AI Unveiled: Steering Through the Digital Transformation

If AI is going to work, it has to be cross functional, cross departmental. You know, you're not just going to be like, oh, well, we've got this team here and they just do AI. Well, yeah, for why? I mean, because we know you need to find your marketing and you need AI yourselves. You need to find your, you know, services and your operations and you need to AI for your accounting and your finance.

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Hey everybody. This is the episode of Business Lunch that you have been waiting for where we're going to talk about AI stuff and in particular we're going to talk about some really cool AI stuff and some new trends that are happening with people. I am your host, Roland Frazier and your co host is Ryan Deiss. Ryan, how you doing?

I'm doing very, very well. So we're talking AI stuff. That's the point.

AI stuff. Yes, I know I told you we were going to talk about the other thing, but we're going to talk about AI stuff.

Change in the mind mid intro?

No, it came into my head that way. So now we're committed. We've come too far. We're going to talk about that. So I sent you an article that talked about a new position that is the subject of a lot of debate and I think that it would be fun for us to talk about. Do we think this is a position that needs to be there? Is it something people should focus on? And, and if so, what do we think of it? And this is the. I think it's the chief Artificial Intelligence Officer or a Director of AI. So we all know that AI is revolutionary, revolutionizing things. It's only been around a short time, yet it's had this outsized impact. You and I have multiple businesses that are helping people with that. We've incorporated it into all of our businesses or it's on schedule to be incorporated. What do you think about the position of similar to a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Information Officer, a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer.

So I'm normally very suspect of new fangled C level rules, right? Like, I mean there's the classics of Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Financial Officer. There are certain ones that have just been there forever because it's just business. And then every now and then you'll have new ones that will emerge that some of them, you know, seem to be done more for like kind of political, you know, PR type reasons and others are more because of, of a timeliness type deal. So when I think about like the, the chief, you know, Information Officer, the cio, that's a role that, you know, largely was responsible for digital transformation. It existed, it was really, really big in a lot of companies and now you're seeing it less and less. You know, a lot of it's been absorbed into the Chief Technology Officer type role and even that role has oftentimes been kind of distributed. You don't really have a cto. What you have is technology people who are down at the functionality business level. So I'm normally very suspect of these things. This is one though where I think I'm buying it, at least in the short term. Like, so I don't know that this role, the Chief AI Officer, I don't know that it's a role that will necessarily be here 10 years from now. Because I do believe that AI is going to be permeated within everything. But I think it is so important that to give this role, even if it is just a 5 to 10 year C level role, to give it that, that C level priority. I think it, I think it makes sense, I think it can send a message. But again, I don't think it's a role that's going to be around, you know, necessarily a decade from now because like some of these other things, it's just going to be embedded into all of them. So that's kind of what I think about it tonight. I'm not certain that businesses should be hiring for these internally unless they're big. I think you could probably get a like a fractional, you know, person to come in and Help you do the implementation teacher people and then be gone. But I would have it before. I wouldn't. Certainly it's better than just burying your head in the sand and saying this AI stuff doesn't matter to me.

I don't know.

What do you think?

I think that what you said at the end there is, is really insightful. I think that I would have it rather than not have it because I think that there are going to be a lot of businesses that disappear because they get swallowed up by people who embrace AI and implement fast and, and it will be really hard to come back from the, the lead that those companies get. I think about adding. I like the way that you approached it too because it's the same way I do is I like thinking about who should I add to the C suite. Because really the C suite people other than the CEO should all report to the CEO. So I think about is this a direct report kind of position? And I think the answer is maybe, you know, with you too. It's like I don't see that a chief AI officer as a direct report to the CEO really is probably appropriate long term. I think that a chief AI consultant that the company brings in who briefs the C suite, including the CEO would be important. I'm not sure that I would have that person report the CEO. I think it's probably a CEO, excuse me, a COO report. If you have a small to medium sized company, I think that you definitely want to do this with consultant versus or someone who's coming in that's really dedicated the company. Because the other challenge is that I think with our AI Powered Entrepreneur program, in putting that together, I feel like we learned that it's a massive undertaking to transform a company across all the 12 major departments. You would want to do for AI to be fully integrated into the company. And if somebody's going to do that, it's going to require them to have the power to work within multiple departments. So putting them in a C position where they would have the ability to do that makes sense. But at the same time they don't really have any reports that are in those other divisions. So they shouldn't go outside the chain of command to do that. Which means that really you need them as more of a support function like legal or finance where they are saying, hey, we've sat and AI fied our brains here and this is what we feel is appropriate. They sell it to the other C suite heads and then the implementation and integration is coordinated together. So it goes chain of command to the people that need to do it. But I really see that I don't know that that person should be reporting to and bugging the CEO who's got other jobs and things to consider. I feel like they, they could easily be briefed by somebody else. So I think I'm going to argue no for the position at that level as a direct report to CEO. I think having a director of AI, a vice president of AI until it does become ubiquitously integrated into all of the different programs, because it's definitely not right now. There is absolutely a function of how do we AI ify stuff in our business and somebody's gotta be in charge of it. I think they're probably going to report to the COO and be a VP or a director or a head of more than anything else. And I definitely think it's better to have it than not have it. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I agree, I agree with you. I could easily see this being the most hated person on the C level team. Why? Because I think I know.

But why?

Because you're talking about somebody who, if AI is going to work, it has to be cross functional, cross departmental. You know, you're not just going to be like, oh well, we've got this team here and they just do AI. Well, yeah. For why? I mean, because we know you need to AI for your marketing and you need AI for your sales. You need to aify your, you know, services and your operations and you need to aify your accounting and your finance and your, like, what aren't you AI ifying? And it does, it reminds me of like the Chief Transformation Officer was a thing for a while, right? And this person's job was to come in and head up digital transformation. And only everybody hated this person because they basically function like an internal outside consultant. But it the reason that, and I think that this is really important for C level people. One of the benefits of having a consultant is everybody's allowed to hate that person. Yeah. And so as a CEO, you bring in a consultant because they tell you all of the things that internally it would be politically disadvantageous for somebody to say. But the consultant's basically like, hey, you brought me in to do a job and my job is to tell you, here are the things that are broken that you need to get fixed. And if you don't like me, that's fine because it ain't like we're hanging out at the company picnic, right? I'm gonna be going back over there and. And I believe that this role it is gonna be inherently disruptive to what everybody's doing. And it's disruption that will be have, you know, have positive yields in the long term. But in the short term it's going to be a pain in the butt. It's going to be scary. You're going to have folks who've been leading departments and doing things a certain way and now all of a sudden you're telling them not to do it that way. But to use this newfangled technology that, let's face it, we saw this with the Internet, with digital transformation as a whole. We've seen this play out. It's necessary, it's critical. The companies that do it will win. The companies that don't will fail. We know that. And yet still everybody hates it. And so, you know, I struggle with it and I'm, I'm excited about this stuff but like integrating AI into my existing workflow and I know how to do it. It's a struggle and I want to do it right, but it's a struggle. And now I've got somebody who's a peer telling me I need to change the way I do my job. Now I just think that that creates. Yeah, exactly. That has the potential to create so much friction and be so counterproductive at a C level team which needs to be a high trust organization. Yeah. In talking about, I've come all the way around this should not exist as a C level role. You heard it here first, folks. Bring this poor bastard in from the outside. Let them tell everybody that they're wrong. Let them get paid really well to be hated but still get the job done. And I just don't think you could do that if you're on the C level.

Yeah. And thinking about what somebody in that job, I don't know what the pay is because I did not see that in the article and I didn't have a chance to look, we do know that good prompt engineers are commanding 300, $400,000 and that's people that are, that are generally computer savvy. Like it goes far beyond, you know, can you enter a query into chat GPT. But, but so I would assume this person would be in the, let's call it 3 to $500,000 range. And I think if you took that money and invested it in good consulting to get each of the divisions or, or even broad parts of the company done and AI iFied, you probably spend less. You've got your tool budget and the expenses that you'd have to spend on that stuff covered in there and, and you get it done faster because you could get three or four people taking each of like somebody to do marketing and sales, somebody to do ops, somebody to do some specific thing like manufacturing supply side or. And then somebody to do the staff functions like legal and HR and stuff. I mean you probably get it done a lot faster. You'd get diversity of opinions and things that each of those three consultants maybe knew that the others didn't. You'd get common things so that you could huddle up maybe and have AI huddle and say, you know this is.

Like, that might be.

It is like an AI implementation task force with a couple of good consultants and we're going to work to harmonize the, we should fight and balance that with. Let's not disrupt our profit centers would be probably a better way to, to manage the implementation in a business than having that one person because that one person then is definitely going to need some support. So now you've got that high paid person plus two or three people under them, you know and they're off on this island as you said. I think that's going to be a big mistake. So it'll be a million dollar a.

Year department if it's small.

I think it is too.

Yeah, it's a million dollar and I don't know a way to get it done competently for less. If you're going to put, call this person the chief, whatever now you know, for some of these massive organizations that's what they're spending on paper clips. It's not a big deal. But I would argue for them they're, they're, they're going to be probably an order of magnitude more than, than the million minimum. But I think to show up if you, yeah, if you've got this person here with some prompt engineers, some integration folks, you're going to need some comms people. I mean it's basically building out an internal agency that needs to do pretty high level technical work.

And I think you get that agency as an agency for way, way less and it's just as good.

Yep. And you don't need to, there's nothing that happens when you, when you do institutionalize something like this. I also would worry very much about siloing, you know of this company is they do AI and so before you can do anything AI related it needs to go through them. I know, I mean I've had the sheer not privilege of selling in to. We've had some companies that sold into larger organizations, you know, enterprise level organizations and it might be an E learning type of program. So I mean, you're thinking like this is not complex technology, but what needed to happen here? Well, because it's elearning, it needed to go through HR because they kind of had the budget for it. But because there was a technology component, people were going to be logging into it. Well, the chief information officer and the chief technical officer needed to review it as well. And any one of these people could kind of squash what was basically, look, do you want your people to know how to do this or not? Yeah. And yet there were these folks who, because in some of these companies technology was centralized, was siloed and there was one arbiter of what is, you know, what technology are we going to approve? And the individual functional business units didn't get to decide themselves. You could just have somebody who, you know, that godlike figure who could decide whether it's a go or no go. And even if they get it right, it still takes forever. So I believe this is an area where you need to be nimble, where you need to try to reduce politics as much as possible. You can't have it siloed because it must be integrated throughout.

And so what you said is a good, is a good, it's, it's a, it's a good oxymoron.

Right.

Because you don't want it to be siloed, but you do need everybody to do it. So really it should be intra departmental. Like it should be within each of the departments that they have a team, you know, of people that are already there that are stakeholders in the department that are making the determination and they've got the advice of a consultant to do their department that, I think that's, you know, kind of harmonizing what you said. Like that's it.

Right.

That's, that's where we end up. The paradox is we need some, we need to have this throughout the whole organization. But we can't have one thing department in the organization that's making that happen. It has to happen in, in the granularity of, of, of the silo. Yeah.

So I don't know. I would, I would pass on this as a C level role. Certainly if you're a small to medium sized company, for the love of God, do not add this to your C level. You know, if you're a small business, you may not need a C level at all. But even like a VP of AI or a director of AI, I think that the other thing that we're going to see, the people who Win these roles. They're going to get paid so much freaking money.

They are.

I mean they're going to, because this is hot right now and they're in demand. They're going to make so much money. And the number of utterly incompetent chuckleheads who are going to rebrand themselves as some kind of like whiz bang AI person with, you know, no real credibility, credentials, no history. And they could in many cases, right, like, well, it's so new, you know, But I mean, it just reminds me of when, you know, digital market, there was a season when digital marketers were getting grossly overpaid. And look, as a digital marketer, as somebody who trained digital marketers, I was rooting them on. But the reality is is there are people who got jobs because they could spell SEO, you know, or because they'd use the Facebooks before. And I think we're going to see the same thing happen here, but ratcheted up a level. So that for that reason also I would just avoid hiring full time for this role, a consultant, if it ain't working out. Done right, done, you can, you can mitigate that risk if you're bringing somebody on full time. Look, you're going to give them, you know, you're going to give them three to six months minimum, minimum in some states you're going to give more than that. And so I'd pass on this as a role, but do not pass on it as an opportunity. You still have to do it, just don't do it this way.

Yep, I agree. I like it. So our advice then is we believe that no matter where you are on the spectrum of startup to Fortune 100 company, Fortune 50s, I guess the smallest group of them I can think of the role of a chief level, a C level AI person should be a no go. When you get to having multi departmental companies and you've got good scale and some operational people in there, it makes sense for each of those departments to put a team together and get their own consultant that they decide they want to work with to help them in their particular area. If you are a smaller to medium sized company and let's say you've got maybe 50 or fewer employees, you're probably better with one AI consultant that has experience in AI. Find the divisions and parts of the business that you've got. There are 12 of them that we've identified. And so what I would do is maybe we can put that in the show notes. But what I would do is say have they got any experience in doing that. And at this point they should. Even though there are, even though it's relatively new, it's been around long enough that the person who's doing consulting should have for sure at least had one thing that they've done so that I would want that. And I think it's probably one person there and they're going to report to you as the, you know, as the owner, operator or primary head of your small to medium sized business. What do you think about that, Ryan, as the kind of.

Yeah, I agree. And then I think start with a department that's enthusiastic about being AI fied. Some will be more than others. And so I would encourage you start with that apart. Maybe it's somebody in marketing who's excited about it or sales. Maybe the finance department feels like they're overwhelmed and they love the idea of being able to run the, you know, the books through some basic AI prompts and for it to produce some insights. Whoever is the most enthusiastic, start there, build up that momentum and then begin to roll it out across the others by as you build your championship. Cause I do think that this is going to be, this is going to be a rollout process that again is essential. It's going to be though, in a lot of organizations, it's going to be tough for some. And that again is why you want that outside person there that's taking the shots for you, that's taking the arrow so you don't have to love it.

Awesome.

Well, hopefully you guys found that helpful. That is it for this episode of Business Lunch. If you enjoyed the program, the best thing you can do to help us is to share it with five people that you think could benefit from it. Hope that you got some actionable advice and we will see you next time on Business Lunch.

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