Digital Transformations and the Art of Possible with Jeff Roberts

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast, where we explore cutting- edge strategies to keep teams human- centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights needed to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience enhancing team dynamics and innovation. Are you a leader facing the daunting challenge of adapting technology and AI into your organization? If so, today, Jeff Roberts serves as your trusted guide. Jeff is the founder of Innovation Vista, an IT consulting firm offering C- level IT leaders for strategy and leadership engagements, driving business results for small and mid- size organizations. First, we'll explore the crucial strategy of embracing technology as a teammate and treating AI as a junior member of your team. Next, we'll reveal the power of harnessing technology to not only meet customer needs, but also cultivate invaluable partnerships with other service providers. This is your path to unlocking new opportunities. Last, we'll address a pressing reality. In today's competitive landscape, you can't afford not to leverage AI, as your competitors are already doing so. We'll provide you with actionable strategies to not only embrace AI, but also effectively mitigate the associated risks. This is your bridge to a future where AI becomes a competitive advantage rather than a potential threat. So, teamwork makes the dream work and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team or put on your headphones and let's dive in together.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork. My name is Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group, and today I'm joined by Jeff Roberts. Jeff is the CEO of Innovation Vista, and we're going to be talking a lot about how technology is driving the art of the possible in teams. So, welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeff Roberts: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have the discussion.

Dane Groeneveld: It's going to be great. Technology is not something that's ever been a strong point of mine, so I would say the last six to nine months with all of the generative AI news, I've been really scrambling to work out what that means. So, I'm sure a lot of our listeners will love hearing what we covered today.

Jeff Roberts: Excellent. Yeah, it's certainly the topic of the day. It's exciting times and for some people, scary times.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, both. Both. So, Jeff, perhaps for the benefit of our listeners, can you provide a bit of a background on how you came to have the skills and the purpose that you have and to be running Innovation Vista?

Jeff Roberts: Sure, absolutely. So, began my career as a system developer and data modeler. Pivoted from there to project management and then ultimately into org chart positions in IT leadership. And I served as the CIO for five different organizations, a lot in financial services and real estate. And when the last company that I served as CIO for was acquired by a very large multinational, I decided rather than try to find CIO chair number six, that I would instead open up Innovation Vista and try to bring some of the ideas that I've had some success with as a CIO to small and midsize companies, with a flexible structure, providing contract CIO consulting to a lot of companies that maybe don't feel they have the budget for a full- time CIO, but they truly do need those services. They need the guidance and expertise.

Dane Groeneveld: And fractional seems to be the future for work. I think a lot of teams, they can't afford or they don't have an immediate need to put an all guns blazing superstar on the team, but to borrow them for a few hours here and there a few weeks for a project. That's something that a lot of companies over the last 50 years haven't had the luxury of and now it's far more available. So, it's great that you are playing in that space.

Jeff Roberts: Absolutely agree. The trend is our friend, as they say, in this, not just fractional but virtual as well. I think coming out of the pandemic, one of the things we saw was a lot more openness to conducting business via video conference and that really opened a lot of doors for us to find better matches. So, we have a team of 350 consultants. In a fractional model where clients expect a consultant to come in and be in their office some percentage of the time, that limits them to just people in their market, obviously.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: But in the virtual world, we can match up consultants from the West Coast with clients on the East Coast or vice versa, even internationally. And it really helps us find that very best expert for what they're trying to do. So yeah, it's exciting times and people's willingness to buy their answers and buy their expertise as opposed to hiring a person, I think it makes so much sense in so many areas where expertise really moves the needle. And certainly, IT leadership is, I think, at the top of that list.

Dane Groeneveld: I really like the way you frame buying answers or buying expertise because the reality is a lot of small business owners, medium business owners have always looked at IT as more like manage the contract with the cable provider, the internet, getting all the tools and TVs and everything working, more of a corporate infrastructure standpoint than what is now so much more of an applications data realm, which is just so vast. So, I know from my own experience trying to fumble my way through some applications and data- type projects, you can get lost really quickly. I would've much preferred to have bought some answers and expertise on some of those past projects.

Jeff Roberts: Absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: So, where is it in your mind, Jeff, going back to this whole concept of the art of the possible, where is it that you think teams right now have opportunity to be looking at different approaches to the way they do work together?

Jeff Roberts: Yeah. Just the pace of change, I think, is the ultimate cause of this, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: And change is accelerating. It's scary to think that change has never been occurring as it is today and it will never again be this slow. So, very hard for the human mind to grasp that. Very hard for people who are outside of technology to have an up- to- date view of the art of the possible. I love that phrase. And because it's a different answer than it was six months ago, certainly 12, 24 months ago, and it will be a different answer in six to nine months than it is today. And that's just a result of advancing capabilities, the economies of scale, the commoditization of a lot of things. There's a race to the bottom on price for a lot of things that used to be cost prohibitive, making them in the realm of possible. The hyperscaler platforms, AWS and Azure, et cetera. You can start as a startup, as a very small organization and have a lot of architecture decisions still make sense when you're 10X and 100X that size. So, it's just a lot of things now are possible and make sense that didn't use to. I think business leaders, certainly staff people in business functions, they're busy, all day every day, they're trying to run these businesses and that makes it very difficult to also keep up with this moving edge of technology. And so yeah, I think an outside view is extremely valuable and to broaden the horizons of a group, " Can we do this?" Or, " By the way this is possible, would this help?" Let's think about ROI with a different set of potential projects than what their internal team has thought about or certainly what the business groups have probably thought about.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: That's a huge part of our practice, honestly, is broadening minds on the art of the possible and how technology can really impact the business model. Not just, to your point earlier, be an internal cost and a group that deals with the infrastructure and let's just keep the lights on, please, as cheap as you can do it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And I heard through COVID, naturally, COVID forced a lot of us into virtual and remote environments, so there was an explosion. It wasn't just Zoom, everyone was buying tools for everything. I think I saw a stat there that said$ 1. 3 billion had been spent on software applications and I think it was as much as 900 million of that... In fact, it might've been trillion and billion. I think it was 1. 3 trillion and 900 billion had been written off already. And the reason for the write- offs were people hadn't scoped the right tools, they'd put too many tools in front of employees who were all of a sudden fatigued and distracted from their core workflows. So, that seems to be some crazy amount of churn that we've just come through. How much of that have you seen with some of the customers you are going and supporting? Are you having to tear out and simplify it or is it more taking them into new opportunities?

Jeff Roberts: Some of both, but we do see a lot, and I think for understandable reasons, I think the pace of change, the complexity, those are the factors that make mistakes more likely. And so, again, all good reasons why the outside expertise is probably more valuable now than it ever has been, to try to avoid some of those basic mistakes. For lack of a better word, to scrutinize and call BS on the salespeople, because technology salespeople are paid to make sales and if clients are trusting those answers when they're looking for solutions and they don't have that person in their corner who is serving as that neutral party to really just give their best advice with no skin in the game, no incentive to drive a decision one way or another, just really motivated to give good counsel. You don't have that. It's hard to trust what you hear and what you read. And so yeah, I think the number of mistakes, sadly, is huge. And the other negative part that comes from that is people are turned off by digital transformation because somewhere in their recent past they've made a mistake like that and the CFO says, "Look, the last time you came to me with something like this, we spent$ 2 million and we ended up throwing it away after six months. So, pardon me if I'm not all that excited about writing another check." Right? Understandable. Tragic, because in some ways with the right counsel, they really do need to be thinking about this. And it's certainly true that their competitors are. Some groups have got a lot of horsepower internally. Certainly, the larger companies have an advantage in that regard. But we find small and mid- size can compete and make just as good, if not better decisions and more innovative decisions, with the right counsel, than the large company. They don't get weigh down by committees on committees and preset budgets and things like that quite as much.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: So, at the same time, it's a very exciting landscape and business right now and it is extremely complicated, risky, and mistakes are common, sadly.

Dane Groeneveld: It's daunting. And there's a cost as well, from what I see, Jeff, and I'm sure you do too. If you roll out a new tool and you train the team on it and you start to integrate it with some of your other systems, there's a huge cost to tearing it out and replacing it with another tool, because like you said, teams are turned off by their digital transformation experience. They're like, " Oh, here we go again." And it's just so disruptive. So, often, what we find is that people, once they've implemented some kind of software or application, if it's not working, they won't complain about it because they don't want to go back to the boss and say, " That check you wrote for me, it was worthless. We've got to tear it out and either fall back on our old manual processes, old tools, or replace it."

Jeff Roberts: Very true. Very true. And we hear this sentiment a lot, the grass is not always greener. There's also a fear that if they complain about some weaknesses in the system, that someone will want to rip it out and replace it and it'll probably have more and different pain points than the current one. And so, there is a mindset sadly that just it is what it is, where the features work, take advantage. Where the features don't work, hey, that's job security for all of us and so we'll do Excel spreadsheets on the side and make it work.

Dane Groeneveld: That's a really interesting point, the job security one, Jeff. I'm glad you called that one out. I've heard and I've seen in a lot of teams that the workarounds exist because it creates power, and I think that's been the case ever since the advent of computing. The original IT guys that used to run the big mainframe computers wanted to be in control there because they couldn't be replaced either. But that is a real thing and I guess it's good and it's bad depending on what the team's trying to achieve through their manual workarounds. But there's a lot of hidden hours and processes that are hard to find even when you're going out to look for a new application because you don't know how some of that black box stuff works in the people side of the team.

Jeff Roberts: Very true. And it certainly has some negative, it's understandable. We could spend a lot of time talking about how we wish that didn't happen, but the truth is, it's human nature. It would be like complaining about how we always need oxygen to breathe, okay, but it's still going to be true. In fact, that human nature aspect is, I think a lot of IT professionals and frankly even consultants are naive and they don't allow for the human nature aspect of change, the fear. The job security being at the very, very top of that, and obviously so many things happening with AI and automation in the market today, they are a source of fear for people.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: And we see business leaders as well as technology leaders and consultants just miss this. Whereas, if they just would cast a vision and explain how they see technology and automation in AI fitting into the operation almost as teammates moreso than tools, right? It would help people really feel more comfortable. It doesn't take away all the fear, I'm sure, but they at least can see a path from where they are to a future world where AI is part of the mix, but they still have a job. And unless they're in a function that leadership intends to fully do away with... Which there are not that many of, frankly because of the need for the human in the loop for quality control and other purposes. The vast majority, it's simply AI is not going to take your job, but a professional using AI might.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Jeff Roberts: And that difference, I think, is critical and it helps people be motivated in a more healthy way and to understand they need to take it seriously, they need to learn it, they need to grasp it as opposed to running away from it.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's neat. I like the way you frame technology as a teammate. I think that's really cool and it makes it more human, less scary, going back to your point. And using that story, that future narrative of, " Hey, this technology's going to help you beat other people with technology. It's going to be part of your team. You're going to interact with it like you might interact with a team member now." That's actually, no matter what the tool or application is, it's just a little bit more relatable, I think.

Jeff Roberts: Yeah. Oh, yeah. We love that approach and there's a lot of truth to it. I mean, if you treat AI like a junior team member... So, you don't accept the limitations, right? If you hired a new junior person off the street to do the low- end part of any function, and if you hand it to the more senior people to finish and to polish, et cetera, they're all comfortable with that and a lot of times they're excited because maybe they're doing that low- end work themselves.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: The mindset we like to encourage is, treat AI like that because what would you do if a junior level person made a mistake? You wouldn't say, " Oh, you know what? We're probably going to need to just do this function ourselves from now on and we'll keep an Excel spreadsheet to the side because AI Bob over here is not capable." You wouldn't do that. You would say, " Let me train you. Let me you how to finish this and do this in a more thorough and accurate way." And most AI models now are either fully custom, particularly if they're machine learning or NLP kinds of models, or they are custom prompt engineered on top of these commercial platforms like the large language models and graphic generative like a Firefly or a Midjourney. Either way, there's custom work there that I wouldn't say it's easy to evolve that and improve that, but it's certainly possible.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: And the solutions are tailored. And so, we try to encourage them like, think of it like you want to monitor the new person that you've just hired, monitor the AI, and then go to the team that's built the model when you see gaps, issues, whatever, and help them make it better. Don't think to your mind like, "Oh, well, it'll help us with job security and this is just a weakness in the system." The way that they're used to maybe with their Oracle ERP or SAP or whatever they have is, " Okay, it's not good at this, so we'll do it on the side." Try to help make it better. And organizations that grasp that really get the full ROI and the full benefit and the team feels like they own it. It's not something that IT did to them. It's their tool. It's their team member, if you will, but they're working alongside them.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that one's really powerful. If they feel like they own it, it's not being rolled down from the heavens above. That's really interesting. And we see in some of our failed projects in the past, we're adopting more of a pilot project approach to some of the new technologies. So, we've got this DEEP acronym. So, we define what problem we're trying to solve, because there's lots of fancy tools, but if you don't know what problem you're solving with it, you can get really lost. Then we engage a team, which I think helps that. Who on the team's going to use it? Who's already doing that work? Let's make them part of it. We explore what tools exist, and then we try and do a pilot. And I think that pilot process, going to your point, is where you can treat that tool or technology as the junior team member and you don't say, " Hey, whatever it does is what it does." And work around it. We actually learn. And that's the nice thing about some of these new tools is that they're fluid, they're not a big ERP system where you've got to call someone to create a custom field, like the prompt engineering, how you play with them is so much more open.

Jeff Roberts: Very true. Yeah, love that. I've not heard the DEEP acronym before, but that really aligns with what we recommend, the agile approach to building, because we don't really fully understand a problem until we've done a little, we've seen the results, we've gotten feedback, we go back to the lab. It's an iterative thing and it's another vestige of the old approach to technology that people still have this big red switch kind of mindset that, " All right, let's figure out what we need to build. What's it going to cost? Let's get the budget approved. Let's design it, build it, test it, and then one day when it's ready, we throw the big red switch and we all hope it works." That doesn't work. The risks are huge. The likelihood that you've got it wrong, even if just around the margins, around the margins is enough to break the whole thing.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, yeah.

Jeff Roberts: So yeah, unless you are NASA and you're trying to send something to Mars and once it's gone on that rocket, it's gone, right? It needs to work the first time, right? There's certain unique use cases where that old approach still makes sense, but by and large in business today, iterative, agile approaches are the right answer and they reduce the risk, they increase the engagement, and ultimately they get you to a more effective solution in the end.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that. Well, before the show, we were talking about the fact that it's a lot more affordable now and modular. You can buy a month, a couple of months, you're not spending huge amounts of money on implementation on a lot of softwares. How does that lead you to be working with some of your customers and teams across functions? So, is it always going and working with the CEO and CIO or are you going in and working directly with marketing or directly with the FP& A function? How does that shape up?

Jeff Roberts: Great question. Yeah. I would say generally the early stage, the identification of a need or an opportunity is usually business leadership for us. So, we're brought in most often by the CEO, COO, CFO. In some cases where we're doing advisory work, we're brought in by the CIO. But to really be successful doing what we do, helping organizations really find the most ideal strategy and innovative project ideas, digital transformation roadmap, things like that. We need to collaborate all the way down to staff level, middle management. Yeah, it's too complex and if the techies in the organization think they really understand the business world and they're not doing that function every day, they're naive, they're making a mistake.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: So, we really try to get the insights from the people who live it and breathe it every day. What would help, what wouldn't? What are the limits of automation? There's a lot of hype about, especially with AI, this autonomous idea where a system can be built that takes over what people do today in full and you just hit the autopilot button and you walk away, right? And it's very rarely possible. Human intelligence is amazing and incredible and people, we're not always even aware of the kind of judgements and adjustments that we make. So, we end up really drilling down on those things and finding, there are usually the junior level opportunities for processes where that ROI makes sense to leverage AI, but it's not an autopilot button. It is, " Okay, let's build a machine that creates the first draft." Something like that.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Jeff Roberts: And then, okay, that saves time and now you've made the people on your team a lot more effective, et cetera. But to really know, where are those break points? What should we aim for with a high chance of success, low chance of false positive, false negatives coming out of the model? We've all heard the amusing/ embarrassing stories of the hallucinations-

Dane Groeneveld: The hallucinations.

Jeff Roberts: ...that the AI might be able to come up with. Right? Those are dangerous in the business world and especially in autonomy. People have inaudible their chatbot to talk with customers directly and they've said some things that just really wish that they had a human in the middle of that in some cases, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, yeah. That one's really interesting and I want to come back to the customer facing interface of technology in a minute. But on that point of hallucinations, a friend of mine shared an article the other day, and it ties into what you just said earlier, it's never been faster, this technology growth, but it's never again going to be as slow. The article suggested, well, right now the large language models, ChatGPT, they've ingested all of the data, which was largely human generated. But let's roll forward three years. And now if you say that half of the data that it has ingested in four years time was ChatGPT generated at an 80% efficacy, then you're getting 80% of 80%, which is only 64%. So, is it actually going to get dumber? That was the question that the article posed. And so, there's some interesting challenges out there that we don't yet know depending on which tool and method you're using.

Jeff Roberts: Very true. Yeah. And I just think, I won't say don't believe the hype, but we say just beware of the hype, because I mean even the Wall Street Journal has gone hyperbolic on some of its articles about AI's going to change the landscape of the business world forever, et cetera. And it's true in some sense, but it's not the wholesale, " Now all we need are robots in the company, we don't need people anymore. We better start talking about universal income because people aren't going to have a job anymore." Right? We are so far from that. If companies are smart... Back on the risk of autonomy, almost every single use case we find, need the human in the loop, almost every single one.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: And the ones that don't, there's only a certain number of outcomes that can happen, and it's not the end of the world if the wrong one gets chosen, right? It's very tightly confined conditions that make it safe for autonomy. Outside of that, these are tools and it's thinking about it as this team member, and let's be the team that has AI in its pocket and on its team, and not the one that's got its head stuck in the sand and let the competitors go and do that, because there are real efficiencies and frankly, there's revenue and market share out there for the taking, because customers are beginning to expect this more and more. It's not just Amazon and Netflix that they look to to suggest, " What else might I need if I'm getting these other things or if I like these particular kinds of movies?" They're expecting that from their industrial parts suppliers and their doctors, and I mean, it's part of society now to think that you will look on my behalf and search some kind of database and have an AI wizard help me.

Dane Groeneveld: It's fascinating. So, I've been asking, whenever I get in the car lately, there's a song that I like listening to and I'm intrigued by the lyrics, so every time I get in the car, I ask for the song. And the last three times I got in the car, the first thing that comes on as I get in the car, Pandora opens up on Apple CarPlay and it plays me that song. I don't even have to ask for it anymore. So, that seamlessness that is possible, going back to your art of the possible, as a consumer, I'm not going to switch from that interface, that Apple CarPlay, because it knows me, it's connected to my device that's in the pocket. It's starting to do things that I want it to do. Or I get in at 4: 00 in the morning and it gives me the directions to the beach. I get in at 8: 00 in the morning, it gives me directions to the office. I don't have to ask.

Jeff Roberts: Right. Exactly. And think about all the things that we just, in our lives, that we have to repeat. That really if someone were paying attention, if a system was paying attention... Drive- through fast food, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: Had a conversation with a prospective client on this topic. So, we have license plate identifiers. We have AI models. If someone goes through the drive- through, and when they go through in the evening, they always order two value meals with Diet Coke, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: And it's every single time, why not prompt them... You know they've driven up, put a little camera there, prompt them to say, " Would you like your normal order?" And just some efficiencies like that are just ripe for the taking and it's back to the art of the possible where we started the conversation.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that prompting too because-

Jeff Roberts: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: ...it's so cool, we had a guest of the show, Carl Cox from 40 Strategy, come down and work with one of my teams here the other week, and we were talking about setting our strategy and how hard it is to execute strategy. And one of the examples he used was, it's really hard to tell your sales team that are used to engaging with customers one way to then add on, " Would you like fries with that." Right? If you start upselling something. But if you can start to use technology and prompt with technology either to help the salesperson remember when they're on a call, to ask the question or to, in fact, send out some digital messaging to the customer after the call to say, " Oh, by the way, we also do this." You can execute at scale very quickly.

Jeff Roberts: Absolutely. And we find opportunities for that, not just with breadth of products and services within an organization, but we found some opportunities for partnerships even.

Dane Groeneveld: Interesting.

Jeff Roberts: So, if you know that what you do is part of an ecosystem that is larger and the people who take your product are probably also buying some other things. Ask them about that, see if that's the case, and then have these strategic partnerships where you can have preferred partners receive leads from you. Your customer base, you're helping the customer because you can make this a seamless transaction. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: So, we encourage people to think about the whole ecosystem. Don't just think about your offering and your book of products and services. What's the world of the customer? And really think about them and if they're doing this, how else can we help them? Right? I mean, if they're buying a pencil, you don't want to offer them a bag of oranges. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: I mean, there's a certain limit of which things relate in that ecosystem, but it's often much broader than people think just within our walls, what can we do? And there are all kinds of opportunities in the digital world where we have system integration, APIs, leads back and forth, even to send orders on behalf of someone else if you get the trust and the relationship built. I think the sky is the limit on a lot of those kinds of opportunities.

Dane Groeneveld: That's interesting. So, for a sales team who are always... Well, sales, account management, customer success, for any of those teams in that RevOps environment, whether it's a SaaS or a product company, they can use technology, they can build partnerships more seamlessly because there's always been partner drag, which is why we don't waste much time on partnerships, because there's a lot of having to pick up phones and trust that they'll show up and do what they said they did. But with the technology, maybe there is an opportunity to bundle more and better serve the customer in that approach.

Jeff Roberts: Absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: They're buying that pencil, the likelihood that they may want a pad of paper is probably fairly high. And if you can connect that and make that a single transaction for the customer, you've probably won the loyalty of a customer. And if you're the first one to move in that and no one else is offering it, that's an opportunity to really disrupt the space and take over. So yeah, I mean, every one of these cases comes down to feasibility and can you find the partners that you trust? And you need to vet a lot of this, but we find a lot of the value we bring to the table is just thinking that way and asking those kinds of questions like, " Well, this would be technically possible. Would it help you?"

Dane Groeneveld: Yep.

Jeff Roberts: As simple as that sounds, honestly, I don't want to undersell what we do, but there's sometimes just value in that outsider walking in with a new pair of eyes and maybe they've done something similar in an adjacent space, but not yet in your industry.

Dane Groeneveld: So, in that sense, the work that you're all doing can actually expand beyond digital transformation into revenue model and other elements there? Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: The word innovation really, we say we're a combination of innovation consulting and IT consulting. A lot of the expertise does end up being, okay, we'll have some IT solution for that, but some of it is, to your point, it's business model, it's strategy, it's positioning, it's market share, it's competitive advantage. And those things now are, they've never been more tightly aligned because the answer to new business models often today is IT, and that's what opens the door and makes something possible that yesterday was impossible.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's really cool. I had a question for you then, Jeff, on, as you move through organizations, let's say a CEO calls you and says, " Hey, Jeff, I've got this services business. We want to look at how we can play with the technologies that are out there." Is there a scorecard or some objective framing that you do that says, " Well, where should we start?"? Because it's a pretty big canvas.

Jeff Roberts: Yeah. Great question. We actually start 90% of our engagements with an assessment and a recommendations report. So that is, it's prepackaged. We certainly want to understand the strategy and they often have something in their head that made them reach out and contact us, but we also want to do them the service of turning over every rock and just simply looking and making sure they're strong where they think they're strong and they're as weak as they think, maybe where they think that they have some distance to improve. So, that's where we start. It's a three- week engagement, very affordable, simple first step. $ 15,000, three weeks, they get this report, and more importantly, they get the recommendations at the end of that assessment. That really opens up the thought process around the art of the possible. They get a sense of our consultant's expertise and their thought process, their creativity and their IQ, and their personality, which is obviously hugely important for trust and inaudible.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, yeah. People still do business with people they like regardless of the technology.

Jeff Roberts: Absolutely. It just makes sense for all kinds of reasons. So, we start most like that. Then we basically, if they like our consultant and they like some or all of the recommendations, that's where we get into a longer term partnership, either interim CIO, virtual CIO or an advisory capacity.

Dane Groeneveld: Great.

Jeff Roberts: And we do have a framework in particular to find opportunities to increase market share and to create revenue streams. We've got some things around efficiencies. I think in every IT group, every IT consulting firm is delivering efficiencies. I mean, that's been the traditional IT ROI since the'80s. So, I think we set ourselves apart more in the focus on top line than on margin.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that.

Jeff Roberts: We're still shocked, very few IT consulting and innovation consulting firms talk about top line, and that's how you grow. You can't save your way to growth. And so, it shocks us. But-

Dane Groeneveld: It's an interesting construct too, because I listened to a podcast the other day, I think it was the All- In podcast and a few smart guys, right? And they're talking about, they think that technology, particularly in AI, will become much more affordable, much more available. And so, most of the benefits will pass to the end customer because companies will compete against each other and they'll increase their innovation, drive down their cost of delivery, the customer's winning. So, going back to your earlier point on focusing on top line, focusing on market share, there'll be some real consolidation plays or just sheer taking market share off competitors. So, that actually seems to stack up as fairly logical.

Jeff Roberts: It is. And it's a great point about the affordability will drive the value. We have that conversation a lot with clients and what it amounts to is there's value in being a first mover, certainly, that ability to disrupt and be the first one to offer a certain thing can really give you either pricing power or just service and product quality power, no one else can match, and you can take over. Right? That competitive moat. Then it's a matter of how do you keep that moat from being filled in? And the one thing that clients have about their customers is their own proprietary data. There's all kinds of information about consumers, and certainly B2B, there are tremendous databases of information that are out there for sale, there's a whole marketplace for that, but no one knows what you know about the customer as deeply as you know it. And so, there's some secret sauce there. It looks different in different industries, but there's some secret sauce there that we believe often can keep the customer. Even if a competitor comes along and says, " Look, we have the same widget. Actually, our widget might even be better than this first mover, because we learned the lessons of what they did and then we copied it and we made it a little better." Maybe, but if you can't duplicate the results because you don't have that data and those insights about the customer, it still may fall short and you still may be able to protect that Rolodex of customers. It's easier said than done, and I just said it like it's really simple to do. It's not. But yeah, I think that's going to be the challenge for consultants in our space and really for business in general.

Dane Groeneveld: And for a lot of the teams that I see out there, Jeff, that seems to be a reason that they're afraid of using AI is that they're like, " I've got proprietary information. I've got proprietary relationships. I don't want to put my customer list or my customer details into something that's sharing it with the great wide web."

Jeff Roberts: Absolutely. Well, there's some embarrassing examples, like the Samsung internal team, they were using ChatGPT to basically refine and wordsmith some of their proposals for their strategic plans, and that went into the public database. And so, other users could pop in and say, " What is Samsung planning relative to X, Y, Z?"

Dane Groeneveld: That's scary.

Jeff Roberts: Huge embarrassment, huge just loss of IP there. A lot of that has been solved. So, there are private instances now where you can send in data. It does not go into training the model, and it's not accessible by anyone else. I mean, I think the industry realized immediately, this is a potential deal killer if people are losing their secret sauce inaudible.

Dane Groeneveld: So, your IP can sit on top of the common publicly available platform?

Jeff Roberts: Right. Right. Yeah. And that comfort level will increase, I think. It's a little bit like cloud computing where people early on were very scared of leveraging the cloud because they thought, " So that means other people can query our stuff." No, it really can be just as locked down, if not, frankly, moreso than if you're hosting that data in your own data center behind your own firewalls. So, same kind of thing now, I think is happening with the AI private instance. So, hopefully that problem is solved, and for those companies out there that are thinking, " We have secrets, we don't want to use AI because of that." It's not enough, and believe me, your competitors are out there.

Dane Groeneveld: They're doing it.

Jeff Roberts: In most industries, they're doing it now. And if they do find a way to disrupt the space, good luck, because playing defense is a lot harder and a lot less fun than playing offense. The conversations we have with CEOs who are scared because they're losing business to a competitor, completely different and the desperation, it's not a place you want to be. Whereas, the CEOs that reach out and say, " We're brainstorming. We think we might be able to build something that no one else has." That's so much more fun and so much more impactful at the end of the day for inaudible results and finances.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's great. Well, there's lots of cool stuff that we've covered here in this conversation around the art of the possible. We talked about treating AI like a junior team member and allowing the teams to own it and treat the work product like a first draft. I loved your statement that, "The AI won't take your job, but a professional with AI will." That ties into your last point there as well, don't play defense, stay on the front foot. The human in the loop. I think you're absolutely right, it's going to continue to be critical, particularly when there's customer relationships or really critical work product that's going out. So, I think all teams should be creating opportunities for their team members to be taking that role. And then, I really like some of that final part of the conversation around the possibility of partnering and bundling to better serve your customer in a wider array of products or services. So, lots of really cool stuff there, Jeff. I guess as a final question, with all of that in mind, if you think about the teams that you support and if you think about creating more agency and opportunity for those teams in the future, what is your hope? What is your hope for these teams? What do you hope to see from those customers that you are joining in with on their growth?

Jeff Roberts: Yeah. So, I think certainly there are some corporate results and ROI on these investments that are very exciting. More than that though, we get a lot of satisfaction from the change, the uplift, if you will, on the job responsibilities of the people in these organizations. So, it's the opposite of the fear. It's, " AI has freed me from this tedious drudgery sort of work, and in my job now, I'm able to use my human intelligence for more satisfying work. Judgments and decisions and just analysis and things that humans are wired to do." And I think, honestly, tragically, there are too many people who their job takes away their humanity. Still in 2023, that's the case. And I hope that ultimately AI, these other technologies can help lift those people out of that, and let's use the full power of the human brain because it is truly amazing. And we've seen that, frankly, I think more clearly now that AI has become as advanced as it is, because we see the horsepower that's needed for that, and we realize a human being with a four pound brain can outperform this enormous model that took dozens of people all these work years to create. It's amazing.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it is amazing.

Jeff Roberts: And so, we really are excited to see what that does to the quality of work life and job satisfaction for people.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that you tied it back into the human impact. I think that's a great way to end a fantastic conversation, Jeff. And it must be exciting to be able to work with those teams that you're out partnering with and to have that impact.

Jeff Roberts: Oh, I love what we do. Absolutely. As you can tell, it's my favorite topic to talk about.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Jeff Roberts: So, thank you so much for having me on to discuss it with you.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet. And if any of our listeners are thinking about how they take their digital transformation journey forward, maybe reach out to you and do one of these assessments. How do they best find you, Jeff?

Jeff Roberts: Innovationvista. com.

Dane Groeneveld: Yep.

Jeff Roberts: And lots of information out there. We try to give away some of our better ideas, and certainly there's a way there to reach out and start a dialogue if they think they're interested in our services as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Great. Great. Well, thanks again for your time today and thanks for all the great work you're doing out there in the ecosystem.

Jeff Roberts: Likewise, Dane. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Remember that by embracing vulnerability, trusting our intuition, and approaching challenges with compassion, we not only strengthen our teams, but also pave the way for a future where collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies, and research on collaboration, head over to thefutureofteamwork.com. There, you can join our mailing list to stay updated with the latest episodes and get access to exclusive content tailored to make your team thrive. Together we can build the future of teamwork. Until next time.