Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay, everybody, welcome. Today I'm excited to be talking to Bijal Shah, the CEO of Guild.
Guild is a company that's been around for a while, and I'll let Bijal tell you the history and really pioneered the idea and the solution for reskilling and redeployment and re education of employees long ago. And it's gone through quite a bit of change, obviously, with the AI era. Vijil, thank you for joining us.
Tell us a little bit about the company for people that don't know a lot about Guild and then your background and how you came to this responsibility.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Josh, first of all, thank you so much for having me. Super excited to be here and chat with you about all the amazing things we're seeing out in the market. Gilt's mission is to unlock opportunity for America's workforce. We believe the best way to do that is through education, skilling and mobility.
And we do that by working with large employers where we can help expand access to education and skilling so that we can unlock the potential of the employees, but also help the employer build the workforce they need for the future.
And so we think of ourselves as a business that is really focused on the win, win, win for everyone who participates in our marketplace.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: And your background as you came to the company, because I know you're not the founder, but tell us a little about the history because the company's been around for a while.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: So I've worked at Gild for about eight years, largely behind the scenes until I took over the role as CEO. My background actually coming up undergrad was focused on what was called operations research, which is the early predecessor to data science.
Before coming to Guild, I actually ran a machine learning, data science and data products team at a consumer technology company.
And before that I was in payments. I worked in the payment space.
And when you think about what yield is trying to do from an underlying perspective, we're trying to build the infrastructure that makes it easier for employers, learning institutions and workers in this country to be able to get educated, reskilled, retrained, or even redeployed in ways that allow them to participate in our economy.
And so taking that background I have in a technology space, I grew up on kind of the technology, the product and the analytics side of the house. And then applying that in this context. Context has been really exciting, especially given the rapid changes that are happening in the workforce and the needs of the workforce as it relates to our broader economy and what's happening with AI.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: I actually studied a little bit of or when I was at Cornell many years ago. I know exactly what you did. So the early days of gilt, it was originally, if I go back to the very beginning, it was about tuition reimbursement and leveraging a fairly large amount of money the companies were spending on tuition reimbursement, which was tax protected or tax advantaged by the government, and finding ways to use that money more effectively and more strategically for employees as well as for employers.
Now it sounds like it's shifted a lot. Tell us a little bit about the dynamics of why companies use you guys and what are some of the problems they try to solve today.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say one of the biggest problems that employers are trying to solve is making sure they have the workforce they need of the future.
And the way that they go about doing that or what they believe will help drive that varies by industry. There are some industries where the way they're going to ensure they have the workforce of the future is they continue to retain the workforce that they have. And in our early days we were very focused on how do we use this as a vehicle for driving retention. But that is not the only way to ensure that you have the workforce of the future. The second is making sure that they have the folks that are required.
Especially as you think about healthcare and manufacturing, those are places where licensure and certified roles are required in order to fill critical jobs. If you work on a production line that is mostly robotic, you need advanced maintenance technicians to be able to actually service those lines. If you work in healthcare, the most critical jobs in healthcare are patient facing jobs. Most of those require licensure and certification in order to actually be able to handle patients and to be able to care for those patients. And so it's critical jobs that need to be filled. And then if you look at some other industries, let's just say technology today and pure play technology companies, they actually need more workers who are enabled on AI and know how to utilize AI in a way that's going to drive their business fundamentals.
And so we think about all three of those types of problems to solve and how our underlying infrastructure and capabilities and navigation journeys and coaching support can actually drive solving those problems. We actually start with the employer, what their needs are, what the future of their business needs to look like, and then we work backwards to say, great, if that's what you're trying to do. Here's the catalog of offerings that you need to provide to your employees. And here's how you combine a few different of our product lines together to help deliver on that solution. And here's how you're going to measure whether or not it's working and how we're going to evolve it over time so that it is actually delivering the outcome that you need to. I would also say employers don't have one unique problem. It's not just retention or filling critical jobs or trying to ensure that they enable their workforce in AI at any given time. An employer is actually trying to solve all three of those problems at the same time.
And so you need a platform that is flexible, that is outcomes oriented and that actually has the results it can measure to be able to continue to allow you to invest in your employees in this way.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Now it sounds like the company is becoming a very strong, maybe the word is traditional reskilling and certification and upskilling company. But I remember in the beginnings of Guild there was the triad included the education industry and there was a big focus on giving people academic degrees. Is that still a part of your business or what happened to the education part of this?
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Yeah, ensuring that people get credentialed learning is a big part of what we do. The difference and the change that has happened over time is the types of providers we have in our marketplace and the types of institutions that we work with has started to really vary.
We believe degrees are important, but we don't believe only degrees are important. We actually think that a wide swath of learning is required to both meet people where they are, employees where they are, and to ensure that over time and over their career lifetime, they have the ability to take advantage of multiple different types of learning pathways, especially post secondary pathways, to get them from point A to point B, but then also to point Z. And So today roughly 60% of our consumption in our marketplace is actually non degree programs. And they range in variety and location and in terms of geography. And then they also vary in terms of whether or not they're in person or online. And partially because we need to allow people the hands on non applied learning component of what we do. And I do think the underlying infrastructure we have, which is a very flexible marketplace, allows us to do that. We can continue to evolve what we offer with what the employer needs, with what the employee needs. And we're not beholden to one type of institution or to one geography or to even one modality of learning, which I think is really important. As we think about the evolution of both education as well as workforce in the future and what employers need, that adaptability is probably our biggest competitive advantage.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: So you're Able to deliver very customized hybrid solutions that might include educational institutions and some of your own support and services to transform a company's workforce to go in a very particular direction for their needs. Is that a way to think of it?
[00:08:27] Speaker B: That is one way to think
[00:08:28] Speaker A: of it. In the early days when Rachel was running the company Guild was this good deed.
We're good for the economy, we're good for institutions, we're good for individuals. And the business side of it was a little bit softer.
Now it's like, let's go out there and help these companies solve some very specific problems that are pressing.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Very specific problems that are pressing. We do believe in broad access to education and I think our employers do as well. There's no misalignment there.
I think what has evolved over time is we have the luxury of 10 years of data now to be able to say like, when does it really do good? Who does it actually benefit? How do we need to evolve in order to ensure that we're meeting the needs of every stakeholder in our business model? And so that learning and that data just helps us get better and get more maniacally focused on how do we deliver really good outcomes for everyone involved.
The business can't survive and an employer can't keep funding education if it's not going to return ROI or be a return on investment to the employer itself. It gets really hard for HR leaders to defend this with finance. And so we need to ensure that we are evolving alongside of our employers. At the same time, the bones of Guild we started working with the most marginalized populations inside of organizations and that hasn't changed. We believe in coaching. We believe in providing services to the employees. We believe in ensuring that people navigate to the right opportunities and then have someone they can talk to when they don't know exactly what to do when they are enrolled in a program, but they feel like life is getting to be too much. And I think about that being relevant in the early days. It was really relevant to a small set of employees inside of our organizations because they tended to be frontline workers.
But with what's happening with AI and the disruption that is happening in more traditional white collar jobs, those people also need those support services. They're actually not sure what industry to go into next. They're not sure how the skills they have today can be applied in different contexts. And so it's become pretty interesting to watch a capability we had built for a set of people that we thought really needed actually be broadly applicable to a larger set of the workforce. And I think the workforce is just really fragile right now.
And I don't think. I think human connection is really important. And you're starting to see that show up. People are opting to talk to someone and wanting to have conversations with other humans. Even if they did pre work by talking to ChatGPT, they still want the validation of human connection. And it shows up time and time again in our data.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: I completely agree with you. The every single employee in every job feels somehow slightly threatened or worried or nervous or excited about AI and not sure what to do about it. So you're tapping into a much bigger market than how do we get the best return on our tuition reimbursement investment?
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: So what would. And I know you have a very rich solution.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about the solution, including the Guild Academy, which I know a bit about, because you guys work with Acquire, Nomadic, but. And then I'd love to hear about maybe the Amazon story or some of the examples of what you guys have done for companies.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I would love to share that. So on a broad level, as I mentioned to you, Gild is trying to help employers prepare themselves for the workforce of the future. And when we think about that workforce and what's required, we have three distinct ways we help employers do that.
The first is broad access to education.
So we take traditional tuition reimbursement models, kind of turn it on its head and say, what business critical things do you have going on? Or what are the business drivers and the business problems you're trying to solve? And then how do we work backwards from that to ensure that we're providing broad access education to your employee base, but doing it in a way that's strategically aligned with where you're trying to go with your business.
So you are trying to build a business that's more technology forward. Great. What do you need in your catalog? What do you need your employees to be embarking on in order to help make that happen? And that is the product that is kind of the bones of Guild.
And it is you. The way that it works is we sit down with an employer, we talk about what their business goals and objectives are. We talk about what they hope their employee population evolves into, and then we build a very custom catalog for that employer. No one employer catalog looks like another employer's catalog. It is very bespoke and distinct. We also are a neutral entity, and so we can go work with any provider anywhere. We are not beholden to being part of an academic institution. We are neutral.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: And you're also neutral in the sense that you're not like a big content company that has to sell a bunch of content.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Which is great.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: You are exactly right. We are trying to go find the best credentialed content available.
And we care about credentialed content because even if you're not going to get a degree tomorrow, we want to make sure that there's portability and stackability in what you're doing and that there's verifiable skills.
And so credentialed content usually requires testing or some application of what's happening in order for us to at least discern whether or not you mastered the material. And so that's why we focus on that. And you could argue a lot about credentialed content and what could evolve, but it's a good initial marker for us to be able to be like, is this worthy of someone spending their time and energy and their dollars and resources embarking on a journey or allowing their employees to embark on that journey? So that is our core bread and butter of what we do. But as we've started to do this with employers and we gain the trust of employers, two additional things have come up that are really important to what we do and what we've evolved to do. The first is some employers are like, this is really great that you provide broad access benefits, but I want a highly tailored solution that actually brings in the voices of my own executive team, my leadership team, my workers. And I want to be able to help drive large scale behavior change inside of my organization.
And that's where our Guild Academy product comes into play. It is designed to drive large scale behavior change.
And so we don't do it for everything.
We can't build an academy for everything. But we do have specific pathways or specific content areas that we really double down on. So one is transformational change on AI. We are trying to bring your entire organization along on the importance of AI, how to use broad general models, how to actually get your company to go from being really nascent in its utilization to being really robust in its utilization.
And you want it to be really content specific at your organization, the way you would drive that. And the use cases that matter are really different than another business. And so great. We have the bones of an AI academy. You then the employer gets to dictate what it looks like for the rest of the components. And. And it's in the voice of the employer. It's not in the voice of guilt or it's not in the voice of a third party institution. It's in the voice of the employer. And so we run a few of these AI leadership, all different types of leadership. We look at it from the perspective of what is really important to a broad set of employers and how can we create the right component parts so that they can add on to that from where they go? And that's been really helpful because employers are like, great, you gave me the broad access, but now I need them to go really deep on my own organization and what needs to happen there. And so it's a great complement to what we already do. It doesn't require them to go RFP again to another provider. And we have learning designers on our team, are really good at their craft of learning design as Josh. And so we get to use their superpowers to help a bunch of different.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: I know some of them, yes.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: The next thing that we got pushed into is, great, you have broad access education now. You're helping to drive behavior change in my organization. But I have really critical jobs to fill in local geographies. And I only need 50 of them or I only need 10 of them. And I need it to happen in this geography and this geography. Oh, and by the way, these jobs require hands on learning, and I need to provide that hands on learning so that these people can get credentialed. And so we got pushed to start thinking about our capabilities at a local level. How do we work with community colleges? How do we work with institutions that have applied learning components, but they're only in specific geographies? How do we take pipelines and create micro pipelines so that the 10 people who need to be employed in the general Houston area are actually getting the skills they need to fill the jobs that are in Houston, not potential jobs in Philadelphia. And so we created a product called Navigator that is very focused on our ability to help drive pipelines in local geographies in places where there are capability and skills gaps and where we need visibility to know that person is ready, they've completed the learning. That is
[00:18:18] Speaker A: an example of one of these.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Amazon is a really great example of this. They have their distribution facilities all throughout the country.
The more and more that those distribution facilities get automated, the more and more they need advanced maintenance technicians. They actually have jobs that people can do that are highly technical.
And in order for people to do those highly technical jobs, they need training and certification to do them.
And so this is the power of Guild. There is no advanced maintenance technician program in this country that exists. And so we went and RFP'd our learning institutions and said, can one of you pull together with the professors you have and the credentialed learning? You already have a bespoke program that allows for advanced maintenance technicians to be certified in this country.
And can you do it at this price point? Because that's what employers are willing to pay.
And can you do it on this timeline so that they can create the pipeline that they need to. And we'll let you bid for it. And we'll let anyone bid. It's an open bid. We manage the process on behalf of the employer partner. And then we do. We get some hits and we get some really great programs. And now they're offered in certain geographies to Amazon employees.
And because we have visibility into who's enrolling, where they are in their journey, what the programming looks like, we can also help Amazon manage that pipeline so that people actually get into these
[00:19:52] Speaker A: advanced people through this program. So as you're managing the contractor to make sure they're doing a good job.
I went down to Tesla four or five years ago and they were telling me they had exactly the same problem. They were trying to find people that could maintain Tesla cars and they were hiring auto mechanics and none of the auto mechanics knew anything about the electronics, so they were the wrong fit. And they ended up having to work with a community college down in San Jose to build this themselves. So you're basically doing this at scale for lots and lots of companies in different roles,
[00:20:22] Speaker B: including the. Including the employer you just mentioned.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: Including Tesla.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: Wow. In some ways you're. I've done L and D for so long. In some ways you're very disruptive to the L and D industry because the current industry, not you, tries to sell off the shelf things.
And then the employer is stuck trying to take the content or the training or the coaching or whatever it is and mash it together into something that makes sense for their company. I would imagine your business is doing pretty well right now.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: It's been really fun to watch. I think there was a lull in our business after kind of COVID and coming out of COVID just because I think organizations themselves with the disruption in AI, we're trying to figure out what are we going to do?
And I think there is still that disruption and a question around what are we going to do? But it's pretty clear that there are these set of jobs that will be required and that we just need to put. We can't solve every problem everywhere and not every solution will Be perfect. But if we can put one foot in front of the other and start to prove these pathways, there's a lot of opportunity in this country. And it's been really fun to watch, especially over the last six to nine months, to start to see this change happen. And part of it is because we now have the solutions and the capabilities to deliver in a way that we also didn't have three years ago, five years ago.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: The typical client, a solution like one of the Amazon Maintenance, for example, you have an academic institution of some kind and their expertise or limitations of expertise, and then coupled with your perhaps content or instructional design with them. So you're not just doing RFPs and then selling people services from other institutions, you're wrapping your own services around it. Is that correct?
[00:22:16] Speaker B: We are wrapping our own services around it. In the case of Amazon, the services are directly to the employee. We have a cohort manager. That manager is trying to make sure that employee is enrolled, doing the thing they need to do. We're managing the pipeline. We are the pipeline.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: I want to ask you bigger question.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: Because I've been in this space a long time, what you're doing is so valuable, but it is so tricky and so complex because each client's needs are different. Each of the providers are different. There's the technologies. There's this issue of the fact that AI is wiping out all this training stuff and starting to reinvent it. What has been your experience as the CEO of Guild on managing this very complex solution? You have a. I think one of the reasons you're so unique is you're gone after a problem that's very vexing for vendors.
Employers do it themselves all the time because they have to, they have no choice. But the vendor community has never done a good job of it because they're always selling only one. Here's an lms. Here's a content. Here's a test, Here's a certification, Here's a coach.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: Yeah. You're like a walking billboard for why Guild exists. This is actually a complicated problem. And one of the things I think is really important that I think sometimes gets lost, is employers can go work with an institution directly.
Sometimes the institution's not incentivized because they're like this. There's no business for me here. I can do this for 10 for you employer. But I need aggregated demand, actually, in order to tell my CFO that this is a good investment to make and for us to break the model we have today. Because there's another opportunity that is equally Valuable and important.
And so we're not only going to institutions and brokering deals between one institution and one employer, we're actually looking across many employers and being like, hey, it's not just Amazon that's going to need advanced maintenance technicians, or it's not just advanced
[00:24:27] Speaker A: auto scale. You're seeing cross pollinization opportunities that any given employer would never see necessarily,
[00:24:34] Speaker B: or
[00:24:35] Speaker A: an educational institution would not see. Yeah,
[00:24:37] Speaker B: I think that employers do get together to talk about this and the need for certain roles like health systems get together to talk about the fact that they need more nurses.
I just think the coordination effort to then get those employers to move together to make it happen and to make it happen across the country and to make it happen across geographies is so burdensome that what they end up doing is being like, great, we'll do it just in Birmingham.
But most health systems don't operate just in Birmingham, they operate in a bunch of different places. And so we not only see across employers, we see across geographies. And I do think there's something really interesting about being able to take the lessons from one geography or one type of employer and apply them to others and to mass critical demand. Like you need to aggregate demand so suppliers are willing to service that demand.
And so that is the power of a marketplace. You are matching supply and demand. And when you can do it and you can do it in a nimble and agile and technology forward way, it's not as cumbersome, Josh, as I think it would be if you tried to do it one off, build by build. And I think that's why the technology matters, the marketplace matters, the underlying infrastructure matters. Because you it would be ungodly in terms of costs if you try to do it in a way that wasn't actually using technology as the infrastructure.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: And you told me you're getting support from states and municipalities who want to invest in this now too, as I understand. Yeah,
[00:26:13] Speaker B: it's been pretty incredible to watch the. Sometimes employers, I think, feel like they're left to hold the bag on educating and training and retraining the workforce. And they feel that way because there's such fragmentation between what the employer is trying to do and what economic development offices are trying to do or how those dollars get distributed.
And so we are super fortunate that we have some really innovative governors in our country who are willing to buck the norm and say, let's try this a different way and let's use a different model. And I think Oklahoma is a really great example. They basically said hey, we want to be able to actually drive five different industries inside of our state.
And we need to work with employers who are going to employ those people on the other side and understand what they need.
And then we need infrastructure underneath it to connect that supply and demand so that we can actually get people employed. And when employers do that, we'll fork the bill, not the employer, which is a great way to be. Like not one entity needs to hold the bag. It can actually be a collective action problem that people collectively solve.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: You're in a very important, unique situation early in the market. Let me ask you a little bit different question that I'm really interested in, your perspectives.
We're launching a book called Super Powered, and it's a long, fairly detailed book about the role of AI on empowering people and jobs and careers and companies and so forth. And I think one of the biggest challenges that I see in the people I talk to is not the reskilling, but the motivation and the fear and the maybe the word is uncertainty about. Even if I do know what I'm supposed to do next, I'm not sure how to get there from here or if I can make the transformation. And you see this in all of these fears of young people coming out of school who have very negative opinions about their careers into the future, the impact of the inflation in the United States and the standards of living, people living at home early in their careers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What have you got since you're in the middle of this?
What have you learned about the motivational issues or the inspirational issues that help people reinvent themselves? Because it's easy for me to say, I've reinvented myself a bunch of times and I'm old now, so I can talk about it. But it's very scary. And I think people are frightened at the moment. So what have you learned about the motivational parts of this?
[00:28:51] Speaker B: I think there's a few things. One is, I think it's really important to remember that there's always a rebalancing of supply and demand.
And that is actually kind of the beauty of the having a sense of open capitalism is there's always a rebalancing of supply and demand and these things and flow.
And I don't think that. I think that there is a lot of fear. I think some of that is fear mongering.
I think that there is rhetoric that is being repeated in this country that is not true.
And I don't actually understand the incentive structure for why that Rhetoric exists, to be very honest with you.
And so I think, and I do see employers hiring folks coming out of college, I see employers investing in employees who did not go to college, helping them either get the certification and training that they need, helping them get the degree that they might want or need. And so I do see, I see states investing in their constituents and their communities. And so I think there actually is a lot of hope around helping to drive this economic transition. I do think we're in an economic transition. I don't think it's a 12 month or 24 month economic transition. I think it is a 5 to 10 year economic transition.
And I think the more eyes wide open we are about that, the more we can help ensure people can get the skills they need to be resilient as the economy continues to evolve. I also think there are a set of jobs that are not going away, they just won't go away. And giving people a better sense of what those jobs are or that they will evolve more slowly than other jobs. Think of any job that has a licensure and certification required. There's so much red tape there that it'll be eons before those jobs evolve, even if they should evolve. And I think those are durable jobs. They might be durable because of the regulatory environment, but they're durable jobs. And I think we need to remind people that those opportunities exist.
I also think that in the last 10, 12, 15 years, we had a supply and demand and mismatch problem.
We told a whole bunch of people that there will be endless amounts of tech jobs and they should just pursue those tech jobs while ignoring all the other industries in our country and the respectable, durable jobs that exist in those industries. And I believe in the rebalancing of supply and demand. It always happens. We go through cycles and you're seeing that rebalance happen now. And so what I hope is that people realize there's a lot of other jobs outside of tech and those jobs are respectable, they're durable and they will actually help teach you things over time. And just because you started in one industry doesn't mean you need to end in the same industry.
That's on you. The onus is on you to be able to navigate that. And there's a lot of people out there who will help support you, including people in your own family who probably moved from one industry to another. I think about my dad. He was an oil and gas and he grew up in Houston or he worked in Houston, Texas. That industry boomed and bust three times in my childhood. And by the time he left, he didn't work in oil and gas. Actually, he worked in manufacturing, but a completely different type of manufacturing. And so I think it's possible and I wouldn't lose hope. And that sounds.
That might sound superficial,
[00:32:23] Speaker A: but I'm really. You and I are completely aligned on this. I think the tech industry loves to write stories of job loss because it sort of incense people spend more money on their tools. So I think that's one of the reasons this story keeps coming up. But for example, in hr, where I spend most of my time, the number of jobs everybody says HR is going to be wiped out by AI. Actually, the number of jobs in HR is increasing and the salaries in HR are increasing because the type of work that people do now is higher value because the AI is eliminating a lot of the mundane work. I completely agree with you. And the nice thing about what you guys do is you help employers stitch all these little pieces together so that they can take advantage of these transformations as opposed to just stare into the New York Times and worry.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And I do think one of the things that continues to be an education point for Guild is benefits. Doesn't have to be separated from L and D and doesn't have to be separated from your talent acquisition or retention strategy.
But you do have to have the organizational muscle to break those silos so that you can see the power of stitching all of these things together. And that's always a work in progress when people are involved. And sometimes you get very focused on your narrow part of the problem to solve. And so we do try to do our part when we see that happening, to be like, hey, can we bring all of you into a room together? Because you want to solve the same problem, but you're trying to do it in three different ways, then there might be a better, more cohesive experience for employees if we
[00:33:57] Speaker A: can do this together. Let me ask you just a little bit, slightly, kind of a controversial question. What do you think is happening to L and D right now?
[00:34:04] Speaker B: I think L and D went through a period of time where everyone focused, everyone told them, and I think they themselves were like, everything denominates down to a skill.
And I think AI has proven that actually, like, what is important is more than just one unique or one unit of a skill.
Competency really matters. And understanding competency and capability really matter.
And I think L and D is going through a reckoning because I don't think it's about the individual unit of the skill. And I think in order to Solve the business problems that happened. You actually do need L and D. I just think you need the unit. It's. How do you orient L and D towards the capabilities people need, not the individual skills you thought were important?
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. It's been. I kind of feel like L and D is going to be reborn in this new world of capabilities and AI for sure.
This is a wonderful interview. Thank you for taking the time vigil. I've been keeping up with you guys for a long time and obviously know a lot about Nomadic and what happened there. And I'm sure those guys are adding a lot of value inside the company now, too.
And we'll talk much more. Any final advice or perspectives on this whole AI transformation that we're going through that you'd like people to know about as we close?
[00:35:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the last thing I'll say is I think sometimes people confuse the skill, the need for skills, with the. With actually, you need to drive behavior change in your business.
And I think it's something really important for leaders to reckon with.
Like, I do watch even in my own business, one of the biggest changes that has to happen is a behavior change.
You're trying to change a habit or a ritual or a way someone works. And it's less about skill building. Yes, there are skills that need to be built, but that's not the people need their horizons expanded around what are the applications of this technology? How can it actually make my work better? And it's not from leadership. It's actually from their peers and from others who are using this or sit inside their org or sit in a similar function in another part of the business.
And so I would just challenge folks who are responsible for driving that transformation in their business to just think about how much are you investing in behavior change versus just in.
Great. Let me, like, have people Enroll in an AI101 course that's online very quickly.
I think it's not capturing the essence of what actually has to happen to move people from the digital era into the AI era.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: I totally agree with you. In some ways, AI is just one of the most interesting tools we've ever had for doing the things that you already wanted to do as opposed to doing everything different.
Okay. Thank you so much for your time today, Bijal. It's just great to catch up with you and we will talk again soon.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks for having me on, Josh.
