5 Altitudes of AI in Business with David DeWolf

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Content is Profit. Today, we'll be breaking down the five altitudes of AI in business. To drop these value bombs, I brought David DeWolf into EO Fire Studios. David is the founder and CEO of Known Well, an innovative startup that is reimagining the way organizations are run in the era of AI. In today's foundation, we will be talking about the five altitudes of business that AI will transform, how to prepare for this transformation, and what we should be doing to not get left behind, and so much more.

0:44And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to David and our sponsors. Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners who want to get straight to the point. Join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions. Recent episodes include five must-knows to sell your online course, program, or membership, and four steps to grow your email list for your next launch. Listen to Imperfect Action wherever you get your podcasts.

1:15If you're looking for a system that will give you a single source of truth, then it's time to check out NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist, designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at netsuite.com slash fire. David, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, everybody? It is great to be here, John. Thanks for having me. You know, I believe more than anything else that it's really difficult to be successful, especially as an entrepreneur if you're not rooted in prayer and I have found over and over and over in my life that it's prayer that actually helps me to define success figure out what my calling is navigate the hard times and I have a struggle understanding how other people do it without it and it's quarter who I am and a secret to what's helped me get to the place where I'm at.

2:23Fire Nation, as I mentioned in the intro, we're talking about the five altitudes of AI in business. And David, you worked at Three Pillar for over 16 years, helped grow it to over 2 ,000 employees, but you stepped down last January. Why and what did you learn from this transition? 16 years of being an entrepreneur and a CEO, it was an amazing run and I enjoyed every single minute, but I'll tell you, I got to a place where after 16 years, it had become all consuming. And from the very beginning, my purpose had been to create an environment where all of our employees could be both exceptional in their professional lives, but also the most awesome mothers and husbands and fathers and whatever they were, hobbyists in the world.

3:16And I found myself not living that. I had become so consumed by driving the business. And for whatever reason, in those final six months, I just became exhausted. I had had just an incredible sprint where the final kind of two years of the business, I sold the business twice to private equity. We more than tripled the business during COVID. We navigated COVID very successfully. It was an awesome run, but I was exhausted and I began to take on more and more and more myself. And I found there was a day my my son, I have eight kids and my seven year old son, who was six at the time, had been asking me all week to play Legos with him.

3:53And I went upstairs on a Saturday to play Legos with him and I laid down on the ground and three times in a 15 minute span, I found myself in a different part of our house working without even realizing I had gotten up and being like, oh, my gosh, I've got to get back up there. I can't believe I just did that. And that was an eye-opening moment for me that I had gotten to a point where I wasn't living my own purpose, my own calling, what I was encouraging everybody else to do. And I just wasn't able to break away anymore. And I needed a break to refresh and recharge. And I looked forward into 2023, and my two oldest kids were engaged and going to be getting married.

4:33And I thought, if I haven't done this so that I can be present to them and to be in a good space, I don't know why I've done it. and I need to take this opportunity. And so 2023 was just an amazing year for me, just refreshing, recharging, traveling the world, spending time with family, and really getting my feet back on the ground. Now, a lot of entrepreneurs are lost when they make a big life shift. I mean, they were getting up every day with so many things on the to-do list, with so much responsibility, with so many big wins, so many big losses, so many successes and failures, they really have a hard time adjusting to this new life of sometimes just feeling unrelevant or not relevant.

5:16So what motivated you to start something new? I didn't know when I left Three Pillar what I was going to do. What I knew was I needed just space and time. And I learned a couple of things, John. The first one was just the value of that space, I started to notice about two months in that for 16 years, I had had blinders on and everything that I interpreted in the world was through the lens of how do I apply that to three pillar? And that had really created a positive dynamic for the business, but I didn't even know what I was missing. The other thing that I began to learn was that in that world, you start to realize things different ways.

5:59And I started to learn things about myself and just really put a fine point on things that I had known but had not really explicitly stated. So for example, I started to experiment. I ramped up a couple of board seats. I did some consulting work. And I realized it wasn't nearly as fulfilling as actually being in the trenches with a team. I actually got sad watching my consulting clients walk away and go implement things. And I thought, man, I don't get to be part of that next phase. And so I began to realize that I really am made to be a leader. I am made to be around people. And I had always talked about the value and how much I love teams, but I realized that I couldn't live a life of retirement outside of that.

6:44And so that was the first thing that really hit me was I need to get back to an operating role once I get through my daughter's wedding. And then I began to take that value of hearing the world differently. And I started to hear this conversation about AI in a new light. And I began to realize that there were pockets and there were areas of this AI landscape that was unfolding that hadn't been solved yet and were really exciting, but also not just were they exciting, but they were aligned to my purpose and they were specifically relevant to me. And when I began to triangulate those things and find kind of the core of who I am as an operator, getting back into the CEO chair, combined with the interest that I had in this evolving space, combined with being able to map that to my purpose and my calling in life, I began to get really excited.

7:41Now, you did touch on this a little bit, but let's get real deep on why you found this opportunity so compelling. like? Here's what I saw, John. Everybody was starting to talk about AI. And unlike other waves of technology, there didn't seem to be any disagreement that it was going to fundamentally change the way we lived, worked, and played. And that was fundamentally different, even from the internet wave or the mobile wave, right? Things that have really transformed life. Usually you have naysayers. Usually you have people saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, that's not as big as we think it is.

8:21So it was obvious it was big and it was taking root. It took off faster than ever before. But I began to hear three different types of conversations. The very first one was about the technology itself. It was about the LLMs and the advancement of the technology. And that was interesting. And there's billions of dollars being poured in there. But it wasn't actually impacting people's lives day to day. The second conversation was the initial work of applying this great technology to our personal lives. And it's the space of what I call personal productivity. And it is leveraging artificial intelligence to help you and I do the task we're doing, actually executing the work more efficiently, more effectively, more productively.

9:07It's writing the first draft for you, software engineers using it to write code, those types of use cases. That's interesting. And there was some work going on there. But I became fascinated with the third question. And the third question was, how is this going to change the way that businesses operate? And there were all sorts of questions and there's all sorts of fear about jobs and what it's going to do to jobs. What is the job of a CEO look like in this future? How are we going to operate as businesses in a different way? And what struck me was there was a lot of fear. There were a lot of questions, but there were no solutions.

9:51Nobody was pushing into that space and creating that vision. And that became exciting to me because fundamentally what I love is to find ways to leverage business and technology in order to elevate the human person. And I think that AI is the most transformative technology, not only of our time, but in the history of the world. And it has the ability to either erode our humanity or elevate our humanity. And I really feel called to be in that space and helping to shepherd the adoption of AI in businesses, in organizations, to make sure that it helps people to really live their humanity and doesn't demean them and pull them down.

10:40Well, Fire Nation, you're going to be fired up when you hear the five altitudes of business that AI will transform when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you're a startup with big goals, then it's important to find a CRM that can keep up. But I get it. When you're in startup mode, it can be tough to know which platform is right for you and your business. Here's the good news. From marketing and sales to supporting content and everything in between, HubSpot's all-on-one customer platform has startups covered. And with the HubSpot for Startups program, you can save 30 % to 90 % on a platform that scales right along with you, increase leads, boost revenue, improve your customer experience.

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13:42That's netsuite.com slash fire to get your own KPI checklist, netsuite.com slash fire. David, we're back and you have identified five altitudes of business that AI will transform. Let's talk about this now. It's interesting as I began to really dissect the AI landscape, I began to realize that AI has actually been around for decades. And if you start to look, you begin to classify the types of automation and types of work that it's been doing across different altitudes that are really applicable to business. The very first one that really for years we've been talking about, and we just don't think about it this way, is robotics, right?

14:28Robotics is artificial intelligence, and it's all about the manual work, right? We think about the factory line and the work that can be done through robotics, right? That is the first layer, that first altitude where AI hits business. The second one is what we've really lived through over the past year with the advent of ChatGPT and these other large language models. And that is, it's now helping us with knowledge work. And this knowledge work, as we briefly mentioned before, is all about execution. How do we do knowledge work in a more productive and efficient and effective manner? And it's the co-pilot example, right?

15:09Helping me write an email faster, et cetera. etc. And so that's the second altitude. We've got robotics and then we have execution. The third and the fourth altitudes are really the frontier where I think we're just at the advent of starting to think about and apply AI. And that third one is operations. How do these discrete work processes work together? How do we facilitate and orchestrate execution across multiple domains in order to create a machine that produces results, right? That's what businesses are, is they're all these different processes and systems together to produce a result. So that's operations.

15:50Then you have strategy. That's the next layer of knowledge work, which is all about making strategic trade-off decisions, right? Making hard choices based on context and contextual analysis around you. That's the fourth layer, the fourth altitude of business that leaders have to be thinking about. And then finally, you have ideology, right? You have values, beliefs, vision of an organization. I think we're at a point in time where you're going to see in the next 12 to 18 months, really new AI solutions hitting businesses that will be transforming operations a new way and strategy a new way. And I find that incredibly exciting because I think it has the potential to really elevate humanity and help all of us live our best selves.

16:38So David, now that Fire Nation has a decent idea about this transformation that is happening right now, right under our noses, what is the best way for us to prepare for this transformation? I think there are a couple of things that people should be doing right now. The first one is I find it shocking how few people really understand what the difference is between artificial intelligence and the compute that we've had for years. Right. The fundamental difference is the difference between inference and judgment, which I can now do, versus computation. Right. Mathematical algorithms. One is deterministic.

17:21Right. The compute we've already always had. And the other is probabilistic. And that creates a difference. And so I think individuals should really wrestle with this and think about it. Because as you begin to understand it, you will be able to imagine how it may transform your business more. The second thing I recommend is people should be experimenting with it. If you have not used ChatGPT and found reasons to ask it questions, I think you're missing the boat. we undoubtedly are going to live in a world more and more where AI tools are really creating leverage and productivity. And it will be the workers, it will be the leaders that really embrace it and learn how to use it that are able to adopt it quickly and stay relevant.

18:09And then I think from a business perspective, if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm looking across my business and looking at very real pain points in my business and asking, how can I solve those in new ways that weren't possible yesterday? And if you do those three things, if you educate yourself and learn really what's different about AI, if you start to experiment and just use it in rudimentary ways, and then number three, if you look across your business and start taking stock of the real business pain points you have, then you will be prepared to start adopting the tools and leveraging the technology to accelerate you in new and fundamental ways.

18:46Fire Nation, this is powerful. And it's really just you gaining knowledge of AI, of artificial intelligence, experimenting with it, playing around with it, having some fun, and then finding some business pain points in your life, in your business that AI can help with, can solve, et cetera. So what should we be doing specifically, David, to make sure we don't get left behind? I think very specifically, go out and spend time, dedicate time every single week, 15 minutes, go read up, go listen to a podcast on AI to make sure you're staying in tune with the technology and you're really understanding it.

19:26Number two, set time aside to experiment with it and use it. Find 15 minutes, find 30 minutes to take a task you'd normally be doing and do it with a tool. Find a tool that is relevant, that is based on AI, that can give you insights and open your mind to how it'll be used. And I think if you just begin to experiment, you're going to see the power of this technology and how it's going to change and start to be able to imagine new things. David, you dropped a lot of value bombs today. What is the one thing you want to make sure our listeners, Fire Nation, walk away with? I think we're at a transformative inflection point in the history of the world.

20:11And what I really hope all of the entrepreneurs out there are doing are thinking about how can we apply this brand new technology that's powerful, that's exciting, that the whole world is embracing in a way that doesn't just provide value to our businesses. I think it can, but I think we can do it at its full potential while at the same time elevating the human person and helping us get back to what makes us uniquely human. And if you begin to approach this adoption in that way, I think you can have your cake and eat it too. And I think you can leverage the technology for good. And at the same time, it'll be good for your business.

20:52If Fire Nation wants to learn more, how can they connect with you? What is your call to action for our listeners today? Yeah, go to knownwell.com. Knownwell.com is the name of the business. We're building an intelligent operating system for services organizations to really leverage the power of AI to drive and to orchestrate their businesses in this AI era. You can also check out the AI Know-How podcast. We talk about applying AI to business all the time. And you can find me at davidnewolf.com. Fire Nation, you listen to podcasts. check out the podcast that David just mentioned because hey could be great content for you to dive deeper into this fascinating topic because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with and you've been hanging out with dd and jld today so keep up that heat for links to everything we talked about visit eofire.com type david in the search bar the show page will pop up link you to his website to his podcast etc david thank you brother for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation.

21:57For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Tons of fun. Thanks so much. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and David for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for, you guessed it, free, freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. imperfect action hosted by steph taylor is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals imperfect action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners who want to get straight to the point join steph taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions recent episodes include five must knows to sell your online course program or membership and four steps to grow your email list for your next launch listen to imperfect action wherever you get your podcasts if you're looking for a system that will give you a single source of truth, then it's time to check out NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more.

23:01Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at netsuite.com slash fire.