#293 Greg Shewmaker: How Enterprises Can Implement and Scale with Agentic AI

This episode is sponsored by AGNTCY. Unlock agents at scale with an open Internet of Agents. Visit https://agntcy.org/ and add your support. How can enterprises truly scale with agentic AI? In this episode of Eye on AI, host Craig Smith speaks with Greg Shewmaker, CEO of r. Potential, about how organizations can successfully implement agentic AI systems that enhance human performance instead of replacing it. Greg explains why the future of work depends on a new partnership between people and intelligent digital agents. He shares how r. Potential, a spin-out from the Adecco Group, helps enterprises design "digital workforces," integrate AI agents into complex systems, and rethink productivity from the C-suite down. Learn how leading companies are approaching AI adoption, what pitfalls to avoid, and why agentic AI could redefine how enterprises operate and grow in the years ahead. Stay Updated: Craig Smith on X:https://x.com/craigss Eye on A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The mission is to strengthen and secure the full potential of humans with AI. So it's very human centric. We don't believe that AI, at least in the near term, is going to automate everything as some claim. We think that it's probably much more around maximizing human efficiency. And I think the companies that are going to win are going to be those companies that take that gained efficiency and open up new opportunities. AI gives us immediate productivity gains. I mean, it's just a linear line that goes straight up. And every time there's new models or new tools that come out, we see efficiency gains almost overnight. But that's not happening in the enterprise because the enterprise is, by its very nature, super complex. And what I'm seeing is the companies that say, hey, let's have an agentic strategy to automate as much as possible.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  And most of the time, it's driven by the IT department or the innovation team, which that's not necessarily wrong with that. But it's probably the wrong approach because AI is truly having an impact across the entire organization. So you need to think about it from the C suite, from the CEO on down.

• 0:56Craig S. Smith?

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• 1:37Craig S. Smith?

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• 2:23Speaker 00

  Hey Craig, I'm Greg Schumaker. I'm the CEO of Our Potential. Our Potential was a company that was recently spun out of the Adecco Group. We're here in San Francisco, California. It's where our headquarters are.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Prior to Our Potential, I was the head of global operations for the Adecco Group for several years. What that really meant was we were building talent supply chains for some of the biggest companies in the world. Adecco puts about 2 million people to work every single day across every industry, across every country. Before that, I was doing primarily supply chain and merchandising work for large retailers and e-commerce companies. And many, many moons ago, I was in the military. From Montana, born and raised in Montana, and since then, I've lived all over the world.

• 3:05Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. The, Our Potential, it's helping companies implement AI into their workflows. Is that right? Can you talk about the mission? And really, how did it happen that it got spun out of Adecco?

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, the mission is to strengthen and secure the full potential of humans with AI. So it's very human-centric. We don't believe that AI, at least in the near term, is going to automate everything, as some claim. We think that it's probably much more around sort of maximizing human efficiency. And I think the companies are going to win are going to be those companies that sort of take that gained efficiency and open up new opportunities.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  So we're trying to figure out with companies, hey, what's the right combination of, you know, let's call them digital workers in quotation marks and human workers, to accomplish whatever it is you want to accomplish. And it's, you know, there's not one simple answer. In fact, there's not even one complicated answer. There are many.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  And the reason why we did this is because, as I said, the Adecco Group puts a lot of people to work every single day across every imaginable sort of job there could be on the planet. And several years ago, we saw, you know, this obviously shift towards AI coming. And we saw that that was going to impact our business on two fronts. One, it was going to change most likely how we do work. Coming out of the recruiting and staffing industry, we knew that it was going to impact us internally. But more importantly, it was going to change our primary business model of putting 2 million people to work every single day. Obviously, the workforce was going to change based on everything we were seeing and hearing. So we went out and we talked to hundreds of, you know, customers and executives around the world and kind of, you know, gauged sort of their sense of what was happening and

• 4:52Speaker 00

  kind of two things. One was we realized quickly, uh, they didn't have a clue what was coming and what was about to happen. And the second thing is, is that we needed to think about the future and, you know, and call it next generation workforces, whatever it might be. But there was going to be some combination of humans and, and AI that was going to make up the workforce sometime in the near future. And I'll just, the last point I'll make on that is we knew that we couldn't can like drive this amount of change in a $25 billion company and run the business at the same time. And so we said, hey, we need a dual strategy. We're going to run the business as is, and we're going to go change the business. And to do that, we can't do that with the same people and the same methodologies and the same sort of risk tolerance. So we spun out a new company and that's our potential.

• 5:37Craig S. Smith?

  And that's interesting because that's, that's part of the challenge of that enterprises are facing, how to integrate, figure out the role that AI should be playing in our operations, how to integrate it while operating businesses as usual. And you talk about AI agents as uh, labor. Uh, and, and but at the same time, uh, there's been a real uh, failure of agentic workflows to, to succeed in, in the enterprise to date.

• 6:18Craig S. Smith?

  But, but uh, you, you talk about that as a management failure, not a software failure. So can you talk about that?

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's, yeah, I think it's just a failure of sort of approaches. So it's not necessarily individual failure. We're all, you know, sort of testing and learning and trying to figure this out on our own, you know, all companies. But if you look at AI today at an individual level or hey, our potential as a startup, AI gives us immediate productivity gains. I mean, it's just a linear line that goes straight up. And every time there's new models or new, new tools that come out, we see efficiency gains almost overnight. But that's not happening in the enterprise because the enterprise is, you know, by its very nature, super complex. And I think At least in my observation, what I'm seeing is the companies that say, hey, let's have an agentic

• 7:08Speaker 00

  strategy to automate as much as possible. And most of the time, it's driven by the IT department or the innovation team, which that's not necessarily wrong, anything wrong with that. But it's probably the wrong approach because AI is truly having an impact across the entire organization. So you need to think about it from the C suite, from the CEO on down. Hey, how's this going to change our business model? How's this going to change our, you know, capital expense policies, our procedures, our, you know, everything. And so you need to think about it. How does it get incorporated into our existing business strategy? Not how do we have a separate AI strategy? And so, as I said before, I think the companies that are thinking about, how do I use AI to increase the efficiency of my people? And then take that efficiency and

• 7:51Speaker 00

  open up new opportunities. I think those are the ones who are going to get it right. Everyone else who's thinking about it as a technology strategy are going to continue to get it wrong, or at least spend a lot of money to get it right.

• 8:01Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and the reason they're going to spend a lot of money and maybe not get it right is, is what? And, and just on the productivity thing across the enterprise,

• 8:17Craig S. Smith?

  you know, a lot of those productivity gains are incremental on the personal level, you know, I, I use an agentic product to, to answer emails and sort emails and that sort of thing. And it certainly saves me time, maybe it saves me a couple of hours a day.

• 8:39Craig S. Smith?

  But in an enterprise that those couple of hours a day don't flow to the bottom line. I mean, they, they aren't aggregated into this massive productivity game. It means that the employee maybe takes a longer lunch, or, you know, is just works at a more relaxed pace. So yeah, those two questions, how, how do you capture that productivity gain across the enterprise? And why are they?

• 9:13Craig S. Smith?

  Failing so often currently.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  You know, again, lots of different reasons. I think one of the main reasons, though, is you're trying to take something that's new, AI agents, and you're trying to shove it into something old, which are existing systems and existing processes, looking at, you know, sort of existing data sets, which oftentimes, you know, are fragmented and are incoherent. And so I think the agents are struggling with that. It's as if you brought in an intern into the company and you said, hey, you're going to go run finance. Now you got to run payroll on Friday. Good luck, you know, and chances are people aren't going to get paid on Friday because the intern, you know, as smart as they may be, is just not going to be able to navigate, you know, this environment and make it all happen. And I think the agents are struggling with the same thing. You're putting it into one system and everyone has an agent today.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  So I buy an agent for my CRM system and that agent does certain things. Okay. But then my CRM system needs to engage with my HRS system and my finance systems. And there may be agents over there and those agents don't work well together. And so they hit a wall, just as humans hit a wall, if they're not able to sort of navigate an organization efficiently. And so I think it's just that, and it stems from, again, not having sort of this top down strategy to say, hey, here's what we're actually trying to accomplish. Now let's introduce these agents into our workforce, just as we would new workers. And that's why I like to call agents digital workers, not because I'm trying to personify them, or I think they have human level intelligence today. But I think if you start treating them as if, hey, we should qualify the agents that we're bringing in to the organization.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  We should train them. We should test them. We should hold them accountable. We should be able to fire them. We should manage them, just like we do humans. Then all of a sudden, it's a different game versus I'm trying to install software. I'm installing software with the high hopes of having this human level intelligence and it's just not realistic.

• 10:58Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And potentially you were saying that, you know, a deco is running a business. Let's run a parallel track to figure this stuff out. Is that something that you advise companies to do to set up? A team or a, you know, a parallel track that, that tests the, these agentic systems or, or AI systems before integrating them into the, into the main enterprise.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  I don't think it's a bad idea. Again, every company is slightly different, but it, it allows you to move quicker in this world of AI. You know, as you know, things are moving so rapidly and it's just not realistic for any big company, even if you're a tech company, you can't move that fast. I mean, we're here in the middle of San Francisco and Silicon Valley and it's a completely different world from where Adecco is headquartered in, you know, in Europe. I mean, there just couldn't be two different universes. And so I just can't imagine doing what we're doing every day here, you know, still within that environment. And again, risk tolerance and just speed and resources that focused on, you know, the core business. So it's not a bad idea to at least consider that, you know, for, for company, large companies especially, to be able to move quickly. And again, when things don't work, hey, we can shut them down, you know, the

• 12:20Speaker 00

  next day and it's very low cost and it's very low risk. And then we get to try it again and again and again. And so it's allowed us to iterate very quickly and build some interesting things for the enterprise, but doing it sort of at, at startup speed.

• 12:32Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And then as you said, the, the things are moving very quickly. This is something I've, I've wondered, I mean, for myself personally, looking at all these tools, it's just overwhelming. How do you decide what tool to spend money on for an enterprise? The tech keeps changing. How do, how do you advise people to deal with that? I mean, how, how do you commit to something?

• 13:05Craig S. Smith?

  And, and then if something new comes along, how do you swap it out in, or, or, or is enterprise always going to be 10 years behind the, the market?

• 13:19Speaker 00

  I don't think they can afford to be 10 years behind the market because I think some of these tools now, as you mentioned, are so incredible and and sort of bring a level of efficiency. That's I haven't seen before how fast it's sort of, you know, materializes. I don't think the enterprises can afford to wait. And just as an example, so what we're doing is we have these things called units of potential. And essentially, it's what we believe is going to be sort of the future configurations of workforces. It's, hey, what am I trying to accomplish as a company? What are the real world constraints? What are the human capabilities that I need to get this work done? And then what are the digital capabilities I need to get that work done?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Whether that's right or wrong, don't know. But what we're saying is, hey, for companies, let's test those this in the smallest scale possible. And by the way, it can't be fully digitized. So we're there's a lot of handholding from us and hey, we're going to work with your teams to try to implement this. And over time, we hand it over to you and over time, we start to, you know, automate and digitize more and more of that. But that allows us the flexibility to say, okay, if we had a hunch, this is what you're trying to accomplish. We're either accomplishing it as planned, or hey, it didn't go quite as planned. We had to make some changes. Now, the next time, we're going to do it slightly different and slightly different. I think that allows you to sort of go fast, do things that are related to the business, adjust as new technologies come,

• 14:44Speaker 00

  adjust as you learn before you make these big commitments. Say, well, we're all in on, you know, this particular agentic platform, or we're all in on this particular technology. And by the time you get it implemented, it's irrelevant or it doesn't work anymore. And so I think it's it's more test and learn and work fast within the enterprise, but doing so with scale in mind.

• 15:03Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And so you work alongside the enterprises. That relationship then ongoing? Because as the technology changes, as new tools come along, either the enterprise is going to have somebody dedicated.

• 15:21Craig S. Smith?

  To figuring it out on an ongoing basis, or they're gonna hire someone like our potential to do it for them.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. So I mean, ultimately, our business model is we're creating something what we called a year ago is the total talent marketplace. So how do we aggregate the workforce supply on one side, whether you're human workers, or AI agents, or robots, or whatever comes next. And as I described before, hey, let's go try them out and test them. Ultimately, I don't want to build another consulting firm to have all these, you know, professional service people running around the world implementing these things. Ultimately, the company should be able to do this, and it should be as automated as possible. But for what we call design partners, sort of our first enterprises that we're working with now, we're right there with them, and we're doing it together. We're learning, they're learning, and you know, it's kind of a we're on this journey together approach. So we have a very small team doing that.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  I envision that team remaining small, no matter how big the company gets. But it's really important for those people who aren't necessarily technologists. These are people that know how the enterprise works. They know how to navigate to enterprise. They're learning alongside the customer at the same time, and then we're feeding that back into our platform.

• 16:30Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and that's a good point, that you don't want to build a consultancy.

• 16:37Craig S. Smith?

  And but how do you scale? So you're trying to to develop like this CEO co-pilot, or chief potential officer, you're trying to develop something that that can adapt to any enterprise. What does the enterprise have to do if they're not working and in hand with you to adopt something like that? Is it is there a menu of, you know, what what kind of data you're gonna have to feed it? Are these models that you fine tune? Or is it a rag system that

• 17:21Craig S. Smith?

  you'd load up with company documents? I'm just curious how that works.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so. You know, like any marketplace, which I relate to all my background before of building in the retail world, and now we're talking about a talent marketplace, you know, you can never build it all at once. So when we first spun out of a DECO, our focus was we have to go build the technology platform. And we built sort of this enterprise platform that had, you know, an experience layer, a trust layer, what we call cognitive services, which essentially is, you know, proverbial brain. And we have data querying services, which what we were able to do spun out of a DECO is we took about 60 years of labor data. We took massive amounts of, so let's think about like a billion resumes, think about every LinkedIn profile that exists today, think about almost a billion job descriptions

• 18:10Speaker 00

  from, you know, 10 million companies, real time sort of labor regulations and laws from the major countries around the world, skills anthology, salary data, et cetera. And all that data we were sitting on forever at the ADECO group felt powerful, but it was completely useless. It was fragmented, dirty data that we sat on forever. So the first thing we had to do with our potential is build this architecture that allowed us to sort of structure that data and make it usable. So first six months, all we did was build the platform. Now this next phase is, hey, how do we take this chief potential officer, contextualize all that data and provide it back to the CEOs to say, hey, we already know a lot about you and your industry and what's happening out there in the world of, you know, human

• 18:52Speaker 00

  and AI. Let us at least provide that as a starting point. So at least that gives them a plot on the map to say, okay, here's where I'm standing today. And so what we do is we provide them that plot, if you will, to say, here's how many people we think work at your company. Here are the roles that they work in. Here are the skill sets of the people in those roles. Here's what we know about what you've said publicly or what we know about, you know, those types of jobs and AI. We think your level of automation is this today, whatever, 18% by different job function. Hey, we think there's a theoretical ceiling of automation, you know, of whatever, 42% in this particular role.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Now, we're not suggesting that you go to that and get rid of those people. We're saying, hey, if you can get to this level of automation in these particular roles, that gives you a lot of free capacity to then redeploy that, you know, somewhere else in the organization, more revenue facing roles or driving efficiency, et cetera. So that's a long way of answering your question is the first data set that we have is just our own data set that we were able to structure and prioritize. Now, if the company says, well, if I provide you my proprietary data, how much more accurate does sort of this assessment get? And the answer is quite a bit more accurate.

• 20:06Craig S. Smith?

  And, and then, so a new company comes along. And once you've got this product deployed or the chief potential officer, what is, is there?

• 20:23Craig S. Smith?

  And if you don't want to have to work with them one-on-one, how do they know what data to supply the, the system in order to refine the, the, the profile that it's built of the company?

• 20:41Speaker 00

  So it'll make a recommendation. So the chief potential officers say, hey, look, here's what we know about you. Here's some, you know, recommended workforce configurations based on what you're telling me. Hey, if I had access to HR data, I can give you, you know, a much better answer. And because we were able to build this sort of this enterprise platform and in part, so Salesforce is one of the early investors in the company. And one of the reasons why we wanted to work with them is because they're enterprise grade security and, you know, using tools like MuleSoft. So now all of a sudden we can, we have all the API capabilities for any major system that an enterprise would have. And so within a matter of days, we can plug into that HR system if they agreed to that, get that data and turn it around within a very short amount of time to say, okay, we gave you one answer. Now the answer is this based on that data.

• 21:26Craig S. Smith?

  And who's doing this at, at the enterprise? Who's, is this a CTO's team or the IT department? Who, who takes on the, the product and, and works with it to figure out what data needs access to?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  For now, we're working with a combination, a cross-functional team of both business people and you know, the IT department. However, for our design partners, and right now, we we're all, we're going live in January, we're only working with design partners. The criteria is that if we don't work directly with the CEO, then we're not working with the company at this time, because the CEO is helping us sort of create this experience specifically for them. And we've been so lucky coming out of the Deco Group and then having Salesforce as the other investor that we've had sort of unfettered access to the C-suite over the last few months. And we've been able to talk to dozens and dozens of, you know, the biggest CEOs in the world. And so we're saying, look, let us give you this, this chief potential

• 22:31Speaker 00

  officer. It's not a tool because CEOs don't use tools. Think about it as a relationship like you or I may have with ChatGPT or another tool. CEO can't use ChatGPT to make decisions for a public company. They need something that's built for the enterprise. It's more secure. It's more private. But they're appreciating to have this thing relating to them, not as the CEO of company X, but as this individual. So the most important person involved right now in the process is the CEO. Now, when they say, hey, let's go and put a real sort of use case into the world, this unit of potential, then that's when we work with a cross-functional team of theirs. But it requires them to whole start the whole process because we have to build the trust with them. Sorry.

• 23:13Craig S. Smith?

  And this idea of working with the CEO does, is it, is, is it, what's the interface? Is it like a text chatbot? Or is it a voice chatbot? Or is it an avatar that, that they talk to? I was just curious how, how that's going to present to the CEO?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So right now it's purely web-based and it's, it starts with a, what we say, here's a workforce sort of assessment or report about your company.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  And then there's a chat interface that allows them to go into any element of that report and say, okay, tell me more about this. Hey, you came up with this number. What does this mean? Or hey, this number doesn't seem accurate, you know, whatever. And so it's, it starts to interact. But what we've done is we've created these composites. So it's not just a chat GPT sort of mirroring back what you it thinks you want to hear.

• 24:06Craig S. Smith?

  And, um, and, and so your, your, your design partners, have you sat in the room while CEOs interact with, with this?

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent every week.

• 24:18Craig S. Smith?

  And then the idea is, once this is in the CEO's office, uh, he would be talking to it throughout the day.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Maybe. I mean, we're not hoping to create an app where we're all about engagement. We're, we want the CEO to talk to this one in the moments that matter the most, right? And, and the CPO is meant to be sort of proactive and reactive. So it's, you know, sort of scanning the world out there and saying, hey, here's some things that maybe you should be aware of, Mr. And Miss CEO, you know, maybe it's important, maybe it's not, or it's just waiting there for the CEO to come and say, look, I have a board meeting coming up. Uh, you know, hey, tell me what I should be thinking about, or what questions should I be preparing for that I think I'm going to get hit by my board, you know, given everything that's going on. So, you know, it's still too early. I don't want to say we know exactly how they're going to use it, but it's not meant to be something like social media where we hope they engage with it every day.

• 25:10Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Uh, and, and the, the advice that, that it's giving, um, how do you expect that to be used? I mean, you talked about a cross-functional team for implementation. Uh, is, is that something that, uh, that, uh, the, if, if a CEO or an enterprise, uh, adopts your solution, then the R potential, or I'm sorry, the, uh, chief potential officer would be advising you should, you know, ideally form a team with somebody

• 25:50Craig S. Smith?

  from this group, somebody from that group, and, uh, take a look at these tools, or, or is, is it, uh, is that left to the, uh, to the C, CT, that's to the human CTO to figure out?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. So as I said, at scale, assuming this all works how we envision it is it is this, you know, this talent marketplace, this platform. So the idea is that it starts with the CEO. And of course, the CEO will never only be the only customer, but we think this is who has the biggest problem now. As we understand the demand to need through these conversations, then it says, hey, would you like to generate this unit of potential? CEO says, yep, great, let's generate it. So again, here's what you told me you want to accomplish. Here's what I know the constraints are. Here's what I think, you know, the combination of humans and AI should be based on all the things that I know about those two things. You can change that.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  The CEO can say, you know what? This is a good idea, but I want to go validate this with some more people on my team. So what we have for now, and it's only a Slack integration now, but at scale, it'll be other tools. You can say, well, go talk to the CFO, go talk to my CTO, go talk to these other two people because I know they're experts in this space. I want them to go tear apart this idea or validate it and come back. For now, the CPO will facilitate a Slack conversation with those people, and it could also suggest other people too. Those people can, you know, kind of weigh in and say, well, hey, here's what the CEO is thinking. Here's a unit potential presentation to that person. Have at it. And it kind of comes back and says, well, here is the original idea. Now here's what that idea might look like based on this feedback. And the CEO can say, okay, well, I like the original idea better, or hey, they're sandbagging,

• 27:36Speaker 00

  or hey, that's good input. You know, we're already working on this project, whatever. But the idea is in its simplest form to say, okay, go make this happen. You know, press the action button. Now, of course, it's never going to be the CEO's job to oversee this thing being implemented. So that's where it kind of gets handed off to the, to the company's team.

• 27:53Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Sorry.

• 27:55Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And is the idea that you'll eventually have a suite of agents that then?

• 28:04Craig S. Smith?

  The team, whoever, whether it's the CEO or head of IT or something can can pull together agents from your suite of agents to implement the idea.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  That's right on. So then that's how the marketplace kind of comes together.

• 28:19Craig S. Smith?

  So you're not building agents or you're you're you're sort of an orchestrator. You you come up with the vision and then have all these resources available.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 28:34Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  And and we think of the chief potential officer as a first true digital worker. And we're as we're testing this out with, you know, our users, we're saying, okay, well, here are the standards that digital worker needs to abide by and kind of, you know, maintain. And ideally, we want to use those as sort of the standards for other supply partners, you know, coming in eventually. So we're learning ourselves, you know, what works, what doesn't work in the enterprise.

• 28:58Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And when you say standards, just give an example of what you're talking about.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Well, so it should be tied to, you know, real business decisions. You should have sort of what we call autonomy guardrails, meaning it needs to have grounded in context. It needs to be accessed to the right data and the right tools. It needs to be transparent in its decision making. So we should need to be able to see, well, why did you make this decision? We need to be able to, you know, see that what you can't today with the L L Ms. Of course, it needs to have sort of network level security and it needs to, you know, be secure and be able to roll back. You need to be able to audit it. You need to have a kill switch, that kind of stuff. But most importantly, it needs to be clear in terms of where its capabilities start and end and where the human capabilities that it's meant to augment start and end. In this case, the CEO to to to begin with.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  The idea is that the CPO today does not make any decisions. It's meant to be a thinking partner. It's meant to sort of propose these things. It's never saying, hey, I'm going to go do this or, you know, make this decision. So clearly, sort of from a standard or guardrails perspective, it has to stop short of, you know, taking any action. It's just making strong recommendations. That may change someday, just like a human worker, as I prove myself and I earn trust in an organization, I get more autonomy within that organization. But until that trust is built, it has to stop at a certain point.

• 30:18Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And and you know, we were talking about the the chief potential officer when you you are using. The term CTO as a digital worker, are they the same things? Or is there a second product that's the CTO?

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Oh, no, CPO. So Chief Lieutenant, I'm just.

• 30:35Craig S. Smith?

  Oh, okay. I'm just.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right.

• 30:38Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Uh, so, uh, on the idea of, of the efficiency or productivity gains, as I said, certainly on a personal level, uh, the way things work now, their productivity gains. How do you, uh, aggregate that into an enterprise level, uh, gain?

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know if it starts on an individual level. It starts immediately if you have access to an agent or a, a tool. I think with the enterprise, one of the things that we're seeing is you kind of have two paths to go down. You say, I want to introduce agents into my enterprise. And maybe I have a partner that, you know, work day or sales force or whoever. I'm going to put my agents into their environment.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  On one hand, that's easy because you already have those existing systems. The challenge, as we talked about before, is how do, are those agents get a run into a wall? Once they try to engage with other systems or other functions or, you know, complicated tasks. But that's going to get figured out eventually because the biggest companies in the world are working on that. The other option, which is even more interesting and we're seeing, and this is what we're doing with our design partners is there's some amazing tools out there right now that are sort of being driven by AI, where they're reinventing sort of SaaS systems on the fly in minutes and hours. So you say, well, look, my limitations are, I have a, you know, 42 instances of a CRM around the world. And I have, you know, 15 instances of the HIRS and I have timekeeping systems, whatever.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  We're working with a few small companies here in the Bay Area now that says, okay, let me come in and I'll recreate that architecture in a short amount of time using AI. Now, AI is only being used to shorten the creation of these systems. It's still a SaaS system at the end of the day. But what ends up happening is it's a SaaS system built specifically for exactly what you need. If we're that enterprise and they're implementable within a matter of weeks, which unlike, you know, you know, CRM or ERP or anything like that, those are usually months or years to implement. So. I say all that because if you take that route, what we're seeing, at least in its smallest scale, is then those companies can gain efficiencies much quicker because now you

• 32:58Speaker 00

  don't have all the tech debt and the legacy sort of processes and stuff. Again, on a very small scale and pilot phase. Then if you want to introduce agents to that environment, great, because now you have new set of rails, which are made for agents sort of organically, and they're not trying to navigate super complex system configurations.

• 33:18Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and you stress that the wrong way to go about this implementation is to see it as a workforce reduction in a box. I think you call it headcount reduction in a box.

• 33:38Craig S. Smith?

  And again, to this, realizing the gains across in the enterprise, you want to reconfigure your workforce. I read that you led a reskilling initiative for over 30,000 workers at a DECO. Is that what the other side of this, and once you've figured out how agents are going to undertake a certain amount of work and free up time, then the second step is to reskill or redeploy workers?

• 34:20Craig S. Smith?

  And is that something that our potential works on, or is that then you hand it off to a DECO?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yep, or someone else. It doesn't have to be a DECO. We're not married to them or anyone else, but that's right. So, unit of potential says, I'm trying to accomplish this. Here are my metrics. Here are my constraints. You know, hey, we need to integrate, you know, three different agents. We need to hire these new skills, and we need to train these people or augment these people with some additional tools. The idea is that, hey, we're going to help you sort of execute that in this early phase now because it can't be automated.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  And we'll do exactly what you just said. Hey, here's a partner that can help with training. Here's a partner that can help with change management. Hey, you very well may need to, you know, let go of some people. You may not need everybody. Hey, here's a workforce transformation, you know, partner that you can work with to help them find their next opportunity. And by the way, here's the companies that have these qualified agents. So the the idea is to say, hey, it has to be turnkey so that you have the highest chance of getting the the ROI or the, you know, the the success that you've outlined initially. Just saying, hey, well, just implement agents and you're going to magically save lots of money and, you know, and grow revenue, all that. It is just total BS. It'll never work. It's like saying, I'm just going to go out and hire the very best person in the world. They're going to save my company. It never works that way. Right?

• 35:37Speaker 00

  I mean, they come in and if they don't fit culturally, they don't have access to the right systems, or they're not, you know, they they don't integrate well, then they fail. And agents are going to continue to fail unless they're integrated in a way that says, here are all the other factors beyond technology that need to work for this agent to be successful, just like an employee. If anyone has any other idea about how enterprises are going to work, they're just fooling themselves completely.

• 35:59Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah. And and the the the penetration of of agents in the enterprise has been slow.

• 36:09Craig S. Smith?

  At at least on a on a top down,

• 36:15Craig S. Smith?

  you know, direction. How long do you think before

• 36:21Craig S. Smith?

  something like

• 36:24Craig S. Smith?

  our potentials chief potential officer or or, you know, other similar kinds of things are going to

• 36:36Craig S. Smith?

  have an effect, have an impact and really begin transforming enterprises?

• 36:44Speaker 00

  I hope it's soon. I mean, it feels like it. You know, knock on wood, there seems to be growing demand for this, for help. I think people are starting to realize this is a leadership problem or a C-suite problem. This is not a technology problem. Just through the conversations that we're having and, you know, so I mean, there'll be other solutions. There are already some other solutions out there, but I, I think, starting with those and then having them cascade into now, what is the technology that we actually need to go make this happen? I think that's the right approach. And I think we all got excited about AI. It was, you know, probably overhyped and everyone felt like, hey, we can't sit on our hands. We have to go do something. Everyone said, well, let's go do co-pilots or let's go do agents or let's go do tools. Wasn't necessarily

• 37:29Speaker 00

  wrong, but it started at the wrong end of the spectrum. And I think people are saying, let's move over here. Let's figure out what the business actually needs and then let's move that direction. And I think if that happens at the rate, I think, I feel like it, you know, is starting to head that direction, then I think you'll start to see a lot more successes in the next 18 to 24 months.

• 37:49Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and right now, the people that are, are doing what, what the chief potential officer are doing are the big consulting firms. And there's been a lot written about, well, how long is that gonna stick around? Because, you know, if you, if you can have an intelligent agent that gives the same advice as a team of junior analysts from, you know, whichever consulting firm, why not go with the digital agent?

• 38:28Craig S. Smith?

  Well, you guys are early in your trajectory. Are, is the market so vast that you're not worried about competition? I, I've heard other people talking about CEO co-pilots and, and things.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  I'm always worried about competition because everything moves so quickly in this day and age. I think our advantage right now isn't the chief potential officer or whatever level of AI we're using. Right now, I would say, the thing I stand behind confidently is we have the sort of enterprise knowledge and execution in the enterprise that at least technical startups don't have. Of course, the big consultancies have. And so I feel like that's what's working for us right now in the C suite is having real conversations. We're not here to sell an agent. We're not here to sell you super intelligence. We're not here to sell you AGI. We're here to say this is really hard work. It's going to get really messy. It's super complicated. We'll be here with you as long as you need us and then you can go work with whoever you want. Until then, I feel like that's the right approach so far.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  I don't know how long that lasts, but so far we're having the right conversations with the right people. And we certainly don't have enough people right now to go after all the work that people are asking us to go do.

• 39:39Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  I don't know if it's a three week problem or a, you know, eight month problem.

• 39:43Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And looking into the future, do you imagine every C suite will be working with something like the chief potential officer?

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Yes, I do. I do believe that. I think it'll have to be enterprise grade, C suite level sort of, you know, companion. It can't be a chat GPT or Quad or whatever. It's just, you know, it's too risky. So I do think that there will be a companion, whichever companies create those in the C suite for sure.

• 40:15Craig S. Smith?

  And are you focused on any particular industry?

• 40:21Speaker 00

  No, not now. We're actually working across some of the biggest technology companies in the world, manufacturers, insurance companies, service companies, et cetera. And so for the moment, it's now we may find out over time as we, you know, we're again very new that there is a certain niche that, you know, has more demand. It does seem like we're getting more and more requests from sort of the mid-market and private equity companies because, you know, but I don't know if that's something we want to pursue or if that ends up becoming a bigger part of the market. But for now, you know, it's a great signal to the market where we're working with some obviously well-known, you know, big enterprises. But we may find out it's much easier to work with smaller companies to go faster.

• 40:58Craig S. Smith?

  In your view, is AI?

• 41:04Craig S. Smith?

  The the magic bullet for productivity or or as a lot of people feel is it's just going to turn into a money pit for for C suites.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Well, I I think that's it's an interesting question. It's probably company specific. I will say that I don't think it's a technology decision. I think it's a leadership decision. And I think depending on how the C suite thinks about AI going forward and, you know, I talked about it, maybe it's beginning of the conversation. If you're thinking about how it actually amplifies your people today and how those amplified people are going to do more for your company, then I don't think it's a money pit. If you're thinking about is how am I going to install this software and, you know, do magical things for less money, then I think it's going to be a money pit for a really long time.

• 41:52Craig S. Smith?

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