1740 – AI in Healthcare and Retail with Lisa Thee

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0:58with us right now it's lisa the lisa you are the managing director of data and ai at launch consulting group and you are found on the web at lisa the.com that's lisa l-i-s-a-t-h-e-e.com Congratulations as well on the launch of your book. It's called Go! Reboot Your Career in 90 Days. Lisa, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Well, tell us just a bit about your work and the impact you have today, Bob. And again, you're welcome to talk about what you do kind of in your day job, but definitely really excited to talk about your book and kind of the work you do as well.

1:40Thanks, Josh. So I've really been passionate about the opportunities for applying artificial intelligence responsibly since about 2015. And that piqued my interest when I saw some of the really cool things that were happening in innovation around personalized medicine and helping people that were struggling with cancer to have more effective treatment options. In fact, I had a colleague that was diagnosed and was given six months to live. And by using the collaborative cancer cloud, he is still alive today to raise his children because they found a treatment that was just right for his genome that allowed him to put his cancer into remission.

2:19So after being inspired by that, I really wanted to take it to new domains, things that were personal areas of interest for me. I'm really passionate about advocating for marginalized women and children. And so I looked to do something in the space of helping to reduce the amount of human trafficking and child sexual abuse material online. So that took me from my 18-year corporate career at a multinational tech company leading the AI for Good group into entrepreneurship, where I launched my company, MinorGuard. And from there, we were able to integrate a solution that allowed parents to have control over whether their children were allowed to make illegal content or not on their devices.

2:58and that's been integrated into some significant manufacturers. So you can check out my TED talk at my website, lisetheth.com, around bringing light to dark places online. And I took that skill sent it into management consulting. So today I work at Launch Consulting. I'm our managing director of AI. And I really like to focus on the places where artificial intelligence is benefiting society and us as humans. So you can imagine that it's been a pretty hot topic this last year with the explosion of chat GPT and everything else. And so it's really exciting to see people thinking through the ethical landscape of artificial intelligence as I've been deploying solutions in the wild.

3:37But I learned a lot going from a corporate career into being a first-time founder and having to fundraise for a software company to having an exit and then ultimately going into consulting. And so I wanted to slow down during the pandemic. I think we all had a little bit more home time than we were planning and documented my journey of some of the things I learned every time I had to reinvent myself. And oftentimes reinvention comes not because you want to reinvent yourself, but because there's some kind of external pressure happening. And for me, that was long COVID. I had some preexisting conditions that I didn't know about that made me a little bit more vulnerable.

4:17And so when I got COVID early in the pandemic, I never quite recovered the same way. And so going through that journey, I wanted to write about reinvention when I didn't know what the end state was going to look like. And so it's really nice to be at this stage today talking with you with the release of a book and having a publisher like Fast Company to help spread that message. But I think a lot of people are experiencing very unexpected dynamics. Maybe it's layoffs, maybe it's budget cuts, maybe it's having to adjust to take care of family members that need more caretaking now than they did before.

4:53but I think a lot of people can relate to what got me here won't get me there. And I wanted to especially be kind of a beacon of hope for women in technology that were working parents. I think we all experienced a lot of pressure to keep things afloat during these changing times. And I think we've seen a lot of the impacts of that on women in the workplace. And I wanted to spend a little bit of time in this book to validate their experiences, because a lot of the things that I learned from researching across executive women in my network and beyond was that things that seem like personal problems to me during my career, maybe challenges with harassment, bullying, unexpected job change, things of that nature were much more prevalent than I thought, but we don't talk about it.

5:38So I wanted to give people a roadmap. If you were in a situation where you had to reinvent that you had a 90 day plan to not only get clear on where you are today and where you want to be, but have an actionable plan to help you get there. Yeah. Boy, there's so much to discuss. Where do we go first? Why don't we address kind of the AI side of things? Because I know that you had mentioned some really, truly breathtaking uses of AI. But I think it's really critical that we understand where we are in history and where we are with this stage of AI. I don't know if maybe you can kind of give us just a quick snapshot of where we've come from, but just helping us understand that, I guess I don't want to lead the witness here, but in conversations, I've had it relayed to me that, Josh, imagine when telephones were kind of like the ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, and you had to like wind up the thing.

6:36And it was just so antiquated back in the day. That's the way the analogy was given to me. It's like, that's kind of where we are with AI. It's amazing what we're experiencing right now, but you haven't seen anything yet. Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that, Josh. So the way that I would put it today is we're probably somewhere around a tween if you look at a human development standpoint with artificial intelligence. So we've had a lot of progress over the years. A lot of that is driven by the compute power that's available today, the cloud infrastructure, and all the ways that we've been able to innovate on hosting data, but it is still something that requires a lot of investment in order to get logical outcomes from the systems and a lot of manual intervention.

7:20So I don't think we're at a place where we all have to worry about Skynet today. And we are early in this engagement, but I do think that it's growing at an exponential rate versus a linear rate. And we are going to see a lot of real-time use cases for AI evolving in front of us. I think it's been a slow burn, and it's going to be a fast escalation as technology is becoming more democratized. The cost of being able to use some of these models that have been cost restrictive because of the amount of compute it takes to train them, now being open source with things like ChatGPT or barred from Google or name your tool now, it's going to allow people to have a lot more opportunity to find new applications and to innovate and bring more ideas to the market.

8:07Okay. So you talked about kind of someone that may be in a position and it sounds like you've had some personal experience with maybe being in a role where it felt like there was misalignment, right? And I think it's really easy, Lisa, when we think about, well, look, I could upset the apple cart here. I really am not thriving here. I'm unhappy. I dread going to work. I'm not doing or fulfilling my highest good right now. I feel like I could be doing better, but yet maybe we feel stuck, right? Because of the reality is like, look, I don't have, I don't have an emergency nest. You know, I don't have months income stashed away.

8:48Maybe I should have done that, but I don't. Could you talk about that journey? Because again, thinking about this in stages of if someone knows that they want to make a change, first off, maybe there's some things that might be resolvable. And I'm sure you'll address that as too. But could you maybe take us through this life cycle and let's kind of focus on these early, early steps of something's not right in my current position? Absolutely. So Josh, we were talking before we were recording before that we're both come from the Midwest, I would not put myself as a huge risk taker. So I can very much empathize with people that want a slow and steady approach.

9:26The way that I break out the 90 day process is something that you can do as either a slash job or maybe during a medical leave, or there's a lot of options that allow you to take the time to get really clear on where you want, not the next job, but maybe a job following that, where you want to be aiming for that five-year mark. And so the way the process is laid out is month one is really around stabilizing and getting out of your head and back into your body, listening to your own wisdom, reconnecting with hobbies, reconnecting with play, and getting some of those creative juices back. Because I think a lot of times when we're all on the verge of burnout, it's really, really hard to slow down enough to even hear your own inner wisdom.

10:08We're just in execution mode and survival mode. And nothing that's going to take you past where you're stuck today is going to come from that kind of frenetic energy of just keeping afloat. So for people that have maybe a W-2 job that allows them if they have ability to take a medical leave, a lot of my coaching clients, unfortunately, it starts with a signal from your body. Maybe it's high blood pressure. Maybe it's migraines. It's something your body's keeping score that there's some misalignment. This isn't a sustainable solution for you. In fact, for myself, I worked a full-time job and started my company kind of as a slash job or a side hustle for about a year and a half before I was ready to take that step out.

10:51So I think that's very relatable. Most people don't have a trust fund just hanging out to do this. So after you stabilize, and maybe you take a leave of absence to do that from your current employment, maybe you do it on your nights and weekends, but you're really intentional about saying a lot of no's to the world and giving yourself a lot of space to slow down a little bit. Maybe that's asking some family members to help with drop off some pickups for school. Maybe that's asking spouses to pick up the dishes. Maybe it's asking for your doctor to give you some time off of work. All of those things are on the table.

11:25From there, it's really around dreaming and getting really clear on what your own personal mission and vision is the same way that you would do for a business. Getting really clear on what motivates you. I have some values assessments in there that can help you to get clear on that. And also thinking through what do you want your life to look like? What are those big dials? Is travel on the agenda right now at the season of life? Are you willing to relocate? Do you work best in the mornings or the evenings? Do you need a lot of flexibility? Getting a lot of focus on And where are your strengths so that you're spending your energies in the ways that are recharging your batteries versus draining it all day long?

12:05Yeah. You know, Lisa, I love this. I believe, and I'm sure, you know, you're a manager and leader of people. I believe that most leaders don't want to be surprised, right? If I have a team member that is unhappy about some aspect, maybe they do just a part of their job that's just really grading, or they really have some personal things that they absolutely have to prioritize. Like, I want to know that and I want to meet them where they are. I feel like that that would be a far better outcome than losing someone with years of experience. I mean, that would be horrible, right? Absolutely, Josh.

12:40Yeah. And that's one of my favorite sayings as a leader, that is, bad news is okay, but surprises are not. I couldn't agree more. And so leading into the third month, it's helping people to network and get those opportunities through informational interviewing and having a clarity of mission to create those new opportunities. That might be an opportunity at the company you're at today. Not everybody needs to run out and start a business. Some people may have more of an entrepreneurial mindset. Some might be more entrepreneurs and innovators within large companies. So once you know where you want to go and what unique value you contribute, and you can talk about that from like more of a business case and a return on investment, Those are the opportunities to collaborate with your leaders, like you're talking about, Josh, to start to do that planning cycle to be able to step into your power and bring maybe a new product, a new service, a new perspective to the market that can help the overall mission of the company grow and the bottom line.

13:38And that's how we talk about in the book is really helping people to be able to build those business cases, to be able to advocate for themselves and to be able to be really clear on what they're bringing to the table that makes them more than just like an employee number 1100574, right? What's your unique spark that can really help to bring the company to the next level? And Lisa, who do you, you know, obviously, again, you do great work with kind of your primary role. So if we had more time, I'd love to talk about like, you know, for the person who's like, looks at what you're doing, like, I like Lisa's gig.

14:14She has a full-time thing. And then she's got all of this kind of personal advocacy work that you do on the outside and writing a book. I don't really have time to get into that. But I do want to know, how do you, aside from the book and the TED talk and so forth, do you engage with people individually? Do you do consulting, you know, that sort of thing? So Launch Consulting is a 1200 person global technology consulting firm. We work primarily with healthcare as well as retail. We have a consumer business and tech. My primary clients over the years have been places like Microsoft and the Center for Digital Healthcare Transformation with UCSF Hospital.

14:55but we have a footprint in companies like Disney and lots of ones you'd be familiar with. So we really are a data and AI consulting firm that can help executive level teams to implement some of these tools of today with that digital transformation and take advantage of the best of the technology capabilities to achieve their business goals. Okay. So your personal website, lisathe.com forward slash go is where you can get a free preview of the book. Go reboot your career in 90 days. You know, just so we can kind of put a pin on this, who should be grabbing this book? Yes. I think the people that the book calls to the most are people that have had some traditional success in their career, but are looking for more meaning, more why in their day.

15:42And they want to combine what they brought to the table to be successful with something that personally has more mission for them. And that's really when my leadership journey started to accelerate. I had a very traditional, successful career as a director of hybrid cloud at a big tech company. It was going to pay the bills for many moons to come, but I wasn't finding anything more than just kind of showing up and doing what I've been doing for 20 years in terms of excitement and enthusiasm. Selling servers when you have 98 % market share is not the most challenging work out there. But what I wanted to be able to do as a leader in tech was to be able to bring my unique view of where we could be applying technology to really accelerate markets and accelerate outcomes for people.

16:26So for me, that's healthcare innovation, that's helping to reduce the amount of toxicity online, and that's increasing the amount of digital safety for vulnerable populations. So that took me to entrepreneurship, it took me to consulting, and I think when you're really clear on what your why is. Maybe it's the environment. Maybe it's the elderly. Maybe it's cars. My husband and I are going to the F1 races in Austin soon. And he's a gearhead that lights him up. Whatever makes you feel like you're spending 80 % of your day doing something that energizes you and not 50 % of your day just fitting in, that is when you really unlock your leadership and your power.

17:07And I think if we all were able to recapture our discretionary energy, especially mid-career and beyond, we're going to have better products. We're going to have better services. We're going to have more energized teams. And that dignity of a paycheck and growth will be coming because when the tides rise, all boats float. Yeah. Lisa Thee, I love the work that you are doing. Again, you are the Managing Director of Data and AI with Launch Consulting Group. Your personal website, lisathe.com. When you go to lisav.com forward slash go. You can get your free preview of Go, Reboot Your Career in 90 Days.

17:44I love our conversation, Lisa. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Josh. And you can get the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, anywhere you get books. And if you're interested in learning more about applications of AI from executive leaders, I host the Navigating Forward podcast from Launch Consulting, as well as the Navigating Abroad web series, where we highlight all those innovative movers and shakers in AI, cybersecurity, and employee engagement. Lisa, one more time on the title so someone can search in their podcast app right now. Absolutely. Navigating forward. Navigating forward.

18:16Lisa V, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Josh.

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