Building an AI-Driven Culture at HireBetter with Velveth Schmitz & Amy Ancira

[MUSIC] >> Welcome to the AI Drven Leader, the podcast dedicated to helping you as a leader, harness AI to build better leaders, better businesses, and better lives. I'm your host, Jeff Woods. Today we are going to sit down with two executives from a company called Higher Better. It's in the strategic talent and recruiting business. They faced the challenge I think so many of us have been facing, which is fear, anxiety, and even skepticism around AI taking their jobs. You're going to hear how they went from knowing the AI was the future and starting to try to drive into the organization, but facing resistance. In realizing that maybe there was a different approach, one that started with them becoming AI driven leaders at the top and then strategically starting to drive it with key people to win support. And ultimately, you fast forward to today where they had an AI driven organization. It's woven into the culture and they're truly beginning to rewrite how they do their work, so that they free themselves up from the way things used to be, where they were doing a bunch of administrative and tactical things to now liberating their people to do what only humans can do. Which in their industry is for me deep, meaningful relationships with their clients. With that, I'm excited to get into this conversation with Velvet Schmitz and Amy Insignal. Before we get into your AI driven transformation, talk a little bit about what Higher Better is. Higher Better is a talent strategy partner to high growth entrepreneurial companies and their leadership. I think that's good because that gives you a little picture of how Amy thinks. She's a practical processor. And I think with my heart, Higher Better is the place that helps people with their best and high use and puts them in the companies where they help them build a great company and where that conduit between the good people and the great company. Love that. I want to go back in time to a year ago. All the way back there. When we first started talking about AI, what did your introduction to AI look like and talk to me about like, where was your head at? What were the hopes? What were the fears a year ago? I find it really interesting. I am a very curious person. I have been my whole life and I have chosen to live my life with no fear. And I'm constantly asking myself, what's the worst that can happen? Maybe sometimes I could ask that twice before I do it, but I still do it. And so my AI journey started before that. I was a year before we met that I was really exploring it. And at the time, all the conversations that were being had were, that's not really going to do anything to I'm so scared of it. I can't talk about it to individuals that were in it and understood what could happen and we're already changing the way that they were doing business. And so I thought, hang on a second, this will shift how we do things. And I was very excited and I have zero ego. Like both of you know, I will dance, whether it's real music or just the one in my head. And I don't know that I'm good at it. I sing all the time. I know I'm not good at that, but I don't really care. And so I do things and have every desire to mess up. And I just started playing. I started playing with a lot of things and I had mentioned this. Because I mentioned it to our founder, he said, you should meet Jeff Woods. And I also think it's interesting because a lot of CEOs found it have thought, okay, yeah, that's cool. I'll get to a later. I'm so busy. Or can I just hire a consultant to do it for me? Or, you know what, IT will figure that one out. What was it that caused you as a CEO to say, I'm personally going to dive in here? I never ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do. I'm a firm believer that if you're going to lead people and ask them to do things, you yourself should be able to do them. And so I obviously, maybe not obviously, but I did not get an undergraduate degree in engineering. I often try to do things almost probably to the team's chagrin. But I think that it's important to understand what it takes for someone to do their job. And so if I'm going to ask people to think about something and to incorporate it into their work, then I need to be doing the same thing. And I know how uncomfortable it is. So I know when you know nothing about something and someone says, hey, we have a new tool. Like, I remember learning to rollerblade. Like, that was crazy. I was like, why do we have the fun skates with the four wheels? Why do we got to go one line? This doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand why is the break in the back? That is so crazy to me. I remember thinking like this is where I break my neck. And you do it anyway. And that sort of elation of learning something new is always worth the fear. But I have compassion for the fear. I know. And so there's hesitation. And I don't blame people for that because it's a real thing to hesitate. It's something new. It's scary. It's not part of my rate. What if I mess it up? All of those things. But I love when it clicks, like you figure something out. And you're like, and that feeling of like, I figured it out. I mean, I don't know nothing about like if you ask me, how does it work? Me, me, but man, it's super cool. So take me from, okay, you personally are diving into this too. We're going to become an AI driven organization. And we are going to transform the way we do business. What did that look like? So after those epiphanies of change and what's going to happen and everything that I just said, I went to my partner, Amy, and I said, hey, Amy, I think we need to go into the say I thing. And she's like, what? I said, yeah, we're going to do this. So Amy likes to do this thing where she lays out for me. Okay. So right now we're doing this and this and this. Yes, ma'am, we're doing all those things. And now you want to add this. Yes. So what's going to come off the list? Interesting. They asked that question. Let's put that aside for a second because I evade the question because I'm constantly thinking we can do this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. It's going to be great. And she's the like, no, but okay. So let's put that aside. And Amy, which this is totally unfair because I use her weakness against herself. Amy's a creative woman. She likes to create. And so I'm like, I know we have to do all that. But guess what? There's a whole tool to create. And I think we could create things there. And so she's an artist by trade. And I know that Amy likes to create new things. And the way Amy sees beauty in the world. And I knew if I get one other person to carry the water, if I say something is cool, they're maybe, but if one other person who people listen to say it's cool, now we're on to something. And so I made Amy believe and much to Amy Shigrin. We did this and this. But boy, then it took off from there. So Amy talked to me about how you go because I know what it feels like to have too much to do in not enough time. And then you got an enthusiastic, see it comes in with a new shiny object that you're like, oh, but here we go. But what did it look like to actually start harnessing this to actually deliver real value? That's funny. We were talking about that the other day. Well, first of all, everything Belvedice said true story. It really was the 85 things that we had to do. And then there was one more. But the thing I think that she excels at is she's, as you can tell, an incredibly enthusiastic person. And so when she's got that come on with me on this journey attitude, everybody wants to come on the journey together. Right. So there's that much I think she knows like she's irresistible to her team when she's like, come on guys, this could make it happen. Everybody jump some board. It was interesting because you came and spoke to our team. And what an amazing opportunity for our team to have somebody come and teach them about some things, especially as early stages that was. I think that book wouldn't even out yet. And you came and spoke to our team. So that's, I mean, a, like, what a huge opportunity. And I think like a lot of people, it was very much, oh, I can use this to help me write an email or I wonder if I can use this to help me like think through a marketing idea. For most people, I think on our team, it was that very beginner mindset where it really just took off was being able to see the way that when you use the the right way it collapsed. time. And I started to see that collapse of time. And to all of its point, I think I had very much of a feeling of like there are 8,000 things that we're trying to do right now. And I feel harried. I don't have time to think I don't have time to be strategic. I'm just going from thing to thing and taking off the boxes and trying to be effective and feeling that I'm not being as effective. And when I started playing around and looking at it, because again, I'm a very process oriented person. Despite the fact that I'm an artist, all of the work that I do is very process oriented. So in pottery, there are stages to it. And you have to kind of do this different stages right, where your piece is going to crack and break, right? All of the different art forms that I do print making, they're all very process oriented. And when I looked at our process internally, which I know intimately, and I started to look at how can we collapse time for one thing? And if I put the work in and I've told velvet this, I think I told you this last week, we're going to go do this thing. And I'm going to go build this thing. And on the front end, it's going to require a couple of hours of my time. But what's going to happen? And the collapse of all of this very manual, very painful work, like it's worth it. When I started to see that could happen, that was like that blew the barn doors open. What's a real example? A real example is we've got, I'll give you two, one is we go very deep with our clients when we're talking to them about a need that they might have. And when we think through and the types of conversations that we have with individuals, when we're trying to help them come up with solutions, and then we're scoping potential rules that they might need us to help them with. All of those things historically have been very manual, meaning that somebody on the team might have to go take notes, like literally hand right notes or take notes. And it's really not a good use of time. So I was able to build a tool in '01 at the time. Are they able to have it help me build a prompt and then build a custom GPT where we can drop in transcripts from different conversations, different people on our team with different people on our clients team. And it will produce this what used to be a couple of hours worth of work. It produces the product in about a minute, maybe. And to recap, if a company's hiring you to go head hunt or recruit a person to come in, even the front manual work would be hours of customer interviews where your team is literally taking notes with hand or typing notes. But then all this administrative work on the back end to centralize those notes and then to manually turn that into a output would take hours. And you said, Hey, let's use AI note takers in these meetings. So you literally press record and people are no longer worried about taking notes or typing. They get to sit there and be present and ask even better questions that AI transcribes every single word. You just feed those transcripts to a custom GPT that you built and the GPT goes boom, and gives you the finished product. Yes, I love that you took a step back, Jeff. I love that you took a step back. The biggest thing we always struggled with was how can you take notes and be present and the way that we build relationships, we want to be in partnership with our clients. And most of them become our friends because we are so entrenched in its synonymous when founders or CEOs are building companies, it's a part of who they are. And we get such an intimate look into their lives. Yes, it's the business, but it's a very big part of their lives. And we have these conversations that are rich and they're infused with so much information that if you're taking notes, you can miss a very slight intonation when they talk about it's important to them that this person does X, but it's through the story of what they saw their mother do or somebody in their family that most people would gloss over because how is that relevant to business? And all of those hours and time now that we have an AI note taker and we are doing this, we can see the flicker of your eye when emotion hits. We can see you have smile. We can see you sort of lean back because something didn't quite land right. And that is where we want our people. We want our people where only people can be. And all this other stuff, we want automated because now, yes, the work is compressed into a minute and the LLM spits it out. But now we are emotionally intelligent beings present for you. And that is everything. This is just a great example of where I get there are people that have fear around this taking their job. Like if you say, Oh my gosh, she used to take me three, four hours to do this. And now it's taking a minute. What's going to happen to my job? And your answer is we just liberated you to be human. You we just actually elevated what makes you human and now you get to play to your superpower and deliver even more value. And instead of being bogged down in administrative overwhelm, you get to be more client facing. Those are the conversations that we've had with the team that very pointed conversations around hey, this is something that the intention is that it's going to take all of this that it's busy work. It's work that must be done, but it's still busy work. We're going to take that and we're going to remove that from your plate. So like when I think about how freeing it was to go from feeling like I had the nine things that we were trying to do that were big lifts and then we're adding one more. I can think now I have opportunities and time where I can step back and go, okay, we've got a business issue. And it requires a different level of consideration and thought. And I would not have been able to look at it before because I was picking everything off the list and doing a different kind of work. So I've seen it transform for our team, but I felt it as well. And I think when you set the example for others and you model the behavior you want to see, it's so transformative for people around you. So you can say the words and then you model and then it kind of comes together. So let's go a little deeper there because one of the top questions that people ask is, okay, I'm starting to use this. I'm starting uses a thought part or I'm writing crit context role interview task. How do I start to get my team on board? You have the people that are optimistic and super excited about this. Then you have the people that are apprehensive, fearful, anxious. If you think back, I'm curious, what are the things you did that you go, that was good. That was really effective. And what are the things that maybe you stopped your tail on or you said, if I had to do it all over again, here's what I would not do. Or here's what I would have done differently. Great question, because much like I said, Amy's creativity, the other genius move and have no fear. I'll tell you what I fumbled up because I messed up a lot the other genius move I made is we have a very, she's not serious, but she's very rule following individual. It's pretty black and white rules are rules and she's very comfortable operating within those systems. And I knew that's who has to help me write a policy. That's the person who has to do the regulatory side. And when this all started, I went to her and I said, Hey, I need you to help me. This needs guardrails. I need everyone to be crystal clear how we operate. I need this to be like, here's what you're allowed to do. This is what we will do. And I need you to go out and see who does it well. Where does this exist? What pitfalls what might we be seeing, et cetera? And it was really interesting because came back and the first iterations were like, well, not a lot of people have one and I'm having trouble locating this. And I said, well, have you tried using the LLM to help you? And like, well, why would I do that? We're writing. And I said, well, that might be interesting. And so little by little, I used the very thing that made that person very comfortable so that they could create, I mean, our policy is beautiful and all the credit goes to that individual. And so that was great. Let me just recap, you took a person that you perceived might naturally be resistant. You gave her a project that you perceived she would probably fail at without AI, which then created the need for using AI. And then as she started to use AI as a thought partner and building it out, she began to realize that AI is actually pretty cool. And then she embraced it. Yeah, sir. She's kind of a little wicked genius, isn't she? I know. Sorry. Yes. You. Oh, I know, I know. Well, but remember, I those were the yay examples. Let's talk about the Oh boy. So on the downside, as Amy said, I'm very into the Aztec and I go like, Hey, everybody join me. And then I get so fired up that like, I just discovered this great thing. I have to tell you all about it. And I have to shove it down your throat to the point where people are like lady shut your mouth. No, thank you. And so I am 99 yards down the field. And Amy says, Hey, Valsit, you never even told people where the one yard line is like good for you. But like this team over here. What you never talked about. I'm like, no, no, but Jeff came. And then we got everybody his book and they all read it. Well, how do you know they read it? What are you talking about? Like we never did a book club. You never went back and asked people. Oh, and you also didn't teach them this and then this happened and you kept going and then this happened like then seven steps are outlined. And I'm like, your name is really bringing me down right now. Super true. All of those things I hadn't stopped to check at every mark. Who is still with me? And I was going so fast. People didn't know what questions to ask. And so I did it the other day. I was having a conversation with someone and I said, well, just met a prompt that so that you can so stupid. Met a prompt that so that you can build the prompt and then you take that and then take the prompt and do it this. But don't use that version because it's going to do this. And they were like, I kept talking and they were leaning in and the more I talked. And then I stopped and I said, oh boy, I've done it. I've totally lost two. Then they said, yeah, and I said, why don't we pick this up on Monday? And then I abandoned it. And that's the part where you talked about the curb of the early adopters that I didn't do a good job of checking back in. I then dumped the pails of water and was like, all right, Amy, you're good. Carry it. And so, Amy, how about your perception? I would say that's accurate. We have a lot of empathy on our team and a lot of kindness on our team. Our court ethos is about being human to human, right? And meeting people where they are. It's very important to me personally. I know it's equally important to build it and to our team. And one of the big aha moments for me and this was reset. We like to do continuous training. And in my role, I do after action reviews for our clients to understand what went well, it didn't go well. And Velvet and I are in very close partnership with one another. And we address the need like, oh, we need to have some training sessions. And they were not AI training sessions. They were like, how do we engage their clients? What is the feedback that we're hearing from our clients? Here's some areas where we see that we need to put some time and focus into our teammates. And so we scheduled four or five training sessions on these different topics. And my aha moment was I took the training topics and I built a prompt and said, we're going to do these four training topics. Here's further explanation of when I talk about when I say that the tag line is calibration calls. What does that mean? And then help me to build out a training module over a five week period. And then loaded in the predictive index profiles of the individuals. This was like, hi, we've used predictive index for how many years? It's the dawn of time since the dawn of time. And I continually go back to predictive index all the time. Like, hey, I just want to understand the way that people are kind of geared. And so like, how do I have to show up and what? Anyway, for the first time, I put it all into the LLM and said, help me to build it four week, five week. Training PowerPoint schedule, taking to account these people and the way that they're naturally built. And so we've been able to have a training path where we've got decks because one person is very process oriented and needs to see. And we have one section of it where we're doing role playing because this other person is built that. Like so we basically were able to build internal training that is structured around the individuals who are receiving the training. And we have people on our team who they are amazing individuals who might be a little bit scared or don't know how to tackle it. Or maybe they're a visual learner and they'll then I joke about this all the time because I have to read things. I have to see the written word in front of me. If I can see the written word, I can take it in. If somebody reads to me, it's like, I can't. I don't process that way. And so whenever we have a meeting, she's like, I need you to, oh, wait, hold on. Let me pull the page up and then read through it. And so it's just really understanding how to meet people where they are and playing to their strengths. Yeah, it's good. I want to shift talking about building the business that will put you out of business. I think somebody earlier today asked me what's the biggest things that leaders are struggling with that they should really embrace. And my answer was letting go of who they used to be and who the company used to be to reimagine who they and the company had become. Yeah. Walk me through what happened when we were together at the offsite for the collective and we asked this question of what's the business that will put you out of business. And what would it look like if you were the one that built it first? So here's the thing that I think is a huge gift that people should know. The fact that Amy and I are in the collective is a big game changer. I think being in the room at the same time while these things are happening, quantum leap are learning, but even more important quantum leap, the action items, we leave collectives and we're already sprinting. We usually have a wrap of session after the collective and divide up action items, but we don't need to recap. I don't need to say so we this was the teaching and then the like we already know. So it was like, okay, these three things I'll take them, these three things you take them. This thing let's assign this to this person. Let's assign that to that person. We're running so fast and that's very helpful. So we ran that exercise at the collective and our answers diverged so greatly and we had a meeting the first day like, what the heck? And when we went through, I realized I was like, oh, I went way off course. I went down a pass and I realized what I didn't do that Amy did. So she's a better active listener apparently than I am. Throughout the day, you had said, you're the leader, you're the strategic seat. It told me we're going to do this and I was like, okay, okay, okay. And it told Amy, we're going to do this and she was like, no, I don't like that answer. No. And she stayed in the driver's seat where I was like, let's get down the highway. And so I fully went in a direction. When we course corrected, I said, Amy, you're right. What you did is right. Like that. And I could see where it broke because what we ended up switching our prompts and reading each other's and I could see where mine broke after I was like, oh, this is where she stopped and went. No, no. So we left there feeling, okay, the second collective. And now it's become shorthand because you have us come up, pull up the thought partner, run a prompt. We can look at each other and I know the cadence of which we've put something in. We've answered it. It's done this. We've answered it. It's done this. And we'll look at each other and I'm like, oh my gosh, and she'll fit and I already know where we're going. It's happened where we've arrived at a place. When we left the collective, when we were there in January, so well, we had a head start because we had you train our team and then we were part of the Q4. So we were feeling ourselves. We are so far ahead. It's great. Then we got to January and it was phenomenal. We're ahead. We're thinking this. Blah blah blah. By May, I could see time collapsing. I could see, oh my gosh, a lot of the sprint that we had. I mean, it's, that's closing very rapidly. And we need to really ask these questions bigger, bolder and really let go. Because you saw others catching up and how fast they were catching up. Yes. And how fast and not necessarily even in our industry, but just in their respective areas. And what they were doing and deciding what they were building and where they were going. And I saw Holy moly. We got to, and so we walked out and Amy felt the same way. Like we're no, we got to think bigger. And a couple of things happened and it was a Friday afternoon. And I said, Amy, we got to take action right now. And she said, yeah. And we decided we have a colleague on the East Coast. And from this information we had right after the collective, we said we need to build a war room. We need to open a shared file. We need to invite them. And the three of us need to go spend a day strategizing. And we decided to meet in beautiful Atlanta, Georgia. And we spent from 9 9 30 AM to about 4 30 or 5 building and asking what is the business that puts us out of business. And we built the second version, which we know can last six to 12 months. And while we're deploying that, we need to build the next business, which will fall in after that and deploy that. And it is amazing. Like I mean, the kinds of conversations that we're having and what we created and what we saw in the way that we were able to sprint in that room and the kinds of questions and strategy we were able to have couldn't have happened without those two collectives. And without that Q4 work we did because we already had the foundation late. And without the thought partner because we were able to. leap in balance. So we would have gotten one-thirtyth of the work done. It would have taken us so much longer to get down a path. So I'm actually curious about that. And for people who are watching or listening is when you keep saying the thought partner, they're referring to our AI thought partner, which is a actual technology product we built, AI product. Whereas Chatchy PT, you ask a question, this asks you questions. And this truly aligns the strategy and execution of a leadership team. What was different about it for you? I mean, honestly, what was different is, and I think we're a very good team in that. We don't fear the thing. We're very much like, no, no, no, be honest with me. Tell me the truth. And so we asked it very poignant, very straightforward questions, basically obliterating, blowing up the business. And it was incredible, we created. And we're being probably a little bit. I don't mean to be so vague, but we literally created something that does not exist today that we believe we can create and will shift everything. Industry transformation. Yes. When we walked into May, I had a conversation with one of our fellow members and this is before the full sessions even started. This was the night before dinner when we were all just catching up. And he started sharing his discoveries around agent to AI and his businesses in some way related to our business. It was a. All that came here, we need to talk like this, we need to have this conversation. And then I think we're always in lockstep because we have the benefit of being in the collective together. But bringing in this other individual to the conversation and level setting and the power of teams that are built very differently alongside the thought partner. I think that's my. But I think that's a good point, Amy, the people in that collective room speak a similar language. And so when we say something, they say it back at the level at which we're speaking. And so it's not someone dropping back into how businesses run today. It's someone elevating what you just said to an even it just elevates the conversation. What was required. For you to let go of the way the business used to be to re imagine what the business could become. Great. You know, that's a really good question Jeff because I'm getting ready to celebrate my 13th anniversary with higher better. And when I joined the company, Kurt had just acquired it. And so we we blew the business up when he acquired it. It was a very different business that he bought. And so I can put a thumbprint on many, if not most of the things that we do. I would say it is excitement for the future and it's lack of ego, right. And the business that we're building when you think about being a creative person. The amount of creativity. I mean, it's so exciting, but you can't have an ego about it, right. It's can't hold on to your darlings because they were your darlings from the past because your darlings are going to be obsolete in about three months. I think it's wonderful that Amy is so emotionally intelligent and can reflect. As you know, I manure CEO to higher better. I've built lots of other companies and done other things. So for me, the natural step was to take what was and built something new. The thing that's interesting to me, though, Amy is especially if you talk about creatives. I know a lot of creatives who have resisted AI because they say, I'm a creative. I'm not going to use AI for that thinking that it's actually going to diminish their creativity. What would you say to that? I mean, I think if you are a creative that you should understand that you're always exploring new media. You're always exploring new ways to get to a desired result. I went to art school when I got my undergraduate degree in ceramics. You were forced to make something called a cone pack. A cone pack is it's got pyrometric cones that you put in a piece of clay. And this is what you put inside the kiln when you're firing. And you have it at three different temperatures. And so the lowest temperature goes and then the next temperature goes and then when you get to cone. That's why they say when you get to cone, the cone starts to bend and it gets to a certain certain level. And that's when you've reached temperature. You can turn the kiln off or you can open it up into your recoup firing. Whatever it is now and these newfangled days. They have these electronic. It's literally a probe that you stick in the kiln and it gives you your temperature real time, right? Or you have kilns that you can program. Does it make you any less of an artist because you're using a cone pack and you're pre setting your kiln to turn off when it reaches temperature? I don't think so. That's antiquated thinking. We're always going to have advances. It's the way in which we approach the work. That's what matters. Yeah. And I think it can be easy to think that this will take away creativity if you are shackling yourself to the way things used to be versus if you say, no, I'm still going to be creative. How I express my creativity might be different. It's not about me just sitting down with pen and paper and coming up with my potential strategies or solutions to achieve this goal or overcome this problem. It might be me having a conversation with my AI thought partner and having an interview me to pull the context out of my head that I would have put down on paper anyways. But then it harnessing its massive amounts of data and processing abilities to show me the things that I can't see and rapidly expand the possibilities in front of me, which then my creative mind is going to start to connect dots I couldn't have connected before. I'm going to share those and it's going to give me feedback on those and help me think of five derivatives that I wouldn't have thought of based on the derivatives that I came up with that I couldn't have come up with on my own. And that is a genius of the eye of crit because I ask my questions of myself, maybe to a certain extent. And I just told you that I'm adventurous and I like new things and I try them out and I don't come from a place of fear. But I'm still just me. So the line of questioning that I ask falls into certain categories that probably most people can predict the first question you're going to ask yourself is this and they probably would be right. Often times when the first question pops up when I put credence, the first question I'm like, you have got to be kidding me. I would have never asked this. I love that you actually describe higher better as an AI native culture, which again, I mean, just to give people context. I mean, we've maybe been on the journey together for a year, maybe. So to go from, hey, this is chat GPT to we've literally come up with a new business model that could transform your entire industry. And we are now an AI native culture. I think people, they don't comprehend that that can happen that fast. What does that mean? And what does that even look like? I can tell you an example of what it looks like. We have this beautiful product that we can provide to our clients that's aligned with all of our marketing and our brand. And it's something that we're thinking about rolling out. And so I sent it to velvet and this other person on the team and I said, God, what do you think about this? This is beautiful. And I think it's going to be really time consuming. I am concerned if you think about like the way we're doing this other one and comparable and the RDA and our colleague. The one that was resistant, the one that had to build out the our policy, her feedback was it's beautiful and it's too time consuming. There's no way we can do this. And I wrote, Bella called it back and I said, I think we should talk about this on stand up. And she said, again, an email, I think it's beautiful. Can we automate it? And I said, God, Kelly, you're right for the like kicking me the way that you did because she was like insisting about it, right? Yeah. And so I went and I did like 30 minutes of research. Like, can we take this thing that's built in Canva and can we pull in this other input and have it automated? And what would the workflow be basically pretend I'm a moron and I don't know anything about any of the programs that I would need to do is this even possible. And if it is possible, give me a step by step, like it's written for a kindergartener. And sure enough, it is possible. And it is something that we can take that process that I talked about and have it be automated. And we can do that for not just that one thing, but probably two or three other things too. And that to me is what it means to be a native is that somebody comes back to me and it's like, funks you in the head, like automated, right? Like, that's what's happening in our company. And I say from a leadership perspective, the way that you achieve adoption of anything is first and foremost, empower and trust your team. And if you empower and trust your team, that means you're embracing error, you are giving them latitude, you are creating ownership of their vertical. And when they do it, and they come back and it's totally wrong, you then have curious inquiry. What did it work? Why didn't it work? Do you feel good about this? Where would you take it? How would you use it? What feedback might you get? Who would protest and be really curious about that and allow people to come to you with triumphs with failures and talk through and really champion it and allow them to be the owners of what they do and trust them and then from that they start to push back. So she pushed back to Amy like automated and now every member of our team because of that they know they are the owner of their vertical, their job, whatever it is and so when someone says hey and I did it to someone who's a couple layers away where I said hey I need this and I'm getting this and I don't want that and they came back and they said well why are we asking it from the software what if we did this in automation? I was like yeah do that and when it came back I was like this is cool we didn't even exist it was so I think that part the trust, the giving people latitude and then the celebrating the success and having curious inquiry about what didn't work is really important. What I'm really hearing is it's a shift from asking how can I do this? Which how can I make Canva interact with this other thing? I don't even know I'm not technical I'm a creative I got other things to do shift away. How can AI help me do this? Context. I'm the chief experience officer for higher better we have this product it is beautiful but it is so manual it is so intensive and it's based out of Canva but we realize in order to automate it it would have to go to these other things I don't even know if that's possible and I really I like I went to art school I know nothing about code or automation or process workflow and I'm really hoping that you can be an amazing thought partner and treat me like a kindergartener and tell me if it's possible and walk me step by step how to do it your role is to act like an expert in systems who has a deep expertise in Canva and these other systems and you're so good at making these complicated technical things so simple that a kid or a garden could understand it interview me ask me one question at a time up the three questions to gain deeper context about the situation task tell me if it's possible and if so walk me through step by step by step like I'm a kindergarten so I could literally point and click and make this real in the next 10 minutes. Yep. Crit. That's it. What a great conversation with Velvet and Amy you got to hear how they went on a journey of taking work that used to take hours and being able to collapse it into minutes and what stands out to me is how when you have a fearless CEO combined with a CXO who is processed driven and can help make things real when you bring those two things together how fast can we get to transform? I love what Velvet said when she looked at her her people and said we just liberated you to be human. I think that's right and I think that's the opportunity that you have in front of you right now. As a leader whether it's your board asking you questions about how your harnessing this or your competition and worrying that they're moving faster than you the bottom line is you've got to get in the game because if you don't you will fall behind and you may already be behind. The good news is what if he didn't have to become an AI expert? What if he just had to become an AI driven leader who knew enough to cast vision for the future to find your strategy for how you're going to win and just to begin to lead the change until you realize you need to get in a relationship with certain people externally they can guide you along the way. This is what it looks like. So I've got three very simple things you can do to put this into action. First if you are not yet subscribed to the show click the subscribe or follow button that way all future episodes will automatically be delivered to you. In the next episode you are actually going to hear me turn the tables on Amy and Velvet and I'm going to ask them what's the biggest challenge you're facing in your business right now. If we could just solve it it would unlock a new level growth for you and I am going to actually pull up AI and harness it as a thought partner to solve one of the biggest problems using our crit methodology which stands for context role interview task you do not want to miss that episode. Second thing you can do if you have not yet read the AI driven leader it is the number one book in the world for its category for a reason I cannot think of a better way for you to unleash a flywheel of momentum with your team then going through the book together it is literally a game changer and finally if you are a sea level executive of a mid market to enterprise company and you know that you've got to start driving this but you aren't quite sure how make sure to check out our website at aidleadership.com you will see there are a bunch of ways that we can support you from doing trainings for your executive team to pulling key C-suite leaders into our executive network called the collective where we make sure that you stay ahead of the competition and drive this strategically in the company and our advisor services where we actually partner with specific companies to harness this technology to grow your enterprise value and your competitive advantage. Bottom line it's time to take action and it's time to think differently because the future doesn't wait in need or should you. I'm your host Jeff Woods and I look forward to being with you in the next episode.