Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with me, Matt Best, and Jonny Adams.
Hello!
Today we're absolutely thrilled to be joined by Athena Peppes, and you're going to talk to us a lot around navigating AI adoption, through overcoming fear and embracing foresight. We're going to address some of those ethical challenges that come up as part of that today. So we're really looking forward to getting into that conversation. So Athena, welcome and thank you for coming along.
Well, pleasure to be here today. Thank you for inviting me.
Brilliant, and just a bit about your background. So you're a futurist speaker, and you advise on trends in technology and looking into the future and obviously, and also a founder of Athena Peppes Consulting and Beacon Thought Leadership. But I wonder, for the benefit of our audience, if you could just share a little bit about your background, your journey so far?
Yes, absolutely. So I started off my career as an economist, working in insurance and then in shipping and mining, and my role at the time involved forecasting quite a lot, which is very different to foresight and researching those sectors and understanding a lot about the policy issues, what the demand, supply is and those in those sectors. Then I moved to Accenture, which is a major consulting and technology company, and I worked in thought leadership there for 15 years,
focused on topics related to the future of business. More recently, as you said, I've founded my own consultancies, helping my clients with two aspects of what I'm really
passionate about. One is around long term thinking and really understanding how technology trends are going to shape business, they're going to change it, and how to help them be prepared and actually turn that change into an opportunity and growth for their organization and the others around the other consultancies is a partnership focused on helping them with their with their thought leadership initiatives.
Wow, fantastic. So I was going to try and come up with some sort of pun there, but I think this is all going to be very futuristic. I'm very much, very much looking forward to diving into this with you.
Glad that you finished it, because I was like, is he? Is he going to do it on absolutely super, super interested about this topic today, Athena. And really, I think, in the last number of conferences, or what's going on in the news feed on LinkedIn at the moment, it's all about the future. And you know, what does technology mean to us? And there's a lot more sort of that personal impact. I'm really super excited to spend some time for you today. So thank you for joining us.
Perfect. And before we jump into the future, though, what's customary on the growth workshop podcast is for us to ask a little bit about what's been going on in your week. What have you learned? What's been interesting? Maybe something that you've experienced in your personal life, but you'd be happy to share with with us in the audience today.
Excellent question. I I'll draw on my recent trip. I just came back from Dubai, actually, yesterday, I spent five days there, visiting different sites, there in Abu Dhabi as well. And I was very impressed. It was my first time there. Was very impressed with the focus they have on long term thinking and future generations. And have they, they plan the city, and they plan their economy with that in mind and kind of working backwards.
I've also heard good weather, good food and good shopping. Is that fair to say? Things may have come into this? What was your favorite out of those three?
The weather not so much because I'm Greek, so I should be used to the heat, but it's actually very humid there. And yeah, so quite different. Shopping was excellent. I will say I've never seen a shopping mall like to buy more.
Did you? Did you go out on the plane with a half empty suitcase and come back, we'll see cases on the way around. Good on you.
Good on you. Brilliant. Well, I mean, thank you for sharing that, Athena. And actually, when we dive into the conversation today, I imagine some of that reflection from your trip to Dubai, that sort of, that forward thinking mindset will come out of it. So Jonny, how about you?
This week's been amazing. So, I mean, it's great to have Athena here. She's worked and is a thought leader herself, and one of my favorite authors, Steve Martin, some of you may have read some of his books in the past. I went to his latest book launch. He's just collaborated with the economist and Matt, you and I have been lucky, but also maybe you know, showed how our business works is that we've we've worked with his organization for the last five years. They are behavioral
scientists. They are an organization called influence at work, and as a SBR, from a business development perspective, have sort of merged together to bring science and art together. And for the last five years, we've worked with him, and I think some of the tips and techniques. That he writes about in influence and persuasion have really helped me as an individual, become become better at my job and as a
person. So he talks a lot about the six principles of influence and persuasion, and he's got some great insights around that topic. So yeah, went to the book launch. Really good. Had a beer. It was fantastic. What about you?
Nice. So I went to a slightly different event, actually, and it was an engaged sales event recently in London, which talked about Mark was focused on marketing and sales. And a lot of what we talk about on the growth workshop podcast is, of course, around kind of client centricity and that focus
on bringing that, that all together in organizations. And there's a lot of discussion at that, at that event, actually, which is really insightful, so similar came out with some Yeah, I feel like I've learned a lot this week, which is always a good place to be.
What was the one thing that you took away that was like, Yeah, that was good?
You know what? There's one of the speakers was talking about the importance of when it comes to sales and marketing enablement, the importance of creating a community around it, acknowledging that normally those teams are quite small, so the ability to scale is challenged, right? So, yes, it's scaling through enabling leaders, but also creating a community of people to support
getting that out into the market. So selecting individuals from different teams to be sort of champions and change carriers, which I think is really, really important to to maximize the impact of that. SoAthena, as we look, as we look
to the future. Again, I'm going to try not to say that too many signs, but one of the we were reading in one of your blogs recently, which is actually titled, could humanoid robots close the gender equality gap in that book, you or in that blog, rather, you talk about, you know, the process of adopting technology, and how it involves overcoming some of those natural, understandable and justified concerns, right? But our challenge as humans is not to avoid this progress, but to
make productive, informed and moral use of it. So certainly, whenever I think about the sort of evolution of AI and look around at some of the people sat in those C suite jobs, right? You can, you can sense some fear in that. What do you do? And how do you help those leaders in getting comfortable with that and maybe being able to make informed decisions around how to effectively and appropriately leverage these technologies?
Yeah, it's a very good question. There's a lot to unpack there. You You mentioned the word fear, for example. I think perhaps there is a little bit of fear, but actually the the main concern is around those leaders being fully prepared, especially in an environment where this technology is just changing so fast. I think we're currently in a in a technology
or innovation super cycle. So one development you see in artificial intelligence is quickly bringing in another, and that's how I ended up writing the article around humanoid robotics, because there's a lot of emphasis in the AI research community at the moment in terms of how large language models and generative AI can be embedded into the previous generation of robotics, and that can bring about another wave of growth. You know, that's all happened quite fast, and it's only been a
couple of years since chat GPT was released. But actually, the field of AI, the research that's been done around that, has been going on for much longer, since the release of chat GPT, there's been a lot of hype, a lot of media attention on it, a lot of company investment. So all of that can make leaders feel like things are changing really fast. What am I doing? Everyone's
doing this. What do I do? The reality is that if you kind of look at I was thinking about this the other day, because in the last six months, I think I've had more than 200 conversations with different organizations. The topic that always comes up is artificial intelligence, in terms of what's top of mind for those for those companies, but the pace of
adoption is very, very different, right? And that makes sense, because if you are in consumer goods, you will just naturally move a lot faster and adopt and respond to trends a lot faster. But some industries, like pharmaceuticals, are a lot more heavily regulated, so you'd understand that there might be a bit more hesitant or slower reluctant, and want to be a bit more prepared before adopting any new technology. There's also
the dimension of size. I personally have seen that a lot of the narrative that we get around technology trends, including AI shaped by very large technology companies, right? But as I just mentioned, the industry makes a difference. The size makes a difference of an organization in the UK, if you if you look at the data, 99% of companies are actually SMEs. If you look at that by revenues, it's about 50% employees, 60% so they're the backbone of the economy, right? And so it can
feel like. Everyone's ahead of you in AI, there is a lot of fear, you know, lack of confidence. How do I go about this? Surely everyone knows what they're doing. And actually, that's not the reality, because if you go a bit deeper, you'll see there's a lot of variation in terms of adoption.
There's a piece that I think was really interesting. I know you're going to continue on this trend of asking the question is that you reference, you've had many conversations, and we also do, like we did some market analysis, where there isn't really a growth consultancy in the space that's taking and capitalizing on this AI
conversation. But what I mean by that, Athena, is that, could you give like, a summary, and without putting you on the spot too much, what are those common questions that you're getting asked about, or common concerns? Maybe. So why I ask that question is, I think the listeners that are typically the individuals that you're talking to might go, Yeah, I also have got those problems or questions. Do you have like, a trend of what they're asking you at the moment?
It's a little bit varied, I would say. And that's why I mentioned kind of the industry and size of company. I won't mention names, I'll just give you a couple of examples as
illustrations. So for example, I was talking to a marketing agency that works a lot with life sciences and pharmaceutical companies, and they were the ones that were saying, Look, we see the potential to use AI and what we do, but it's very important to take our clients along with us in that journey, and they're a little bit hesitant, because they worry about that regulation. And when you say AI, that could mean a lot of different things. It could be something very simple,
right? It can be something super sophisticated.
Should be AI for dummies. You remember the book that were your like, you know, I think my mom and dad got...
How do you use a computer for dummies?
There must be one.
I'm sure there is. But it's a little bit like that. And I think the issue is sometimes, if you're very senior executive or, you know, then it can feel a little bit like, oh, I can't say that. I don't know exactly what's happening in that space. And actually the best way to kind of get around any fears just better understanding, better knowledge, more conversation around the talk. Expert, yeah. Another example is how to use it for pricing. How to use AI for pricing.
Describe that a little bit more when I'm curious, I've talked to a professional service firm. So future will look like there's been a lot of consolidation in
financial services over the last number of years. There's going to be a heavy pivot towards professional services being consolidating in the UK market, with a lot of classic sort of money needed to be invested by investors, as we all know, it was going on at the moment, and that was sort of a bit of insight shared to me this week, but, but pricing was the key point that investors are looking for at the moment. So how do you
think AI and pricing? I'm curious about that because that's very topical.
Yeah, that came from another kind of lead, and they're just interested in understanding basically how they can get better data faster, into their into their sales teams using it, and how AI can help them do that, so that they can have more competitive pricing, so they can think a little bit differently about what their pricing strategy. So my dynamic sizing board, yes, or modeling different scenarios, right? And being able to understand, okay, if I do this, what if this
happens? What would the impact be? And some of that might be already there. But obviously it's becoming a lot more sophisticated. The data sets on which these models are trained are a lot bigger. So in theory, they should be better quality, but then you also get issues around that, like, is it really that robust? We know there's an issue with hallucinations, right? So if you create a tool to help your teams with with pricing, how can you make sure that the data gives them is also
very robust? You're also dealing with very sensitive data, right? How do you ensure that it's, it's secure when it when it comes to pricing? So those are some of the questions that are coming up around this.
Something that's sort of interesting, and I'd love your perspective on on some of those industry type trends you mentioned, sort of Life Sciences and pharmaceutical fair to assume that they're a kind of fairly highly regulated industry. I think, you know, some of the more consider it kind of more straightforward, sort of AI technologies are still struggling to get into into some of these industries,
just as a result of the regulatory environment. Do you see this as much the job of regulators and policy and policy makers as it is the businesses themselves?
Yeah, I think there is an element of that, in the sense that sometimes organizations might wait to see what the regulation is before they adopt something right? I think then culture comes into. Play and kind of how fast you can be. Some organizations might say, well, but in the meantime,
we're still missing out on all this potential, this growth. I think the other thing with being an early adopter is potentially, of course, it's high risk, but also you might be able to illustrate the benefits to the policy makers as well as they shape that policy. The key thing, I think, around regulation policy making, is that, for sure, organizations have to deal with just a patchwork of regulation, because each country or each region, say, in the case of the EU,
takes a very different approach. That's another part of the dynamic. You have to think about that in the US, they tend to be a bit more relaxed. I would argue, if you look at the trend over time, that they are actually becoming a lot more focused on on regulation, for sure, but look at the UI act that's already come into into force, that is quite intense. I'm not an expert in the space. I can't comment specifically, but on a webinar recently about like, how many assessments now
companies have to do? Because even if you have the same tool every time you use it, if you use it for sales, you have to do a different assessment than if you use the same tool for marketing or internal employee training or different kind of things. There is a lot of that. But I think the back then, it comes back to the balance we talked about a little bit before, right of, how do you make sure you take advantage of the opportunity and not miss out?
And if we think about, kind of practically diving into some of the practicalities of the work that you do, when you sit down with a C suite executive who's feels maybe a little bit under qualified, is getting pressure from the business to adopt new technology. He's worried about
the risk. And you know, whether that be, you know the because, because risk is always on the other side of that, the other side of that equation, how, what's your approach, typically, to doing that you mentioned, sort of education and building and understanding is so important. So is that at the heart of what you do, in terms of you of helping these executives in understanding what this looks like and how it could shape the future of their business?
Yes, in terms of how to help them, it really depends on where they are on that on that adoption journey, because some come and say, we know this is a trend. We know we need to do something. We kind of don't know what to do. Others are experimenting. They've already rolled out some proofs of concept. And just want to thinking about scaling, you
know, across different business functions. The way I help them is to think a little bit about the future of their organization, and where is it that they want to be, and to also make sure that when they're thinking about those technologies, they're not just thinking about today, but what will AI look like in five years time, so that you can be whatever you introduce now, can be more resilient, I would always start with the problem. So what's the problem that
they're facing, right? It's the classic consulting of trying to understand, in some cases, it's not them, it's their teams. How do we take our teams along with us? In other cases, is like, Oh, we feel resistance, because people think this is going to take over their jobs. How can we make them sure there's actually potential to help? It kind of varies a lot.
If you're looking and again, I kind of digging into this, and I'm really curious, is your perspective? We talk a lot when we when we're working with leaders, around, kind of toward an away motivation of your employees, right? So away motivation being, I'm afraid of something, so I'm going to do something because of the consequences of something else. And toward motivation is I'm going to do something because I really want to strive for it. So it's sort of proactive versus
cat versus stick, if you like. Are you seeing that, if you had to sort of balance the the equation on which side is that falling? Is that? Is it more about with the executives that you work within the businesses you work with? Is it? Is it fear of being left behind more than what opportunity could we unlock? Or is it the other way around?
I think it's kind of, it's almost actually a little bit above that, in the sense of, maybe, I'll give you a stat, and that might help. So some of the research that I've done in the past has been focused on change, quantifying change, a pace of change, and understanding how the C suite sees that and how that compares to actual data on change on the
ground. Now, 88% of C suite executives surveyed said that they expect the pace of change to accelerate, but 52% said they not fully prepared for what that change will mean for their organization.
So there it is, right?
So yeah, because, as I said that, and then you can go deeper into that, but the implications are huge, right? Because they have to make decisions about how to allocate their budgets, their time, for people. So if you're not fully prepared, then how are you going to make. Those decisions. And the idea is, most of the time they spend dealing with the day to day, operational delivery for the next quarter, financial
results, that kind of thing. So how can you, or in this case, me, help them kind of take some time out of the day to day and think about their organization in the future and where they want to go. And there's different ways to do that, right? You can help them with recognizing the trends that are out there. I always use rise in my mind as a way to kind of structure that so eyes for recognizing trends and just understanding what signals are out there, what's happening, the
eyes around imagining the possibilities. Okay, so, yes, I've read about this interesting trend. What does that mean? And so the example of a humanoid robotics I was just thinking, Who knows whether, in the future, we might have companies instead of giving you certain types of benefits like health insurance, what if they gave you a home robot to do all your housework for you, so you wouldn't have to spend your time doing that, and you could be more productive.
Oh, please, that sounds amazing.
I know, but I'm not. The point is not to predict or to argue for it. It is just to say what if or what you know, and to pose those kind of questions that really straight.
And is that the "I", because it's unpacking that sort of quite boxed view, and actually we're opening up our blind spots to think, well, what could...
Yes, so imagine, like different possibilities, right? Then the S is for shape scenarios, because you can imagine those kind of possibilities, but people respond differently to seeing a story of what the organization will actually look like. So you can take, say, two dimensions.
If we take the example of AI, you can take a dimension around advancement of the technology, and another one around regulate, like fast to slow, and another one around regulation, lenient to kind of tight, and then almost create stories of so you can imagine like a little quadrant of that, and think about stories of what, what would that world look like, and how, how do you operate? How do you what does your organization look like in that future? And then that's where the E comes in
around enabling action. Because once you have those different stories, what you can do is say, But hold on a second. If that came to bear, that would mean we're obsolete. Or if that came to bear, that would mean we'll make a lot more money. How you influence that? You know? So that's the that's the idea behind using foresight frameworks to help you think about the future, but see growth today.
I think anyone like you talk about that, that with execs, you can imagine the calmness that comes over the boardroom when they all go, Oh, okay. So we can put this into those mode, into those moments. And I can think about this in the big, big picture, without feeling all of that pressure. And I can be, you know, I can be conscious of of those, of those
other stages. So I love that. I think that's really and I think actually, for anyone listening to this, whether, regardless of where you sit in, in your own or in your own organization, is a really, a really important way of, kind of having that perspective. Because you mentioned the robot in your house doing the cleaning, and like, some people will be going...
Athena doesn't have a robot in the house just yet.
But some people will be going to the kind of I Robot view, right? Will Smith. They go, Oh my gosh, it's gonna, like, destroy us, Black Mirror. No, God, let's not go there.
Which is very forward looking and excellent at prediction.
Somewhat worrying.
But then the reality is that we take ourselves back, kind of came back, kind of 2030, years and said autonomous cars, everyone would be going having exactly the same response that people are probably having now to the idea of having a robot doing the cleaning. So I think it's just sort of, I guess, being able to sort of see that and put that in perspective, it's really important.
Well, and also to let you know that that already actually exists. The I'll send you a video, which I'm sure you'd love to watch. There's a company called 1x they released a robot, humanoid robot called Neo. The video is of this. I don't know. Would I say he, she? I don't, I don't know. It's Neo, yeah, yeah, helping this person get ready for work, right? I mean, it's kind of fascinating, and there's a lot of VC funding and investment, and even the big tech players like Nvidia are
really backing a lot of companies in this space. So it feels futuristic, and part of the job is to help organizations see that perhaps it's not as out there as you might think. Some of that is already there. Yes, you could argue about the pace of it, whether people will want to adopt it or not. At the end of the day, technology is not neutral. It's up to us to decide
if we would want a robot around children, for example. On the other hand, if I was to put my economist hat on, I would argue might be a good thing, because we have aging demographic, aging population in many developed countries. How do we care for them when there's a lack of carers? Should policy. Makers be investing in this should companies be working with them to help address this problem? There's just so much to unpack there.
Athena, thank you for joining us, and to everyone listening. Join us for part two as we continue this conversation.