How To Thrive In the Age of AI with One Simple Identity Shift | Tony Robbins x Robert Smith

People just don't realize how important persistence is. The willingness to never give up and just keep going no matter what the obstacle. That theme comes up over and over again. I don't think there's a replacement for that. But I'm curious, when you look at your success in business and in life, besides your ability to solve problems, what do you think has caused you to raise to such a high level? Is it that persistence, you know, that, that relentlessness? Is it that the fact that you have both the financial and the technical? You're an engineer and yet a brilliant financial mind and training. Is it focusing on the sector you did? Because no one was into SaaS at the beginning, right? Or SaaS. They were— they didn't think it was worthwhile, I think, when you started in 2000. Right. What do you think has been the most important elements that have helped you to succeed? I know you're very humble, but pretty obvious you've succeeded at a level most humans will never dream of.

I think it's a lot of what you said. And, you know, that relentless curiosity. Curiosity podcast. And I bet if you talk to, you know, I know you do talk to, you know, thousands of people a year. Yes. You will find those who are successful in their field remain curious. I agree. They are those who know they don't always have the answer and they ask the next set of questions.

Yes.

And from that they get informed and it brings insights and then they can bring their own intention and their energy against that to solve whatever problem they may be focused on or say, hmm, this is another problem that I can solve and it'd be interesting to solve it. So it's that, I think it's that curious nature, which is essential.

That curious nature is so unusual because most people, they give it up. They get to that first wall, if you will, and they just stop. So how do you coach people to get through that wall and to just continue to persist even when it gets frustrating?

Or question, or do you work to find people that just already have that in their nature?

I think so. It's a great question. Being a father, you want all your kids to have that.

Yes, yes.

Not all of them do. Yes. And you have to think about, well, what is it that I can do? And to me, there are things like sports. Yes. Okay. Sports in some respects, you know, you know, you, when you have a child who's doing something or my, my kids are, you know, play chess, right? Yeah. And, and you see them hit a wall and so you can tell them the answer or you can help them discover how they go about solving that problem. And that gives them a little more confidence. Yes. And each time they get a little more confidence, they get a little more confident. Yeah. Right. And I think that's a big part of it. And we as parents, as you know, you know, part of our job is to prepare that child for that journey, not prepare that, you know, that, that the path for them.. And it's a hard thing to do. But when you find students, you know, employees who have that and you can recognize it, you ask the right questions, you figure out, you know, a lot of it is tell me about your origin story, tell me how you grew up. And you listen to how they describe what it is that got them to that place. Yeah. That's when you start identifying, okay, here's somebody with that spark who's not gonna take no for an answer.

We call it a lot in our firm, we call it grit.

Right.

Right. It's that grit. It's really hard to identify.

Yeah.

But when you find somebody with grit, they usually will persist and they usually will figure it out.

And so part of it is, you know, what are the things and where do you need that grit in certain circumstances? Look, when all boats are rising in a marketplace, yeah, everybody's making money.

And you think everybody thinks they're a genius.

They're brilliant, right? Okay. Grit is when you see downturns, okay? And when you see changes in market conditions and when you see the introduction of new technologies into the theater in which you have been operating. And do you ignore it? Do you embrace it? Do you, do you, do you make it a part now of your DNA and how do you do that? And so when it, when you talk about, okay, what has made you successful? It's we have built an institution that evolves technology, enterprise software. It evolves. The early days of this, all on-premise.

Yes.

Okay. And then we saw the recognition of SaaS or hosted. Yeah. And I said, okay, there's a couple things you can do. You can ignore what is going to be the reality or you can build an infrastructure. So what we did, We built a factory. We built a conversion factory to convert from on-premise to cloud. And as far as I know today, we have converted more businesses from on-premise to cloud than any institution on the planet. Well, now we have a new technology, don't we? This new general purpose technology we're calling, you know, artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence. So guess what we're doing now? We are building a factory, okay, to go from SaaS or hosted to agentic. And so we have 89 of our companies pivoting in that direction. All of them. Okay. Certain will become agentic. Some will I call what I call GenAI enabled. But that has been the last 2 years of pivot, understanding that this new technology changes everything again. But you've got to have an institution that can evolve.

I'm going to help the audience out here a little bit because most people have no idea what agentic means. So walk us through that and explain that.

Sure. That's good.

And how important is the adoption of AI for— small businesses as well as big, large-size businesses, right?

Yeah, it, it's critical. So the way to think about— so artificial intelligence, there's kind of what we'll call traditional AI. So for instance, when, you know, a few years ago we would go and say, oh, I want to take a trip and I want to go to Paris and I want to go on a restaurant tour and go to museums, and you could go online and a— what you would have is an artificial intelligence agent would actually identify places where you could go. Great. Okay, now it'll do it for you. Now, not only will it do it for you, it will book it and it will make changes and adjust for you. So that's kind of the modern AI. That's agentic. These agents now can do something. They do stuff.

Actually, they replace employees. And I was talking to Mark Manyoff about this. He called me in the middle of the night about a year ago and said, this is it. This is the piece. I can't believe what this will do. I can take companies and they can have 500 new employees and doing things really effectively with this technology. Right. So how are you using that in your company?

So if you think about it again, we have— now, this is an interesting math. So this is what we're working against. We have 750 million users of our software globally. Wow. Okay. So if you think about 89 software companies operating in 180 countries, we're in 70 different industries, 750 million users of our software. Initially, there will— each of those users will have 2 to 5 agents. Ultimately, they'll have 10 to 12 agents. We're going from having 750 million users of our software to 8 to 10 billion agents. Wow. Okay. Now these agents work 24/7, 365. If you tune them properly— and they stay fully engaged, fully engaged all the time. They don't have to, you know, go and, you know, pick up kids from school and all that sort of stuff. But which creates a whole nother set of issues that we're all going to have to think about.

I know that.

But, you know, as a fiduciary, my job is to bring maximum efficacy to the assets that we control and that we own. And so what our factory is doing is building all all the infrastructure and the components to make, to convert users in essence to agentic solutions. So each agent will have specific tasks associated with it. And even within that construct, you have to have an agent that each agent has to be protected. You have to have cybersecurity around it. It has to operate in an environment in the enterprise. Consumer is very different. Okay. Because, you know, the three of us after this, we could say, hey, let's go to a Thai place, right? And we could go online and send an agent and I'll find 10 of them. Yeah. 9 of them will be open. One have been— one has been closed for 3 years. Right. Yeah. And right now, just kind of is with book the appointment, all that. In the enterprise, no, you need 100% accuracy, certainty. Right. Because we have to go and say, I'm sure you wouldn't want your, your, your, you know, your check get wire transferred to someone else at 99.5% efficiency. You want 100%. Yeah. So there's aspects that enterprise software brings to an agentic world that agentic can't do on its own.

Right.

Remember, the enterprise software are the trusted— are the trusted providers of the infrastructure, the workflows, and the data today. Yes. So, you know, Bidiyof, we talk about this, we laugh about this a little bit, you know, people say, oh, is AI going to eat software? No, AI is going to feed software, enterprise software. Okay.

That's what Marc said. Marc, from Salesforce, he said this will transform Salesforce, as powerful as the company is, to a different level in terms of servicing their customers. Absolutely.

So let's do this. Explain how it's going to feed software? Sure. How is that going to feed and actually help build software? Because I think people get really confused about the two.

Sure, there are aspects of it. So let's talk about just one aspect. One of the most important parts of running an enterprise software company is writing code. Yes. Okay, we already have deployed, you know, code generation across 100% of our companies. So the efficacy—

how much faster is it, by the way? How much effective— more effective is it?

40% more effective today But that's today. Next week is probably gonna be 80%. That's just one aspect where AI feeds software. That's just on a cost side. Okay. On a revenue side, you think of, we, we have some solutions today where we have an orchestration agent with 9 separate agents that do the work of a customer service person, right? Or a salesperson with 24/7, 365 efficacy. So if you have a customer service person who's trying to understand some changes in their customer base, Somebody changed jobs and it was posted on LinkedIn that that job got changed. Well, your customer service agent may have 300, 400 clients that he's covering, has no idea. Our agents know immediately. Okay. And create an activity. So another set of agents now start kicking in and doing work in and around what it takes to support not only that client, but the impact and implications of whoever is moving in into that role and what the impact is on the companies that it serves. Okay. This works today. This works today. So that's part of, and that's why we partner with Microsoft. We want the foundry aspects. You've got to create environment, you've got to create cybersecurity, you've got to create telemetry, you've got to create all the aspects associated with ensuring that these agents do exactly what you want and not anything you don't want it to do. Okay, so that's an important part of this whole transformation. So that's what we've been doing the last couple of years, Alice, is building this factory. And so I'm really excited about it.