Carnegie Hall to C-Suite: Christine Duque Reveals Why AI Adoption Will Happen 5X Faster Than the Internet

In this episode, Edward Roske speaks with Christine Duque about the rapid adoption of AI in business, the importance of storytelling in customer experience, and the unique challenges faced by mid-market companies. They discuss how data and AI can transform customer interactions, the ethical considerations of AI, and the need for upskilling in the workforce. Christine emphasizes the importance of human connection in business and the potential for AI to enhance rather than replace human roles.

Takeaways

• AI adoption is predicted to reach 90% in four to five years.
• Storytelling is crucial in marketing and customer experience.
• Mid-market companies often lack the resources to implement advanced technologies.
• Data-driven experiences are essential for modern customer interactions.
• AI can help businesses provide personalized experiences to customers.
• The human element in business is vital for success.
• Ethical considerations around AI must be addressed by leaders.
• Upskilling and reskilling are necessary for workforce adaptation to AI.
• AI can free up time for employees to focus on higher-value tasks.
• The future of work may involve a blend of AI and human collaboration.

Sound Bites

• "AI adoption is faster than anything else."
• "It's all about stories in marketing."
• "AI is going to give us back time."

Chapters

00:00
The Future of AI Adoption and Education

04:57
Transitioning from Corporate to Consultancy

08:07
Democratizing Technology for Mid-Market Companies

11:57
Data-Driven and AI-Enabled Experiences

17:15
Navigating Digital Transformation Challenges

20:27
Understanding the CFO's Perspective

24:25
Unlocking AI Capabilities

28:33
ROI Conversations with CFOs

30:54
Transforming Roles with AI

32:39
The Ethical Implications of AI Adoption

35:20
AI's Impact on Humanity and Creativity

36:11
Upskilling for the AI Era

37:42
Preparing the Workforce for AI

38:08
The Future of AI Adoption

39:35
Technology and Population Decline

40:31
The Evolution of AI in Creative Writing

41:55
Transforming Customer Experience with AI

43:18
AI and the Value of Time

44:39
Work-Life Balance vs. Work-Life Blend

46:50
The Future of AI in Everyday Life

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Transcript

Christine Duke (00:00)
The predictions around AI adoption for human, and I'm talking about 90%, at least a minimum of 90%, is four to five years. That is faster than anything else that we're doing, but how do we get to that reality? And it really is coming back to education. How do we start to re-skill and up-skill people? And I think right now there's a lot of buzz, there's a lot of fear, but how do we take that back to reality?

Edward Roske (00:21)
Hello and welcome to Asking Good Questions, the podcast where we explore the intersection of business and technology by asking good questions from great people. I'm your host, Edward Roske, and today I'm joined by someone with a truly unique perspective on how technology is transforming modern business, particularly at that crucial intersection of data, AI, and customer experience.

That someone is Christine Duque, co-founder and managing partner of Allen Sarah, a customer experience consultancy, but she's also a bestselling author. She's a podcast host. She's an accomplished actress and operatic soprano who's performed at Carnegie hall. We should dive into that at some point. Prior to co-founding Allen Sarah, Christine held some executive leadership positions at Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, probably 45 more. If I actually dug into it a great deal. Christine.

It is a pleasure to have you on the show.

Christine Duke (01:17)
It is a pleasure to be on the show and to meet you as well. So super excited about our conversation today.

Edward Roske (01:25)
So I Christine, you, have a incredibly diverse background and I'm trying to figure out where I should actually start. mean, musical performance, global consulting, launching a customer experience consultancy. So I'm going to start with a question that I am 100 % positive has never been asked in the history of earth. How did your background in vocal performance at Oberlin influenced your approach to business and customer experience?

Christine Duke (01:52)
Actually, surprisingly the question gets asked a lot.

Edward Roske (01:56)
my god,

I thought I was finally coming up with something truly unique. But like in those exact words, like background and vocal experience at Oberlin College. see? Thank you for making me feel slightly better.

Christine Duke (02:08)
Yeah, and I you go from like opera singer to kind of business and more so kind of marketing and actual fact and in the they're not quite the odd couple. As you may think, opera and the study of the arts and music is all about stories, the study of human emotion. How do you take a story or piece of music and create an emotional connection with the audience?

When you think about marketing and you think about what we'll get into customer experience later, but marketing at its core is about stories. What is the story behind a brand? What is the story behind Tide and Ivory and Lululemon? And how do you take that story of a brand and make that emotional connection with a customer? And over the years, it's just gotten more complicated. It used to be, you know, what we call now analog channels, billboards and commercials and print mail, things that are kind of tangible.

and now the mediums change a little bit more with digital and it's really created a lot more, I guess, a way of being able to kind of communicate that. And it's the same way as theater, right? Is it straight up theater where it's just, you know?

straight up words or is it as complicated as the art form of opera which is the only art form that actually encompasses every single medium of the arts you know dance music song everything else and so that's really kind of it's it's not any different and if you think about

being a classical musician, I'm gonna make the distinction with classical musicians, there's a lot of discipline that goes into classical music and being able to show up on time, being able to see patterns, being able, that discipline aspect of it does translate really, really well with business. And so they're not quite the odd pairing, it's just a very different way of thinking. And so...

And if you anything else, and when you think about where we are today, where the channels are so complex, complicated, it's no longer about marketing and the great idea. It's also sales and service and commerce as all the digital channels have blurred the lines around how you're really interacting with brand. Even more so important to really find that right connection and that right experience for people. and it's even more, more seamless requirement.

Edward Roske (04:24)
Do you ever find yourself wanting to like break out in song during a customer pitch or?

Christine Duke (04:29)
No,

but there's definitely some sort of background music, like the music that comes in.

Edward Roske (04:36)
I think the world will be a lot more interesting if as we walked into a room there was some sort of triumph and arrival music. You know, we all had our like, I don't know, Darth Vader March theme or something. My younger son is a classical musician. He's a violinist and he also has a bachelor's in mathematics. And you he always says, well, like, music is kind of the opening to all of that, right? It helps you think analytically, but you make a really good point. Also,

you music and acting, it's not just an art form, it's a form of conveying information, right? It's storytelling. And it's, we've dived into this on a couple of other episodes that there's a new skill set for you can't just present data, you can't just show information. You have to take people on that journey. And I love that you've married the whole concept. It's, you know, take what you've done in terms of being able to tell that in an engaging sort of way and then bring it forward to everybody.

When you look at your prior roles before Ellen Sarah, so leadership at IBM, Deloitte, Accenture, what convinced you to leave the security of big established, I don't want to say monolithic, remarkably large companies, although I think I just said monolithic, what made you leave the security of that to launch Ellen Sarah?

Christine Duke (06:00)
Listen, I've had a really great career. The first 15 years of my career was still in the big agency before I went into the large consultancies. And it was weird because when Accenture was my first introduction into the large consultancies, they asked me to come and build a marketing practice for them. And when they first asked me that, I was so confused why a systems integrator would want to build a marketing practice. And it was probably early days around when they were really building a lot of big

data houses and databases that they started to think about how do we make the experience for someone entering the data a lot better? And that was like really starting to get into user experience, UX, that we would call in marketing, right? Everything that you're interfacing with the screen. And then it started to go into like, well,

Now that companies have their data, how do we directly go to consumers instead of now going to the agencies? And so I didn't realize that when I went to Accenture to build a marketing practice that I was gonna end up disrupting my industry, which is marketing industry. Five years into Accenture, we ended up buying all these marketing agencies really kind of to really focus in on that.

really enjoyed the challenge and just kind of right time, right place of being at the intersection of data and that explosion of data and that explosion of marketing technology and advertising technology and commerce technology that was really changing the way we consumers were interacting with brands and the way that honestly we would shop and do our regular business. you know, I remember a time when we had to go to the bank to cash a check and then I worked on a project that digitized that process.

And so it's just the explosion of how technology and how we interact with technology has changed. But here's what I also realized after like, you know, at 15, 20 something years of doing this. The people who are getting access to technology are the big enterprises, the Fortune 500 companies. They can afford the Accenture, the IBMs and Deloits of the world to really help them think critically around all the technology investments. But

The game has changed, especially in the last two, three years when we think about open AI and how technology today is table stakes and how it's like water. If the internet has gone, surprisingly, none of us can do any work. But there was a time where there was no internet and we still have to do work. It's true.

Edward Roske (08:31)
No, I was complaining

about the speed of Wi-Fi on a plane yesterday and I was like, wait, I'm 35,000 feet in the air. Like I should be thankful. It's like, why does it load faster? My chat GPT is taking too long to show me something.

Christine Duke (08:44)
Precisely, right? And so, but then I looked at the landscape and I looked at the mid-market. I'm not even talking about the small, I'm talking about the mid-market companies that have, let's say $300, $500 million worth of, you know, revenue. They can't afford the Deloitte's and Accenture's of the world. They're trying to figure out what their technology story is. They're looking for a partner to help them figure that out. And I just, at my heart and on my core, really thought...

Any company, regardless of size or budget, deserves democratized data and demystified AI. And so that's kind of at the heart of where...

I started the company and I think on the flip side of that as well was I started to see a pattern after the pandemic of a lot of these big companies and how they were going to market. It was very transactional. was like contractor for contractor for contractor. I started to look at the bench. People were looking at them as Excel spreadsheets and not people. And I really, it bothered me so much when you talk about customer experience, when you talk about the human experience, when you talk about my experience as well, being just another executive in the branch. There was that disposability that I

didn't like, that really kind of devalued, you know, the humanity or the human element of it. And I felt like that was really important to go back to basics because I believe that business, regardless of what business you're in, is all about people and at the heart of everything that we do is all about people. And I wanted to get back to that core about people and relationships. And so that was also the reason why I started the company.

Edward Roske (10:12)
That's awesome. I want to dive more into it, particularly like that, that mid market size, cause you're right. AI is, it removes the barrier to entry, right? It democratizes it and says, you don't need that massive level of infrastructure. You don't, you, it's not just for the rich, the billion plus dollar companies, but there's a space for everybody to have access to the same thing. I was in, I was in Africa recently on a speaking tour and, it's amazing how many people have smartphones. and.

because we all have access to the same information now. It's not like the privileged view and we can all generate it and AI and technology and always on the connectivity. You're right. It's become a basic necessity for business like water is for human beings. I want to dive into the customer experience side for a bit. So you mentioned a lot of things in there. You talked about data-driven experiences. You talked about human, know, customer-led experiences.

You're talking about AI enabled experiences. Can you in practical terms talk about how each of those transforms that customer experience? Like why they're all important, but why each one individually makes for a better customer experience?

Christine Duke (11:27)
I think, yeah, absolutely. When you talk about data driven, It's everything that we're doing to your point and when we've got these crazy smartphones, that's all data. That's collecting data. And I remember a long time ago when I said, oh, by 2020, there's going to be an explosion of data because of what you can collect from like smartphones. like, you know, it's even gotten more amplified than that these days, right? Because it's not just your smartphones, it's collecting every single channel that you're engaging with, including your television.

and what you're streaming and all the devices. But every action that we make is a signal to a brand around, know, what do we want, you know, what do we expect. But then you want to think, people will think, that's really scary. That's a stalker report. I'm like, actually, we as customers are expecting our brands to know who we are.

Right. To predict what we want and be able to essentially serve up next best action, next best offer. And so all of that comes in with the data. Right. And to create that speed of real time, next best action, next best offer that really comes down to, to AI and what the possibilities of AI could do. Right. For us. And we talk about human behavior and what we expect. Most of us don't want to talk to anyone anymore. We just want to look at our phones, get it.

everything else, DoorDash, don't want to call anyone. We want to look at our transactions. There's a lot of self-service in how we want to do. And there needs to be sort of like data information that can serve up and make that experience for us very seamless without us even thinking about it.

And that's really kind of the reality of it is that we've gotten so used to interacting with technology when we're expecting, know, what we call the GAFAs, the Googles, the Apples, well, Gamma now, Meta, Facebook, and Amazon that changed that experience for us. Now we're expecting all of our brands, every single interaction that we have to be at that level. And the reality is, is not every brand is on that level, right?

to be able to do that. And there's a little bit of data and orchestration that really comes into being able to deliver that seamless experience. And then, you know, take the backseat for a second, you know, companies, like if you really look underneath the hood of a company, there's marketing, there's sales, there's service, there's commerce, there's loyalty. There are not one.

department. There are multiple departments and multiple fiefdoms. So we're still in a day and age today that you talk to someone in the call center to resolve something, they upsold you on a credit card, and then you look at your email and you're like, wait, why do I have an offer for a credit card that I just signed up for? That coordinating point is also part of it is organizationally.

even they're not quite there yet in terms of getting that organizationally right. The data is an easy part of the tech part of it, but it's organizationally getting people ready to really pivot towards that, you know, seamless delivery of customer experience.

Edward Roske (14:27)
I love that going back to who we're delivering that customer experience to so your consultancy on Sarah you wanted to focus on that underserved middle market basically giving the power of the larger companies to it. love it not only you know should we all have access to the greatest things we possibly can but people forget that half of the fortune 500 wasn't on the fortune 500 10 years ago where did they come from.

They came from those up and rising companies. So if you can help the middle market become the next decades, Fortune 500, they get to catch the companies on the way up versus the ones that are plateaued or on their way down. But they're going through some unique challenges. They're not only growing fast, but they're trying to decide who they want to be and how we expose that to the world. What are some of the unique challenges that you've run into at mid-size companies when implementing?

AI when implementing data strategies, when trying to really focus on delivering that customer experience. And particularly the challenges that mid-size companies face that enterprise organizations might not.

Christine Duke (15:37)
Sure.

I think the hardest part with mid-sized companies is resources, right? A lot of them are in growth mode, but they don't have enough resources to really do that. And they get stuck into a lot of the busy work. Hence the reason why technology is even more important for them. And it's a dimension of time, right? Where can I point and shoot my attention to to continue growing a company? And it's like that chicken and egg thing where I need to grow the company, but I need the resources. I need the infrastructure. Where do I find the time to kind of do this in the budget and the money? And the answer to a lot of enterprise companies here

point, let me go hire the consultants to supplement my bench, to supplement our things and they've got the budgets and to do that and when you're a mid-sized company you're looking at your spreadsheet and you can't quite make those big bets.

to make those investments in order for you to kind of invest in an Accenture Deloitte. And plus those price tags for premier consultancies are big. They're meant for enterprise. And so I think that is really the other half of it. And so I think that's where I kind of come in as a different kind of partner without the overhead of a big four, but also the willingness to kind of roll up my sleeves and kind of run after it. The beauty of a mid-size market, right, though, or anyone below that Fortune 500 is the

within the organization. They don't have the historical layers and the historical politics within the C-suite, you know, to kind of move the company and so their ability to actually be agile and move forward and execute on a plan is pretty quickly. And I think that that was also...

part of the fatigue that I had working with Fortune 500 companies is coming up with these crazy amazing programs and roadmaps for digital modernization, digital transformation, business transformation, name that transformation, then it becomes a two-year roadmap to nowhere for a variety of reasons, whether you're really fighting with fiefdoms or,

Edward Roske (17:32)
It's like a booze

cruise. It goes out and comes back into the same port. Yeah.

Christine Duke (17:35)
Exactly. Everyone's really excited about it. And you're just like, people get really frustrated around, know, how do you really make that incremental change a big change? Because so much of it is in large enterprises are fiefdoms that want to stay exactly the way they are. And with the unwillingness to really think outside of the box and change. I mean, change for anyone is really hard. But moving a

big ship like an enterprise sometimes is very, very, very, very difficult.

Edward Roske (18:10)
So on that note, just talking about the fiefdoms, the silos, we've interviewed people all the way up to, you know, Fortune 50, you know, CFOs, and they, one thing that's pretty common across them is as companies get bigger, they get more and more siloed. A lot of our listeners are on the finance side, and what happens at the bigger companies is that when they're smaller,

They realize that tie between like marketing and finance. They realize that marketing drives the top line. Finance tracks the bottom line and all the things happening within it. And they need to be tightly connected, right? What are we doing to drive demand? What are we doing to really drive our revenue increase? What are we doing to get customers and keep customers and make them ecstatic about our product? And how does that drive through the rest of it? So if we're not doing our job on customer experience, it's going to flow down. It's going to affect our forecast. you get up to smaller companies, I don't know, maybe

They just all work closer together. Maybe it's people have more cross-functional roles. They seem to be much more tied with understanding that connection, that they're all not very far from the money line. You get up into the big companies and it's like the marketing department has no idea who the finance department even is. It's like, it's on a different floor. think it's in another building. Maybe they're in another country. I'm not entirely sure. How do you help make sure, I've almost said, how do you make sure you bridge that gap?

between like marketing and finance, but how do you make sure they stay connected and don't get siloed like as they grow?

Christine Duke (19:36)
Yeah, it's kind of funny, right? Cause I think I honestly, like, I think I can, I can summarize consulting as like connecting the dots. That's your job. It's really connecting the dots. Surprisingly, as particularly the larger, company, no one really talks to each other. They, know, they, to your point, I'm like, I think they're in another room. They're another, another, and, and, and even if you start to look and isolate like your C-suite, they can have these great conversations in that room, but how that actually trickles down to the people who have to execute in such a large organization.

It's a game of like, you know, that telephone where things get lost in translation as you kind of go down the chain. But, you know, if I'm going to put myself in the CFO shoes for a second and, you know, the guy is looking at a massive budget, a massive spreadsheet, he's always thinking about OPEX, right? And also CAPEX, but not only OPEX. And he has to actually justify every expenditure.

to set of stakeholders, right? And then he's the guy who's holding the money bags and he's the guy who has to answer for that. And that's a lot of pressure. Let me flip that for a second and then talk to you about the rest of his friends. There's two sets of friends.

There's the tech side of the house, which is the CIOs, the CDOs, CISOs, all those technology guys who hold the technology budgets for a company. And then there's the actual business side of it. The people that I probably deal with the most, head of product, head of marketing, head of sales, head of distribution. Let's just talk about the fact that the tech guys and the business guys don't speak the same language. They want the same things, but they don't speak the same language. So...

things are often lost in translation. On the tech side of the house, they know that tech is really, really important and they need to fight for that. But even let's just focus on the tech side of the house, those CISO, CDO, CIOs are all fighting for their fiefdoms. There is a confusion around what their roles and responsibilities are. it to innovate? Is it to keep security? What does that look like? And their budgets, you know.

are tied to Mr. CFO over here and are trying to hold on to that budget. Then you've got the business here who needs tech, who have also been sold a lot of technology that says that you don't need IT dependency, which create risk and creates friction. And then they're also saying, CFO, if we buy this technology, if we do all this stuff, if we create this transformation, we can save some money.

But the savings is not showing up because they still want to hold on to their seats. And the savings on transformation is not business versus IT, it's an entire organization. So how do you tell this cast of people?

Who to cut, where to cut. And you're looking at the CFOs like guys, you guys need a cut. And everyone's looking at him, you know, whatever. No one's gonna, and the funny part is all of these guys have their own problems around how they're not working together and how, but they're not gonna point the finger at each other. They're not gonna say, they're never gonna reveal to your poor CFO what the problems are happening because they wanna maintain their budget and their integrity. And so that's what's essentially happening in the C-SPEED. And that's also what's preventing a lot of really

good and meaningful change to happen in larger organizations.

Edward Roske (22:53)
Yeah, it's by the way now I cannot get out of my head. The image of the CFO is like Mr. Moneybags from the Monopoly game. Just carrying money around with like a monocle and a top hat or something like that. But on the on the technology side, you have a really interesting view I hadn't thought about, which is when IT was created and we had, you CIOs and CTOs and CTOs and C they love giving themselves C titles. They were all about

How fast can we implement the cool new technology? Like how can we bring it to everyone? And there is a level of, we'll slow down now that is coming in some areas. Like we're not sure we actually want to do that technology. Is it scalable? Is it secure? Is it stable? With AI, growth oriented companies are latching onto it. And the business is driving that demand. They're saying, well, I can do this AI in my personal life. Why in the name of the gods can I not do it in my work life?

How do you convince the business and the IT side that an AI enabled customer experience is better for them? That it's what growth oriented companies want to do? Because they have all these misconceptions. And some of them are just dabbling. They're like, I don't know, maybe we can use drive marketing copy or something. And I'm like, you need to think bigger. Like you need to unlock a capability. You don't just need to do something a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper.

But how do you get them to realize the capability that they can unlock with technology?

Christine Duke (24:25)
Yeah, first and foremost, this these bad actors, these lot of tech companies that have sold them a lot of, know, I'm not going to name who they are, but a lot of, you know, software that says you can stand up to software without the dependency of IT, no code, low code, you know, that is going to help and shape your business. That first of all, let's just call it what it is. That's BS. That is not true. You absolutely need IT because in order for you to do anything and like AI related, you need data and data is at the domain.

of the technology, right? And so, especially if you want to leapfrog into something like generative AI, your data foundations, your data structures need to be there. And, you know, I feel real bad because like a lot of my business guys can't even do machine learning, which by the way is AI. It's not the sexy part of AI, but if you can't do machine learning, how do you expect to go and leapfrog yourself to generative AI? And this is really where I come in, right? I am the referee between the tech side

and the business side. And as I said, if you think about it, they all want the same things, but they don't speak the same language.

So I'll give you an example, right? What goes in the middle a lot of the times, like what the business wants is a customer data platform. It's a chance to tie in all of the data that sits within an enterprise, a total relationship of a customer, and then all of the data that sits within the business, know, Facebook, click-throughs, all of that kind of stuff, right? Tying it to you so that they can do efficient next best action, next best offer.

Oftentimes that kind of solution is sold to the business and they said you don't need IT just put it so then you have a poor let's say CMO going to your data guy just give us the data just give us the data just give us the data go in and then the data offers us like What did you buy? Did you think about data governance data security data duplication data replication? What data sources do you want? What data attributes do you want and suddenly your CMO is going? Hmm What what do you mean? Right? Like how complicated because it's actually

be just give me the data when you actually gonna like have to sit down and say okay miss CMO

What are your use cases that you want to enable for next best action, next best offer, because that'll dictate and allow us to go back to Mr. CDO and say, hi, these are the data sources that we want. These are the data attributes. This is how we want to use it. Create it and create those pathways around security. And that is constantly the game that I'm always playing is, is because, you know, they're all just, you know, kind of rubbing each other kind of the wrong way. And you think about, you know, if you really also think about, you

your C-suite again and everyone trying to protect their job, protect their fiefdoms, you know, the fastest way to make someone very intimidated, right, and to make them feel stupid is to start talking technical jargon. And I'll tell you, your tech guys are so good at doing that to make it seem more complicated than it actually is.

Edward Roske (27:18)
You

Yes. Yeah. The part of the job justification is I somehow have to make, justify my own salary by confusing the daylights out of other people. And to quote Einstein, if you can't explain it to a child, you don't understand it well enough. I, what I love is when I, when I asked Chagy or Claude something and it comes back with, I think it sounds like string theory. And then I go, can you explain it to me? Like I'm five. And then I'm like, okay, cool. I'm not five, but I totally get what you're talking about now. Now we can take it up to the more technologically advanced area.

When you're having those conversations, especially you might have a great initiative and I really want to do this. Maybe we want to use AI to improve our experiences this way or improve our data access this way. A lot of the CFOs are trained to come back and go, what is my return on investment? What's my ROI? There was a study that came out recently, I think it was IDC, said for every dollar spent on a generative AI project inside of a company, it returns $3.70.

That's more of a statistic. It doesn't make it real. How do you get that buy-in from the CFOs? Like how do you approach that ROI conversation? How do you get them on board for doing maybe something they didn't budget for, but it's going to give them an immediate value.

Christine Duke (28:40)
And this is really where the C-suite needs to come together where the business and tech and the CFO really need to sit down and have a really clear conversation around what it is. And this is also where we need to demystify what AI can and cannot do. So I don't know what it is and I'm sure you know, I don't understand why companies are allergic to use cases. But they are. then every time I come in the door and like, guys, what's the use case? it's super important.

right? Because there are a ton of things that AI can and can't do. There's a ton of things that technology can can't do. And it's not this magic thing where you come in, you implement the technology, you turn it on, voila, right? There's a whole bunch of other components on it where a reason why a lot of digital transformations fail is because you got to think about the people who are going to use it and then the organization and the processes around it. That is the hardest part. But let's isolate the use cases, right? Because you need to actually

to be able to measure that. And that's what Mr. CFO is asking for. You want an investment in technology. What is the technology going to do? Great. How are we going to start to think about the investment that we're getting? And then your business tends to go, it's going to do all these great things. I'm like, okay, great. So now you've actually set an expectation with your CFO that I'm going to have this great incremental savings once you've actually done this and forecast it out six months and we can cut like what, 25%. That's what you've done.

But in the reality of the situation is you implement the technology if you focus on certain use cases because there's a maturity of how you're actually going to execute on things. There is the basic piece of it, then there's an advanced level and then there's like the AI part because you have to take your people in your organization through the changes and through adopting through the technology. So it's not quite six months and then wham bam. Let's just say that, okay, your use case is going to go attack the service center for a second or we're going to enable AI chat bots on our website.

to do this which means we're gonna decrease the need for you know people you doing all these mundane tasks and really creating more self-service stuff that's gonna create a savings of I don't know 80 75 80 percent time you know reduction time so that's saving people great you know we'll do that but you know okay it doesn't also mean that you're going to get rid of 70 % of your bench

It just means you've freed up more time for those people to do something else, to think about something higher.

And that's the misnomer that kind of comes into a lot of these conversations. When you're thinking reduction in efficiency, you're thinking, I'm going to get rid of people. I'll give you an example. I had a client that was a furniture company and he did exactly this thing. They actually enabled a lot of these chat bots in their service center to actually answer a lot of low hanging questions, password research, all that, that was really clogging up the service center. Smartly, they thought, wow, okay, we've gotten to a point of really good efficiency where we're not feeling

building all these calls, we've got more people now, but let's take a look at the people that actually work in here. Why do they work here? Why do they come here? We've realized that a lot of the people who are handling their service center for a furniture company were passionate about furniture, were passionate in design. And so what they did is took a subset of all those people and turned them into digital interior designers.

to serve as customers at a higher level instead of just saying, okay, we're gonna get rid of everyone. And that's really what the way that we need to start thinking about all of these different capabilities. It is absolutely new ways of working, new ways of thinking and new ways of thinking about how you actually think about the people who are doing the job. And that's the part that I think people are lost in translation. There's so much fear around.

Oh, AI is going to take over everything and there's not going to be a room for a human. Absolutely there is room for a human and there needs to be room for a human. It's just that what I do on a day to day basis is now elevated to something else.

Edward Roske (32:39)
Yeah, we're getting into an ethical conversation, which I want to have. It's an interesting one because, you know, there are people that are generally worried about their jobs because at a fundamental level, companies need to produce things as efficiently as possible. You know, you wouldn't, I'm sitting here drinking a Starbucks right now. They're not an official sponsor, but I am drinking my daily London fog. And if I walked into a Starbucks and they did everything at half speed to employ twice as many people,

I would switch my business to a different place because I don't want to wait in line twice as long. We want them to operate, to do things as, as efficiently as inexpensively as we possibly can. But to your point, that is so far down the future because we all have about a hundred things on our to-do list and we're getting through one through 10.

And the value added stuff is 11 through 100. But if we don't do one through 10, the company comes collapsing down. So we're doing the grunt work, the mundane work, the thing that are repetitive that frankly, AI and technology should step in and do. If we take those away and have AI do that fundamental base level, we can get to the really value added things. Like in your example from before, we can turn people from, I don't know, copy editors into designers into...

changing initiatives into how can I make this better? How can I ask those good questions? I think I just quoted the name of my own show. That was not intentional. But before we dive into the ethics side of it, we're going to take a quick break to hear from today's episode sponsor, Caprus AI. This episode of asking good questions is brought to you by the great folks at Caprus AI. As someone who spent over 25 years helping improve the office of the CFO, I am genuinely excited about what Caprus is doing.

They're bringing the power of AI to finance and accounting teams in a way that actually makes sense, helping unlock insights buried in data and make better business decisions even faster. If you're an FP &A or accounting and you want to see how AI can transform your workflow, check out Caprus AI. Trust me, your future self will thank you. Welcome back, everyone. I hope that was a very brief speech from, well, actually me talking for the last 30 seconds.

Right before the break, we were talking about ethics and Christine at the 2024 World Knowledge Forum in South Korea, you presented on a topic I think is genius, the future of business and humanity with AI. What are those key ethical considerations that we're looking at as we go into that future? What should business leaders be mindful of as they adopt AI?

Christine Duke (35:20)
very hard of it, it is really that the counterpoint around what does AI mean for humanity and people. And you can go about that in a couple of different directions, right? And really thinking about that, again, I think we talked earlier about what that means for jobs. And then what does that also then mean in terms of, know, valuing

The human mind and human creativity and that's like a whole nother thing that opens up a whole discussion, particularly for creative people in the creative class around copywriting and in the dilemma in Hollywood around, you know, a number of people that can be on screen and in the use of humanity and creativity. But then there actually is also dilemma and the back end of that for the technical side of it. Right. When you're using a lot of these and algorithms like this, the developer.

get a credit as well for developing all that stuff. And so I think that at the heart of it, it's really that. And then where it really landed was how do we, we're really at a point where we need to really think about upskilling and re-skilling people for AI. Let's be honest, no one's graduating from college knowing all of this stuff with a real major for AI that comes in and says, I'm very well equipped to do this. No one in the working world right now

has all the experience to even understand how to do this, right? It's good data in, but...

good data out, bad data and bad data out. And it's as simple as, know, someone doing chat GPT and what prompts are you using it and what it spits out, you know, could be something super generic or something, or if you know how to ask, you know what, ask it for, it's gonna spit that out. And that requires training and that requires upskilling. And anytime that we've really talked about, you know, any sort of the digital transformation, as I said, the hardest thing is getting people to adopt to the technology. Tech is the easy part.

It's the people aspect of it that's really hard. And that was really kind of at the crux of it. The world leaders there, particularly the Korean government, was really thinking, what do we need to do to prepare our workforce and our people for that? How far back do we need to really think about that? And I said, how far back is like, you got to go all the way early STEM. You got to start to really teach kids all these different things. But then we've got some catching up to do to where the technology is today and where we need to kind of where we see

where we see the landscape of business pivoting, where we all want to apparently run after the $1.8 trillion opportunity of AI by 2030. And so I just learned, right, it took I think about like 27 years or something like that to, or probably more, for people to adopt to the refrigerator.

So, and even another 20 something years for the internet, for people to fully adopt the internet. The predictions around AI adoption for human, and I'm talking about 90%, at least a minimum of 90%, is four to five years. That is faster than anything else that we're doing, but how do we get to that reality? And it really is coming back to education. How do we start to re-skill and up-skill people? And I think right now there's a lot of buzz, there's a lot of fear, but how do we take that back?

to reality. so that was a lot of what was talked about there. And coming out of that, I talked to a couple of my friends that are AI leaders in the space. And we kind of developed a master class that we can do, whether it's virtually or hybrid or whatever, to start to really bring these to the companies. Because it's not about training people so much on the tech and the coding. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about people's comfort and understanding overall of what AI is going to bring and how that's going to change.

the way that businesses and how they really need to start thinking about the people and processes, how do you start to make those new ways of working.

Edward Roske (39:11)
Yeah,

it's interesting you were talking about that future in South Korea because South Korea and Japan have the two lowest birth rates in the world, at least at the time we're recording this. Their population is declining going forward. So we can't do the old method of, we'll just assume if we have more work to do, we'll just have more humans do it. Like, it's got to be something technology aided.

So I'm glad South Korea is looking at this and saying, well, you know, how can I be mindful of what that future looks like? What can I do to prepare now and not wait for it to hit? Because you're right. It's not a way off thing as of the time of recording this chat. GPT is now the sixth most popular website on earth right now. The 400 million people use it weekly and it's growing. think in the last.

When it first launched, it was a hundred million. It was the fastest application or any technology ever to a hundred million people. Now it's up to 400 million. And I think it's grown a hundred million in last two months. It's insanity. We're all using it in our lives. So this is not something it was like the dawn of, of AI. I don't know, go back to touring and like the forties or something, you know, it's not going to be, it's going to be 80 years off. It's not going to be eight years off. So looking at that, that near term window, let's look three to five years out.

There are some things that if you told me two years ago, we were going to be able to do now. I still wouldn't even believe it would happen. Just yesterday I read a Sam Altman has a new internal model at open AI. And they said, he said, it's really good at creative writing. Here's an example. And it was right. Write a metadata story about AI and grief. And that was the totality of the prompt. And it made me cry when you actually read the story. I don't mean cry from like, my God, AI is horrible. I mean,

It was truly amazing what it was able to write. There's a belief right now that people don't like AI generated content. What they don't like is badly prompted AI generated content. If I have to read one more marketing copy that starts off with imagine this or picture this, like that's because somebody put a one sentence prompt into chat GPT and didn't know any better. So you're right.

Part of it is training. Like we're going to have to build these people up for the next three to five years. We need to be asking better questions. I, I love AI content when either the model is really good or somebody's really good at talking with it. Like it can bring tears to your eyes. So looking ahead to those next, like three to five years, like what are those major shifts you see coming in business? is it, is it data? Is it AI? Is that working together? Is it transforming customer experience? What do you see?

Christine Duke (41:55)
It's all of it, right? It is A, having to work together. That one is number one. We gotta figure that out.

in order to accelerate the value of data AI. And customer experience is always gonna be a heart of it. I talked a lot about what it means for us as consumers, as buyers, but customer experience is also the employee experience and what you come into on day-to-day basis. And that's gonna be really important. And it's kind of crazy, going back to what you said about South Korea and what actually prompted the conversation in South Korea around humanity and business is a dimension of the fact that

they're having a declining population, know, people are not, you know,

are not getting married fast enough, or they're not also producing fast enough, and it's scary to them to really look at the decline in the generations, and that doesn't seem to kind of value family. And what they're getting feedback off is a dimension of time, that people don't have time. And so what they're trying to do, the government's trying to do, is give people back time for their lives, and so that they have time to raise a family, time to really kind of meet people and really be there for family, which is...

an interesting concept, Because we're so, are we that American that we, know, time is money for us and that's our value. And he just kind of go, go, go, go, go. And I think that's a narrative that they're trying to change. And I think that that's what.

actually AI is going to give us back as well. I think there is that, I think we learned during the pandemic and being locked down, what that value of being able of time is to be able to spend with people and loved ones. And hence the reason why we've got all of this resistance around going back to the office full time and what hybrid looks like, because there is a little bit more productivity and a little bit more time to that you can do it, especially when I lived in the Northeast, right? Most of the people would commute in New York city and it wasn't an issue for them to go be on a train two hours, four hours a day, right?

and do that, but they also knew what dimensions of time and experiences that they're missing out on. And I think that that's where I think AI is also poised, is how does that give us back time? And I'm going to be even daring to say, the 40-hour work week was because of Henry Ford, right? That was all because of the four factors back in the Industrial Revolution. We haven't talked about that. That's a long time ago. What does the actual work week now look like when we've got

an explosion of technology and revolution. So there's a lot of things that need to adjust. And if I've got to look at my little couple, honestly, this is our industrial revolution, which is AI, and a way for us to start to redefine all of these old narratives that we've just been living with that we've never questioned.

Edward Roske (44:39)
I was reading something recently that said, the phrase work life balance is kind of fallen out of, of usage because it was sort of created during the gen X, time period because a lot of Gen Xers looked at their parents, you know, boomers and before that, we're just really happy to have a job and believe you should get there before your boss and you should leave after your boss and work as many hours as possible. Like, I kind of want to have a personal life and that it's been being replaced with work life blend.

You know, it's fine if I, if I go check social media and look up something and make an appointment during the day. And of course I'm going to check my email at night. Like, why would I not? I, I wonder if this is this world coming where it becomes work life AI blend that it just becomes so much a part of our work and personal life that is just kind of always there, always present. You know, where, where is our art? Cause right now it's like, I'm going to go over and use it. Now I'm going to go back and do my other thing. And I think it just becomes.

so omnipresent that we stopped talking about using AI. it, cause like you never hear people go like, Oh, I'm about to have a meeting. I need to use electricity. Um, well, course you do. Like that's what makes the computer go on. It's just kind of obvious. I believe we will look back at this time and it will be weird. Uh, like they will look back on this and this will be a time capsule episode where they would go like, you had to talk to people and using AI. What's next? You're going to talk them into using a phone.

Oddly, yes, we had to convince people that smartphones were an important concept and we should pay a thousand plus dollars to go have like the most cutting edge one. Technology, it makes our lives better. I think everybody should realize that. Like that's a good takeaway, right? South Korea and beyond. makes life better.

Christine Duke (46:20)
You and I have lived enough time. when I, when I think when I, when students ask me, when did you start your career? And I'm telling them that there was a time when I literally sat in front of a fax machine and send press releases. And when I first came in, there was no such thing as email marketing because the only email access that I had was a DOS based system that allowed me to email anyone. And they're looking at me like, what's DOS? But even we can even say that we know of a time when there was no such thing as social media. The fact that I can say like, yeah,

I actually spent my career testing all of the advertising units and social media before there was advertising units and social media They're like what I was like, yeah, there wasn't such a thing as Facebook We're definitely at a dimension of that and I think it's not

I always see it as work-life continuum as opposed to work-life balance because I get asked that question again around how do you kind of, know, part late. was like, I think if you're passionate about what you do, then your work should reflect that as well. And it shouldn't be like you wake up in the morning, you're like, oh God, I got to work today. It's like you get to wake up in the morning with purpose and passion around what you do. And that's just.

That's just kind of how I see it. But I think AI is, this generation is kind of fun because I'm looking at the younger generation, how they're using AI. They're using AI for text messaging, how to break up with someone.

Edward Roske (47:40)
How

to negotiate so my rent doesn't have to go up as much. Yeah.

Christine Duke (47:44)
I mean, these are just use cases that I would never really think about, I'm listening to my nieces and they're telling me and I'm like, yeah, I'm talking to this guy and I'm asking chat GPT, how should I respond back to this tax? I'm just kind of taking it.

Edward Roske (47:58)
Please break up for me. I know!

Christine Duke (48:01)
Please

break up for me or can you check the sentiment of this text to make sure that it's

Edward Roske (48:04)
Am I reading too much into it? So let's wrap up with a speed round. So short questions, whatever pops into your mind. Okay, ready? One customer experience metric that every CEO should monitor, but most don't.

Christine Duke (48:22)
Return on investment.

Edward Roske (48:25)
most overrated technology trend in customer experience right now.

Christine Duke (48:30)
CRM.

Edward Roske (48:31)
Ooh, fun. I could go an hour diving into that one, but I violate the rules of my speed round. If you could instantly gain expertise in one emergency technology, emerging technology, like what would it be?

Christine Duke (48:45)
I wanna say Gen. AI but like I already know it so...

Edward Roske (48:48)
You know what?

That's good. like always stay on the cutting edge. That's a valid answer.

Christine Duke (48:53)
Yeah. The intersection of quantum and AI.

Edward Roske (48:58)
That's fun. Instantaneous. Answer my question before I even think about it. Best advice for women looking to launch a tech-focused, data-driven business? In 10 words or less.

Christine Duke (49:12)
Go with your passion, go with your gut, just do it.

Edward Roske (49:16)
Cool business leader who's influenced your approach to customer experience the most want to give a shout out to anybody.

Christine Duke (49:22)
Total wolf.

Edward Roske (49:25)
Nice. Best selling book that you've written that you would recommend to people.

Christine Duke (49:32)
that I've written. There's only one. Walking in my shoes, shattered glass ceilings in corporate America.

Edward Roske (49:37)
Yes, that was,

I figured we closed on a nice softball question. like, well done. Christine, I didn't know we would dive this much into data, AI, but this has been fascinating, like exploring how AI and customer experience and data and growth companies, how that all ties together. Before we wrap up, anything you want to share that we haven't covered? you want to share with our listeners?

Christine Duke (50:01)
No, not at all. This has been really, really fun. I can't wait for like the next one. I feel like there's more to dive into.

Edward Roske (50:07)
I might very well be inviting you back and we'll like, let's dive into this talk. You might be my go-to person for like when this whole area comes up, it's like, I need to get Christine back on. Thank you again, Christine, for joining us on asking good questions. I can't wait to reach out to you again. You'll be my go-to person in a lot of these areas. Thank you to our sponsor, Caprus.ai for supporting this episode. To our listeners, we appreciate you tuning in. Remember you can follow Alan Sarah's work at alansarah.com and Christine's personal site at

duquesa.com and until next time keep asking good questions.