Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, everybody. Today I'm introducing our new book, Superpowered, the book about the role of AI in our lives, our jobs, our careers, and our companies. Over the last two years, we have talked to hundreds of companies about their perspectives on AI, their projects around AI, their use cases, their technologies. And we've written the book on, on what this means to business, to individuals, to workers, to job seekers, and to the organizations and economy as a whole. Now, four years ago, I published a book called Irresistible. And that book was the culmination of many years of research on the role of people in companies before we even started talking about AI. And what we talked about in that book was what I call the unquenchable power, that of the human spirit and the fact that businesses, which are financial organizations, thrive by honoring and empowering and caring for individual people. The reason we build companies, the reason we build organizations, the reason that we have startups, is that groups of individuals can do more than one person alone. And that's the fundamental idea behind any company or any business that you know about. But the trick is not just collecting a bunch of people, it's organizing and aligning and creating a mission and a set of cultural practices that allow people to thrive. And when you do that, as Irresistible explains, a magic occurs. People feel empowered to do more. They collaborate, they innovate, they talk, they disagree. They take care of customers, they take care of patients, they take care of clients. And the organization thrives. And as a result, the organization grows, the organization is more profitable, and the organization adds more value to our society.
[00:01:55] Now, since that book, many things have happened. We've had the pandemic, we've had this enormous run up in AI and we've had massive changes in the economic distribution of wealth. The United States right now is at a point where the role of capital is extremely high relative to labor, maybe the highest it's ever been. Fortune 500 CEOs make 331 times the average wage worker, up from 25 times 30 years ago. And the increase of wages and wealth of the upper income workers in the United States have dwarfed the small to zero increases in wages amongst those that are working class or frontline. And that's resulted in lots of economic growth through the stock market, where wealthy people own stocks, but not necessarily general wealth growth in the economy as a whole. Now, of course, as AI came into the world, this affected that equation and, and many of the pundits and economists and technologists continued to talk about the fact that AI was going to replace people, replace jobs and make it harder to find a job and reduce the number of people needed to run our organizations. And that certainly made a lot of sense in the early discussions. But now that we know what AI really is and how it really works, we actually believe, as you'll learn about in the book, that quite the opposite is true, that what AI is doing is. It's empowering every one of you who's listening to this podcast to do more, to have a greater career, to work at the top of your license, to add more value to your company or your customer or your patient or your client, and to learn at a rate of speed that was never possible before. This isn't a question of learning AI as a skill. This is a question of using AI and leveraging AI to advance your professional career and opportunities in leadership, management, or professional of any kind. And eventually this same impact will affect hourly workers and individuals in more manual labor as well. When you look at the job market as a whole in the United States, about 12 to 15% of U.S. workers are highly exposed to automation by the new generation of AI. That's a relatively small number. And those people are in very routine jobs. They're working in call centers, or maybe they're schedulers. And they will, to some degree, have to find new opportunities in our companies. But most of them, as was the steno pool in the 1980s when I worked for IBM, can find better things to do to add more value and to create more wealth for themselves. All the way up the chain this is taking place. And the reason it's happening is not only because AI is an empowering technology, but because. But because organizations don't add value by cutting costs. They add value and they grow. And they create high stock prices by growing and adding more innovation and customer service and customer solutions into their portfolio. In other words, AI as a tool to cut costs is a minor factor and probably an irrelevant factor in the growth of the economy and the growth of your company. You can't cut your way to success, but you can grow your way to success. Now in the book, we have more than a hundred examples of how companies and individuals have redefined work, redefined jobs, and redefined roles in their organizations. And one of the themes throughout the book is that because AI is such a powerful data integration type of technology, it allows us to redesign how we work, redesign the workflows, redesign the processes that we have in our companies. The example that's the easiest under understand, of course, is the driverless car over the last 40 years, going back to starting in the 1960s, we've had a whole variety of automation tools to automate the role of the driver in the car. Power brakes, power steering, automatic lane control, collision detection, automatic high beams and low beams. Lots and lots of things that have been added to the car to make it easier and easier for the driver to drive. The idea is we've automated that job, the driving job, in numerous ways. But over the last few years, we realized that making the driver's job easier isn't really the goal of a vehicle. The goal of a vehicle is to take care of the passenger, is to move the passengers from place to place in the safest, fastest, most comfortable way. So we've now taken this AI technology and other technologies in the vehicle and, and changed it from a problem of job performance improvement to redesigning the process entirely. And when you look at a Waymo or a Zoox, which doesn't even have a steering wheel, you end up with a vehicle that is a completely redesigned vehicle. And that's exactly what's going on in our companies. What starts as the use of AI to automate or assist the work you're doing today very quickly turns into a decision about whether this work even needs to be done, or an agent could do it better than a human. And the humans then take on a bigger role as managing the agents. And now that we're four years or more into the AI revolution, it's very clear that the agents are going to be like digital workers. Now, I don't like personifying AI because it's certainly not nearly as capable as humans. But today, with the agent tools that are rolling out in companies and for individuals, we as humans can train our agents and align our agents and monitor our agents and use our agents to. To scale up the work that we want to do at orders of magnitude greater than ever before. And this is something that we've never really had before. If you look at the manufacturing automation that took place in the 1920s and the 1930s, we had to hire engineers and contractors and all sorts of specialists to build the robots, implement the robots, and then design the robots in a way that we could learn how to use them. You now can do this yourself. So superpowered is about not only what happens in the organization, but what happens to you when you learn how to use AI and do the things that you always wanted to do in your job or your career or your life to make things better, faster, easier, and more effective. And that is a spectacular experience that we've never had in my lifetime. And I'VE lived through the birth of the PC, the mobile phone, the Internet, and all of the other major technology revolutions in the last 50 or 60 years. Now, one of the questions that comes up often we think about our jobs and our careers is are we going to be replaced by the AI and are we going to have lower wages and essentially do the less important work and the AI will do the more important work? And there have been a lot of what I consider to be slightly nutty ideas that AI will be the CEO and AI will run our companies and AI will start its own company. I don't know how many of you believe in that, but I certainly don't. The value creation process of innovation and customer service and competitive business is really a human endeavor. AI is very good at analyzing data, interpreting data, answering questions, looking things up, doing math, computing large amounts of data very, very rapidly. But it doesn't have that spark of creativity and innovation that comes from our genetic makeup. And if you read a lot about biology, and many of you probably are biologists, human beings have billions and billions of genes and historical references that make us who we are, that have essentially taught every cell in our body to react and to adapt and to execute. Based on millions of years of history, AI has none of that. So not that AI is going to be our slave, but we will be the architects and the designers of this new AI fueled business and career future. I do not believe, and the book describes it in great detail, that we will become the slaves of AI. The book also talks a lot about the role of careers. And if you think about your career today, regardless of whatever age you are, there's a good chance that your children, or you as a young person will live well into your hundreds. That's a five or six generation life. You will live through five or six generations of new workers during your professional or working life. That means that technology revolutions like AI and space travel and genomic science and many, many other things are going to happen multiple times in your life. So this is not a question of learning AI or getting certified on AI as if it's a trade skill like a plumber or a contractor. This is a question of you taking advantage of this technology to continuously advance the goals and interests and skills and capabilities and insights that you have about your career and your life. And AI is the first time that I can remember with a technology that is so empowering that we don't have to hire a programmer or a consultant or a computer science person to figure out how to use it. And so part of the book discusses the issues of your progression in your career or from individual to specialist to leader to manager to executive and how organizations can move through that path as an agile, dynamic company. Now, much of the research underlying this book comes from our 30 plus years of research on human capital and organizations. So you'll see lots and lots of echoes of irresistible dynamic organization learning culture and lots of organizational experiences that we've had and lots and lots of case studies. But we've written the book as a business book, as a book for individuals, as a book for professionals to make you feel comfortable and excited and empowered to take advantage of this technology. The book is now available for pre order on Amazon. I hope you take some time to browse through the table of contents and enjoy reading it and we look forward to talking to you more about your situation as an individual or as a company in this exciting new world of super powered organizations and individual careers. In the era of AI.
