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Dogs, Dial-Up, and Disruption: My conversation with Brian Solis
145 Plays9 days ago
Are we stuck iterating when we should be innovating?
Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, joins Phil Fersht on From the Horses' Mouth to unpack the AI paradox. Why is AI maturity declining even as capabilities explode? The answer lies in mindset—not models.
Brian argues that leaders must stop using AI to simply optimize yesterday’s processes and start reimagining what’s newly possible. It's not just about doing things faster—it's about doing entirely new things.
What You’ll Hear in 30 Minutes
- Why AI maturity actually dropped in 2024—and what it signals
- The difference between iteration and innovation in the age of AI
- Why rethinking jobs and workflows is now mission-critical
- How leadership must evolve from cost control to possibility design
- What it means to become an “AI-native” organization - Why the pressure to change needs to feel urgent—but be inspiring
Guest Snapshots
Brian Solis is the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, where he leads a worldwide network of futurists and innovation officers focused on helping enterprises navigate disruption with clarity and purpose. A world-renowned digital anthropologist, Brian has published nine bestselling books and over 60 influential research reports on innovation, transformation, and emerging technologies. He’s been featured in HBR, Fast Company, CIO, and Forbes—and is consistently ranked among the top global voices in business innovation.
Timestamps
00:00 – Welcome & Brian’s Background
01:30 – From Disruptive Tech to Enterprise Innovation
03:25 – Brian’s First Generative AI Encounter
05:00 – Building the AI Maturity Model at ServiceNow
06:40 – Why AI Maturity Scores Are Falling
07:50 – From Quick Wins to Business Transformation
09:35 – Connecting Silos with AI (Not Just Automating)
11:00 – Reimagining Work, Not Replacing It
13:20 – Helping Employees Become AI-Native
15:20 – Leadership’s Role in Inspiring AI-Driven Change
18:10 – Linear vs. Exponential Thinking
20:30 – Free Time, Dark Leisure & Organizational Curiosity
22:20 – Why Most Companies Still Think Like It’s Web 1.0
24:45 – Iteration ≠ Innovation
26:50 – AI as an Extension of Human Creativity
28:10 – Who Will Win: Services or Software?
30:15 – Cost Center or Growth Engine? You Decide
34:00 – Sign Off & Canine-Approved Conclusion
Explore More
• Brian Solis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansolis/
• Brian's Latest Book: https://www.briansolis.com/books/
• ServiceNow AI Index Report: https://www.servicenow.com
• Phil Fersht on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pfersht/
• More from HFS on Agentic AI: https://www.hfsresearch.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Guest Introduction
00:00:12
Speaker
You're listening to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First. Ready to meet the disruptors who are guiding us to the new great utopia by reshaping our world and pushing past corporate spin for honest conversations about the future impact of current and emerging technologies?
00:00:30
Speaker
Tune in now.
00:00:37
Speaker
Greetings and welcome to the latest edition of From the Horse's Mouth. And today I'm actually delighted to be joined by somebody who feels like he's a very old friend, even though I think we've only met a couple of times.
00:00:50
Speaker
You are very familiar and I'm very familiar with your work is Brian Solis, who's currently the head of Global Innovation for ServiceNow. But b Brian is a career-long thinker and analyst.
00:01:02
Speaker
That's where we crossed paths a lot before, embarking on a career with the software industry. So Brian, it's great to have you here. can you just provide a bit more on your background for the audience that you want to share?
Brian Solis on AI & Career Insights
00:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. yeah Other than being a longtime fan of Phil, you have helped blaze the trails for many of us out there. I've been a longtime practicing futurist, digital anthropologist, and then by trade for most of my career.
00:01:34
Speaker
When I wasn't launching or working with startups, serving as an industry analyst, as ah as a provocateur of sorts that focused exclusively on emerging and disruptive technologies.
00:01:45
Speaker
I've published over 60 research reports, nine books, taken the stages all ah all over the world. But at ServiceNow, my role has been exclusively focused on working with customers,
00:01:59
Speaker
in particular C-suites, to understand, especially over the last few years, the challenges that they face in AI business transformation.
00:02:10
Speaker
So that includes research, that includes a lot of listening tours, or I will call therapy tours, listening to the questions that executives are asking and also not asking.
00:02:24
Speaker
And Delving into research to help answer those questions and help provide blueprints forward for those ah organizations. And last but not least, our new charter this year in the Innovation Office is to create thought leadership reports, thinking assets, and also proofs concept to help guide executives by doing the future forward research necessary to understand where things are going.
00:02:54
Speaker
I'd like to say back in the day when we did five and 10 years out, but now 12, 18, maybe at most 24 months out so that executives understand not only what's happening today, but where things are going so that they could make tomorrow's decisions today.
00:03:09
Speaker
Right.
The Rapid Pace of AI Development
00:03:10
Speaker
And why things different now than maybe even six months ago? What's your perspective on the pace of change happening in the industry? Is this totally unprecedented or is this kind of what you expected?
00:03:25
Speaker
Phil, i I could turn that question back to you. It's certainly it certainly faster than expected, but I do think you, me, and many other smart folks out there did expect it to be fast.
00:03:38
Speaker
Though I will say, i was... My first preview of generative AI was maybe a decade ago, and I'll never forget the demo. It was actually part of a self-driving car lab where I was writing research on the future of autonomous vehicles and the path to level five.
00:03:55
Speaker
And it was a manual typewriter sitting on top of a black draped with black cloth, And i don't know, if Phil, if you took the same tour, but they said, I want you to start a story and watch what happens. And I remember thinking, OK, I'll be clever. I'll conjure up something that Edgar Allan Poe might write and gave it this intro.
00:04:19
Speaker
And then I stopped. And then the next thing I know, the typewriter started typing and finished this story in the exact same tone and voice. And it was wild. and And so that was 10 years ago.
00:04:30
Speaker
we hit ChatGPT, what, three years ago? That seven year span was quiet, but these last three years have made up for it. And I think we're only getting faster.
00:04:41
Speaker
What about the conversations you're having with ServiceNow customers? I mean, can you typify why you're being drafted in to talk to them and where you feel some of them are with their development with AI?
00:04:57
Speaker
I'll share what I can. In the innovation office, which is led by Dave Wright, our chief innovation officer, we spent about a year studying all of the questions, all of the conversations. We also looked at third-party research of where executives work were finding traction where they were struggling, the use cases that were helping them move forward, the conversations that they were having in order to allocate resources and measure progress.
00:05:28
Speaker
And those things were wildly essentially all over the place. That research led to what we call an AI maturity model.
00:05:39
Speaker
And but we only published that internally, but it was reflective of the conversations that we were having and also the questions that we were being asked to provide our customers with a path forward toward that maturity.
00:05:53
Speaker
And Over time, it became stronger and stronger because it was a model built on peers and actual progress, actual conversations, actual challenges, actual successes.
00:06:05
Speaker
And over time, as of last year, that research formed the foundation for ServiceNow's AI Index Report. This is now our second year publishing it. And so that setup was to share One of the key takeaways, which was last year, out of a a score of a possible 100, with 100 being the most mature, the average score last year for AI maturity was 44.
00:06:30
Speaker
forty four This year, the average score was 35. So it went down by nine points. And so it's reflective of the conversations that we're having with customers. So if you think about why would maturity go down a year after having been exposed to it,
00:06:47
Speaker
The answer was because in one year, we went from generative AI to AI agents to agentic AI, and the speed of which, as you were ah talking about earlier, Phil, has accelerated so much so that companies have no choice but to take a step back, to assess, to understand, and to look beyond just the quick wins to explore essentially what's going to be business transformation, the type of transformation that we didn't see with digital transformation.
00:07:16
Speaker
That's right. That's right.
Challenges in AI Adoption & Innovation
00:07:18
Speaker
I mean, isn't the problem that a lot of businesses, particularly in the last couple of years, they've been trying to bolt these LLMs and more recently, agentic tools onto existing workflows and realizing it's going to fail that's what you're going to try and do. You need to redesign how you operate and you also need to redesign jobs.
00:07:38
Speaker
to make them more relevant. And I was hearing some disturbing conversations over the weekend around we could get back to Keynesian theory of the 15-hour work week if we're not careful. So how do we rethink jobs and do all these things? So what do you think the common mistake customers are making right now?
00:07:55
Speaker
I don't want to position it as a mistake because it is something so new, as our research shows, that companies had to take that step back.
00:08:07
Speaker
One other stat that I'd like to share with you is that we found that 30% of those companies that were on the more mature side had experimented with AI across multiple workflows. And so multiple workflows spanned different organizations within the enterprise.
00:08:27
Speaker
I say that because what we're seeing with those mature ambitious organizations that are looking beyond the quick wins, they're looking at how AI can connect the dots. So connect the silos, connect the data, connect the processes, connect the work.
00:08:41
Speaker
And that's ultimately what we were trying to get to back in the day with digital transformation. Break down those silos, get data more organized, and get that hygiene and that connectedness in place.
00:08:53
Speaker
So we know what's possible. But the challenges that we're seeing with companies today is they don't know what they don't know.
00:09:04
Speaker
And so when they don't have the answers, they lean on what they do know, which is what the market has conditioned most C-suites to perform against, which is Cost takeout, which is historically how technology has been viewed within the organization.
00:09:22
Speaker
Profitability. Automation. So all good things. I call this optimized AI. Where we're not seeing that experimentation is what we call innovative AI, which are the net new use cases, reimagining how work can be done in the narrative AI.
00:09:40
Speaker
Imagining that ratio between employees and AI agents, for example, and that latter part of your question, which is how we should be thinking about the jobs of the future, is around the outcome and around what's possible tomorrow, around what we didn't do yesterday that we can now do, exploring more of those innovative conversations. And last but not least, I do want to share a data point I was just reading before I joined you today, which was published by McKinsey's Quantum Black AI Group, which
00:10:15
Speaker
Hopefully this isn't competitive data, but there was an interesting thing where they looked at the most successful companies that were transforming. They had this proprietary recipe of 25 attributes. And but one that had the biggest impact on earnings before interest in taxes was reimagining workflows for an AI era, which means that the answer to your question is we have to ask ourselves not just what we could do yesterday better with AI, but what didn't we do?
00:10:44
Speaker
What can we do now? And start having these bigger conversations that actually bring more people to work rather than using AI to displace them. Yeah, I mean, there's no economic data out there to suggest that AI is replacing jobs right now.
00:11:01
Speaker
There is none. It's purely scaremongering, people feeling nervous, a lot hype, obviously. As we get more adept to this, who do you think, my personal view is,
00:11:13
Speaker
smart people are going to get way smarter because they they're especially smart experienced people who have figured out i know how to do my job and these tools are just making me so much more productive and slick and quick and smart at what i do i worry a bit more about people who might be a little bit they're not very experienced and they over rely on these tools to try and just get the job done i think these are to really augment your human capabilities and speed you up, make you a superstar versus I worry about certain people who just aren't changing the way of doing anything.
00:11:47
Speaker
So if you're an editor today, for example, and you just edit reports all day long, right? And you have a team of four or five editors in your company, you can start training these LL owners to do your editing for you.
00:11:59
Speaker
the way you want to do them with the rules you want, all this sort of stuff. So why do you need it? You don't need four or five editors anymore. You need one or two. So how do you, as an editor, become more valuable?
00:12:09
Speaker
Start learning how to edit video and podcasts and different types of content to be more creative. So aren't we under this pressure to broaden our jobs and our skills and learn how to do new things like never before?
00:12:23
Speaker
i don't know, Phil, should we take this conversation to a place where we could have a glass of wine and philosophize over the future?
Leadership in the Age of AI: Proactive Approaches
00:12:31
Speaker
i mean, this is the fundamental question. So you ask, are we feeling the pressure?
00:12:34
Speaker
No, we are not. And that is part of the challenge. We need to feel the pressure. Certainly at our company, we have what's called ServiceNow University. We're on the path to become an AI native company by training people to understand how to work with AI, not how to just use AI to accomplish what's what they did yesterday, better tomorrow, and also explore opportunities to create what is going to be necessary for tomorrow.
00:13:00
Speaker
And that, I think, is the biggest opportunity. Again, we don't know what we don't know. So when we don't know something, we lean on what we do know. And we use AI then in that case to to do the familiar better, faster, cheaper, more at scale.
00:13:12
Speaker
For example, what we're doing at our company is we're looking at where people are and where people could be with AI, and we are working with them one-on-one to get the tools and the training they need to get to where they want to go and where do we need them to go.
00:13:27
Speaker
If I look at a startup, well, not a startup, but an early technology player who's well-known, I won't say who it is, but they already rolled out publicly measures for their employees and their recruits about where they sit in what we did with the AI maturity model, but for work.
00:13:42
Speaker
Thank you. so that they're now measuring that capability, that capacity for the people that they have and that the people that they're hiring. You look at AI native startups, and it's already built in.
00:13:56
Speaker
That conversation, that casting that light for, let's say, legacy and enterprise organizations that aren't feeling the pressure yet, I think we don't have to scare people to change. I think we can inspire them to change by showing them what they don't know, the role that they play in tomorrow, and what success looks like tomorrow.
00:14:19
Speaker
And by putting a hand on their shoulder to say, hey, we've got this, let's go. I'd like to see more optimistic language out there. It's interesting. was getting into some conversations with people, slightly heated ones, where If you're in the business of selling AI and selling technology, it's easy to be optimistic.
00:14:37
Speaker
You're trying to make money selling the staff. If you're the receiving end of being impacted by this staff, it's just a different side of philosophy on, shall I be excited or shall I be scared?
00:14:49
Speaker
But let's turn this around to, you were talking a lot about showing people how to do these things. Surely the role of the manager in the organization is now absolutely critical.
00:15:00
Speaker
Like you need to be file more adept at training your people, training yourself. bringing a more humanized element into your day-to-day interactions and getting away from this sort of scorecards and tick-the-box type management. isn it I mean, do you think leadership is under immense stress to make this happen?
00:15:22
Speaker
Yes and no. And I'll tell you why i feel like it's a yes and no answer. But before I do, let's go to a commercial break. So I wrote this book.
00:15:34
Speaker
It took years to write it, not just because of ai but just because of all of the disruptive signals that have been compounding over the years. And I've watched time and time again, wave after wave of leaders essentially responding, but responding urgently and then as if we were back to business as usual.
00:16:01
Speaker
And if we think about artificial intelligence and the coming waves of AI, We are still largely seeing that behavior of responding, but putting it into the box of business as usual, which is why we see, for example, cost takeout conversations, head cow conversations, automation at scale conversations, and less about that innovation, that sense of urgency around competing differently, competitiveness, et cetera.
00:16:29
Speaker
So leadership, I was inspired to write the book because i felt like we needed new genre of leadership. One that was willing to not just say, how can I do this cheaper? Or how can I do this at scale?
00:16:45
Speaker
How can I use AI to do what we did yesterday better? But instead, start asking what if or how might we? to explore the unknown, to ask the questions that they either didn't know to ask or were afraid to ask, and start embracing those answers. Start doing the work around possibility, because the more that you embrace, say, this balance of automation and the word you used earlier, which is, I think, the money word is augmentation, you get different types of outcomes when you bring both of those together.
00:17:17
Speaker
and So if we think think about automation as a linear performance metric and augmentation as an exponential curve, you'll benefit from both of those trackers.
00:17:30
Speaker
If you focus on, say, one or the other, there will be a delta between the two, which is disruption. And that disruption, I feel, shifting the narrative back to an optimistic one, is if you invest in both,
00:17:44
Speaker
the disruption between linear and exponential growth is positive disruption, meaning that old Silicon Valley mantra of disrupt yourself or disrupt or die, you are disrupting not just others, but yourself in a way that puts you in a better position.
00:18:00
Speaker
So that's a different type of leadership conversation than we have at the traditional quarter to quarter conversation. It reminds me of a, I read an article using the Washington Post about women writing about dark leisure.
AI's Impact on Personal & Professional Growth
00:18:14
Speaker
don't know you're familiar with this, but essentially people, a lot of people are using these tools and they're just saving themselves ah bags, bags of time. So what they're doing, they just have more free time.
00:18:27
Speaker
And it's what you do with that free time that's very important. Some people are just saying, you know what, I'm just going to do the same old job. just going to get it way quicker. And I'm going to spend more time walking the door and going shopping and but Whatever other people want to do with their spare time.
00:18:40
Speaker
Other people who are constantly motivated, like, this is great. I can now do things two, three times faster than before. So I'm now going to become even more productive and even more skilled, and I'm going to keep learning even more tools.
00:18:53
Speaker
I've finally time now to play with Grok and make videos on that thing. I've been driving my entire company nuts. Yeah.
00:19:02
Speaker
so Somebody had a kid over the weekend and he was everyone was asking for pictures of him and the baby and he still has injected in, so I just went and faked to the babies. I'm drunk.
00:19:14
Speaker
Anyway, but this is the type of stuff that's going on. And, you know, and I think if senior people in your company are having a ball just learning about this stuff, it's just, it's like infectious. It gets everybody thinking, this is great. I want to do more. I want to more. So, so how, and how this impacts our time and our jobs is just, I think this is totally unprecedented. I think the last time we saw anything like this was in the nineties when we made that first move into the internet.
00:19:43
Speaker
Right. And then, It was the first time we meant that made a fundamental change to how not just we did business, but how we lived our lives. Society changed, everything changed.
00:19:54
Speaker
Then we had the dot-com bust and everything kind of reset itself. And it wasn't until after that, that true value of the internet started to evolve. Do you think we'll get something similar happening with AI where we are in a bit of a bubble right now?
00:20:09
Speaker
there will be some type of correction. and then we'll truly start to absorb these tools and technology in our lives. Yes. With the help of leaders like you, Phil, you just demonstrated that your organization is probably being driven crazy by all the time you're using to invest in new things like creating babies on Grok.
00:20:29
Speaker
But that is a choice. that that is a choice and in the absence of that leadership, people will err to spend more time doing other things that aren't necessarily as productive as could be because they just didn't know what they didn't know. So for example, to back up your story, Dave Wright on our side, he told the story about how an executive had pondered, what do we do with that time if we're not going to invest in new resources, if we're not going to reduce headcount?
00:21:01
Speaker
And walking the dogs became the thing that everybody leaned on, that the direct beneficiary of automation were the dogs because their owners would spend more time with them. But that's I think that's how we describe that that future forward technology.
00:21:15
Speaker
together. And so to your question about that linear progress, even though the internet was a really big disruptor, we still use the internet largely the way that we used other analog services. So think about Encyclopedia Britannica or think about the website.
00:21:33
Speaker
i think amazon launched in 1994 it's 2025 and most websites if you're shopping today for example or if you're browsing a site most of them are essentially just digital brochures or catalogs it took entire mindset shifts or mind shifts to realize the power of that that change that shift to do something that new so for example amazon with the internet realizing that we could create e-commerce, but then ultimately becoming ah an intelligent logistics company as well.
00:22:02
Speaker
If you think about when we started to get into the early days of Web 2.0 and the rise of mobile, for example, some companies said, hey, how can we get our website to show up on a vertical screen?
00:22:15
Speaker
While other companies were were launched to take advantage of those platforms like Uber or Airbnb or think about the evolution of Netflix from platform shift to platform shift. So that mindset shift is what most organizations do not give themselves or allow themselves to explore, which is why we see so much iteration and incrementalism versus that innovation.
00:22:43
Speaker
Right. It's just the time that we... generally start innovating, Brian, or do you still think we're just smidgen of a way into this journey? We're a smidgen on the way to the journey, but I don't know that people understand the difference between iteration and innovation. So let's take a step back.
00:23:00
Speaker
But before I do, you just reminded me of something. Did you know, this is such a random aside, did you know that AOL just ended its dial-up service like this to like this month?
00:23:13
Speaker
Wow. No, i thought that I thought that had been killed about 20 years ago. Yeah, me too. they's still i they they I think they still had, i think customers were in the hundreds, if I'm not mistaken, which is wild to me. But to your point,
00:23:29
Speaker
Iteration looks a lot like innovation when you're doing something new. So if I use Copilot to help me write a better email or to create a better PowerPoint or to create net new images that I needed to convey a specific context, that looks a lot like innovation.
00:23:48
Speaker
But if you're using at tool, no matter how cool or innovative or different it is, if you're using a tool or service, to do what you did yesterday better, that's iteration.
00:24:00
Speaker
If you're using it to create net new value, then that's innovation. So one is yesterday better, and the other is what you didn't do yesterday or didn't know you could do yesterday.
00:24:14
Speaker
And so... Now we need more innovators. We need more creativity. We need more imagination. And we also need the psychological safety of leaders empowering people with not just the skills and the job descriptions of the future,
00:24:32
Speaker
but also that space to play and explore, to wonder, to embrace curiosity, because on the other sides of those exercises could be innovation and that new value.
00:24:47
Speaker
I couldn't agree more. I'm personally experiencing it. I know a lot of my colleagues are, and other people and the industry as
AI Convergence: Services & Software Opportunities
00:24:54
Speaker
well. It's like you get hooked on it and you start realizing all this new stuff you can do. And then something becomes Everything everything that I do now, I've got my agent running at the same time.
00:25:04
Speaker
That freaking chat GPT-5 thing, it's talking to me. and it i said I've had it for two weeks whatever. It's really quite a new experience, to be honest with you because it's suddenly becoming like an extension of yourself versus this fairly rigid tool where it's just doing this, it makes PowerPoint, know isn't it? Suddenly it's like, hey, Phil, have you thought of doing that?
00:25:22
Speaker
Have you thought of doing that? And I'm like, this thing's actually getting to know me. I got a bit nervous about it at the beginning, but now I'm actually starting to embrace this. and I thought, this is actually fun. I can be way more, as you said, innovative than I've ever been.
00:25:35
Speaker
I'm 53 years old and I feel like I got a whole new lease of le the life ahead of me. Anyway, let's just finish up a little bit with the impact on our industry because we've gone right off the rails with the future of AI.
00:25:47
Speaker
We talk a lot about services as software at HFS, this phrase that we coined, we trademarked. And we see a lot of the big services companies, yours included, feeling that they can edge into the services industry.
00:26:03
Speaker
While we have a lot of services firms, and we work with a lot of them as well, who are now evolving into selling what we say services as software. It's outcome-driven, consumption-driven,
00:26:16
Speaker
services which have mimicked activities into the software. I just feel while conceptually this sounds great and we can talk about a $1.5 trillion dollars market opening up, how real is this and who do you think is going to win out? Is it the services companies? Is it the software companies?
00:26:35
Speaker
Is it consulting firms? Or is it going to be a lot of small to medium tech firms springing up in the next few years? I think this is an opportunity for everybody, for everybody that sees it.
00:26:45
Speaker
It's not an overnight thing. It's waves, it's stages. It's also individual and collective consciousness of understanding not just what's possible, but Phil, like you, the things that you're doing today, you didn't know you could do last year.
00:27:02
Speaker
And the things you'll be doing next year, you don't know to think about those things yet. It'll happen as you get more access to these tools, as these tools become more capable, but you're operating in a safe environment where you are empowered to do these things.
00:27:17
Speaker
And I'm sure your teams also feel the same way. There is opportunity for everyone to help others. If you think about just traditionally the role of startups in a community is that they're serving they're serving factions of a market that aren't being served by others. That's the age-old opportunity for founders and investors.
00:27:36
Speaker
But we have to remember, at the end of the day, even though we say things like AI agents or AI, that it's all software. And that software is just becoming more intelligent based on the models that they're trained against.
00:27:53
Speaker
But it is that human creativity, imagination, and orchestration that's going to put these things to work. The way that I want to think about is...
00:28:04
Speaker
is selfishly, as ah as the AI platform for business transformation, we're essentially saying the work that you need to be done with humans and AI still needs access to data,
00:28:22
Speaker
still needs access to the workflows to get that work done and power that with AI, that work not only becomes faster and more intelligent and optimized, but it also starts to bring the organization back back together.
00:28:40
Speaker
So the idea of disparate systems of records now become connected so that the beneficiaries of that would be employees, customers, to deliver against the service promises of better experiences.
00:28:54
Speaker
So it's, I think, part technology and part intention. What do you want to do with it? It's almost like right now the value we're getting is tends to be more from the internet and getting all that information that's hidden away in every freaking website or whatever outside there. Suddenly, you can prompt it, ask it, live it in a way that you've never experienced. And this is creating an experience that we're saying, I want this internally.
00:29:25
Speaker
I'm actually seeing what's possible because I'm getting access to information that I've never had before. And now how do I do it? in my own company. So we've actually built our own agentic tool at HFS commercial break, but we had to literally recreate 4,000 research assets to do it and retag all the stuff. It was a lot of old school, just mundane data work, but you had to clean it all up so we could do it. And now I've got my CFO all over me saying, I want want to make this you everything.
00:29:54
Speaker
It's people seeing, I think it's people seeing what's possible. And right now I think we're seeing what's possible. particularly outside of our organizations, and it's now how do we bring these experiences to home?
00:30:07
Speaker
And that means for the very first time, it's roll your sleeves up and actually make some painful changes and fix some systems and do things differently than we've ever done. I see it as an optimist.
00:30:18
Speaker
I see it also as an opportunity for those catalysts who want to redefine their role more productively and positively in the future. So think about the role of a technology leader.
00:30:30
Speaker
Oftentimes, taking 10% out of the business in terms of costs has been ah North Star. But based on what you and I have been talking about for the past 30 minutes or so, it's an opportunity for that cost center to now shift into a growth engine.
00:30:48
Speaker
And that mindset shift or that mind shift to get to that growth engine is really about opportunity. How do you see this You see this only as a cost takeout solution, or is it an and, which can lead to that exponential curve?
00:31:03
Speaker
So the more we learn, the more we can do, and the more we can do, the more impact we can make. I see this with the right leadership as upside, and I would love to see the media start being more creative as well, and and more real with all of the opportunity that exists before us.
Closing Thoughts & Future Plans
00:31:22
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, I can actually hear your dog in the background now, Brian. so it's time for some say Hey, stop, start, start using more AI. Take me out for a walk. Exactly. Exactly.
00:31:33
Speaker
This is actually wonderful getting this time ready, Brian. And The conversation went all over the place, which was exactly what I was hoping for. I look forward to seeing you again very soon and sharing this part with the industry. industry I am thankful for the opportunity to spend this time with you. And I'm also looking forward to spending some time with you in New York.
00:31:53
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. Sounds great. Thank you, Phil. Thank you.
00:32:02
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First. Remember to follow Phil on LinkedIn and subscribe and like on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite platform for no-nonsense takes on the intricate dance between technology, business, and ideological systems.
00:32:21
Speaker
Got something to add to the discussion? Let's have it. Drop us a line at fromthehorsesmouth at hfsresearch.com or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.