We Fixed It, You're Welcome - Replay: The Automation Irony: Why Are We Still Working So Hard?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello to our listeners and fixaholics. This is going to be our last replay for a while, which is good. That means there's new episodes starting next week, so I hope you enjoy this one. This is the automation irony from earlier in the season. This is another one that I really like. We got into AI, the promise of AI, all those hours back in your day. Yesterday I did something with Photoshop that would have taken literally hours and it took a couple seconds because of AI. Love it or hate it? It gave me time back theoretically in my day. Where did that time go? I don't know. I had a busy day. I didn't feel like, wow, I have all this time now. I just went on to something else and burdened myself with more tasks. So that's exactly what this episode's about.

Starting point is 00:00:39 We try to solve it with Steve Furman, who has been working with tech companies and now AI and he's a business coach and he's a straight shooter about all this stuff. So I think you'll really appreciate his perspectives. This is the automation irony. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to We Fixed It. You're welcome. The show where we're We take over companies. You come along for the ride and we try to put them back better than we found them. Welcome back. We live in the most automated era in history. AI writes our emails, virtual note takers summarize our meetings, and workflow tools claim to eliminate busy work. There are hundreds, if not a thousand plus automation tools on the market right now. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. Each automation tool wants to give us time back in our workday, freedom, and peace of mind. Market forecast suggests that the usage of automation tools and platforms is growing by 10 to 15% year over year.

Starting point is 00:01:37 We all want the dream they're selling. We all want to be the stock image on their homepage. You know, like the person blissfully swinging in a hammock on a workday? So much free time. Yet, most Americans and across the world, people are working long weeks, often well beyond 40 hours, early days, late nights, and we are collectively stressed out and exhausted. With so much automation available, why hasn't the work part gotten any easier? How do we all achieve the dream we were promised? We're going to get into that. Melissa, Chino, I know you're up for this. I think we can

Starting point is 00:02:15 fix it, but let's be sure we can. Joining us today is Steve Furman. He's a tech executive and AI coach who helps companies align and scale up with AI. And yeah, automation. He brings more than four decades of experience building and scaling technology companies, his expertise is in high demand and we've got them. Steve, tell us more about yourself. Thanks, Aaron. I appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:02:38 Nice to see everybody. So I built bought and sold six tech companies over the last 40 years. I've always been a, what I like to call a tech visionary. I saw cloud before it was called cloud. and I've you know the benefit of leveraging it and getting out a few times I even had to shut one down not everybody's perfect what can I tell you but I ended up getting into chief AI officer program and I got certified two years ago because I figured out that I could take static data and I can massage it and ask you questions and have it come to life and when you're a business coach

Starting point is 00:03:14 which I'm also a certified getting a business coach that really gets to become have some important tool to use when you're looking at disc reports or most of a brandy reports and you can understand how people really think together, but yet you can go beyond the data it gives you and you can dig deeper. Great. Thanks, Steve. We're going to use your expertise and you're going to throw down and get into our conversation. Let's get into what we're talking about.

Starting point is 00:03:39 So, Steve, we can't automate you. We're glad you're a real person that you're here. But automation, let's talk about it together. So let's think about the word automation. It used to be like a punchline, you know, decades or a century ago. You pictured like a crackpot inventor with wild hair and a crazy prototype with a million parts on it. It's supposed to do all your work for you, but then it goes up and smoke. Like you've ever seen the Rube Goldberg machines, like they turn simple tasks into absurd contraptions,

Starting point is 00:04:07 like hamsters running on a wheel and a boot kicking something. And then Charlie Chaplin famously mocked workplace automation with machines that promised efficiency, but delivered chaos. they made things worse. But of course, automation started working. There were conveyor belts and machines and factories that applied labels to bottles. But what about the everyday worker? For decades, the idea of automation sounded good, but the reality rarely worked well.

Starting point is 00:04:33 But now it does. There's AI productivity tools. There's software bots. There's automation workflows that can handle tasks that once took hours or entire roles to achieve. They can write code, design websites, do mindless repetition and busy work. The outputs may not be perfect, but every step they get right, something we didn't have to do ourselves. Research suggests that 30 to 50% of today's work tasks could technically be automated, and most office workers now use some form of AI at work. We're not talking about automation as replacement. We're talking about it as enhancement and replacement for the drudgery of work.

Starting point is 00:05:08 But that's not even counting other solutions, like human virtual assistance that will take on tasks for us, food delivered to our door, videos we don't even have to drive. ride to the store and rent? Traffic we don't have to sit through when we work from home. Where is the time? It seems like we're as busy or busier than ever. There's never enough time. Despite the tools, the average American workweek still hovers around the same range it has for decades. We're up early. We're staying late. We're answering emails on weekends. We're helping on one more Zoom call. How is it that we're not getting ahead here? I don't think that they're leveraging it properly. There's not any thought on governance and how will it be used in the workplace.

Starting point is 00:05:50 So you've got what I call AI sprawl or shadow AI, where people are, you know, John's used a chat GPT to write some programs or maybe do some automations. And Sally's over there using Gemini. The two aren't being intertwined or shared. So they're not collaborating. And they're both getting frustrated

Starting point is 00:06:10 because they get to a certain level. And then they're like, ah, we can't figure it out. I'll just move on. Or they have no one to go to. to ask. And I think that's one of the first issues that I see a lot of in my work is that people are doing it with thought process of governance, guardrails, standard operating procedures, and just planning it to, you know, AI is really a tool. It's not the answer. You know, and it's just a tool. If you're still tools at things, well, you're going to open a bunch of tools that, you know,

Starting point is 00:06:40 really are not working together. Thank you, Steve. If everyone, I understand that, you know, the uniformity and the consistency, but let's say each person is using AI for their own role or their own methods and they get it to work to their advantage. You know, it's not a step forward. Like, shouldn't there be, okay, it didn't save two hours in a work day, but did it save 45 minutes? Where are the 45 minutes? I think, but it's about what Steve mentioned is it's the AI strategy and not having an integrated and focused strategy.

Starting point is 00:07:13 And so in the world that I have. worked in, we kind of call this the walled garden trap, and it's really silos. It's just about silos, right? So you deploy AI in these silos, then you can't really access the entirety of the journey of whatever operational process that you're working on or the customer journey or what, you know, the response and the outcome that you're focused on is, it's kind of like if you go to the doctor and only one person that sees you is focused on one symptom instead of the entirety of what you've gone through and what men since you're taking, et cetera, et cetera. So I really think it's incomplete when you just say, okay, we have AI, to Steve's point, right? We want to say that we're utilizing at AI, but you're not thinking about it in a very strategic manner.

Starting point is 00:08:09 So the fix would really be about prioritizing that integration, using sort of AI boundary or wrapper to connect those silos so that you're giving AI the full context so it can really be helpful. And it also is giving you base to have the human assist and the auditing that needs to be done that is crucial for the positive outcomes and results you're looking for. And then you can look at how do you redistribute the work. Aaron, that gets to your point, right? Redistribute the time, the work, the effort, etc. I actually want to peel it back a level because, you know, we're talking about AI in silos and people actually adopting it. But I think what we need to look at is how people use AI or maybe why people have barriers to using AI.

Starting point is 00:09:04 And I think, you know, how many articles where it's AI is taking over your jobs and this and that. And there is a hesitancy to adopt AI for a lot of people. So I think to understand how to connect it, we need to understand what baby people aren't using it as much as they can be. I think part of that is analysis paralysis. There's a lot out there. Steve, you mentioned Gemini and, you know, someone else might be using copilot from a governance perspective as well. Depending on what your business is, if you're a lawyer, you might not want to be using AI because you want to trust the validity of the answers that's sharing with you. And maybe legally, you're not only able to.

Starting point is 00:09:46 And so what I'm seeing having worked with a few agencies is they're now creating their own internal AI so that it's all within a certain hub so that you can trust that AI to learn from what you need within your agency versus putting it on a certain hub so that you can trust that AI to learn from what you need within your agency. versus putting it on an open source data where maybe some sensitive information you don't want to have shared, you know, is still confidential. So I think there's a piece of that of can we trust the data. There's the, I'm afraid that this is going to take over my job. And like you mentioned, Steve. And Melissa and Aaron, it's supposed to help us. It's not going to replace us. It's supposed to be used as a tool.

Starting point is 00:10:28 And I think we need to have learning around what that can look like. And I think, again, I'm sure, Steve, this is where you come in and where you're educating a lot of organizations on what to do. Back to Aaron's point, you know, why don't, aren't we getting a bunch of time back? Well, the first thing is you got to think about we're humans, we're people. You know, and we may have robots helping us do things or AI helping us do things. But at the end of the day, you got to keep a human in the loop. A human, you know, AI doesn't have emotion. It can't reason.

Starting point is 00:11:02 Well, to a certain extent, but it's not really reasoning in the way that we can reason as humans. Because we can take contacts without any information from someone else, and we can then reason it up ourselves. But change management. I literally went to a township, and the town manager flat on told me I got two years until I retire. As far as I'm concerned, I'm going to try and avoid AI as much as possible. And I'm like, why? He said, well, honestly, I got people that I'm working here 20 to 30 years. They don't like change.

Starting point is 00:11:34 They like it the way it is. So, you know, are they still working the same? Yeah, and they are. There's, I think, that's why I stick so strictly to you got to get your governance. You got to find out what's the end goal of the company? What's your big, Harry Audacious goal? And this is maybe where my coaching comes in. What are you trying to achieve as a company?

Starting point is 00:11:54 How can you leverage AI? I always think in asking it, what can you do to help? me. How can you help me? How can I leverage you? That's kind of my thought process when I'm thinking in AI. And that's really important when it comes to getting your company to go, it's kind of like building a building without putting in good studs and, you know, a good foundation. It's going to fall down. It's going to crumble. You're going to get the silos as Melissa was talking about. And that's not collaborative at all. That's, I think, going to add hours to your work day, Aaron. That's where it comes fun. I love what you're saying, Steve. I love that it's, you're getting to the root and the

Starting point is 00:12:31 foundation of what we're talking about here. And there is, Chino, the cultural issues of fear, change management, all the things we've talked about. And that has to do, you know, way past AI. But when you're feeling threatened that the work you're doing and the value you bring to a company is threatened, of course you're going to be fearful of what this new process looks like. And so what we need to do as leaders and organizations and through, you know, Steve, your consultive roles as, you know, as a tech guru here is really take AI's highest purpose. Is it to replace the workforce? It's really to rescue them from the operational grind, from making the errors that they do because they're just tired and they just, you know, it's just,

Starting point is 00:13:25 It's things that repetitive processes and operations that can be automated, right? But you're still in need of, to your point, who is in charge of the empathy? Who is in charge of the critical thinking? Who is in charge of making sure that the needs of the customers have been met? It's the human that is able to do that. Now, you can't have AI put in some rules for critical thinking, But it's a check. It's not necessarily that they're going to be able to say, hey, you should be sending some flowers to this person, right?

Starting point is 00:14:04 You know, it's actually a check that says, hey, we've completed this process and your email reply seems a little stale and formal for the tone of what was the request, et cetera. Again, I feel like we need to make sure that we somehow continue to integrate the teams in the processes. And one of the things that I used to do when I was bringing AI onto the team, and I think, Steve, as a coach, you understand this, is you need to get people involved at the get-go. Because they don't want something thrown at them. They want them to be part of the solution. And so if you are sharing with them, what are the things that are just the mundane processes that are, that you have the most trouble with and that we need to have consistently handled every single time a certain way.

Starting point is 00:14:58 And then let them know that where they bring value is when they are actually delivering this amazing result and anticipating the needs of the customer. And they are really able to really create that relationship that is necessary to, you know, continue to grow loyalty, to continue to grow retention, et cetera. etc. All the numbers that the business is looking for and they're using AI to drive those numbers. There's two things I think are very important and you just touched on the list. So Walters, you need to have buy-in from the executive team. If the executive team isn't bought in that this is the initiative we're going to take, this is the way we're going to drive our company.

Starting point is 00:15:39 These are the ways that we're going to do it, ethically governance. We're going to write operating procedures, usage policies. They're going to take the time to do it right. And also, you know, I think it's important for the upskilling of the people and having them be, like you said, engaged in the process. And they should be excited about the process. It shouldn't be a bummer. Oh, my God. AI's going to know it goes my job. I mean, it's like AI is coming.

Starting point is 00:16:08 It's going to make my job easier. This is awesome. I can't wait to leverage it. So I go learn some new stuff. And I can actually use my brain more instead of, you know, punching the ticket every day all day. Yeah. but that's what we're talking about though. So there are things. There's, there's tasks or repetitive or going through, you know, endless spreadsheets or whatever that you can do. It could

Starting point is 00:16:30 have taken two hours. Now it takes 30 seconds. And I'm not, you know, we can discount the, the old guard and the naysayers and the holdouts and I'm never going to change. I'm talking about, okay, the people that get it, get in line and say, yeah, this is for me. I want to upskill. I like, I like what you're saying. I like this process that we're putting together as a company, I just accomplished something that used to take me two hours. I did it in 30 seconds. In reality, I've got two hours left. In concept, I got two hours left. In reality, I don't. Like, where are those two hours? Why are they, why do I feel busier than ever? That's what I want to talk about. To answer that question, Aaron, and again, it's going back to not just change management,

Starting point is 00:17:08 but looking at behavior, going back to psychology a little bit here, right? We've learned how to work, you know, for years and years. It's okay, everyone punches. in, you got your 40 hours, and you need to be here from 9 to 5. That is kind of what is there. And it's really interesting having worked in different agencies. And we've all been there where, you know, you kind of done work. You know, you could be going home early, but it's the perception of I need to, I need to look like I'm on. I need to look like I'm on. And now, particularly in a remote world where people don't get to see physically as often. And, you know, there's a lot of questions of, you know, especially when you look at return to work, wanting to make

Starting point is 00:17:48 sure you can visibly see that, right? And so we have learned that we need to be working nine to five versus how can we make that more efficient? And I think some of the solve there is we need to relearn as a society how to work again, right? Again, going back to Steve and your point, Melissa, around it being a tool. So first and foremost, we've got to change the way our mental heuristic, how our brain thinks about what AI is. So that's the first thing, right? We need to be able to trust and not have that fear of using AI. So it's the first thing. The second, I think in order to do that, is getting engaged early, as we've discussed, but also playing, learning a little bit about AI, right? I think the first thing anyone should do is, okay, what are those tasks that I hate doing, whether that's, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:47 tracking your timesheets, doing a financial spreadsheet, whatever report that you absolutely hate, writing down kind of those like two things. Maybe it's just two things, right? Talking to AI and exploring what that looks like fee, because again, this is all new. This is, we've never had a blueprint for this. And we're all kind of machine learning in real time for ourselves on how to use AI. And so being able to explore and have that discovery process as part of the introduction and the, you know, executive buy-in is super important to do so that people can down feel comfortable say, well, actually, now that I've tested it out a little bit and I know how to test it because we've had these guardrails, we know exactly what program we're using. Oh, wait a minute. I just took two

Starting point is 00:19:41 hours back of my time. Now, what do we do with that? Is that, do we need to fill that time with other things? Are we able to allow our culture and society to say, maybe go for a two-hour lunch? Are we there yet in society to say maybe even nine to five? Maybe it's a four-day work week? These are the questions that I think are going to continue to evolve as AI evolves because we have being trained and, you know, prime to think of a work week being that nine to five, 40 hours where AI now is challenging what that can look like. And you can see that testing out.

Starting point is 00:20:21 I would give a very personal example on this as a leader who just automated some, two teams works. So 24 people were working on this. We automated it. And that work went away. Okay. And so Aaron, And to your point, what happens to the work that goes away?

Starting point is 00:20:42 Why are we not seeing less stress on the team? I will just say as a leader, a leader of large teams and small teams, leaders treat automation wins as a way to continue to raise the bar. Raise the load is not lowering the load. So time saved, quietly becomes, and not so quietly, I didn't quietly do it. I told them they were all reassigned to other roles. Okay. So they didn't see that that actually helped them.

Starting point is 00:21:15 That just meant that the job that we're doing once, now they're doing another job that actually they don't make me really like that much because this was a little more easy. I mean, mindless kind of work. They could listen to podcasts while they were doing it. And now they have to like really pay attention or they have to get on the phone and talk to a customer. I had one of them say, I wasn't wanting to get on the phone and talk to a customer. wanting to get on the phone and talk to customers. Why are you doing this to me? I said, well, then you don't have a job, right? So we lack organizations, to your point, Chino, lack those guard rails that say, when we reclaim those hours, so like I'm giving you back those three hours,

Starting point is 00:21:52 go back and use one and a half of those for your own personal curiosity and learning time. Use one and a half of those hours for the company. We don't do that. And we're met. And we're measured on speed, volume, productivity, outputs, widgets. So it's about being more efficient, but at the same time, we're not making it so the worker be feels better. I always say the children are products to their environment, and they only know what they see, what they hear, what they're exposed to. And if you think about that, it's really truly the same context of us as workers.

Starting point is 00:22:32 We only know what we've been trained to do. You know, I've been around four decades, a little longer, but who's counting? You know, and I've always, what I'm really good at is working. I love working. I'm happy doing it. I'll do it tirelessly all day long because I love doing what I'm doing. But I think that there's the smart leaders, like you just said, Melissa, that would go, you know what? Yeah, we came back two hours.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Why don't you guys take a half hour, an hour and a half, or whatever it is, and learn something you want to learn. You know, the capital you're going to gain in that employee for caring about their well-being, their learning, I think that's part of what we are figuring out with AI and automation. Like, you know, some people are going to go gangbusters. Great, give you another 20 hours on top of what you're doing because you're automated it.

Starting point is 00:23:25 And I think the smart ones are the ones that are going to really grow in scale are the ones that are giving back time and giving back, you know, what the employee feels like they've been taken away from them. What's been taken away from them? I appreciate that. And, you know, I don't, I'm not saying, Melissa, I'm not saying any, pay anyone to stand around

Starting point is 00:23:46 and watch a machine were. Like, obviously, if a job position is eliminated or efficiency gains, like, they've got to go somewhere else and there's retraining involved or maybe they, you know, there's companies doing mass layoffs for automation purposes and and pocketing the difference. But those that are left in the company,

Starting point is 00:24:05 you know, are they working a 38 or 40 hour work week? Probably not. They're probably absorbing, you know, cross-functional tasks and picking up a grab bag of whatever's left. And I would doubt that they're going home humming, you know, at 459.

Starting point is 00:24:22 They're just, they're sat overloaded. Yeah. Yeah, you're 100%. And you're seeing that this week, the mass layoffs at Amazon, at meta, at all of these places that are happening. And I hate that they're saying it's because of AI, because then again, to Steve's point, strategically you have built this AI versus us culture type of thing going on. And you're right.

Starting point is 00:24:51 Like the guilt, not even the guilt, but the amount of work left for the people there. because to our point, AI does certain things very well. And I'm not going to say that it doesn't, like what we automated, it was wonderful, it was consistent, it was clear, it was accurate, which was our issue. It was an issue. There were human errors involved. So we were very excited and we saw a $1 million drop in in error payouts. So that was great.

Starting point is 00:25:25 but it doesn't change the fact that there's still a lot of work that needs to be done within these companies that humans have to do. And now you've taken away, you know, 4,000 employees at Amazon and expect the people left there to carry the burden. Now all of a sudden it's going to be perfect. Well, guess what? It hallucinates. It's not there yet. And this is what I was alluding to about rethinking about what the works culture is. And Steve, you mentioned really, you know, it's what I'm trying to touch on.

Starting point is 00:26:00 Yes, you can fire everybody and say, you know what? A has just done that by 4,000 people who cares? That's how it feels like. And this is where, again, from our first point, people aren't going to adopt it if this is what's happening. And at the end of the day, the harsh reality is AI is taking people's job. So that's not pretending that's not happening. We're seeing these mass layoffs. But where I think companies are being really short-sighted is there's

Starting point is 00:26:25 thinking, okay, great, you know, bottom line this year overhead because there's so much going on with AI, they're kind of forgetting that long term on the people's side, right? If everybody has AI running their entire company, there's no one, there's no one there. There has to be jobs. There's work that needs to be done. The AI will never be able to do. And where people are missing is that time to explore the people who are invested in you like your number one value proposition is the people that you you have right if you don't look at your people as the top important thing within your company exactly thank you Steve you're nothing and so if you can enrich your teams right you took two hours back instead of cutting them off or everybody and again bringing that fear so that now

Starting point is 00:27:18 people aren't going to adopt into the future, allow them to think about ways to make your company better. And if you can provide that discovery time, you're going to find things that you would have never even thought in your company because you didn't have people to think about that, how to program and how to train the AI and the machines to do what you need to get the most effective, efficient way. And so I think it's very short-sighted to do that. And again, we need to massage what we think is the work week. If we're getting AI to do those two to three-hour reports that we hate it to do, and we have, you know, it takes off our Friday because you usually do admin on a Friday. Most people get people to leave a little bit early or that's your exploring time on the Friday. And you know what the employee satisfaction is going to be back?

Starting point is 00:28:12 And if that is their number one asset, why wouldn't you bring that back? If you're able to do the same production, make the same money plus God knows how much more, save the same amount of hours or God knows how much more, why not think about, you know what, a three-day work week? We're not thinking about saying to your employees, hey, you did a great job today. Murley, you did a good project or whatever. People don't realize how important it is to that asset. set, which is your employees.

Starting point is 00:28:45 How much it definitely matters to them. And they will work as many hours as you need for a project. They will, I hate to say, we're dying for you. But you know what I'm saying? They would go to back to any given time because you treat them like a human. I think that you have really brought out a few things, Chino. I love this, like, I would call it kind of like the watchouts that we have to be prepared for.

Starting point is 00:29:09 And, you know, one of the things that I, I just mentioned, and I think, Steve, you've mentioned this as well, but automation has a tendency to shift work into the upstream. And if no one's there, then how is that going to be completed? So those productivity tools move effort from customers or frontline agents into ops data, other teams. That's why silos happen and create these hidden bottlenecks and actually a lot of burnout. Also, when their strategy isn't solid,

Starting point is 00:29:42 and there's lagging adoption of that strategy because it hasn't to see the point, you haven't gotten everyone at the table on board. Then you're going to have these pockets of dysfunction, and that's a problem as well. And then, Erin, your point, I know you're trying to drive this home, but rising expectations with no relief, right? So as research has shown, large share of tasks are automatable. You know, we can automate a lot of things and tools improve that, helps leaders quietly raise expectations, right, instead of revisiting that 40-hour norm,

Starting point is 00:30:20 locking teams into permanent productivity paradox and not allowing them the time to be innovative, creative. You know, one of the things I loved at one of my companies is we had a block of time that leaders had on their calendar that was for just thinking full time. And, you know, if you choose to use that to clear out your email inbox, that's on you. But I think that to have a three-hour block on a certain day that you can sit in a room and, you know, over popcorn in a soda, talk to team members and be like, what have we solved this week? How do we feel about that? How could we have done that differently?

Starting point is 00:31:01 Which is ideal if something else comes off the calendar and the expectation something else shifts. You know, Chino, you mentioned, you mentioned agencies. if you, you know, you're talking about agencies, you know the agency culture of unlimited PTO, take the time you need, you want to go do something? Or we all, we all take, we all do picnics on Wednesday afternoons, you know, that's great in theory. And I got a deadline and this client's pinging me and I've got, you know, I have a review coming. Like all those stressors don't go away unless there's got to be a lot of restraint in the, in the company culture. And in the, yeah, we used to have that block on the calendar and it wasn't practical.

Starting point is 00:31:41 We got rid of it. You know, like, how do you stick to those? You make a commitment. You stick to it or you keep adapting it and evolving it. As efficiency gains are realized by the company with profitability and all the good benefits come along with it. How do you keep from overburdening the employees that are playing along and saying, I'm following you?

Starting point is 00:31:59 And if you don't have the executive team consistently pushing down, here's our values, here's a big, hairy, audacious goal. Here's what we're trying to get to. Here's why we do what we do. If they won't go to, I'm a Marine, okay? I'm not going to go to war for a general unless I believe in the cause of why we're doing what we're doing. And it's the same thing in a company. If you have that culture and that core value set and everybody's fighting the same fight,

Starting point is 00:32:26 I think that's really where you drive the change and you can all do it together. And they'll be happy doing it. Agreed. And it's a rare company. Actually, I want to hear from you. It's a rare company that says, yeah, ignore that client call. We block Tuesday afternoons. Don't take a meeting.

Starting point is 00:32:43 Don't take a client call consistently forever. We got your back on it. It's a rare company that's going to keep that up for any length of time. I, in terms of my employee with my clients, I would flat on tell up, don't call me for tech support. You can call me. I want to talk to you if you want to hang out and have a conversation. But if you call me, I'm just going to hand it over to the tech manager, which means now I've got to regurgitate what you said. And eventually, I try.

Starting point is 00:33:05 train them to start calling Rocco, who was my tech manager at the time, and then Rocco would get it handled with the engineers or write a ticket or whatever. And me, I got to have my thinking time or I got to work on whatever I had to work on. So I think it's a culture set. When we're looking at it as leader, so if you're going to sit down with an executive team at any wherever company, agency, brand, you know, you're running your own little shop. you need to decide first and foremost what your company is going to be. Are you going to be leading? Do you want to be innovative? Do you want to be making a lot of money? Guess what? The number one, when you look at historical data about what companies thrive, what companies make most money, it's always ones that have some

Starting point is 00:33:52 form of innovation happening within their team. And AI allows for that if you let it. You're right, Aaron, there's real life happening. I love, I run my own company. I wrote my own little thing. I try to like have Fridays. But the reality is client needs come. Money needs to come in. If I'm not able to do something, it's not there. So, you know, that time that you try to block off doesn't always work. It can't always be Friday between like nine to 10. But if you can allow some flexibility in your, your team's time. So say you, you know, got an hour back, right? We were able to do this report really quickly. It doesn't need to be a set time, but if you can allow people to think, and if you want to be an innovative company where we know historically, research has shown are companies that make more money. At the end of the day,

Starting point is 00:34:47 we're all talking about a business, right? You want your teams to think innovatively and to adopt those tools so they can keep thinking, how can we do this better? And if they're doing it with less stress, less lift, but allowing you to push forward, that makes everybody happy. And again, if we go back to your people being your top asset in your company, it also will help you. You know, maybe you look at schedules if you can and maybe three-day work week, four-day work week is something you can offer from a culture perspective. And you know who's going to want to work there? You're telling me, I can use my brain. I can think strategically. I can help you make money, meaning that I get to make money. I don't have to worry about my job security there.

Starting point is 00:35:32 Listen to what I have to say. Exactly. Right? People will want to work good. And guess who you're attracting? The top talent. Well, and I really think it's a bit, I mean, it's, it's the business strategy. It's business planning. It's just like what we do with a product roadmap. You need a hard code these reclaimed times and hours into the operating model. So when you free up hours, you pre-commit that a percentage of that goes back to either fewer hours or backlog reduction or special projects. Like special projects is funny. You can put a bonus on them.

Starting point is 00:36:07 You can do innovation lab time like we were talking about. And it just, it starts the juices flowing and it shows on the roadmap just hard-coded, just like, you know, Project Initiative X, right? that's getting launched in three quarters, and this is the ROI on that. This is the ROI on your employees. And that's the most important resource. And I love that, you know, all four of us have been able to kind of get back to this place where it's like, what has actually happened to that time?

Starting point is 00:36:42 And really, the time was always there. But we as organizations and companies and leaders have always looked at that as, okay, I'm going to take that and run with it somewhere else, right? Try and fill it with more stuff to get more stuff. Exactly. I would go as far as saying it's definitely not the right answer. More stuff is not always the right way to go. Just because you did more.

Starting point is 00:37:05 Didn't mean you did it any more effectively or any better or you saved any time or energy? It just means you get more stuff. It's like those partunes where you're running and you're just running and running and running and you're hopping up. You're on the wheel, man. Steve, when companies come to you and they say we've implemented the systems and we bought into the enterprise software, and we thought everyone would, we thought we'd get these, the gains, and we thought we'd get the time back. We do want to do right by our employees, but it didn't do what we wanted it to do. It's the software's fault. Like, what do you, what do you tell them?

Starting point is 00:37:37 I tell them, stop, drop, and roll. We're going to take a step back. Let's take a look at what you have, how it's set up, how it's being implemented, what everybody's using. And depending on what I find, basically a readiness assessment and a roadmap blueprint, but basically, basically, When I understand their environment of what they've done, then I can kind of start either peeling things out, adding things in, saying, you know, this is the right way to go. That might be the right way to go. But until I understand where they are in their journey, it's kind of hard to say every single time I do exactly this. I always, always, always can guarantee you I'm going to ask a lot of questions. And I'm going to ask questions of every department head because, you know, I might ask the question, what do you want to start stopping keep? Not every exact. is going to necessarily have the same answer. It's true. They have their own agendas. But what I'm looking for is who has the same core values and the same agenda as the

Starting point is 00:38:36 leader of the organization or leaders of the organization? And are they all on the same page? Once we get that figured out, then you can start looking at AI. How can we implement it to make things better, faster, more efficient, upskillie employees, training, all of that. Make sure there's governance and guard rolls up. that that's how I go about it always and it's never it's never any different it seems like a lot of companies start with the solution you know they start with the here's the technology here's the

Starting point is 00:39:04 promise here's what they're telling us it can do here's the feature set here's 2.0s coming out in a couple months that's going to be even better but you're saying start don't start with the solution start with the address the problem yeah but see and everybody think it's a tech problem it's a tech issue it's not it's an operations problem operationally what do we need to look at in order to improve, in order to be better, more efficient. And then the tools may or may not come later, and it may be an off-the-shelf tool, or maybe you have to write an agent, or you have to use make and create an automation process that will talk to different applications.

Starting point is 00:39:41 But you never really start as, it's not a tech problem. I say it all the time, it's an operations problem, it's an executive problem, and that's where it needs to start. And you should get together and get an AI council together through the executive team, and you should start having discussions on where are we trying to get to and then work backwards, okay, how can we get there? We want to be here? Super. How do we get to over the next year, six months, three months, 90 days, 30 days,

Starting point is 00:40:09 whatever, however you're measuring your time and measure it. You got to, is it working? It's not working. Are you stuck? Where are you stuck? You got to have meetings to have those discussions. And just to add to that too, I think as well. So again, from an executive team, to executive leaders, what I would be saying to your teams, right?

Starting point is 00:40:28 And this is where I come in on the people on culture side. Again, AI is a tool. It shouldn't be replacing people always, depending on what your company is, right? Like, again, there's, it is, it's bound to happen in some places. But the best companies, innovative companies, people who are going to survive in 10 years and make billions of dollars are the ones that are remembering that their people are assets. And I think what's important as leaders is to ask your team, what are two things that you hate doing that we can get AI to do for you? And you know what adoption rate is going to skyrocket? And in terms of people actually using the tool because they're saying, hey, this is helping me.

Starting point is 00:41:12 And if you can reframe how we look at AI's versus this is competing against you versus again, this is a tool. not only will your teams adopt it so then as executive leaders when you meet, you actually have the data because if no one's using it, you're not going to have the data that's like, oh, we spent millions of dollars on this tool that nobody uses is not what we want to do as well. You need to, like we're all in the age of machine learning and relearning how to work. And I think without getting your teams on board and reminding them that it's their tools to help them on the shitty. tasks, excuse my French, that is the only way you're going to adopt and automate and then reframe how we can potentially look at how to structure your work week and relearn how to do that based on what the goals of the larger business is. Do you want to lead? Do you want to be an innovator? Do you just want to kind of keep the status quo? Whatever that is, it's not for me to decide or us to, but to talk to Steve and get your teams to come together to figure that out. Well, I love what you said, Chena, because it's truly a fix.

Starting point is 00:42:26 Like, in my estimation, this is one of the things that I would say is a fix. So you invest in enablement, not just the tools, and that enablement is that human touch. So treat AI and automation like a new colleague, onboard them, train people around them, give the team simple playbooks, your favorite word, Chino, for when to lean on the tools versus human judgment. And I think the biggest mistake is treating AI like a replacement for human conversation, for the human mind, the rationale. Steve, you mentioned that. The goal isn't to build like a wall of automation. It's to design a seamless partnership so that you're getting to the outcomes that you want and not just outcomes, meaning tasks, but really looking

Starting point is 00:43:17 at every automation project with like a clear outcome. What do you want? It's not just about less tickets in the system, right? It's about what do you really want? So bundle all of this into end-to-end journeys and ask it from the customer's perspective or from like the business's perspective is what is that outcome that we're looking for. And so really looking at integrating it from the top down, I think is so important. So I love Chino, like, you know, I had to get playbook in there for you. Thank you. You know, I love it.

Starting point is 00:43:53 I got to have a playbook, but I want to drop one little quick nugget that I think is very important for people. And this will help you. You don't have to start big. Start small. Take something really small and mundane in your business, an intake form, contract review, number crunch, whatever. And work on it internally, get some wins, measure it, check the same. status of it, I'm not stuck. Are we moving forward? How is it working? Is it returning any ROI? And then you can move yourself to more outward facing type tasks. Well, you know, let's flip it real

Starting point is 00:44:27 quick. So let's say you're, okay, so you're an employee. You've bought into every step of this. You have everyone, good intentions all around. You have the leadership that wants your success and they want the company gaze and all that. But let's say 20% of your role has efficiency. because of automation. And now you've got time to think, and there's pressure in the company and they want to fill that time up and they're assigning you to,

Starting point is 00:44:56 what's the right way to have a productive conversation and to frame it and to say, look, we have an opportunity here. So what's the value add to give people time back? Well, employee satisfaction, because at the end of the day, you need people to do the job. The robots can never do our job 100%.

Starting point is 00:45:15 And so, you know, you risk losing great people. Because again, if you can, you know, retain the best, attract the best, that is, you know, I always say retaining your employees is your top recruitment tool. That's the top recruitment strategy. People who aren't into AI or people who want to adopt it knowing that this is where the company's vision is, there's going to be changes that that's bound to happen with any change with. Regardless of whether this is AI, new leader coming in, it's, you know, this is just the friction point you have any change bringing bud in. And I would say to HR and talent teams and executive leaders is, again, defining what that strategy is and where you want your business to be. Again, we cannot be short-sighted and say, great, we took three hours back and, okay, we can, you know, reduce 30% of the staff or whatever, whatever the case may be because you're going to need people at the end. So you want to retain your A

Starting point is 00:46:20 players, get them excited. And so having, you know, looking at work schedule, looking at just even protected time, whether that's an hour each day, 30 minutes each day to test or to have little committees of AI committees where people can try different things where they say, you know, they take the two things that they hate and work together within their department to figure that out and, you know, share that with the group, help people's presentation skills, like the little soft skills that, again, AI can never take from people. There's so much value at into, again, bringing that back. But again, I can't be the person to make that call. It's the leaders of where do you want to be? And if you want to stay current, you need to be able to do that. You need the innovation within your

Starting point is 00:47:08 team or else, you know, AI is going to take your company too. So don't be, you know, something also to say as well. So you have to think strategically. All right. I'm in. I'm in. I think we're fixing this. So don't, okay, so here's where we're at. We, this is a people decision, not just a software functionality tech stack decisions. So don't leave this decision up to your CTO. You know, we're going to mandate. We've got to do some automation. Go find the best one out there. Get the license, negotiate, and we're going to implement it. You're taking it too far.

Starting point is 00:47:47 You miss some critical steps along the way. You got it critical. You got to gut check your people. You have to get everyone involved. You have to look at cross functions, cross departmental, and real one-on-one talks to say, what do you hate about your job? Give me two things. You wish you'd never did again.

Starting point is 00:48:10 maybe we can prioritize that in our automation. Maybe you get some time back. And then as a company, you have to use some restraint, which is hard to do for profit-driven companies to say that time, let's not fill that with 20 other things that, oh, good. You know, we freed that up now. Now we've got this pool of employees that is looking for work to do. No, they've got work to do.

Starting point is 00:48:34 You just gave them an ability to think a little bit or scale up or take a little break or do something that is different from the way we've all been running and running. You know, maybe there's a better way. So if we can pull those things together and, you know, and then from the employee standpoint, you have to also be protective. And you have to say, if I block that hour, I'm going to commit to it. And which is really hard to do because someone's going to call you. Someone's going to pull you into a meeting.

Starting point is 00:49:04 And you have to be able to say no. And we have to live in a culture and in a work. environment and in a universe where no is an acceptable answer. Self-protection, mental health preservation, all those things. If someone says, it's a block on my calendar or the company says we take early Fridays, that doesn't mean work Saturdays or Sundays. That means you come back Monday. If we can all adhere to those rules, did we get a little bit of time back? Did we fix the situation? Melissa, what do you say? I love this. I think this is. been a really outstanding conversation, and I want to thank Steve for your insight here.

Starting point is 00:49:43 I do believe that this creates a truly powerful collaborative fix. I think AI handles speed and the data. The human provides the heart and judgment. And instead of losing that personal connection, we're actively using tech to protect and enhance it. And we have to make sure there's governance, Steve, to your point, and ensure that even at scale as we grow, every customer, every business owner, every employee feels heard, not handled. So I love it. Good job. Good, good, Melissa. You know, did we get, I don't know, it doesn't mean a three or four day work week.

Starting point is 00:50:32 We're not there yet. But do we get some peace of mind? Do we get a little bit of relief? Did we get a few minutes back? For the cool companies that I like working with, yes, it does mean sometimes do your four-day work week. So, yeah. But for everybody else, what it means, AI is an evolution as we know. It's removing us from this really outdated, archaic 9 to 5, 40 hours plug-in, plug-out.

Starting point is 00:51:01 It's taking us from execution to strategic thinking and innovation. That's what AI allows us. to do. And you're always going to need doers. We need to do the job. But if we can think smarter and work smarter, it doesn't mean you need to work harder. And I think that's the nugget. And so allowing your teams to be strategic with how they use AI so that as a business, you can be a part of the innovators, the part of the people who in 10 years are going to be making names. versus losing your business by not adopting this and remembering that your people are your asset is going to be big. So I do think we've brought a lot of fixes to the table.

Starting point is 00:51:48 I think this is a topic we can talk about, you know, for hours. And so, Steve, so happy to have you here, too, to get your insights. But I think we fixed it. Good, good. Thanks, Chino. Steve, take us home. Did we fix it? Do we have a little peace of mind?

Starting point is 00:52:04 Do we alleviate some of the pressures? What did we accomplish? There is a symbiotic relationship that has to happen between AI, the machine, and humans. And I think as long as we're still running the show, and I believe we still are, I think it's up to us on how and what that symbiotic relationship looks like and how it's going to function. And is it going to be an easy thing to give somebody a three-day work week or four-day work week? That's probably not going to happen anytime soon. Let's be fair.

Starting point is 00:52:36 but if you think about Europe, I use them for an example, they have a siesta where they take a break in the middle of the day, and they come back and they work in the afternoon until nine at night. There's something to be said for their happiness. When you think about it, right, they take three months off. They shut down a city. There's a lot to be said for us in here in America. What do we do?

Starting point is 00:52:57 Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, produce, produce, produce. So if we can leverage AI to do that mundane, production and work work that needs to get done. And we can spend more time thinking strategically, being more visionary, hiring the right A players you want to work with. So taking your time, not just throw it a body or a tool at something just to fix it, I think, yeah, we absolutely can, can, you know, help the automation benefit us and not hurt us, not just give us more to do.

Starting point is 00:53:31 But we have to think in the right mindset, and it's got to be driven by the leaders. that's got to push down and you need guardrails. So, you know, you were saying, you know, that get people time to be creative. Absolutely. But they need guardrails on what that creation can be. Otherwise, you know, or humans, you're pretty creative. Well, and I like kind of what you said, Steve. I just want to add on to that, you know, just personal experience.

Starting point is 00:53:57 I had a whole bunch of contract engineers, software engineers working for me at a time. and they were from Madrid. And I didn't know there were so many saints in the world because there were so many holidays. Like, I think it was over 54 that I counted that they took days were saint, whoever it was. And to your point, always took the month of August off. And this was, Chino, this was hard-coded into our calendars. So we knew that they were going to be gone all of August. So we got everything in.

Starting point is 00:54:33 And it's amazing when you know these things and you can set parameters and boundaries around that, you can actually get a lot done. This was a startup. And it was fine that they have that. I mean, we all thought, you know, being in the United States, we were like, this is crazy. They're never around. They're on St. Something holiday. It was amazing because, you know, the protection of, you know, having it actually be something. something that's hard-coded is what I talk about. Put it in the roadmap. Like, make sure that

Starting point is 00:55:06 it's understood. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a standing hour every Friday afternoon. It just needs to be that we expect that we're giving our team its time and space to be curious, to learn, to innovate, and let's do something really cool with that. And let's take AI, let's take automation, let's take our product to the next level. And one quick point on that too. I don't have the research in front of me, the data. But curious to look at life expectancy. I'm a feeling they live a lot longer in Europe and different places.

Starting point is 00:55:42 And at the end of the day, again, love working. We all like to write. I do like to earn. I'm in company. Like that's insane to do sometimes. But you got to think about what life is there. If I died tomorrow, what did I do? And I just work the whole time.

Starting point is 00:55:57 And I think there's something there. I think we're missing and it can unlock a lot more for us as humans, as a society. Yeah, we give ourselves the same level of grace that we would give to others that set the parameters. We don't say, well, you have to, you know, if we were fortunate enough to work with other cultures and other countries and they bring us into their world, we don't say start playing by my rules. We say, oh, good, I understand. You know, you set these expectations and you set these blocks. and this is an observation day and month or what. I understand.

Starting point is 00:56:33 I'm not going to ask you to work during that. We don't do that for ourselves. Let's give ourselves some grace to you. All right. Well, that's going to close out our episode. Before we go, I'd like to give another big banks to Steve Furman for being our guest and playing along. Steve, how can people reach out to you or keep up with you and what you're doing? Then go to www.

Starting point is 00:56:52 the number four pillarcoach.com. I'm on LinkedIn. So at Steve Furman on LinkedIn, I have a YouTube channel. If you go to YouTube.com forward slash at Steve Furman, I post videos, I post blogs on my website. And I'm always on social media, always on LinkedIn. Just trying to give good helpful information. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Steve.

Starting point is 00:57:17 And thank you, Melissa. Thank you, Chino. To our first-time listeners and our returning fixaholics, we hope you enjoyed. We're glad you found the time to listen. us and I hope we came up with something you can actually use. Stress is real, so take good care of yourselves. Whenever you do get free time, you can catch all our backlogged episodes at wefixeditpod.com. That's we fixed itpod.com.

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