Steve Brown

Just get rid of a few people and increase your margins and yay, go us.

Maybe you grow your business 10% or 20%.

And, you know, you slap yourself on the back and think, haven't we done well?

No, you haven't.

The reason is because if you take the 21st century approach and you think differently and you say AI is something I can use as an amplification, I can amplify the people that I already have and I can use that to create more value.

And that potentially, instead of growing your business 10%, you're now growing it 10X.

So that's the mistake people are making is they're going down that old path.

The first thing a leader, because it's what they've learned to do for maybe 30 years, right?

Is how do I use IT to cut costs?

If you do that, you're not taking full advantage of AI.

And what you're potentially doing is putting your business at risk because when your competitor goes the other path,

By amplifying the value you're creating and amplifying your scale, you get economies of scale and you collapse costs that way.

You make all of your competitors who followed the old route irrelevant.

And so that's the thing I spend most time explaining to people is how do you become an AI first company?

How do you fully harness AI so that you're still around five years from now?

If you follow the old path, you may be gone.

To some extent, a lot of the leaders I work with, I mean, they're hiring me because they're oriented towards being successful and doing something with AI.

But there is a little bit of that.

And I tell them a story about a guy I used to work with at Intel, a lovely man, Scotsman.

And it was the era when we just first got email for the first time.