Will AI Supercharge Our Output or Sink Our Standards?
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Will AI turbocharge our output, or will it erode our standards in a rush to automate? Let's talk about it.
All right, welcome humans to episode four of the Neuron Podcast. I'm Corey Knowles, joined as always by our writer, Grant Harvey. Say hi, Grant.
Hi, Grant.
All right. Today's episode will be centered on whether AI will become a massive productivity boost or a race to lower our standards across industries. So we went out and found the right person to talk to on this subject, and that is Andreas Welsh. How are you today, Andreas? Doing well. Thank you so much for having me. Awesome. We're glad to have you here. Andreas is an internationally recognized AI strategist. He spent more than about two decades turning tech hype into real business results. At SAP, he led the Global AI Center for Excellence and helped weave AI into the software that powers thousands of enterprises right now. Now, he's the founder of Intelligence Briefing, and Andreas advises Fortune 500 leaders and teaches LinkedIn learning courses on agentic AI and hosts the popular show, What's the Buzz?
AI in Business. And if you haven't watched that, go watch it. It's good. He's also the author of the bestselling AI Leadership Handbook that we'll talk about a little later as well.
Yeah, and that's what it looks like.
Yeah, good looking book. Yeah, I like the cover actually. Well, few people have what I would call a clearer view of the true cost and true payoff of AI. So we're thrilled to have you here to help us kind of unpack whether lower model prices will spark a productivity renaissance or a race to the bargain bin.
So I guess I'll kick it off. So Andres, I think that the largest thing that I think people think about when they think about applying AI in business is the idea that it makes you faster or more productive. So when you hear claims that dirt cheap AI will make everyone 10 times faster, what simple tests do you use to see if that's actually realistic or not?
I think there are two. One is who's the person saying it and how long have they worked on AI? That's the first one. We've seen a lot of crypto influencers become AI influencers almost overnight. But I think more and more realistically in business, I would say faster is great, but the question is faster at what? And what does it mean if you're faster? What does it mean in business terms? What does it translate to if you're able to do something faster, better, cheaper? There's always some business KPI, key performance indicator that you need to look at and say, well, if we're thinking about introducing AI, by the way, which isn't always the best starting point, thinking about where should we use this.
But if we're introducing AI, what is the business KPI that we're looking to improve? So first of all, my recommendation would be start there. What KPI do we want to improve? And then see, is AI even the right technology? Yeah. to improve it? Can it help? There's been so much talk and so much excitement about generative AI and everything that it can do, right? Makes you 10 times more productive. You know, do we all want to have Copilot or other tools write our emails? Maybe. If it's the one-liner, the quick things where you're getting a summary. But maybe there are some cases where we don't want to do that. And, you know, that's just productivity. I think there are also so many more examples in bigger real business processes where you
Get an order. You process the order all the way to receiving money for that order that you've fulfilled, order to cash. So, you know, faster is great. First of all, it's not the only dimension, but also then faster at what and what does it realize? I think that's the bigger question.
I think that's a good call out. And I like that you touched on, you know, even that it's different between, say, a company that's producing a physical product that they're trying to sell and has this very clear programmatic pipeline versus some work that doesn't happen that way as well. And seeing that difference, I think, is important.
Yeah.
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