AI Lessons for Startups: UNICEF Keynote | Thomas Anglero

So let's get started. I am thrilled to be introducing our first guest. We're going to be doing a fireside chat with Thomas Anglero. Thomas is the Nordic Chief Technology Officer— sorry, Technology Innovation Officer at Cognizant. He's a podcaster and he is the author of the book Intro to Artificial Intelligence and How to Benefit from It., which is available on Amazon. You can go and check it out over there. Now, Thomas is also a public speaker. He motivates, energizes, and connects with audiences across the world. He has a remarkable personal journey that has seen him launch two startups, coach a championship basketball team, and become an executive at a global technology company. He has a wealth of expertise. He has some very exciting lessons to share as well. Thomas, thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you. And I love that intro. You embarrass me, but thank you.

Well, it was hard to pull all your expertise and your experiences in such a short amount of time. I mean, you're a serial founder. You've started two startups, but also managed companies worldwide.

Yeah.

What can you tell us about the lessons you learned? What would you say are the biggest lessons you learned throughout this journey?

Wow. The biggest, the biggest lesson— I gotta change my tone because it comes with, with the answer comes a lot of pain, right? The biggest lesson is you gotta truly believe in you. It is so lonely. It is so lonely. And I mean, you're a CEO, you're done, you know, startups, right? It's so lonely when, first of all, nobody understands your idea. It's so lonely when you sent out God knows how many emails and you get rejection, rejection, rejection. It's so lonely when you don't have the funds. And in my situation, I wasn't taking salary out of the company. You just gotta believe in you more than anything else. But you have to be at the same time humble. No one wants to talk to anybody who's like, "I'm gonna conquer the world, da da da da, I'm gonna buy a Ferrari tomorrow." Who cares about that individual? You have to come off, You have to— and also you have to learn, you have to learn how to make a friend in 30 seconds. How do you impress somebody with your voice, your tone of voice? How do you impress someone with just your body language? That is so important. They, they're not just investing in your tech, in your idea. The first thing they do is investing in you. Do I believe you? Do I trust you? That is number Number one, right? And then, and also humble, humble is a big piece of it too. You could be a great idea, but at the same time be a nice person. But I think also the other one is think insanely big, right? Don't just say, oh, I got a reply. It doesn't make any sense. Why didn't I get a reply back from the President of the United States? It's the level of like where you should be at. I mean, just set insane insane goals. And then the last one I'll share, I will share something that what I did, and everybody, when I share this, people think I'm crazy. But I said this thing, this thing to myself every day when I woke up: I am not going to eat my first meal until I do something that no one's ever done before, until I have to do something so innovative that no one's ever done before. That's when I meet my first meal of the day. And there was so many days that I didn't eat breakfast until 3 o'clock in the afternoon. But that's that. You got to set that bar. You're not doing it to impress anybody. You're not doing it to be the next influencer on social media. You're doing it because you woke up in the morning and you did. You said, I cannot exist unless I do this. I have to give birth to this idea. That is the intensity that you have to have, you know. And every time at the startup, you know, I would— both times I quit my job to do the startup. Which my wife hates, right? And what happened both times was at 4 o'clock in the morning, I nudged her and she goes, no, not again. I go, yeah, I have to give birth to this idea. And then she goes, I'll support you. Let's do it. So yeah, that, that's, but I mean, every, all these wonderful startups, they, they know this. And I wanna tell you, it's okay to feel that way. You're not weird. You're a beautiful person. You're the ones that are gonna change the world. Keep going, just keep going. It's fantastic.

I love that. And I relate that so much personally as a founder, as a solo founder as well. I remember at the beginning, one of the entrepreneurs, one of the colleagues that were also trying to start to get started, to get that ball rolling, saying, you know what, I am tired of pretending it's going amazing, right? And yeah, one nice—

I'll keep the story very short. The change moment where my startup was struggling, struggling, struggling. It happened when I was coming home from the store. I had 2 plastic bags full of food. And then all of a sudden I fell to my knees. The plastic bags emptied out into the streets, the sidewalk, cans are rolling all over the place. And I started to cry. And I started to cry and people walking by me and I'm crying because at that moment, you know what I realized? The biggest problem with my startup, why everything has been going down, was me. It was me. My whole head was wired the wrong way. When I understood that I was a problem, that all my attitude, my perception of people, it was me, I felt this thing just lift. And do you know, within a week I got funding and the things, right? So yeah, it's a powerful personal Journey is not the Elon Musk Tesla thing. It is actually, it's the Elon Musk story that nobody talks about. You just talk about the stuff after the, you know, the IPO and all that stuff. But all the other stuff, we all go through it. You're normal. Everything, you're fine. Trust me. The crying by yourself, the not believing in yourself, the, the depression, the sleepless nights, you're normal. You, you're part of the family. Welcome to family. You're good.

Love that. Love that. I mean, um, You have a lot of experience as well in the AI field. You've recently published a book as well, and we're seeing all this hype around it, right? We're actually today here to see so many startups that are using frontier technologies to change the world. What is your vision on AI and the hype around generative AI and ChatGPT in particular?

Well, I was, I was with IBM for 5 years and I was the global spokesperson for AI with them. Done hundreds of keynotes on AI and all of a sudden here comes ChatGPT and the whole world goes, what, what is this? What happened? I've been talking about this for years, right? So it hit me last night in the shower when I was prepping for this. I go, you know what? I got a good analogy to make people understand this. If you're old enough to remember when the internet started, that's telling my age. I apologize for all the young people who are starting up companies. You guys have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'm like Father Time to you.

I remember when the internet started, and the internet was around for quite a few years, but when Internet Explorer came, that's when everybody said, oh, the internet. But there was the internet before that, and actually was something called Slipknot that you had to run on a Unix machine and all that. So I mean, just going back, but so ChatGPT is the Internet Explorer moment, is when all of a sudden somebody creates a browser that made the internet accessible for everybody. ChatGPT makes AI accessible for grandma and grandpa. What should I cook for dinner? I have beans and rice, or, right? So this, that's number one. We are at that huge moment. So ChatGPT is not hype. It's not. ChatGPT, AI is done.

It's here.

It is implemented. It is embedded into every facet of our lives. We are, you can never remove it. Done. Just forget about it. This is not hype. This is not a dot-com. This is, this is reality. What I'm super excited about is that the announcement from Apple with their 3D headsets, the timing of the ChatGPT excitement and virtual reality coming at the same time, this world we're going into. As I said, I'm father time. I actually was born when there was no internet. Everybody on this call grew up with an IP address, I always say, right? They only know internet, right?

Yeah.

The people on this call— there's someone who's smiling, that's cool— when you guys have kids, your kids will grow up only knowing virtual reality. The world is changing so fast and there's no way to take it back. This is so exciting. I mean, it's insane. It's like the day when everybody found about Internet Explorer and people go I remember the word, everybody was pronounced the internet, we go internet. I was like, it's embarrassing to say the word that way today, right?

Yeah.

We, it's, this is so huge. So this is a permanent change. The opportunities are immense. I see marketplaces like the Apple marketplace or apps and stuff like that. So I was talking to one company the other day. I said, listen, you have your shipping company, you have tremendous amount of data, train your AI, your language models so that you could actually resell that. That AI, that knowledge is sellable. Just because you're a shipping company, you ship goods all over the world, that's not your business in the future. You can make more money off of training an AI and selling that to other companies that need that knowledge. You have to think, everybody, you have to think beyond what you're thinking today. Think big. Remember I said, why didn't the president email me back last night? Think that big with your ideas. New business models, new revenue models. Be crazy. If you're not crazy, you're not at it. You're not there. You've got to think like ridiculous. Redefine the world. And matter of fact, you can redefine the world with ChatGPT, right? So you're not alone anymore. When we did our startups, there was no ChatGPT. It was just us and a pen, right? So yeah, I'm super excited because this is real. This is a huge opportunity to improve our lives. There's a huge opportunity to improve healthcare. And the last thing I see, because I— is that mental health, people being lonely.

It's—

you can have a virtual— you have an AI, an avatar or something that's going to talk to you and keep you company. That does not replace love. That does not replace a hug. Nothing replaces a hug. I don't care what you say. But you wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning. Let's go back to startups. You feel lonely. Wouldn't it be wonderful to talk to somebody, say your mother, and they're sleeping? Your grandmother, you can't reach out to them. You're gonna have these AIs. I know it sounds weird, but I'm telling you, a startup just took some influencer woman, they, they put her voice, they trained it on 20,000 hours of her voice from, from the internet, and then they made an avatar and they released it on the internet. She gets paid They charge $1 per minute to talk to her virtual AI. She has 18,000 people signed up. Yeah, it's, it's, it's here. Don't think it's weird. It's here. This digital society, right? We have the real society where you can pinch and touch yourself. Now we have the digital society and we've now merged the two. And I think it's beautiful. It's strange, but it is beautiful. And think of it as a beautiful thing. How can I help my mother or my friend or this person who needs help with this? Think of it that way and you will solve huge problems and you will be the next president of the United States or whatever country you want to choose. This is a beautiful point. I'm so excited that— and I'm excited for them, right? They got another 40 years in them. I don't.

Right, right. I mean, it's just like you said, right? It's another mindset and It's on the one hand mind-blowing to hear the way new possibilities open up, and on the other hand, we have a lot of hype around the dangers, right, of AI, people claiming or fearing it would take people's jobs. So what is your vision on how it could affect society going forward?

You know, I answer that question always the same way. It's when the first automobile came, when the car goes down the street, and the car runs over people, is the car's fault? It's the driver who decided to go on the sidewalk and run people over. It's a crazy example, but it's just a tool. And it's human beings that train the tool to do these things. Now, the problem— not the problem, the challenge we have with AI is that AI is creating new AI and they're speaking a unique language that we don't understand. And when it gives us conclusions, the creators go, we don't know why it came to that conclusion. So that, that's like a rogue child. If you have a, you know, you have 5 kids, 4 of them okay, one of them is driving me out of my mind all the time. So, the answer really is that we are responsible for AI and, and you can't just say AI is bad. We will train the AI. We have to be responsible AI and we have to have that intelligent discussion saying, I'm not just creating it to make a billion dollars and 'cause I want a new Ferrari. I'm a responsible human being. I'm accountable, and I'm gonna take some steps before I do this. And there will be individuals who don't care. There are always bad people in society. So bad people will do bad things. Good people will do good things, and life will continue. And good versus bad, you know, yin versus yang. Welcome to the universe. This is the way we're gonna proceed. It's just in a more powerful, faster way with AI.

Definitely, definitely. And it's all about the input, right, that AI receives in a way.

It's a— so it starts with the human input. Mm-hmm. And then the AI creates its own input. It could create its own synthetic data. And when it looks at its own answer, it comes to its own conclusion. And if a human being doesn't interrupt it, sort of like a kid, it does something. And if no one— if the parent doesn't say that's bad, the kid will go, okay. And then it goes on to the next thing. And then it amplifies, right? So you used to do the same thing to AI. You've come to a conclusion. No, no, no, that's not the right conclusion. You know, AI is a baby, right? And, um, I always give the example of if you have one child that you raise on candy and cake and brownies, that kid is not going to grow up to be a great kid, probably very sick. But you grow up another one on apples and carrots and all those wonderful things. What you give the AI will be the outcome of the AI. Be a responsible parent. And this is not just for developers. The, the, the AIs can develop themselves. You can write their own code. So I'm talking to everybody listening. You are the parent of the AI. It is your responsibility that your child, that AI, be it Siri or whatever, grows up to be a responsible human being. You're responsible. Don't blame it on any nerd or anything like that.

Yeah, I love that. And I think that's such a powerful metaphor, right? The kid that needs to be educated. Well, Thomas, thank you so, so much for your insights, for your motivation. I honestly leave this conversation very inspired.

Yeah.

Yes. I think all of our startups will as well. So you've given them a lot of strength just ahead of their pitch. Thank you so much once again.

Thank you. And to all of you, believe in yourself. Believe, believe you're not alone. Believe. We believe in you. Good luck.

Thank you.

Thank you.