Clarity at the Top Podcast Summary
Podcast Transcript
It’s the beginning of the week and your calendar is already completely full. Back-to-back meetings all day long, all the way 9 to 5. Matter of fact, 8 o’clock in the morning. Matter of fact, some mornings you gotta even take your first meeting from home or from the train or the bus. We all know the drill.
You as a top leader, as an executive, you are reacting to this calendar that’s completely full day after day, day after day. And yet you have this thing called AI happening all around you. You’re worried about how it’s gonna disrupt your business, how it’s gonna disrupt your revenue and the future of your company. Matter of fact, it’s disrupting you today, let’s be honest.
Welcome to Clarity at the Top podcast, I’m Thomas Anglero. And let me give you some new perspectives, some insights, some more information you didn’t have before, calm you down and give you solutions to help you get out of the situation that you’re in now. Because number one, this is where we start: you’re not alone. All right, I’ll repeat, you’re not alone. Everyone’s overwhelmed.
Your competitor’s overwhelmed. The guy in the cubicle next to you is overwhelmed. The woman over there is overwhelmed. Everyone’s calendar is completely full with back-to-back meetings. When it gets to 5 o’clock, so many people are going home, you’re sitting at your desk going, “I’m finally opening my inbox.” We’re all there, we’ve all been there.
And where do you have the time to learn this AI stuff? Where do you have this time to see what all these people are doing, all these amazing things, and you say, “Oh it’s just hype, oh it’s so annoying, let me just get what I gotta do.” And you start doing what you’ve always done, grinding away, pounding at the keyboards. But in the back of your mind you get that little voice of, “Why is everybody going home so early? Why is… What about me?” Relax. As a top leader you’re in a difficult situation.
The 20x Power of AI-Enabled New Hires
Let me help you to get yourself out of that and also let me help you to expand your company and save your culture. Let’s start first with this: You’re responsible for all your employees and what’s going on in your company, and you’re gonna be hiring new people into your company. So that means that your company is refreshing itself with every new hire. You know this, you’ve been hiring people forever. Don’t have to be speaking to the choir. But what I want you to be aware of now, today, is that your next new hire will be able to launch their own company with AI.
Let me explain to you what I’m talking about. In my other screen I have over here, which you can’t see, I actually have all these AI agents running in parallel. They’re completing a project that I have them working on while I’m talking to you. Each AI agent has a different experience level. They have an infinite number of years of experience ’cause they have access to all the information on the internet on doing every individual task that I want them to do.
In your organization today, you have a project manager, you have sales, you have customer support, you have marketing. You have all these individual positions. And with my AI agents sitting over here working off camera, they each are expert in customer support, marketing, sales. It’s all been digitalized. Your next new hire knows how to do this.
So you’re thinking, let’s just give an example, product manager. You’re hiring for a product manager. In traditional interviews, you’ll ask them, “What have you done, what clients have you served, and how have you handled different difficult client situations?” You ask about KPIs, building pipeline, and handling unhappy clients. You know the traditional questions.
Your new hire is gonna be a person enabled by AI, enlightened by AI. They will say to you, “I will be the project manager for this role, but I’ll be able to deploy an entire team of people to assist me. I’ll work with my colleagues, but I’ll be able to deploy an entire team of people.” They are able to deploy their own marketing team, their own sales team, their own accounting team, their own legal team. But that’s a big question mark, be careful with that one right; respect the lawyers and the law!
Every new employee is able to have their own company in their role that they have for you. That new employee who is comfortable with AI and can build their own company within their position for you is 20X-ing their output for you, for your company, for your team, and for the colleagues. Every new hire is a 20X better performer in output, deliverables, and speed than any previous employee.
The Growing Cultural Rift in Your Corporation
I’m not saying get rid of your previous employees. That is the wrong way to look at it. The way you should look at your employees, you have a rift happening now in corporations, and this is something I really wanted to get into. The rift is those people who are comfortable with AI and those people who aren’t comfortable with AI. And the organization, your culture, is beginning to split, and I’m seeing this in a lot of organizations, and as a leader, you’re responsible for it.
Now you don’t need any more pressure. You don’t need me to be putting any pressure on you, right? Saying, “Thomas, why are you throwing this pressure on me? I don’t need this right now.” I’m not putting pressure on you. I’m helping you by saying you’re so bogged down in that calendar that’s full of back-to-back meetings, and then you’re bogged down in your inbox ’cause you’ve done all the back-to-back meetings, now you gotta do all the email replies and everything like that. The rift in the culture of your company is growing.
What is the rift? There’s those people who are comfortable with AI, they’re producing more, doing more, and human nature, they may be a little bit cocky, a little bit rude in their bravado about knowing AI so well. And those people who aren’t comfortable with AI, who haven’t figured out AI for whatever reason—there are a million reasons, and there’s nothing wrong. These are normal people; these are you and me before we figured out AI. They’re feeling a little bit put to the side.
It’s a bit like, remember in high school, where you have the cool kids, and if you’re not part of the cool kids, you felt like you’re outside the group and all that crap? Well, that is the culture that’s being produced inside of your professional corporation. You’re just reproducing the discomfort of high school. Who wants to go through that again? Never again. Your job is to get rid of the rift and make everybody one solid team, right? One solid unit.
First thing you need to do is recognize that there is a rift in your culture that is splitting your company, and if that persists, you will not grow and AI will destroy you. The AI influence on cultures of corporations will destroy your corporation, will destroy your future, will destroy anything you’re trying to build, because everybody is in sort of high school mode. God, that in a corporation, what a horrible situation. And that’s the reality of so many people. And people going to work going, “I really am getting uncomfortable with work.”
Leading the AI Transition as a CEO
And that is ’cause it’s triggering stuff and memories from the past and they can’t associate it. But you’re the leader, you’re the boss, you’re the CEO, you’re the person they report to. They’re the person they look up to, who has to have the answers, now you understand. And you’re also the part-time psychologist as well. Part of the job is how do you address this and how do you fix this? You do that by calling an all-hands meeting or going around to different groups.
So I would start off with an all-hands meeting. It can be online, but it’d be better if you have a big auditorium. But if you have people all over the world or in different locations, have an all-hands meeting and just say, “I see a rift in our corporation. We’re introducing AI. There are people who are comfortable with AI and there are people who are not comfortable with AI. It is my responsibility to make everybody comfortable in this organization and I have not been able to do that.”
“But my plan going forward is to make sure that we’re all comfortable with AI. Because those people who are not comfortable with AI, once you understand that it’s not just a tool, this is not just the introduction of a new dashboard that you gotta figure out how to use. This is a major change to how we work going forward for the rest of our lives. This is the equivalent to going from pen and paper to the PC.”
And then I remember those days—dating myself—but I remember that transition. That was very weird, you gotta be pretty old to remember that, but that was a major shift. There were a lot of people who were uncomfortable with that and it took some time. But now today, can you imagine doing your job without a PC? Nothing digital. Doing your entire job with pen and paper, it’s impossible to see that.
This shift from pen and paper to PC is the same as PC to AI. That’s how important this shift is. “And me as a leader, I have underestimated it. We have some people who are comfortable, we have some people who are uncomfortable, and it’s my job to make everyone comfortable. So going forward, I will spend more resources and more time to make people more comfortable, more one-on-ones to get them to understand the value of AI and where we are going.”
“And then as a company, we’ll come back together. I apologize for putting not as much resources on this as I should, but that’s the plan going forward.” Excuse me, doing this in real time. That is one way you can handle it. As a leader, you take the blame because the responsibility is yours, but you also show humanity.
The True ROI of Retaining Your Employees
You also talk about the elephant in the room, right? The rift of the people. And once you talk about the elephant in the room, you talk about how the thing that makes them uncomfortable, as their leader will go, “Oh okay, it’s something we can talk about now. In our culture we can discuss this now, and this is gonna be fixed now. This is great, I’m very happy now.”
Right, that’s where you start understanding that this thing has separated, understanding that your new hires are gonna be so comfortable on this side it’ll make these people uncomfortable. But these people are just a few days, a few weeks away from sliding over, and this becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, and this becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, and then you have an entire company of AI-enabled people. And each employee is 20X-ing what they were doing before. That’s your goal, that’s where you’re targeting, and that’s what the outcome’s gonna be—a 20X for each employee that you have.
This whole AI thing has never, never been about layoffs. Every company who lays off an employee and says, “Because of AI we’re more efficient, I’m laying off 100, 1000, whatever, five, ten employees,” they don’t see that every employee that they laid off is 20X the output of what they’re gonna get from the AI. That’s madness. To lay off people when for every employee you get 20X, but when you lay off 500 people, 500 times 20X, that’s a humongous loss.
You didn’t lay off 500 people, you laid off 10,000—what a stupid move. Your employees who are uncomfortable with AI are your most valuable resource because when they come to understand AI, fantastic. That is what you need to keep in mind going forward and becoming a better leader, ’cause you already are a good one. You’re just overwhelmed with everything that’s going on. You’re not alone, you’re okay.
But here are some strategies, right? That’s a strategy going forward: understanding the power of AI, understanding the implication it is having to your culture, to your day-to-day, and let’s be honest, to your sanity. We gotta save your sanity. So smile, it’s not all doom and gloom, okay? I got you, this is the Clarity at the Top podcast, I’m Thomas Anglero.
I look forward to sharing with you every week insights into how AI and being a top leader coming together, what happens when that magic comes together, right? And what can you do, give you some different things to think about and help you enjoy the quality of life even more. Spend more time with your family, friends, more time maybe just sitting in the grass, why not? I’m Thomas Anglero. Talk to you next time.