Most companies have an AI problem, but it’s probably not the one you think it is. It isn’t the technology, it isn’t the budget, and it almost certainly isn’t your team. The problem is leadership, and specifically the gap between leaders who are treating AI as something it installs, and leaders who understand that AI is a strategic opportunity they need to own. My guest today has spent her career studying what it takes to lead through disruption, not the incremental kind, but the kind that rewrites the rules. She is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, the founder and former CEO of analyst firm Altimeter Group, and an advisor to 49 of the fourth dream 100 that’s a big deal. She’s spoken at the World Economic Forum Ted and South by Southwest, and she’s just released her latest book, winning with AI, the 90 day blueprint for success, co authored with Dr Katia Walsh. This is her second time on the show, and for good reason she came on two years ago. Talk about running towards disruption. It was one of those conversations that cut through the noise in a way that very few do. She’s back, and the stakes today are higher. In today’s conversation, we get into why 95% of AI pilots fail and what to do instead. We talk about why women in tech face a particular version of this challenge that was pressured to be perfect before acting, and why that instinct, however understandable, could cost is our seat at the AI table, and we talk about what AI fluency actually means, why modeling your own learning and public is one of the most powerful relationship and leadership moves you can make right now. And Charlene makes the case that the goal isn’t just to use AI it’s to become a super human cliche, maybe, but keep listening to combine everything that makes you irreplaceably Human with everything AI makes possible. Maybe we are getting there. If you’re navigating AI adoption in your organization, trying to build the business case, trying to bring a skeptical team along, or just trying to figure out where on earth to start. This is the episode for you, so let’s get into it.

Unknown Speaker  2:05  

Welcome to the leading women in tech podcast, the show that celebrates women in technology leadership. I’m your host, Tony Collis, and this podcast is the result of my passion for building better tech by diversifying the leadership of the technology sector. Join me on this journey as I discuss all things leadership, what it takes to be innovative, breaking through the glass ceiling be a great leader, and how to navigate the unique experiences we face as women in tech. So sit back, grab your headphones and get ready to be inspired to become a better leader.

Unknown Speaker  2:41  

Welcome to the show, Charlene, thank you for coming back to see us again today. Thank you so much for having me excited to be here. You’re one of the few women I’ve had back on the show. Not that we don’t have lots of great guests, but you were one of those ladies who, when you reached out and told me what’s been going on, I was like, Okay, we have to chat. So tell the audience what’s been going on since you were last on the podcast. It’s been a couple of years. And for those who haven’t listened to that previous episode, which I will link in the show notes, by the way, but for those who haven’t listened to that previous episode, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do in your work, and what you’ve been doing since we last spoke. Sure, I am a New York Times bestselling author, and one of the things I really focus on is around leadership and strategy around disruption. So how do you change things, not just in an incremental way, but in a big way? And dealing with change is just very hard, and my background has been as an analyst at Forrester Research, and I also started my own analyst firm called Altimeter Group, and that all happened between 2008 and 2015 when I sold my firm. And my focus has been really on how technology is going to change the way we lead and the way our organizations work. And the latest rendition of that is my latest book, winning with AI, the 90 day blueprint for success, which I’ve been working on since the last time we talked, and that was just came out at the end of March. Yeah, and it’s super exciting, and that’s one of the reasons I want to talk to you today, because I I’m having conversations all the time about how AI should be embedded in our organizations, the common things I hear from my clients about why it’s not working, but I love your angle, which is explicitly the leadership piece, and I know it’s called winning with AI. That’s a pretty bold claim. When I’m having daily conversations that basically suggest to me AI is not winning. You know, we’re getting all this media attention on AI disruption and all that kind of stuff, the conversations I’m having and I’m trying to work through with my clients, I would say a lot of companies aren’t wanting a lot of what my clients are trying to do as leaders, but not necessarily CEOs is trying to get the other leaders around them to have a better approach so they can with AI. So let’s unpack this. What does it mean to win.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  

AI, what do you think is going wrong? Does my story correlate with what you’re hearing as well? Like, why do we stop Yes, so first of all, what you’re hearing is this real concern about, how do we use AI? How do we even think about AI? There was a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety when it comes to AI. Like, what’s this technology going to do? Can we trust it? Is it going to take my job? How am I going to survive with this? Do I really have to deal with this right now? Can I just wait it out? Can it just kind of like figure it out slowly? Do I need to spend any time on it, because I don’t have any time and so what happens is a lot of leaders treat it like a technology, not as something they could use in their job. So they shunted over to the IT department. They go, you install it. And then the IT department goes, Okay, I guess I’ll get Microsoft copilot or chat GPT. Here you go, here’s AI. And then people think, Well, what I do with it now? So there’s a disconnect between the technology of AI and the transformational power of AI. So I think the right way to do this, the way to win, is to not focus on the technology. You don’t need an AI strategy because you already have a business strategy. Your organization has a mission and purpose. So focus on that, and then ask the question, not what can ai do, but how can AI support you achieving those strategic objectives? I came across a company recently that said we have seven strategic objectives, and six of them are, here they are, and the seventh one is use AI to accomplish the first six

Unknown Speaker  6:43  

and like that is perfect. That is a greatest example of AI in service of your strategy. Yeah. I mean, this comes back to what I truly believe as a as a leader, as a leadership coach, as somebody who works with teams on organizational strategy, which is everybody in your organization should know how they’re contributing to the corporate strategy. Right? Every single person down to the cleaner who comes in to clean the office at the end of the day. Ultimately, they’re there to deliver on the corporate strategy. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a role. They’re there to make sure that other people can do the work to deliver on the corporate strategy. But they should know that. They should know how important their role is. I think everybody should know that. And I think it’s really interesting that you’re saying you don’t need an AI strategy, because I think this is worth is really pulling apart here, because I think some of my listeners will disagree with that, and I can see why, because I think it’s about nomenclature, because there will be, we’ve got an AI strategy, but what it is a good AI strategy, in my mind, if you’re going to call it that is going that last bullet point of those supporting those other six. How do we achieve those other ones? What? What is the strategy using AI to achieve the rest of it? And I would say you could call that an AI strategy. So I just kind of, like, want to dig into that with you, in case we’ve got listeners going, but no, we need an AI strategy. Would you agree with what I just said? Or do you disagree? Like, how would you frame it? It may be a nomenclature, because I call that an AI roadmap. It’s a roadmap and not about what you’re going to do. It is not a roadmap and checklist of we’re going to install this technology and do that technology. It is a roadmap that shows how you are going to create value every single quarter with AI. I think this is the big difference, because if you have a business strategy, you are going to want to use AI to deliver value, and so the roadmap has to show every single quarter in stark numbers and time. These are SMART goals, very specific, measurable and timely. And

Unknown Speaker  8:41  

every quarter, how are you going to use AI to deliver value? So I believe that organization should have an 18 month roadmap over again, six quarters. I call it a six quarter walk, so that you know every quarter how you are going to use AI to deliver value. Now at this point, people’s heads usually explode, like I don’t even know what AI is going to do next week versus eight months from now. And here’s the key thing, your strategy is written in ink and your roadmap is written in pencil. And I think every quarter you sit down and go, where are we now? How far along are we? What have we learned? What are new skills we have? How is our technology going? Where are we ahead behind? How is the competition changing? And very importantly, how are our customers changing? And you’re revising your next five quarters, and you’re adding another quarter at the end, it is a rolling 18 month AI roadmap, and that gives visibility into what you are building in the future and what you have to do today to prepare for that, and then also gives you the flexibility and the adaptability to make changes to that roadmap, because it’s constantly changing. I love that because i i.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  

I think it addresses one of the other big concerns that I and others have, which is this technology is changing so fast. And actually the way you should be writing this roadmap, from what you were saying, is not like, what is this technology capable of, and therefore we doing in six months time, 12 months time, 18 months time, but more like, what do we want to be achieving this quarter and then in that moment, look around the technology, which brings me back to your book, actually, because one thing ever since we first spoke about this book, when you and I had a coffee chat a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been thinking to myself, How did you write this book? In the sense of AI? Is the place that I was looking through my notes from 12 months ago like what I was using AI for, and it has changed tremendously in 12 months. It’s changing almost daily. I feel like, at the moment, like what I’m able to do with it. How did you write your book? Or is the point that it’s conceptual, and that’s what you’re getting at from a leadership perspective, there is a second which is things that are true about leadership and strategy have always been true. Yeah, it’s about knowing where you want to go in the future, making sure that you are setting a strategy for that and then communicating it to your point. Does everybody know what the strategy is and how they are going to be contributing to it? That is the role of leadership, and then removing any blockers that are in the way, removing the challenges, the barriers and giving people the resources to get that done. So those are the core foundations of the book. It is not about just the technology. If I were to write a book about technology, I would be insane. And as it is, the book is being produced in a way. It’s called Print on demand, so the books can be updated anytime you want. So we do have plans to potentially update it, and we’ll do it through audiobooks, which are a lot easier than print. But again, there are many ways to keep a book, a quote book, updated, but the foundations of the book are really around leadership and strategy. How do you pull together a roadmap to use AI to serve your strategy. And we break it down into not just putting the strategy together, but also the key building blocks of your culture, your people, the tools themselves, and also the governance that’s needed to make all of this tie together. And 90 days isn’t about finishing it. It’s about laying that foundation so that you can run as fast as you can go. Because the second thing that we try to impart in the book is that speed is the new moat. It’s a wonderful quote that Vikram mahidar, a wonderful AI thought leader and friend, said to us, we’re like, Oh, that is absolutely true. Speed is the way that you build competitive advantage in this space. So we see the biggest challenge right now with what you started with, which is people are waiting on the sidelines, waiting for some sort of sign to say it’s okay. Now it’s okay to go, and I’m here to say it you need to go. And there are ways to do this in a way that is safe, probably not that comfortable, but you need to go 100% well, okay, one of the things on that like you need to be moving forward. You need speed. You need to go, as you put it, one of the patterns I see, and I think this is very common, is a company running pilots use cases, but nothing’s moving the needle. Why does that happen? How does a leader move from this kind of like pilot mentality into like, look at what’s going on in their organization, and actually rolling out change? Well, pilots, sound really good. Let’s go do this, pilots, let’s see what works. Make sure everything is safe before we commit to it. It sounds very responsible, doesn’t it? And I think what happens is we end up in pilot purgatory, because if it’s a pilot, nobody takes it that seriously. Your IT department isn’t going to truly connect it into your legacy systems. People look at this as optional. Your CFO saying, Oh, it’s a pilot, I don’t really need to put investments behind it so it never gets past pilots. 95% of AI pilots fail because they’re a pilot.

Unknown Speaker  14:07  

So our belief is, don’t do any more pilots. Just stop. Don’t do any more feasibility studies, because you will find that you just can’t do it right now. Don’t do readiness assessments, because it’ll just show you that you’re not ready. Instead, figure out which are going to be the most impactful ways you can use AI. These are strategic, mission critical things that if you do this, it will make a huge difference to your business. Then go and invest in that. Figure out what is going to take and start building towards that. You won’t get to 100% maybe you get to 20%

Unknown Speaker  14:43  

in the first few weeks, but you will learn so much more, and you’ll be able to pivot or persist and figure out things. But because it is so important, you can pull everybody into this make the commitments in terms of resources and people and investments and.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  

Very importantly, leadership needs to be involved. Because it is strategic. It has to be. And I think this is one things that drives me a little bit nuts, is when leaders assume that AI is going to be used by everybody else and not them. And that’s not the way to do it. But let’s talk a little bit more just about I want to pull on this thread of the pilot problem, because for many women in tech, and I hear this again all the time, we have a unique pressure. I think maybe you’re not unique. Far more common as women to justify everything, to be perfect before acting. Again, it’s one of the reasons I have a job. Because what the experience we have as women, on average, is different from the experience of men in the same workforce. And that leads us to this place of doing pilots or slowing things down because we need so much more evidence. How do you address that? Like, if we’re going to get women adopting this which, oh my god, I we need to, or we need to accept that AI is not going anywhere. Like either women need to be involved in changing the course of history here, or we need to be pushing back and saying AI is wrong. I think we need to adopt ai i do the right challenges, and if we’re not involved, those are going to be defined by somebody else. So how do we deal with this gap that we have the way women are treated in the workforce? Again, it’s a huge conundrum, because you are and you aren’t, at the same time by what you do and don’t do. So it is, if you take a risk, you’re seen as being foolhardy. If you don’t take a risk, you’re seen as being weak. So the key, I think again, is to tie everything back to strategy. To say, we have to do this. We’re going to be experimenting and learning, but we are moving towards this because it is important to us strategically. So us strategically, so as a as a leader, I think first of all, figure out how to use AI yourself. And not just learn how to use a prompt, but become as quickly as you can AI fluent. And by what I mean by that is you feel that it flows. It’s second nature to you. It’s like a language, and it just comes naturally. And you just reach for it whenever you’re trying to do your work. You know what AI can do and its limitations. You know how to use it responsibly and ethically, and you use it for your job, and you’re teaching other people about it too. And it is this fluency, this comfort level, that I think comes from practice. So learn to do it. And very importantly, and this is the hardest part, do it in public. Be vocal about the fact that you are learning it, that you’re experimenting with it, that things are working and things are not working. I started by coding last year, and did that very publicly, showed my work, showed how messy it was, and how wonderful it was, and it was, it continues to be something, this muscle that I’m pulling and exercising, and I getting better at it, but there’s no such thing as perfection. So perfect is the enemy of done, as we often say, and it is the hardest thing to do, because as leaders and as women, it is so risky to not be perfect.

Unknown Speaker  18:07  

It feels it is so difficult. Because if there’s any crack that I show, it is going to be an opportunity for someone else to come in and say, I’m not competent, I’m not credible. I do actually want to pull on this thread, because I think this is something that we all struggle with in every aspect, not just AI adoption. I mean, I’ve got a client right now who is very good at using AI, and her team will say things like, well, you just wrote that with AI. She’s the VP managing a team. And, I mean, there’s a cultural issue there that the team culture isn’t healthy, because they should be delighted that their boss is using AI for certain things. In my opinion, it’s not that the outputs are bad. They’re just judging. And I think part of what you’re describing to me is something I think we should all get more comfortable with. And it feels counterintuitive in this place where we are so judged as women, but they actually one of the ways I view authentic leadership, which I don’t think is very well understood, is authentically showing up and saying, I’m trying this. It’s new, it’s hard. Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s what’s working well, here’s what I don’t know what to do. I’d love somebody jump in here to me that is authentic leadership. Authentic Leadership is not coming to work and saying, I’ve just had the worst possible morning. Don’t talk to me. That’s not authentic leadership. Authentic Leadership is showing you’re working, showing that you’re making mistakes, showing that you’re struggling, and saying, and I’m fine with somebody else doing this better than me. Come to me and tell me how I could do this better, showing your team that it’s hard. And I actually think when we get out of our comfort zone and do that as women? Yes, there might be challenges like that. The client of mine I described, who is getting pushed back from her team, but the team is gradually coming round and respecting her more. You do eventually get respect. It’s just so vulnerable making in that moment, I would love to like you to step out and with all your work and leadership and strategy, do you think that works for women?

Unknown Speaker  20:00  

In or not

Unknown Speaker  20:01  

it does. And I think you have to change the mindset just a little bit instead of having all the answers, which is impossible. Yeah, it is just impossible to have all the answers, but you have to feel that your leadership credibility comes from is being able to ask great questions that then together as a team and the great questions are going to steer people again towards what’s important we’re answering this question to be able to head to our strategy. And it’s reminding people constantly with the questions that you have, this is a problem we’re working on together, and together we’re going to solve that because together, we’re going to get a better answer than if you try to do this individually, and I’m going to model that with my own leadership. One of the fundamentals of leadership is to model the way. And if you expect other people to be learning with AI, think you better be showing how you are learning with AI. And this is not about fail fast and fail well and and fail all the time. I don’t like running towards failure. Nobody does, but if you know that, the only way you can grow and to change is to learn. So what we’re doing here isn’t failing, we’re learning. And how could learning ever be a negative thing?

Unknown Speaker  21:19  

So this is a little trick. As a leader, you can say to the people coming into your meetings, how did you use AI to prepare for this meeting? Let’s just go around the table and share. And if you did, you know, just chime in and just share that. And I’ll share with you how I used AI to prepare for this meeting. And it’s to remove the stigma and also to set the expectation that using AI is normal. It is expected. And very importantly, we’re going to give you the tools. We’ll give you the training and the support, both top down and also peer based training, and we will, very importantly, give you the time. And this is the number one thing I hear from people. We’ve got all this training, we got the tools, but frankly, we we have no time. We are so busy doing our work. AI is just extra, and I feel like tearing my hair out. If you use AI, you will find more time, yes, but it’s chicken and egg, right? Always with adopting new technology, right? And this is why, again, that top down training support, but also the peer based training, so and so over here is using it, and they’re doing better work than I am. What’s their secret? Although using AI show me what you’re doing, that is one of the best ways to get adoption going. Well actually, that brings me nicely to another little caveat that I have, again from my coaching practice, where I’m now beginning to see where things like using AI to write code is causing knock on problems in an organization, and I definitely view it as the organization not not using AI in the right way. So let me give you a specific example. A software engineer is using AI to develop new product functionality that with science that they don’t know. They’ve got AI to provide them with the science, and then they’re getting AI to help them with the code. The scientist, who would originally have been the one that says, This is the science behind the product, this is how you need to write the algorithm, go and code that for me, please, is then tasked with reviewing this code to check the science and check that it’s going to work. And what the scientists are telling us is, you know this, I’ve got, I’ve got tons more work, and not because you’re producing more output, but because the quality is wrong. Rather than checking with me before coding the science is right, you’ve just the science is not wrong. It’s just the wrong science to use.

Unknown Speaker  23:40  

And then in addition, the code that’s been written a lot of the time is not adhering to their own coding standards, like good coding standards, for anybody who’s a software engineer, you don’t have software repeated you use classes, you use modules, so that if you ever need to change something, you change it one place rather than 10 places. And AI is not really up to that yet, on its own without extensive human input. That’s just one very specific example that came up in the last couple of weeks. But I’m hearing stuff like this, not just in engineering, obviously, that’s my discipline, so I really understand what’s going on in the challenges. But across all of tech companies, somebody is doing something faster and great, and actually what it’s doing is causing this massive accumulation of work somewhere else in the business. One, are you hearing this too? And two, one needs to happen to stop that occurring? Yeah, it is definitely happening. And it’s not just in coding, it’s in marketing, it’s in writing, it’s in design, in so many places. And I think part of this is that, first of all, we are still really early on, and the tools are improving. I can just say that in the past three months, the coding tools have gotten so much better that a lot of these instances aren’t happening as much anymore, I mean, and that isn’t just the three months the tools that are now coming out.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  

Are, are fairly reliable. That doesn’t mean that they still understand the science. And this is where, again, knowledge and expertise is extremely important to be able to gage if the content that’s coming out that the product that’s coming out is of sufficient quality. And part of the problem, I think, is that we haven’t defined what quality means. Yes, what is quality? What is accuracy? And it can’t be I will know it when I see it, because an agent doesn’t know that, a person in a junior place doesn’t know that. And if that person, you’re asking somebody to do something, but they fundamentally don’t understand the science, then I believe it’s incumbent on the scientists to define what does quality look like, to educate that engineer to understand the science, or otherwise the scientist is supported by the engineer to go write the code themselves, so they can see whether it’s right or wrong. And so there’s a bunch of systemic issues there in that one example that I can point to, and I can say, Oh, this is what’s going on. This is how we can fix it. And usually the quality isn’t at the right level of what you expect. There’s something about the system or the way you’re approaching it, the way you’re prompting it, the questions you’re asking and the process you’re using that needs to be addressed. Because I’ll give my own experience. We use AI to write the book, everything from doing research to outlining to actually doing the writing. And when I told this to my other my author friends, they went, Oh yes, how could you use AI to write?

Unknown Speaker  26:36  

And I went, it’s actually okay at it. In some cases, really terrible at it. But we use it for one very specific reason. We use it to break the tyranny of the blank page. Yes, right? I think that’s, I mean, I use it for that because the blank page staring at that’s the hardest bit. Always, the blank page is evil, yeah, if we can get over that hump, it gets me to producing and editing and everything. Why not do that? I get something on paper. I have an outline that I’ve worked through in conjunction with my AI refining and everything. I’m like, Okay, do your best to create a first draft, and it’s like 40% of the way there, but it did it in minutes, versus me slaving for hours, and then I can go through. And so I’m a much faster and better editor than an original writer and my co author, we would play this game, and she goes, Oh, hey, I definitely wrote that.

Unknown Speaker  27:29  

No, I did. This is beautiful. This is so totally you’re like, I wrote that so they it’s really hard to tell. And I would just ask people have some patience, we are really early here, and this is why I think it’s so important for all of us to be involved. By us being involved, we are shaping the future of AI. It is shaped not by the technology giants. It is shaped by every single one of us using these tools. It’s saying this is acceptable, this is not, this is ethical. This is not, this is responsible. This is not. We are shaping the use of AI. And I like to say that worried about the bad things happening, obviously people are using AI for nefarious reasons. And if you don’t want the bad guys to win, then the good guys have to show up, and that’s us. We have to show up. This is why I wanted you on the podcast, because I think there is a real danger in my mind of a group of us. And obviously I’m talking to women here, and I think women are a big part of this group going AI is evil. I want nothing to do with it. That applies to every single technology the human race has ever developed. And I think everything can be used for good and for bad, but if we, as the people who have a strong moral sense and ethics don’t stand up and say, This is how we’re going to use it for good, please stop using it for bad when maybe remove the please, but show how it can be embraced for good, and have the power to then say No to the bad, like we’ve got no hope, because there are people who are just going to develop it for the wrong reasons. If we don’t have a voice, we’ve got to be using enough that we have a voice. And here’s the thing, you do have a voice, even if it’s just deciding which technology to use. If you’re in a position where you are looking at technologies and deciding which of these AI tools that you’re going to bring in, you can say a lot to your vendors. Instead of saying, Tell me what your AI does. Tell them. Begin to the conversations that these are our strategic objectives. How will your technology help us achieve these objectives? And only have that conversation, because if it’s not focused in that way, you’re going to get distracted and you’re left doing the work. No, it’s their job to do the work, to tell you how their technology is going to support you, not for you to figure that out. So make them do their work absolutely. Well. Okay, so if somebody’s listening to this conversation is going, this is all great, Charlie and Tony, but what do I do now? What would be your starting point for them? How.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  

You. How do you want a woman listening to this conversation to change the way she’s operating, starting today, this week, not eventually, but right away. What are the first baby steps to take? Figure out how to use AI fluently. Find the most tedious soul sucking parts of your job, and figure out how you can use AI to do that. Do that with your team, ask them, What are things that we could do with AI to just make our work better, faster, cheaper, safer? How can we use AI and things that are going to be meaningful and make a difference to our ability to contribute to the strategy? And then those things will pile up, and you’ll start figuring out the things that you can do individually, but also things that you need to do as a team, as a department, as an organization, and then have that conversation with as many leaders in your organization as possible, and just repeat, rinse and repeat again. I believe it needs time and focus, but especially focus on the part of leaders, which is why this is a leadership and strategy book to say, what is it that’s truly important to us as an organization? What are we trying to achieve? What are the biggest opportunities? But let’s also be very realistic about what it’s going to take to get there. I don’t believe in the total AI optimist. It’s going to be the best thing ever. It’s going to be a bright future. I’m a realist optimist. I believe that the future is there for us to grasp, but it’s going to take a lot of work, and this is where my disruption research comes in. Disruptions happen,

Unknown Speaker  31:35  

and it can be a very positive force to create change, but you have to prepare for it, assuming that this is going to be an easy stroll in the park is the worst thing you can do. You have to prepare yourself and your team for the fact that this is going to be uncomfortable. You’re not going to know what you’re doing at some point, you may run right into a wall. And what are you going to do? Then, how are you preparing yourself for this journey ahead, and any journey that’s worth going on is going to be hard. That’s where growth comes from. 100% I love all of that. I particularly this is going to be unconscious. I think many of us who are using AI, we’ve used it to solve a problem for ourselves, like a blank page is a classic, right? I write a lot of stuff, and sometimes I’m like, Oh, give me some ideas to get going, and so I’ve used it very much to, like, make my life easier, more comfortable. You could argue I’ve removed the discomfort of a blank page. And I think actually, if you’re going to bring this out through through an organization, as you say, that rinse and repeat of individual, team to organization, until you’ve, like, covered all the aspects of your corporate strategy, I love that process. But if you are going to do that, it’s going to get uncomfortable, because it can be out of the things that make you feel comfortable. I think that’s such a great way for us to leave this all this conversation is, remember, as a leader,

Unknown Speaker  32:53  

it should be uncomfortable at times. You should be stretching yourself. You should be growing, and that comes with discomfort, and it’s normal and healthy. I was like to remind people that the moment you stop growing is kind of the moment you’re done with things. And that’s sad. None of us want to be there before we move on to the quick fire round. Is there anything else you’re like? I really wish I’d had the chance to say this today. I think one of the things that is so important is when I think about the future, here’s my optimism part, that we are going to become superhuman, and it isn’t like some cyborg thing, it’s the ability to integrate these intelligences. So we have all the best of AI, and it’s just going to get better and better and better. This is the worst AI you will ever use today, yes, so know that it’s going to get better and you have the things that make you uniquely human, things like empathy, self reflection, intuition, judgment, and especially wisdom. And when you compare those things with the ability to do amazing things with AI, nothing can beat that. That’s the true winning, I believe, is the fact that we can develop ourselves and our team members to be superhuman. And so when people ask, is AI going to replace me,

Unknown Speaker  34:09  

the honest answer is, you know, I can’t guarantee you a job, because that’s what they really want to know. Is my job safe? And you can say, I can’t guarantee that any of us are going to have a job. What I can promise you, though, is that we are going to give you the ability to be that superhuman. We’re going to give you the training, the tools to be the best person you can be, the best human you can be. And that’s all we can promise. And I think we we can’t even do that today, because we don’t know how we’re going to use AI. We don’t give people the time and the tools to do this, the resources to do it, we’re all over the place in terms of, are we serious about AI or not? So I think if we can just focus on why we’re really here to really maximize human potential and to use AI and the best of humanity to bring those two things together, and who knows what that’s going to look like.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  

Like it’s going to look different for every single person. And as a leader, I think it’s incumbent on us to be able to explore that for ourselves and for the people that we lead

Unknown Speaker  35:09  

absolutely well. I could talk about this all day, but let’s move on to the quick fire round. And anybody who’s listening might want to go back and listen to some of Charlene answers from a couple of years ago, see what’s changed. What is the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given? The worst piece of advice I was ever given was to not go onto a board, and I it was my first board where I was a very large, well known retailer, and people were just giving me bad advice, left and right. And the thing that you realized, especially as a woman and as a woman of color, of Asian descent, in the Americas,

Unknown Speaker  35:44  

getting onto your first board seat is absolutely essential, because once you’re in your board seat, that whole world opens up. And so the worst piece of advice I got was to not go on a board and what I realized later on was that these were all men, and these were all men who had the privilege of being able to say no because they knew another position would open up. And so I think that is a really key thing that I’d be wish I had not done, yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad you learned that lesson. Hopefully somebody is going to learn that before I listen to this podcast. Obviously, that’s one of the most powerful things about asking that question, is, I hope that the women listening go off and change their lives. If somebody gives them that advice, they go, Wait, hold on. I heard that on Tony’s podcast, and there’s ramifications that I need to take seriously. So thank you for sharing that. On the flip side, what is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? It’s something I learned in my last semester at Harvard Business School, and it was a career class that I took, and they said, look out 18 months from now and say, Where do you want to be? And then take the steps today to be able to be there in 18 months. And I like that a lot because and throughout my career, if I’ve said, Okay, I’m here today, where do I what do I want to be doing? What kind of life do I want to have? What kind of colleagues do I want to have in work environment? And that took steps to make that happen, because it takes a little while to get to that point to prepare yourself to a career shift or to ask for an advancement. But it’s even now today, even as a solopreneur, I’m thinking, Where do I want to be 18 months from now? What skills do I want to have? What kind of work do I want to be doing, what boards I want to be sitting on, for example, and those are the types of things that give me that focus and also the discipline of being able to think about my career. I like to say that we manage our Spotify playlists. We spend more time managing our Spotify playlist than we do managing our careers. So I think it’s a good thing to invest, and that’s why it was such good advice. Invest in your career. Think about it. Actively manage it. That’s the most important asset you will ever manage, 100% it’s one of the things I insist every single client of mine does, is we have a plan. I will have a one year, a three year, a five year and a 10 year plan, with these longer ones being malleable. But you’ve got an 18 month thing going on, haven’t you? 18 months for an AI adoption and 18 months for career? I love that. This has been fabulous as always, Charlie and I’m so glad that we’ve had this conversation today. So how can the audience find you? Where can we find you online? Where we can connect with you? Where can we find your book? Where do we find you online? Yeah, everything is on my website. It’s Charlene lee.com my most current writings and everything appear on LinkedIn and various other social media and content outlets. And the book itself has a landing page, winning with AI book.com love it. I will make sure all those links are in the show notes. And please give Charlene a follow on LinkedIn. I follow her, and definitely one of those ladies that I think is well worth a follow, almost irrespective of what your job is actually, there are some really valuable nuggets of wisdom. Charlene, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Before we wrap up today, any final thoughts you want to leave us with? I always like to talk about power when I talk to women, and that is to realize just how incredibly powerful you are, and that my my hope is that you can tap into that know for yourself, even if no one else you feel can see it, but know it for yourself, where your power comes from. And it is something I have to remind myself and be honest with myself when in my lowest moments I think, how do I go through this and reminding myself what the sources of my power are? Again, you can learn that from your friends, from your colleagues, from the people you work with, but to always come back to that source, because that will be the thing that guides you through the dark phases. Yeah, what a beautiful note to end on. I just want to pull out a few things to wrap this up today. One of the things that stood out, which was almost a throwaway comment from Charlene, was the need to focus. When we’re using AI, it’s time and focus. She was very much talking about the context of giving your team time and focus.

Unknown Speaker  40:00  

But I think this is worth just pausing on for us, because I think it’s very easy for those of us who are enthusiastic about AI, myself included, to not give it the focus. And I think there’s a lot of research suggesting AI brain rot is a thing, and not just because of scrolling on the internet, but because we’re either using our critical thinking. And I don’t think it’s the same with adoption of any AI. You’ve got to not stop focusing just because you’re using AI. So I really wanted to make sure that those listening take that piece away with you. Make sure that as you’re using AI, you are still giving it the time and the energy that you would if you were doing it in another way. So as Charlene said, AI can get her book 40% of the way there. She’s still got to do the 60% and that’s what makes it an amazing book. Don’t fall into the trap of giving over your power. Instead, stay in that power. Understand, as Charlie said, Where does your power come from? When you add your power to AI, it’s going to be uncomfortable, as she said, but amazing things are going to happen. AI is going to amplify every single one of us, and my goal is it amplifies every single one of us to do more good in the world and change the tech industry for the better. I hope you’ve all enjoyed this conversation as much as I have, and I will see you next time. Bye for now you

Unknown Speaker  41:20  

you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai