November Pulse - Driving An AI-First Workplace - Episode #75

He offered the whole company $100,000 to the first person who was able to offload their entire job function to AI. That is obviously a lot of money. That kind of incentive is going to motivate people to go above and beyond. How do you get people to get over that hump?

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring, get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys.

Hello everyone. For today's Pulse episode, I want to focus on the subject of how to drive an AI first mindset at your company. There's obviously been a lot of hype around AI in the enterprise, especially in the last couple years. We've seen posts on LinkedIn of emails from CEOs and their employees demanding that every single one of them use AI. All the new AI companies that are growing to 100 million of ARR faster than anyone before them, the billions of dollars being invested in the space, stories of companies that are made up of a single human with dozens of agents doing all the other jobs at the company. Now, on the flip side, there's that MIT report that came out that said 5% of AI projects are successful. At a CEO dinner that we had recently, everyone was talking about how their engineering teams are starting to sour on coding assistance because of the high volume of low quality code that's being spit out and on the ground at very successful, fast growing companies that I spend time with. I can say that I'm seeing the adoption of AI, but it's not at the speed that's being presented in the media, if it's being talked about more broadly. So I've honestly, I've been trying to reconcile the two sides of the story. And when I talk to CEOs and I meet CEOs, I ask a lot more questions, like very tactical questions about how they're driving an AI first mindset at their companies. I try to get like actually specific examples and tactics from them of what they do. And in general, I would say that I've heard probably three major buckets across people that I've talked to. And what I want to do today is share those with you, but actually put them in the order that I would do them based on what I've heard. So really the three in order are something to get the ball rolling with AI adoption. And a lot of that has come from really monetary incentives. You know, how do you get that experimentation going? The second is once you've Got people feeling comfortable using AI and thinking about AI first when they're doing their projects is actually getting to some very specific projects with small teams, maybe one to start across the whole company and taking that all the way through to completion and sharing that with the team. And then lastly is either hiring or dedicating one person or at least a part of one person's job to be the AI czar. So let's talk first about the monetary incentive. So one of the examples that a CEO shared with me is he offered the whole company $100,000 to the first person who was able to offload their entire job function to AI. That is obviously a lot of money. And that kind of incentive is going to motivate people to go above and beyond, to experiment, to get out of their comfort zone. And actually one of the things that I noticed when talking to CEOs and their leadership teams about AI is more than like I would expect to see is just this, people scared to play with AI. And again, that's why I put this as step one is how do you get people to get over that hump of starting to play with this? We actually experienced this at Not Another CEO. Earlier this year, Nick and I were talking about building a custom GPT for something having to do with the podcast. And we spoke to a third party consultant that someone referred and they offered to build this custom GPT for us for $10,000. And honestly we did look at that and say, should we do this? I mean, it was going to save us a lot of time. And then Nick said to me, hey, you know what, I'm just going to try to build this myself, no joke. That was probably 4 or 5pm on a Thursday. And the next morning he messaged me and said, hey, here's the custom GPT. Test it out. I think it does everything that we need. And that just small example is how we thought, oh, we, this is too complicated for us. This is. And this is people. Nick and I, who have spent our entire careers at technology companies were always testing new technologies. But for some reason that idea of building the custom GPT sounded too big for us until we started playing around and experimenting with it. And there's, there's a bunch of this. I mean I, I like the idea of putting the monetary incentive out there because it is a forcing function. Another person I spoke to, another CEO, mentioned that at his company they give each person a thousand dollar budget and each person must spend this year $1000 on AI for something related to work or even something related to their lives outside of work. But they have to spend a thousand dollars on some kind of AI products, AI project, something. And this will get people to start experimenting, they're going to start researching things, they're going to start asking friends about it, they're going to, they're going to get going. The momentum starts. We've seen this, I mean we, at this dinner that we had, people were mentioning these different products that they were using ADIO for their CRM and granola to do note taking. And this product that everyone's been talking about called Whisper Flow. And just hearing those ideas and then actually trying them, you see this power of when you see it in motion, it gets your brain thinking in a different way. Now after that, once you've done that and you've got people kind of going, you've got people comfortable using it, I think the next thing is really, how do you get a small group of people, give them a mandate to work on a specific project, a specific AI project, either for internal tooling or something that's in your product or whatever it is, it really doesn't matter, but like a product, something that's going to be used in the company, something that's going to be critical infrastructure. And when you give them that, you have to put them, kind of allow them to work outside of the machine. Whether you're a 50 person company, a thousand person company, a 10,000 person company. There's one of the challenges, especially if you're an established company, is that there are systems, processes, standard operating procedures, a way of doing things. And it's hard to bring a new way of thinking with this new technology, revolutionary technology into that established machine. So the way to do this is siphon off that group and have them be the disruptors, let them run wild. Don't worry about how you're going to integrate that branch back into the core, at least not to start. One good example of this, I was talking to a CEO who had an idea for a feature he wanted to add to his product that was literally only possible because of AI. And he sent a message to his product and engineering team and asked them who wanted to work over the weekend on making this new AI feature reality. He explained to them this is going to be a game changer for the company and he didn't know how to build it. He's not technical, he had no preconceived notions how it was going to be built, but he wanted a group of people who were excited to tackle the problem to join him in the office in the physical office Saturday and Sunday to build this. And he actually got about 20% of the product engineering team to raise their hand and opt in. And they built a feature in a weekend that now saves their customers countless hours. I saw, I saw the feature completes a part of the product that was critical for acquiring new customers. And he celebrated the team that worked on this feature and, and asked them, hey, would you do this again? He actually gave them bonus afterwards he didn't tell me he was going to do, but he gave them a bonus and everyone wanted to do it again. The excitement of using the new technology, seeing it in customers hands, making a major difference to the company, the right people are going to be motivated by that. Another company, there's a company that's tens of millions of ar, hundreds of employees. And the founders had a realization they needed to add a new AI product to their portfolio in order to take advantage of this massive opportunity that was coming with the rise of AI and their customers adopting AI. And so instead of them distracting their engineering team from the core roadmap with the large enterprise customers that everyone's waiting for features, the two founders grabbed one engineer and they spent nights and weekends working on this new product. They did it literally nights and weekends on the side in addition to the day job of running the company. And they did this for months. They showed it to customers, they got buy in from the first couple of customers who were willing to pay for it. And after, only after they did all of that did they talk to the company or actually get it back in as like a main part of the product. I've had, I have so many stories like this, but the theme here is once you get people going, not trying to go, then boil the ocean and build a bunch of mat critical tooling and infrastructure all at once. Because it takes time to change the culture. You can't do that overnight. It takes time to change the product, it takes time to change all this. And so if you have an existing product and a customer base, you don't want to disrupt that. So find the people that are excited about AI, find a project that is easy to carve out and has a high chance of success and invest the energy there to build the momentum and prove out the impact. Lastly, now you've got people using AI, everyone's getting excited about it. You've got a project that actually got executed, it got rolled into the pro, into the core of the business. And now I believe the next thing to do, which I've heard from a bunch of people Is, but, but I think it's important to do this last is now go and identify someone at the company who can either be a full time AI czar, chief AI officer, AI champion, whatever you want to call it, take that person and if it's a big enough company, make them full time. Most companies are not going to have a full time AI czar to start. Maybe they're going to be part time. But the reason here is because everyone is busy a CEO, it should and will talk about AI at their all hands meetings. They're going to send the employees to the, you know, to go use these. They're going to go tell them you have to adopt AI. But once you kind of get going somebody and it doesn't matter, look, I mean really, it could be the head of it, someone from the product team. I've seen a company where it was their head of hr. Somebody who has this perfect mix of passionate about AI, about new technologies, about the company, pushy enough to drive actual change and a really good internal marketer so they know how to get all of these wins and amplify them to everyone else for, for one company, which is pretty far down their AI journey. They talked about how their AI champion or aizar organized a full day AI summit for their company. They found, they went out and they found 12 people at the company that were using AI in innovative and impactful ways and had them present one by one to the company. I actually sat in on this in IT for a different company where they did something similar just with the executive team. It was a couple weeks ago and I got a bunch of new tools that I had never heard of or seen and I saw the examples of how these tools are actually changing jobs. So when I first like when I first heard about this idea of I'm going to dedicate a person or a large portion of, of someone's time to this. I, I, I felt like it maybe wasn't a good idea to centralize all this with a single person. But the more that I think about it, the more I really like the idea. Even if you just look at things like the incentivization for the, for, for everyone or these small projects or all of these different things that I talked about over a long period of time. These things will lose momentum if someone is not banging the drum and in front of everyone and, and, and making sure that there is this steady momentum around AI happening at the company. So that is the order that I would take it. Get people going, get the momentum going, just get them playing with it, experimenting with it, then show that it can really make an impact in your business with a critical product, a critical feature, something that can be done by a small group that can go work on their own and bring that back to the, to the core, and then ultimately take somebody and make that person focused and dedicated to the success of AI at your company. So, look, I think we all know that this AI is going to change the way we work. It already has. And over the coming years, it's going to touch every job function at every company. That's. That's it. I mean, that's why it's important to start getting comfortable with it. Your team needs to get comfortable with it. SaaS and I experienced this firsthand. SaaS drove a very similar change to how we work. But. And it's hard, I mean, it is hard to remember what it was like before SaaS applications, but it was not like, not like this AI is changing faster and it doesn't matter, like, if we like it or not, we will have to adopt it. So anyway, hope this was helpful. If you have any other examples or ideas, please feel free to share them with me so I can share them out with the, with the, with the community and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.