#146 Embracing the AI Revolution
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on Mon Jul 10 2023 17:00:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
with Michael Lenox, Darren W Pulsipher,
In this episode, Darren talks to Dr. Michael Lenox about the emerging AI revolution and how to embracing it or get destroyed. Michael has just released a new book 'Strategy in the Digital Age: Mastering Digital Transformation'.
Keywords
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As a CIO looking to lead your company through digital transformation, it’s important to remember that technology isn’t the only piece of the puzzle. According to Dr. Michael Lenox, a respected author and professor in the field, digital transformation is about much more than just cloud computing and data organization. It’s a strategic initiative that requires cross-functional collaboration and a holistic approach.
To effectively navigate digital transformation, your leadership team and entire organization must embrace the change and understand the broader implications beyond just digital infrastructure. This means reflecting on where your company is today and where it wants to go in the evolving competitive landscape. It also requires collaboration between the C-suite, product team, sales, and other key stakeholders.
As you navigate this initiative, remember that it’s not just an IT project happening in the background. It’s a fundamental change to the basis of competition, customer relationships, and business models. To drive effective change, you must leverage people, process, and technology.
When implementing new tools or technologies, it’s important to think critically about how they align with your organization’s goals. Don’t waste resources chasing after trends blindly. Instead, be intentional and strategically leverage technology to create value and meet market needs.
Additionally, it’s important to be proactive in understanding your role and contribution towards the organization’s overall strategy. This is especially crucial in the face of digital transformation, which can be both exciting and nerve-wracking as we navigate the exponential growth of data and technological advancements.
However, it’s also important to consider the concentration of data and power in the hands of a few major players. This can potentially stifle innovation and create an uneven playing field. It’s crucial to prioritize data privacy and ownership, and to ensure that laws and regulations promote fair competition. In Europe, for example, there are already discussions about giving individuals ownership of their data and allowing them to decide who can access and use it.
Overall, strategic thinking, adaptation, and consideration of the impact of data are key to successfully navigating digital transformation. By balancing innovation, privacy, and competition, your organization can drive long-term success in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Links
- https://www.michael-lenox.com
- https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35677
- https://www.amazon.com/stores/Michael-Lenox/author/B07C33ZNSC
- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Michael%20Lenox%22
- https://bookshop.org/lists/books-by-michael-j-lenox
Podcast Transcript
1
Hello, this is Darren
Pulsipher, chief solution,architect of public sector at Intel.
And welcome to Embracing
Digital Transformation,where we investigate effective change,leveragingpeople process and technology.
On today's episode, Embracing the
AI Revolutionwith author and professor Dr.
Michael Lenox.
Mike, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me there.
Hey, we werewe were connected by somebody.
I can't even remember who And when Iwhen I read your bio and things like that.
Oh, I said I have to have Mikecome on the show because you're an authorand you're releasing a book on digitaltransformation, which is awesome.
Yeah.
So just today,officially Strategy in the Digital Age
Mastering Digital Transformationhas been released by Stanford Pressthat that's awesome.
Now, before we talk about thatand your expertise,how did you get to be where you are today?
Well, let's hear that story.
Everyone's got a backstory. Let's hear it.
You know, it dependshow far back you want to go, but.
Born and raised.
Let's go post.
Let's. Let's go.
You know, post adolescence.
How's that post? Adolescence.
Okay.
Well, I was going to say born and raisedin a steel town outside of Philadelphia.
But for that kid.
That's good. That's good.
I'm a reformed engineer.
I did my bachelor'sand master's in systems engineering.
That's had a lot of influence in the way
I kind of look at the world.
I always point outthat even when I was an undergraduate,we were learningsome of the very techniques that we talkabout today, thingslike neural networks and machine learning.
The problem was we didn't havethe processing power of the datato do what wecan do today with exactly theyou woulddecide to go back and get my Ph.D.in economics from MIT.
But with this particular focuson technology,business strategy and public policy.
So I'm really interestedin that kind of intersectionbetween those those three areasand do a lot on digital transformationand digital disruption.
And I also do a lot of workon environmental issuesaround decarbonizationand clean technology as well.
So what made you want to go into moreof the management routeor was it management business route?
Business route?
Yeah, more than the technical route.
What was it that that made you,you know, move in that direction?
Yeah, I think at the end of the daywhen I was looking at, you know,challenges, eitherorganizations or companies were havingwith technology or society more broadly,as much as there wasalways a technical component to it, italmost always seemedto come down to people, right?
It came down to incentives,it came down to management.
And so that just got me really interestedin kind of the business aspectof these technologies and, you know,what are their implications.
Yeah, just just likeat the beginning of our show,we say people process technologyin that order.
Yeah, it's on purpose.
You're right.
I mean, the people, people's big thing.
I actually went back to school.
I have an undergraduatein computer scienceand several minors because I wanted to bea biomedical engineer,which wasn't a degree back in the day.
So I took a bunch of crazy classes.
But I later, aftergetting in the industry, I learned thatthe people aspect was something that I wasin Silicon Valley in the nineties.
No one knew how to manage people.
Yeah, it was it was a it was a disaster.
So I actually went back and got my MBAand learned that no,no one did know how to manage people,especially smart people.
And so I feel your
I feel your, your pain there with that.
It's one of the things I talk aboutin the book that I thinkif your digital transformation effortis being ledexclusively by your team,you're probably in trouble, right?
Because you need that senior managementbuy in and you need that vision for how toconnect the various business unitswith your digital transformation efforts.
If you think this is just an IT thingthat kind of happens off in the dungeons,wherever it doeswhat it does, you're probably in trouble.
No, I totally, totally agree.
And I've seen that in my careerbecause I goand help organizationsdo exactly what you're talking about.
Digital transformation.
And it always comes downto a people problem.
So we look at organizational change,we look at organizational structures,knowledge transfer, knowledge management.
Those aren't technical things, Right?
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
So, all right, So you studiedall this stuff you're teaching now at UVA.
You got your book out.
So let's say I'm a CIO.
I hear the buzzword buzzword du jour,digital transformation.
Where do I start?
Yeah.
And I think this is kindof the primary message of the book is
I think a lot of timeswhen people think of digitaltransformation, they immediatelygo to what I might call likedigital infrastructure.
Now, should we be using cloud computing?
Should we build a data layer? Right?
How do we get our data organized?
But I think the implicationsof digital technologymore broadly are much more fundamental.
And industry after industrythat I study or work with companiesand what you find is it's changingthe fundamental basis of competitionfor one could be changing the wayyou relate to your customers,the underlying value propositionthat you create,creating more consistent and longlasting relationships with your customers.
It's creating new business models,or at least proliferatingdifferent types of business models.
So just selling a productnow it might be software as a service,maybe it's a platform playwhere there's an exchange feethat you get for using your platform.
We're seeing the deconstructionof the value chain where maybe digitalnative companies are coming in and takinglittle pieces of what you used to doand trying to disrupt those little areaslike we see in the in the fintech sector.
So it really causes,
I think, companies to reflect onnot only where they are today,but where are they goingand what capabilities dothey bring to the to the evolvingcompetitive game that they'rethat they're finding themselves in?
It's interestingbecause you didn't once once mentionin thatany roles that the CIO plays at all.
Yeah, yeah.
I think the CIO is critical. Absolutely.
Yeah, he's right.
Yeah, it's critical,but it doesn't start withthe CIO as what you're sayingbecause this is a a chief product officer,this is the CEO,
This is your sales organization.
Everything's changing when you talkreal true digital transformation,that's what you're saying.
That's yeah, exactly right there.
And I like to believe,like as a business strategy professor,you know, everyone needs to understandbusiness strategyno matter where you are in the hierarchy.
And some of that is to try tomaybe influencethe overall strategy organization,but at the very least, to see howyour work fits into that overall strategy.
And I think it's really criticalthat you are quite explicit aboutwhat are you trying to achieve.
You know, and I use this analogy, I'm sure
I'm borrowing it from someone else.
But, you know,if all your digital transformation effortsare are improving the efficiencyof the engines on the Titanic,you're still going to hit thaticeberg, right?
So where you direct, you direct thatthat ship is really important.
And I've seen so many companiesfail developingdigital applications using technology,that's really cool.
But they're not thinking throughwhere are you trying to go with this?
And then they have wasted effort,millions spent on an applicationthat isn't actually used.
You know, these are the problemsyou need to be thinkingabout and be proactive about,okay, what just popped into my mindand you may not.
This is cold.
Completely cold.
So you ready for this not generative?
I yes.
When you said all right,because that's the buzzword du jourand people don't know what to do with itor how to harness it.
And I'm starting to see everythinggo kind of crazy.
Like it almost feels like the dotcom boom.
Yeah, in the late nineties, right?
Oh, you could do all this.
You can do all this.
And the scare around it.
Companiesdidn't know what to do with the internet.
I don't have a web presence. I don't have.
So this is a paradigmshift. It's happeningand use a new technique.
So I got to
I got to think outside of my normalway of doing things,is what you're saying.
Maybe embrace, embrace this? I don't know.
What do you think?
I think it
I think the answer is, you know,this is a good academic answer,but it depends. Right.
And I think it dependson a number of different ways.
I, I think you really have to be cautiousof all here's a cool new tool.
Let's go use it. Right.
Like,you've got to be intentional about, well,wait a minute, what is this toolactually going to do for us?
The second thing that I worry about,and I use this all the time with companies
I work with, is
I hear them say things like,
We want to be the Google of X,like we're going to be the leaderin generative II.
And I'm like, Well, maybe.
But I think maybe like Googleis going to be the Google of X, right?
Like they are far better positionedto do what you're thinking about doing.
But, you know, but, but back in the daysof Google when they first kicked off,they would have said, well,that's IBM's job.
Right?
Right.
Well, I mean, isn't that how it's alwaysbeen, right?
I mean, no, no.
I think disruptors coming inand really disrupting the whole industry.
That's right.
And I think for the incumbent firms,maybe even very successfulincumbent firms, being thoughtfulabout how you can take what you dowell and evolve it in a way to meetthe evolving market needsis a different questionthan maybe a startup who's pursuing open
AI and generative
AI and how they might thinkabout the opportunities available to them.
And so in the book, you know,we have a whole chapter, againusing an econ term here,but of appropriately, it really justspeaks to as you create value.
How do you think about the valueyou're going to capturefor your various stakeholders?
And it's an important question to askbecause, again, history is litteredwith companies who've gone after a marketopportunity and ultimately failed.
You know, for every Facebook, there'sa thousand MySpace is out there oror there's Kodak and, you know, Codex,the example I you know, I start the bookwith it's such a simple storyat the surface level right?
Here's a company that makes digital,it makes film,and then the world goes digitaland they go bankrupt.
But the fact of the matteris, Kodak was well awareof the possibilities of digitaland some of the first patentson digital technology,one of the first digital cameras,and yet they still weren't ableto successfully manage the transition.
They stillsufferedfrom all those behavioraland managerial challengesthat a company might run into while tryingto to manage this type of transition.
So so would you attribute thatthat transition failurewith Kodak, with the culture?
I think so.
You think it was directly in the culturebecause.
Yeah, I remember that
I was in the middle of all that.
The company I was working withactually got purchased byand then later spun off into Kodakand then died.
Yeah yeah.
And againit's it's a challenge and I think Kodakdid so many things rightin terms of this transformation.
But at the end of the day,
I think the heart of it was,you know, the chemistwhere the stars of Kodak.
Right.
They're the oneswho are making the new filmand and they weren't seeing a futurefor themselves in digital.
And it just held them back enoughthat they couldn't fullyembrace and embrace it completelyor alternative LTD, I point out
Fuji has actually done very welland the Fuji high competitor of Kodak,especially during the 1990s.
Yeah, market share in filmthey went a different direction.
They actually kind of leaned into some of their core capabilitiesand kind of moved into other industrysectors.
So, you know, they they didn'ttry to become a digital imaging company,but they actually leveragedtheir expertise to go into thingslike health care and other adjacencies.
Interesting.
So digital, are we just rebrandingwith digital transformation?
Are we just rebranding what happenedwith the Industrial Revolution? 3.0?
Right. Yeah.
I think, you know, one of the points
I make in the book is that the patternsof let's call it disruptionor technology change, those arethose are very common and market basedeconomies, like we see this all the time.
And so it shouldn't be surprisingsome of the the transitions that we see,the failures of established companies,the diffusion of new technologies.
And in fact, we can leverage thoseto help us strategizeabout how we should position ourselves,you know,where are we in the lifecycleof the technology and the industrieslike Very important questions to to ask,
I think to your to, you know,the broader pointabout these kind of epics that we see.
You know, I do point outlike digital transformation isn't new.
You know, we can go back 50 plus yearsand find examplesof companies and industriesbeing digitally transform.
I think there is a heightened awarenessabout it, and
I think there's a new set of technologiescoming to bear that areincreasing the impactin the scope of of digitization.
But this has been around againfor at least half a century.
So so what would you sayare those technologiesthat are catalysts to make this happen?
Because it's it's strangebecause we said at the beginningpeople in process and technology, right?
I mean, you have to get the people linefirst in order toto get the other two to work together.
But isn't technology the driverbehind a lot of this?
Yeah and I, I talk about, you know, theseexponential curveswe see in three core technologies, right.
Processing power.
So the old Moore's Law, we see it inbandwidth and we see it in storage.
And the reason I like to highlightthis is because events trends continue.
If we continueto see the exponential growthin those three core technologies,let's say for another decade,the world is going to beradically different than it is today.
And ways, to behonest are very hard to predict.
I don't
I don't claim to be a technology futurist.
I can't see where the world is goingnecessarily, but what I can see isif those continue, we're going to bein a radically different placeand you've got to be nimbleand able to adjust to that.
I do think what's core to a lot of thisis this notion of data.
We are we are generating and processingmore data today than than we havein the history of the world, obviously.
And that just continues to increase.
That becomes importantbecause our data and our tools,especially right now,
I they're becoming more powerfulthan they had been five yearsago, ten years ago.
And that and that's going to continue.
And I think it'swhy a lot of people are scared.
I think it's a lot of peoplewhy people are are nervous about like,where is I going?
Because I think it is hard to predictwhere we're going to be in five years.
Just look how much we've improvedover the last six monthssince the release of about 3.5.
Yeah. Now for oh.
And so
I think that's why there'sthis kind of palpable sense thatwhile this has been around for a while,things feel likethey're accelerating now.
So in that acceleration is causinga lot of people concern, I'm guessing.
I mean, look at Intel.
We're going to be producing 18angstrom wide transistorsin the next three years.
Yeah, maybe too.
I mean, I don't think people understandhow small that is.
And and our CEO Pat Gelsinger saidwill continue Moore's Law until there areno elements left in the periodic.
That's my understanding. Right.
Like we're starting to run into likethe literally like the physics limits.
Yeah.
What we're talking about
I mean 18 angstroms, that's really smallto give people a a perceptionwhat that is.
The corona virus was 72 nanometers acrosswhich is
Wow. Wow.
Right.
Oh no no 7200 angstrom.
Sorry I got that wrong.
Send me 200 angstroms across.
Yeah.
So think think about that people. Yeah.
I mean, we're building thingssmaller than virusesin a repeatable manner and we're buildingtrillions of them every day.
And that's pretty,pretty impressive stuff.
And like you said,where is that going to lead to?
How much data are we going to generateand what are we going to dowith all that data?
I think one of the big questionsand I haven't seen an analysisthat can really answer it yetis I've got to believe there willsome point be decreasing returns to data.
You know, there's only so much datathat you need about us as individuals thatyou can predict a lot about our behaviorand interests and things like that.
Where is that number?
If it's a pretty big number,which I think it probably is,that's going to give a lot of advantagesto those companieswho can scale quickly and in essencegrab a lot of data.
So this is the big tech players, right?
This is where Alphabet's Google.
This is where Appleis, where Amazon come into play.
If it's a smaller number,then you have more hope thatmore entrepreneurial startupsand other companiescan get into the data gameand still be able to be, you know,viable players do.
Do you think because because of that,do you think there'll be databrokerages that are selling data?
There already are, yeah, we know that.
But more readily andand do you think laws and regulationswill make it so that there'sa more even playing field for the smallstartup to gain access to that datathat all the big boys already have?
Yeah, I think this is a critical questionfor us moving forward.
I do worry and I talk about in the booka little bit about the power thatit's accruing to the small set of playersthat have this data advantage.
And if we allow that to persist,how it could actually stifle innovation,stifle entrepreneurial growth and the likeif we're not careful.
So I think thinking very clearlyabout data privacy, thinking about dataownership is really goingto be critical here moving forward.
And we should have a lens towardshow do we keep this kind of innovationengine moving forward and notand not stifle it because it's controlledby because it's controlledby a handful of people, Right?
Yeah, right.
I know Europe because I deal a lotwith global governmentsin my in my job right now.
I know Europe is currently looking atgiving youyou are the owner of your data.
Yeah.
So you can sell your own dataeven if other people are collecting it,you can tell who is allowed to see itand who is not.
And and if you say, I want this startupto have it, they have to give it to you.
And those are the types of laws therethat they're developing right nowto really protect data privacy,which does not mean hiding all the data,but it means me having the opportunityto share it with whomever I want.
And I think if Google collects itor if Amazon collects it,
I think this could really start to changesome of the business modelsand the competitive landscape.
Again, because it could make modelsthat are based purely on advertising.
Again, Google and Facebookhistorically less viable.
It might empower a companylike like Apple, right?
Because Apple's basic argument isand their business modelis they want to sell you a devicethey still make.
Vast majority of their revenuesare selling iPhones.
So to the extentthey're using your personal datato improve yourpersonal iPhone experience,they might be able to sell that.
Even in a world where usershave a lot more ownership of their data.
If you're in a world where, hey, I'musing your data to sell you advertisingand make money off the advertising side,will people give up their data for that?
Some might.
You know, some might enjoy the customizedadvertising they receive, butthey're going to be many others are like,
Yeah, I'm going to opt out of that.
But it's interesting when you said thatbecause Apple is in advertising.
Yeah, you already are.
Because the feedback that they're gettingfrom their device, from their devicesand about youthey're using to make products betterand to offer you specific services.
So it's it's a form of advertisingor getting to know your customer betterand to the pointthat I don't even need to really advertisebecause I'm producingexactly what they want.
Well, I would say Amazon is the onewho's probably even further along.
Yeah, Yeah.
Because, you know, they'rethey're going to be ableto customize their recommendationsand say, Hey, we really need thisand we sell that to you.
And here it is.
There is even theidea that they could get ahead of youright there.
They're going to understandyour wants and needs and know like, hey,you're running low on deodorant.
I bet here it is.
And it just shows up on your doorstepthat you're doing that.
They already have. That they have that.
I, I do that.
So I'm notoriousfor changing the air filters in my housevictorious. Right?
I was supposed to change them every threemonths or whatever, whatever it is.
And mymy brand new AC unit that I just boughtbecause I had a 30 year old house,which means my house,he was shot to smithereens.
They contacted Amazon.
Amazon said, you know, you should changeyour air filters every three months.
Would you like this to be recurring?
Click done. That's right.
I'm like, Exactly.
Now they show up and when they show up,
I just install them.
So I'm being I'mbeing manipulated by Amazon.
I feel like I'm in a tournament,a tournament time by Amazon now, Right?
It's telling me what to doand how to do itthat.
So is that instant transformation?
Is that where we're headed as a societywhere I mean,
I have a whole a whole chapter in the bookis aboutkind of the societal and policyimplications of digital.
And my point to businessesis it's not for me to tell you where youryour value should be, but it is very clearthat you need to be intentional.
In my mind,you need to be thoughtful aboutwhat are the implicationsof what you were doing.
I think you see it out there.
I think you see both Google and Microsoftin particular right nowstruggling with large language models.
And general, they arethey know that they need at some levelto keep pushing the technology.
They also know it can it can have somereally negative implications potentially.
And they're trying to navigate this.
And again,
I don't have any great recommendationsother than to say be intentional.
Right.
At least be explicit about understanding,one, what your values are,what you feel comfortable with,and what are you doingwith the technologyand how are you going to pursue it.
You know, Google Long has had the taglineor value statement, you know,do no evil, right?
That doesn't provide a lot of guidance,but at least it's at leastit's an expression of some thought hereabout how you should thinkabout a technology like this.
So that brings up another thingthat just popped in my head in the dotcom boom dayswhen you've done your researchabout the dot com boom, becausethere's plenty out there on it, companies,companies thatare not known to have lived through it.
So yeah, you lived through it too, right?
So companies what companies succeededcompared to companies that were complete,that completely dissolvedunderneath underneath this,
What was the big differentiatorbetween the two.
Yeah.
Ability to address thator because the wrong way, right.
I mean yeah.
And look, you know lookwrong bets are made all the time, right?
And that happens.
It's a it's about, you know,
I think a couple of things come to mindsometimes you hear,especially during ecommerce,but you still see vessels today,especially in Silicon Valley, about,you know you don't need a strategy, right?
Just move fast and break thingsand figure it out as you go.
And I think that's a one levelof misunderstanding of what strategy is.
And to a bad set of advice.
You need to have some visionof what you're trying to achieveand how you're going to get there.
Which strategy isn't isn't some planyou set that it is then set in stoneforever, right?
It is actually somethingthat needs to be dynamic.
You need to be constantlyrevisiting your strategy, questioningthe assumptions, looking at new dataand when necessary, pivoting.
So I think the companiesthat are most successful,especially in these kind of disruptivetimes,are those who are ableto build a culture of innovation.
They have nimbleness built in.
They understand.
I talk in the book about humility.
They have an ability to understand, likethey don't know exactlywhere the technology is going to go.
So they're able tothen build in a culture that understandsthis and wants to learn and evolveand when necessary, pivot their strategyto meet the evolving technologyand market market needs.
I think when you looked at the dotcom error, you know, when you startseeing things like businessmodels don't matter,you know, all that matters is eyeballsand clicks and it's like, well,you better have a vision for how you mightgenerate income at some point in timeand it might change, but you better havea vision of how you're doing that.
And there was too many people,you know, pooh poohing the idea thatyou should even think about those things.
And oh, I did.
And everything had to be obviouslybusinesses that weren't going to work.
They just weren't going to work.
I wassaying, yeah, no,yeah, I was doing a startup at that timeand it was a integrated developmentenvironment for software engineersand every single VC I went toand I was right in the thick of itwith, with the morning, the morningelevator pitchstaff, the whole thing, right?
The red and the red and green panels,the whole thing.
And I got shut down continually becausethey said, you don't have a web presence.
What's your web strategy?
I'm like, Yeah,it isn't a web strategy tool.
I ended up selling the company,which was good, right?
I did okay on that.
But are we in the same boat today?
What's your ice strategy?
Well, I mean, if you look atearnings callsand what analysts are asking of CEOsand the rhetoric, the CEOs are like,well, yes, we are, you know,investigating generative
AI and incorporating it intoall of our business functions, like, okay,are you really and what does that mean?
And what's inside is importantfor your business.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And look, I'm of the mindsetthat these large language models ingeneral is going to be is being disruptiveand has lots of potential applications.
But again,that doesn't mean everybody runs outand starts, you know, putting these thingsout there in the world.
I think you've got to be thoughtful aboutwho are you as an organization,what capabilities do you have,what positions are available to you,and then think throughhow can you leverage
AI to thenbe useful to you as an organization?
I'll take you know,
I also serveas our chief strategy officerat the Darden School of Business, where Ihave a professor andan I'm reading our digital transformation.
And one of the things that we're dealingwith right now, of course,is more broadly like online education.
And we look at darted.
We're known for a very intensive, Socraticoriented learning experience.
We don't lecture,we actually run case discussionsand engage our students in a conversationthat doesn't translate very well to a likean asynchronous online environment.
That's not going to be our future.
We're not going to be that online
MBA program that you see proliferating.
Now, that doesn't meanwe totally askew technology either.
The question becomeshow do we leverage technology to betterdeliver the positionwe do have in the market,which is the number onebest educational experiencetaught by the number onebest teaching faculty, right?
Like that's who we are as a school.
And technology plays a role in that.
But it isn't going to be this other thingthat everyone's talking aboutwith this online, pure online degrees.
It's Internetand we're at an interesting time for sure.
Right?
And generative
AI is turning everything on its ear,frankly.
I talked to another and here'sanother side question for you.
I have another friendthat's a professor of English,and she's a she's a New York Timesbest seller and the whole thing.
Great, great lady.
And I said, what are you going to doabout Chad Djibouti in your classes?
And she looked at her.
Yeah, she looked at me bright red,and I said, You need to come on my podcastand talk about it.
So she's going to once she and she goes,
But I want to figure it all out first.
And this is No, no, no, no.
You need tocome on before you figure it out.
And then and then do it.
But right now, her concept is it's a tool.
I'm supposed to teach critical thinking.
So it's a tool.
We need to use this tool to help peoplebecause she feels that in the workplace,they're going to be using A.I.tools like generative A.I.to help them get their work done.
Yeah,
I'm actually in total agreement with that.
You know,when I hear people say things like,
Oh, we've got to prevent studentsfrom using this technologyto be a little too cute.
I always like to say technologyalways wins.
You know, I can think of very few exampleswhere just like, you know,collective will to stop a technology.
Actually, if that technology isis actually creating valueand it is creating value.
And what it does, I think, for usas educators is itputs the burden back on us.
You know,maybe we need to design assessments, examsand the like that for studentsto use those critical thinking skills.
They can't just be plugged into Chad.
GPT and give you the answerwe half jokingly have talked about.
Maybe we should just move to oral exams,you know, so studentsare really forced to think on their feetand can't rely on the technology.
But at the same time,
I also think the point is very well-takenthat this is alreadybeing deployed in the real world.
If you will, to be deployedin higher education as well.
And how do we guide our students?
What's the what's the ways in which youcan leverage that technology to improve,which I'm not old enough to remember,like slide rules, But there was a timein business education where our studentswere learning how to use slide rulesto be able to do calculations,and then suddenly this miracle innovationcalled a spreadsheet on word,you know, on personal computer arisestransformational to how a lot of businesswas done from the old ledger days.
Again, you embrace the technology,you learn how to use itproductively and effectivelyand you evolve your skill set.
And that's something, again,that I talk about in the bookis and I'm borrowing from some colleaguesat the University of Toronto,they make this great observationthat AI and dataanalytics more broadlyare really good at prediction,but you still need judgmentto be layered on top of that.
You've had a chat.
GPT There still needs to besomeone who reviews it and assessesit and makes them the choiceof whether to deploy it or not,and that's just going to becomeactually more valuablebecause from an economic standpoint,what we're doingis we're reducing the costs of prediction.
We're making itincredibly effective and efficient.
Well, that actually raisesthe demand for compliments like judgment.
So the demand for judgment,especially in what's going to go onsophisticated, it's going to just it'sgoing to skyrocket here.
You know, I like are you going hereand what your what you've said abouteducation is the same for business.
If business sayswe're just not going to allow generative
AI to be used at our company,they'recrazy
If they think that's not going to happenincreasinglybecause people use it already.
They've been using it since it came out
Novemberof last year.
So professors are using itfor their own work.
So I mean, it's happeningand it would be hypocritical for usto prevent our students, my faculty,or using it in any number of ways.
Oh yeah, I use it every day with my job.
Now, even writing emailsthat are highly critical emailsat a customer or a boss or an employee.
And I'm like,
I don't quite know how to word thisin the right tone, but it does a great jobat those sorts of things.
But ultimately, like, like you said,you have the judgmentand same thingwith digital transformation in general.
It's the peopleare the eyes aren't going to take overbecause there's people still involved.
We still need to make the judgments.
We still need to use these toolsto their most effective way that they can.
So one of the things I advise in the bookis to come up with digital champions.
And the idea to me is, isyou have your data scientists,you have thosewho are technically sophisticated,but I'm actually talkingabout something different.
I'm talking about peoplewho maybe have more domain expertise.
Maybe they're in h.r.
Maybe they're in marketing or whateverit might bewho have enough knowledge to understandwhat the technology can do for youand can serve as that bridgebetween the technologistsand the business unit functions.
Because, again, no offense to the ceosand the technologists, you know,sometimes we can get into our own headsand it doesn't translate well to the otherparts of the organization.
So those people who can bridge, I think,are going to be incredibly valuable.
The data scientists willclearly be valuable, but you don't needjust not know where you're going.
Those it can those itcan see how I can leverage the technologyto get my job done betteror more effectively.
Right. They'rethe ones that are going to succeed.
Hey, Mike, this has been wonderful talkand we could talk for another half hour,
I'm sure, but my audience will fall asleepbecause we're having fun.
But I know their attentionspan is about this long.
So thanks for coming on the show today.
We most definitely want to have youcome back and pitch your book some moreand tell us how it how ithow it did one last time.
Tell tell my audience where they can findthe book and the name and so forth.
She asked. Let's get to a strategyin the digital age.
Mastering digital Transformation.
It is availablethrough Amazon or Barnes and Nobleand all your favorite book retailers.
And you can find more about meat my personal website,which is michaellenox.com.
So MichaelLenox.comand I actually have my own podcastcalled Good Disruptionwith one of my colleagueswhere we talk about new technologyso you can get a link to that as well.
And all my Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Check out our website, linksto Mike's bookand his website and podcast will be there.
Thanks again, Mike.
Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Thank you for listeningto Embracing Digital Transformation today.
If you enjoyed our podcast,give it five stars on your favoritepodcasting site or YouTube channel,you can find out more informationabout embracing digital transformationand embracingdigital.org Until nexttime, go out and do something wonderful.