Why Your AI Strategy is Failing: Leadership Problem, not IT

My guest today spent nearly a decade inside one of the world's biggest mobile advertising companies, rising from customer success manager all the way to sales chief of staff. She was helping unify a 300-person global organization through a big merger, cutting tens of millions in costs without losing a single pound in revenue. She then took everything she learned about what breaks inside companies doing change and build a business around it. She's the founder of Hacker AI, a company focused on developing and upscaling teams in AI knowledge and helping organizations navigate the human side of AI transformation. She also did a course on ethics of AI at the London School of Economics because she believes how you adopt AI matters just as much as whether you adopt it at all.

She's sharp, she's direct and she has seen the insight of AI transformation in a way very few people have. Alex, welcome to Women Lead AI podcast. As I understand you spent nearly eight years at liftoff and you went from customer success manager to the position of chief of staff for sales. At what point did you look at everything and felt like you want to be a founder of your own company? What made you decide to take that leap?

I think the honest answer is I've always hated being told what to do and it's just it's made me a very difficult employee. I think some of my old managers would probably agree with that. It was at the back of my mind for the longest time but it's not something maybe I was too scared to do it because jumping out and trying to do something of your own is incredibly terrifying. You lose your paycheck, your friends or people doing the bits for you that you don't like doing or that you're not very good at. Over the years I kept climbing the ladder, I did an MBA and I really thought I would just keep going but I just realized the corporate stuff never really ends the bullshit and even as a chief of staff I'd work with a lot of C-level and and VPs they were still being told what to do you know and it's just so it's just the only way to get out of it is really to to jump and eventually just felt like that was the only thing I could do.

And in terms of the hacker AI, the company that you found, you were focused on training non-technical staff. How did you decide that you know this is the specific kind of gap in the market that you need you're going to fill? Was it a specific moment or have you looked at it over the past two years and felt like that is something that's needed? I would say just from my experience being in corporate before as a customer success manager so I've always worked in AI and AI JSON fields not as a coder but working with the tools and then working with teams who you know what I did was advertising so the people we worked with were advertising manager and marketing managers. They couldn't care less about AI they just wanted their campaigns to work like the hype wasn't then what it is now.

But one of the issues that we kept having was because at Lyft we built this tool that was based on machine learning and it was really impressive but it was also a complete black box so you couldn't look under the hood you couldn't you know and like our clients were used to like playing with like adjusting here and there and like making tiny little tweaks to their campaigns you couldn't do any of that and we just kept telling them oh this is the the ML the machine learning like you can't touch it and then we ended up in a situation where one of our big clients at some point said if you say it's the machine learning one more time I'm going to pause all of my campaigns. So we had to kind of sit down and just think and be like okay we need to give them something more and because they were my client I then sat down with our head of machine learning and we devised like this workshop of how do you close the gap right like what is machine learning he really taught me from like his point of view and his technical point of view of like what is it that they're building and the underlying mathematics that goes that underlines everything and that really helped me understand kind of there's such a gap between the technology and how we want to use it in real life and gap in language and understanding and everything else so this like training came from that gap really and I explained to to then our client that you know these are the things that machine learning and AI do incredibly well and you really shouldn't interfere there and these are the things the edge case is and maybe the limits of the tool and you know and it turns out that a lot of the intuition when they felt like something wasn't working was actually correct they just didn't really have the language to kind of how to explain it to us and we didn't have the language to start explaining to the technical people um and then I did over a hundred of those talks because once the word got out that you know that client liked it then another client liked it then another one that really planted the seed in me that there's such a gap in language and understanding and kind of how we view the technology from technical and non-technical people that was back at left this was back in 2018 okay so this was ages ago and I don't think it's really changed if anything it's got worse because now everyone is using it and the hype is just so much right um and if you don't understand how it works and the underlying forces I think it's really easy to believe the hype um or to fear you know the worst kind of fear-mongering scenarios right um so that's where the seed got planted then I did an MBA still kind of thinking I was going to be you know super corporate for the rest of my life and I wrote my dissertation on how non-technical leaders can implement AI into their organizations in a way that's ethical that doesn't create problems down the line and like how can you ask the questions that you want to ask but you don't maybe don't understand the technology fully right which I think is um yeah um and I remember actually when I was writing in like 2020 2021 um we were talking to a bunch of different AI startups and and organizations that were looking after ethical AI and they're like oh there's this new startup called Open AI they're very small but you should chat to those guys um and yeah so then that was I think that was the whole thing of just it's never really I don't feel like that sentiment has changed right people who are technical view AI in a very particular way and then the rest of us view it in a different way um and and people use it really differently you know as well so that's why we focused on kind of training the teams on just kind of getting the baseline of this is how you use your gen AI tools this is how you can think about it this is when you should trust it this is when you shouldn't trust it right and just get everyone on the same page and then you can really start experimenting and coming up with like really cool crazy ideas but you need to make sure that everyone in your team knows what they're allowed and not allowed to do how like how do you do that considering the fact that you know I hear about a new AI tool almost every day and it feels like you know the train that train is moving at hundreds of kilometers an hour so how can you make sure that the teams are trained kind of it feels like they have to be trained continuously in order to keep up with technology and also get those benefits I don't think it's realistic to keep up to date with absolutely everything that's happening at this point like I'm not even trying and I know from other people who are either AI trainers or they've built a whole like creator economy around being kind of the person that teaches you AI no one can keep up with everything that's happening so that's just unrealistic what you can do and I mean considering that I think it's like 50% of all VC funding now goes to AI companies which seems to be honest low to me I don't know how anyone gets money at this point without being an AI company and I'm not being flippant right it's just I'm sure they'll just like add it in somewhere just so they can get the money yeah so how can you keep up with every single startup that comes out of like that gets funded and doesn't get funded right like my LinkedIn feed is full of SaaS startups they're all doing like slightly different things you know like my background is kind of sales and custom success like do I know what all of them do no absolutely not but you keep on top of the big LLMs you keep on top of the big startups that are coming out and really getting traction and then you just have to accept that no one really knows and things change all the time right like something that worked two months ago and that maybe wasn't possible two months ago is possible now but I don't think you have to be the first person to jump at every single opportunity like that and I know that controlling that feeling of FOMO is it's hard it's hard for me I want to be you know like that's my job so I want I need to be ahead of everything but it's just it's impossible how you know considering kind of what you studied and the MBA that you mentioned how do you think you see the ethics of AI differently like you because of that you were able to have that lens that a lot of people don't have how yeah how did it make you think differently about also implementation of it in companies and how the companies should approach it yeah the way I think about it is you can go into ethics from like a very technical point of view right and there's all sorts of types of biases that AI can create and a lot of it has to do with training data or the assumptions that you make when you are building the models and all of those kind of things I think as a non-technical person or someone who's using AI it's really unrealistic for you to go into the hood of like every single tool so it's impossible right because it's a lot of its proprietary information so you have to think about it in a different way right it's if you are using these tools what's the potential fallout right and you think of that from like a PR lens right like Anthropic got in the waters recently because they were working with the US government right who is then working with Palantir they have a deal where they don't I think directly work with Palantir but if they work with the US government who works with Palantir that's fine right and it's a trade-off that they have to make right like some people would say that's really unethical and it like 10-15 years ago would have been unthinkable for like a left-wing Silicon Valley company to be working on military projects but in 2026 it's expected right and it's a huge chunk of their revenues so they have to make kind of concessions or decisions somehow so the way I think about ethics is generally think about your values don't get too hung up on the technical aspects of like biases and everything else where I can go wrong and think of your values right like if you value your people at the company don't replace them all with agents at the first opportunity right and like maybe down the line that's what happens but if you do it at the first opportunity then you know you've rode a lot of the trust that you have with your team because then they're like well clearly people it's not what matters most to you right you can and it might be the inevitable that that's the way things go but you can do it in a different way right like you can start introducing agents at the same time you train people to work with agents right like you retrain some of your workforce you give them a lot of securities around like these are the things that we really value that humans can do that machines can't do at this point in time and this is what we needed to focus on yes your role is changing but your livelihood is safe for now right so there's different ways of going about it that still protects people that focuses on your values so really I start with that rather than any of the kind of technical aspect because you can get like bogged down in the quagmire of like all the different types of biases and yeah I think it's like what you said in regards to thinking what are your values is so important because I think when you look around a lot of people they adopt these tools right without considering what is like as a company what is most important to us like what is our north star and I'm sure like you see that as well whereas there is like lack of that consideration for for what is important to us right yeah and I think a lot of it doesn't even come from a bad place I don't think there's like evil managers who are sat there just like oh how can I create more anxiety for my teams you know it's just maybe sometimes it's FOMO and they feel like everyone else is doing something so that's what they want to do I think the outputs and the effects are the same but it I think a lot of time it happens because people don't think things through not because they sit there in some evil cabal and think about how they can like impose as much harm on other people okay so let's say I'm a leader of a company that's has got 50 people and I want to you know I want to jump on the train I want to implement AI like what is one of the first like questions I should be asking myself before kind of making any any changes and any implementation I would say if you're a leader now and you don't have any AI in your org officially and you have a 50 person org you probably have a problem with shadow AI usage because I don't believe that no one is using their chat gbt or Claude on the side do you want to explain what's what what is shadow AI yeah so shadow AI is when employees use AI that like hasn't been approved by the company right so for example I know a lot of companies that either don't use any AI or they only have co-pilot right co-pilot at this point in time is by far the worst one of the LLMs it just has the worst capabilities right so that's the only thing you've rolled out and yes you can block access to chat gbt and Claude or Gemini on work laptops what you can't stop people from doing is taking a screenshot of something on their phone putting into their chat gbt and then getting the answer and copy pasting it right and obviously the what happens as a result of that is then you're training open AI or Anthropic or whoever on your proprietary company information that shouldn't really be going into those models because that data is not siloed that's really dangerous you can't blame people for it just because it's so you know I don't know anyone who doesn't use who's never used one of those models at this point right it feels like productivity that you can get is just the gains are there right so it's so much faster so how can you expect people to work in like the 19th century you know like we don't expect people to ride a horse to work so um so you should and so I would say that's number one if you don't have anything you more than likely have a problem with shadow AI usage so implement something I would definitely start with kind of gen AI tools right um like I'm agnostic I don't care where which tools companies use if they ask me for recommendation at the moment Claude is definitely the best one it's having a moment six months then the line that could change right six months ago I would say open AI was probably the strongest right so you can implement Claude now but it doesn't mean that maybe at some point you're going to have to also get chat jpt or Gemini or something else so that would be number one and then number two and one of the mistakes I see companies making is they kind of have this roll out and abandon approach where they give everyone a license uh and then they go okay off you go bye um and people use it differently right like some people are skeptics other people are early adopters and kind of experts some people will be creating like agents and automating everything of the work others don't even know how to prompt right so you really need to get everyone on the same baseline um that's the work that that we do at Haka Redlich is providing that training so everyone is is there they know how to use it and it matches with kind of your guidelines right it could be that for example if you work with clients do you want to automate not even automate but do you want people using um Gemini's or Claude's to write all of the emails it depends right because if suddenly clients feel like they're talking to Claude and not their account manager that could have rolled a lot of trust and it comes back to that training at that point right because you can you can prompt it in a way whether you do it with kind of like voice for example we can make really detailed prompt a will sound like you but if it sounds like you know chat jbt generated then you know is that like is that a fault of not like having been trained it probably is a fault of not having been trained because if people don't know what they're allowed to do and what are what are they not allowed to do then it's it's not necessarily their fault right i've had managers say i don't want my teams using any chat jbt to write emails because that's what we pay them for and i think that's also unfair um again coming back to the horse right like we don't ride a horse to work so yes we should be using it but you should really think about the guard rails right um so if you send out an email that's a chat jbt and i think it's also easy to get to this like lazy point where you don't really check it you just skim it or you trust it to say what you want it to say and then it can be a little bit off and it can especially if you're analyzing data it can really be off right like it's just um so that's what goes into the training right of just like where do you really sit down yes use it to create a draft which are the bits that you really have to read through it maybe you have like a company level voice prompt or like how it's meant to sound so it sounds as like least chat jbt ish possible um but yeah that um definitely the training number three is the anxiety i would really address that um and it's like so in my in my work as as a chief of staff um i was looking after like big mergers and like post-merger integration of companies and and that's incredibly anxiety inducing for people right they know it's coming because there's like well in my case it was two orgs that basically looked identical and you couldn't keep it for so long but it took us a long time to get to a place where we knew like how the roles were going to change who was going to stay who was going to go whose management was going to go and that's you know people were just stressing stressing for like a year while we were working on it i constantly got questions like am i on the list you know this and that so and i don't think ai is any different right um it's incredibly anxiety inducing and that anxiety can eat up so much of the mental bandwidth of people so if you don't address it they could easily be spending half of their time trying to figure out if they're going to have a job in the next year or not that's a huge loss of productivity so i would really think about that and and focus on that but that also means you need to have trust with your teams right because if you just do a presentation of like oh these are the ai tools you're all safe but you don't have trust then you've wasted everyone's time even more so how do you build up that trust that your employees know that you're not going to let them go when you know like anthropica whoever releases any update and suddenly can do their jobs i think uh like what you said really rings true because in a company where um i work you know there was a reorganization and people got laid off and you know immediately the mood like shifts completely right and everyone is just talking about that one thing about like who uh who was laid off who's about to get laid off and and i can imagine that with like with ai it might be the same you know the same feeling especially when i hear that you know that company laid off 500 people because ai can do their job right and how like how do you make sure that people are are open to that training and like reduce that level of anxiety comes back to trust you need to trust your leadership if you don't trust it then it's a lot harder to do that training i think generally people understand that you can't put the ai genie back in the bottle right like it's it's out it's it's like a tsunami right like it's that's what our life looks like but you can reduce that um mental bandwidth that anxiety takes by building up trust building up training right like focusing on like i said earlier right like yes your role is changing and ai can do some of those things but this is really what we value right like for example if you work with clients directly maybe you go and see them more right and and you do things like um face to face maybe you do more events so you really then focus on the relationship but you allow ai to take over some of the kind of optimization that you would have had to do manually before and i wonder whether like a lot of companies what they what they do is you know they get those gains in productivity but then that means that the expectation is that you just do you're supposed to do more work right but i think what you said in terms of like using that time for example to have you know in person more in person meetings or create better relationships with clients like is so important because then it feels like oh like we are using this tool it helps us with productivity but it also means that you know and it also means that the team actually benefits from it but on the other hand i've also seen situations where so many tools have been released and people spend so much of their time checking the output of the tools and fixing them and right and like i really started kind of focusing on my linkedin about a year ago so i've created like a bunch of different projects and agents that helped me do some of that work i find that like a year down the line some of them don't work as well as they used to because open ai changed their models or something else so like those things decay a lot faster than i think we're used to with like traditional sass and tools so the upkeep that's required to keep all of those automations actually running how you want them to run is a lot higher i think there's still a productivity win overall but the more those automations you create then the more you have to spend doing the upkeep so i don't think this like i don't really believe this there are some game where we can all be on the beach and you know our agents are just like not yet not yet well yeah um you know they're just producing everything on our behalf i just don't see that happening at this point so like let's say that i'm in an organization where we have co-pilot and i use it you know kind of instead of google for drafting some emails like what but i'm i feel like i'm not a technical person i'm not you know software engineer like what should i be doing in order to you know to to be up to date with those tools so that you know if i were to get laid off like i have those skills and i can use them at the like at the next company oh there's so many things you could do one thing i really love telling people to do is you you have to approach it as like a playful thing and experimentation i think that's the easiest way to see what works for you and where you can get the gains and also it takes the pressure of things right of just you then don't expect to automate all of your work within seconds but you could start with you know putting the same prompt into different llms and see what the outputs are like right you could play around with like a really vague prompt versus a really detailed prompt and see what the difference in the answers that you get is and just try try and get that sense of what's working and develop that intuition for yourself and and then pick something easy right that you could maybe automate right so for example if you wake up every morning and you have um a million emails that came in overnight and slack messages and something else and something else and you have to check all of those things maybe you create some kind of like summary email that's just just like these are the things that need your attention and maybe that's useful right like try and create that see how that works keep testing it to see like is it missing some things out that are important right is it leaving them out is it working how how you want it to work if that's great that's one automation you've created but you don't need to you know automate your whole life away i don't think that's that's the point that i don't think you need to be you know i definitely feel that because that's probably all the social media i consume at this point is that everything should be automated and and i don't think that's realistic right and also it's incredibly expensive it eats up into credits if you start automating everything then the tools kind of change right and the outputs change and we go back to the whole like you need to upkeep all of your different projects and automations and agents etc so just do the things that are the biggest blockers in in your day-to-day and then see how that works out take it slow you know play around with different tools if something doesn't work then try something differently i think also what's incredibly useful with all of these tools like i for some reason for me learning like going into a new like sas tool and trying to figure out like where all the buttons are and how do i get to what i want it's just incredibly painful like i hate that i never read instructions i just find that boring right but what one of the things with ai is you can say this is the tool that i'm trying to use this is what i want to get to how do i do it it doesn't always give you the right answer sometimes it can lead you down like a garden path but in so many cases it will tell you exactly how you should do something and where all the buttons are so it you know just keep trying to see where those opportunities are um use as many of the tools as you can like they're not that different ultimately you can use them in like you can learn them in a couple of weeks if you go to a different company and they don't use copilot they use something else um but just play around with them and yeah don't live under a rock i like what you said um in terms of using the tools like using for example chat gbt to use a different tool like rings really true because um my dad he um he got inspired by me when i started doing like 3d printing and he got a printer and he lives in back in poland so you know i couldn't just kind of see what is happening so one of our conversations were over whatsapp and you know he said at some point like oh um i'm so glad that you know chat gbt is here otherwise i would have been asking you like hundreds more questions so um yeah i think these tools like really really give you that power to you know i don't know how this works and also i guess like the kind of questions that you can ask are like sometimes you feel stupid asking someone else but it's like your um your search history right you sometimes people are like no i don't want others other people to see like what you know what is happening as well 100 i think that's even more private than my google search history right it's is but but also maybe one thing i really like doing to kind of learn and see where it's good is not focusing too much on work but on like your personal case right like a hobby or like i've been trying to figure out you know like i also like i love fashion content and all of those kind of things right and then you start putting together like your body type your seasonal color analysis your this your this and there's so many different theories i like it's overwhelming i have no idea what i should be wearing or like i keep buying the same things over and over again in shops so i then fed all of that information into chat and i told it you know this is what i like i gave it also i give it pictures of like inspiration like these are the things that like i like wearing does it suit my body type does it suit my coloring and because at this point it knows me quite well it then tells me how to adjust some of the outfits to like make them work for me it tells me if something is good if something isn't but but it's i found that it's helped me develop that intuition where i go around shops now i don't want to buy everything or the same things over and over again i'm like okay i have this these are the gaps this is so to be honest at this point before i buy anything i put it into chat i'm like is this what i do i need this yeah what's what's funny is now like whenever i go like grocery shopping and we've been trying to eat healthier me and my partner so or you know take a picture of the yogurt and what the ingredients are and ask like is this healthy or um yeah or or not and i found one app where you can just scan the barcode and it will give you like a score you know 73 out of 100 and if it's lower than 60 then we're not allowed to buy it i like that right it's like it's useful for for those kind of things right and yeah or like another thing maybe like my background is estonian russian um so just like on a family level like we're very different political views depending on you know what media sphere people are in and i have family who like have very different views in the war in ukraine for example and it's really hard when because there is no like middle ground in it really right like you're either wrong or you're right and depending what side you're on that changes but i then use chat to kind of try and understand almost do a conflict resolution with them and try and understand where they're coming from with their point of view and all of these things and what i often find is the underlying that obviously to my mind there's a lot of misinformation right and they're coming to the wrong conclusion but the underlying fears or what they want to achieve they're all valid but we just reach different conclusions but i i found that it's really helped me kind of mediate some of those really tricky family dynamics that i think lots of families have in this day and age where you can be polarized on you know on everything like the wars brexits like yeah i've actually never had someone say it but now when i think about it like it makes so much sense to to use it that way because you know it gives you that uh perception that and you know you can you can kind of argue with it and tell your points versus uh versus what you know potentially the other side things and it can give you that another perspective on on the things especially like the the ones you mentioned so like when we think about companies and how they're like rolling out ai like how much do you think is leadership responsible for how much is i let's say it department responsible for and individuals like who is supposed to lead for example on education and and you know those those things i think generally leaders think it's an it problem or maybe like an hr like lnd you know learning and development problem um and and they don't think it's their problem i would argue it's very much their problem from various different points of view like their the anxiety that we talked about earlier right of am i going to keep my job am i safe that's a leadership problem um the tools and how do you use them what are the values like are you allowed to just like send out batch emails to clients that you haven't looked over that's a leadership problem that's not an it problem what kind of tools do you implement what kind of agents you build i think that's also a leadership problem right um i think sometimes it's maybe it's laziness maybe it's like you have so much on your mind that you don't really or you don't understand the technology well enough and you just think especially sometimes companies have like an ai lead or like oh they'll come up with all of the things that we need but they don't know the intricacies of the workflows of every single team so how do you trust them to come up with the best possible tools um i think leaders also need much more education on the possibilities but i think the way leaders think and the way the teams think is very different i think for the teams they need to know like how to prompt when to trust outputs when not to trust them like when to raise an alarm uh when not to use shadow ai right like that's that for leaders they need to be thinking much more long-term strategically if competition came along and they built a similar company but from the ground up and they were ai native what would they build and how would that affect us right and then i think that can really get you to a place where you can think a little bit differently about what are the blockers yeah 100 you know there's a lot of talk about the fact that there there is going to be a billion dollar company just with made by a single person and i think like that's definitely going to happen especially seeing some of the like the progress with like cloud um so and the question that you ask like how would the company look like uh it's like it's so interesting but then what happens if the answer is oh we would not have like this whole department like do they do they how do you evaluate that you know risk of potentially laying off people what from a point of view of one person let's say a leader is thinking oh we if we were ai kind of native company like this process that currently you know a team of 10 people is responsible for actually it can be automated away oh yeah or we would need one or two people right yeah it's hard i think leaders who start from the ground up with ai they don't get any of the hates then the leaders who then have to let go their teams right but actually the outcome is in many ways the same um i think it's a great point um there's a company in like my old field and i was in in our tech so like advertising tech that um there's a lot of companies that use ai machine learning all those kind of things but the technology was probably built 10 15 years ago so there's a lot of really cool stuff that's been built that works incredibly well but the kind of the operational side or the managing it requires hundreds and hundreds of people right and it can be clunky in many ways um there's a company that recently kind of came about they've got a bunch of funding and they've basically rebuilding one of the aspects of the ad tech industry but from the ground up and ai native with all the genetic work so they're automating away a lot of the work that would normally be done by by teams they've made a huge splash where some of the valuations drop massively and you know and they really spook the investors um in that field um i don't know i don't know if i have an answer like as a leader you're taught right like one thing i you learn and if you do an mba and kind of leadership is you always have this tension and that is leadership is managing that tension when you're being pulled in two different directions right and i think as a leader now especially as a senior leader you will feel the push to automate everything and introduce agents and do all of those things because otherwise you won't have a company anymore right um but at the same time hopefully you feel the responsibility for the teams and the people um and i don't think there is a single answer because in different situations you would do different things but there's there's an easy way or like there's a there are different ways of reacting to to that situation you could fire everyone like who was it not camber carter did it right they fired like thousands of people replaced them with agents and then they realized actually agents can't do that so now they're rehiring them but they've destroyed a lot of trust right and in many ways i mean i'm glad they did it because it serves as a lesson to so many other companies to not do that but that's one way of dealing with it where they didn't think of the people but you could think of it in a way of like okay can i give people other jobs what else could we do could we retrain them can we do them something else um and and just go that way but i think it's inevitable that we're all gonna have to upskill and learn new things you know we don't work now the same way we worked during the industrial revolution and that's fine um but it does mean that some jobs go away yeah and i think what you know what would you say to someone you mentioned the companies are not hiring and like you can see that in stats as well uh in in uk and in the u.s were that you know there there is a need for kind of senior leadership but when it comes to fresh graduates actually that work can be outsourced to ai and you know uh if let's say a law firm was hiring a new associate who would do a lot of groundwork of research well i've got an alum that can do all of that so if you're in the position of like recently graduating what what do you do to you know to survive basically i don't know i it is definitely harder and i think it's only going to get more and more harder um having said that i graduated in 2009 right in the height of the financial crisis um and i was in a situation where me and my friends all had jobs lined up and then those companies went bust um so they were no jobs so in a way maybe a similar situation right i didn't graduate into an economy that was booming um what i did is i wasted a bunch of time doing like i did a year abroad i had a lovely time i don't think it was wasted um i learned a new language then i did something else it just took me a little bit longer to get on the path that i wanted to get to to get into tech i also didn't know i wanted to get into tech um and i did some kind of not so high paying jobs at much smaller companies but eventually i got to the place where where i wanted to get to um and it ended up being fine you know like i still got to like senior leadership levels like it's i think you feel as a graduate that like you really have to be kind of get the job like get the promotion like you're under so much pressure to achieve things really really fast and instantly but that's just not how life goes all the time that's the only advice i can give really is it's you're not the first people who have struggled to get jobs and have graduated in an economy that's that isn't booming and you know dying to hire you um it is harder and sometimes it will take longer yeah i relate to it because i graduated in 2020 when covet just started right and all of the graduate schemes and all of the jobs that i was applying for they suddenly started just sending emails out that they're not like they're stopping hiring just because they they're not sure what's going to happen and it was that like moment you know panic of what do i do and i did have a gap of like several months between when i was able to find like a job that i was happy with like almost over a year um so yeah it is it is very but you're okay now right like you got the job it just didn't happen instantly yeah and i keep learning skills while you're looking for jobs right like maybe you start a startup and maybe that's what a grad can do like you know there's plenty of young kind of entrepreneurs out there who've made millions if not billions i i think you know whenever a new technology comes in you can always think about oh like this is gonna like replace me or this is um like it's it's gonna be a challenge or you can see it as opportunity right and it is i i think that it is about that mindset whether you think oh you know i can you know like i can do training for for example companies or i can become really skilled at that one thing and you know offer it as a freelancer so um i think yeah a lot of it is about how like how you think and how you see it whether it's it's opportunity or it's all doom and gloom right i think so i don't i think it's attributed to winston churchill this saying but it's like never waste the good crisis i don't know if he actually said it but i really believe in that right um like i through my corporate career probably went through like eight restructurings and redundancy rounds so many but i got promoted through more than half of them and got promotions that would have never got otherwise where like i could move up not just like from you know how they love to go send you from like your ic to suddenly you're like an associate manager and then you become a manager and then you're an associate something else right and they just create so many steps you can jump so many steps when there's like a huge crisis um because the rules are different in that situation right um so yeah absolutely i think now you know is is the easiest time to start a company um one of the main things that companies all companies struggle with is trying to get clients and get the word out for how they're doing and it's so easy to create content now with ai right so like half of that and i'm not saying also made all of it away i don't think that's well you can do it but it's not going to be very good content right but it makes it so much easier where before would have taken someone probably a full-time role to do that you can probably do it in a day now right so that's one day of your week that you focus on kind of marketing and um and creating awareness and the rest of the time you focus on building the company it is it's absolutely so many opportunities are coming from this um and i don't think we know when you were saying you know what happens to um employees where you know a company just like doesn't create a new department because they're ai native from the ground up i think we're moving towards a world where we're not going to have huge multi-corporates we will still but a lot more people will be working for much smaller companies like five people 20 people 50 people right because you'll be able to do what 600 people used to do with 50 people now and a few hundred of agents doing the groundwork and when you think about you know companies implementing ai like what are what other mistakes you mentioned one of them what mistakes do you see when the company is rolling out uh and what not to do basically um i think a lot of them we have covered i would say one is the kind of roll out and abandon right so when they like roll out a license and then they just leave people to to use it however they want to um the second one and like i feel bad saying this but if you only roll that copilot you also probably have a shadow ai problem because people just don't like using it at the moment um so that one but also maybe a bigger point there is just not monitoring for shadow ai usage right and having all of your sensitive data leaked out um the trust issue right and the anxiety not addressing that i think that's a huge mistake um and then the last one maybe is stopping at rolling out an llm right and being like that's our ai strategy or we have like a sas that we have for sales we have a sas that we have for ops team we have something for like our product teams and then our engineering team uses clawed right like okay yeah that's an ai strategy but it's a very like basic ai strategy i think um the companies that are really going to get ahead are the ones they're not thinking how can i get a 10 improvement they're thinking how can i get a 10x improvement and that probably means kind of thinking okay we're building this from the ground up with a genetic ai what would we change um and where the blockers where we relying on maybe processes that don't work uh oh another one i love this one where people try and automate like a really fuzzy process that doesn't work or a broken process and they try and throw ai at it um yeah that really doesn't work where do you see as like the the biggest gap between where um a lot of companies are right now and where do you think opportunity is when it comes to ai adoption i i would love to say we're at a place where we all need to start thinking about like the 10x improvements in reality we're at a place where you need to make sure that everyone in your team knows how to prompt like we're at such basic one-on-one level and it's fine it's a really new technology um but if we get everyone on a on a baseline and also like when to use it when not to use it i also like i feel like almost everyone and not even in the knowledge economy i think you know like farmers probably need to use ai right like and it just makes everyone's lives easier when should you use it when should you not use it we all need to be up skilled on kind of the intricacies of of this incredibly complex technical tool and technology i think uh you know organize i think in a lot of organizations you have like basically two groups of people where someone is like oh i'm not really a tech person i'm not you know interested in this i'm a bit anxious about this this tech and then you have someone who is like obsessed with it and you know every new tool they're like on it and and usually that you know that second group is put then in charge of uh like education potentially but they're you know they're starting with not that base knowledge but expecting everyone to be already there um and they're like potentially they're not do you see that as well i see that um i mean sometimes it can work it depends right but i would say in the cases where it does go wrong maybe the people who are early adopters they don't share the same psychological fears as the people who hold back right and i think that's where it comes from it's not like people do fall in this curve right of like early adopters whatever is like the late majority i can't remember where all the bits are um we treat new things differently and some people are just naturally more skeptical but if you don't address those fears or then i mean it doesn't matter that you show them like 10 different agents that you've built for yourself it's if they don't want to use them because they think they're going to get lose their job in like six months because of it it's not going to increase adoption right um so yes i think it's good you should you should have that you should always have like um people who are really into new tools and that help kind of create that adoption and someone that you can always ask questions to um but would you would i put them in charge of training the whole company probably not yeah i guess you know it comes back to that trust and how how trusting employees employees are in the organization right whether the organization creates an environment where saying oh like i don't understand this like can you explain it differently that like that is absolutely fine and it is expected um but a lot of environments are such that okay i i i got it or i'll just you know figure it out on my own and and that's like that's very challenging it's challenging but i think it also becomes because leaders don't really understand the technology themselves we're all just kind of feeling around in the dark um yeah would you say that like it has to start there where the leadership gets up skilled in it and really makes it their priority to learn because that you know that creates that cascade where you think about use cases you think about like how can you roll it out right yeah absolutely it's it can't be like a good ai training is not just prompt training for your teams that's really important but that that's not really where it should end right as the leaders you need different things you need to think about you know can a competition create my company from the ground up with agentic ai what does that mean um what are the downstream like if we start using um ai for hiring people right and suddenly tells us we only need to hire white males what are the pr repercussions of that if a journalist finds out that's a leadership problem right so understanding that there are biases with these tools and even if you bring in a supplier um who's going to provide it like it's still going to be ultimately your responsibility you can't always say that it was them well why didn't you ask the right questions then right um so there's different leaders also need to know how to prompt but it's it goes like further beyond that of things that they need to be asking yeah like safeguards and all of those things and where we use it like you said and where actually we shouldn't be using it yeah how does our culture change right like how um i mean you're not gonna have like um presents and birthday parties for the agents in your workforce but you know if people start also doing different things do they like maybe some of them will like doing those things right if you can spend more time with clients face to face great other people might not like that so then they might need to do something else all of those are leadership problems i love this conversation i like i learned so much uh i think for me the biggest takeaway was that question that you asked like if my company was starting you know from the ground up like what what would the competition be doing to be um if they were starting to with being ai native um but let's do a question um a fast round of questions so um what's uh one ai workflow or automation that you adopted and it generally you know changed how you work mine content creation i create a lot of content on linkedin and it really helps me with that having said that it's not fully automated i really don't believe in full automation but that like research first draft analyzing it 100 what's the best use of ai that you've seen inside a company that most people wouldn't think of a leadership team they started recording their meetings and they were kind of a very established team where like there's no new blood for ages and so they worked together quite well they started feeding those transcripts to an llm and just saying can you find holes in our thinking and what are we missing where are we two in agreement with each other what else should we be thinking about that is such a good use case and that's not and i'm again i'm not saying trust it fully right but it will surface some things that you wouldn't have thought because we all just get a bit of like inertia and set in our ways that is that i'm gonna use that um let's say that we kind of discussed this but um i'm someone who decides today that they're gonna lean into ai uh rather than kind of wait for guidance um where where do i start uh so i can see you know so i can i can start today and within a week kind of see improvement if you've never used it before let's say i've used um just chat gbt for questions and answers i mean first my number one is make sure your prompts are good try different prompts try a poor prompt a good prompt you know a detailed prompt see what that the output that it gives you and i mean if you're using claude you probably have more opportunities right now for like automation right just because it makes it easier so then you could start like what i said earlier right like if you wake up every morning and you have a million different emails and it's really overwhelming try and automate that start with something small where you can create an automation right if your company doesn't allow it and you have no ai or you have only like ai that like you can't build like little agents or whatever do it in your personal life right um whatever you're doing like maybe you create like give me the news on this topic of like what's being discussed in like social media and news and whatever right try and find um a contrarian point of view or like a devil's advocate point of view just so another thing i like doing is you know with news and social media we're so in our bubbles and it's so hard to get out of those bubbles actually if you actively ask ai to take you out of that bubble what is the opposing point of view it does it quite well and you can kind of try and break some of those walls a little bit it's not an automation but i think it's really useful for how we see the world and how we think about things yeah i am you know i've noticed i was looking for like recipes for breakfast on instagram right and then my discovery page was just full of food like all of it um and it's like i mean i don't i don't really want to see you know just that so i think you you definitely get into that like single mindset of um of just seeing like one thing or two things so yeah um so final question um if you could like share one message to every every person that's sitting in a company right now wondering whether ai is going to make them more valuable or it's going to make them redundant what would be that message if you if a majority of your role is doing things that ai and by ai really mean llms right does really well as well you're probably in the danger zone right so if your role is coordinating information finding uh like reading through things to like find information summarizing things you're in danger zone um and it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be out in a year focus on hopefully your role has some other aspects focus on those right um so even like even if you're doing mostly let's say you like find insights from like different reports and you combine them into something else right or you're doing marketing like content creation right like super prime for automation you can then use your judgment and your intuition that you've developed over the years to guide the the ai and the machine like how you should be doing and where your values lie and so there's ways that you can kind of spin it um but then the other thing i would say just because you're doing it doesn't mean you're going to be kept you know the the game of corporate politics is visibility so you know you have to play the game so be really really loud about all the things you're doing that machines can't do yeah i think that's that's a really good advice um if um if someone wanted to to work with with you and and you know their company uh how uh how should they get in touch yeah um i'm on linkedin um you can dm me or alex at hawker.