Your AI Pilots Need to Grow Up to Keep Up, with Barry McGeough, Global Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at AmeriCo Group and Sonal Gandhi, Chief Content Officer at The Lead

Transcript

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Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies, and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from The Digital Shelf Institute. The constant stream of AI announcements and prognostications can sometimes be paralyzing. You need to pay attention, but you can't be distracted. The key to powering through and taking advantage of the opportunities of the era is staying focused on the business outcomes you mean to drive and relentlessly shaping your AI strategy. To match from our guest, Sonal Gandhi, chief Content Officer at the lead, and Barry McGough, global Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at Americo Group, come practical strategies for turning innovation, testing and learning into production scale processes, driving growth and profitability. Welcome to the podcast, Sonal and Barry. We're so excited to have you both on.

Barry McGeough (01:13):

Thanks, Peter.

Sonal Gandhi (01:14):

Yeah, it's great to be here.

Peter Crosby (01:15):

Awesome. So we're not only excited of course to have you Sonal from the lead, but also to have someone from your Esteem Direct 60 leader list. Barry and I know for both of you, for all of us, those freaking two letters that are on everyone's mind right now, we can't avoid AI and it's there, we can't stop. But the real question is what does it mean for the future? And particularly when I think about where the lead puts all of their energy, you so much want to empower professionals from across the space of commerce and point them towards practical ways of working best practices. It's a really great gathering. And so that real question of AI is what does it mean for the future and what are brands doing about it now that really stands out as leadership that you can share with us, and you both are able to discuss different angles of that. So Barry, let's start with you. What do you think of how AI will fundamentally shift how we all work in the next, I dunno, five minutes or five years? Actually, why don't we start there?

Barry McGeough (02:26):

So Peter, Lauren, thanks for having us on the show. It's a real honor. I think you asked maybe one of the most loaded questions that can possibly be asked at this time, and so I do not want to start off on a catastrophic note, but I think this has been an incredible point that's being driven home every single day now in the news and it's in all our feeds. AI will change the way we work. Now the question is what are the sort of leading indicators and signals that are coming in that we need to process? There is a lot of noise around this, so I think there are two aspects of this. One is how does it change white collar jobs and how does it change blue collar jobs? So on the blue collar jobs side, we have to really think about robotics and that's not something that we're thinking about much. And yet there's over a million robots in the Amazon supply chain alone. They have everything from Kiva to Sparrow, which are these sort of handpick, spindly robots that are actually picking and packing boxes. We have a big announcement in the last couple of weeks around unit tree in China selling a humanoid robot for $6,000, a company called

Lauren Livak Gilbert (03:48):

One, only 6,000. Oh my

Barry McGeough (03:49):

Gosh, that's it. You can own one. And then there's a company, they actually had a really interesting presentation at the TED Talks and that they just launched their, it's called their Neo one. It's a company called one X, and they're selling robots that can do your laundry and they can do your dishes and your dishwasher for $20,000. Now there's some really clowny videos about how it takes mine me up like five minutes to load three glasses. So we're not there yet. But this idea from a blue collar perspective that we're going to be working with cobots, Harvard Business Review, said that we would be working with cobots by 2037. That's going to be more like 2026 or 2027 where all of us will have robots working next to us. We have to think about robotics. We also have to think about what's happening on the white collar side.

(04:42):

So if you look at some of the numbers in the last couple of weeks alone, Walmart said and made an announcement that they were going to flatten their workforce of 2.1 million people for the next three years, totally flat. That means that their plan is they're going to move a lot, they're going to fire a whole bunch of people that don't know ai, and they're going to hire up a whole bunch of people that know ai. So that is going to change the future of work at Walmart. Amazon just announced that they're going to lay off 30,000 people. They've already laid off 14,000, and that's in the white collar side. So there's announcements from WC actually said that jobs requiring AI skills are now growing three times faster than jobs that don't require AI skills. So the numbers are coming in, right? IBM said they're going to drop 2,700 jobs.

(05:30):

So we have to think about what does this mean for people that are also entering the workforce? Anish Ramon is the chief Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn, and there was a really good article that Anish wrote about two months ago that said that entry level jobs on LinkedIn are shrinking or what does that mean for Gen Z? There was something actually Stanford study from the New York Times that said that 77% of job applications of Gen Z that are trying to find jobs, they bring their parents and 10 the interview, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's back up. I swear what? Because they're seeking ways of credibility. 10% of these people are getting their jobs on TikTok. It's really, really hard out there. So wait, bring their parents to the interview, to the job, and they get the job. Don't know. Don't know. But that's how dire it is, guys.

(06:27):

I mean, so I'm not being doom and gloom, but I'm saying this is something, and I just wrote an article about this. This is something we really have to start thinking about because if we look about what happens with white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, there's this idea, this sort of concept that we would be reaching this idea of a KS shaped jobs market. What they're saying is that 20% of job skills will be 10 times more productive by the use of ai. The other 80% will go down. So this is a really, really big deal. Two days ago, one of the executive researchers at Deep Seek said in a big press release that most jobs will be eliminated by AI in the last 10 or 20 years. Now, I think that's catastrophizing, but what we have to think about is, so how do we remediate the time to consider remediation is now.

(07:23):

So World Economic Forum says that at Davos that in order for us to upskill in the US one and a half million jobs because going to cost us about 34 billion, that's just in the us. So we have to think about upskilling and reskilling in the AI world because we have to think about what is the relevance of humans, our will, our role be if jobs can be accelerated, if we can do things 10 times faster, it is an open question, do you need 10% less of us and what will we do? And there's a lot of studies on the jobs that are at most risk and the jobs that are at least risk. But I have to say that from my point of view, I don't personally think that that means that everyone should be plumbers and electricians. I don't necessarily think that we need the workforce of the 19th century.

(08:23):

We don't need to be pushing plows and running sewing machines. I think that we need to really think about and give it some really serious thought. So one of the things I'm actually kind of encouraged by, there's two different aspects to do this. One is do we promote a universal basic income? Now that's really, really controversial and a lot of people think, and even Harvard Business Review says that by 2050, most countries will have some version of a universal basic income. Canada is already trying it. We've tried in selective towns and cities in the US to see whether it works or not. That's costly. And still you have to figure out if you have a universal busing income, what do you do every day when you wake up in the morning, get a check, and then what? Feed the birds. So the other thing is a lot of countries are looking at upskilling.

(09:11):

China is very, very aggressive about making sure that its workforce can be continually upskilled. And Singapore has this thing called Smart Nation 2.0 where they're giving every citizen $4,000 to upskill in ai, and that's $4,000 for their lifetime. And it never expires at any age. You can be 70 years old and you can get four grand and you can learn how to upskill yourself in ai. So we're going to have to start thinking about those things. We're going to have to start thinking about what's happening, what's in the zeitgeist, what are the potential implications, and then what is the remediation that we do ahead of time instead of just catastrophizing and saying, gosh, what about those jobs?

Peter Crosby (10:02):

Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting, I mean, first of all, thank you for the onslaught of data because Sorry

Barry McGeough (10:10):

About that.

Peter Crosby (10:10):

No, no, I was looking for a positive term. I'm feeling positively about it, but the word that came to my mind is onslaught, just because it is fundamental how things are going to be rewired. I, I know I've been thinking a lot in this current environment that we find ourselves in, where can each of us put our attention to better the world to make a difference, to impact things? And I think some of that's kind of where I might take where Barry has brought us, which is how much this world is going to change over the next really just five years or two. You were talking about the robots in my house. I think Sonal, I'd love because I think of our listeners and so much of what they're contending with is, alright, what do we do about that? What does my workforce look like? How do I think about how to form my organization, my teams? Where are the opportunities to make AI a multiplier and not only a divider or reducer of human inputs? And I'm just wondering, Sonal, if you could tell us what you are seeing brands do or are they thinking about these things? Are they applying it? Are they taking Barry's macro view and finding a way to put it into somehow take action on it in their own environments?

Sonal Gandhi (11:50):

So of go back a little bit in time just to sort of go forward. So Barry does this for a living. He's thinking about the big picture all the time. Most people are not right. Most people that work for brands are reacting to what's happening in the world. And so we've been conducting conversations with brand executives for the last five years around this list. One of the questions that we ask is about AI and how you feel about it. What I've seen the temperature change in the last few years has been, it's just something great. I need to look into it. My boss is telling me to go find AI technology. How can I use it to, alright, I'm already using it to make my copy more efficient, my imagery more efficient, my chat bots better, and my predictive analytics on marketing a little bit better.

(12:45):

That's kind of where things were last year where people were already adapting it. They were doing it to make things more efficient in their business. For most people now, the thing that they're reacting to is the consumer is using ai. The consumer is asking Chad, GBT, what should I buy? Where should I go on vacation or perplexity? So how are we showing up on those engines? How are we preparing for those engines becoming the new shopping platforms? And that's what they're reacting to in terms of the pure brand retail. A good percentage of young people now use that as their main sort of search engine. And so how do I prepare my business for that? Especially starting this holiday, you're going to see a lot of that traffic originating from Chachi, PT and perplexity. And so people are thinking about that. I think the question of where we end up, how much of those transactions get integrated into those engines versus how many happen on your website or your mobile site?

(13:56):

That's going to be the next question that we're going to see in the next year or two. In terms of internally, I think everybody is trying to keep pace with it, right? There is a new announcement every day. Every day this is happening. That's happening. Some of it, it can be dizzying, some of it can be like, what do I keep up with? What's real? What's fake? What decision do I make that doesn't set me off in the wrong path? People are also afraid of taking big steps in order to go off in a direction that may not pan up because again, there's a lot of microphones on this AI industry. Everybody's listening to what they're saying, and this product may not be ready yet. Product may not be. Brands are never early adopters. They're sort of followers in most cases. So there's a bit of trepidation on what's real, what's not, what do I need to react to?

(14:53):

And so that's where I think most people are. And in terms of to move forward, I think they just need to brace themselves that this is going to be a lot of things coming at them for the next year or two, and they're just going to have to sort of stay sane, stay on the path, bring their teams with them. There's a lot of knowledge within the teams about your business that you still need to retain. So you need to be able to train your teams, bring them with you, instead of just saying, I only need to hire people that know ai. I need to work with my teams to teach them AI, to bring them along with me because at the end of the day, they have to balance the human with the ai. I think that's, and I'll stop. I think I might have answered some of the future questions you, but this is sort of where I think things are. And I think it is more of bracing yourself, taking it step by step and sort of staying aware, but also not overreacting

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:00):

And Sonal. Are you seeing brands move more towards that kind of test and learn landscape where they're dipping their toe in, they're trying something, they're like, Hey, that worked, that didn't work. Or are they fundamentally shifting their priorities or taking a step back because of legal or, I've seen all aspects. So I'd love to hear what you're seeing on your side in terms of the tactics of how they're actually doing it inside their organization.

Sonal Gandhi (16:25):

So I haven't seen a lot of legal issues lately. Those were conversations that were happening a year ago. This year it's been where do I put my money? What do I prioritize? And so everybody knows that this technology's been unleashed. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle, and it is going to make them very efficient, but it's also going to create a new competitive environment for them and how they show up in front of their customer. So they kind of have to keep pace with both. They have to make sure that their competition is not getting more efficient with their marketing, with their logistics, with their warehouse, whatever that may be. They have to keep pace with them, and they also have to keep pace with their consumer. So yes, I'm seeing a lot more tests and learn a lot of adopting this technology faster, but also a little bit about, I only have so many resources, how do I prioritize?

Peter Crosby (17:24):

And Barry, you are right there in the building where these things are happening. And in your role, I'm sure you spend a ton of time educating inside your organization as well as we're fortunate enough to have you also facing that knowledge out this way. And I'm just wondering how you think about this macro and then focused on the micro environment. I'd love your perspective on that.

Barry McGeough (17:54):

Yeah. So yeah, definitely my day job is to be on the pointy end of this.

Peter Crosby (17:59):

Yes,

Barry McGeough (17:59):

Right? So what kind of painted a bigger picture, because your question was a great one, is how will it affect jobs? What we have to think about then is what are the decisions that we make as enterprise owners? And one of the things I think that I totally agree with Sonal is that there's a lot of endemic AI literacy, but that doesn't mean it's focused. So because I've been on chat, GBT does not mean I know how to use AI in my job. It is very anecdotal. So one of the things that we've done is a massive upskilling inside the building to make sure that we give everybody a baseline of AI literacy to understand the tool sets, to understand the implications of being inside or outside of walled garden, whether we're working with data that can be trained on or not. And then most companies are in pilot phase.

(18:56):

So I'm fortunate enough to be able to run through several pilots. What I think the point, and again, I totally agree with Al, we want our dollars, any organization want our dollars to be utilized effectively and not get into the endless pilot loop. About 85% of companies are still in pilot mode and they have not moved into the plateau productivity. So the targets that we're running right now are very, very focused on being results oriented. Because what I want to do, what my job is, is I want to create, I want make sure that this is a successful gateway drug into doing more of it. Because we're right now, we're in a very interesting period of ai. The choices are this, you can hire a Palantir or you can hire someone at SAP and you can go into their full enterprise stack and you can have enterprise wide AI and say, I want it everywhere.

(19:53):

So I have the dangers. You go an inch deep and a mile wide. And if that's true, then you're not seeing the ROI that you need to be able to justify the investment. So I think honestly, I'm going to make a shameless plug for the lead. One of the things I think is really important is our era right now is enterprise wide stuff is coming, and that's going to be really huge. It'll come from people like Manus, it'll come from people like OpenAI and they will compete with the Microsofts and the Googles of the world in the next five years. But until then, what we're going to be looking at is people that are offering AI as a service, they're very, very good at one thing and they can offer that pinpointed solution. And there are so many amazing startups and establish enterprises that come through the lead that give us what I call the answer to the test, to be able to engage them, to answer the question properly using AI and using that tool that's going to get us an effective result.

(21:02):

So I think what we are seeing something really, really quite amazing, and I've been really paying actually attention right now to Walmart. So Walmart has been a leader in digital for a while, and one of the things that obviously is going to be the Achilles heel of being able to use all this AI was the approach to data. Remember when data was the new oil? So not every enterprise in our industry has actually been very good about having clean data sets, having data lakes and having clean data repositories. Usually your data's in a lot of different places. What Walmart's in an amazing job at is over the last 15 years or 10 years, they've been working on having very, very good clean data. Their data is so good that they have actually productized it and they sell it back to brands to help them sell more stuff at Walmart.

(21:57):

So their approach to data and having very, very clean and reliable data has been really good. But recently there have been incredible announcements, and that sounds hyperbolic to use that word, but if you think about it, they took all their efforts in August, they took all their efforts and they put 'em down into four different platforms. Sparky, associate Marty and developer. So there's only four different AI facing applications. There were hundreds and they focused 'em all down. One week later they announced this something called wbi, and Wbi is their super agent. So they had thousands of developers doing hundreds of pilots on agents, and they said, you're going to go through one platform. So they're necking down their AI efforts into productivity. Now they have an AI agent called Amelia, and Amelia is their AI agent for people on the three P enterprise. So that means that if you sell on three P, you can ask Amelia, give me a dashboard of how my stuff is selling.

(23:00):

Give me a recommendation of how I can sell more at Black Friday. What should the ad look like? Who should I target? How much should I spend? So we're talking about how we can affect ai. They're already working on agency, super agency. And then just two weeks ago they announced a partnership with chat PT where you can shop Walmart in the app. If you shop Walmart in the app, in the chat GPT app, you never leave the app. It's like being in China, it's like being on WeChat and using WeChat page to shop for something. So we're getting into super app territory where you use chatt PT as your engine, chatt, PT one week ago, this is the dizzying thing, right, that Sonal just said. They just announced the chat g PT Atlas as their new browser to compete with Google. I just installed it yesterday, so I don't even know what I think about it, right?

(23:59):

But add all that. So that's the Walmart thing that's happening only since August. Now if you think about what Google just did, they just launched AP two. AP two is the ability to have my agent as a Google customer go out and find a green jacket for under a hundred bucks. And they have a protocol where you tell the prompt, then you put something in a cart and then it stops. And then you get the intent protocol, which is yes, I want to buy, and then they purchase for you. So it's supposedly secure. They've launched with 40 different enterprise consumers, enterprises to be able to make a P two. So all of a sudden, what do you have? You have this scenario where your Google agent is shopping and it's talking to the Google agent from Walmart and chat P two, and now you have agent to agent selling.

(24:51):

They can't make this up. This is happening right now. So all the tool set that's going to be able to allow brands to compete in this environment, that's all coming up at once. So we have to ask ourselves the question, are we going to go enterprise wide? Are we going to go solution by solution? But we will have no choice because these juggernauts of commerce have already moved in this direction. If you think about what Walmart does and its power and what target will do and what the mass retailers will do in kind, and you think about what's happening on the consumer side, the ability to use agency, then that's going to be really important. And what's really, really interesting about agents is there's this idea that we trust agents more than we trust people. So if we trust an agent to say, you should buy this brand over that brand, we'll say, yeah, sure. You know me, my buying

Peter Crosby (25:48):

Behavior, everything,

Barry McGeough (25:49):

My budget, go for it. So this is as a whole question of what is a brand that gets into something?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (25:57):

Agree, I agree with that one, what does the future of a brand look like? But I think all the points you just made about the retailer is why the brand should pay attention, right? The retailers are moving in this direction. Walmart is putting significant investment here. When you're browsing on chat GBT, you can buy through Walmart. This is the reason why I think brands who might be, Ooh, we don't want to really do anything about this, or we're just waiting to see retailers are investing in this and it's a really important critical next step. And Sonal, I think that's where I would love your perspective, because I'm wondering, are you hearing brands being concerned about what the retailers are doing? Are they on board with it? What are they trying to interpret from this announcement between Walmart, OpenAI, the announcement between Shopify and OpenAI? What are you hearing around those things?

Sonal Gandhi (26:49):

So I mean, I think that if you're a significant portion of your revenue is coming through Walmart or Amazon or Macy's, then yes, you will be worried about what they're doing and how you show up. Because not only how you show up in front of the consumer, but how do you show up with the Walmart agent and the perplexity agent talking to the Walmart agent as very, so there's all this other related hats to get to the consumer that you hadn't thought of before. So yes, I'm sure there are people that are worried about it. It also creates more opportunities for retailers to monetize their agents or media networks or whatever. That ends up being a whole new transformation of this media network essentially. But I think a lot of brands have invested in direct to consumer in the last five years since COVID. And I think having Shopify integrate with chat GPT, and a lot of them are on Shopify, that that's actually a positive because then they can control some of that transactions that are happening on chat GBT or service those transactions directly without having to, so it remains to be seen what the push and pull between direct versus wholesale is going to be in this environment.

(28:14):

That's always the pendulum swinging back and forth in terms of priorities for brands. But if a retailer takes the lead in this space, then the brands will be forced to follow in terms of investing in the gen AI engines with the retailer and directly themselves.

Peter Crosby (28:37):

So Barry, I'd sort of connected to that. You were talking earlier about how AI projects are staying in pilot

(28:50):

And just sort of lumping along, and it sounds like you are running efforts to get your pilots into productivity, or maybe they already are. And I'm wondering if that advice might be very useful to our listeners. One, how do you decide what are the gates to move from pilot to productivity? How do you line up the KPIs? What makes the gate, how do you know the right gate, where then this is worth doubling down on? And then how do you, because these things are often cross-functional, how do you get everyone aligned to do the shift from pilot to productivity? Does that make sense?

Barry McGeough (29:33):

It does. So look, in my role, I run an innovation division. And so I believe in my heart of hearts, and I've been in innovation for a little while, that most people think of innovation as sort of a black box. Some people with white lab coats, you hear about it when you hear about it. It's sort of a science project or an art project. And what I firmly believe in is that that's not a useful paradigm, that a useful paradigm for innovation is what I refer to as applied innovation. And applied innovation is anything that moves the business forward, that solves the problems of the business and affects revenue and profit. It's connected to the core business. So nothing isn't digital now. Everything is digital. And so what we want to do is if you having an innovation division is a way to get a new idea into an enterprise that has the wheels turning on doing everything in a seasonal basis.

(30:35):

And so relevant to your question, Peter, the way that you typically get things into an enterprise is you figure out, first of all, what's the problem to solve? And then you figure out who might be the incumbent solution providers for that. When you follow an innovation process of vetting down those ideas, then you can figure out basically over a short period who your solution provider should be and who you should go forward with this. That gives you a better likelihood of success when you do choose a partner. So choosing out of the phone book or who has the best website is going to be really, really tough. Having a process to bring it in is going to be a key indicator of success. Why I bring up the applied innovation part is applied innovation is not just getting to a pilot stage. Because usually if you go to pilot stage, innovation ends with kill, pivot, or scale.

(31:36):

It didn't work, let's kill it. It was pretty good. Let's try a different solution. Provider scale it. It was awesome. Let's do it. Applied innovation, commercializes that idea all the way into the enterprise. So there are ways to make sure that any innovation, including innovation in AI, gets to, yes, gets to the position of success and that is carrying it across the line. And you only spike the end zone when you meet your KPIs and RO. I think there are ways to make this possible and that there are process oriented ways to make sure that innovations are successful.

Peter Crosby (32:13):

Call to action for all of our listeners, I know everyone's struggling with that,

(32:19):

And it will be a, well, I say struggling. It's funny, we had a session with 30 brands last week just talking about a lot of this topic. And what I was delighted to find is that is less fear and more excitement. These are people who are in it every day, really want to seize control of it, seize power over it, and make it work for a couple of reasons. One, to drive the growth and the profitability that you're talking about. They all were thinking about what is the end goal here? Because I think they've gone through the phase of, oh, how do you spell ai? And okay, and let's try a couple of things. And now they're laser focused on what are the outcomes and how do we get there? And then secondly, they know it's career defining and those sort of metric-based and then human-based desires. It seems. I felt a lot of leaning in, Lauren, you were participating as well. Did you find the same?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (33:33):

Yeah, I agree. I think it's the excitement that they can finally do what they want to do with AI because you can't just continue to add headcount. So I agree. I think the sentiment was excitement, but also just trying to make the right choice. I think there's just a little bit of, Hey, we don't want to add 17 different technologies. We want to know which one's the right one, make the right choice and move forward. But overall, I agree, Peter, I think it was exciting sentiment.

Peter Crosby (34:00):

I thank you both of you for coming on here. And I think adding to that sort of calm down, what is it? What did the Brits say? Keep carry on. Carry on that. Is that what we were going for? Something like that. It was that. Or speaks softly and carry a big stick. I'm not saying either way, I he does. No, it probably wasn't. But I think critically both of you bring such deep experience and exposure and to bring the receipts, which is also really helpful embracing for our audience. So thank you both. We want to make sure we direct people. The lead summit every year in New York is such a great event to be with your people, those experts that Barry was talking about. So we encourage you just Google the lead summit. It'll be in New York on May 20th and 21st. Sonal and her team as usual will be running an outstanding event. And Barry, I'm guessing your brain will be there.

Barry McGeough (35:03):

Hopefully I'm going to be on stage again. It'll be my fourth year keynoting. So,

Peter Crosby (35:08):

Well, you heard it start here. That's awesome. Thank you both.

Sonal Gandhi (35:11):

Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thank you Laura very much.

Peter Crosby (35:14):

Thanks Peter. Thanks Anna.

Sonal Gandhi (35:15):

Thank

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:15):

You.

Peter Crosby (35:17):

Thanks to Sonal and Barry for their useful insights. The best of the digital shelf community will be gathering in May in Atlanta to figure all this stuff out. Please join us. More info at digitalshelfsummit.com. Thanks for being part of our community.