Glenn Gow is not just a CEO Coach; he’s a Harvard MBA, a successful CEO for 25 years, and an executive who has left his mark on the tech industry.
His journey from being a software developer to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley giants gives him an unparalleled perspective on leadership, business growth, and personal development.
He has advised numerous leading tech companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many more, on strategy.
He recently served as a Marketing Partner at Clear Ventures – a VC firm whose partners have produced 34 exits yielding $52 billion from 8 IPOs and 24 acquisitions. In this role, he worked on strategic issues for Clear’s portfolio companies and was responsible for helping CEOs accelerate growth.
Glenn is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Soteria Intelligence.
What you will learn
- Discover the transformative impact of long-term coaching on leadership
- Glenn shares his unique approach to coaching CEOs
- The pivotal role of external talent and coaching in helping CEOs scale and adapt to their companies’ growth
- Why adapting to AI-driven changes is crucial for businesses
- Learn about the benefits and applications of AI-powered niche solutions
- The role of CEOs in mandating employees to work with AI tools
- How AI can streamline the evaluation of contracts, proposals, and documents
- The rapidly evolving nature of AI and the need to embrace it and experiment
- How AI enables productivity and allows people to focus on the fun and strategic aspects of work
- Plus loads more!
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:05 – 00:01:26
Hi everyone and welcome to The Jeff Bullas Show. Today I have with me, Glenn Gow. Now Glenn is not just a CEO coach; he’s a Harvard MBA, a successful CEO for 25 years, and an executive left his mark on the tech industry. His journey from being a software developer to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley giants, gives him unparalleled perspective on leadership, business growth and personal development. He’s advised numerous leading tech companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many more. That’s a good resume, Glenn, by the way. He recently serves Marketing Partner Clear Ventures, a VC firm whose partners have produced 34 exits yielding 52 billion from eight IPOs and 24 acquisitions. In this role, he worked on strategic issues for Clear’s portfolio companies and was responsible for helping CEOs accelerate growth. He’s currently a member of the Board of Directors for Soteria Intelligence. Glen contributes to corporate strategy, risk and governance. Now, Soteria is an AI-based company, and we know that’s rather topical at the moment, delivering the next generation of social media and digital customer experience solutions. So Glenn, great to have you on the show and let’s have a chat about AI tech disruption and, you know, all of the above.
Glenn Gow
00:01:25 – 00:01:27
Great. Let’s do it. Thank you for having me here, Jeff.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:27 – 00:01:53
It’s been a pleasure. It’s great to have you here. So, Glenn, what, so you went and, you were a software developer. What took you from being, so let’s go right back to that, let’s say. So what inspired you to become a software developer? How did that start? Did you sort of discover a computer at high school and started coding? How did it all start?
Glenn Gow
00:01:54 – 00:02:37
Well, what I figured out is that computers were a lot smarter than we were back a long time ago. And that if I could get ahead of that curve, then I could continually be able to add value by leveraging this amazing technology. And so that’s why I jumped into that and then I made a shift when I went to get my MBA when I realized it’s a lot more interesting when you’re dealing with people than you are with computers to solve business problems. And that’s why that led me into the career of actually consulting to these large organizations to help them solve business problems. And that was a lot more fun for me.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:38 – 00:02:42
So, is that because it involved humans instead of machines?
Glenn Gow
00:02:43 – 00:02:50
Yes. And we’ll talk about that as we get to what’s happening today. But yes, exactly. A lot more interesting.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:51 – 00:03:17
Okay. So you went and did the MBA and where did you do the MBA, Glenn? Okay, cool. And so once you got that ticket, right? The MBA from Harvard, did you put up the shingle to become a consultant then? Or was it, had you started to do consulting to companies on disruption and tech before that?
Glenn Gow
00:03:17 – 00:05:41
The most formative role I had was working for Oracle in the early days. And there I had an opportunity to work for some very very famous and powerful people at Oracle. Larry Ellison being the most famous, but Tom Sebolt being another legend in Silicon Valley who’s today running an AI company called C3.AI. But more importantly, I was deeply involved in the sales organization. And what I recognized is that we had a tremendous opportunity to enable companies to be much more effective and efficient by leveraging technology that then turned me into wanting to help other companies do the same thing. So when I left Oracle, that’s when I started the consulting organization that I ran for 25 years and it was absolutely wonderful, amazing work. We helped these companies solve what I call the DNA problem, Jeff, meaning let’s say Google wanted to go into a new market, but they didn’t have anybody inside the company. They would look around and say, who understands this product market fit and no one would understand it. Why? Because it’s brand new to the organization. We brought that talent in to say we’re gonna bring and constructive team that can help you figure this out faster. And then I was very fortunate during that period of time. I had a coach while I was the CEO, I had a coach for 17 years and that was a transformational experience for me. What I didn’t recognize at the time was that that coach was teaching me how to coach because every day I use something that I’ve learned from that coach when I’m working with my CEOs who I coach and the combination of my business experience and my coach taught me what I will call the mental game, how an individual CEO can become an even better CEO. So I combined the business and the mental game together, which is very powerful and very fun to work with CEOs on. I can continue and talk about the next step if that’s of interest.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:41 – 00:05:48
Yeah. No, that would be great. So, yeah, continue on in terms of what the next step was from there.
Glenn Gow
00:05:48 – 00:10:06
So I was recruited in the venture capital, great opportunity. An opportunity you can’t turn down and I began coaching the CEOs of our portfolio companies. And that’s when I fell in love. Like I really, truly fell in love with this work. I realized that this was what I actually wanted to do. I didn’t realize it until I was doing it. I was getting fantastic feedback from the CEOs I was working with. I was getting great joy out of watching them grow. And now it’s an interesting thing about the CEO in the venture capital world, 60% of them get fired within a five year period. So I stepped back and I said, well, why is that, what is happening here? Now, the simple answer is the CEO is not growing the company fast enough, okay? So you’re not growing the company fast enough and eventually you’re out. But I said, okay, that’s too simple an answer. Let’s peel the onion a little more and get to an understanding of why is the CEO not growing the company fast enough? And the answer turns out to be that the CEO isn’t scaling themselves. They’re not growing themselves personally. They were perfect when the venture capitalists put money in for that company at that time. But every time a company grows, some milestone occurs. A brand new client, a new product, another round of financing, a new set of skills are required by that CEO to be successful. And my job is to help those CEOs pick up and use those new set of skills. And I have seen enough movies when this is happening before that I can almost predict what’s gonna happen. So that’s where, that’s really why I enjoy this. But there’s another important thing I need to mention. During my time as a venture capitalist, one of the amazing things about being in venture capital is that you can predict the future. Now, I know this sounds a little bit crazy. But the reason you can predict the future, Jeff, is that it’s walking in the door every day telling you what the future is gonna be. Every entrepreneur is saying, I have an idea, I see trends, I see opportunities and when you put that all together, you understand something’s gonna happen and we need to invest in this. And the biggest wave I saw by far was AI. Now that was five years ago. And so I said I need to dive into AI, I need to begin to understand that deeply. However, I said I need to understand it at the CEO level and the board level, I am not going to tell you how to build a convolutional neural network. So even though I have a technical background, we’re not going to delve into that. Why? Because that’s not where I believe I can add value. I believe I can add value to the CEO and the board members. So the first thing I did is I started writing a column in Forbes. So I’ve been writing a column in Forbes for five years now, specifically talking about the implications of AI at the CEO and board level. Now, what’s interesting is I didn’t have a lot of people paying attention to my column until roughly a year ago when ChatGPT exploded onto the market. And now suddenly everybody wants to hear what’s happening. So what’s beautiful about that is that someone, in this case OpenAI, put a consumer wrapper on top of a technology. That’s all they really did. They put a consumer wrapper on top because this technology existed, Google had it and probably has even better technology than OpenAI. But no one had put something on where every one of us could relate to it and it’s exploded in popularity. If you look at what’s gonna happen in the world of AI, Jeff, McKenzie, who I trust when they do market research, says that roughly one third of the value of AI is gonna come from generative AI and two third, excuse me, two thirds of its gonna come from traditional AI, the AI that people haven’t been paying that much attention to. So yes, it’s interesting and yes, we need to wrap our arms around it and as CEOs we need to understand how to take advantage of it. But there’s a much bigger story than just ChatGPT.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:07 – 00:10:30
Yeah, something you mentioned just then too, as you said, AI was given a face, okay. And that face was ChatGPT, in other words, a user interface. And what’s interesting if you reflect back on the last 35 years or so in that the PC really took off when it was given, you know, Windows.
Glenn Gow
00:10:31 – 00:10:54
That’s right. Another example, you’re exactly right, is Netscape. So think about the internet existed for a long time, but it was a bunch of geeks talking to each other. And then when we put a wrapper on it all of a sudden, we as regular people who want to interact with something found this amazing technology sitting there all the time. It’s a very similar kind of thing.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:55 – 00:12:03
Yeah. And that’s, I’ve heard that mentioned before and that’ll look back into what’s happened over the last 30-40 years. And it is true is that a complex technical ecosystem is given a friendly face which the average user, you know, can use and we can’t, you can’t think of anything much user than, you know, a browser. You can’t think of any much user than a mouse even though we still get sometimes confused. But then, you know, the ChatGPT is just ask a question like it’s been given a user interface that is everyone can use and, what I blows me away about AI and ChatGPT is the fact is that it’s the fastest growing trend explosion in tech I’ve seen and I’ve been in tech since the mid 1980s. So this is so we’re learning, creating content all around it, doing SER research. What are the biggest questions people are asking about AI? And that leads me to my next question. What are some of the big questions that the CEOs and board members are wanting answers for around AI?
Glenn Gow
00:12:04 – 00:14:54
Sure, happy to. Now, I didn’t mention this earlier but I’m also a keynote speaker on AI. So I’m gonna take some of the material that I would use as if I were talking to a board of directors or a group of CEOs which I do often. So the first thing people need to understand is what I call the competitive landscape and how that’s changing. So the most important thing people need to understand about AI is that it’s different from every other technology disruption. So you and I were using examples of Windows and Netscape. But this is different. And the main reason it’s different is that AI learns and sometimes AI learns all by itself. What does that mean? Why is that different? It means that it’s getting better every day. So you might say, well, we come out with a new iPhone every year, right? I mean, it’s getting better all the time, right? Well, it’s different because most of that getting better for the iPhone is based on people, AI is doing it almost all by itself. And that means it’s gonna grow faster and things are gonna change faster than things have ever happened before. And when we think about the competitive landscape, if you look around and your competitors are taking advantage of what’s happening in the world of AI and you are not, you are gonna be left behind because the change is happening so fast. So here’s a story for you. So I was talking to one of my CEOs in a coaching session and he told me how he let go one of his senior machine learning engineers. I said, oh my gosh, why did you do that? Those are one of the most valuable people around. He said, oh, we’re doing prompt engineering now. I said what? He said, yeah, we’re using ChatGPT and other tools that are co-generation tools instead of that very expensive person. And we’re getting more work done then we would with that human being. So that was the first time I heard that there is a very serious potential loss of jobs here as it relates to AI and that was a person you wouldn’t expect to lose their job. It is, in fact, the white collar worker that is going to have the most impact. AI is gonna have the most impact on them, I should say, and we’re gonna see a lot happening in the world of job change. And so I want CEOs and board members to recognize that there’s a good and bad part of this. The good part is maybe we reduce our costs considerably or maybe we increase our productivity significantly. The bad part is some people won’t be able to change fast enough, Jeff, they won’t lean into the change that is happening now, they won’t be able to keep up and people will lose their jobs.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:55 – 00:15:15
Yeah. So in terms of let’s go back to the question, which led to this, which was, okay. So what is the top three questions you think that a CEO or a board member says, like number one, you’ve said that will people lose their jobs and who will lose their jobs.
Glenn Gow
00:15:16 – 00:15:23
In a competitive situation. So how do we make sure our competitors are not getting ahead of us in this realm.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:24 – 00:15:54
Yeah. So AI there’s a lot of trying to put guardrails around this discussion, maybe we should stop and pause it. So we actually don’t get taken over by the machines, right? So that’s anyone’s going well. The only way you know what’s gonna happen is by continuing to use it. So what’s your approach to guardrails and ethics for AI and in use, you know, that involves CEOs and obviously board members?
Glenn Gow
00:15:54 – 00:17:36
So the first thing we need to understand and I’m gonna talk more broadly, not just about ChatGPT here, but I’m gonna talk about AI as a whole. The first thing we need to understand is that AI is biased. So, if you’re a board member, you go, oh, what are the implications of that? I could have reputational damage, I could have actually coming up with the wrong answers, I could have other problems happen because AI is biased. So you ask yourself why is AI biased? Well, the answer is people are biased, Jeff, and we train AI on the data that was created by people. Now, I think there’s a silver lining in this, okay, I’m gonna use an example. Let’s say you’re a loan officer at a bank and you’re gonna decide on whether or not a person can get a loan. Are they qualified for a loan? Well, now we’re gonna say, Jeff, we’re not gonna have you do that anymore, we’re gonna have the AI do it. And so we look at the answers the AI comes up with and we say, hey, that AI is biased. Look at that. They’re not enabling people who should get maybe it’s people of color or something else or a certain zip code or a title or a name. Those people are not getting loans from us. What, why, what’s wrong with the AI? Well, here’s the silver lining. What really happened is that all this time, the bank was around the same bias existed. We were still doing the same thing. It’s only now it’s in the spotlight and we can fix it. So there’s actually an opportunity here to say we can make life better because we recognize the AI is, has a bias.
Jeff Bullas
00:17:37 – 00:18:42
What’s interesting is and you’re completely correct in that the bias because we, the humans, are training the machine. So the machine’s biased. It’s very, very simple in essence. So the thing is the machines, when we ask the machine questions and it comes up with answers, I suppose the bias becomes clearer because it’s now there in black and white and stark relief. And you can basically say, well, we need to fix this and no one feels threatened because you’re just talking about changing machines’ programming or bias. So, alright. So let’s talk further about AI. So what are the biggest changes you’re seeing AI bringing to organizations in Silicon Valley? And then there’s the other discussion which I’m fascinated by is you’ve got all these startups going. We’re going to take on the world and run over the incumbents with a challenge with AI, is that AI needs lots of data and who’s got all the data? The incumbents.
Glenn Gow
00:18:43 – 00:21:49
You are right. So let’s take on that topic for a moment. So it’s not only that AI needs lots of data but AI needs lots and lots of computing power, okay? And right now I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m fairly confident that OpenAI and Microsoft and Google are losing a ton of money every single time you or I or someone else uses a chatbot. I can’t prove that, but all the evidence is that they’re losing money, now they’re fine losing money for a while, okay? Because they’re gaining market share. They wanna grab that market share. Small companies can’t play that game. Absolutely cannot play that game. Small companies in the world of AI can own niches though. And what they hope is that Google is not gonna come after that niche at some time, at some point because it’s too small. But that’s where small companies can succeed. They can’t play in the game where it requires massive data centers and billions of dollars to run these systems. They just don’t have that. The only reason OpenAI is successful as a startup is they got $10 billion from Microsoft. So they’re not really a startup, startups don’t get $10 billion that just is not normal. But they figured out they can partner with this company that’s actually it’s really Microsoft funding all of this. So there will be very interesting and are many because I read about new startups every single day and there are very interesting niches that are gonna be carved out. And we’re all, here’s the good news, Jeff, we are all going to benefit from this. So I’ll give you an example. I write a column in Forbes magazine on AI, right? I mentioned that. So I use an AI tool where if I pull up an article from anywhere, any news online publication, let’s say that article takes six or seven minutes to read, AI can summarize it for me in one minute and now I can read a whole lot more articles or I read a lot faster as a result of this. Now, that’s just a little mitchy tool. It’s a plugin to Chrome. But oh my gosh is an incredible time saver. So Google is not gonna wanna do that anytime soon. Well, who knows, right? They may, we have to be worried about these giants running roughshod over everybody because they can, but it’s just an example of this awesome little tool that saves me a lot of time and could save anybody a lot of time. The other thing that’s gonna happen though for you and me and everybody else is that Google and Microsoft in particular are gonna incorporate AI into everything they do. Everything. And we’re going to benefit. Now we’re gonna pay a little bit more money because they have to actually make money on this eventually. But we are gonna be the beneficiaries of all these amazing AI tools that they’re putting in.
Jeff Bullas
00:21:50 – 00:23:53
I’m finding AI is one of the big question I’m finding with AI too, is it’s been questioned and this is like the Hollywood writers’ strike, for example, is that AI is coming for white creative jobs, okay. They saying AI is going to come for white collar jobs. So the challenge too and even now there’s a lot of lawsuits going on challenging copyright. In other words, so and this is fascinating in that the big player essentially stealing private proprietary designs, images, videos, voices and the list just goes on and on and on. Where do you see that playing out? In other words, the ability of the big players to just use anyone’s content and because they trained it on some of this content that was proprietary and everyone was just like it was the Wild West and it still is a lot of Wild West. So I know one company I’m involved with a startup is now using AI tools in Adobe because Adobe can guarantee that it’s not basically copyrighted. So where do you see this playing out with copyright and ownership of content, which is an ongoing battle any rate, even in search, right? And even media and content in that, even in Australia, we had the big media company said to Facebook and Google going, if you’re gonna use our stuff, you need to pay us. What’s interesting for that is the big guys get paid by the old media gets paid by the new media, but it’s only the big guys getting paid. What the other creators such as me as a blogger, a podcaster, they’re stealing my shit. So how do I get paid? Because I don’t have a big enough voice and a big enough to, you know, bankroll.
Glenn Gow
00:23:54 – 00:26:17
So, first of all, I’m gonna question the word steal, okay? Because you, as a podcaster, make your content available to anybody. You haven’t restricted it and you never told anybody you can’t use it for training. So there’s legal precedent here. But let’s put that aside for a moment. I think what’s gonna really happen. I’m gonna call it the Spotifying of content. So today, if I’m a musical artist, I might get, I don’t know, some percentage of a penny for every time someone plays a song because it’s licensed and I think that’s what we’re gonna see with content going forward. However, Jeff, I need to point something out. This is gonna be a really hard problem to solve. So, one of my favorite recent headlines I just read is that Amazon just said to all book authors, you are now limited to publishing only three books a day. Let just think about that for a second, Jeff, it usually takes about a year to write and publish a book. But if Amazon suddenly had to say to anyone author, hey, Jeff Bullas, you can only do three books a day. We know that Jeff is actually not writing this is that it’s being automatically written. And so there’s this explosion of content that’s happening. So how do we copyright that? I’m not sure we do, I’m not sure we can, I don’t think we know how. Now, what the Googles and Microsoft’s and Adobes of the world have done is they’ve said, hey, we have big enterprise customers. They don’t want to get wrapped up in some lawsuit, you know why? Because the lawsuit is gonna go after the people with the money, right? So you don’t want to be general motors finding out that all these content creators are suing you. And so what they are doing is they’re saying we’ll protect you. You know how Adobe did that Microsoft is, has done that and Google’s done that all their agreements are slightly different, but they want to be able to serve the enterprise as well as consumers with these solutions. So they’re saying we will protect you against copyright infringement and it’s gonna be really fun to watch how this plays out in the courts because nobody knows. This is uncharted territory.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:18 – 00:26:39
Exactly. So, what are some of the other upsides for AI that we talked about, some of the downsides? We’ve talked about, you know, the downsides of losing jobs, for example. What are some of the more interesting, I suppose applications of AI that you’ve seen in your past few years?
Glenn Gow
00:26:40 – 00:28:18
So here’s one. So AI can see patterns in the data that humans can’t see. So in the United States, in the state of Texas, there’s a little town called Frisco, Texas. And it turns out that in Frisco, Texas, there are more ethnic Indians than on average in that little town. Now, Frito Lay sells chips to people.They sell Cheetos and other flavored chips. The AI said, hey, we have this flavor that we sell in India called curry. It’s a curry flavored chip and we found this pocket of people in this little town. We should ship a bunch of these products to this little town, fill up the shelves because we’re competing. We, Frito Lay, are competing for every possible snack in that town against all our other competitors. But the AI saw this pattern and said, I recommend you ship all these curry flavored chips to this town. And let’s see how that works and guess what they dominate the market. Now, no human would have ever figured that out because the data is so hard to understand and it’s so big. This is something that AI does very, very well. It’s these patterns and makes recommendations for us. It’s very, so that makes it extremely powerful if you’re running a big company and you’re trying to figure out how do I leverage what’s really happening out there when I have all this data available to me.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:18 – 00:28:39
Yeah, exactly. Now, let’s move on to one term that you used which a lot of people are talking about is that the rise of professional prompt engineers. So let’s have a chat about prompt engineering and where is that going and tell us what it is?
Glenn Gow
00:28:40 – 00:31:34
So, prompt engineering is where you learn how to talk to ChatGPT or any other tool like it, okay? By the way, it’s the leader today, but it’s only the first of many, many, many that we’re going to see. We also already have something called the Google search experience and Google’s Bard. Those are two different offerings. We have Google’s or so we have Bing’s Chat which uses ChatGPT but it’s different. We have Pi, we have Claude and we have many others, okay? So we need to communicate with these chatbots. So prompt engineering means how can I be specific in my communication to the chatbot so I get what I want as a result. So what that means, for example is I could say to ChatGPT, give me a few bullet points of what I should say to Jeff Bullas when I get on his fantastic podcast and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it’ll come back. And now I wanna say, well, you know what, narrow that down because Jeff’s audience is a business audience. He has a lot of CEOs, sometimes he covers marketing topics and sometimes he covers AI. So let’s narrow this down so that people walk away with a better understanding of how to leverage AI using prompt engineering. Boom. That would be my prompt, okay? Literally a big long explanation of what I’m really looking for and I’ll get back a much, much, much better answer and then we’re not done yet because I want to encourage everybody to understand this. You’re having a dialogue with the chatbot. So now I’m gonna get another answer and I’m gonna say, okay, that’s pretty good. But you never really talked about image generation and your answer. So add that and it’ll go add that. And finally, I refined and I refine and refined. So here’s an example, about six months ago, an artist won an award at an artist contest, I don’t know exactly what the contest was and he told the judges, he said, look, I’m using AI, okay, so I don’t want to be disqualified in advance, I’m using AI. So he built this image. But what’s important is that it took him 900 prompts to create the image that would became the winning image because he is in dialogue with this image generation tool until he got it exactly the way he wanted it. So it’s humans learning how to translate between the AI and the human to learn how to talk to the AI. That’s what we’re really doing is as prompt engineers.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:35 – 00:31:41
So really, it’s the old edge. If you want better answers, ask better questions.
Glenn Gow
00:31:41 – 00:31:44
That’s a great way to say it, Jeff, that’s great. Yes, exactly.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:45 – 00:32:59
So the other one that fascinates me and as a writer and also I have a senior editor who’s a writer as well and we’ve talked about this a bit is, you know, writers are having existential crisis going, wow, this, I’ve asked the right prompts, got the right question, I’ve got a fantastic article that I would have taken me two or three days to write or a day to write or whatever. But then on the other hand, computers aren’t human storytellers, even though they can make stuff up and that gets rather interesting. So the other question I have is, and for me is how’s AI gonna play out for creators and will it help us become more creative? And for me, one of those is sort of that question about, will it help us be more creative? I think it is because number one, but out of all this data, it’ll help us make connections and bring up combinations that we as a human have never even thought about. We’re going, wow, I love that. And that comes down to seeing building architect designs done by computers make me a couch that looks like a Porsche.
Glenn Gow
00:32:59 – 00:38:28
Exactly. And so you’re exactly right. So, the first part of your question had to do with what’s gonna happen in the creative world. The answer is this, all of us are going to have an opportunity to be more creative because we now have this, I call my AI an intern, okay? They’re just an intern. They’re really smart, but importantly, interns make mistakes so that we forgot to talk about that. We have to know that interns make mistakes. And so you always have to have a human in the loop, Jeff, okay? When you’re doing something, you can’t let it run wild, you can’t trust it. But let’s use an example. So I don’t know how to design a drone. I don’t, that’s not what I do. But if I used the tool from a company called Autodesk, I could design a drone now. And if I get really good at prompt engineering, I could become an excellent drone designer, but here’s what’s great about AI, I’m not gonna start drawing pictures of the wings or the motors or the landing gear or whatever it is. Instead I’m gonna say to AI, I want a drone that can fly 1000 ft high, carry a payload of a hundred pounds and go one mile and back before running out of battery and cost under $100. Now, the AI is gonna go off and create all these different combinations that I never imagined before. I’m gonna say, oh, I never thought about using titanium. Wow, we’re not gonna come up with that idea. I don’t know, maybe we should go play with that idea. Well, I never thought that we should use six motors. I thought one would be enough and AI is gonna give me all these ideas to play with. And so people who are good at being creative will become much better at being creative and people who are not good like me at creative are gonna be, I’m gonna become better as well. I’m not gonna replace that drone designer personally, but this is where I say to all CEOs is that you want all your employees to lean into this and understand how they can become more productive. So one of my CEOs did something I thought was brilliant job. He said, look, this is a game changer. I see it. I understand. I’m not sure how it’s gonna change everything, but I know it’s gonna change everything. So he said, okay, every single employee needs to start working with AI right now, you have three weeks to come back and tell your manager what you learned by using AI and you have to, it’s a mandate. If you don’t, you’re out of here, which I thought was brilliant, right? Because there’s we can, he didn’t say it had to be good. He didn’t say it had to change the world. He just said you have to use it. And what’s fantastic, especially about generative AI is that we are often amazed and what it can do once we begin to experiment with it, I’ll give you two examples. So one of my CEOs taught me this. He said, hey Glenn, look at this, I can take, I have a contract here. I was or a proposal rather, I got a proposal from a vendor. It’s a big thick proposal. I don’t really wanna read it. So I’m gonna give it to ChatGPT and I say ChatGPT, I want you to evaluate this proposal, here are my key criteria. Come back to me and tell me what I should be telling that vendor they should do differently in their proposal. And boom, just like that, there are the answers. And literally, this is gonna happen. I’m not suggesting it’s a great idea, but people are gonna kick back to the vendors. These are the changes I want without having read the original proposal at all. Now I think you need a human in the loop but, the fact is something that might have taken you an hour, takes you a minute to evaluate a proposal. And ChatGPT is gonna give you a response and that’s what I mean by having people just interact with it in different ways. Here’s another example. So ChatGPT is just doing something right now. They’re coming out with a new, it’s called multi modal capability. Mind blowing. You can show it a picture, okay? I don’t have a picture with me. I would show you if I did, you can show it a picture and say what’s going on here or what should I do? So there’s one famous example already, there are street signs, okay? There are six street signs, one on top of another. One says no parking on Tuesdays between three and four for street cleaning. The other says, and so they’re all there. And so you can take a picture of these, all these seemingly contradictory signs don’t park on this side of the street on Thursday afternoons, whatever and you say to ChatGPT, can I park here today? And it reads all the signs, it understands the logic and it comes back and says, Jeff, you can park here today between four and six.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:28 – 00:38:31
Boom. Done.
Glenn Gow
00:38:31 – 00:38:52
Amazing, right? So it can understand images now. So we haven’t even really seen this because it’s literally, I don’t have that version of it yet. It’s coming out. I keep checking every day but that’s the other big point here why you need to lean into this and why that my CEO is so smart to say everybody needs to start experimenting with this because it’s changing so fast.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:53 – 00:39:15
Yeah. I think. Exactly. Right. So we’ve got to actually just have fun experiment with it. So I’m gonna ask the questions next after this last question about AI just to wrap things up. So what is the one singular thing that excites you most about AI?
Glenn Gow
00:39:16 – 00:40:03
There’s so much so, I have to think carefully about the answer. The thing that excites me the most is that because I focus on the business world, Jeff, we are all going to be so much more productive and we’re going to have the opportunity to work on the fun stuff. And AI is gonna take care of all the stuff that isn’t fun and that’s just phenomenal to me. Just phenomenal. What a great opportunity to spend time. I don’t know, whatever it is it gets, you know, that any CEO excited but managing your employees or thinking strategically or maybe not working as hard even but the opportunity is here for us to have a completely different way of working in the world.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:03 – 00:40:32
Yeah, I love that answer. AI equals more fun because it does the hard stuff for us. And scales us, which is the CEO problem that you mentioned before that. Okay, last question which I ask, well, my guess is I capture at the beginning is what brings Glenn the most joy from life, whether that be personal or business, what brings you most deep, profound joy and happiness?
Glenn Gow
00:40:33 – 00:41:49
I actually discovered this recently. Remember I told you I fell in love with CEO coaching. So I said, what, why do I love it so much? I mean, I really get this tremendous positive feeling in my body. Frankly, it’s dopamine that I think actually hits my brain. I study neuropsychology quite a bit. But I said, what is that about? And I said, oh, I got it. If I spend time with the CEO, I’m always on Zoom. I spend on average an hour a week with my CEOs, if I watch them become better as a result of my work, I just get this massive dopamine hit. I mean, I really, really love that and it’s partially physical neurochemical, but it’s also, I can see they’re gonna, they’re gonna do something that you never would have done before as a result of my interaction with them. And that’s my commitment to them every time we meet. I said you have to walk away being a better CEO and even better CEO as a result of our interaction. Otherwise I’m not doing my job and I, and frankly, that’s why I do it. So that’s really truly what gets me the most pleasure.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:49 – 00:42:25
Yeah, that’s awesome because you’re actually helping them be a better person and also the world, a better place. And I think that’s wonderful. Glenn, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. And I wish we had a bit more time but loved your insights on AI and I look forward to maybe catching up in real life one day for a glass of maybe, you know, Californian red wine or white wine. So thank you. Thank you very much for your time, Glenn. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Glenn Gow
00:42:25 – 00:42:26
Thank you, Jeff.