AI Adoption Isn’t IT: Exec Alignment Comes First

00:00:07 Mark Smith
Welcome to AI Unfiltered, the show that cuts through the hype and brings you the authentic side of artificial intelligence. I'm your host, Mark Smith, and in each episode, I sit down one-on-one with AI innovators and industry leaders from around the world. Together, we explore real-world AI applications, share practical insights, and discuss how businesses are implementing responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI. Let's dive into the conversation and see how AI can transform your business today. Welcome back to the AI Unfiltered Show. I'm glad you're here. Today, I'm joined with Kristi, who's joining me from Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. We'll cover a range of topics in this episode, and all the links, as always, will be in the show notes for this episode. With that, Kristi, welcome to the show.

00:01:03 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
Thank you.

00:01:04 Mark Smith
Pleased to have you on. I always like to get to know my guests to start with. And so I start with food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

00:01:10 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
Well, It's funny that you put them in that order because I don't consider myself a foodie anymore. Not really, because I don't travel as much as I used to. But I grew up on the beach in Florida. So I am a lover of seafood. I love stone crab. If you've ever had stone crab, it is better than any lobster any day that I've ever had. family. I have the best husband in the world. I have a stepdaughter and I have 4 fur babies. So I have two cats and two dogs. One of them happens to be a 11 month old Dalmatian puppy. She's still a puppy, very much a puppy. Her name is Siren and very much a love of my life right at the moment because she is just a handful and just a blessing all at the same time. But very much a handful too. And fun. You know, the puppy is a lot of fun right now, but I love to travel, always have. So that is what I try to do anytime I get a chance. that and eat that and eat and drink. I mean, I love a good wine and a good meal. So I love to cook and garden and all those things that go around with food. And so, if you can put all those, if you can put food, family, and fun all together, that's what I really love. So there you go.

00:03:03 Mark Smith
A winning combination. What's top of mind for you right now? What are you focused on? What's going on in your world?

00:03:09 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
Oh, wow. it was about three years ago that I transitioned into being an AI consultant. And I thought I would have been more, because I'd always been a corporate than working for SAS and software companies, I thought I would have missed that. I thought I would have been, questioning myself by now, whether I really wanted to do consulting or whether I wanted to work on my own for my own company. But I haven't looked back. I love what I'm doing. It has been slower, I would say, than I expected because the world is a little bit slower about AI adoption. And I think there's a lot of reasons for it. But those who are ready to jump in, are very ready. And they're ready, they're ready to go. I'm working with a company right now that decided that they needed to be reinvented, basically, that they had sat back and not done a few things on the marketing side, but that they have, they're seeing competitors do some things and being very loud about it, where they had been doing similar things, but had not been loud about it yet. And they just, something clicked with the AI, because a lot of it had to do with AI. Something clicked and they went, what? We just need to reinvent ourselves for this era. And that's so fun when you have a company that all of a sudden gets, they don't get everything with AI yet, but when they get kind of where we're at and they're like, you know what? Put it in front of us. the art of the possible, the realm of the possible, we get it. We really get it. So let's talk about it. Let's see what this means for us. So they're all open for training. They're all open for, hey, I had this idea. So that's really been fun.

00:05:22 Mark Smith
That is awesome.

00:05:22 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
So I'm working on with a couple clients like that. And then, you know, there's always the clients that are a little bit still apprehensive and wanting to take things slow, and that's fine. I mean, that's where the majority of the world is right now. But yeah, I'm just, I think if you talk to most people who are in AI that have dove in, it's a lot of excitement, a lot of, because things are so different and we're learning so much and there is a lot of excitement around it. And I think that's just where I'm at right now is because I continue to learn, I continue to have things put in front of me where you're like, wow, did that just happen? Was I able to really just do what I think I did? So there's just a lot of cool stuff going on right now.

00:06:10 Mark Smith
And the clients that you're working with and even your research in the market, why do so many initiatives fail at a leadership level in the organization? And what is that misfire or mismatch? And then what decisions do you feel executives really need to align on if they're going to execute and deploy AI and get the AI adoption they need across their business?

00:06:39 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
That's a great question. And it's one that I deal with a lot because I focus on strategy. mostly, and I focus with C-level and with founders. And the biggest challenge that most have had, and I find this true no matter where I go, and even with the companies that say, no, we're good. And when you start talking to them, they're like, maybe we need to go back and have some conversations. AI is a different way of doing business. It's not really a tool, even though we call it a tool. It's not really normal software as we have perceived software previously. It's not an upgrade of a typical Microsoft product that we just roll out and throw over the wall to IT and say, handle it. People talk about this ground-changing, disruptive thing that's happening in the environment right now. And a lot want to go, yeah, it's not that big of a deal. It's just another piece of technology. We've dealt with that before. Oh, no, it is that big of a deal. It is that disruptive. It is that different. But it's just technology, right? We've done that before. It can't be that difficult to tame. And it's almost, it's, I have all kinds of analogies, but the problem with that and what we saw a lot in the very beginning, it's a mindset, it difference in dealing with this technology that's not like a technology, this software that's not really a software. most approached it going, well, should I roll out AI? It's not really, should you roll it out? It's where can AI really help the most? Frankly, it's a different mindset. Even when you are in AI, it's hard to get your head around it. I've been in it for over five years, well over five years now. And constantly I have to stop myself and re-challenge myself daily. It's a different way of thinking for developers. It's a different way of thinking for individual contributors, a different way of thinking for just the everyday person when they go to order a drink or they go to buy something online. That mindset change is change. It's disruptive and nobody likes change. So we try to like reshape it and make this square back into a circle so it can fit back in the circle box that we're used to pushing it through because we don't want to change. And yes, it is software. We're going to push it back in the software box that we've had all along. We're going to make it fit. So we're going to continue to deploy it. We're going to continue to treat it like we always have. It still doesn't work because it is different. It doesn't work like software. It is a completely new way of doing business. And it keeps coming at us. It keeps upgrading. We keep getting more of it. And that is something that has perplexed almost every CEO out there. Because no matter how much they ignore it or change it or try to redefine it or try to hand it off, it keeps being AI. It keeps being what it is and they can't reshape it. They can't assign it to someone else. And it all of a sudden become what it wants it to be. What everybody wants it to be is easy. And it's built to be easy from one aspect, but it's not easy to overcome the mind shift. The mindset shift, the cultural shift, the fact that it's very different is a big deal. It will impact everyone on this planet, except for those that live completely off the grid and do nothing electronically oriented at all. It will impact those who are clients of something, customers of something, or produce something everywhere. And even if you don't want it to, It will because your family or your customers or your clients or your neighbor will use it and ask you to use it too, or force you to use it. And the fact that you just want to buy a Coke from a machine, or you want to order food, or you want to buy something online, then now it's going to be different.

00:11:54 Mark Smith
So what advice do you have for the executive layer of an organization to get their mindset reset, to get their culture even reset in their organization and set them up with the best possibility to move forward with AI.

00:12:12 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
Yeah, what I've seen work is the C-level founders, whatever size company you are, is really bringing in a chief AI officer like myself or an AI expert to come in and do a strategy day with your executive team. And the reason that tends to work is that, at least in my case, what I do is I not only work with the executive teams to gain alignment on what their beliefs are around AI, which in many cases, that's the first time they've talked about it. And it's somewhat surprising between some of the executives of that maybe someone doesn't feel the same about AI as the other, but to get out the whys that they're feeling that way. But also part of what I do is spend some time on really making sure everybody understands what AI is and what it's not. what it's capable of. Part of that for me is really going into some strategic and advanced techniques with Gen AI of what it really is capable of. So that the myth around, I call it a myth around, but the small use cases that you can utilize it for content generation and email, which are all great, But there are use cases around Gen AI where you can get real decision-making out of it. You can get game-changing results out of it, past some of the low-hanging fruit, I would call it, that are the go-to use cases that you immediately think of, where you kind of get the aha moment of, oh my God, I never had any idea that was possible. And then you start getting the questions of what about the hallucinations? What about this? What about, everybody starts unloading and you start addressing some of those. You start addressing the security. You start addressing some of the things that can be handled fairly easily.

00:14:34 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:14:35 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
But then you also start talking about their goals. And for some, this opens up the whole, well, wait a minute. We've always wanted to go into Latin America, or we've wanted to go over to EMEA, but we've never been able to because we couldn't translate. This means, oh yeah, it does mean, it's rather easy now. This means, oh, you know, the product we were wanting to do or the whatever we were wanting to do that we just kept leaving off. What does this mean to the people? You know, you start doing some of the assessments, even in miniature form, Because usually my strategy days are about, are really a day. Sometimes they go into two days, depending on the size of the company. But I call them miniature assessments. It's really talking about your people, talking about your data, talking about where you are from a governance standpoint and what that really means when you start talking about it. AI. And I work with software companies as well. So we're not just talking about governance internally. Some companies, we're talking about their product and what it means to develop AI, which is a different entity. But we go through those discussions and start really talking about, okay, so mindset check again, guys. Are we now still sitting on should we go with AI? Or now you're starting to talk about where should we use AI? Because the next step of this is to talk about your use cases. You get a whole different reaction and it's like, okay, yeah, that again, use cases, we need to start talking about where's the pain felt. Because you don't want to do 8 use cases at one time. Again, that's back to why people were failing. They started throwing darts at a dart board anywhere it landed. Here, AI, feel like Oprah, here's you some AI. Here's you a little bit of AI. Here's you some AI too. Now, where's your biggest bottleneck? You may do AI for your first use case on the easiest thing in the world, but you know what? It may be because it's the biggest bottleneck in the world. It may be the most manual thing in the world that everybody in your company hates doing. But we need to find out where some of those pain points are that block revenue, that Our manual, I have a list of things that I go through. Yeah. But then you prioritize them. And just because you want to do it doesn't mean that you're ready to do it. Again, back to the assessments. Where's your data? How's the data quality? How's this? You've got to put all of this into context and look at it and say, what makes sense right now to start learn from and then apply to the next one. Doesn't mean you can't do a couple at the same time. You might be able to do one of those low-hanging fruit ones, several of them, while you're doing a more significant use case. But then again, why? Understanding your why are we implementing AI, understanding your communication plans, understanding how you're going to handle change management. AI for, again, where we are We all hate change. AI is huge change. For organizations, that means huge communication and change management plan. Even if you're a 20-person company, you have to understand what that's going to mean to your people. And that's not an IT issue. That's a C-level issue, owner issue, founder issue. And right now, it was a section report the gap between what the C-level or the owners or the founders think and what the individual contributors believe that's happening between AI, whether it's that they have a strategy or that it's being used or that, oh yeah, the individual contributors are encouraged to experiment and they're gangbusters using AI. There's a huge gap between what the C-level thinks and what the individual contributors think. Huge. And that lack of communication in between is the reason.

00:18:52 Mark Smith
I like that. So do you, a couple of things that came out there. One, you got to get the mindset of the executive layer at a point that you then can go, okay, now let's look at what workloads and which ones we're going to prioritize first. But you've brought up another dimension there. And the other real key takeaway I've had is this is not an IT project. And I think that is super important, although data and IT definitely will be contributors. But you've just brought up a really interesting thing, that disparity between the executive branch of the organization and the boots on the ground, the people at the coalface doing the actual work. How do you, and part of you, know, you're running your workshops, there would be, I assume, a gate for you to go, this company is not ready yet. like whether you've got very strong resistance from the executive that are either fearful, potentially ignorant, and there's no will to move forward. Have you seen any clear things where, or have you, in most cases, been able to go and address the risks, the concerns, the why now to move forward? So I'll let you answer that, and then I'm going to pick up on the, then how do you get the executive to go, hey, let's go to the bottom of the org, and let's engage there before we create this prioritized list.

00:20:20 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
Yeah, absolutely. There are three things that have to exist or have to be done, have to be answered before you can just start rolling out pilots and use cases. Now, you can do some of this at the same time, but the companies who are successful, who have been successful, You look at the Netflix, you look at the Amazons. They didn't skimp in these areas. You have to have that strategy day, strategy days. You have to have those discussions. You have to know where everybody is. You have to have the assessments, know where your people are. You have to have the honest discussions. Some of those assessments won't be answered in that initial day. You may have to go, I don't know where my data, the quality of my data, and I don't have the right person in here to tell me, you know, we need to go do a deeper dive. Okay, then let's go do that deeper dive. That's A to-do out of the strategy day. It just sometimes is, depending on your size. The next thing is in order to get, and you should always be focused. AI is wonderful with helping with efficiency gains. And that's where everybody got kind of lost their minds at first with AI. So, yay. But it is brilliant at helping an organization grow. And that's where everybody's like, ROI, ROI, where's my ROI? Well, you have to track it and plan for it when you start. And that's where a lot of people didn't. You have to plan for growth when you start with a use case. You have to think about that. Well, the one area that you need, and I'm sure we'll talk about this in more depth, the one area that you need to know is that your people understand how to use it correctly in order to know that you can leverage your people to wield it properly. Training is huge. huge. And I know we're going to get into this soon. But that's the second foundational issue. And third, you have to understand what processes that you are willing to go deep on and re-engineer. And as soon as you say re-engineer processes, it's another where everybody wants to just go, well, that's way too, that's a big project. I'm not going to re-engineer processes. We're just going to put AI on top of stuff.

00:23:09 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:23:09 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
I think this study was done at late 25 by McKinsey, I think. All the companies before that. we're hearing about all these failures and nobody's getting out of it what you want, what they wanted. It's because only 21% of the companies deploying AI even touched re-engineering their processes.

00:23:28 Mark Smith
Yeah. Interesting.

00:23:29 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
AI is an enabler. It's an enhancer. It's an a multiplier. It multiplies good and it multiplies bad.

00:23:40 Mark Smith
So bad processes, right? Bad processes are only going to be multiplied if they're not re-engineered.

00:23:47 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
AI is meant to help enable and streamline and make your processes, this is where the efficiency craziness comes from. This is why you want to target manual processes, bottlenecked processes, painful processes, because it's optimal. to point AI at it and take all that craziness out of it. So if you want to put AI on a process, it doesn't mean that it can't take a really good process and make it really awesome, which it can do. But those three things, if you don't do those three things before or as you are implementing, you're not going to get out of AI what you want.

00:24:34 Mark Smith
Yeah, so true. I know we're running close to time. The last thing I want to really talk about is the people in the organization and how do you take them from, you know, you'll have some people that think they're really good at AI and they're like, hey, I can write a prompt. And we know that, you know, prompt engineering's been in market as a concept for a while. We're now into outcomes engineering, which is a lot, you know, more advanced form of engagement with AI. and contextual engineering is another key pillar that we have here. What type of work do you find works well with the folks at the coalface that have their own ideas, but also as an organization, we need to increase the AI literacy by 30% of all staff. How do you tackle that?

00:25:32 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
Yeah. When you say increased literacy by 30%, that's still, the section report I mentioned earlier, it comes out every six months and it showed that AI literacy is still at a 40%. And those are people who are trained, who think that they know what they're doing. So that is someone who tells me that they're confident in what they're doing. They've been trained. then we test them and they score 40 out of 100 on a test. That is not only a lack of literacy, that's a huge risk for your companies. No, it's not only just shadow AI, people are using AI without you knowing. You now have people who are confident in using AI. They've been trained. and they think they understand it. They think they know what they're doing. Now, I equate this to, and you've heard me say this before, to being all of us dropped on another planet. I used to say an island, but let's say it's a planet. And nobody knows the language, it's not inhabited, but there are some type of inhabitants there that have some language that we have to start speaking somehow in order to get along. Most of the world so far is okay with being able to point at things and having an alphabet that they understand. But all of us know that you can't do business You can't rule the island or rule the planet by knowing an alphabet. You need to learn how to do trade. You need to understand nuances in cultural differences. You need to understand the slang. You need to understand the different dialects. You're going to need to be able to understand a lot of intricacies of everything. in order to actually really do business and be a top player, like a Amazon or a Microsoft, or to really do, or just a top player in your niche of business in order to do business, pointing at stuff and being able to put 2 letters together in an alphabet isn't going to help you do much other than maybe get an orange. or get something that you're pointing at to get it done. The difference in that and being able to really collaborate with AI as a true partner and have interactive conversations with it is substantially differentiating. It's an ability to narrow the field. It's an ability to challenge, to push. on both sides, you and I have to push back. It's different techniques that you can only utilize once you're doing that with AI that most will never realize are even possible. That once you learn that these things are possible, the decision making, the art of the possible, the ability to streamline things like sales and sales process and other basic things in a business that aren't so basic, that are so difficult right now is huge. It's game-changing. This is where the game-changing comes in when they promised at Gen. AI when it first came out, game-changing. This is where the game-changing comes in. Yeah. That's the difference of when you start talking about what do people need to, you know, where do they think they're confident? Why do they, the people right now who think they're confident, is because they've been trained one or two sessions and they're getting responses like Google. And Google gave you a response and you took it and ran. They haven't been, again, it goes back to mindset. They haven't been instructed that AI is this different. They've heard here and there, you know, it hallucinates, it does this, it does that, but not to the degree. not to, they have not been able to been instructed on how to recognize it, how to combat it, how to do the things to combat what's going on, or even why it's so different.

00:30:16 Mark Smith
Yeah. Kristi, it's been so interesting talking to you. I feel like we need a follow-up session. This has been so valuable. It's definitely sparked so many ideas in my mind. Thank you for coming on the show.

00:30:28 Kristen (Kristi) Perdue
Oh, again, anytime. Loved it.

00:30:32 Mark Smith
You've been listening to AI Unfiltered with me, Mark Smith. If you enjoyed this episode and want to share a little kindness, please leave a review. To learn more or connect with today's guest, check out the show notes. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next time where we'll continue to uncover AI's true potential one conversation at a time.