Dashboard: You Probably Should Be Doing More with AI

[Music] Welcome to another 21 Hats dashboard. I'm here with Ted Wolf who built a business called Wolf Advisory International from two people to around 800 uh with I believe more than $100 million in revenue and then sold it to Iron Mountain. He's also been a Vistage chair. But most recently, he's taken a deep dive into artificial intelligence with a focus on helping business owners make smart decisions about adopting the the new technology. Welcome to the podcast, Ted. >> Uh, thank you very much for having me. Look forward to a conversation. >> Really appreciate it. Really happy to have you here. So, as I said, AI will be our main topic today, but tell us a little bit about your background. Uh, what did Wolf Advisory International do? Well, first of all, my brother and I both worked for IBM, and uh this was right out of college, and we both wanted our own business, and we thought, well, the future's going to be in software and services versus selling hardware. So, we left IBM, started our own business. Um, we each put in $500, total of $1,000 capitalized, and we did a lot of sweat equity, and uh we worked hard, but we made a lot of mistakes. And I'll tell you, most of the mistakes we made were all people mistakes. And that's part of learning to hire, manage, and um sometimes separate from the people that don't work. But um great learning experience. Um we ended up uh knocking, like I said, on a lot of doors and a lot of sweat equity and we grew the business um pretty well and it was because we surrounded oursel with really good people. >> What did the business do? >> The business uh was a technology consulting and staffing company. So we actually started out as head hunters and we supplied technical people for hire full-time by client companies in the IT area. Uh the recession of 82 came along and uh they stopped hiring. So we said well maybe they'll rent them from us. So we started doing contract staffing, staff augmentation along with consulting and kept the recruiting going and more and more people started coming because we could identify and locate really good technical people. That was our product for the most part and uh basically word started spreading. We opened offices in Philadelphia. Then we went to Baltimore uh etc. Started expanding our reach into New York City general area. >> You were based in eastern Pennsylvania, right? Yeah, we're based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 60 mi west of Philadelphia. And um worked well. My brother then went down and opened up Florida offices. One thing led to another. We ended up having uh 650 billable people and probably a good hund 125 people between admin, recruiting, and sales um within the offices. We had 13 offices um across the United States. Uh so it was a great experience. learned a lot about building business, but I learned more about myself and managing and guiding people. Um, and that's real relevant today in the age of AI. >> Why did you decide to sell it? >> At that point, we basically did everything we wanted to do with that business. There wasn't a lot more we could do or wanted to do. We didn't want to put ourh houses back on the lines of credit and go into all kinds of debt and expansion. And it was a very opportunistic opportunity for us to be able to um be acquired by Iron Mountain Corporation. Uh and after that I had an out in the contract about two years later. I had young children and I wanted to know them as my children and I wanted to know I wanted them to know me as their father. So I left and started some other small entrepreneurial businesses. >> Good for you. Um was it an IT related business? Are you yourself uh techsavvy? >> Um no. >> Do you code? What what can you do? >> No, I'm not a coder. I h I hired coders. What we did was basically build the the organization and uh build the culture, develop the people. We hired the people who went out and did the technical uh programming, technical consulting, running the IT departments and things like that. So our expertise was more in that people organizational development side. How do you get your business objectives tied in with your people and people resistance but at the same time bring it all together through technology. So I am not a technical person knowing code and went out into decoding. I'm took a different path. It was I'm going to build a business and hire those people and together we'll work together and solve client problems, prospect problems. So, aside from the fact that it's the only thing anybody wants to talk about these days almost, what what got you interested in uh really understanding AI? >> Well, having worked for IBM and building a technology business, consulting business, um it's hard not to stay in technology because it's just the way you think. The input process output formula works in everything. So always had a hand in it. But as I saw AI coming down the road, it was almost a full circle in my own career and life. And that when I was working with IBM, most companies didn't have a computer. So I had to teach them how to use a computer. I had to explain productivity through a computer to an organization. When I look at AI, it's almost like I'm back at the beginning of that very cycle. I feel like I've seen this movie and I have a feel for the way it's going to end. and I think it's going to end very well for a lot of people. Um, so for me the interest in AI was the increased productivity and the absolute positive things you can do with it. And also my son who worked for Deote and his background is technology. He and I decided to co-ound the business guidewise, our present business. And I'd say I probably handle the business and the people consulting development aspect of what you need to do to implement technology and he's doing all the technical side. >> Was there anything in particular that you did to get comfortable with AI? Did you take a uh any kind of planned approach to understanding its capabilities? >> Well, what I did was I started playing with chat GPT when it came out and uh started seeing the possibilities. So, I spent more and more time playing with it, started associating with other people who were um using it andor key in the AI area. And uh as I learned more, I saw more more and more of the possibilities. and my son and I started talking and then he showed me a lot of things in it. And to me, it's just kind of a no-brainer. You have to be involved in it today. You have to opportunities for um not just developing and growing a business, but the opportunities just to grow and develop your own mind and how you think about things and um it really does stretch the envelope in uh helping youth, helping one person or an individual think I believe in a structured manner. I want to ask you a little bit about that uh your sense that you have to be in it today because I I hear different versions of that but first tell us about guidewise what what did you create the company to do what's the plan? >> Um actually it's a very interesting story started out I've done a lot of coaching decades of coaching between my own business other businesses I've owned and um helping other clients build their business. So I have a lot of coaching experience and um when we put everything together, I looked at all the possibilities and changes that are going on and how people are having great difficulty processing the speed and pace of change today. And when they can't do that, they basically go into default mode. And that is resistance. They don't want to make the change. They don't understand and they don't know how. So I spend an awful lot of time helping individuals from a business standpoint learn how to identify what the resistance is to change and then at the same time how do you implement technology because it changes everything very very quickly. Um and how do you make that work out in your own benefit to your benefit I should say and the benefit of the people working for you clients vendors everybody else in doing that. So we basically I basically put that together with my son and that was the lead. Then AI comes out in what 23 22 23 and we looked at it and said this is going to be a huge change management challenge for organizations because AI is not a technical implementation. It's really a business change that you got to evaluate because it just changes everything in the business unlike other technologies. So starting out with the coaching aspect, managing change and people's resistance to change became the complimentary aspect of the offering versus AI because AI now leads everything and it's what everybody wants to talk about for good reason. But um I can go into more detail as we talk here. But the platform we developed actually centers around three vulnerabilities in a business and that is business objectives and strategy integrated with technology integrated with people's resistance to implementing and using the technology. >> Who's your target market? >> Target market would be what we callmemes um 30 million to500 million companies um organizations. We work with senior leadership. We work with what we call the great middle of every organization. That would be your middle managers etc. and the frontline workers also because they all have to adopt and adapt to change. But um there's plenty of statistics and research out there um that says this change management is significantly hard and the odds are against you if you don't know what you're doing initially. >> And how do you deliver your service? Are you going out physically to to clients? Do you have a platform? What are you doing? >> We bought our own technology platform, particularly in the whole um change management aspect for people. So, we can give an awful lot of data that other people can't give on people, what their beliefs are, what their emotional patterns are, the meanings they're assigning to things. But then we combine that with AI. uh I think because the big question that's out there right now for individuals in the area of AI the decision point is which story is correct and what I mean by that is you read about the MIT story research that came out and said 95% of AI pilots right now are failing but then you read Salesforce I've heard some people question that study smart people who I I I don't know enough about it to question the methodology myself but I I think there has some questioning of it. Is that am I right about that? >> Yeah, there has been there has been definitely um the questioning and the insight that I get from it is 95% of pilots, AI pilots fail simply because companies are trying to do all of it on their own. They found significant change if you partner with the right people. Let's just say that you're putting together your own little business or you have a business and you have a technology stack you put together for, you know, you go to LinkedIn to get your leads, then you use something uh to be able to get emails, you scrape the web, get the phone numbers, then you need to put it into a CRM, etc., etc. Um, you can put that technology stack together that way. But when it comes to AI, you have different technologies that have to fit together. It's not just AI. and they found significant improvement in that MIT study um as I remember it if you have the right team and technologies you're putting together to complement it but I think it even goes a little farther than that um so you have to be able to make sure the business is prepared the technologies prepared and your people are prepared because on the other hand people are hearing a lot of stories for instance about Salesforce um I believe they let go up to 40% of their customer service individuals replace them with AI agent and their customer satisfaction scores with clients remain the same. So people look at that and they say which story is true the MIT story the Salesforce story which one's true do I get into AI right now or don't I do I wait and I think that's the dilemma a and the mindset and the the catch 22 a lot of organizations are experiencing right now I hear that all the time from business owners you know many of them are smaller than what you described as your target market but I think they're expressing the same thing uh even if they're not necessarily aware of the MIT study, they have a sense that, you know, they've heard all about hallucinations and unreliability and uh they're perhaps they're being resistant, as you suggested, because they're wary of it. Uh but but also, I think they they they just doubt that the the the technology is ripe, that the time is ripe for them to really invest time and energy into it. and they don't have time and energy to waste. Um, and then I also talk to business owners who are just really excited that they've made great headway and they see tremendous uh potential advantages uh coming down the road. What what do you tell somebody who is for for whatever reason being resistant? >> Well, I think when you look at the two alternatives, the MIT study and then you look at Salesforce and you say which one's right, I don't think that's the right question. And I think the right question is what did Salesforce do that these other companies didn't do? There's got to be something because there the point in time that we're at with AI, there's such a dramatic opportunity for smaller businesses. I've worked with five 7 million businesses, $20 million businesses and helping guide them into AI. And what I found is there's what I call a leapfrog opportunity right now for small business. If you don't get into AI right now and if you don't get in doing the using the right methodology and process, you're probably going to fail. But if you can get in and use the right methodology, >> wait, when you say fail, do you mean fail as a business or fail in your efforts to adopt AI? >> I think failing first in adopting AI and in the next 2, three years, your business could be in significant trouble. And here's why I mean that leapfrog moment. You have a opportunity that if you bring in AI right now and you do it correctly, you can leapfrog your competition in ways that we very rarely had opportunities to do um in the last 40 years of business. What I mean by that is you could be the next salesforce in your industry if you're a small business and really jump ahead of a lot of the competition or you could suffer if somebody else becomes the salesforce equivalent in the business and what they did and they begin now to target you. So we're at a catch22 and you have to make a decision. This is one where you you can't just sit on the sidelines. It's going to be way too costly. But you don't do it in an irresponsible, high-risk manner. It's not just come in, throw II agents at everything that you can think of. You've got governance, you've got compliance issues, you've got cyber security issues, you've got copyright issues, you got intellectual property issues that you got to take into consideration. And I mean, this isn't like you're going to be spending ungodly amounts of money. You can actually bring in a very good suite of AI for less than $1,000 a month. Now, as you do more with it, it will go up in price. The difference between most software in the past that we've used is we pay a license fee per seat. With AI, you pay a license fee, but then you pay a usage fee on top of it. But when Salesforce did what they did in replacing up to 40% of their customer service agents, they had hundreds of millions of dollars now to reinvest in AI in other areas of the business and do the same thing all over. I I can't help but ask you you said that they were able to get rid of I think 40% of their customer service people uh by adopting AI and there was no uh decline in their uh >> customer satisfaction >> customer satis is it possible that their customer satisfaction was so low that it didn't make a difference that they switched to AI >> I'm sure that's probably possible but given the state and the status and and the history of Salesforce um pretty quality oriented organization. I think we would have been reading about how bad the customer service is. I think it would have hurt them. So, I don't think that was the issue. I think they sat back. They probably had their own failures, but they figured out how do we get this to work and how do we put it in? Because right now, I'm told they're hiring unbelievable amounts of people to go in and sell those AI agents to their now present customers that they've developed in house and are using. Interesting. >> So, people have to make a decision. Do I get in or don't? There's a certain way right now to get into AI. Um, the odds are you're going to do it wrong because let's just take a look. The hard truth of the matter is change initiatives in a business, no matter what size they are, the numbers are against you. I mean, McKenzie, Boston Consulting Group, the MIT study, they estimate 70 to 95% of change projects implementing change in your business fail. and they fail because of people resistance. And I think it's because of poor communication, planning, uh, etc. from middle and upper management. >> Well, it's even more fraught with AI, isn't it? Because you're asking your staff to adopt a technology that they suspect is going to put them out of a job. >> Well, I think if you approach it as a productivity tool, no question, you got a problem. And that's the wrong way to approach it. And that's what's going to make it fail. And I'm sure that's what le led to some of these 95% pilot failures in organizations. You have to approach it from the standpoint of how is this going to affect our people? And that's that whole people resistance effort within the organization that you have to pay attention to today. You know, AI is going to sort out the people that can use it and thrive with it versus the people that fear it and stay away from it. So, you know, you can go and look at um um Accenture Consulting. They just had a big press release, I think in a last month. I think there was thousands and thousands of people they had to let go because they could not train them to use AI and that's going to be a reality and you've got to be able to go into work people and say we're going to train you. It's going to involve you doing some extra work. You're going to have to be trained in doing this. It's a different way of thinking. It's going to be the future. But you have to work and build structures that people will want to use it and can use it >> and build trust so that they believe when you say that they're going to still be there. >> Well, you can't have I don't think employment security regardless with no accountability of the results is that you can't run a business that way. But you certainly can help individuals learn how to manage change in their own life, let alone at work. um because they do there's an echo chamber between work, personal life, and health. They're constantly pinging each other. AI is going to just put more pressure on that eco chamber, echo chamber, if you will. So, I think that you got to be able to build trust into the culture. You got to be able to be factual and honest. You got to respect people. You got to be honest with them. You know, respect means I accept you for where you are and I'm going to help you develop, but you've got to do your share of development also to make this work. But we're going to explore it and we're going to find other areas that people will be able to work. I mean, I don't think AI is going to replace people totally. A lot of people, a lot of senior managers, even middle managers say, "I'd love to replace all my people with agents." That's not going to happen. It's impossible. But I think what will happen is you'll go for an interview for a job and they'll say you're going to manage two people and 20 agents now you're responsible for that's a different way of relating with technology but there's going to be so many other jobs and benefits that get created I believe um that if you really want to develop a career the opportunities are much better with AI than without AI. When you talk about the difficult future that companies face if they choose to ignore this, are you talking about truly all companies? I mean, is there an industry that this doesn't apply to? Uh, or does it apply equally to restaurants and HVAC uh businesses and all kinds of things that have not really been considered technology uh forward businesses? I think it's going to affect all businesses, but the time span that would affect all businesses will be different. Um, interviewed a lot of individuals that are very knowledgeable of engineering and AI and they said right now, this year and next year, we're in the period of AI agents starting in three years, four years, and in particular five years, we're going to see actual robots coming in to do work. >> You know what, Ted, you could you explain what an agent is just in case? >> Okay. An agent is a um it's a technology of AI that you basically build where it can actually think and suggest prescribe if you will make make decisions. So it's like um think about >> and take actions >> and take actions and and take actions because you can have multiple agents working together in unison to get a an output and that output is all guided and responsible for the individuals responsible for those agents. Now what will those people do? They're not just going to sit back and wait for the agent to do everything. They're going to look for hallucinations. They're going to validate and verify the information coming in. you do that with an ERP system today in today's technology. But then they're going to be responsible also, I believe, for the lack of a better word saying it, the emotional makeup and the character of that particular agent. There's all kinds of prompting they got to put in place. They got to make sure that they the agent knows what to do and what it can't do. Then they got to be able to oversee it and monitor it. They have to train them in how they're going to be doing it. That sounds an awful lot like training a new person coming into a job. No different. >> So, can you kind of walk us through the process? Suppose a the owner of a small business comes to you and says, "I'm, you know, I've played around with chat GPT a little bit, but we really haven't done anything other than that. Uh, but I know it's important and I want to figure this out and see what it could mean for my business." What do Where do you get started? What do you do? >> Okay. Well, the first thing I do, I talk to individuals and I say, "What are your business objectives?" A lot of organizations don't have solid business objectives other than cash flow, meet payroll right now, pay the bills, and have some time off. Certainly understand that. But you've got to reach a point where you're just not working out of responding to necessity and fires and things like that. But you have some time to work on the business, not just in the business. And when you work on the business to me there's three points of vulnerability in organ an individual small business or big business has to pay attention to. Number one do I have a business plan? Do I know for instance a simple SWAT analysis understand how to put that in place? I build my business objectives. I build my priorities and then I link I find out through those business objectives and priorities what's most important. And then I figure out how do I make a use case out of that. So what's an example of where I could use and bring in AI to achieve that business objective? That means you got to be able to look at your workflow, make sure your processes are all documented, everybody's doing it the same way. Make sure the data is good. And a lot of organizations today don't have documented processes, unfortunately. Um, they don't have really good control over the data. And a lot of the work they do is in what's called tribal knowledge. They know it in their head, but it's not on paper and they can't transfer it easily to somebody, a new employee coming into the business. So, that's where you get into trouble. AI is not going to take that away. You've got to have that as a basis. So, that's your first vulnerability. The second vulnerability is the technology. Do you how do you train somebody to use non-coding AI to build some AI agents that will be integrated and aligned with your business objectives? That way you can get an ROI. You know the technology is good, but how do you actually use and I'll say prompt the AI to do the things you want in building that agent? And and that's a point of vulnerability. There's no cutting corners there. And the third point of vulnerability in the organization is the people. Will they resist the change or will they embrace the change? How are you going to get them to embrace the change? You don't do it quietly. You don't do it behind closed doors. You put a plan together. You tell them here's its benefit of people. We're looking for individuals that can learn to implement and use AI in their everyday work and we're going to build a small team and then we're going to expand it. We're going to get what I call our beach landing of success. We're going to really make sure it's good. It's open to everybody. We're going to communicate the wins and then we're going to build those initial individuals into role models, if you will. This is how they thought. Here's the emotions they felt. Here's the meaning they gave to everything. So we can help individuals overcome that resistance to the technology to achieve the business objectives and everybody can win then. Does that make sense to you? >> Yeah, sure. Um I'm curious when you go through that process, especially with say an owner who brings you in who knows it's the right thing to do but is feeling some emotional resistance to it. Are there aha moments are that you can recall where someone what what happens when somebody's eyes are open to the potential? What makes them realize, okay, this is this is the path I need to be on? >> Um, let's just say they have a business objective where they want to work on the business and not just in the business. So, they're going to find out where the most most of the fires and the the process breakdowns, the product recalls, all those things are starting to happen. So, they identify it. Okay, now they look at that and they say, "Okay, I got a real use for this here and it's dragging me into 10, 15 hours a week that I really don't have to pay attention to this thing." So they sit back and say, "Okay, how can we develop an AI agent to offload that and take that 15 hours and maybe cut it down to an hour?" So then they begin to understand, here's how you prompt and build it a simple part of what we're looking to to reduce that time involvement and to do that task for you. As they see that time involvement go down and the agent take over more, it's almost like a kid in a candy store, it becomes addicting. It's like, "Wait a minute. I did this here and I didn't pay $100,000 for it or even $6,000 for it and I just gained 10 12 hours free." Now, you don't want to go back and build put out more fires. You want to start saying, "How do I train my people to do these things? How do I get other people involved in this so they're going to see and feel the same thing I am? And that you're not going to work yourself out of a job. We're making ourselves more productive so you also can work on developing the business, not just work in the business. And it's a great way to identify future leaders in your business, whether you're a fivep person company or you're a 5,000 person company. >> Oh, that's interesting. That makes sense. who who's most eager to dive in. >> Yeah. Cuz they're going to learn and they're going to come over. They're going to make they're going to make mistakes and they're going to overcome those mistakes. They're not going to let the fear of failing inhibit them and become the the obstacle that they can't transcend. And that takes self-awareness, takes some inner work to do. And that's why that people is that people aspect is extremely important in this because it's going to move really, really fast. really fast. >> You know, you said earlier that what is likely to happen if you don't jump in is that you're going to be overwhelmed by competitors who do who figure things out. That at this stage, I suspect that feels very amorphous to a lot of people. It's, you know, nobody's going to say that's crazy, but there I'm not sure it has the the impact today that it will in in the future. Can you imagine for for someone like that who who who doesn't really think that that competitive um factor is real yet? How are they going to see it? How are they going to know that they're being bypassed by competitors? Number one, their sales will go down and they won't understand why. They'll take a look at their sales pipeline. It's going to start drying up and they don't understand why. So, here's a good exercise to use with AI right now before you bring it into your business. Pick out a competitor, go to their website, then go to a chat CPT, go to Claude, go to, you know, whatever Google, whatever one that you want to use, and say, "I want a competitive analysis between these two companies. I want you to examine this website and put in your competitor's URL. And I want you to compare it to this second company and put in your URL. And then say, I want you to find out in any documentation that's on the web, stories of success and failure. What's going on in company A and what's going on in company B? Be company B being your own company. Tell me about hires. Tell me about new product announcements. Tell me about successful wins, PR. Tell me about any announcements of expansion. Tell me about any PR articles that are appearing anywhere for both companies. And at the end, I want you to give me a summary on the strengths. And in effect, do a SWAT analysis on company A and a SWAT analysis for what you can find on company B. and then compare them and summarize which one has more strength to get through the AI challenges and opportunities that lie in the future and where are the weaknesses in company B versus company A. You'd be amazed at the response you're going to get. That's one way of testing and using how do I test what my competition's going to be and who's starting to leapfrog me in that market and who will the next salesforce be that I got to worry about overtaking me. >> That's a really interesting suggestion and I bet a lot of people listening to this are going to go right ahead and do that. I'm curious. Do you think it matters how far along a business is in terms of what say chat GPT would show up in that kind of SWAT analysis? If you're comparing a business that hasn't been um ambitious, aggressive about going down this path with one that has, presumably there's more information available uh for that SWAT analysis and chat GBT will know more about that more active company. Is is that right or no? >> Well, today people are saying you don't plan SEO for um Google anymore. You plan it for Chat GPT. So let's say you do the example I'm talking about company A, company B. You can tell them and prompt them, I want you to go into that website in detail. I want to know all about the blogs. Tell me the blogs they're posting. Tell me about the podcast they're on. Tell me what their main messages. What are they selling? Can you tell that? And if it comes back and says there's not much out there to talk about, either the company wants to be a real small boutique that's unknown and they don't have to grow or they're not investing where they need to grow in the digital assets, if you will, of the business like blogs, thought leadership, what kind of classes do they offer, what kind of education, what's the success rate, how are they how much are they growing? I mean, there's all kinds of information out there. So, I don't think it's a question of am I too late to get in. You just have to start getting your feet wet. But do it. Probe and test those three points of vulnerability. I talked about the business center of excellence, the technology, and the people and people resistance so you can get them aligned and organized. And I think before you know it, I mean that's working on the business. Before you know it, a lot of insights are going to come to you. And if you use AI correctly as you know that simple example I just gave you, you will learn more than you could have ever learned or even brought in an intern and paid them for a year to study your business and company A. You can do that for every one of your competitors. You'll see which one over time. Do it every single quarter. Get your prompts in place. Save the prompts. All you have to do is run the AI system again and the evaluation will take place and it'll tell you and you can tell quarter by quarter, wow, here's who's really growing. here's what's going on in the market. You don't have those eyes and ears if you don't do that and if you don't get into AI to do that. And what I just described to you is a research agent. That's what I just described to you. >> Right. When you were talking about price earlier, you named a monthly figure that was a little higher than I was expecting. I think you said you can have a good suite of AI tools for under $10,000. Um, miners, you can get chatbt for $20 a month or $200 a month. Do you have to spend close to $10,000 uh to get started on this? Well, you can get started on it. You can start it literally as low as $600 a month. Now, here's the difference between a chat and what I would recommend, and I recommend taking a look at IBM and their Watson X. I think you'd be surprised. If you use chat GPT, everything you put in there right now is basically public domain. You can't copyright it. You're going to lose your IP. You don't want to put your financials out there. Other people can get them who are in the business of snooping and finding those things out. >> Don't they say they they tell you that if you create your own GPT that the data stays with you, don't they? Well, they do, but I can't say that I my own personal fear, I can't say I trust it. And the reason why I say that is because uh you can't do that for $20 a month. I mean, there's governance issues, there's cyber security issues, all kinds of things that you have to take into place, who can use this information, who can't, uh who has access it and who doesn't. I mean, you kind of do that with today's ERP systems, but anybody can break it and get in if they want. The same thing is true with chat. So whatever you do, you have to make sure you have all the cyber protocol in place and practices in place that are going to protect it. And IBM does that. It's just a given right out of the box. And everything's what's called SOCK 2 compliant. In fact, IBM is the only organization right now that I can identify that actually indemnifies and protects your IP and copyright and the material of your organization if you put it in their large language model. Now, you can also use chat and put it in their umbrella or their what I'll call their envelope that protects everything for you in that way, but they're the only ones that I know of right now that actually do that. And that's a gamecher for me. >> When you say indemnify, that means if something were to go wrong and the information were to get out, they're on the hook for damages. >> Yes. >> Interesting. >> Yeah. I'm not saying this cuz I'm an exIBMER, but IBM has done their homework on this and I'm telling you, they they've done this right. They've really figured out and they've done this right for these small middle market environment. and IBM never ever was a player in those market, but I predict I predict there'll be big players in the next couple of years in that market because of this. >> If I'm a small business and I've been putting my P&L into Chachi BT to get its analysis, am I making a mistake? >> Well, I think you are cuz other people can get it and there's no protection of it. >> And I know some owners have said to me, what are they going to do? What difference does it make? Are they wrong? Um, in my worst fears, yes. And I say that because the wrong person gets your financials. It's not going to take them long to fish and get your bank accounts. They have their financials, the bank accounts. They can play havoc with you. They can start doing all kinds of things today that they couldn't do 5 years ago. So, I think we're going to go through a huge huge change also in cyber security and protecting of information and things like that. So, I think putting your financials on the web, I would never recommend somebody to I'm sorry, on the open AI platforms that are out there, I would just never recommend somebody doing it and I wouldn't do it because I don't want the wrong people getting into quote unquote my books, my information, etc., etc. >> Got it. Ted, I think this has been a great primer for somebody who's kind of assessing where they are and what they want to do. Have Have we missed anything? Is there anything that you would want to add? >> Well, I think what I would say to you is you have to start living today. If you're a business owner or senior leader, no matter what, you have to live all of us individually, we have to live at that intersection of business processes, technology, and people. I think what AI is going to do is force individuals to really develop deep self-awareness. You know, businesses were set up at the turn of the century for high production. You don't have to know how to do a lot. We're just going to come in and produce prod produce the same widget on the assembly line over and over and over. We just want to keep you healthy so you can show up every day. I think it's changing because people now are educated and people say, "I don't want to be a minion working on the same thing like that. I want to use my mind. I want to be creative. I want to actually see how I can make an impact today." So that means we have to begin to work better together and that's emotional intelligence. And the second thing that AI is going to force on us is critical thinking which a lot of people do not do. Critical thinking means I look at solving problems. I can figure out and I accept different perspectives. I want feedback from outside. When you get that feedback on your performance from outside and you get it regularly versus a I'm going to say your annual review, it can be tough for people to accept that. A I can help you develop that self-awareness to understand what resistance comes from. How do I overcome it so I can actually perform better at work? Quick example, Lauren. Somebody's working in sales or customer service and they're not happy. They don't know why. But deep down inside, they have a fear of failure and a fear of rejection. Well, what do you do when you're in customer service or a sales role? You're dealing with rejection every single day. people that don't talk to you with empathy, respect, etc. So, if you personalize it, you're in trouble. If you have a fear of failure and you're in sales or customer service, you're sunk. You're in anxiety territory. Learning how to overcome those opens up a whole new way to engage with a company and it can be done. Now, I'm not talking therapy. I'm not talking that at all. This is what I have learned in growing businesses from my own two people to almost 800 employees. I'm not a therapist. I don't do therapy. But if you work with AI and look at those that intersection of business challenges, technology and people resisting change, I think that we're going to have a whole new work environment that's going to be less conflict. It's going to be much more conversational and supportive where we're coming together and belonging, but we don't have to all work for the same company. So, you'll have a lot of people who still have that entrepreneurial witch. They'll start something and they develop a network of five other people, do complimentary things to them. It's like a motion picture. AI is going to bring it together and AI will help you develop that understanding of how to overcome personal resistance to change. You're going to have to because the change is going to be extremely intense. >> That's a very positive portrait of the future of AI. I certainly hope you are right about that. >> Well, I've seen the seeds of it already take place with clients. I have seen it already work and you identify your future leaders that way cuz in the future identifying a future leader will be even more difficult than today with AI. >> Ted Wolf, his company is called Guidewise. He has his own podcast. It's called implementers. It's available wherever you get podcasts, Ted. >> Yes, it is. And predominantly you go to YouTube. That's where our big subscription um of followers and everything is. We we've now got over 200,000 followers on it. >> And what do you talk about in at implementers? >> Um we talk about how ideas are easy, but implementation of change is hard. >> Kind of like this conversation. >> Thank you, >> Ted. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you're taking the time. >> Thank you very much for having me on. I've enjoyed the conversation. >> Have a great week, everybody. [Music]