The Tech Humanist Playbook for Responsible AI | 693 | Kate O'Neill

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Kate O'Neill. She's known globally as a tech humanist. We'll figure out what the heck that means in, in a moment. She's been helping leaders navigate AI ethics, responsible tech, and human centric digital transformation. She's been on the 2025 Thinkers50 ranking of the world's influential management thinkers, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award in digital thinking, author of 6th book, inducted into the CX Hall of Fame, on and on and on. But anyway, welcome aboard, Kate.

Thank you. I like a, an introduction that's like, blah, blah, blah. It's too long. We're cutting it off. Yeah.

It's like 2 pages and you're sitting here smiling. I like, I'd rather talk to you than tell you how brave you are. Or tell anybody else how great you are. You can Google that. But anyway, you're great. All about it.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you, Peter Winick. All right.

So what is a tech humanist? What— this is what we're thinking.

Well, you know, I've worked in tech for over 25 years, and one of the things that's always been true in my work is that I've always been interested in the human component to it. Like, what are we doing about user experience? What are we doing about customer experience, patient experience, guest experience, student experience, whatever the case may be? And what I find is that that becomes increasingly urgent the more powerful tech gets. So that was just something that, uh, a realization that I made over the last, uh, I don't know, decade or so is this framing around the three-way relationship between business, humans, and technology. And that, that business is what gets the technology to the humans. Um, but the humans are obviously not just the consumers of that. Of the technology, the beneficiaries of the technology, but affected in many, many ways by that technology. And so it's a, it's a recognition of that ecosystem and trying to make sure that we're making the right decisions.

Well, and I think that's cool because, you know, a lot of times we're thinking about what can technology do to help business grow faster, be more effective, do the things that businesses need to do, process, et cetera, et cetera. And the human thing is sort of like, oh, and then we'll impose this on the humans and they'll do it, right? Like, like, It's, it's an afterthought.

It is. It's so often an afterthought and it needs to be the forethought. It, it's one of those things that I think, you know, businesses understand that they can't exist without people, you know, being consumers of their services or their products or, uh, and also the employees of the, of the company. And now I think with, with, uh, increasingly with AI and, and intelligent automation, there's this sense that we can sort of bypass some of that, right? Like we're, well, AI is gonna do a lot of the work and AI is going to, you know, make sure that things get in the hands of people that we want in the hands of. And it's just so much more important than it ever has been for us to foreground that conversation as opposed to pushing.

Let's stay there for a minute because, you know, we're living in an age where every company's a tech company, right? And then further to that, every company's an AI company, whatever that will meet. And the reality is, you know, previous generations, if you grew up in the manufacturing world, you know, now we're manufacturing, but we're just doing it a little better, faster, quicker, cheaper, whatever, whatever. But if everything is tech, particularly things that were not tech-driven before, you have leaders, you know, leading things that they, they didn't come up that other than sort of the, you know, the Silicon Valley universe or whatever. How, how are clients leaning into you for that?

It's a really good observation, Peter, because I think one of the things that we can, we can draw upon is, is an understanding that throughout most of business history, it was not tech leaders that ascended into the CEO role, right? Generally speaking, right? You generally saw people who came up through operations or finance or, you know, HR even, or marketing, but not typically through the technology path. And you don't even see it that often in Silicon Valley. You, you might see tech founders become CEOs, but only until there's a certain amount of growth, right? And then the venture capitalists and the, you know, the, the public want a more seasoned business leader to take over that CEO role. So we're only in, I think, maybe about the first generation, uh, business-wise of businesses that are actually being led by tech founders or tech leaders who have ascended into the CEO role. That doesn't help this situation any because people have not necessarily learned the lesson throughout technology history that humans need to be forefront in these considerations. So, you know, I think business leaders struggle in terms of thinking about humans in the technology equation just because technology doesn't come natural to that part of the thinking. And then tech leaders who ascend into business leadership don't necessarily blend those— that thinking either because they're thinking technology first. So both of these are flaws. Of thinking. And, and really the opportunity is for all of the leadership, all of business leadership to take a blended approach, a really integrative approach to thinking about business strategy in a way that's really meant to be successful for the business. Obviously, we don't want business to struggle, but we wanna make sure that business is succeeding by achieving human outcomes in a way that is aligned with what the business is trying to do. Not, not that serves the business first and only secondarily thinks about, well, this is, what's this gonna do?

Well, and how, and how do you get leaders, leaders to be sort of a little vulnerable and say, hey, I'm really strong tech, really could use some help on the human side, or I come up through traditional leadership set, whatever the place I came up, how do I get a tech buddy to sort of help me figure this whole thing out?

Yeah, that's an interesting idea. The tech buddy. I think there's a, um, There's another way we go about it, which is to recognize that these shortcomings or these flaws of vision often correspond with the way people think in terms of future readiness. So, some of the decision-making is a little foregrounded or it's a little more impulsive and, you know, sort of short-sighted and sacrifices future readiness and other kinds of decision-making. And this is often, the tech leaders are often much more driven to thinking far into the future and not necessarily thinking about immediate consequences that they may be sacrificing. So that's the way we usually kind of set up that discussion and think about, you know, how does it, what does it actually look like to resolve that tension where instead of trying to, you know, do one or the other, you're actually trying to make a set of decisions that, that bring you safely into the future and help you become more resilient, more future-ready. Where you're more agile and you can, you can respond to opportunities as they come, but you're also thinking generations ahead, à la, you know, Reed Hastings at Netflix in the early 2000s, which, you know, I, I got a chance to witness up close and it was one of the formative experiences of my business life.

Love it. I love the idea of tension because people avoid ten— tension's a good thing, right?

Yeah.

Like when applied properly and, and when used properly. I wanna go pivot a little bit to where I usually sort of start a lot of these conversations, which is ultimately the, how the heck did you get here? Like, you know, I doubt a young Kate in third grade was thinking, I wanna be a tech humanist when I—

you know what's funny though? I tell this story a lot 'cause I think it's so funny. Uh, it sounds apocryphal. It sounds totally like I'm making this up, but it is 100% true. In first grade, as a matter of fact, I won two statewide competitions. One was a young authors competition. And one was a young programmer's comp—

wait, wait, that was not, that was like paragraph 11 on your bio. I was gonna get to that, but isn't that funny though?

I mean, so from this early age, I'm a programmer and a writer and you know, I have that as an identity because I've already been validated for this, you know, from, let me push on this.

So, so then when did you decide like, I'm gonna make a living as an author, speaker, advisor, thought leader thing? Like, you know, that wasn't. Somebody didn't show up on Career Day for that.

No, no, they didn't. And I didn't actually make that decision straight out of childhood. I went into languages, as I think you may have read, or, you know, folks may know. I'm a linguist by education. My undergrad degree is in German with a minor in Russian and linguistics, concentration in international studies. So, you know, exactly the educational background you would expect for a technology expert.

Yeah, clearly.

That's what we're looking for.

Yeah.

Right, right. But, you know, so there's a lot of— there's decades of work in the trenches in technology, you know, just actually learning and being an opportunist at looking at like, there's a problem to be solved. I'm curious. Let me go apply my curiosity and the skills that I have to seeing if I can help figure out that problem. And then once it's figured out, kind of looking for the next problem and just keeping that curiosity alive throughout all those years. And then also this strong sense of synthesis, you know, trying to, to blend the insights from these different problem solving opportunities and then apply them.

Take that to a more, I don't know, you land the plane a little bit more and say, 'cause that's great and I love that, but I think what a lot of thought leaders struggle with is the business side of this, right?

Yeah.

How do I validate that what I have, there's a market for? How do I take my stuff to market? How do I get paid and paid well and paid often for the ideas that I have? Because the concept of the starving artist is like, it's a lovely concept. It's, it's, I don't think it's a necessary one for thought leaders to make a vow of poverty.

No, no. And I, like I say, I, I was spent decades actually working as a technologist. Yeah. And then at some point, uh, in 2009, I decided to start an agency. I had, I'd actually left one role and been hired on to be the managing director of an agency, uh, that was doing sort of marketing, digital marketing work. And I really wasn't that excited about digital marketing services. I started an agency thereafter called MetaMarketer, and it was an analytics firm. It was meant to be strategy as a service. And so what, what we did was, uh, help companies, uh, implement analytics in a way that would give them better insights about their customers, may help them make more data-driven decisions. So 5 years I had that company, and in the process of growing that company, I did a lot of speaking, a lot of writing, a lot of thought leadership, um, to make sure we were out front and center. And that the way we capitalized on that obviously was selling services on the backend of that.

So I, I'll stay there for a minute. 'Cause that's, I think that's, you know, I see this a lot where I didn't deliberately wake up one day and say, today I will be a thought leader. It's like, okay, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm trying to grow the business. I don't have the resources of my competitors that are 10 times my size, but I have this skill. I can speak, I have ideas, I have research, whatever. So I'm gonna use that to get out into the marketplace. Whether I get paid for that or not isn't the point. The point is elevating the brand. The point is standing out from the competition, cost-effectively acquiring clients and all that. So you become sort of not necessarily the voice of the brand per se, but you're spreading these ideas and then people are going, wow, tell me more. Can you help me? So I love that. And I, I preach that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And then you probably realized you liked it.

Like, hey, I did. I really liked it. I did. You know, in the early years of doing that, I was, you know, doing side sessions, breakout sessions, conferences, talking about case studies and success stories we'd had, you know, where we increased the whitespace around a conversion opportunity by 10 pixels and increased it by 12%, you know, like really kind of fascinating stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah. Detail and stuff. But, you know, in a, in a way that I was learning how to tell these kinds of things in a way that was engaging and fun and that interesting, people could get takeaways from them. And so I got invited to bigger and bigger stages and to the main stage and eventually got started getting paid for doing keynotes. And at that point, I think it was clear to me that was the direction I wanted to go. And so I exited MetaMarketer and started Video Insights in 2014. And that was the intent, was to be a full-time professional speaker, author, you know, just generally like a thought leader doing these different kinds of distribution channels and, and making money at it. So that's been the, the, the chase ever since. And it's really been, it's been that for the, all those years until over the last few years, I really decided that KO Insights is really, I'm not building it the way that I, or I had not been building it the way that it had the opportunity to build, which is this, I think, a more future-ready version of a, a mini Gartner or McKinsey or something like that, where it takes on more of an analyst consultancy sort of brand. And there's a lot of credibility that comes along with the brand as opposed to just from me personally.

So stay there.

There's that.

This is, I'm one of the few people that are fascinated by the, this part of the journey. It's like, welcome to my world. Right? So I think that, you know, I always, I always joke with folks that, that, you know, there are two types of folks that come to work with us, right? Those that say, make me a rockstar. Right. And that's fine, whatever. And then the others that say, please make me irrelevant. Right?

Yeah.

So you're at this phase where it's not the Kate show, not that you're not an important part of it, but it's an organization that you are obviously one of the assets, but it's really about the IP. It's about the ideas. It's about all those things. And yeah, if, if you wanna pay Kate the big bucks to come and go to your conference, you should do that 'cause she's really good. But I like the idea of sort of the mini Gardner, the more agile, the sort of next gen, whatever. Because then ultimately at some point they're gonna go, Kate who? And that's a beautiful thing. Might be a little damaging to the ego, right? But it's actually actually a great thing, I think.

No, it's about the impact for me. Yeah. Like, it's about, you know, a, and one of the initiatives we have, uh, we're just launching now, I'm calling 10,000 Boardrooms for 1 Billion People. And it's really about getting into, you know, either metaphorically or physically into 10,000 boardrooms, helping make the decisions that get made at that level, or even a level or two down in the VP office.

Yeah.

Whatever that are affecting many, many people downstream of those decisions. So we are tracking that. We're setting up metrics and, and, uh, dashboards that are giving us a lot of visibility into how is it that me speaking to an audience of, you know, 400 CEOs then translates into the kinds of decisions that they make, you know, for further from those, those events and trying to get buy-in from those organizations that they're committing to being part of that process to making these more intentional decisions. So, I am, you know, I have ego as much as anybody, but to me it's not so much whether it's the Cate Show or isn't the Cate Show. It's like, which of these is the brand or the, the, the lever that's going to get us access? Like, is it going to be the KO Insights way in or the Cate O'Neill way in or the Tech Humanist Show way in? Or, you know, which of these is going to be the way that's going to open the door and help us have the conversation we want to have?

I like that focus on the board 'cause it's a definable target market. Mm-hmm. Right. And I think the, the, one of the things going around in boardrooms today around the world is there's a lack of, I'm gonna say a lack of honesty, but a lack of saying, hey, let's really look around this table and who here is really best qualified to answer the issues that we're dealing with now.

Right. Mm-hmm.

Right. Like there's a lot of, and I'm not, I'm not dinging board members. They're accomplished, they're smart.

Sure.

Each come from a different discipline or a diff— you know, they all bring something to the table. They tend to be a little older, right? And they tend to have gotten there based on their track record of success, right? But no one's lived through what we've all lived through in the last 10 years or will live through in the next 10. So I think this, this concept of bringing someone in to sort of plant the seeds of ideas into the board, once they get it, they're smart, they'll figure out the things that they need to do. But I love the idea of sort of being the, the, the Johnny Appleseed of tech humanism.

That is it. It's Johnny Appleseed indeed. It's the Katie Appleseed, although Lloydie Ellen Katie, so we're not doing that. No, no, no. Kato Appleseed will do that. And I get to keep my apostrophe in my name, which causes all sorts of e-commerce trouble, but I like it.

Yeah, why did e-commerce never figure out someone has an apostrophe?

I know, or hyphens for that matter. Like, how many people have hyphenated last name? Yeah, like an itis. Irish itis.

Exactly. Cool. So what are the other things as, as we're looking like things that you're interested, intrigued, excited about going into the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months? Like, what, what are, what are the things that you're noodling on now that we'll inevitably, we'll hear in the next keynote or book or whatever?

Well, I think one of the things I'm paying a lot of attention to right now, uh, we sort of alluded to slightly, which is that in order for these te— these tensions to be resolved between tech business and human, I think over the coming years, what we're going to be seeing a lot more of is a greater understanding of the taxonomy of trust and of risk. Like, those two concepts really need to be better understood in order for people to make better decisions. And we— so we see AI, I think, the AI acceleration of decision-making and of what it means to business.

Like really put acceleration's not necessarily good, right? So when we talk about, you know, decision-making, you go to Kahneman, Fast and Slow Brain and all this other stuff, like AI enables or allows us to do things at a wicked speed, right? But that's not always good. Sometimes that need to be contemplative, to have a, you know, some thinking time when you're taking a walk or in the shower or whatever. AI never says, okay, and here's the answer. By the way, think about that over the next 2 days, right?

Exactly.

Before you do anything with it.

100% why in the subtitle of my, uh, my book, What Matters Next, the long subtitle is A Leader's Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That's Moving Too Fast. And that moving too fast piece really is speaking to that sense of acceleration, because I heard that from leaders again and again and again over the last few years. I would step off stage, you know, maybe there was a formal Q&A, maybe there wasn't during a keynote, uh, and maybe somebody asked a question that spoke to this, but usually It's more the one-on-one question afterward where, you know, a CEO comes up to me and says, you know, confidentially, thank you so much. This is great learning, great vocabulary and frameworks. I've needed this because my board just does not listen to what I have to say. And they want us to be moving faster and they want us to be accelerating, like leaning hard into this AI space. And we just don't know what we're doing there. And we just don't know what the consequences of those decisions are going to be. I mean, like, I can tell you how many dozens of those kinds of questions and feedback I've gotten from executives, uh, privately.

Those aren't things that they can say out loud to their teams and their board of, hey, I'm scared. Right? They need to exude confidence, whether it's real or not. They can say, holy crap, I don't know what I'm doing and I'm scared to death at the speed at which I'm doing it.

Right?

Like, nobody wants to hear that from them.

That's what's scary. Yeah. Yeah. About this moment is that there is this sense that no one can speak honestly about the, the conditions of the moment, right?

Yeah.

That, that we're pushing for these incredibly powerful decisions to be made with incredibly far-reaching consequences at greater scale and capacity than we've ever known before. And we're asking those decisions to be made by people who have genuinely no understanding of the complexity of which they're dealing with. So it's a, it's a real problem.

I'll set you out of a channel note.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so that's what this book was meant to address, was, was to try to put some decision-making tools in the hands of leaders who needed them, and in a non-judgmental way, in a way that was like, hey, look, I get it. Like, I can hear from you that this is very stressful. I have empathy for what you're going through, and here are some ways to better frame the future and make it less scary and less uncertain. And here are some ways to stockpile some insights so that the next time you're making a decision, you're doing it with more wisdom and you can do what I call ethical acceleration. You can move into rapid decision-making, but with a sense of insights and foresights that you've already accumulated because you've done the work ahead of time to make sure that you're making those decisions wisely. So there's, I think there's an awful lot of this that still needs doing. Uh, and you know, I have years ahead of me, I hope, uh, helping, helping leaders do it. Uh, but I also hope that it just becomes part of the social discourse that, you know, this becomes something that we understand a bit more culturally as a need and that business schools catch up and, you know, yeah.

Well, that's gonna take a lot. That's a whole nother topic. Well, this has been amazing. I appreciate your sharing your story with us and dropping wisdom.

So thank you, Peter.

Great stuff. I appreciate you, Kate. Thank you.

Cheers.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.