Charlene Li on Winning with Generative AI at AIE 2024

Hello everyone, it's Charlene Lee, and today I will be speaking about winning with generative ai. Now, just to level set, let's make sure we all understand what generative AI is. And it does five things, it creates content and five different types of content.

There's language, there's images, there's audio, video, and of course coding. And now many of you have already tried using these tools and we know how just transformative it is. But I have been in the technology and business space for 30 years and I have seen a lot of transformations happen.

And what is it about this moment that's significantly different than any other moment beforehand? And I think this is important to establish because if you want to get your organization up and moving and using these tools, there's a sense of urgency that I think is needed. So what's really different are a couple things.

First of all, as you know, the speed of adoption is tremendous, fastest growing technology, a hundred million users in just two months with chat GPT. And we also see people just using it across all spectrums of life, all globally too as well. We know that things are getting, are changing constantly.

There isn't a day that doesn't go by without a significant, it seems major announcement in the space, especially as the technology is changing. Uh, there's a huge impact on jobs potentially on the way that people do jobs and potentially on the fact that people's jobs themselves may be going away or new jobs are being created. And we'll talk about that too.

It's also happening across the entire company. In the past, if you wanted to do digital transformation, you had the luxury of doing it in marketing first and then in sales, and then hr. But with generative ai, it's hitting across the entire enterprise all at the same time.

And of course, we know that anyone can get access and there are tremendous ethical issues that come up all the time. So we're facing two dilemmas here. First of all, there's a sense of we're missing out, we're not going fast enough, this fear of missing out the FOMO that's happening, but we also have a fear of getting in what I call the PHO G.

So we're being pulled into FOMO and PHO G, and we're really feeling conflicted as enterprise leaders. How do we move into this space strategically with intention, safely and with good results? So today I am gonna talk about three things.

First of all, how do you create a strategy? Second of all, how is this going to transform our workforce? And third of all, how will it change leadership and the need to be to develop new leadership skills?

So let's talk about, let's talk about, first of all, setting that generative AI strategy. Now, what's interesting I see many organizations doing is they start with use cases. Like what are the ways that we can use drive of ai?

And I think that's a mistake. Instead start with the things that are not going to change in this fast moving space. And those are things like your vision, your purpose, your values, your business strategy.

And the reason why it's so important to start with those is because what I mentioned before, there are huge issues that come up around your workforce, around leadership, around even ethics. I, I had a client recently asked me, you know, we, we want to use gen of ai, but we are concerned that if we tell our clients that we're doing great work, better work, but with less effort, they may ask that we charge them less. So should we tell them or should we not?

And my response was, what do your values say? How do your values inform you about how to make this decision? So start with that vision and purpose, and it also will give you some foundations of your ex with your existing policies about what do you want to do and not do with with responsible ai?

Because when you want to go fast as a Formula one driver would say you have to have good breaks. And the good breaks in this space is an AI responsible use and ethical use policy. So get those use policies in place.

ASAP. Now am I am I work with organizations, I speak to a lot of organizations and conferences, and the vast majority of them are using AI in some way. They're testing it or they're actively using it themselves.

But very, very few of them have a formal AI policy. So I wanna take a minute here just to reinforce how important this is because unless people feel safe, unless your legal security team and your risk team feels safe, people will not okay and approve going fast with your joint of ai. So there are five areas to cover in your joint of AI policies.

Obviously you have to have data privacy and safety and security. So tap into those existing policies that you have. In addition to that, you need to have a a point of view about how transparent you are going to be about your use of ai, when are you using it and what circumstances do you tell people?

And also accountability. Who's responsible for this AI working well? And very importantly, who's responsible for responding when things don't go well?

And then finally, of course have the ethics there in place and also the rules that you have to follow for compliance. Now I have resources available at this, um, QR code. Uh, it is just a couple templates, some examples behind this.

And also some ways to actually create your policies even using generative ai. So get your AI policies in place, use your foundational values and existing policies to make that happen. And even in the beginning, you may just want to train people on using critical thinking things like look at the results and make sure they match your gut and instinct.

Don't take them at face value. So critical thinking as a skill is extremely important. So once you have those policies in place, then you get to do the really exciting things.

And that in particular is to think about how AI can really make a difference in your company. Now, I encourage people to think the biggest, biggest impacts the broadest impacts you could have with generative ai. Because when you think about how generative AI can support your competitive, a vantage can support the assumptions inside of your base and and, and overall strategic plan.

What are those assumptions? Understand what they are, do an audit of your strategy and understand these assumptions, these views of the world are what make us so successful and give us our competitive advantage. Now, how can generative AI support us in that pursuit of that advantage?

Also, what are the threats to this? And the whole idea behind this is that you wanna think big, start small and then scale fast. The current approach in most places right now is we start small.

What are the easy use cases we can have? And then you stay small. So I encourage you to think big, think really big.

Where could we be 18 months, three years from now with generative ai? What are the things that we could do to transform our organization and also give our advantage, give us significant advantage as an organization? Let me give you a quick example of one company did a great job of this.

Uh, this is a company that said the customer experience is really important. They are 130,000 people. Uh, they do business process outsourcing and run call centers all over the world.

And when they saw GPT come out in December of 2022, they said, this is a game changer for us. And they immediately started looking at ways to improve the quality and the production of the lowest levels of their employees. These are new employees, not very tenured, and people who just need that extra boost.

And they found that they increased their productivity significantly. And I have some studies later on that can show you this, this as well. Now, when they found that extra capacity, they then took that extra time from people who were more advanced and said, go and find ways to serve our customers using generative ai.

You now use this. What are the opportunities to serve those customers? And they took their resisting list of opportunities, created new lists, and started executing it.

So by July of 2023, they were already launching new products for their customers. And then the third one of their strategy is to say, how do we create competitive vantage? When you look at all these opportunities, which are the biggest ones as we develop them, that are going to significantly make a big difference in our organization.

Now, this is not a technology company. This is a company that really focuses on creating customer experiences with call centers. And so this is an industry that is very ripe for automation.

And instead of saying, we're gonna take all of those gains and productivity to the bottom line and get rid of people, they instead turn to their values and stated right at the very beginning to all their employees, we are never going to use generative AI to get rid of people. We're going to use it to make you more productive because we want to do more things for our customers, not less. So it's a very short side of view.

If you look at just the productivity gains, if you only look at the, the, the, the few percentage gains that you can get just from productivity on the bottom line, instead think about what you can do with the top line because never have we ever had the opportunity to create new products and services to raise our top line with very little people, additional in test investments and also in a fraction of the time. This is a unique opportunity. So I encourage you to take full advantage and look for the big strategic wins you can have with generative ai.

Now, to pull all this off, you need the right people. And this is when you have to create an AI council. An AI council is the group that is going to be charged with creating and executing a detailed plan.

Once you have that broad idea of what that plan would look like, then it's for this team to work out the execution details. Now, it should absolutely have technology people on it, it should have product people on it. But very importantly, have people who understand what the state of your future customer is going to be so they can advocate for that future customer.

And very importantly, have HR involved. HR is typically not involved in transformation discussions and especially things that involve technology. But when you start thinking about this as not a technology but as a transformation, then HR absolutely has to be involved.

Who are the people you need? What are the skills? While are careers ladders going to be changed because of generative ai?

So all those things get wrapped up into an AI council that will put the plan together. And this is what the plan should look like. I believe you should be putting together a 18 month plan, what I call a six quarter walk, which has very broad definitions at the end of each quarter where you want to be.

Now you may be thinking, this is insane. We don't even know what's going to happen in this space in the next week, let alone 18 months from now. And this is how I encourage you to think about it.

The technology is not going to get worse. Imagine that the technology stays where it is and with some good guesses where you think it's going to develop rationally and then at and and and use that as your basis for creating this plan going out 18 months. And ideally, the plan is broad enough that each quarter has the same level of detail.

It doesn't peter out and have no details in like month 12 and and and 1618. So the way to to do that is to think very broadly about what can happen and write the strategy down in pencil. Because as you're going through the first quarter of this plan, you're going to learn a lot more about how feasible things are, how quickly your organization adapts, is it faster, it slower, and also where the technology is going to be.

And at the end of that first quarter, you look at the next five quarters, adjust the plan for the next five quarters and you add another quarter at the end. It is a rolling 18 month plan. The reason you want to do this is as, as with any transformation, you want to know where you want to head and because you know where you want to be though, then you'll take steps today to make that happen.

And this plan also helps with people who say, well, I don't know if I need to go that fast. If they see the plan and they're role in it, then they'll see that they're dragging everyone behind and they will be encouraged and given more resources to go catch up in a similar fashion. If somebody wants to jump ahead, they really wanna do this project, you can show them the plan and say, this is why we have to wait because we don't have these foundational skills or technologies or data in place yet, but it will be there two quarters from now.

So hold your horses on that project, help us get everything else ready so that we can be ready to execute when it comes to that particular initiative. So this is extremely valuable as a plan. So how do you get started with your strategy?

Well, first of all, I believe it's important to set up the right tools. Make sure you have a large language model, a general purpose one like chat, GBT or Gemini or Claude, available to you behind what I call a firewall. Meaning that it's not going to use your data information to train the model.

One easy way to do that is is chatt chat, GBT teams is what it's called. com slash chat gbt slash team. And it allows every member of your team to automatically have all of their data not be used to train the model.

And so that's one level of security to make sure it's in place. Even though you have that, I still wouldn't be comfortable putting in, um, very valuable and sensitive information like your customer data, employee data or personal data, um, into that until you can be assured that all your security protocols are being followed. And that usually happens only when you get an enterprise grade on your existing cloud servers, uh, and, and make making that happen.

The second thing to do is to make sure you are treating your prompts as ip. And this could be as simple as setting up a Slack channel where people can start sharing best practices and ideas of how to use generative AI inside your organization. But it could also be a very simple Google doc or a page inside of your collaboration platforms, SharePoint or notion, whatever it is.

Uh, but you can also use some of the new prompt management tools. Prompts are incredibly valuable knowledge and you want to manage that knowledge as you do any other valuable knowledge and IP inside of your organization. The third thing to do is to train your top two levels of executives.

Now those executives are important because they're the ones who think strategically about the organization. And I can guarantee you most of them are not using or have never even used any of these tools. So get them trained, get them hands on.

I have some resources at the end of this presentation of, of exercises that you can give to them that they will be able to practice and learn how to use these tools, um, in a very safe and non um, and, and and non-invasive way because I do believe the best way to train people on how to use this is to show them how to do the things they already know how to do, but using it with regenerative AI to do it faster, more efficiently and even better. So once you have that in place, then the next thing to do is to think about how it's going to transform your organization. So transforming the workplace is important because so many people, so many of the employees are worried about what generative AI is going to do to their jobs.

They can see the writing on the wall. They have used these tools. And the most important thing to to reassure people is this, it's not AI that's going to replace you, it's someone using AI that will.

So the AI itself is just a technology, it's neutral and it needs people to use it. And so if you can convey to people, we want to ensure that you have the tools to do your job so that you can do it better, faster, more efficiently. And the our goal here is to use it to serve our customers better, not to get rid of people.

Again, say that only if you do believe it and mean it. Because when people feel like they understand what the role of AI is going to be, they're given reassurances to this and they're given the training on how to use this, then they're going to be supportive of it. But right now they're hearing nothing from their leaders.

They're hearing this complete and total silence. So they're left to wonder what is going on. So I want to share with you some, some studies that were done last fall, uh, by some various business school professors.

It's called the jagged, um, technology frontier, the Jagged Edge Technology frontier. And what they did is they worked with Boston Consulting Group, had 800 consultants working on a fake case and they used generative AI to, to produce the results. So one group of people used generative AI and they had a control group.

And what they found is that the bottom half of the, of the, uh, consultants, 'cause they have all these ratings and performance measurements that bottom half increased their performance by 43% when they use Donative ai. And even the top half participants, they increase a little bit less, but still 17% over their peers who are not using generative ai. So this again shows that the real benefit of generative AI isn't just eliminating jobs, it's actually helping people do their jobs better.

It's being able to do research, writing, presentations, analysis better than you could have on your own. And what we're finding is that people are saying these mundane tedious tasks that I had to do in the past are no longer there and I'm actually enjoying my work more 'cause I get to do the things that I really enjoy that makes this job so, so fun and interesting. Now, how do you prepare your organization?

So I think it's important to prepare your organization and especially get hr, the entire organization to be AI first and AI ready. I'll give you an example. This one organization, the CEO, stood up and said, I believe that we need to be AI first.

And that means everybody in this organization needs to use generative AI tools. So we're going to give you access to all these tools. We're going to give you a budget of a couple hundred dollars a month between a hundred, $200 a month, and you can pick from this list of approved tools and you have to get training before you can use them.

And we want you to use all these tools and we're gonna do this for everyone in the organization. And we're gonna have a dashboard so that you, if you're actively using all of these tools, you're, you're in it, you're enjoying it, you're making a difference, you're demonstrating best practices. Uh, you get a green light if you're figuring it out, you're trying, you're experimenting it, but you're not completely comfortable with it, but you're at least you're trying, you get a yellow light and if you're not doing anything at all, you get a red light.

And then he drew a line in the sand, he said, in six months there will be no more red lights working at this company. So what he did was to really put out how important it was to get up to speed. And he positioned it also that this is not only good for the company, but it's good for you as an individual because even if you do not stay with the company, you will be highly employable because you will know how to use these incredibly powerful tools to do your job anywhere that you go.

So having that philosophy, philosophy I think is so important because what you want to do when you transform, when your workforce is going through this, you want to have a tremendous openness and transparency about what AI is going to do for for tasks and jobs and careers. And you want to reduce that employee uncertainty as much as you can. Now this is not to say, to be pollyannish and say jobs are not gonna be impacted.

Absolutely they will. Tasks will be be changed, jobs will be changed, and careers will be changed. So some tasks and jobs will go away, but new ones will also be created.

So this is something to work out in your 18 month plan, how will our workforce be transformed over this time? At what speed? How fast can we do this?

Do we have the people internally? Can we train them or do we need to hire from the outside? So all of those things go into your workforce planning and transformation.

All right, closing it out here. I wanna talk about leadership skills because what happens when your people become superhuman? They know how to do their jobs better than you ever did.

And as a leader and manager, you probably got promoted because you could do the job better than anyone else. Well, that's no longer the case with Genive ai. They know how to do the job, not only better, but in ways that you could not have ever imagined.

So how do you lead an organization? How do you manage people who can actually do their jobs better than you can? Well, I define leadership as a relationship between people who are aspire to create change and those who are inspired to follow them.

And you're a leader when you create change. And when you're not creating change, then you're a manager of the status quo. And that's fine.

But if you want to be a leader, then you've got to create change. And generative AI is going to require a huge amount of transformational change. And it's a change that we don't know and understand we can't control.

It's constantly unsure. So our credibility as leaders can be called into question. So a couple things to think about as you contemplate how your leadership needs to be changed.

So the first one is to give up the need to be in control. And that is this fallacy of control that we control our employees is just not true. Because if it's a relationship, then you don't control anything in that relationship.

It's something that is formed and crafted and negotiated and agreed upon. Just look at the best relationships you have in your life with your family, your friends, your partner, and you clearly don't control those relationships. And yet when we come to work, we think we need to control relationships with our employees and their team members.

So giving up that need to control allows you to be in command where people will follow you because they believe in you and believe in your credibility. So giving up that need to be in control is a key step in terms of this, this new leadership. The other key thing is to move from answering, having all the answers to asking great questions because when you ask great questions, you're directing people towards a particular goal without a specific way to achieve that outcome.

And that does two things. It increases the agency of people and it also allows people to contribute their best ideas. And we know that the collective wisdoms of teams and of crowds is so much more powerful than the wisdom of one person.

So get comfortable asking questions. Think about how you can ask questions to direct people again towards the strategic outcomes you want to achieve. And I think it's also very important to understand this transformation is not gonna be nice and neat and tied up with a bow.

It's gonna be very, very messy. And yet this is that messy space that this messy middle between where you have been and where you want to go. This is where success actually is created.

Think about it. When you were in the past, you were anchored by the way that you saw the world. Now that you are free in this liminal space, you can be creative, you can think about things in new and different ways.

You see the world from a different place and yet you are not tied down to the future yet. So you can explore. And I encourage you, instead of trying to rush through that messy middle, to find ways to hold space for yourself and your team so that you can be curious in this new space, be adventurous and yet at the same time feel safe that you can explore.

So holding space in the messy middle is a key skill that you have to exercise as a leader. So I wanna close out with just two last thoughts. First of all, I do believe that AI is going to make us better humans.

Now I get a lot of skepticism around this idea because you can be an optimist about technology or a pessimist. I tend to be an optimist. And again, I do believe technology is neutral.

It's how we use it. And while we have to be aware of the downsides of all this technology, the misinformation, disinformation, the hallucinations, I also believe in its ability to help us do our jobs more, to communicate better, to be able to do not just direct translations, but these subtle translations that help us just connect with each other better. I do believe also that it'll help us be more empathetic.

These technologies don't get tired and we do as humans. And so it can help us see past our blind spots, to have empathy, to look past our biases and judgments, to be able to look at things from a different perspective. Because may, we may be tired and clouded by own biases from seeing something that needs to be seen.

So I do believe that AI is gonna help us actually see better, understand each other better and connect hopefully better with each other, but only if we approach it with the right intentions and, and and the right strategic objectives. So finally, you have to move outta your comfort zone. And the more you can move out of that comfort zone up to the edges of what you are possibly capable of, the more the magic will happen.

'cause that's where everything, the magic success, all the things you want to hope for are going to happen. So that's what I have for today. Uh, this is my contact information.

I encourage you to stay in touch. com/a IC for the for the conference initials. And then you can also just use that QR code.

And again, if you download the slides, you'll also get these additional resources. Lots of information here. I have some great resources available for exercises for your executives.

Uh, there is a AI use policy, resources and also a course, a fantastic course on Coursera for our CEO playbooks. And again, it's a great training tool for executives. So that's what I have for you today.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and attention. And then I think we'll go into q and a at this point.

Thank you.