it's not that you can get rid of faculty, clearly you cannot, but you can actually use AI to help facilitate feedback and reflection and discussion in a very personalized manner, and sometimes one-to-one, effectively removing this faculty to student bottleneck. I think we're still very much in the early stages of this.
But there are some very promising examples, not so much in management education, although it's starting to slip into management education as well, but in K through 12, in math training, in physics, in basically sciences. And so I think this will continue. Think about a case and then having essentially an AI tutor facilitating a discussion, a one-on-one discussion with a learner.
in executive education or MBA doesn't matter. So this is an obvious one. Another one which is quite important I think is
w2sk29w5zy (34:48.454)
So people, adults in particular, learn from experience. We go through a new experience and then that kind of contradicts our prior experiences and that creates this cognitive dissonance which ultimately triggers adult learners to start experimenting with their existing stock of mental models and eventually evolving them. This is what learning is all about. so historically there's been a lot of discussion about
what is the impact of direct experience and indirect experience on learning? So direct experience is when I actually go through an experience myself. Indirect experience, when I observe someone else go through an experience. So the case method is the ultimate example of indirect experience. Let's read a story and then let's put ourselves in the shoes of these guys. So I think what technology is doing or will do, and that includes AI, but not only AI, it's gonna blur the line between direct and indirect experience.
Andreas Deptolla (35:29.994)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (35:44.348)
In simple terms, we're going to see a lot more simulations which would come through a combination of AI and augmented reality fundamentally, immersive reality or immersive learning. And so we're going to blur the line between direct and indirect. And this will be a big game changer. And the final thing, and this is what I'm seeing now, and again, there's a lot of experimentation going on.
especially in executive education, a big bottleneck had been kind of the distance between classroom learning and then what is happening in the workplace. So in the classroom, we have all these wonderful discussions, right? But then people go back and it doesn't really translate into what they do day in and day out. And again, I think AI, and we've seen this already, what we're able to do today,
with AI in terms of having people, having learners in very short time, generate artifacts that could come, like, you you can run a workshop and you can ask people to come up with some sort of a minimum viable product, right? In the past, it would be a presentation, a slide deck. Today, you can actually use generative AI to produce all kinds of minimum viable products, right? You can actually have it build a website.
Andreas Deptolla (36:51.787)
Hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (37:11.004)
You can do many other things, develop a communication campaign, whatnot. And so I think just the ability to generate artifacts quickly is going to close this gap between the classroom and the workplace.
Andreas Deptolla (37:29.684)
I want to go back to the first point that you mentioned. Could you see a scenario where in three to five years, maybe, or maybe even right now, right, where you feed like an AI model with all your research papers, maybe all of the class recording from the last 10 years, whatnot, right? And then you kind of create like you mentioned a tutor or like somebody that could run kind of like your office hours. Do you think that technology will get to that point?
w2sk29w5zy (38:00.572)
I certainly would not say no at this point in time. So I don't think it's going to be complete substitution. I think we're really looking here at their augmentation scenario. maybe it's my wishful thinking as a faculty member. don't know.
w2sk29w5zy (38:29.628)
So there are many things that human faculty will not have to do that could be augmented or even substituted some of the tasks with AI. We've seen this already today, right? In a way, you could train AI to give feedback to students on a particular well-defined body of knowledge.
You could run simulations. There's a lot of really cool stuff in terms of negotiation simulations, for example, that are taking place. Let me give you another example. In business schools, faculty write a lot of cases. Usually, like in the past, you would need
to run this case a few times to really understand how the discussion would unfold and then really the learning become complete and effective, right? So today you can expedite this tremendously by just emulating the discussion with AI, right? And so as long as you describe in a very precise way,
who's the target audience? You can have a very good kind of back and forth with AI to try and anticipate what kind of discussion will follow, what kind of responses you would get to what kind of questions and so on and so forth. Coming back to your question about whether AI would be able to, or what would be the effect, I suppose, on the job market for business school faculty. I think globally, it's quite realistic that we will see
a significant drop in demand. Business schools will need faculty, 100%.
w2sk29w5zy (40:27.036)
But on the, I mean, so on the teaching side, if people become more efficient in what they do, there's a big question mark, whether we're gonna need fewer people or there's also oftentimes a phenomenon where as when the cost of a particular activity drops, we end up actually doing more of that activity. We'll see, right? We don't know, but.
So at the level of individual tasks that faculty today perform, I can certainly see how many of these tasks can be either supplemented or sometimes even substituted with AI. This is on the teaching side. On the research side, I think it's a more complex conversation.
But I would just, without going any deeper, would just suggest that we have to be mindful about a very simple fact that a lot of research that is being done in business schools today, and again, without undermining the value of this research, because I do believe strongly in high value of research that is being done, but a lot of that research is being cross-subsidized through teaching.
And so if things start to change on the teaching side, it's difficult to predict what will be the implications on the research side.
Andreas Deptolla (41:41.932)
I mean.
Andreas Deptolla (41:50.098)
For my own perspective, so much of the executive education, whether it's an MBA or whatnot, is also coming from the network that you're building. And you talked a little bit about online versus in-person learning. And maybe that's where some of the magic will occur in the future, where maybe AI can help us to do some of the learnings remotely, or maybe I've...
w2sk29w5zy (41:59.447)
Yes.
Andreas Deptolla (42:16.286)
already cracked my case studies, right? But then I still have to come to Barcelona or wherever, right? To do the networking, right? And meet my classmates.
w2sk29w5zy (42:24.193)
Yeah. And no, that is hugely important, right? And so again, I mean, we as faculty would like to believe that it's really the acquisition or the development of knowledge that is the main element of the value proposition. But we also have to be kind of realistic about it. And when you go talk to executive education participants or MBA students, clearly networking comes out.
Probably at the top the the only the only caveat here is that? The strength of the network that people develop actually is directly Related to their The kind of the richness of the experience that they live through together So the the richer the experience the stronger the network, right? And then I think what we need to be asking ourselves is
How do we think what makes this experience rich? Right because clearly if it's the emotional element I'm not sure that business schools are best positioned to really play To that emotional element there are other things that you can do Right that would create these shared emotions too much, you know much more effectively but but I think what happens is this
partly cognitive but still kind of has emotional element to it this intellectual challenge of Trying to really make sense of some of things that are new things that are difficult to explain and that effort to together try and make sense of it and through discussions through debates I think this also is very rich in terms of the experience and I think this is really what business schools are doing and also
you know, in the context of executives, it's just the ability to step out of your day-to-day, where you really don't have enough time to think deeply about things and engage with your peers in a more, I would use the word relaxed, but relaxed is not the right word here, but in a more mindful, I guess, in a more mindful...
w2sk29w5zy (44:42.264)
reflection and conversation about what do we do, how do we do these things, what different things actually mean, and so on and so forth. And I think this is ultimately how business schools create value and a faculty member that actually paid to think, hopefully, right, and that can enrich that intellectual exploration. This is what their role is.
Andreas Deptolla (45:07.648)
This very much resonates. So I think that the kind of deepest relationship that we have, right, are created during experiences of profound change, right? Or when we go through maybe difficult phases or whatnot, or where we have stress, where we have a lot of new things, we're maybe a little bit out of our comfort zone. So now, if you look at like kind of AI, right, and how it's discussed in the classroom,
And we can already see some changes in the real world, Like jobs being cut specifically, like, you if you think about call centers, right, you see some certain automations and whatnot. What's your prediction here in Europe, how AI will change the job market? And then, you know, lot of discussions around upskilling, right? What can we do, you know?
w2sk29w5zy (45:59.387)
Yeah.
Andreas Deptolla (46:03.488)
for society here, right, in order to avoid maybe larger unemployment.
w2sk29w5zy (46:07.864)
Right. I understand that there's a lot of concern about unemployment and the impact of AI. And this whole conversation really started with generative AI, right? Because there you see a direct impact.
white-collar work, right, knowledge work.
So far, I don't think we see any clear evidence of that actually happening. So there's been a lot of predictions as to what kind of occupations will be more affected, what kind of occupations will be less affected, but I would really take those with a grain of salt. I mean, you can look at the methodology of how these studies are being done, and it's really...
I mean, a lot of this is with a lot of rigor asking AI what kind of jobs it will be able to do and what kind of jobs it will not be able to do. I think there's a lot of merit in it, but I don't think that we can just directly extrapolate in terms of what's going to happen in the job market. From what I know so far, we don't really see any major effects on the job market itself. We've seen some interesting studies. And by the way, part of that is because of their, again, high inertia of job markets, because of regulation.
and on and so forth, especially in Europe. We've seen some really interesting studies on where people actually looked at freelance marketplaces, because those are not regulated at all. And those are very, very kind of dynamic in terms of their responses to various external forces. so one paper, they looked at, they looked at the impact on job postings and earnings per freelancer in
w2sk29w5zy (48:01.034)
writing jobs and graphic design jobs related to the launch of Chad GPT, and they found that both actually dropped significantly after the launch of Chad GPT. Their time horizon was fairly short term, so it's difficult to say whether the effect is actually going to be, will remain long term or not. my take is...
So when we think about different jobs, different occupations, no jobs consist of a single task. And so far, we've been looking at the impact of AI at the level of different tasks. So jobs or occupations are essentially systems of tasks. So a single person, even in a call center, actually performs a number of tasks. And by the way, those tasks are not independent. They're interdependent. So I think what will happen is that
Andreas Deptolla (48:56.373)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (48:59.643)
we will have basically to rethink the architecture of many of these jobs. Right? So I'm not, don't, I don't want to kind of make predictions about which jobs will likely disappear, which jobs will not likely disappear. But I, but I would say that all jobs fundamentally will need to be re-architected. Right? What I mean by that. We will need to rethink what individual tasks we can fully automate with AI.
which individual task we will be performing together, and maybe what new tasks will appear. Clearly, the sequence of the tasks will change. And that's really the challenge, really rethinking the architecture of work at the level of individuals. But if we go back to our earlier conversation about the CEOs, rethinking the architecture of work and the architecture of business processes at the level of the entire company.
Right? but, but, but it's, it's, certainly it's an individual challenge. And one of their key obstacles to addressing that challenge that I see today is that most people actually know very little about job design. We've never been, we had never been, or we had never needed really to proactively think about how our job is designed, how to improve the design of our job, how to redesign our job.
and so on and so forth. And now it's increasingly becoming a necessity. Right?
Andreas Deptolla (50:33.872)
And to take it back to your example with, I think you mentioned freelancers on these platforms. My assumption is that the freelancers that use AI tools can produce results quicker and might be able to win more business.
w2sk29w5zy (50:48.255)
Chomp.
w2sk29w5zy (50:55.604)
Yeah.
Andreas Deptolla (50:55.968)
But at the same time, I could also imagine that AI could level the playing fields, right? Specifically, if you look at certain areas that are maybe economically less developed.
w2sk29w5zy (51:02.254)
Correct. Yeah.
w2sk29w5zy (51:08.305)
Yeah, so you've kind of mentioned a number of important issues here. just before I go there, you also mentioned something else that by becoming more effective or efficient in certain tasks, you would be able to devote more attention to other tasks or spend more time on other tasks. And that is 100 % true. And just to give a quick example, so as people who do lot of writing and write articles, example, scientific articles or blog posts.
There are different things, but nonetheless. again, what we see today is that, in fact, people are starting to spend less time on drafting and more time on editing. OK, so this is a clear example where AI allows you to rethink a little bit the architecture of your job. Coming back to the playing field, or leveling of the playing field, so there's a lot of evidence that suggests that
For many types of jobs, AI benefits less skilled workers more than highly skilled workers. And again, so we see that in call centers. You mentioned call centers before. So in a way, I guess this is bad news. We also see this in software development quite a bit. So I guess this is bad news for
Andreas Deptolla (52:33.751)
The co-pilots of the world.
w2sk29w5zy (52:38.399)
for people who used to think of themselves as the best in a given cohort. So in a way what this means is that the gap between your best people and your average people is closing. I would also suggest that we exercise a little bit of caution in drawing these conclusions because there's actually evidence that shows that it depends quite a bit on the nature of
or in the nature of the job. And we've also seen instances, for example, talking about call centers. There's a lot of research that shows, and also case studies by now, that shows that if you look at a basic call center operation, first year support, then clearly when you start to introduce AI, call agents with less experience benefit more than call agents with lot of experience.
Which makes sense, right? But at the same time, if you look at another context, call center context, outbound sales, consultative sales. And so there you actually see that people with a lot of experience when they start integrating AI in their work and consultative sales assumes that you engage in a conversation with a potential client. You really have to understand the needs of the client. really have to come up with convincing examples and reasons for why the client needs whatever you're selling, right?
So actually, more experienced call center agents in that context benefited more from AI than less experienced ones. So it a little bit depends on the nature of the work that you're doing. So I guess, I don't know. So the other important point here is
w2sk29w5zy (54:32.708)
In terms of reskilling, So there's a lot of conversation about reskilling clearly today. And the big question is, reskilling to what? Right? So the usual kind of narrative is, so we understand that some of the jobs are gonna be destroyed. Perhaps this basic call center jobs will be destroyed, right, or will be automated and we're gonna need significantly fewer people.
So we're to have to upscale or reskill these people and redeploy them in some other area. So we just don't know what area and what to reskill them to. I think from their learning process standpoint, I think we're much better prepared also because of AI to upskilling people at mass, at large scale. But the big question is just upscale to what?
Andreas Deptolla (55:28.857)
Interesting.
w2sk29w5zy (55:32.196)
And it will, I mean, the history of technology tells us that, you know, some of the jobs are destroyed whenever new technology comes about. Some of the jobs are being destroyed, right? Because they're essentially substitutes and some of the jobs are being created because they're complemented by the new technology. And the, you know, one million question today is what are those new jobs? We don't know what they are. So we don't know what to reskill to.
Andreas Deptolla (55:57.91)
If I'm reading correctly in between the lines, I think what I'm hearing is that overall you're positive, right? That like, you know, hey, some of the jobs will be destroyed, other ones will created, but you know, for society of a whole, there's enough work here, right? And we just have to be creative and smart about it.
w2sk29w5zy (56:16.786)
Well, I'm generally a positive person, so maybe that's part of the story here. And that is honestly, I mean, I don't think we're in a position to make any meaningful longer-term predictions, right? I mean, there are certain things that we know for sure. And things that we know for sure is that in the past, technology has also
has always made humankind better off. Like, what is the big difference today? So, I mean, we would like to continue to follow this logic, right? But what is the difference today? The difference today is that the pace is much faster, or it seems faster, right? And again, when we look...
at it historically in the hindsight, we say, well, the humankind is better off. But for the people who actually lived through that transition, be that the industrial revolution or whatever, this was very, very, very painful. And so it will continue to be painful with this transition as well. But on top of this, this transition unfolds or seems to be unfolding much, much, much faster. Right? So the other thing, and I don't really want us to go in this direction because it's a little bit of a rabbit hole.
Andreas Deptolla (57:16.042)
Very difficult,
w2sk29w5zy (57:35.192)
is the whole conversation about artificial general intelligence, right? Because if that is to come about, that is a complete game changer. We have no idea what that means, right? So we're in their kind of no man's land in their uncharted territory. But again, this is, I mean, there's a lot of discussion on that. I think it's very speculative at this point in time. So I prefer not to enter into that discussion. What I also observe,
globally actually, is that the conversation about AI, how people perceive the future in the context of AI, varies drastically by region. And by region, meaning what is the growth rate, the economic growth rate in that particular region? And so, you know, speaking about Europe, Europe, you know, is not really known for...
Andreas Deptolla (58:13.59)
Hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (58:29.976)
significant growth lately. And so because there's no growth, people are mostly concerned about AI taking away jobs, right? And therefore all these calls for regulation, clearly it has to be regulated. I'm not arguing about this. Right? You go to Asia, you go to Asia and what you hear from people is that AI is very much a savior because the market has been growing so fast, we cannot keep up. And so that actually helps us
Andreas Deptolla (58:31.734)
Speed of innovation, yeah.
Andreas Deptolla (58:37.609)
Hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (58:57.296)
you know, keep up with that growth. And so the concerns are much less pronounced, right? And so people see this more of an opportunity. And I think we will continue to see this division not only by region, but also generally by, I guess, area of life or area of business where you see significant growth. People would look at AI as a vehicle to help fuel that growth, right? Where you see stagnation.
people are gonna see this as more threat.
Andreas Deptolla (59:30.848)
Super interesting the correlation you mentioned between, you know, growth of GDP growth and whatnot versus kind of like the excitement about AI and hopefully that's not a vicious circle for us here in Europe, right? But let me maybe ask you another question. You work with a lot of CEOs, top leaders. What are maybe the discussions about AI once a door?
gets closed, Are there certain discussions, whether it's a boardroom, right, or the CEOs have with you, whether it's fears or opportunity that maybe are less pronounced in the public discussion?
w2sk29w5zy (01:00:13.588)
Sure, so, so apart from just working with senior leadership teams, I'm also an academic co-director of the Global CEO program that we run together with
MIT. so as you imagine, a lot of the conversations revolve around the.
So what am I seeing today? And it's interesting because especially in the global CEO, we really have people from all over, different parts of the world, different types of companies. I think at this point in time, it's very uneven. The awareness and the exposure, I think it's catching up, but it still remains fairly uneven. so I would say that many of their...
make a step back here. the important distinction in this conversation is the distinction between, I don't like the terms, but let's use them, traditional predictive or narrow AI. This is what we had before generative AI had entered the scene for the public. And so this would involve training, oftentimes training models internally.
Andreas Deptolla (01:01:19.286)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (01:01:32.28)
focusing usually on improving operational efficiency of your processes or, I don't know, predictions of customer demand or pricing or whatever, right? And generative AI, right? And generative AI with large language models and beyond, right? So I think CEOs generally feel that they have a pretty good grasp of traditional narrow predictive AI. They've been doing a lot, all kinds of industries. I think there's a general consensus that they see it as an opportunity.
in the sense that they understand how to generate business benefits through it, right? So I can deploy it to make some of my critical processes more efficient and so on and so forth. Personalize my value offerings, personalize pricing. It feels that it's more under my control. It also feels more of an enterprise play in the sense that we're gonna create a team that will develop this AI-driven solution, we'll deploy it, we have full control, wonderful.
Andreas Deptolla (01:02:16.416)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (01:02:31.598)
Right? So this is like a little bit the story of old, good old enterprise IT. The story of generative AI is a little bit like the story of consumerization. Right? So, so when, you're, if you call when kind of social media and then mobile phones and everything else entered the enterprise domain, you know, they actually entered from the outside, they entered through employees, through customers and so on and so forth. So when it comes to generative AI,
Andreas Deptolla (01:02:44.479)
Hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (01:03:00.856)
There's a lot of interest, a lot of caution. People have experimented with it some. Fortunately, we've seen that the share of CEOs who actually have used it personally is growing, and that is really critical. I think you have to have firsthand direct experience with it to really start to understand what this is all about. Unfortunately, oftentimes this experience is fairly superficial. I've given it a try.
It kind of was cool here. It was not cool at all, you know, with this task. I just, and then I don't have time to work with it. So, and so this is where we are. I think what we hear and people would not be willing to go on record with these kind of considerations, but what we're hearing more of is that these concerns about the impact of AI and genia in particular on labor.
Andreas Deptolla (01:03:32.416)
Mm-hmm.
w2sk29w5zy (01:03:58.582)
becoming a bit more pronounced. And clearly, it's a very politically sensitive matter. But the early pilots, and most companies are still very much in the land of pilots when it comes to generative AI, the early pilots have generated this initial evidence that, in fact, the workforce could be reused in certain tasks.
by very significant percentage. And that kind of blows up the whole equation. Because first of all, what do do about it? Second of all, okay, we've done the pilot, we need to scale it. Usually, to be able to scale it, I still need to involve or engage a bunch of these people who will eventually be replaced to help me fine tune the current solution and so on and so forth. But how do I actually engage them?
They're not stupid. understand that they're basically helping me develop something that will eventually replace them. So how do I approach that? I have no idea. Right. And I guess one other comment that I would make is there is a lot. So when we talked about traditional predictive AI and the fact that it was very much deployed in a top down manner, the of the enterprise manner, let's identify a good business business case. Right. Let's
build a team, let's give them a budget, they're going to build a solution that they were going to deploy. Companies attempt to now apply the same approach to Gen.ai. And sometimes it makes sense, but we also have to keep in mind that Gen.ai, first and foremost, is technology that will make an impact at the individual level, at the level of individual work. And therefore, we have to give it to people.
to really experiment with that. Very few companies, or few companies, let me put it this way, actually complement this top-down approach, let's run a few pilots, with a bottom-up approach, let's make it accessible to our employees, let's enable them to start experimentation in a way that is safe, that controls for the risks that are critical to our organization, but most importantly, let's make sure we can actually diffuse those learning and that emerging knowledge across the entire organization.
w2sk29w5zy (01:06:22.944)
Few companies are doing that. There good examples, but actually most companies are still not.
Andreas Deptolla (01:06:31.644)
So presumably the winning organization, so to speak, will be the organization that use more of a button-up approach, equip their employees with the technology in a safe way to experiment with AI, then presumably also incentivize the employees in the right way, creating more of a broader funnel of new ideas, new experiments. Is that a fair assessment?
w2sk29w5zy (01:06:55.502)
It is, it is, it is. The only, the only kind of thing that I would add to it, it's not either or. I think you still need to have them and you would need to, you would, know, as a CEO, would, within your organization would have to identify a few strategic use cases and you would need to commit resources to it and put together teams and do all of these things, And that needs to be complemented with bottom up. And bottom up will benefit you at the level of individual workers as very
they move forward re-architecting their role. But also out of that bottom-up experimentation, a lot of insights will most likely come out that then will inform what kind of pilots you need to launch top down. So you need to align these two streams of transformation and closely coordinate.
Andreas Deptolla (01:07:48.042)
And then scale it, right, whenever you've found something that really works well. So maybe to wrap up our conversation, what are you most excited about in terms of AI technology, if you look at the next three to five years?
w2sk29w5zy (01:08:05.356)
So, listen, I think we're going to be riding this AI way for a while. What I'm most... Okay, let's use the term excited about. I think what could become very, very, very consequential, again, without venturing into their territory of artificial general intelligence is the development of agents, autonomous agents.
Because ultimately, coming back to what I mentioned before about the need to rethink the architecture of work and of businesses.
You know, if you try to factor in these autonomous agents into your own business architecture, it will look nothing like it looks today. And so just thinking about, and let me get a little bit, again, a little bit more academic. So organizations are socio-technical systems. It means that they consist of people and they consist of technology. Right?
But in the past, only humans would have agency, meaning only humans would be able to decide what it is that they want to do, right? And only humans would have the ability to learn, right? And now what we are observing is that perhaps we are at a point where that might change. So all of a sudden, the socio-technical system
will become heavier on the technical side. We're going to have autonomous agents that will be able to autonomously perform certain tasks, and more importantly, they will be able to learn. And how do you...
w2sk29w5zy (01:10:03.133)
run such an organization or how do you manage such an organization, how do you design such an organization is we don't know. And that's to me, that's exciting. Right. And also this would likely require very different type of senior leaders and CEOs to be able to kind of even imagine what this might look like.
So really thinking about how agents will develop in the future and how they will be integrated into their broader architecture of work and business processes is something that very much interests me and excites me.
Andreas Deptolla (01:10:50.742)
Thank you. Maybe really the last question now is like, who would you be excited to listen to? Who should be invited to be a guest on the show?
w2sk29w5zy (01:11:03.273)
Right. let me start with... Well, this is, in a way, by now the usual suspect, and I'm sure that you have thought about him. And I'm speaking about Ethan Molyke of Wharton University of Pennsylvania. What Ethan does really in a very amazing way is just simplifying.
some of the things that we all are thinking about and talking about and making those things very, very crisp. So to me, he's also closer in the sense that he does a lot of work at the intersection of AI and education learning in particular. So he certainly could enrich the show and the conversation on that. This is on the academic side. Speaking about transformation and the CEOs,
I would go back, it's really a very unique story and a very long term story. If you can get actually the CEO of DBS, the current CEO of DBS Bank, Piyush Gupta on the show. And really the question that I would ask him is how has he managed to keep up the momentum going, to keep up the focus, to give the transformation really a lot of very meaningful continuity because
when they started out back in early 2010s, they didn't have a blueprint, they didn't have a roadmap. The roadmap emerged as they were going along. And so I think this could be a very interesting conversation.
Andreas Deptolla (01:12:44.256)
Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time today, being generous with your time and sharing all your insights.
w2sk29w5zy (01:12:50.239)
Thank you very much, Andreas. It's been a pleasure.