Customer Zero: Supercharging Sales & CX With AI - Garry Green - CX Chat 016

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Hello there, my name is Martin Henley and this is episode 16 of the CX Education Podcast, where we are working to connect, empower, and motivate CX leaders to build better businesses. And today we have a guest who is extensively academically qualified to talk to us with a degree in electronics and microcomputer systems, a master's in defense studies, and an MBA from Henley Business School. He has been managing change and transformation for almost 40 years, including 20 years program and change management experience,
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with the RAF. Since 2009, he has been involved in large-scale national transformation projects in New Zealand. He is currently the managing director and founder of Quanton, a business that transforms enterprise operations through strategic AI implementation, consistently delivering five to 10 times ROI for clients with more than 100 implementations.
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He has a unique experience commanding cutting-edge technology initiatives across Europe and the Middle East for the Royal Air Force, followed by enterprise transformation roles in banking, utilities, and governments. He brings military-grade strategic thinking combined with commercial acumen that gives a unique perspective on what separates successful AI implementations from expensive failures. He was introduced to us by the brilliant Mark Carter. Today's guest is Gary Green.
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Good afternoon, Gary Green. How are you? Good afternoon, Mark. Martin, great to see you. It's great to see you as well. We are struggling a little bit with the length of the distance between us, I think, and the reliability of the internet. Maybe someone with a military-grade strategic mind could be providing me with support on this, so I could get a much more consistent internet delivery mechanism. What do you think? Yeah, I think...
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Yeah, we've got civilian spec gear here, which is probably better actually. We're doing it via Starlink. Yes, I think Starlink is going to be in my future. I think that is going to be in my future. So you are all the way in New Zealand. How is the mood in New Zealand? Things are good there? You're coming into winter now, are you? Yeah, it's that kind of winter blues, you know, a bit of,
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The good thing is being in New Zealand is you're only a couple of days away from sunshine. We haven't lived in the UK for weeks until we get sunshine again. So nothing compared to sunny beaches of Bali. No, it's not. So we're always well, we've had some really rainy, rainy seasons here, but good Lord, I could not live in the UK again. There's weeks and months of grey and rain and cold and people complaining. It's awful.
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So, but I really enjoyed New Zealand, but it's so far away from everywhere is the only problem with New Zealand. And that's a kind of, that's a good thing at the moment. People only come here for one day here. And we all live to travel as well. Excellent. So that's a good, yeah, it's a good place to be, maybe a long way away from everyone at the moment, I think. I think maybe in the future I could live in New Zealand. Whereabouts are you exactly?
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based in Auckland and most of the team are based there. Okay, cool. So you are in the busy part and you are a team, are you? How many of you are there in the team? We're just, although we're just over 20, we obviously use a lot of technology. So we use quite a lot of agents that help us as well. So you could say we've got, almost every person's got two or three agents working for them, AI agents. Okay. So our productivity is quite good. And we've got a team in Australia, a team in Malaysia as well.
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Okay, cool. So you are living the dream, the AI dream right now. You've actually got AI agents working, which is I think what a lot of people are aspiring to. And a lot of people were being sold the promise of but maybe not quite experiencing yet. Yeah, and it's that thing of go that are part of what we believe in is authenticity and integrity. So it's we want to try ourselves do it. I mean, since we started 10 years ago, we've been using AI in our business because again, we started in
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looking at automation, and we brought an automation technology to New Zealand and Australia that wasn't being used before. And what we found was that if you automate processes, you need good processes. So we also spun up an operational excellence practice within our business. So we actually made sure we had good processes so we could then automate them. We also found that if you're automating processes, you're dealing with data. So you need to understand data. So we have to have a data capability. But what we found was most data is unstructured.
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and some semi-structured, some structured. So we needed ways of dealing with unstructured data. So we brought in early AI models, machine learning, other ways to deal with that unstructuredness so we can actually get structure of it and process it and use it. So over time, we've kind of evolved and been using AI as integral to how we deliver. What we also found that we built an operating model that helps support of how you drive change and use technology, including AI.
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But also what we found that when you look at some of the tools and large language models, we've used it for usself. We're customer zero. So from our, in our sales, our marketing, our consulting, our delivery, how we operate back office, we've kind of used it for everybody in a team. And it's that thing of, we found ways and techniques. So for example, in sales, we found that we can use AI agents that
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We record conversations. We also protect privacy, but from that, it helps us build out proposals quicker and understand what the problem is. We're going with a structured questioning technique, consultative understanding is, and that means then we can get better outcomes quicker and deliver that. What we also found was that we could, from that same conversation for our sales team, we could actually analyze how well are the sales team performing,
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And so we could actually, the agent can identify which stage for sales process it is, what you should be doing at a stage, score what the salesperson is doing, give them feedback as to what they've done well, how they can improve, and what they need to do. Because what we found was that for salespeople, you get initial training, but supervision levels are low.
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So you can't be in every call. You can now. And for me, I ended up going to do sales. I went to run my own business. So it's helped me actually become better in understanding myself, how I interact with people and how I do stuff there. Ensure I don't miss anything when I'm talking to customers.
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And then even for experienced salespeople, it's been great for them because it's critiquing, because they might be good, they want to be great. They might be great, they want to be exceptional. So it's that virtuous learning and it's instant feedback.
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Andrew Mashman, It's not have someone sitting and wait for an answer so we've kind of used it there with you in how we build that proposals, how we look at legal documents as well. Andrew Mashman, You know we use it to kind of curate them and look at them and suggest we've baselined on master service agreements or stay as a work and and so on, so we've got a baseline that then the Ai can use, so we know what good looks like.
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And then if we get contracts from clients, we can actually look at them. And from a kind of customer experience, they can send us a document and we can get back to them the same day, legally reviewed, given feedback. It's not going off site to lawyers and come back weeks later. So what it means for us is we can be a lot more responsive to our customers. And that's from the legal side, from the contract side, from building proposals, from understanding them. It's critical.
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yes and we see it as a major way of getting a competitive advantage i've probably just given away all my secrets now no you haven't given them all away yet and we are going to grill your needs so we would hope that you will have given all of them away by the end i like before we get into the meat and potatoes of the questions that you know are coming i like the tone of the way that you talk about this
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And specifically, I like the tone of the way that you talk about this compared with the tone that the world is talking about this or the noisy world is talking about this. We can we can like think about that a little bit more later. I love the idea of customer zero like you are customer zero because this was kind of Steve Jobs's idea, wasn't it? We make things that we think are amazing. And thankfully, our customers think they're amazing as well. You know, so I really like that idea.
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And then there was something else that I really wanted to say, which has gone out of my mind already. So I like the tone of what you're saying. And because you are involved with Mark, who is brilliant, Mark Carter, then I know you must be good people. Do you know what I mean? But this is what I want to say, is that you're thinking about or you're framing this in terms of improving things for your people rather than...
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doing away with your people. So you can help your salespeople, you can help your operations, you can help your processes, you can do all of those things. Whereas I think in the world, I think businesses are hoping that AI is going to save them from having to deal with people. Yeah. It's interesting because it's, when you look at AI or improvement or automation or other kind of tools put in, people often look at it from the perspective of their experience.
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So what we can say, for example, when we did work in the automation field, businesses would either adopt it or reject it or stall it or put it in in a tactical way. So, for example, business process outsourcing where you're effectively taking menial what they perceive as menial tasks to then do offshore of really simple processes that can be lifted and moved.
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Their whole operating model was around maximizing number of bums on seats they had in offshore locations, such as India or elsewhere. Now, they saw innovation as a threat because it could reduce the number of headcount they had, where they didn't see it as an opportunity that they could actually be raising the level of services they provide and providing more than just the base level. And so it's interesting that their perception was that. So you could never deal with a BPO.
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and actually have a strategic conversation, because all they were bothered about was really tactical things and what they wanted to do. Now, we look at AI, automation, improvement. We look at it at three levels. We look at it, what's the individual level? And that could be individual fulfillment, productivity, value add. And so if you look at AI,
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at an individual level, people can adopt ChatGPT, co-pilot individual things that will make them more productive. Now, I look at this and go, this is similar to, you've got people that were using typewriters in the past, and some people love their typewriters, they could type blind and tap away and a piece of paper and a ribbon, get tipics out if you make mistakes, or snowpack, whatever. And
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what you're doing is you're going, actually, this is a great thing called a personal computer. You need to use it. And again, why? Now I'm happy here. I can tie with you that. No, you can do all these other things. And it's that thing of what's often happened is people have been thrown all these systems, get on with it. No training, no enablement. And actually it's not necessarily, it's not that you're doing the same thing. You can do so much more, but people haven't been shown what that more is.
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Now, the thing is if you operate a typewriter and then you try and operate your word processor, you're going to end up with a load of Snowpack Tippx on your screen because you've not learned that you can actually delete all stuff. So the silly things like that have changed. But the thing is everyone at level one has gone from typewriter to word processor to Office Suite. There's virtually no one in a business that uses a typewriter.
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because they had to evolve. You got the same thing with level one AI, co-pilots and individual agents and productivity gains. You will all have to go that way.
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Yes. Now, okay, so it seems to me like we might be getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. So I want to formally ask the question, like, you know, the six questions that are coming. Yeah. So I'll go through the questions very quickly so that we can just have it in an ordered way so we can chop it up later and use things in an interesting way. So question number one is how are you qualified to talk to us about AI and customer experience? And you're already telling us the answer to that. So that's why we need to get that question in.
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The second question is how do you deliver value around AI and customer experience? The third question is what's your recommendation for people who want to get better with AI and customer experience? The fourth question is what media should people be consuming if they want to know more about what's going on around these topics? The fifth question is who can you recommend to us who will sustain the podcast for us by giving us more guests? And then the sixth question is which business do you think is delivering the greatest value with AI?
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and maybe customer experience. So formally, I just wanna say before you answer this question, I think you're eminently qualified to talk to us about AI and technology and transformation. It seems to me when I look at your history, like you were doing change before change existed.
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I don't want to be, it's like change management has become a hot topic maybe in the last 10, 15, 20 years, but you were there doing it for the RAF in the 1990s. So I think you're eminently qualified, but maybe you can fill us out a little bit more in what that kind of journey looks like and how change has evolved over those kind of almost 40 years. Yeah. It's interesting because I was very fortunate that,
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served in the Royal Air Force and they sponsored me through university. I got my primary degree because they paid me to go to university and I was commissioned, taught me to fly, sent me to lots of nice places in the summer holidays to learn how to do stuff. And the great thing is the military invests massively in leadership and leadership is a phenomenal quality. It's not management, it's being able to get
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people from A to B or to do something from A to B, you know, through, it's not shouting loudly at them, but it's actually inspiring them and getting them to do stuff. And so some of the fundamentals of military leadership and everything have been foundational in me setting up in business and operating because strategy comes from military, tactics come from the military. And so all of those things that, you know, we take the day-to-day, things around that of
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Yeah, commander's intent. And this is a really powerful thing for enabling organizations and groups of where they are gonna go. It gives them freedoms, constraints, what they can do, what they can't do, how they're gonna get there, what resources you've got available. And also leadership's actually an adaptable thing in that it's not static.
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So warfighting leadership is different to the leadership in peacetime. It's from a peace support operation to when you're in an office environment, and you've got to adapt to those environments, the leadership in need. And that's important because some of the models we've developed on how you drive change or how you get change to happen, you need direction at the top, you need that vision, you need that kind of massive transformational purpose and the commander's intent, what that means. But you've got to get people on board.
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Because if you don't, you've got to get the ground swell from below. And so there's some models I can talk about later that would be embedded into that. But what I found was that the amount they've invested in me over the years in
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helping me be a great leader but also how i i've kind of applied that and the jobs and roles and i've had i was originally an engineering officer so i worked with aircraft i then worked with it systems and then worked in cyber defense and i ran a program for a kind of upgrade on that and what was quite interesting was i had to i had no one working for me there i had a very very small team
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so many agencies that were involved in this particular program I had to corral them and get them on board and get them to a common vision of what we were trying to do and achieve otherwise would have fritted this money away and we managed to do that and get get them there through various techniques and skills and buy into what what what they needed and it was kind of a great lesson and I'd
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I did my MBA when I was also in the military because I thought I'm going to leave the military one day, but I need to, you know, what I do. And I went to Henley, I picked it because it was, you know, one of the best business schools in the UK and Europe. And I was a bit worried that I'd be out of my depth. I didn't realize that a lot of what we did and do that is the same as business. It was just a different name. And so, and actually a lot of leadership and soft skills were way more advanced than
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our civilian counterparts. And also we had, from a change management perspective, and when you bring technology in, there's a defense model and it's a defense capability framework. And that basically articulates that if you're bringing something in, and it could be that you're, if you're bringing in a new aircraft, it's quite a complex piece of kit.
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There's the engines, the airframe, the avionics, radar, the people that need to fly it, the people that need to service it, the ground infrastructure you need from fuel, weapons, to data information. And it's a phenomenal framework that was used to make sure that when you bring something into service, it actually works and you can operate it and it doesn't fall over. And some of that was also around your operating model or new ways of working.
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Because you don't want to bring in, say you were flying Spitfire aircraft in the Second World War, and then you bring in the first jet fighter, and it's got missiles. The way of operating, and you've got radar, the way of operating that is going to be completely different from a propeller aircraft with cannons. So it's that thing you've got that you've got a way of working that was limited by the technology for time. You get rid of some of those constraints. You've got a new way of operating
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So you've got to get people's thinking to get rid of those constraints and think about what is the art of the possible, and now what can I do, and how would I like to do stuff? So you've got to go up and up that kind of external thinking, go not convergent, but the opposite, and then converge back to build your models of what you need around. So that defense capability framework was massively useful to me
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And I've used it in some of my thinking when I built out models that were used here and some of the change management of our leadership. And then also some of the great people like Simon Sinek can start with why. And I found his model is massively powerful in how you can drive change and think about it. And like you say of, you know, a comparison between Apple and Dell of how you build computers or stuff and how you get people on board and get them ahead. So a lot of this stuff I found it massively valuable
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in going to where I moved into a civilian world and driving programs and change and getting the right outcomes. And that's the thing of that. And so when I look at what you're trying to achieve, if you're bringing in a new technology or a new capability, or you're looking at AI, it's AI is a technology, but it's also dependent on data. It's dependent on people. It's dependent on how you employ it. And importantly, if you're a business or an organization,
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You've got to look at it from the perspective of what's this mean for the operations of the business? What's it mean for our shareholders? What value is it going to give? What's it mean from the customer's side? What value are they going to get from it? And then from our employees as well, what value is it to them? And I'll try and look at, I call it a triple win.
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I can't claim that. That was Professor Leslie Wilcox came up with this kind of triple win perspective that you look at those three perspectives. He's learned the School of Economics, by the way, and a bit of a guru on automation and technology, how you embed it. So, I mean, I've had lots of influences throughout my years. And that's the other thing. You never stop learning and you can't stop learning. It's just the learning cycles used to be quite long, so now they're really quite short of what you're going to learn and what you go forward and not.
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Okay, so I'm joking about you having been in managing change since before change existed, but we know it's like, I think it was Heraclitus said in ancient Greek, the only constant is change. So we know that this has gone on. But it seems to me that change has changed.
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Like the speed of change has accelerated, certainly in the last, well, certainly in my career, like the last 30 years, because of automation, because of digitization, because of all of these things. So I've got a question, which might be an aside, but I'm just nosy, so I need to know. Like you're saying that the military really invested in leadership.
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Do you get a sense or do you even know if they are as invested? Are they as good at this now as they were then? Because it feels to me like in everything that there's been kind of a degradation in the amount of seriousness or discipline that goes on in the world. It feels to me like even the military is much less disciplined than it might have been previously.
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I think there's a few questions there, but fundamentally, over the last 40 years, there's been an erosion in trust in institutions. And so, and nations, and the institutions of nations and international bodies. So, there's that degradation that's gone over the years. I mean, I left military in 2008, 2009, so I've been out of the military, so I can't really comment on what.
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the current state of various militaries are. But what I do know is that there's fundamental principles that are important of how you operate and you do that. And there's a thing that I also learned in the military, the OODA loop. I'm not sure if you've heard of that. No. So it's OODA is, I forgot the famous, it comes from kind of how you project air power, but it's observe, orientate, decide, act. So it's this feedback mechanism.
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And basically, I use that when I look at organizations because you go into that, if you want to be agile and outperform your competitors, you've got a really tight OODA loop. You've got to observe what's going on. You've got to orientate your actions and what you're going to do in the organization. You've got to decide which one you're going to take, act on it, do it, and then do that. And you're continually doing this process. Now, if you're a big entity, you're like a super tanker. You're the nudge of the rudder and nothing happens for ages. Their OODA loops are pretty big.
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So actually, in a kind of accelerating environment, agile businesses that have got a tight OODA loop that they can accelerate have got a distinct advantage because they can go through 10 iterations of stuff before their competitors have done one. And the reason this is really important, because you said about the acceleration of change. Fundamentally, since the start of time,
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when we invented the wheel, when we went from hunter gatherers to growing crops and all that, change has been a linear process. You knew if you took 30 steps, you knew you went 30 metres. You know if you went 15 of the steps, you've done 15 of those metres. You can project forward what things are and understand it. We are wired for linear change and also we're wired for managing scarcity. So that would be scarcity of food.
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money, resources, minerals, et cetera, et cetera. Organizations are designed around scarcity. We have a command and control structure within organizations to make those decisions, and then obviously delegated authorities of how much you can commit and do an exposure risk and around that. So everything is designed around a linear world. Now, if you take something like the microchip or computing,
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If you take computing back from abacuses to cogs, valves, transistors, integrated circuits, quantum computers, so on, this is an exponential technology. And if you take Moore's Law, which is every 18 months, that capacity doubles or halves in price effectively. It's pretty much consistent, going back to the earliest forms of computing, that every 18 months that has doubled.
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Now, if you look at 30 exponential steps where you take one, you go one metre, then you double it, go to two, go to four, go to eight, go to 16, go to et cetera. Do you know if you've taken 15 steps, do you know how far you've gone? Very hard. Did you know that effectively that 95% of your journey is done in the last five steps?
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So it's really hard. You've got this hockey stick that underperforms and then suddenly goes up. And linear is there. And linear, people following linear go, oh, but dismiss this disruptive technology because it's underperformed, underperformed, then suddenly, boom. So it's like ChatGPT. It wasn't overnight. It was for years they'd been working on the technology. Suddenly it came up and went hockey stick. Now the pace of change of those technologies
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It's not 18 months. We're getting major drops that are 10x every two or three months. So it's actually accelerating. And so you've got this thing that in the past, we might have had one major breakthrough every few hundred years to 10 years, etc. Right.
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We might have the first industrial revolution was one major technology. At the moment, we've got 30 plus exponential technologies that are all at various stages of this hockey stick. And some of the futurists actually predict that the next hundred years, we will get more progress than the last 20,000 years of humanity. So you're right, things are accelerating, but we're only at the start of it.
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so that pace of change is getting faster and faster and faster now the problem is how do you deal with that change how do you cope how do you ride the wave and if i knew all the answers yeah no one knows the answers we're all working on ways of handling this and doing this and that's for the paradigm we've got at the moment and then you're going to get new paradigms as you
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You go, AI is on the cusp of artificial general intelligence. That basically AI is better than humanity at intelligence and doing cognitive tasks. Now, some could say it's probably already there. It just depends which percentile of the population you pick around that. And then you've got, because there are some people do some pretty dumb stuff, but there's some really bright people.
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But you've also got an arms race between China and America. And that is who gets to not just AGI, but artificial super intelligence. Because once you get to that, you will control everything.
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Yes. And you can do stuff quicker and better than anyone else. So we are in very, should we say, exciting times. I'm excited by the opportunities of that sort of intelligence for solving cancer, physics problems, et cetera. But equally for every good thing it can do, it can also be weaponized as well and used for bad things. And that's, that's my concern. And when you kind of put it down to business level of go that, you know, how can you
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You know, we believe in a business that does things, you know, is a power of good and actually does good things for society and provides good things and services and not exploit people or things. So we see it as, you know, we've very much got ethical use of those sorts of technologies. Others might not. And so there's all these things people are going to grapple with as well and when they're kind of looking at AI and how they implement it.
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and the challenges that are kind of strategic level down to a tactical level.
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Okay, so many questions now. So many questions now. Okay, good. Right, so we're definitely gonna have to have maybe other conversations in the future because there's much more that I want to talk about. I mean, I'm interested in, like in my, I come from sales and marketing, which isn't about the defensive countries or whatever, but I can see that when I started in business, my job was to talk to people, like directly I would reach out to customers and hopefully make them into customer, reach out to strangers and make them into customers.
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Well, that whole activity has gone away. Nobody's doing that anymore because it's not anything like efficient enough. So now you've got people who are sales and marketing people and they've never had to get themselves into a conversation, get into trouble, get out of the conversation or not get into trouble and convert them into a customer and manage that relationship and all of those things.
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So if that's what's gone on in sales and marketing, I mean, I can only imagine what's gone on in the military, like what steps of interaction have been skipped because now that's not the most efficient way to do it. So that's kind of my question, I think, about the military and whether it still has that discipline and delivers that value for people. Like if somebody comes in in the way that you went in in 1989,
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are they going to get the same kind of experience and benefit that you will? And I suppose what I'm saying to that is, like, we know that you have this unique experience, 20 years military, top, top level leadership, technology, investment, coming up for 20 years market in the world. But is that experience ever going to exist again? I don't know. Maybe I'm getting too philosophical.
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Tim Jones- I don't know, but I think if you go back, certainly before I left, we were involved in cyber defense, but also an area I worked with looked at activity with drones and stuff like that, and these were strategic drones and human in a loop and whether you have weapons systems or so on, but a lot of this was always around.
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You've got rules of engagement. You've got a code of conduct on how you behave and what you do. And rules of engagement are a legal thing of what you can and cannot use force and the reasons. And there was always a human in the loop for any fire control decision, because ultimately someone's got to is accountable for this and other people are responsible as well. So it is very much embedded in that. And even if you take it to the extreme of autonomous systems, you've got to look at
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you know, if an autonomous system does something, at what level does autonomy stop or is it completely autonomous? Yeah. And that's, and so there's philosophical, legal and moral questions around that. That's on the kind of weapon side, but also there's things around intelligence, gathering surveillance. But the thing is, if you look at, I'll go back to my typewriter. Actually, if you're worried about,
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being spied on or people accessing your data, you probably do want to keep your typewriter. Because the only secure way of doing something is actually either keeping it in your head or actually writing it pen and paper and locking it away. As soon as you've got an electronic device, any electronic device, especially a network, can be hacked. It can be got into by good actors or bad actors. And the thing is that mobile phone, how do people have this?
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Most people carry this. These can be hacked. This is tracking your every movement, what you do, and everything else. So good actors, bad actors can use these. And we voluntarily take these. We're using stuff there. It comes down to what you value around that. What's privacy? Is it important or not? Now, for my generation, we didn't grow up with these. We came later. As a younger generation, it's fully part of their life. And they have got different views on data,
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and what they share and don't share and so on and access. And they're not so concerned about certain things around that. And so, yeah, it's also contextual, some of that stuff as well, as to what people kind of think are problems or not problems or whatever.
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Okay, cool. So that's interesting. Yeah, and it's interesting. Sometimes you engage with young people and they are more concerned about the security and they're more concerned about the fact that they're being shown an ad and they're more sensitive to those things because they've grown up with those dangers. And maybe people of your generation, my generation, we're more blasé. It's like, what are they going to do?
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But I think that the issue now is, well, I taught digital marketing for a long time. And I say to people like that, not organized enough, like it doesn't matter. Unless up until the point where you upset Mark Zuckerberg or somebody like that, you're probably fine. Because Mark Zuckerberg 100% can go and look at everything you've ever done online. But if you don't bother him, then he probably won't bother you. Whereas now we have AI trawling this stuff.
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So they're looking for us. Do you know what I mean? They're looking for us as individuals and tracking us. So I think that's interesting. The question I keep asking, and I haven't got the answer that I want necessarily, so I'm going to keep asking it, is how much, like you've said that Chachi PT was motoring for years and then it kind of broke the hockey stick and broke through. But how much was there a step change in technology in 2023? Yeah.
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or how much was it a step change in the way that this was marketed to us in 2023? I think going back, so it was then it was GPT-3 that broke through. Different iterations before. But ChatGPT is actually based on a Google research and a paper they published. Google didn't know the value of preformed transformers.
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and the value of that. And obviously, these bright people at OpenAI did and built that out, and Google had to catch up, and others did. But I think that with that, it's interesting because ChatGPT's original marketing and sales was around individuals and consumption. Now, they broke into the market because they gave it away for free, and they now paid plans that individuals go to.
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They had to pivot now and are focused on business because people don't want to pay for it as individuals, but as enterprise sees the value in it and will pay for plans. Now, Claude and Gemini were focused on the kind of enterprise markets. So Anthropoc would make Claude. They're very much focused there because with the plans that people will pay it, they recognize that.
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So going back to your point in that, yeah, they flooded the market with a free product because to get market penetration and whatever marketing they did and social. It was it flew under the radar for quite a bit until it suddenly got to a certain level of capability. And they had people, everyone chatted about it and it goes viral and explodes that way. Equally, you've got things like Anthropoc and Claude. They they went through the roof.
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when they stood up to the Department of Defense and said, no, we will not accept your terms and conditions. We do not want this used in weapon systems around that, because there was a misuse of it that misidentified targets that were because of old intel, and they ended up bombing a civilian school. And they basically said, we do not want anything to do with that.
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our terms and conditions are will be this we do not want it used for us we won't use for good and trump threw his toys out the cot and basically said we will ban you from all government contracts because they wouldn't bow down and they stood firm consumption and sign up for claude after that went through the roof because people
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you know basically said it's a values-based organization we like that and we have fears about how this is going to be used and we want to be part of and use the product that is that yeah so and that was only recently but so that's it but going back to your sales and marketing so basically when I did my MBA um
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I did the marketing module and then I kind of threw the book away and thought I'll never use marketing ever again in my life. Yeah. Luckily it was in a bag, you know, in the attic. And when I started a business, I had to scramble through all my MBA books, found my marketing book, found the sales book. And I think I need to know about marketing. And, uh, and, and so I think that. AI is transforming how you can do marketing is transforming how you do sales.
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It's not, and it's effectively changing where you can monetize human involvement in it. So it's changing that. There's stuff that it's automating and you can do, and it does very well, especially when it starts scanning. Because ultimately, I had marketing explain to me the very simple and sales, salesperson will do anything to get a sale. So they actually drive down the price of your product, whereby, or the unit,
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shipping price that you'll get so we can get the sale. Where marketing is about actually pushing up the value of what you have and what you can sell it for. So in my kind of simple mind, I see it like that. So I see them both as really valuable. And I've had to learn a lot about it over the last 10 years running a business and that and how we actually generate
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How do we get new customers? How do we get interest in us? How do we build a brand? Because 10 years ago, quantum never existed. We never had, no one knew who we were. Now we got known for automation and now we're known for AI, but it's a lot of work gone into that and articles and thought leadership and how we do that, events and so on, as well as what we publish. And then also how we digitally, how we outreach to people. And we've got, I guess from that side, it's also depends on the type of business because,
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We provide consulting services, we provide delivery services, we'll sell licensing. We've also developed some products now that we're going to market to sell as well. But they're all different customers that we're engaging with. We've had to work out who we best engage, who are the personas that we're trying to deal with, what are the sizes of business, what are the sectors, et cetera. How's that work in New Zealand, how's it work in Australia, how's it work elsewhere?
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AI has been really great at helping us identify and analyze stuff, but actually what we found is you still need for the creativity, for all that, you've got to have good material to begin with. And that human creativity you can't replace. You can mimic it, and it's a pale thing. But we found that if you've got, once you've got it right with the core stuff that you come up with in ideas and concepts, you can use AI to distribute across different channels, you can create derivatives.
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But if you don't have something good to begin with, you then amplify those imperfections across multiple channels there. What I also found then was that we've got this kind of sales engine that sorry, the marketing piece that helps us. It's then when we are on our sales for us, we've got a consultative sales process with a bit of spin at the end spin. We've broken it down into six stages. It's a human process because we are selling to people.
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And for the products and services we provide, we've got to have human interaction because we want to speak to the CEO, the chief operating officer, the chief financial officer. We don't generally sell to the chief technology officer. We sell to the business side of things. And we've got to understand what problems this organization's got and what opportunities are there and then how we can help them.
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because we are selling a value proposition as to what we can do to make things better for them, you know, in how they can engage their customers, how they get more sales, how they can generate more revenue, how they can increase their profitability, how they can give their customers a better experience, how they can make their back offices more efficient. So we can't do that without meeting people and understanding that and people telling us what those things are.
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What we can do, though, is ahead of that, we've got AI agents that will give me a brief on the company, what's gone on in the media, what potential things are. And I've got an agent that will run a report before I have a meeting that will tell me the background of companies, what's gone on, who the key people are, background on those people. I even got an AI agent that will predict their personality type so I know their disk personality.
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So I know that if you're a driver of a dominant, the competitive advantage, if you're an influencer, where they're more people orientated, bigger picture, if they're stabilizers that are empathetic and people person, if they're analysts, C types are very analytical, they want to know all the details. So we can tailor our approach before we even meet someone. But then when we're in there, we then hone that to know that actually, we know that that personality type is right or it's slightly off.
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but we know the approach that we will do to then communicate really well. And we've used this tagline of using AI to make us more human. So we use that particular personality prediction software technology, you know, in our sales process, we can tailor our marketing comms to individual personality types, because it's important that you,
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tailor the message to the personality type you are and how you communicate and process information. We also then, when we run workshops with clients, we'll get them to do the, we can predict the personality, but because we're doing a workshop, we say actually you can get free personality
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assessment. We run that because then we build out the team dynamics and we understand the dynamics of the team. And if you're doing change, we know that half of this profile, Cs and Ss, are change resistant. They don't like change in the status quo. We know that Ds and Is are open to change. We also know that
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and eyes and S's like the bigger picture that aren't into detail as well. So we can kind of tailor that. So we use it then that we use that particular AI to then help us with how we manage team dynamics. If we're brainstorming, we've got a mix of people to get this so we don't get groupthink. We use it in getting preempting potential conflicts through
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the groupings of people for these workshops and make sure we got a balance. We also then use it to help us for building out the change program and doing tailored change down to the individual. So this is where AI becomes really interesting that you can do mass personalization. Now we use that mass personalization to help people on the change journey and make it better and more comfortable and that you get a better
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and that the change is adopted. And so, yeah, this is, and that's the thing with, you know, we like being customer zero, we've adopted these and embedded into what we do. And then with some of our clients again, oh, you've done that. We're quite interested. Can you help us with that? You know, oh, what about this? And so on. And it's that thing, it's also, you've got to be, don't be afraid. You've got to embrace and try these things.
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You've got to be aware of risks. So again, when we use AIs, we've got guardrails to make sure that any day we know what's happening to the data and that we're not exposing the sensitive data. And again, we've got clients in financial services, health and insurance and education and others that have got varying levels of compliance that they need for the data that they've got. Because like you say, medical records, very sensitive, financial records, very sensitive.
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and so on so yeah so so you've got to take those into consideration as well but again it's it's it's not being afraid it's actually being prepared to try stuff as well right and i need to stop being afraid of slowing you down because now you're answering question three and four already it's okay sorry oh sorry what what i found from we use
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because we record our interviews for transcription purposes to do this. What I found was that we'd have a structured interview thing of, we've got all the questions we want to ask and we start. And then what we found was people didn't jump around because they do all of that. So what we found was we'd go, okay, I've done that, I've done that. What we could then do afterwards go, have I covered it all off? Yeah, no, yeah, great. I've covered it, great.
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Because people don't follow the linear order. We are a bit kind of, I would say scatty, but we do kind of follow the chain of thought that's not really
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I think you're on the linear order. You're just going too fast for me. That's all. You're doing it in the right order. So I wanted to say so. OK, good news. You're eminently qualified to talk to us about change, AI, all of those things. Thank you for sharing your experience with us. But what about customer centricity? Because I feel or customer experience like you've said is one of your three pillars. So the the one pillar is customers. What were the other two pillars? Employees.
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And the business or shareholder. Okay, so shareholder. So you have an MBA, so you will have been schooled in the idea that the way you achieve profitability in your business is you drive up your prices and you drive down your costs.
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And the issue for customer experience is that's kind of diametrically opposed to what we think in customer experience is, which is you should be delivering as much value as you can for the customer, and then you will reap the value in return, which is their money. So interestingly, customer experience is kind of positioned
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in opposition to that idea and in opposition to shareholder value. Not because we don't believe that shareholders deserve their value, we do, but just that we believe that if you deliver more value to customers, to employees, to the community, to the environment, then everybody gets more value in return, including the shareholders.
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this wasn't intended to be a question but I'll ask you a question like because for us for us customer experience people the best customer experiences are delivered by employees so customer experience goes hand in hand with employee experience to drive up the value that's delivered to divide up to drive up the experiences of everyone so in reality
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Okay, so here's where we are. We're at a fork in the road and 99 times out of 100, a business will take the right hand fork to how do we achieve the least risky profitability and the greatest return for our shareholders. And they won't take the left hand fork in the road, which is how do we deliver the most value for our customers and our employees and our environments and all those things.
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So the danger with AI now is that they're going to continue to go shareholder value, shareholder value, shareholder value, profitability at the expense of everything, at the expense of customers, employees, the environment, the future, you know, all of these things. So that's the danger, I think, of AI is that businesses are...
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I don't know, businesses like Oral, Oracle, or Meta, who've just laid off tens of thousands of employees, are just going to see this as an opportunity to drive down their headcount, further reduce the value that they deliver to customers, but make more short-term profit. Somewhere in all of that little rant was a question. Did you get the question? Okay. All right. I like your point because I've witnessed where,
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I won't mention any names of people that we know or organizations, but I can see there's three ways that businesses have done this. There's the, what can you charge a customer? There's that. So you put your price up or what Michael Bear. There's the, what you buy services for or products or raw materials. And if you can squeeze your suppliers, and then there's a bit in the middle of how productive are you?
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And we've seen some organizations that have taken advantage of market conditions to push up the price to customers because they could because of certain using part of their supply chain was increasing the cost. They've also then squeezed their suppliers massively to then, you know, there they've then hollowed out their business as well. So they have been a triple dip of charging more, buying for less,
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uh paying less inside and we see we've seen that in some major institutions yeah what we've also seen there's major institutions that have done the top and the bottom but the middle bit's too difficult yeah of making sales more productive um but but that's the other thing of market you've
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If you haven't got an open market or it's dominated by a small number of players, they will often abuse that position because there's no market forces preventing them, stopping them. So you've got to look at does it need regulation or whatever around that. And there's various industries you can look at for that. And I'm not going to name any of them at the moment because of that.
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You've got potentially with AI that they could be hoovering up. You end up with a very small number of very powerful organizations that are hoovering a lot of the money out of the economy because they're going in and disrupting all of these. And that's my fear, that you end up with just a few organizations that are just hoovering the money up. And you've seen that with, say, Google's gone into certain industries in marketing.
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you know, in advertising and it just hoovers up all the money and disrupts, you know, the radio advertising, TV advertising, print, et cetera. And interestingly, the Commerce Commission didn't recognize them as a legitimate threat to our local industries and didn't act several years ago. And I got that from a CEO of one of the media companies. So you got the regulator failed to actually act on that.
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So you've got some pretty substantial market forces, and it's down to in individual territories where you can regulate. But some of these may be beyond individual nation states regulating because of the sheer scale of some of these entities they're dealing with and across multiple jurisdictions and how they do stuff. What I would say, though, is that as consumers,
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you've got to also look at what your personal values and what you'll buy and not buy and from who. And we're quite selective in who we work with and will operate with, because for example, we will not deal with the tobacco industry. I can't say that about the alcohol industry, because I do like wine. But no, so example, things around that,
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you can do as an individual, you can choose what companies you'll buy stuff off or not buy off because of their ethics and policies. And again, around that kind of ethics and policies, we get, certainly with the enterprise, we have to go through a lot of scrutiny of our supply chain and our ethics policies, how we handle it, our environmental policies, anti-slavery policies, child labour, we don't do any of that stuff, but equally we are international, so we do pay a fair
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because we want talent and we want good people in these countries. And we want people on way above a living wage. So we live what we say. And interestingly, when I formed Quantum, part of the reason I formed Quantum was not because I just saw an opportunity in the market. I was absolutely disgusted of the behavior of certain international companies that were selling their wares into New Zealand. Even some of the behavior of some local companies, how they treated customers.
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And I took all these negatives and said, if I had a company, how would I behave and what would I do? So I turned all those negatives into positives. And we've got kind of values associated with that that we've got, you know, effectively, you know, say it like it is, back each other up, celebrate awesome, turn actions into outcomes, own the question for the new. And a lot of that's, when we have a question for new, that's what's the customer's perspective, what they need, how do we get them there? So we kind of embedded that into our culture and how we operate.
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And that comes down to a lot of people, especially my kids, they're very ethical in how they think and want and idealistic. We're not doing this because we're idealistic. We have strong values in what we do. We know what bad looks like. We also know what good looks like and the line where we want to be. And if you live like that, you attract people like that to your organization, but also in your customer base. People like what you do because of that.
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When you look at, if you just look at pure financial takes, there's, have you heard of the balance scorecard? Kaplan and Norton kind of came up with it, but it's got several perspective. It's got the kind of the financial perspective. It's got the customer perspective. It's got the learning perspective. It's got the process perspective. So we use that. So we've got to make a profit because we've got to pay bills and we're going to pay, you know, software, you know, and we've got some level of growth, but we invest in our people.
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grow them and make them. We want problem solvers that are clever and do great things. We want to reward them for that as well. So we've got not just pay them well, but we've got an equity option scheme for them as well, so they can share our success. But also, the customer is important. Without the customer, we've got nothing. So we treat the customer well. We do that. But it's part of the equation. We've got to be good at what we do as well.
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And we've got to have good processes in how we operate in good systems as well. But going back to your thing of excelling over delivering to the customer, that can be a point of difference. There are so many businesses that can't even get the basics right. And I brace myself anytime I've got to deal with a company as a consumer because if I was to go to a contact center, I'm like, oh, no. I'm like,
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How long can I get on a fan fall? Can I actually, it's going to go offshore. Someone's going to deal with it and it's not qualified, doesn't understand it. I'm going to go around in a circle, et cetera. And when you get good, you're a bit shocked because you don't expect it. You're braced for bad experience. And I mean, I had a car hire company where we got, gone on a trip to UK, picked up a hire car, and there was some mistake they'd done on the paperwork.
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I tried to phone them, couldn't get through to anyone. Submitted it, went to the website, put a thing on, came out, we'll get back to you in 10 business days. I was only over there for five days. I'm going, it's like, come on, it's like. Yeah. But what I do see is that, oh, sorry.
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Yeah, yeah. So when I talk about this degradation, like we've seen it in customer experience, there was a time when I had my bank manager's telephone number. So if I had an issue with my bank, I would phone and the phone on his desk would ring and we'd have a conversation. And then that was too expensive. So I had to speak to someone in the branch. And then that was too expensive. So I had to speak to a call center. And that was too expensive. So now I have to speak to a call center in India.
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Now that's too expensive so I now have to speak to a chat bot or a chat, somebody in India. Now that's too expensive so it has to be a chat bot. Now it has to be an AI chat bot. So we've seen a definite degradation in the value that banks deliver to customers. We've seen this across the board, I think. And what I really think about this is a rising tide should lift all ships. But we're not seeing this with AI now. What we're seeing is the rising tide is...
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is flooding people's careers. And people who are really invested, like people who are really invested in technology or medicine or law, are finding themselves in real jeopardy of not having a job to do because I think it comes back to this idea, drive up your prices, drive down your costs. So the fewer unreliable human beings we employ, the more cost-effective, or certainly the more cost-effective,
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Because now the data is coming back. It's not turning out to be GB. The cost of data is going up. The cost of processes is going up. So, yeah, that's my concern is that. And we're being sold this in a very scary way. We have to beat China. It seems to me like China's beaten the big tech firms hands down. Hands down they're beating the big tech firms. Sorry, I got on one again.
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How are you doing for time? Are you alright for us to carry on? Because we are running over, I think, a little bit. You are? Okay, cool. So give us something positive, Gary. Tell us about some of the ways that... I mean, you've already given us some examples, because you got ahead of us, about some of the ways that you're driving value with AI. That includes kind of customer centricity. So it arms your salespeople, or you as the salesperson, to know more about the business, more about the personality. This is good use of AI.
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Yeah, you're right. And it's that depth. So I can think back to when I first started and I fled your steps of trying to do a sale and how bad I was and I try and research stuff and I do a lot of manual research to find company, the website, this, that, and the other. And now I can, like I said, get an agent that will do massive scouring across multiple sources so I understand that business, what media activity there's been,
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And I've got an AI agent that will basically find me the business, find the stuff that's going on, do a competitor analysis, who else operates in the field, who are the competitors, what are they doing? Okay, great. I ran some models around, you know, poured five forces for them and SWOT. So I've got an understanding of where they are, what they're doing. And then it also goes, okay, the products and services that we do are this. So it also then goes, what are the potential angles I should explore when I go in there?
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And so if I'm going in for the first time, I'm going in better prepared than I ever did in the past because I know that. And the person I'm meeting, I've got, obviously an agent can tell me about the person, the job, how long they've been there. Obviously I can look up stuff on LinkedIn, but it can do that for me. So I'm not having to go off and do all this. I've got a pretty comprehensive briefing before I go in. And almost now I feel, if I've got something that turns up short notice and I've not
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I'm happy to go meet someone and wing it, but I know my chances of success are lower. I've got to probe questions I'm not going in harm. Well, now I go in really, really prepared, and I know how much time I used to take. Equally, when I'm talking to people, I feel that I can build rapport quicker and better because I'll know the personality type, and I'll know some common things there we can explore, and we can take it. And if it goes further, great. You can do that.
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I find it's helped me as a salesperson. It's helped my sales team as well on that. And like I said, I'm not a salesperson, but I end up opening doors and operating a certain level that some of the sales team obviously can't because they're not the founder or owner of a company. And I think it's great for that. I think what it is, the other side we've kind of seen it as is that if you've got,
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If you look at salespeople, there's a nut hunters. There aren't that many hunters. There's a lot of farmers. And then even within the performance side of that, there's some outstanding people. There's some people at high average, there's average, there's low average, and others shouldn't be in sales. What we found is that what you can do is that if you're the
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you know, a plus plus salesperson that achieves, that's great. You're going to just do even better because you use these tools. What it also means is that those that aren't quite at that level, we've given them a superpower now that they didn't have before. So they can actually perform and do better. They can earn more. They can, they can actually satisfy, understand the customer better because we've given them the tools in a way that helps them perform better and get better outcomes for the customer as well.
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So actually, you can use it like a superpower. The thing is, you do have to check what you get. You do have to know what you're doing and what you're looking at. Because if it gives you crap and you recycle like crap, you're going to look pretty stupid and undermine what you're doing. But it's like having a superhero assistant. Because again, you can't afford to have assistance for every salesperson, but you can now with AI.
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You've effectively done that. And you've also democratized the access to that knowledge. In the past, it was really expensive to have a whole research team doing this for you, where now you've got your own research team as agents doing that for you. Yeah, 100%. So it was this. And what I would also say is things like law is going to change the way law is delivered, because in the past, and financial advice and other stuff.
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In the past, you had to be rich. The more money you had, the bigger the lawyers you could get, the more legal stuff you could get. But it democratizes it because a lot of the legal stuff you need is boilerplate. So the cost of doing that has gone virtually to zero. Now, what it does mean, though, is that
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I mean, we still use our lawyer. Don't get me wrong. Our commercial lawyer is really good. But we use him and we can afford to use. Where in the past, we'd have a budget and he'd be going through a lot of boilerplate stuff. And we'd burn our budget in a year. And it's on pretty mundane stuff for us. And we're not getting much value. Where we'd really want him to go, okay, we're looking to acquire this company. We need to understand this. Can you give us a view on it? Great. So what it means for us is we can use our legal budget on,
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higher end stuff rather than the boilerplate stuff. He prefers doing that stuff where he's having to think about things and all those, you know, our angle, or we're bringing this product to market. We need to, what are the vulnerabilities we need to be aware of? How do we actually make sure we're protected around this? How do we make sure that we're not breaching IP around this and we expose ourselves on a liability?
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So we can ask those questions so we can actually use our legal budget more effectively. It's not we've reduced our legal budget. We're actually using it on higher value advice that we couldn't do before because I had to use on a mundane advice. Yeah. So we've got an AI agent that will basically review our con contracts we get from clients and we can turn them around a lot quicker. We also know the points where we can go in and negotiate straight away. This saves me doing it at 10 o'clock at night.
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I hate reviewing master service agreements or standard work from customers. And me doing it at 10 o'clock at night is not a good thing because I'm going to miss stuff. And now I can get it run through and I know exactly what I need to look at. And I can get in front of the customer quicker and say, okay, happy with that, but can we change this? You're giving us an exposure here that means it's outside our insurance limit. We can cover it, but we've got insurance, which means we're not going to increase that. Or we can pull it down there and keep the price the same.
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So it puts us in a better position. But going back to your point as well, is that what we are seeing in the States, graduate unemployment is going up massively because a lot of these entry jobs are going. There's a lag between them going and the creation of new roles that you hadn't thought of before. So it's like when social media came out. You know, you've never thought you'd have things like influences or
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search engine optimization people or other things or all these other kind of roles that came with it. The stuff that this is going to create that we haven't even thought of. And the net, I think, from the World Economic Forum is that they think there's going to be about 70 million jobs destroyed by AI, but they think there's something like 120 million new jobs created. The issue is that it's not the same skill set and it might not be in the same geographic areas.
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That's the thing. There's a net gain, but the net gain is not necessarily equally distributed. Or where is it going to be? And I don't know the answer. It's OK because AI is going to answer that for us. It's just not going to answer it in time for the tens of thousands of people who've been laid off by Meta and Oracle.
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It's the thing, because I'm with you 100%, like AI could, like you supercharge your business, you supercharge your people. So not only is your budget going to go up for your lawyers, because you're going to be more effective, more proposals, more success, more income, all of these things, like more contracts that need to be reviewed.
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So it could have the effect of raising all ships. My concern is that it probably won't because I think lots of businesses have a very short term, we need profit today and tomorrow, we don't care about what happens in six months, 12 months, whatever, we don't care about what happens to the employees. So the question that I really wanna ask you and I'm sure people really wanna hear
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is what kind of value are you delivering for customers? What sort of AI initiatives is it that are generating five to 10 times return on investment? What sort of initiatives are actually landing, working, delivering positive results right now? Like what's possible from AI? That's what I'm interested to know. Or not even possible, let's just talk about what's reliably implementable.
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Yeah, and just taking a slight step back, when we look at AI implementation, I look at three levels. I look at individual productivity, I look at team productivity, and I look at organisational productivity or value at those levels. Now, individual productivity, I mentioned before, it's like going from a typewriter to the word processor. Generally, across the board, you should get a 15% to 20% productivity gain for your teams in service industries.
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You'll get people at the far end with multiple hundreds and then some with nothing. But as an average, you should be upping that. But it's tapping into, if you free that, what do you do with that time? What are people going to do? Have you got a list of other things they need to do or more strategic or are they going to fritter it away? So important that you can look at that. Level two, which is a team. This is workflows. So if you look at customer journey, an onboarding or sales process or stuff like that,
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and or loan application or stuff like this you know if you look at i'll give you an example um we went into australia and we had to deal with a bank there honestly the onboarding process and to get an account going it took something like six weeks and that was to get i had to get physical
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I had to get documents witnessed at the consulate, Australian consulate. I had to have them couriered by airmail to the bank. I had to fill out these forms and if it was a mistake, sent back. Verify our, you know, our identifiers, our business, everything else. We know your customer, setting up all the accounts and then get the cards and then get the little widgets we had to do. Six weeks. It was absolutely painful.
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We went through a similar painful process for setting up a bank account in Malaysia. And again, that was actually slightly better than the particular Australian bank we were dealing with for that one. And then the bank we've got in New Zealand, we can transfer money into Australian dollars. They don't transfer into Malaysian ringgits. So again, oh God, how are we gonna do this? Anyway, I use a Wise card.
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personal wise cards, which is like a money card. Yeah. So basically I've got a personal one. I think it is fantastic because what we've done, you can basically put your New Zealand dollars in and say, I'm going to India, set up the Indian account. Boom, your money's in there. I can go into a cash. I can use a card machine over there. I can use it there. It's coming out of the Indian account I've got.
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I can get money paid into that Indian account. I can transfer it back. I can put money in there and set the exchange rates when to move money. Fantastic. With my card, as soon as I've used it, I can have my card or on my phone. I can use it. I can freeze it so I don't get, if someone skim it. Phenomenal. The onboarding for that is minutes. I then, my wife said, ah, what about wise for business? So I had a look at that as well. Okay, oh my goodness, we can get that.
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15 minutes, I had a bit of account set up and I could move money into Malaysia. Yeah. And that's the sort of thing that's an organizational, that's a level three operating model change. Now, the banks could do that, but they don't. They've got so much baggage of how to do this and so on. Basically, I'm almost going, I
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I could probably actually set up my whole operation through a WISE accounts for quantum offshore. I could have not had to go and deal with banks at all. I could have done that. And WISE links to Xero. So it's completely orderable. It's got double signature authorizations, everything that you need for security, compliance and audit. It's brilliant. Yes. And I'm going, oh my goodness, the pain.
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I had set up as a client conventionally and is at that level to the process, that process is bugged. And then with this material that we sent to bank, I went to this particular bank's branch in New Zealand because they had to authorize stuff there. They didn't know what they're doing. Had to find out Australia. They did that. And then they lost the bloody paperwork. They had to go again. And I'm just going, oh, it,
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So from that kind of perspective of go that if you look at what is the process, look at that customer journey, right? Yes, yes, yes. How good was that or not as the case may be? Six weeks is diabolical when you can do it in 15 minutes. It's insane. And without friction. So you can design those sorts of things. And that's not a 10x, that's 100x gain, 1,000x gain on what you're doing of
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Time is taken, how much resource would you have to throw at it conventionally? What was the customer experience? What was the cost? What was the pain? You know, what's the security there? What's the risk of fraud, et cetera, that you're preventing through secure electronic means of doing this stuff, you know?
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So the short answer to that question is, it depends how invested they are in their legacies, in their old rubbish junk processes, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so we've got three quick fire questions now. So this will be clipped up. So these need to be punchy kinds of answers. So let's say I am a business leader in a corporation and I'm thinking AI could be helping me
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What's your recommendation? What should those people do so that they understand more about AI and potentially what it could be achieving for them in their business other than picking up the phone and speaking to you, which obviously is a given, but what should they, before they pick up the phone and speak to you, what should they be thinking about that will take them further down the roads to achieving AI success? Yeah. Okay. I think an email being said, I shall go to my website. Um,
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I come back to why, you know, why do you want to do this? What's the value you're trying to get? What's the outcome you're trying to get? And you've got to be clear. And it comes back to what are you trying to do for the customer? What are you trying to do for employees? What are you trying to do for the business? Yes. And what's this going to do for you? And if you've got, you know, you may have a pressing problem and
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AI effectively will remove some of those constraints. So, for example, in that kind of fintech example I gave you, that it can do stuff. But it comes back to why to begin with. Why do you want to do it? What's the advantage you're going to get? How's it going to make your business different? How's it going to help your customer, your staff, your operating model, your profitability, et cetera? So you've got to look at that because there's lots of shiny AIs out there.
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but they give no, absolutely no value, you know, in what you're doing and stuff. You've got, there's gotta be a real business problem or a business benefit that you're trying to achieve. And then, and you're working back down then of, you've got that, you need to understand what are your processes, what's the flow, what's the data you've got that you need for that? Does it exist or doesn't it exist? How are you gonna operate doing that?
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how people involved in that, what do they do? And then what are the potential technology solutions, which include AI, that will help you? So you've got to go in reverse order. Don't jump to technology first. If you run it as a technology project, it will be a technology project and you won't get the outcome you require.
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Fantastic. I think that's a great recommendation. So you have to start with the people. And this is what I really think is like the AI, the digital transformation, all of these things, they're just tools. And if they are used to improve the situation of people, then that obviously is first price. And if they aren't improving the situation of people, then, you know, we shouldn't be doing those things.
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Okay, great. So we've got to question number five. Question number five should be an easy one. What I need you to do now is introduce me to two people you think will add value for our audience. And this is how the podcast propagates itself. This is how I ended up talking to you because I made Mark introduce me to two people and he went on to introduce me to eight people is the truth.
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So who do you think I should be talking to who could build on this conversation, do you think, who might be interested and add value to our audience? I need two people from you, ideally. Okay, I'd chat to James Lachlan, who's a high performance coach. He's New Zealand based, he's from Northern Ireland originally. And he works with executives, commercial teams on the human side of performance and also
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has a good view on how AI should be used to help people in those sorts of areas. Fantastic. And he works in businesses of all sizes. And again, he's been great. I've worked with him on a few things. He's another kind of Mark as well, another Mark Carter. Excellent, we all need more Marks in our life. We need to be careful about how many Marks we have in our life is the truth. Yeah. I would, yeah.
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I would also talk to Hayley Alexander, who's the CEO of Alexander Group. She's a lovely lady and we've worked with her for a number of years. And she's from a, they've got a logistics business that transports compressed gases, cryogenic and petroleum gases. So quite specialist in what they do in a logistics distribution company. And we've worked with them on a journey of digital maturity, data lakes, AI, and so on.
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And they're a kind of industry that's, they want to be a data-driven business and leverage AI. And they kind of, we work with them and help them in our thinking and what they need to do. They've done really well as to where they've got to, but they've got ambitions of where they're gonna get to as well. And so we've often found that some of the legacy
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Financial services tend to be at the forefront of adoption because they've got the money and they're investing heavily in this and on the cutting edge. And then it tends to be the more physical industries that adopt, let them do their stuff, let it be bedded in, and then they'll adopt. And then the real laggards are, you know, there are then some laggard industries as well that are going that they'll only kind of jump when absolutely forced to and other stuff stops.
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So yeah, but she's brilliant. And I probably talked to Lloyd Cartwright, who's former CEO of Momentum Life. And he's a real innovative thinker. Very, very bright and forward thinking. He's got background from working in banking and insurance and so on. And he was the CEO of Momentum Life, a life insurance company that he transformed. And then he's,
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I think he's just about to move to Singapore to run, I think, a dairy exchange company.
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And he's looking at them of how they modernize what they do and move them forward. Good. That's three. You're 50 percent up on what I needed. So thank you very much for that. I will reach out to those people. Or if you can maybe drop them a line, let them know to expect to hear from me. That would be great. So the last question then is, because what I want to do is I want to run like some content aside this, which thinks about which is the greatest business in the world ever.
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So that's the question I have for you. You can make a recommendation, which you think is the greatest business in the world ever. I'm thinking specifically beyond shareholder value, which business, and if it's got an AI flavor, then that's perfectly fine. If it's got a digital flavor, that's fine. But which business to you do you think has delivered the greatest value in the world ever? And I know you should have had an opportunity to prepare, but nobody else has, so that's why you haven't either. I think probably anthropic.
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The makers have clawed because they spun out of chat of open AI because they didn't believe in a direction that it was being taken. And I've created a business that has really good values is one of the frontier models in the AI and it's got high values in what they're trying to do. And they're not perfect. But again, if you look at big tech, there's some, yeah,
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unsavoury characters running some of those businesses or, you know, like say, have got their own personal agendas that aren't necessarily in everyone else's best interests.
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Yeah, 100%. And that's why I think no business is going to be perfect. So it's going to be a balance. There's going to be some yin, there's going to be some yang, and we have to think about those things. Okay, good. So Anthropic wasn't on the list. We've got so far Patagonia, Apple, Kopinski Hotels. Mark had some interesting ones. The Australian Institute of Concierge was one of his because they're obviously delivering great customer experiences every day.
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So that's cool. I will put Anthropic on the list and I'll do my little investigation. We've also come up with a model, which is how we kind of judge how good businesses are. So it's going to be interesting to kind of stress test that and see how much that works. Are you ready for some good news? Yeah. We got to the end. We answered all of the questions. I think it was interesting. What's that? I'm waiting for the difficult question.
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You went for the difficult question? No, I'm waiting for a difficult one. Oh, they're not difficult. Okay, well, maybe you'll have to go into more depth next time around. I mean, I've got issues. You've probably got a sense that I've got issues. I 100% really don't enjoy the way that the big tech Western...
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AIs are operating and marketing themselves. So I didn't want to challenge you too much on that. I've got issues around this. So if you wanted to have another conversation, I'll come up with some different questions and maybe there'll be a question in there that might actually challenge you. No, no. I was only being sarcastic there. Okay, cool. No, no. And it is interesting, like you say, of how certain...
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companies and we've seen it with some companies where effectively when they start up, they behave a certain way. They take stage A, B, C thing, and then they change. Then they get to a float and change again. And so it's probably a symptom of the venture capital route that some of them go down or who their investments are as to drive that because
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They're expecting certain returns and we sold a certain promise. So yeah.
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Yeah, 100%. I think by the time you're public and you have shareholders or you've taken on funding, it's not your business anymore. Do you know what I mean? And then you are under pressure. You can't just be successful. You have to be stupidly profitable or our share investors are going to go somewhere else, you know. So I think what we've done is in – I mean, it frazzles my mind that in the West where we're all supposed to be about business and freedom and all of these things, we're really doing business really, really badly.
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Because, like, I'm going to get on a rant here. We need to be careful. You need to go and enjoy your evening. But 100% for me, customer-centric businesses are better businesses. They last longer. They make more profit. They attract customers more cost-effectively. They keep customers more cost-effectively. They innovate better because they are innovating with their customers.
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This might be a conversation for the second time where we go deeper maybe on customer centricity and customer experience and how really – because there's no two ways in my mind. Like AI could be used to produce and deliver amazing customer experiences. The fear I think right now in 2026 is that it probably won't. It will probably just be used to make a lot of people unemployed.
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and drive down the value that customers receive again. Anyway, we're talking about me and we shouldn't be talking about me. We've had a great conversation. It's been really interesting. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you said that you shouldn't have said, do you think? I don't think so. Obviously, for more controversial stuff, I didn't want to name any companies. So we didn't. We're a good step to name companies, but yeah. I think you're safe from the lawyers. Is there anything you didn't say that you think you should have said?
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I can't think of it at the moment, but no. Just on those three people, if you've got a bit of blurb I can share with them around the podcast, I can introduce you.
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Okay, that would be fantastic if you could do that. Okay, so then we have got to the very end. So what I'll say to people is if you have got to the very end, if you could like, share, subscribe, comment, get involved, then that will help us, obviously, to produce more of these kinds of conversations. So we'll say goodbye right now for the sake of the audience, Gary. And then don't rush away and we'll say goodbye like normal human beings after I've stopped recording. Is that cool? Brilliant. Thanks, Martin. Bye. You're an absolute legend. Thank you so much, Gary.