You're listening to Bloomberg BusinessWeek with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio.
A popular story that was highlighted on the Bloomberg terminal yesterday. It was actually from Dow Jones Wall Street Journal, and it talked about the talent war for those with experience
in artificial intelligence. So some companies here in the US, and industries as Diversus entertainment manufacturing are check this out, willing to pay salaries that are close to a million dollars a year for top AI talent, according to the journal reporting think machine learning specialist, data scientists and the like.
So kids study that AI. Kids AI degree in school, so you can be replaced by AI.
Well.
Our next guest knows a thing or two about AI. Brian Evergreen is the founder of the Profitable Good Company. He advises executives from some of the biggest companies on AI strategy. He's also worked for a century, Amazon Web Services and Microsoftware who is the global head of Autonomous AI co Innovation brand. Is also a guest lecturer at Purdue University in the Kellogg School of Management, among other roles.
He's got a new book out. It's called autonomous transformation, creating a more human future in the era of artificial intelligence. He joins us on zoom from Washington State. Brian, how are you.
I'm doing well. How are you?
We're doing pretty well. We're still we haven't been replaced by AI at this point, yes yet, not yet. But when you talk about a human future, what do you mean?
What I mean is that initially I set out with the goal when I went through the process of researching and writing the book, I set out with a goal of discovering why is it that only thirteen percent of AI initiatives make it through into production. And what I found, what I'd hoped from my own personal background, was that I'd be able to find a way that we could harness the economic and societal potential of AI and these other advanced technologies to do good in the world and
to create a more human future. And by that I mean a future where more and more people can thrive and have dignity in their work and have access to opportunities to bring in create value in the world. And what I found was that it's not that harnessing the economic potential of AI and creating a better future are
two distinct things. Is actually the way that you get the potential of the economic and societal potential of these technologies starts with how you work with and treat the people within your organizations and your ecosystems.
All right, sounds rather utopian, but it just also you know that sometimes to get to a better place, it's a little bit messy in the middle. Is there going to be a massive adjustment as we get to a world where artificial intelligence the next generation if you will, the generative AI, really has an impact, but it's going to be a little rough to get there and where we all benefit potentially.
I think there will be a period of adjustment. That I personally written about it and I speak about it is that there's really three types of outlooks on jobs today. There's two that are prevalent in the media today. Which is one is job protectionism, which is that the current class of jobs as they exists must be protected in that set of tasks that make up those jobs at all costs, which presents a longer term economic risk to the organization if the rest of the market is advancing forward.
The second, on the other end of the spectrum, is job fatalism, which is that AI is coming for all our jobs, and you know, we might as well prepare the way for our robot overlords. And the issue with that, with that line of thinking is that it means that we as a society and we as humanity have stopped creating value. All the value that we've created can now just be automated and there's no further work to be done for humanity, and I also disagree with that pretty foundationally.
The one in the middle that I recommend is job pragmatism, which is that, yes, our jobs are going to evolve. The way that we work, the way that we create value must evolve. We have these opportunities in these tools, and that leaders have the opportunity from the time that they sign a purchase order or set their technology strategy for what they're going to do and what tasks will
be able to be automated. They usually have about six months to if not a couple of years, before the technologies at the point that it actually can be put into production. So if at that same time they set a workforce strategy and the separate product strategy with an expansion mindset instead of a cutting cost mindset, that gives them an opportunity to continue honoring the people and the culture of their organization and move forward with the expertise of those that they've hired over the years.
Does the AI run up that we've seen this year, did that come as a surprise to you. I'm talking about the you know what we've seen in the public markets with companies such as Nvidia and the like.
Yes and no.
I think that I had visibility to some of the investments that were taking place and the potential if anything, I was I would have expected there to be more of a runoff and more hype earlier, because there's quite a few other AI technologies that have already reached a point of inflection that are as capable or more capable
than the large language models like chat GPT. But for whatever reason, I I think because of the accessibility for people to be able to use chatch EPT or Dolly on their phone, then I think that's a big reason why the hype ran off the way that it did. But there's several other I refer to it as one piece on the chessboard. There's several other AI and even other advanced technology pieces that haven't quite made their way
into the limelight. Even though they're as powerful or more powerful for executives to harness today.
Brian, I do think about, you know, Tim and I talk a lot about the aging populations, demographics, people having less babies. Although it does feel like Earth is getting maxed out here too in terms of resources. But it does feel like we're going to see you know, continuation in terms of slowdowns. And I do wonder about the labor force of tomorrow, whether or not there's going to be enough people. Health Care is already in a crisis
to some extent. You just see it. I see it in places where you can just see more and more things are being automated. So I do wonder how you think about this? Is it akin to the world discovering and developing the internet and all the things we do online that's made certain things automated? Like how do you think about this transformation? Is there a slot we can place it in? Is it from horse to engine, you know, buggy to car? Like how do you see it?
The way that I look at it is that we've been talking about the next revolution of the industrial revolution over and over again. Right now, it's industry for dot Oh, we've discussed industry five to at zero. I think that we're actually in a stage now where we can move past and we can thank the industrial Revolution for laying the foundation of our society, but move forward into a
new Renaissance or Enlightenment level era of society. And as someone I interviewed recently on my podcast put it, she
said that we're cave painting with AI. And I think that's a really good analogy and that there's a lot of potential that for the way that we as humans can maybe if anything, have a little bit of an analog transformation and some of the things that where we know there's been societal harm, like with screen addiction and these things, maybe we can look at ways that technology can augment for the areas of value creation where we
do rely on technology. Now, are there ways that with AI can add a little bit more capability to so that we don't need to use a screen to interface with that and therefore don't get sucked back into scrolling on our favorite social media platform.
Favorite ones that we love to hate. Brian paint that picture for us of what life looks like in five ten years.
So if my hope for what life can look like in five to ten years is that as automation and autonomous systems continue to proliferate and be put into production, that humans can move up the work hierarchy toward more creative work. And an example of this is now Chemical did an amazing thing in their factories where humans were they would have to drain their vats of chemicals. Humans would suit up in their hazmats suits, go in, inspect the inside and check for quality and check for safety
and all of that. Then they'd exit. So did slow down production, and there is a human safety issue whenever they every time that they had to perform that. What they did instead is they were able to use drones with machine learning or AID technology to be able to just drop the drone into the vat while it's still running and run that same security check without a human having to ever go in and be exposed to that risk.
And so for me personally, I think in the next five years, especially with the amount of time it takes to adequately develop these kinds of systems, I'm guessing that we're going to see more and more work that either is currently not being done or is being done very inefficiently, be automated or become autonomous.
Well, do you think you just got about forty seconds left here? Like the folks in Hollywood, right that have been on strike, I mean, I know they're working, and it looks like they're making some progress potentially, But I mean, do you think they were right to be worried? Creative types?
I think that their right to be concerned about the misuse by executives that are trying to use AI but to replace the work that they do. Absolutely, I think it's a good opportunity to challenge the structure of the way that they're being treated by these organizations, especially if they're being treated like they're dispensable. But what I would say is that any organization that leverages AI as to the full extent and replaces human writing and something like
entertainment is only going to put out pulp fiction. And I don't mean the movie. I mean like the lowest quality of entertainment, and that humans will always be needed to create things like you know, the movies that are flashing across our headlines this summer.
I agree. I mean, I don't know, you can't get maybe we'll get a body by AI exactly, I haven't seen it.
You can redo something that's been done with AI with some mixes and matches and some surprise elements, but it's not going to have the same It'll be the same as any other story arc that's already existed, probably the average of the existing stories.
Brian Evergreen, thank you so much, really appreciate your time. Your book is autonomous transformation, creating a more human future in the era of AI.