Adi Sehgal on the Age of AI | Extraordinary Life Stories

0:00So a human being may find themselves competing against an AI or a human plus AI. So if you ask dinosaurs, they would not like evolution. Life has moved on without them. So the risk that people face at this point of time is if they don't adapt, if they don't change, then the world may move on and they may get massively disadvantaged. Tell me, who is Adi? Art, I'm a very curious person. I'm able to see trends in the world before others and start walking in that direction so that by the time the trend comes around, I actually have something interesting to offer. And my idea here is that I'm looking to build a world where AI is at the service of humanity.

0:37So it's called Asgard world. Why is it called Asgard world? Because Asgard is the home of the gods. The humans are the gods. So the humans are people who inhabit this world, and they are treated like gods because machines serve these humans. There are people worried, scared. There are professions like being a lawyer or an accountant, ultimately AI could replace. It's going to be very difficult for many people. Many people will lose jobs. People are very worried. So how should we think about what this new world is going to look like? We are at the fastest time that we have ever been in terms of change.

1:08But we are at the slowest time of what we'll ever be in the future. There will never be a day where the rate of change will be as slow as it is today, from now till eternity.

1:30Welcome. Thank you. I've been looking forward to this conversation. Tell me, who is Adi? At my heart, I'd say I'm a very simple person. I've had a very long career in one company. And at some point in time, I reached a realization that allowed me to walk away from something that was really successful and very interesting. I spent 27 years there. But most interestingly, what I learned about myself allowed me to then become an entrepreneur and to start building things which are very different, very interesting and very in tune with what's happening in the world today. So at my heart, I'm a very curious person.

2:08I'm able to see trends in the world before others and start walking in that direction so that by the time the trend comes around, I actually have something interesting to offer. So you've got a very curious person here. and when we had our conversation before this, you know, we've saved it for now. And I think that's clearly for the benefit of anyone watching and listening as well. Let's start with what you're actually working on now, because that's super relevant. I'm working on essentially two things. On one side, I'm looking to build tools and products using AI. And my idea here is that I'm looking to build a world where AI is at the service of humanity.

2:46So it's called Asgard world. Why is it called Asgard world? Because Asgard is the home of the gods. And the home of the gods is a place where the humans are the gods. So the humans are people who inhabit this world and they are treated like gods because machines serve these humans and actually find ways to benefit these humans and make their lives better. So I'm really building tools in that area. and the second thing that I'm doing is because we're living at a time of dramatic change we have to think about how we can take people into this new world. It's going to be very difficult for many people.

3:24Many people will lose jobs. People are very worried. So how should we think about what this new world is going to look like and how can we upskill ourselves or change ourselves or actually walk down the path so that we all become AI native and we all thrive a few years from now. I'd love you to elaborate because there are people worried, scared. There are professions like being a lawyer or an accountant that have been a long-standing kind of study at school, pass your exams, learn all of that knowledge to then become a profession which ultimately AI could replace. So for someone that's watching, listening to this, that's still afraid and now you're reframing of actually integrating work with it, what are you doing?

4:06If you think about evolution. Evolution is a great thing but not for the dinosaur. So if you ask dinosaurs, they would not like evolution because they have, life has moved on without them. So the risk that people face at this point of time is if they don't adapt, if they don't change, then the world may move on and they may get massively disadvantaged. So people may find themselves, so a human being may find themselves competing against an AI or a human plus AI. And when that happens, then they may not have the equipment to compete very well. So this is a real fear. But at the same time, what's happening in the world is that as AI comes in, it creates new roles, it creates new jobs, it creates new ways of thinking about things.

4:55So if you're early enough and if you educate yourself enough and if you start playing around with it, the odds are that you may be one of the people who is driving dramatic change in AI in your area. Let me give you an example. Think about black cabs in London. So when technology disrupted them, when you had essentially people like Uber and so on come into the market, there was a reduced market for black cabs. And there were challenges for some of those people who were very specialized. But at the same time, if you look at the total number of drivers on London streets, that went up 5x, 10x. So 10 times the number of people who are actually driving cars and making a livelihood than before the technology change happened.

5:43So think about accountant. So many years ago, you were an accountant. You used to, like 70 years ago, 60 years ago, you used to basically move numbers with a calculator. Now, along comes a computer. So theoretically, your job should go away. But when the computer came, it actually created so many different types of accounting jobs. So in any industry or any field, there is the potential that AI will create new ways of looking at that field. And if you are smart and if you're agile and if you're looking for ways in which you can leverage AI or harness AI, you can still find interesting things to do in more or less every field.

6:20One of the things that I found fascinating when we had our chat prior to this was the pattern recognition, the signs that you can pick up. And that comes from a wealth of experience of staying. I used that word already, relevant, but with incredibly high profile experience, if you like. The speed we're moving at now has never been experienced before. So it's almost like, as a human being, there's probably no one that's got that experience to be able to keep up with that. But I feel like you are. And by stepping away from what was corporate to be that entrepreneur and now working in space, how are you doing that?

6:56How are you staying at the pace that it's moving? Because use the analogy of a dinosaur. A dinosaur could be sort of a business that's only three years old now. You know what I'm saying? Whereas nothing moved that quickly. We've got no precedence for this. So let me give you a paradox. We are at the fastest time that we have ever been in terms of change. but we are at the slowest time of what will ever be in future. There will never be a day where the rate of change will be as slow as it is today from now till eternity. So from that perspective, while it may look like we are going fast, actually we are relatively slow.

7:33So the way I see this is that I've made a study out of understanding how things grow and how things change. And there is a very simple pattern which is called an S-curve. Basically, things go like a long, there's a long tail of people trying, learning and building capability. And then over time, with all these experiments, businesses grow. Even a fast-growing business, think of Chad GPT. By the time it reaches the public consciousness, these things take five, six, seven years, four years maybe in a very, very fast-growing business. What used to take 50 years before has been compressed to four years.

8:09What takes four years today maybe get compressed to two years tomorrow. So the trick always is that rather than looking at what's happening today, you can actually broadly project the direction of where things are going five years from now. And you can already start building for that, knowing that you're imperfect today. Maybe you're building a bit early for what is happening today. But by the time you actually have done the work to build anything, three years have passed. And now you're suddenly on track and you're relevant and you're just at the right time. I think that's inspiring for people to hear because there could be a negative connotation of, well, there's no point in me trying to start building with what's around me right now because it will be obsolete in three years' time.

8:49But then there's no progress. There's no innovation. So you've got to put time in there. You've got to work with what you've got. And then you're actually trying in some way to keep pace. So all movement works the same way. You want to go to a particular place. So the first thing you do is you see where you want to go. So if you're here and I want to walk to King's Cross, I look on a map to see where King's Cross is and then I walk in that direction. I may make some wrong turns, I may be slow, I may be fast, I may take a car, I may take a scooter, it doesn't matter, I'll eventually get there. But the most important thing is knowing in which direction you want to go.

9:23So similarly in our careers and in our lives, if we are directional, then regardless of roadblocks, we will find a way to get there. So the first and most important question actually is what is the best future that I want to aim for. So I explain this to a lot of my friends like this, that most of us are smart people. Given any ladder to climb, we will climb it. It may be a struggle, it may be difficult, but we will find a way to get to the top of whichever ladder we start climbing. The more important question to ask is once you're at the top of the ladder? How's the view? Is that where you want it to be?

10:02Have you just spent five years climbing the wrong ladder and realized it at the top? So the more important question is not whether I'll climb the ladder or whether you'll climb the ladder. The most important question is what ladder are you climbing? Does it head to the place where you want to go? And is that place consistent with where the world is going in future? I'd love to humanize you in this moment. I love the analogy of the ladder. And I think there's an element of paralleling that to the journey. And of course, the destination, the view at the top, there's a contentment that comes with you without any arrogance, brimming with intelligence and knowledge, that's sort of almost a mentoring element to you.

10:37So humanizing you, I think you probably know this already. I'd love to ask anyone I film with what their definition of success is. And I imagine at different times you've climbed your own ladders to get to a view that was different to what you thought it might be. Sitting here now, what would be your definition of success? I'm going to twist the answer and not give you the answer you want. Rather than giving you the definition of success, I'd like to give you a definition of happiness. And in a sense, happiness is success. So happiness has a simple framework in my mind. It is achievement minus expectation.

11:11I'd say achievement is 50 % in our control. 50 % is in control maybe of fate or the environment. Our expectations are 100 % in our control. So when we think of success or happiness, most of the time we are thinking about only achievement, but we don't think about what the right expectation is. So to illustrate what I mean, when I was younger, I came up from India and I joined this company in 1994 in India as a management training, right? And I eventually left the company as global president and CEO, a significant multinational company, a 27-year career. to begin with i started from nothing and a lot of the indian managers you see today who are ceos of global companies and there are many of them all came from the same background where their parents were in some kind of government service and they were all insecure overachievers so it was the insecurity that drove their overachievement all the time so what used to happen with me was you get promoted your salary gets doubled you feel very happy two years later that salary is now normal.

12:19And now you're feeling unhappy because you need to get promoted again. And therefore, you're in a persistent state of unhappiness. Through life, I learned that actually, if you set a base standard, so the reason I was able to retire when I retired and walk away from that kind of life, because I wanted to do something else, was because I managed my expectation to say, this is what I need for my life, a simple life. And actually, I have much more than that already. It's not that I'm rich in a very absolute sense. I don't run around, you know, if you give me a million dollars, I'm not going to go and buy a Ferrari.

12:53I don't really know what to do with it. So as long as you can manage your expectations and you have more than that, you're happy and you're successful. Now, the question is, where should you peg your expectations? What is that ladder that you want to climb? And why do you want to climb that ladder? So important. So many, it's awful to be around people that have climbed a ladder with an expectation of a view that didn't fulfill them. And use the analogy of the Ferrari or Lamborghini, if that's what they wanted, doesn't change anything. Using that same analogy of the ladder that you're effectively climbing now to achieve the business view, what does that look like?

13:31I'm building businesses where I'm trying to create swarm companies. What I mean by this is if you go back many years, the factor of production was people or land, you put a lot of capital. So you put a lot of people together, a lot of capital together, that becomes a bank. Put a lot of people together, that becomes a company. And in the past, what used to happen is that to build a business, you had to have a lot of people because you can't scale yourself infinitely. So you have to have either people or capital or land. And all of these are physical things. So you have to build physical things.

14:06We now live in a world where technology and AI allows us to build factors of production, which are things like bots, things like AI agents, which can combine with money, people, and so on to create swarm businesses in the sense that you can have huge impact with very few factors of production, very few people. And you can scale these things digitally, globally, and make them very interesting and massive. And you can have massive impact and reach lots of people. I'll give an example of a potential swarm business, which I am building is called Asgard jobs. So there are all kinds of jobs available in the world.

14:43So it is not trivial but what we managed to do is let us say put all the jobs together. So we have a platform that today is quite new but we have let us call it 11 million jobs which are open on an average of 8 days old. So people say there are no jobs in the UK but I have a list of 700 ,000 jobs that are open in the UK today that I can share with you. So now we have technology that is going around the internet picking up all of this stuff. So we have this. Now for each individual user they can come onto the system and the system gets to know about their CV, compares it with the job, tells them these are the 20 jobs that work for you as of now, tells them that you should apply to them.

15:26Now when they apply people find it difficult to apply for jobs because today job companies are looking for keyword matches and people don't know how to write CVs. So the system writes the CV in the right way, so the keyword, so it presents them in the best way possible. And now suddenly you have people who are getting interviews who did not get interviews before. And to scale this business internationally is a matter of scaling the code. It all lives on AWS platform. It doesn't require more people. It doesn't require anything. It just can scale. So now you have agents that can scale globally. So you think of a business like Telegram.

16:05So Telegram, over a billion users, but I don't know, 40, 50 employees. So the potential to create these kinds of businesses out of the UK. So we talk about productivity in the UK, 65, 69 million people, aging population, competing with America, whatever, 350, 400 million people. But what if it was 65 million people and 300 million bots? Now suddenly the productivity of the country could be completely transformed. Now the question is how do you orchestrate these layers? How do you set them up in a way that all of this stuff works and is controlled by humans and is at the service of humans? So that's the kind of products that I'm trying to build.

16:55Thank you. I love the way you articulated that. And you actually ended there talking a lot about tech and the AI on the humans and the influence and the impact that humans have. And this is, I think, a key thing. I'm having more and more conversations about how the AI feeds off what we put in. So how we feed it and obviously what we get back. And I wonder what your views are on that, because there are almost like deluded geniuses out there that are feeding what their version of they want to put into AI. And that spits out. And I'm just wondering where the AI catches up, if you like, whereby the AI would go back and say, that doesn't make sense.

17:33Or because it's got a more of an overarching view rather than you feeding what you want as a human being, in my viewpoint. And the AI can't see past the fact that, well, actually, that's not right. So I think what happens today is when you interact with an AI like a chat GPT or a perplexity, all of these AIs are tuned to be very polite. They're tuned to be nice to you. And they actually struggle or they do not contradict you. So you think that what you're saying, even if it's wrong, they are kind of agreeing with you. And you're going like, I'm training this AI. But actually, that's not true. It's just that the AI has been trained to not be controversial with you.

18:10So if you go into the setting of your chat GPT and you tell it that I want you to actually tell me what you really think and actually contradict me and tell me where I'm wrong and challenge very blunt, it's going to change completely. And you will suddenly find that what you thought it was agreeing with, it is not agreeing anymore. So this goes back to you knowing how to use it as well as knowing what to feed it. Yeah. So rather than thinking, oh, I'm so clever, I'm this genius because everything I say, it's agreeing with me and so on. It's about knowing the settings, knowing how to use it. Yes.

18:42So there is a way to use AI. So I don't think one should delegate one's intelligence to AI. One should use AI as a sparring partner. Now, think about AI like a library. Think that you've got a library with a mouth. And you can ask this library whatever you want about anything that has ever happened before. So it's up to you to ask the right question in an age where every question has an easy answer. automatic answer, the most important question is what is the right question to ask, which is the right ladder to climb. That's the most important question always. And you use AI as a sparring partner.

19:23You don't use AI as giving you gospel truth. No. And you want that. I think we need that. And this probably brings in leadership, a key point in this conversation. We were introduced by Steve Tappen, who's a leadership specialist and coach. And when I asked him, having filmed with him and got to know him, who would you think would enjoy talking with me and would be someone I could learn from and other people? He literally named you. And we know he knows lots of different people. And I want to open up leadership because you have been a leader of companies, a FTSE 20 company as the CEO and continue to lead now entrepreneurially.

20:03What values really matter to you in leadership? It's about opening doors. So a leader to me is like a doorman in a hotel. The person who opens the door to you. Now, this door can be physical. So I'm a leader in my company and I open the door to someone to change their role and go to a different place and do something different. But I'm also responsible to open doors in people's minds so that they can take them in their minds they can go to places where they have not been before so to me a leader is someone who inspires people to be the best that they can be and then helps them by opening doors both in the real world and in their mind so that they can transform themselves a leader cannot be a leader without a follower because by definition a leader in vacuum is nothing just a blob so a leader has to be with a follower and the purpose of the leader is to make the follower great again.

21:07And the purpose of the follower is to be the best version of themselves that they can be to the point where the leader is no longer needed. See, I remember when we spoke, again, coming to this conversation, you said, I think from the success you had in China, you were one of the few, if not the only foreign person that had come in to then lead a Chinese company. And I want to open that up because the cultural differences around the world are something you have had a lot of experience with. I want to know how you did that. So first, I'll correct you slightly. I think there are many people who have been, many foreigners who have been successful in China.

21:44So I'm not unique in that respect. But what I found, so let me tell you a bit more about my Chinese journey. So I went to become a marketing director of this company, this big multinational company in China. The only problem was in China, it was not a big company, it was a small company. Why? Because it had missed the boat. And this company had been trying to, for many years, they had been trying to scale their global model in China. So they knew one way of doing things and they were saying, this works everywhere. It'll also work in China. And they had failed and failed and failed and they had fired the last five general managers.

22:18So I got very lucky because I came in as marketing director and my general manager left very soon. So I found myself in this strange place of being a general manager in a company, which was very small. And for the first year, year and a half, I tried to tow the company line and do what the company wanted, which is follow the same process and the same operating model of the company globally. And then I learned it's just not going to work. And it doesn't work because of structural reasons. So the model of that company is that you operate in premium categories with a niche, but with a very premium product.

22:55That gives you extra margin compared to other people. You invest that margin into marketing, telling people why your product is better. So now suddenly you have a lot of advertising, a lot of marketing, and now people want to buy you a lot of awareness. So this is great. But in China, first of all, the Chinese were not willing to pay a premium for that category because Chinese people only wanted to pay a premium for something that gives them face or gives them health. They don't want to pay a premium for a cleaning product, which is hidden in a cupboard because they are like, I just rub a little harder.

23:24Why should I pay three times the price? Therefore, there's no extra margin. Anyway, you're competing with Chinese companies who are efficient because you have no extra margin. then you cannot out-advertise them. Because of that, so the whole model is broken. So after a couple of years, we learned, there was a moment of freedom. The freedom was, we are screwed anyway. There is no chance this is going to work. And it's very likely, like all the others got fired, we as a management team are also going to get fired. So now the expectations are clear. The worst that can happen is we are going to get fired next year.

23:54We're going to make zero bonus. So now there is this freedom that says, that's a likely scenario. so now rather than being desperate the question is what can we do to actually break out of the mold and have fun so this is back in 2010 2011 we had a brand called durex at that time which we had just acquired small relatively small brand in china and we said okay let's have some fun with this brand so we started working on social media with durex the first thing we did was we said we're going to throw a durex party so you can join our social media campaign and if you do if you become a fan of Durex, get five other people to become a fan.

24:30And all six of you come to this party. So we had this 5 ,000 people in a big party in Beijing. And that was the start of a social media campaign that actually over the next 10, 15 years became one of the most followed social brands in China. And we learned how to do social media. But as we learned that, we learned that instead of awareness through TV, which is what the company used to do, we learned how to do it on social media. we also learned instead of distribution in the real world how to do distribution on e-commerce back in 2009 2010 so that business which was 15 20 million pounds at that point of time 2008 2009 today is way north of a billion pounds but that business has um i overwhelming majority 80 75 80 85 percent of that business comes from e-commerce unlike the rest of the world where 10 15 percent of the business comes from e-commerce so that's where I learned how technology, when applied properly, can help scale things in the real world.

25:34And building that business gave me the learnings to then come back and apply those globally on the company, then built a big e-commerce business for the company. And that then ended up with my career accelerating rather than slowing down. And those are the same learnings that I'm now using in the world of VA. Thank you for explaining that. And what I really enjoy about that is there's a test and learn. You decided that you weren't going to be afraid to fail and you were going to try the things that felt right, which actually is very entrepreneurial within a corporate environment, which probably gave you, I guess, the confidence to know you can be an entrepreneur and you had that pattern recognition and your gut instinct backed up with knowledge to be able to see that through.