AI for Leadership Teams with Julie Holmes
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
Julie Holmes is an AI entrepreneur and tech founder with 20+ years of experience in enterprise technology. She shares practical AI tips for leadership teams to sell smarter, serve better, and save time.
Leadership in the AI Era
Responsiveness and Agility: Critical traits for adapting to technological and market changes.
Avoiding Stagnation: Long-term plans must be flexible post-AI emergence (e.g., post-ChatGPT world).
AI as a Tool
AI is akin to general-purpose technologies like the internet or the printing press.
Offers both opportunities and challenges depending on its application.
Efficiency vs. Strategic Advantage
Efficiency: A quick win for leadership teams, using tools like ChatGPT for routine tasks.
Strategic Advantage: AI's potential to redefine customer engagement, business models, and products.
Levels of AI Integration
Basic: Consumer-available tools (e.g., ChatGPT).
Blended: Tailored tools like custom chatbots trained on specific organizational data.
Bespoke: Fully custom AI platforms, often for niche applications like manufacturing.
AI's Impact on Workforce
Shift in job roles: Entry-level, repetitive tasks likely to be automated.
Focus on retraining displaced workers for more strategic roles.
Hiring emphasis on critical thinking, communication, and innovation.
Addressing Fear and Misunderstanding
Avoid "panic policies" that hinder AI adoption.
Educate employees on safe, productive AI use.
Transparency and proper messaging critical for organizational buy-in.
Keeping Up with AI Advancements
Use AI champions within the organization for updates and training.
Align AI adoption with solving actual problems rather than technology-driven decisions.
Practical Tools and Tips
Recommended tools: ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Fathom (e.g., automated meeting minutes).
Start small: Use AI daily for personal or professional tasks to build familiarity.
Conclusion
Leaders must prioritize learning, adaptability, and strategic foresight to leverage AI.
Julie Holmes offers resources like the AI Readiness Assessment to guide organizations on their journey.
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Mike Goldman: Our guest today is a tech founder, inventor, and AI entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience transforming enterprise technology. She's passionate about staying ahead of the curve and helping others do the same by sharing practical tech tips.
Tools and innovation strategies to sell smarter, serve better and save valuable time. Get ready to challenge your thinking, spark your imagination and have some fun along the way. Tune in as we chat with the self proclaimed nerd who swears she's smarter than her smartphone, Julie Holmes. Julie, welcome.
Julie Holmes: Hello, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Mike Goldman: So first I've got, how do you know you're smarter than your smartphone?
I, I think I'm smarter than mine, but I'm not sure.
Julie Holmes: Well, I think probably because there's things that I want to be able to do, and the default behavior on your phone is not to let you do it, and I'm all in. Like, that's just like I wrestle it into submission.
Mike Goldman: There you go.
Well, as, as AI integrates into our phones, that'll probably, hopefully change over, over the coming months or maybe coming minutes, uh, given how fast it works, so going to focus on all things AI and, and for a long time, I have been wanting to do an episode like this because most of the leadership teams that I work with dabble in AI. But most are not using it to the level they probably should. And I'm not quite sure how to help them with that. So I think, I think Julie, you will be able to help all of us learn more. So we're going to focus on all things AI, but because this is the better leadership team show, I always start with a question totally focused on the leadership team, and that's Julie from all of your experience with leadership.
What do you believe is the one most important characteristic of a great leadership team
Julie Holmes: I think the one most important characteristic, especially right now, is being responsive. Responsive to the market, responsive to technology, responsive to your employees, you know, responsive and able to see what's happening and react.
Mike Goldman: got so responsive? And I guess what, what goes along that is, is that the flexibility to not say, well, I've got my three year plan and I'm sticking to it
Julie Holmes: Absolutely,
Mike Goldman: anybody that had a three year plan pre chat GPT coming out, and I know AI wasn't invented with Jack GPT, but anybody who had a three year plan and is sticking to it, uh, is probably going to be in some trouble.
Julie Holmes: absolutely. I think the other piece of that too is agility, right? Just being agile, willing to kind of bend when you need to bend, but you've just got to be open to that change. And the leadership teams that are really kind of knocking it out of the park with AI and are really kind of keeping up with the times are those that are willing to be open minded and responsive to the world around them.
Mike Goldman: So speaking of being open minded, talk kind of very big picture, artificial intelligence for a few minutes and understand whether, you know, is it good or is it evil? Right? And I have always thought of any new or any new technology is kind of like fire. Fire could be used for good and fire could be used for evil. I imagine AI is no different. And I just read, I don't know if you read this book, Julie, but, uh, uh, Yuval Noah Harari. Um, who's written some great books, Sapiens and other books, wrote a book called Nexus. And I gotta tell you, it scared the crap out of me, not about AI in general, but AI unbounded without the regulations we might need. So how should we be thinking of it? Is it good? Is it evil? Is it both?
Julie Holmes: It's a tool. I think, I think you had it exactly right. Right. In fact, AI, you know, is, is really another GPT. And I don't mean GPT is in chat, GPT, but GPT is in general purpose technology, right? We have seen these kinds of general purposes technology. General purpose technologies come out throughout the years, right?
The internet, the computer, the telephone, the printing press, you know, these are all examples of technologies that have fundamentally shifted economies, uh, industries, you know, they apply, you know, ubiquitously across the world. Um, and in doing so, you know, they can be used in lots of different ways. The real challenge in this instance, what's different now than has ever been true before is simply the speed and the scale at which the change is happening.
So we're, you know, historically that change has kind of rippled outward, you know, so leadership teams could keep a handle on it and they could push it down gradually to their teams and to the people in their organizations. However, what's happening now is that we're seeing that ripple being forced from the, from the kind of the bottom up, as opposed to the top down.
So leadership teams, like we were just, I was meeting with a marketing team yesterday and it's exactly what's happening, right? They're driving the change. The marketing team is driving the change up, you know, to their leadership teams. And it's very different now. I
Mike Goldman: So how should teams be thinking about this new technology? And given the speed, but also given the fact that it is generative, like there are things this does that I think go beyond any technology we've seen before in that learns and it can make decisions and take actions for us, depending on what we ask it to do, which could be great or could be scary if you're not using it in the right way.
But should leadership, how should leadership teams be thinking about AI? And I'll preface it a little bit with leadership teams that are thinking about it, tend to think about it as I do to a degree, which I think is limited by, oh, it could make me more efficient. You know, I've used it to help me with writing for my social media, to take things that I have recorded on stage and say, I want to use this for my book.
I'm going to tell chat GPT to turn it from written from spoken word to written word. All that's about efficiency. So. Should leadership teams be thinking about AI from an, as an efficiency tool, or should they be thinking of it much bigger than that?
Julie Holmes: I think leaders should be definitely thinking about AI broadly. Um, I think efficiency is the first great starting point, right? It is an easy place for leaders to look for opportunities to kind of dip their toe in the water. If this is new technology for them, if they haven't really seen or looked at how they can embrace that throughout their organization.
That's a great opportunity. It's quick. It's easy to identify the ROI and to make sure that they can calculate the return on investment. They can very easily get feedback from their teams. And a lot of the generative AI tools, for example, are really nice, easy, quick wins that even if leaders don't recognize it, their people are probably using already.
So getting a handle on what people are already doing and trying to put some Controls and boundaries and acknowledgement in place for that is usually a great place to start
Mike Goldman: So it starts with efficiency, but how how should leaders be thinking about this beyond efficiency?
Julie Holmes: strategic advantage.
Mike Goldman: say more about that?
Julie Holmes: So it's great, you know, when people think about particularly leaders and I realize if you're new to AI and you're You're kind of in that reticent or reluctant piece, right? We talk about there being you know People who are AI reluctant people who are AI ready and there are people in organizations who are you know AI empowered If you're in that kind of reluctant phase and you're not ready for AI and you haven't really thought it through and embraced it, then chances are what I'm about to say is going to feel a little kind of side swiping, but the truth of the matter is, is that.
With all of these kind of efficiency enhancements that people can do with AI, you're not going to get competitive advantage from that. Not long term. If you're a first mover and you're quick to do it, then great. Yeah. Your people are going to be more efficient and that's awesome. Um, but that's just a moment in time because that's such low hanging fruit that we expect every organization to be jumping on that bandwagon.
So the bigger long term opportunity is to not think about it from, Hey, how can we do the same thing we've always done faster? But rather, how can we leverage this technology to do something different, something valuable, something that gives us competitive advantage in the marketplace? So, for example, if you're thinking about AI and asking the question, well, how could AI change the way that we engage with our customers?
Not just that we do the same things faster, but how can it change the way we serve them? How could AI change our business model? How could it change the products that we sell or serve? You know, could we incorporate AI into our products or services? And if we did that, what would that look like? So really thinking about if this piece of a puzzle was injected all throughout the organization, Not just to do something faster, but to do things differently, or to do something new, or to remove something from your model currently.
That's where you're going to start to get competitive advantage. And then,
Mike Goldman: Oh, I'm sorry, keep going.
Julie Holmes: I was just going to say, layer on top of that, that as soon as you start building custom AI technology platforms, that's a whole nother game. Right?
So, when we look at the, the, the breadth of AI application that organizations can deploy, We break that up into a couple of different levels.
You have basic and basic are all those applications that are really consumer available. That's your Chat GPT's of the world. And that's where a lot of organizations are right now. If they're not there at an organization level, their people are there in the organization is playing catch up. So that's basic.
And honestly, that's where a majority of organizations are right now, particularly SMB space to step up one level, you get to blended and blended is where we start to now tailor those applications. in order to take advantage of our IP, our expertise, our processes, our people, and to really take that to the next level.
So that might be, for example, a custom chatbot. And we put that custom chatbot on our website. It's using a standard large language model, like a chat GPT behind the scenes, but it's been trained on our user cases, on our support systems, on our policies and procedures, our data. There's another level on top of that, and that's bespoke and with bespoke, that's where organizations are really creating entirely custom AI technology platforms.
So this could be a completely custom large language model, for example, and we're seeing that particularly in manufacturing. I was working with a group of manufacturers not long ago and speaking at a conference, and I would love chatting with them about how they are bringing in this bespoke AI.
Everything from computer vision and using cameras and generating data off of cameras that can be leveraged. That's all AI technology, all the way to creating completely custom large language models that are entirely siloed for their organization. So that new employees don't have to go through rigorous, you know, month, two, three month long training programs instead, they can interact and engage with these technology platforms to say, well, how's my inventory today?
Which lines should I check or consider? Who should I talk to about that? And all that information is in there and ready for them to access.
Mike Goldman: And here's where I think it gets for some people, it gets scary, right? Because if you think about the model you just talked about for the bespoke manufacturing example, well, they may have a training team that normally spends three weeks with new folks and now spending a lot less or not spending any time at all because it's done in a more automated fashion.
And another example of that is, um, I was looking into a couple of different tools for my business. One is called searchy and another one is called, uh, Delphi dot AI. And both of those in some ways can take all of the knowledge. From my books and my speaking and my podcast and my social media, put it in, create a little avatar and people can go and ask me questions and it will answer. if it's me, probably not, you know, not as good and not quite as handsome as me, but, uh, but it'll, and, and, and I was describing, I said, I want to investigate that the person I was talking to said, what would you want to do that for that could replace you. And I had two answers to that. I said, first off, I don't think anybody's replacing me so quickly.
It's just a compliment to what I do. But on the other hand, if anyone's going to replace me, it's going to be me. I don't want somebody else to do it. And I think it sounds like companies need to think about it that way. Like we can think short sighted and say, what about those jobs? But if we know our competition are doing similar things, we need to think more of what about our company?
How do we keep our company ahead? How do we, as you said, how do we use it for competitive advantage?
Julie Holmes: Yeah, I think it's great to remember that this is not the first time we've been around this block.
Remember we talked about those general purpose technologies and we see the same pattern historically that we'll see today, which is that when new general purpose technology lands in our world, we will see a dip in jobs.
You know, we will see a negative impact as people are displaced by this new technology. But what always happens is a spike afterwards, right? So we always go back up and exceed where we were before. So there is an adjustment period. The opportunity for leadership teams is to minimize the impact of that adjustment opportunity.
To help their teams and their employees to be ready to embrace this change. and to actually cross train them and develop them. There are not very many jobs in an organization where people get to the end of the day and go, do you know what? Actually I'm done. I actually, I'm done with everything. I, you know what?
I'm going to go home early. It rarely happens that that's the case. And so for the majority of jobs that are You know, work that people are doing on a day to day basis, what you know, what we should be thinking about for them is great. We've now got this technology platform. How can you leverage this technology platform to get more done and to have less stress at work and to feel less overwhelmed by the tasks at hand?
And how do we do a better job of what we're already doing? I mean, that's the other thing too, right? Is improving the quality of what we deliver. Now, will there be jobs that are displaced through this technology? For sure. I mean, let's just think about customer service as an example, right? We think about call centers.
You know, there are organizations that are replacing thousands of call center employees with AI the opportunity then is for them to think about what else could those call center employees be doing? How can we retrain them? How can we make sure that we're serving our employees in the best possible way, even if that long term service isn't for us?
You know, how do we help them and not just kind of chuck them to the curb? Take that beyond just that immediate, like, gosh, there might be a displacement of jobs. I'll throw another consideration out there for leadership teams, which is how are you going to train people? So if you think about something like sales, and I spend a lot of time speaking to sales teams, that's a big part of what I do.
And When we talk to sales leaders in particular, one of the, one of the areas that we have to focus on is around most professional salespeople, just as an example, have often started out their world in business development, or they've started in some kind of entry level sales position. They might've even started in support and they've kind of worked their way up from there, but they've cut their teeth, so to speak on You know, these kind of less risky, you know, less personalized, more general purpose tasks.
So that by the time they get to a sales professional, they've really got a lot of time and energy and effort and learning under their belt. What happens when we automate those? Entry level jobs. You know what happens when we automate those kind of repetitive, low risk tasks? Because those are really the first ones we should be targeting with AI and leadership teams have to be thinking big picture in terms of great.
If we take this job out, where does this job normally feed? Like, where do we see the progression of people in our organization? And as we know that map of what the movement of people in our organization looks like, how do I prepare these people either with or without this technology? How do I integrate this technology?
What does it mean from the big picture? And they need to be partnering up with their talent and development teams, with their HR teams, with their team leaders. They need to go and get a holistic view. Of their business so that they can really think about what the bigger implications of all that are.
Mike Goldman: It's a great point and, and to that degree, it's going to change who and how we recruit those positions,
Julie Holmes: Well, certainly the skills that we're looking for in recruiting are, should definitely change. Right. And, you know, in the past we might've been looking for somebody who has experience with, you know, software application, XYZ, you know, gosh, we need somebody with experience in Salesforce or we need somebody with experience in Marketo, or we need somebody with experience with, you know, PeopleSoft, like you name it, whatever the platform is.
But, you know, that kind of experience can be taught. You know, that type of, you know, like skills can be learned, you know, the, the attributes that leaders should be looking for right now are ones they've kind of always been looking for, but they haven't always prioritized things like critical thinking, communication, um, innovation.
You know, people's ability to be again, you know, flexible, agile, you know, are they open to technology? Are they, you know, willing to grow themselves, you know, long gone are the days where we could hire somebody that just wanted to come in and push a button all day. You know, we have to become again in an age of thinking.
You know, we have to grow back into the thinkers that we once were and make sure that we can ingest that technology and really use it effectively.
Mike Goldman: which is such an opportunity because forever I've been consulting and coaching for 35 plus years. And the. The first time I was able to put words around, I was, what I'm about to say was probably 15 years ago when I read the book E Myth by Michael Gerber, who talks about working in the business versus on the business. But this gives us as leaders and, and beyond just the leadership team, this gives us as leaders a much better ability to spend time working on the business. Cause as you said, you don't get to the end of the day and go, I fit it. It's five o'clock. I magically finished everything I need to do. Well, as leaders, a lot of those things that we don't quote unquote finish are there's more strategic. Creative, innovative, working on the business things, which we may never get to because we're spending so much time rolling up our sleeves. So, so this becomes a wonderful opportunity.
Julie Holmes: Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head. You know, if we're using this technology effectively, you know, I talk about, um, You know, and helping people think about how to apply a I talk about that. We have three, you know, three lists in our lives as professionals. We have a to do list, and that's the list of all the things that we have to get done every single day, right?
That's the check mark, you know, all the, things Emails we have to reply to all the reports we have to run all the conversations we have to have. So that's all of our to do list. Then we have a should do list. And that should do list are all the things that we feel bad that we didn't get to that day.
Right. So that's a lot of those strategic initiatives. Like, Oh, you know, like, Oh, I kept meaning to do a new onboarding strategy for our employees, or, you know, I really wanted us to have a discussion about this new business line. And then there's this. Third list, which is this could do list. And the could do list is gosh, what could we do if we didn't have all the things on our to do and should do list?
Where could we grow the business? What opportunities does this open for us, and how do we think bigger and broader than we've ever been able to do it before? So really starting to prioritize and decide where you'll get the biggest bang for your buck, but also being super conscious and aware not to scrape out the sand and then just let more sand fill in the gap.
You know, like you've got to save space. You know, you've got to kind of like clean off that to do list and automate some of those things and really leverage this technology to help you be more efficient. But you've then got to take that time and not fill it with more crap, but instead fill it with more strategic time, you know, carve time out and really take advantage of that.
That's, I mean, for leaders, that's a huge part of the value of this.
Mike Goldman: To get tactical for, for a minute with things moving so fast. I think it was two, two January's ago if I'm getting it right. And depending on when you're listening to this podcast, I may be off. Um, but if it was January, 2022 or 2020, whenever I first heard about chat GPT and I had no idea what it was, but all of a sudden people started, started talking about it. it seems to me like with every month, five years go by and how the technology grows and not just chat GPT, but, but all of the different AI tools. And I guess my, my tactical question is. With how fast things are moving, like, Oh, don't, don't use chat GPT for writing. Use Claude. Claude is much better. Oh, you know, no use this tool.
There's so many tools popping up all of the time. How should. How can leaders keep track of all those changes, especially because all of us have day jobs that are taking up way more than full time. And like you talked about your, your to do list and your should do and your could do, how do we keep up with, with, with all the changes?
Julie Holmes: Well, I think the first answer to that is, is that this isn't a technology first problem, right? You don't start with technology and then look for a place to plug it in, right? What they should be starting with, what all leaders should be starting with the same things we've said about projects all along, by the way, this isn't new, this isn't a new insight that I'm offering, right?
But I've spent over, you know, 20 years in enterprise technology, and it's always start with the problem first. You know, what, what is it you're actually trying to do? What, what problem are you trying to solve? Then you identify what the technology platform is that addresses that problem. Now, in terms of keeping up with changing technology.
You know, good news is, is you probably have people in your organization that are already doing that because that's just where they love to spend their time. So there's a real opportunity to find some kind of AI champions or some technology champions in your organization and let them kind of be advisors to you.
So again, you don't have to do it all yourself, right? Who in your organization would naturally be inclined to do that? And how do we take advantage of them while giving that person an opportunity to really shine and showcase what their aptitude and their interest takes them to? Then when you start to think about, remember that, that spectrum, I talked about a basic blended and bespoke, there's a different timeframe on each one of those.
Those basic technology tools can be switched out very quickly and very readily, and they're not expensive, they're quick to implement. So if you wanted to switch from ChatGPT to Claude, for example, Great. That's a pretty easy shift. And in fact, you could probably use both of them at the same time. Doesn't make any difference.
What you have to be aware of is that those basic tools, you could probably change out every three to six months is kind of the window of time that we set right now, when you get into blended technology, now you're really talking about kind of six to nine months. You don't want to be changing those out too frequently, and maybe even six to twelve.
And then recognizing that when you get to bespoke AI technology, you're talking about projects. You're talking about building custom solutions. And in that instance, what you really want to be doing is almost finding partners who are going to be keeping those technologies updated and changing on your behalf.
Right? So, great if you as an organization can go off and build something truly custom. But the world is changing so fast that in most instances, you're going to be better off partnering with a third party for those technology components rather than trying to build and maintain themselves. You're not in the business of that.
You know, unless you are a tech developer, you are not in the business of staying on top of all of that. So, in that instance, you're probably going to be looking to change less often, probably a year, but you're also going to be embedding pieces of technology or using platforms that are doing that kind of upgrading for you.
Mike Goldman: I want to go back to the idea of AI champions that you mentioned, because I love that idea. and my mind goes to two different places. So I'll start with the first place and hopefully I'll remember the second place is you also said, think about it like any other project where, you know, what's the problem you don't think of it, technology first, what's the problem you want to solve, and then how do you solve it?
The. I think that the other piece of that, though, which may challenge that way of thinking a little bit is what I have seen is very often I'm not trying to solve a problem or my client. I don't even think I have a problem. And someone says, Wait a minute. you know there's a tool that could help you do that?
What you're taking? A day to do, there's a tool that can do that in, in about five minutes. So I love the idea of AI champions who, even if we're not trying to solve a problem, if there's some way of structuring the communication, so as leaders and, and around the company, we're hearing from those AI champions.
You will find out there's problems we don't think we have, but there's still opportunities to put some AI in place. So that was one, one piece. And, and that's, I love. The AI champions helps with that.
The other one is. And I've played around with this on my leadership teams and, and I, I'd love your coaching on it is of the things I do with my leadership teams when I coach them is we, we spend a lot of time looking at the structure of their team. one of the most basic, but super powerful things we do is say, what are the functions of your team? Not the titles, but functions or things like head of company as a function. Finance is a function. Sales, marketing, technology, customer service, HR, those are all functions. What are the functions? Who's accountable?
How are we measuring success? Pretty straightforward, but, but still very insightful for companies. When I think about AI, It is very easy to either not include AI as a function because it's not a function, it's a tool, it's a technology, everybody uses it. but, but I think you could say the same thing about. Technology, and we typically have a CTO or a CIO or a VP of technology or a smaller company. You may just have an HR manager, or you may outsource some of that, but we have someone accountable. should we be thinking when we think about structure of the leadership team? AI be a function? We have one person being accountable for, uh. Complimented by these AI champions who may be feeding information and what's the right way to think of AI as a function or, or not a function on the leadership team
Julie Holmes: ?
I think it goes right now. It's going both directions. So there are organizations who are, you know, creating new functions, which are, you know, AI head of AI, you know, you know, chief AI officer, you know, we're seeing that already happening. I think ultimately it's, you know, to leadership teams, it's less important whether you carve it out as a function, but more important where you.
You know, where that kind of ownership comes from, right. And who's kind of who's steering the ship now, it could be the CTO that's steering the ship. Now, chances are that CTO might not have the bandwidth to steer this other ship. So, you know, it's good to know, gosh, if we're going to give this to the technology function, then we better be super clear that the technology function has the bandwidth and the capacity and the capability.
To steer the ship the correct way, like they have to know how to build the ship. They have to understand the ship. They have to have the right attitude to steer the ship. Um, you know, I, there's a great example of this. I was talking to, um, a leadership team not too long ago and they, you know, they said, Oh yeah, we just had our CTO presented, um, to our entire organization at a town hall, all about AI.
Everybody left feeling like they were going to lose their jobs tomorrow. And that this was the worst thing that had ever happened to our business. And you think, Oh, what an, Oh, that's just a terrible, terrible loss. You know, that organization is going to struggle to recover from that type of messaging.
And, you know, they had people in the organization who were, you know, started looking for jobs. I mean, he made it sound so bleak. And so again, having the right type of person ready to lead that up and ready to help people feel
. It is important for leadership teams, especially part of your job is to help your people feel safe, and they have never needed to feel safe more than they do right now.
There is so much change and uncertainty and the speed of change we've already talked about happening right now. So as a leadership team, your first concern for people has to be, we have got to make people feel safe. Because nobody can operate at the best possible level when they are standing on an, you know, uneven surface and struggling just to stay upright.
Nobody can do that. So as you think about this leadership for AI, it's more important to have somebody who has the bandwidth, the knowledge, and the attitude to do that. In order to effectively lead that and whether you want to call it the chief AI officer or whether you want to give it to the CTO or whether the CEO wants to run it, I personally think it doesn't really matter so much as long as that person has those capacities and those capabilities and can do it effectively and that they are coming at it from, uh, from an angle of service and from an angle of opportunity and from how can we benefit from this technology as opposed to how can we.
reject or how can we block this technology? This is no time to put up walls. Right. And that is the worst thing that a leadership team can do right now is to find is to have somebody who is super against this technology doesn't mean they can't be cautious of the technology. Make no mistake, right? This is the wild west of technology right now, right?
There's a lot happening and a lot of changes taking place. Yes, they should be responsible. Yes, they should be aware of ethics. Yes, they should be thinking about implications, but they need to come at it from a What's the benefit to the business? And how do we embrace it? Because there is no other option right now other to embrace it.
There just isn't another option that is going to be effective for any organization
Mike Goldman: .
Especially as you said, when you've got folks at the grassroots level that are using it
Julie Holmes: Absolutely,
Mike Goldman: why not figure out a way to better support them in using it, which is a much better message than look at all this stuff we can automate. We probably won't need half of you guys. Well, no, a lot of you are already using this.
We want to do what we can to help you. So you could spend your time doing X, Y, and Z instead, instead of this. So it's a very, however you slice it to your point, it's a very different kind of leadership. It's not like the CFO that owns finance and it's very, you know, this is, Grassroots, everybody's using it.
And, and first thing I thought of when you said the C the CIO gets up there talking about AI and scaring people was how many people in the audience are saying this damn CIO doesn't know what he's talking about because they've used tool, they may be using AI more than he or she is.
Julie Holmes: absolutely true. That is absolutely true. And in fact, that's generally true right now, right? Very rarely am I seeing people in leadership roles who are more experienced with AI and more embracing of AI than their team members. You know, and there's lots of reasons for that. In many instances, it's because, right, there's an age gap.
There's a, you know, as we get older, I think, you know, all of us, I think, some, many of us tend to find ourselves in the position where we're oh, I don't know, change. Ooh, that's harder for me. Ooh, I don't know. Ooh, it's change. And a lot of it is muscle memory, and we've got to think about, like, these younger people that are in our organizations.
They have been in tech forever. They've never known a life without technology. You know, they have a very different approach to it. They have a very different demeanor when it comes to technology. They're much more open to its implications and what it can do for them. And I think that's a huge part of it is making sure that we are Leveraging all those different generations, different backgrounds, different experiences, different mindsets.
We're leveraging all of them to get the very best out of this technology and to do the very best for our organization. But that has to start with leaders stepping up more than they have been. There's a great trend right now that I've seen with a lot of companies
. I don't know if you've run into this, Mike, but you know, we, I like to call them panic policies.
You know, so a lot of organizations are definitely recognizing that they have a need for an AI policy in their organization. And what we're seeing come out of many organizations right now are panic policies. And a panic policy, I can summarize basically like this, don't do anything. Whatever happens, don't touch anything, don't use anything.
We don't approve anything, don't do anything and don't put anything anywhere. Don't copy any data. Don't put it anywhere. Don't use it for anything. And if you do, don't. And this panic policy is completely unrealistic and unhelpful, right? It actually is almost putting on paper that a leadership team is wanting to reject this technological advancement.
And employees see that and they feel shackled and frustrated. I mean, it came up recently with a sales team that I was working with and in between the time that they had scheduled for me to come in and work with their team. And the time that I arrived, they had gotten a panic policy pushed out to them.
And it was such a vague policy that basically said, don't use anything. And if you want to use something, you have to request approval, but we're not going to tell you who to ask. It took the head of sales almost a week to find the right person to even ask about how do I get a tool approved. And then the person was like, well, you know, I guess you could ask me.
I, you know, like nobody's really, nobody told me that I was responsible for this, but I guess I'm responsible for it. And, you know, I really don't know what you'd need to tell me for me to be comfortable with a tool. For you to start leveraging it in sales. I don't really know. And so, you know,
Mike Goldman: What are you finding is how is it? Because when I think about what you're talking about, what I hear come up a lot, and it's probably not the only thing is the security aspect of it. Hey, whatever you feed into these tools goes out to the world. So if you feed in specifics about us, now out there in the ether, which my understanding is to some degree, that's true if you're not careful, is, is that what's scaring people?
And I know there are most tools have ways where you could your data in now and it doesn't go anywhere. It's just used for you, but is that one of the key things that are scaring people or is it more than that
Julie Holmes: ?
I think there is a lot of that. What's interesting about that and about this kind of fear and security and how do we protect our organization? What I think is really interesting about that is that is almost entirely driven from a lack of understanding, right? The reality is, is that leaders, especially leaders don't really understand how this technology works or what it does.
Right. They, they think it's kind of like Google, right? They think if you put something in there, like it's going to be retrievable in exactly the same format you put it in there. They also don't understand that you can turn off, you know, whether or not a tool is training with your data when we're talking about generative AI tools, or they don't understand that there are some technology platforms like copilot, you know, that are, are essentially siloed within an organization that have controls put in place.
They don't even understand that they should be going out and looking at the privacy policies of these technology platforms and confirming what they can or can't do. And another huge part of that is they're, they're kind of, because they don't feel like they have control over it, they're going to try to exert control.
And the reality is, is they can do that all day, but their employees aren't going to listen. You know, we have, um, we do an AI readiness assessment and people who want it can go on my website and take the AI readiness assessment for leaders. But this readiness assessment, you know, one of the questions that we ask is, you know, do you think there are people in your organization who are using tools that you don't know about or haven't approved for use?
And 88 percent of leaders will say, Yeah, I think there are people using stuff I have no idea about. So if you think as a leader that the answer is to tell them not to do it, you're completely wrong. That is not the answer. What you should be doing as a leadership team is you should be saying, Okay, let's work on the assumption that they're going to use these tools.
Right? Let's work on the assumption that the kids are going to stay out past curfew. Let's work on the assumption that they're going to potentially go out and have fun that we don't know about. Is it better for us to say, no, no, no, just don't do it. Or is it better for us to say, like, listen, if you're going to do it, here's how you do it safely.
Right. Here's how you use this technology in a smart way. Here's what it means. Let's make sure you're educated. Let's make sure that you understand which tools we have, we have evaluated and why we're saying those tools are okay. Because a lot of times leadership teams will say like, Hey, don't use Chat GPT or Chat GPT is okay, but don't use Gemini, but then they don't explain why they've made that choice.
And people are just thinking, well, they've just randomly picked one tool over the other. So really I can go and use either one when there might be very good, very valid reasons. Leadership teams have to be so much more transparent because this is being driven from the bottom up. They have to be more transparent so that the people at the bottom understand and become thinking advocates for the business and become assets to the process rather than people who are circumventing it.
Mike Goldman: And I want to go full circle to your answer to the question, what's the one most important characteristic of a great leadership team? And you said responsiveness. is changing every day. So if there is a tool, we're not going to use this tool for these reasons. And if those reasons are completely valid today. may not be valid a month and a half from now, which is again, the read, the importance of the AI champions and some level of AI leadership that has an accountability and a responsibility to keep up with all of that. So, and that's like it's, I mean, it's, it's exciting, but it, but it is a difficult challenge at the same time. Because of how fast it's moving
. And speaking of how fast it's moving, I'm going to ask you a question at the risk that six months from now, this answer may be totally meaningless.
Julie Holmes: Six months.
Mike Goldman: well, or maybe six minutes from now, but, but what are the tools that, that you are most excited about that either you're using or your clients are using?
What, what are some of those tools?
Julie Holmes: All right. Well, first of all, it's the generative AI tools, right? So the chat GPTs of the world, you know, and whether that's chat GPT, whether that's copilot, whether that's Gemini, you know, just the sheer breadth of that technology to be able to help us do a lot of the busy work that we don't want to do, or that isn't in our wheelhouse.
So that's really powerful. Um, I think that if I give some specific technology platforms, I am still a big user of ChatGPT. I do use a lot of technology platforms that leverage ChatGPT in the background. And don't forget, that's what we're going to be seeing a lot of is we're going to start to see a lot of these technology platforms like Apple has partnered with ChatGPT with OpenAI.
So we're going to start to see a lot of these partnerships forming, and you're going to see more and more of that, which is good for businesses because it's a bit, you know, not as many tools in the, in the kit bag that you need to manage. I think the second thing is if I'm going to offer some specific tools that you could go out and play with, I'm a huge fan of Fathom.
And this is a great example of applying AI to, you know, something that, Is really enabling sales teams, marketing teams, you know, leaders to be able to do more and do it better and fathom is a tool. Fathom dot video is the is the website. Fathom is a tool that will record any meeting any virtual meeting that you're having and it will generate meeting minutes in about a minute.
So, you know, at the end of your leadership team meeting, everybody gets meeting minutes and then you can actually ask questions of the meeting so I can interact with and say, what did we agree was going to be the outcome? Or did we discuss this? And what were the concerns that were raised? And so that starts to level the playing field again, just think for a minute about like, somebody's out sick for the day or somebody's traveling or somebody's on holiday.
You know, people do get to take time off periodically. How do we make sure that they're still involved in the decision process and they're still in the know about what's happening in the organization? We've got to come up with better ways to make that accessible to them. So using tools like Fathom, that's one that I really, you know, love and enjoy.
And I just don't know what I would do without it. So I think if you start with those kinds of technology platforms, that's really a good, solid, safe place to start
. I would love to add one more thing around how do you start thinking about this AI technology as something that is that does good. So, you know, we've been going through a process of interviewing people about what does AI empowered look like as an individual and as an organization.
If you are AI empowered, what are the attributes of that? And one of those attributes is about using AI to do good. And instead of just thinking about how AI can help us kind of get from point A to point B faster, it can be how does I help us to bring more people with us from point A to point B and how does it make that journey better for those people?
And I want you to imagine for a second, this kind of generative AI technology and what it can mean to people who are coming from different cultures. People who are coming at the world with different languages and backgrounds, people who might be dyslexic, people who, you know, might be neurodivergent, you know, whatever it is, there is suddenly a technology platform.
And technology capabilities that allow us to embrace more people and to involve and integrate more people into our world and to communicate with them and to support them in ways that we have never been able to do as well as we wanted to. We've always wanted to help people, but now we've got technology that can help us to do that more effectively, more efficiently, better.
Look for how you can use these tools in these platforms to serve those people in your organization because they are waiting to give you more value. They are desperate to be more valuable to the organization and to add more to the world. Help them to do it.
Mike Goldman: Love that. For the leader who's listening, that is more of that, that basic level, you know, that you talked about how, as we start to wrap up, how, what, what could they do
? What, what, what's something pragmatic that they could focus on to say, all right, my next step is to do X. How do people, how do people get started to, to build a little bit more momentum here?
Julie Holmes: All right. So this is going to sound a little bit cheesy, but I promise it is the number one way, if you are in that kind of left end of the spectrum of like, gosh, I've really never really delved into this. I don't know a lot about it. So here's the quick and easy answer. And that is download Chat GPT on your phone and use it every single day for something.
And that can be something personal instead of something professional. And in fact, that's kind of the best way to get started. There's a great, a couple of great things that you can do that are just fun. So if you're a leader and you know, and you've got kids. especially young kids, or you've got a niece or a nephew or grandchildren.
Like think about using Chat GPT and use it to help write a personal story with that child. So sit down, it's bedtime. We're going to do a story, you know, let's make a story. What do you want that story to be about? Chat GPT is going to help us write that story. And you're going to just, the more you interact with it, it's so much like riding a bicycle, right?
You can watch somebody ride a bicycle and go, you know, Yeah, I mean, I kind of get it. I get it. But until you've actually sat on that bicycle and pedaled and until you have found your balance and you've fallen over a few times, right? But until you found your balance and gotten comfortable with the bicycle, you're always going to just look at it from the outside and think, yeah, I don't see what the big deal is.
But riding the bicycle feels pretty amazing. So get out there, get on it, you know, try it, test it, use it to, you know, I, I used it the other day to come up with 20 You Tube trivia questions to ask my husband while we were driving, you know, down the highway, you know, like there's so much. Fun stuff that you can do with it, you know, come up with, um, you know, we've got the holidays, you know, coming up, or you've got Valentine's day coming up, or you've got 4th of July coming up.
You pick the holiday. Give me a list of 20 themed food dishes I could serve at the company picnic, you know, just constantly be working with it so that you start to get this feeling of. Gosh, it's not that scary. And wow, this is kind of cool and really fun. And I would never have thought that it could turn out like that.
And wow, look at all the amazing stuff that it can do, but just break the barrier and get really comfortable with it. And be the person who is trying it. You don't have to be the best at it. There's actually no, you know, there's nobody who's going to have the answer. There's not an answer anymore. There's just people who are working the process and they're constantly getting better.
Be one of those people
Mike Goldman: .
You mentioned earlier and I want to come back to it. Your, your AI readiness assessment. Tell me a little bit more about that and give us kind of the specific place people ought to go. And I'll put this in the show notes as well, but tell us a little bit more about it and tell us where people can go to, to actually take the assessment.
Julie Holmes: So on my website, um, which is julieholmes.com up at the top, you can see, take the readiness assessment. You can, there's one for leaders, there's government leaders. There's one for sales teams as well. So if you take the readiness assessment, it really goes through a list of 20 questions that kind of evaluates where you are with this technology right now, where your organization is with this technology and what are the opportunities and the potential gaps.
Based on that, it comes back and it gives you some feedback about, okay, here's where you are compared to, you know, the other people that have taken the AI readiness assessment and compared to our professional evaluation. Based on this, here's the things that you can do next. Here's your next steps. So it's very pragmatic in terms of like, where are you?
Let's first of all, find out where you are so you know where you need to go. And then it gives personalized and tailored feedback about where you should go with that. But certainly as a leadership team, learn. Just learn, you know, try it, put your hands on it, learn it, you know, that's, that's at all levels.
We are constantly going to be learning in the AI readiness assessment is a great place to start with that
Mike Goldman: .
So if people want to find out more about you and how you might be able to help them as individuals or their companies, you mentioned your website. Is that the best place,
Julie Holmes: It absolutely is. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You can go out there and see what we do. You can contact me. You can schedule a time on my calendar. Absolutely.
Mike Goldman: So JulieHolmes.com and it's, and it's H O L M E S
Julie Holmes: Like Sherlock.
Mike Goldman: There you go. Like Sherlock. Well, Julie, this was fantastic. I know I learned a lot. So I, so I, I assume others did as well. As I always say, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. Julie, thanks for getting us there today.
Julie Holmes: It was my pleasure entirely. Thanks for having me. Mike.