04. Curiosity, Adaptability, and Smarter Workflows with Adi Klevit

Hello guys, welcome back to the Victor Cho podcast. Today I am super excited to have a conversation with Adi Clevitt. She is a multi-faceted force, which I love. So she started her career in engineering, but then went on. Of course, to do many things, but most recently she has scaled up her own consulting company, focused on business process, reengineering called the Business Success Consulting Group. She also has her own podcast where I was, she was gracious enough to have me join several months ago. We had a wonderful conversation, serves on many nonprofit initiatives, just a wonderful human being, and some very excited to have this conversation around how technology has impacted both her journey and also kind of her current business because as you all know, this wave of AI in terms of how it impacts things like knowledge industries, consulting, et cetera, it's just going to be fascinating. So Adi, it's such a pleasure to have you here. Thank you Victor. It's great to be here and thank you for inviting me. Yeah, now such a treat. So this is just going to be a casual conversation. We'll take the conversation wherever it goes, but maybe I'd love to start with just some super high-level background in terms of what would love to hear a little bit about your story and journey and how did you end up in business process reengineering and consulting and podcasting at the end of the day? Yeah, okay. So I'm going to answer each part is different, right? So I started as an industrial engineer and so process documentation, process optimization was what I was doing. So it's something that I've been doing throughout my career. I love that combination of bringing order, organization, figure things out and also working with people. So in 2011, I started my current company and it started as a general business consulting because I'm very good at strategy. I'm very good at consulting and finding solutions. But then I saw that niche. I saw that need to document processes because I will tell my clients, you got to document your processes to say, yeah, yeah, we know we need to do that. We've got to document your processes. Okay. And it would just would not get done. So I said, well, how about if I do it for you? Really, you can do that. Said, yeah. So that really, I learned about that need. It's like a stumbled upon that need that I knew it was needed. I mean, I knew that people need to document their processes, but there was really not nobody doing it. So I go, okay, let's start and I started doing it and obviously I scaled my own company because I was not able to do it myself. And I'm not the one, I mean, I, I'm very good at the high level. You know, I'm also good at creating the processes, but you know, it takes hours. So that would be basically, I would be able to work with one or two clients, but I wanted to expand and there was the need. It would start referring others and bigger companies. So then I definitely build a team. So that's on the business side on the podcast. It actually started in 2021. I used to do a lot of networking in person, but then we know that during 2020 and 2021, there was no more in person networking. Go, what, how am I going to get connections? How am I going to meet people? And I was a guest on somebody's podcast and I go, wow, this is interesting. I love being a guest, but I can also have my own because then I can invite all the people that I want to talk to. So it started as a solution for not in person networking. But then I, I just fell in love with it because I get to have people on the show like you and I, I mean, I had you on the show. We had this amazing conversation. I'm just getting to have amazing conversation with people that otherwise I wouldn't. And I get to ask the questions and be curious and then get the feedback for my listeners is the best because like somebody last week told me, oh, I listened to your podcast that you had with such and such and it was a great conversation and I was listening to it in the kitchen. And my wife asked questions and I was like, wow, you know, I'm really creating a difference here because I'm bringing that information and I'm pushing that information out and it's a win-win situation. So that's how you're going to do that. I'm with you. I think this is one of the, we're still in our wave one of our first wave of guests. Of course, and thank you for being one of our first guests. But yeah, this is one of my favorite things to do by far for that exact reason. Right. Just having deep conversation on topics that are interesting and then having hopefully having people say, yes, that was a great conversation and I learned something I got a golden nugget. But so the consulting side is fascinating to me because we are entering this world where I'd say up until now technology has been in service to process in many ways, right? It's helped us codify it. But those processes generally are pretty fixed. And so what really is interesting to me is how things like AI may fundamentally change business processes, meaning the example that I give you is, you know, if you think of what these AI algorithms can do today in terms of just generating output, like there are hundreds, if not thousands of companies that are basically going to go under because they were brute forcing approaches to problems that neural networks can now solve. And so it's very clear to me that like business processes are going to get way more fluid in a world of AI. So I'd love your thoughts on that, right, which is like in a world where we have these intelligences and I'm the big fan of agentic. I do believe agentic systems are coming. Like what? What happens to the general workflow of business? Like how does it, how does it fundamentally change in your mind? Are you starting to see any of that change already today or or no? Yeah, you know, it's I don't have the complete answer. I don't think anyone does. It's an evolving subject and we do have to have to be agile and we do have to adapt. And but what I see is the shift to I want to have my processes well defined or I want to have the workflow well defined so I can use AI agents so I can use AI. But I also see we're using too much technology. We got two new clients just with that. Look, we have such big, that's what they told us. We have so much tech. The tech stack is just accumulating because, you know, the availability of those apps, all this Apple will solve this and with this one will solve that and this one will solve that. We got it into it ourselves internally. So that's where the cleanup is kind of like, okay, let's let's see what we can do and really identify. So what we do is we identify the process. We map the process and when we map the tech that is in each part of that process in order to see what can be eliminated, what can be consolidated, what can be used more? Maybe we are only using 5% of something that could have been 95% utilization, 70% utilization. So really ensure that there is utilization of the tech existing tech and also one thing that I've seen victories that the agility is not there. So let's say for instance, I have a client that they're not happy with their current ERP. But and go, okay, let's change the ERP. But really, what would it take to change the ERP? They want to have it. The idea is, okay, well, let's change the ERP and have it all new in two months. It's not going to happen. It's months upon months, especially if you don't have your processes documented or the workflow documented. Just have a new client, we are helping them with their sales process. I mean, they have a sales consultant, we're helping with the process mapping and it is, so there are four different iterations. I mean, that takes time because they can just shut down their business and now do process improvement. It has to be done together with all the actions that are being done in the business and that takes hours. So I see that evolution. But going forward, if you if you will like in terms of look at the analogy or the picture, imagine like this tidal wave that is coming forward, but people are not yet adapted to deal with it. So it's either going to swamp you and you're going to you're going to drown or you figure out how to stay above and then float and then sail and then conquer it. So that is where we are at and how to conquer it. I think it's still to be seen. Some people do it better than us, but I don't think anybody has a solution. Otherwise that person will just come up with that solution and say, here's the manual. Here's the playbook of how to integrate AI. Yeah, that's so it's just to use like a tangible example for folks. So we at the new startup that I'm running, we have salesforce.com and we have a pipeline of clients that we're chatting with and of course we've configured that in the traditional way that everybody would have configured sales software. We said, oh, these are all the stages that you need to go through and there's manual tracking. So we've mapped the business process and the software really is built to help you accelerate through that process. But then we get these pitches from companies, these new AI companies that are saying, hey, that's the old way of doing things. You can just plug all your conversations, we'll ingest all of your email and just all of your calls and you can just ask the system for whatever insight you want. Now, I don't think the technology is there yet today, based on the demos that I've seen. You still want the structured data, but I could absolutely see a future world where you are just going into a sales AI and saying, hey, tell me who's hottest in the pipeline. What are the conversations I need to have? Do you think software systems like salesforce or these big ARP systems go away? I know some people have claimed that these AI ingests all software, which of course I don't totally believe, but what's your thought on that? You know, I don't know. I mean, you know, think about the camera, you know, code, you know, when I was a kid, you know, it's like buying a film and all that and that was completely nonexistent in terms of the film, right? I mean, I think even professional photographers don't use actual negative. I mean, they will use all digital. That went away and probably somebody said there before it went away. Oh, I don't think so. I mean, you know, film is, you know, film would always be there. It's the, it's the foresight. You know, how do you, I mean, I think that's an important question that I, I often ask and think, you know, what, how do you gain that foresight? Like, what tools exist out there in order to gain correct foresight so you can actually take the initiative that it takes in order to change. And you have to take the initiative fast enough and early enough so you're not left behind. We can't ignore it. You know, and I, I definitely, I'm not, I like to look to see myself as an early adapter or at least, you know, definitely, I'm not afraid of change. But what I, my struggles are, you know, you have the day-to-day demand of running a business, of innovating yourself in terms of the processes. How can I make an onboarding process better? How can I deliver better? But I also have now the challenges of figuring out what are the AI tools that we need to use in order to provide better for our clients as well. Because one of the things is, you know, that they look at, okay, so there is so many tools for marketing. Yes, can I now spend the time learning all these marketing tools? No. So consultancy, in my opinion, marketing consultants that in the past could have like, you know, spend hours designing a website that now can be designed very fast using AI, they're going to become valuable because I am not going to use the AI tools to design the website. I mean, it's just not going to happen because I will have to invest in my people to learn it. They will have to stop what they're doing or hiring somebody new in order to do that. So I do think that the consultancy world is going to change to a knowledge because you still need to have a human knowledge. And human interaction, you and I talked about it. I mean, that's what your company is all about. It's like, you know, you still need to have the human knowledge. You want to have a conversation with a person because their attitudes, their qualities to a person that the AI does not have. And that's why I see consultancy changing too of consulting of like which tool to use and monitoring and running those tools to create a product. So I do think that the intelligence, the emotional ability of a human, the ability to imagine, ability to create is there. The tools on how to use it is going to change. That's my take on it. I give you an example. I used charge, I mean, I was renovating my home and I used charge GPT to help me figure out the colors. So I had the color of the floor was, I chose the color of the floor and I had the colors of the wall, but I was debating between two colors of the world. So it analyzes it really well, but it gave me all this content. Oh, you have such good taste and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, it's like flattering me as it's like telling me the truth, like you can tell me this is ugly. Anyway, that's a different subject. But so it gave me this whole analysis and then I needed blinds for my windows. And then it analyzes the color against that. So it helped me choose two different colors and two different styles because you know, it was a company that had basically a product like 100 different blinds, different styles, different fabric. So I then I called the place that had a designer and I said, look, I'm looking for this and this because I like to make decisions fast and I like to make decisions. So in order to make decisions, I need data. So that's what I got. I got the data and I said, look, I'm looking at this option A option B, this color or that color. She was extremely happy because I'm not, wasn't a customer. Hey, I want something. I don't know what, you know, so she could take it, but then she added her. She goes, look, for my knowledge, this color, which was very similar to what I chose. We look best, but let me check. She went to my home. She put those two together. She looked, took, we took, we looked at it and I go, okay, yeah, this looks great. Boom done. So it helped me with my decision making, but it's, it wasn't just the AI deciding for me or me deciding based on that. I still needed that human touch because she had something in, is that artistic sense that AI doesn't have and it can create art, but you have to add, it's kind of like, you're not going to let the paintbrush paint by itself, whatever it wants. You give the directions and then you create it. And that's the way I also use AI. I have it interview me, right? Ask me questions. This is what I'm trying to decide. Ask me a question one at a time. So then it asked me the questions and the one. Yeah, also with marketing content, of course, I use AI. I mean, why would I not? I can now create articles in a fraction of the time, but I don't let the AI create the article and the one who is the thought leadership is mine. Sometimes I get stuck and I go like, I don't know, what do you suggest? Give me some ideas. I mean, give me 10, 10, you know, examples, or give me like the research and exact quotes from the research, so then I can actually evolve my idea a little bit better, but it's still it's it's as driving it. Yeah, and I saw it that if I had to recap that, let me know if you think this is accurate, because it was one of my core questions, right? How does how does something like AI impact a knowledge business like consulting? And it sounds like you have a more optimistic view of this, which is, yeah, it's going to make things more efficient, but because of the complexity of what humans need to add to the equation for things like consulting or right or other domains, like that's probably going to be a world where those tools are supplementing firms like your own. People are still going to those firms because they need that they need that meta layer of really higher level intelligence and synthesis on top. They don't have that themselves. And so they're going to come to the wrong conclusion if they jump straight into some AI solution without that, at least today. That's true. And I am optimistic because it's not like, I mean, a pessimistic approach will be like we will all die and there will be nothing so I want you to be controlled by AI. I mean, no, it's how we make it and we can make it that way. We can allow it. I mean, if we all go become a pathetic and decide, we're not going to do anything that's the AI control the world. Okay, fine, but we can also use it as a tool. Use it as something that is going to help us drive forward what we do even faster. And I really still think that people will need that advisory, that fractional operations, CFO, bookkeeping, whatever it is. I mean, look, a bookkeeper nowadays is different than it used to be. I used to have a bookkeeping company. And in the late 90s and early 2000s, and it was a lot of work. You had to reconcile. I mean, oh, reconcile the account against this. I can do the bookkeeping myself right now. I don't even need a bookkeeper because it's all in QuickBooks Automated. I mean, if you are actually down, I mean, all the trends, I mean, it's not like, remember, in the past, we used to write paper checks and until they clear, they had to be manually logged into the, I don't need to do it because I don't, I don't know when the last time, you know, even if I write a check, it's immediately from my bank, you know, I put it from my bank and it's immediately shows in the ledger. So it's kind of like, you know, and then it downloads into QuickBooks. So there is no chance that it's not going to get reconciled because it's just everything is accounted for. And it's just like boom, boom, and it's reconciled. So what a bookkeeper does now, but still, you know, you know, you need a bookkeeper in order to actually keep everything in line and make sure that everything is correct. And you know, people will pay for that because they don't want to do it themselves. So if the bookkeeper is smart, that bookkeeper will charge a flat fee per month. And this is all they're going to do. And then I have a piece of mind that my books are being taken care of and I might have paid the same as I paid them for somebody to work hours upon hours. But who cares? It's being done. You know, I don't care how it's being done because there is also the limit of how much we can do ourselves. Yes, can I do all the problem myself now by buying all the AI tools and getting it done? Probably yes. Am I now, but it's going to take me time? Yes. Am I going to do it myself? No. So yes, maybe the marketing agency now can do it instead of 30 hours. They do it in 10 hours. Okay. Fine. But I can also do my work faster, but I still charge for it. So it just goes down the line. We just will have more. I think what do it will do is that we will have more time to create more. Yeah. And expand and going faster. Don't you think? No, I think that I talk a lot about this idea of AI amplifying people's abilities, right, as a first step. And so, yeah, if you're a firm that has not been amplified, you can deliver you have two, three, four, X, the output, right. And however, that output is measured. It's a fascinating shock into the system of work that is going to ripple through in really interesting ways. I'm super curious with these tools because your firm is going to be able to be more agile than like a much larger firm. Are you able to now go after a bigger business? Does AI make you more competitive in things that maybe in the past were impossible because you're amplified because you guys have right more time. You can spend more time on strategic a lot of the tactical stuff, right, can be delegated down to systems. Yeah. I mean, I think it just allows us, I mean, I don't necessarily bigger, bigger businesses, but more. I mean, you know, it definitely allows us to scale, but we still have our target market. So it's not like right now I'm going to go after Fortune 500 companies because we are not. We're not built for that. This is not our interest. You know, we are serving the mid market, you know, so that's that's what we concentrate, but we have more ability to, you know, we have more bandwidth. We're creating also. It's not like, you know, it's one and done and like, okay, that's it. We have the AI doing everything because it doesn't. We do still the human capital. We still need the people, but we definitely like, you know, let's say right now I need to write a statement of work for a new client in the past. It would have thanked hours. Now I can just take the transcription from the call I just had because, but because I had the call structured and asked the right questions at the right times, then I already have a template. It takes it and it writes exactly what we discussed. So it's not like the AI invented it. I'm not sending the AI right a proposal based on whatever. No, it's taken what I already said. Just put it in writing, send it, person signs, boom, it's like, okay, what it would have taken hours can take now 15 minutes. So that's very good. Yeah. Now I love that. Actually, in that vein, what have been the biggest productivity enhancers that you found for your business in terms of if you had to pick like your top three in the last three or four years? I mean, sending communication out, it's fast sales following up, you know, writing the emails, automating, you know, basically from one platform to another, not having to do manual work. Finances is a big one, you know, bookkeeping for sure. Yeah. What have been the biggest things that you tried where you're like, ah, it didn't work. Do you have any? When the AI has a hallucination, well, I mean, actually writing the processes, it doesn't work. I mean, we conduct many knowledge transfer calls where we transfer the knowledge, ask the questions, and then if you try the AI to figure it out, it doesn't, it's some, I mean, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't work consistently. So we can't rely on it because sometimes it just hallucinates and writes things that are not there or meets things that are not there or change things that are not there. So we're working on training it correctly. Yeah. Now that makes a ten of sense. I was speaking of training one question, curious question on this one because I just had a conversation with someone from the academic side of the world, a professor at one of the larger universities. And we had this great discussion of, right, the role of learning and training, right. We went from a world where the young folks would come out with some kind of point skill, right, and companies would hire them and train them, right, and build them up. And just yesterday, there was an interesting article that said, you know, they do believe, I think there was a Wall Street Journal article that the dampening of some of these entry level jobs is happening because of AI. No, I'm curious from your guys' perspective, how do you view the hiring pools now? The people that you're going to hire, has there been any change in who you hire, the age, the quality, the skill set level? Is that changed at all? Well, I definitely hire people that have AI adaptability. I can tell you that. I mean, that's part of the things that I require. But I'm curious, like another here, I hear your question on what you just said. I mean, you know, I wonder if there will also be a big shift in our traditional education. Do you really need four-year degree, college degree nowadays, when things change so fast? I mean, by the time you enter college, by the time you get out of college, what you learned on your first year of college, it's probably going to be completely obsolete by the time you're done, especially if you are learning, unless you are learning, of course, you know, the history of literature, which is important. We definitely need to know the humanities. I'm not making less of it, but you learn how to call the first year is totally different. It thinks change so fast, and you can also absorb and learn knowledge so fast that I really think that the skills that need to be learned and developed is the ability to think for yourself is the ability to think and the ability to be able to ask questions and investigate and get to the bottom of things and what doesn't make sense then continue to ask and really question what the output of the AI so you can actually ask the next question or correct it. I mean, those critical thinking skills is very important. That's not being taught right now. We have to really develop the ability to skill and the skills to think independently, and I think that is something that I'm also looking in terms of internal training, in terms of each and every one of my team members have to be able to evaluate and look and think correctly because otherwise, you're not going to be able to maneuver and use the AI correctly. Yeah, it's one of the most interesting topics I think. Yeah, how our fundamental educational structures change, and for me, it comes down to a super interesting question, which is how much content knowledge do you really need to be able to manage large-scale complex systems well? And I think the short answer is at a high level. I think human beings have an amazing capacity. If you give them the right critical thinking and foundational knowledge layer, they have an amazing ability to manage a ton of downstream complexity. In some ways, they all become a little mini-steel. I don't know. I don't know all there is to finance or to marketing or to product, but I'm smart enough to know what questions to ask and whether these individual elements are coming together in the right way. Absolutely. That skill set, I think, is going to be so important because you'll have the world's best everything at your fingertips. That's right, and you have to use it, and I think that those of us that know how to do it and utilize it are the ones who are going to survive it very well. Yeah. I love that. I love that. So in the final couple of minutes, any personal tips, is there anything that you do personally outside of work with these tools where you're like, I would recommend that people do this. How do you stay on top of all this crazy change? You know, I just stay on top of it. I'm not I'm not sure if I'm really on top of it, but I do my best, and that's the thing is like don't be hard on yourself, do whatever you can. I definitely belong to maybe too many chat groups, you know, with different organizations that they belong to, that deal with AI. So I read it here and there. I definitely am part of the AI collective that got started by Jeff Woods, and it's very good in terms of, you know, it's a group of entrepreneurs that we meet three times a year. We have monthly calls, and we stay on top of the innovative, the newest tools. So that's that's one thing that I do. And I, how do I use it in my personal life? I mean, you know, I'm, I, I use it to renovate my home. So it gave me a whole project, which was great because I was able to go back and forth, but, you know, and it gave me ideas. I mean, I'm the one who got me the divisions, of course, and then I found it outside of the AI, but it gave me good ideas. I actually asked him to ask it to design something, and then I showed it to the contractor, the carpenter, because we cannot do that. That's impossible. But okay, fine, but it was a great idea. Anyway, I used that. I mean, travel to, to travel, to ask medical advice, you know, to ask, you know, anything, you know, just like that's my go-to in terms of like, hey, I'm looking at going to this and this place in November. What do you think? Like, what is the weather? Where is the best way to stay? What, what do you recommend for doing for the day? You know, it's just like different things like that. Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense that random personal anecdote. Yeah, we did some landscaping recently, and the AI is a great example of two complex, a problem, right? Because we had to figure out like, what flowers should we plant, right? Now that the landscaping was done, and I had never done this before, and so it blew my mind how complex of a problem that is, because it's like, oh, well, what areas get sunlight at what part of the day? Like, how is the water flowing down the hill? Right? What, what plants are next to what plants? Like, how, you know, can deers come in? And so, you know, it's funny. I asked AI, like, oh, what would you do? And it gave me what looked like a reasonable thing. But then we actually had a botanist come in. And it was like, this would die instantly if you tried to do this, because there's no way the AI had the complexity knowledge of all of that, all of that other stuff. And like, literally, the person needed to walk the terrain and understand, oh, water is going to flow this way down the hill. There's no way that that's going to come out going back to this idea, right? That's a great idea. And it's a misconception that now AI is going to do everything, you know, it's not. It's, it is going to do some things, probably the path of resistance or the list, like something that is black and white, absolutely. And that is, I think, the differentiator. And that's what we do when we do process improvement and process mapping. Okay. So what is black and white here that we can delegate to AI? Good. Bookkeeping, downloading the transactions from the bank and reconciling against it, against the statement, absolutely no problem. But even figuring out what the transaction has to be like a new transaction, how to, you know, what do we need to categorize it as at it's not always right? So you do need to, you need to tell it at least, right? So it's like the black and white yes, but the more complex problem. So the problems that also necessitates that aesthetic or artistic ability, emotional ability, that's human. Yeah. And that's, that's what I think the future is like is like this nice cohabitation of artificial intelligence with humans, humans in control. But using the AI just like we right now, we can get on a plane and I can get offloaded to New York in two and a half hours, like in the past, it would have taken days and days if I even would have made it. So now it's, it's something that facilitates and makes things faster. And that's what it is. It's nothing, it's no more than that. Yeah. No. I, I hope that is the vision. I see many worlds where that becomes the future. So I am also optimistic. Final question. Adi, is there a book or piece of content or something just specific that you just loved that inspired you that you'd want to share? Say, hey, good, go check out this. Jeff Woods, AI Driven Leader is a wonderful book. And I think it really also talks about how like what, what can the AI do for me and staying ahead of the AI and. Wonderful. Jeff Woods will definitely put that in the, in the show notes for folks. And Adi was such a pleasure. I think we're done with the 30. So this was, I wish we had more time, but this was just a wonderful conversation. I had such a great chat and thank you for coming on. Thank you Victor for having me. It was a pleasure. Awesome. We'll chat soon. In addition to running this podcast, I'm also the CEO of Immovate. 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