Eric Siu showed a Slack AI agent to a Chinese company and they weren't impressed, while Americans thought it was cutting edge. In China, 87% of people support AI versus 46% in the U.S. Siu argues adoption comes down to mindset, not age.
Neil, one thing I'll tell you is that they're very ahead on the AI piece, okay? So this is like everyone in their company uses AI because they're like a Chinese company. Again, 87% of Chinese are pro-AI, right? And then 46% of Americans are pro-AI. So when I showed them, Neil, our agent that works inside of Slack, to most Americans, it blows them away, right? To me, I'm like, whatever. I've been doing this for the last 3, 4, 5 months or so, okay? When I showed them, They looked at me like I was a caveman, right? As if what I showed them is nothing new. They looked at me like I was an idiot. My CTO used the word, the R word, and he doesn't really use the R word much. So he's like, they looked at you like you were R word, right? And I was like, yeah, they did. And they're like, they already have their agents that live inside of their chat solution. That's one piece, okay? Which means they're just on top of it. The second piece is the person I was sitting next to, she's like, oh yeah, I use Codex to help me with my stock investments. Notice she doesn't say she uses ChatGPT or Claude. She uses Codex, which is the coding harness from OpenAI. That is also advanced as well, right? And then just everything that we're talking about, they're super on top of it and they're very curious too. The things that they're not, they don't really understand, like AEO. I think it just comes down to, Neil, if I had to make it simple, because I have a Chinese background, right? Yeah. I look at it as the reason why 87% of them are so pro-AI, it's a mindset thing, it's a curiosity thing. And so I don't think it's anything about age, right? So people like to say, oh, you got to hire young kids. No, it's not a young kids thing because there's plenty of young people that are very anti-AI, right? You've heard these CEOs get booed off the commencement stages, right? Yes. And then I've also met older people that are running circles around the younger people. So I just think this all comes down to a mindset thing. And the fact that I can meet 5 people from this company and they're all super AI-pilled, it just is— how do you just learn to flip the mindset and show people that this is a very beneficial thing?
