Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers
Welcome to the Think Forward podcast where we have conversations with futurists, innovators and big thinkers about what lies ahead. We explore emerging trends on the horizon and what it means to be a futurist.
Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers
Everyone Gets a Superpower | EP 151 with Paul Baier
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Paul Baier has spent the last few years in the rooms where large companies decide what to actually do about AI, and he has trained something like 15,000 people within those organizations. So when he says the technology is almost never the bottleneck, it lands differently than it would from someone selling a platform. He grew up in Ohio watching the Midwest get hollowed out by forces everyone could see coming, and nobody managed to get ahead of, and he brings that same unsentimental realism to what is happening now.
His core reframe changed how I talk about this entire moment. Stop treating AI as a technology, the thing executives buy and plug in down through the organization, and start treating it as a capability, the thing you have to grow, with new skills and processes and systems attached. A technology leaves you the same shape. A genuinely grown capability changes you. We get into why this is the first tool in history that arrives with zero cost, zero learning curve, and high value all at once, what it means that roughly 24 million people ever learned to write code while eight billion can now simply describe what they want, why enterprise usage keeps climbing while measurable returns stay stubbornly flat, and where the surplus from all this automation is actually going to land. Paul also makes an argument about this bubble that I had not heard before: that it runs on usage rather than hope, which makes the disruption ahead more real rather than less.
If you have deployed AI somewhere in your organization and are still quietly waiting for it to matter, this hour is for you.
=============================
This Week's Companion Issue
The companion Future Proof issue built on this conversation, Everyone Gets a Superpower, lands Thursday. It is part of a four-part series called Reading Yourself Like a System, and it takes Paul's capability argument into the personal register: why the power is now universal, but the rewiring is rare.
Read on Substack: https://befutureproof.substack.com/
Read on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/future-proof-7303526412311842816/
=============================
Chapters
0:00 Usage Beats Hype
1:39 Paul’s First ChatGPT Moment
5:08 AI As An Enterprise Capability
8:32 Democratized Coding And Recursive Tools
10:02 Tech Giants And Governance Reality
11:52 Where Jobs Shift And Surplus Flows
18:30 Secure AI Training And Change Management
23:45 Agents And The Widening Advantage
34:22 Adapt Tomorrow With These Habits
=============================
About Paul Baier
Paul Baier is CEO and co-founder of GAI Insights, an analyst and advisory firm focused entirely on what enterprises actually do with generative AI, and an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School where he teaches this material to senior leaders. He writes on AI for Forbes and hosts GAI World, running in Boston September 28 to 30. His path runs from enterprise technology and sustainability consulting into full-time research on how organizations adopt intelligence.
Connect with Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulbaier/
GAI Conference: https://www.gaiworld.com/
=============================
Go Deeper
📬 Future Proof, my weekly newsletter on foresight and leadership, here on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/future-proof-7303526412311842816/ and in full on Substack: https://befutureproof.substack.com/
🌐 Join the Future Proof Community for conversations about the future: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/10084416/
📖 SuperShifts, my book on the forces reshaping business and society: https://www.supershiftsbook.com/
👤 My website: https://www.stevenfisher.io/ | My LinkedIn: ttps://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenfisher/
=============================
Think Forward Everywhere
🎧 All episodes: https://thinkforward.buzzsprout.com/
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/think-forward-conversations-with-futurists-innovators/id1736144515
🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0IOn8PZCMMC04uixlATqoO
▶️ YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxPaMTfnbnI&list=PLionR73qBCQmgCvEI9iFSS4gXPvQl5m3n
💼 Follow the show on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/think-forward-show/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thinkfwdshow/
X: https://x.com/ThinkFwdShow
=============================
Presented By
PRESENTED BY THINK FORWARD NETWORK https://tfn.one/
SUPPORTED BY THE HUMAN FRONTIER INSTITUTE https://humanfrontier.org/
=============================
Sponsor This Episode
Interested in sponsoring Think Forward or partnering as an affiliate? Email sfisher@humanfrontier.org to reach a growing audience of leaders and futurists thinking seriously about what's next.
What have you been treating as a technology you bought, when it is really a capability you would have to grow? Tell me in the comments.
If you found something useful, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review so more people can find the show.
#ThinkForward #EnterpriseAI #AIAdoption
ORDER SUPERSHIFTS! bit.ly/supershifts
🎧 Listen Now On:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/think-forward-conversations-with-futurists-innovators-and-big-thinkers/id1736144515
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0IOn8PZCMMC04uixlATqoO
Web: https://thinkforward.buzzsprout.com/
Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.
Usage Beats Hype
SPEAKER_01Usually you had the financial bubble, which is before the financial bubble's based on hope and speculation that the usage will come. This is usage and the financial bubble.
SPEAKER_02We've never had a tool that could create better tools.
SPEAKER_01Now it can not only tell you how to use it, it can tell you how it's going to improve itself.
SPEAKER_02Paul. I've been following your stuff for a long time, but I wanted to reach out and I'm like, I don't know, he's really busy. He's got the, you know, those of you who don't know Paul, Paul's going to tell you a story, but GAI Insights is like an awesome newsletter, especially if you're taking the journey of AI. But you have, I believe, one of the best conferences because you get people who are at the forefront of doing crazy weird edge things, but at the same time, there's a lot of practicality in it and application that people can be like, I could do this to today. And I think that's you usually get one or the other, like you know, when you get to conferences. But you know, so you and I are, I would say, roughly the same generation, grew up through networking. We talked about our pre-call. We we both grew up through the 90s of networking. We've seen a lot of uh, a lot of bubbles, yeah, a lot of busts, a lot of transformational change. And I think we both agree that this is profoundly, even since the web, you know, one of the biggest, you know, changes civilizationally for us. So, but your story, for those that don't know you, like where where did you, you know, what who are you, what you're doing now, where'd you come from? What'd you what are you up to these days?
Paul’s First ChatGPT Moment
SPEAKER_01I mean, my story, I 25 years in B2B SaaS software. So uh involved in open AI, I mean open market way back in the dot-com era, did a dot bomb myself, and uh been through supply chain HR, and I spent five years at a company called First Fuel, which used traditional AI to look at commercial buildings, and that's where I really got to understand the limits and capabilities of visional AI. So when I got my hands on Chad GPT in December 22, I couldn't believe it. I'm like calling all these guys and my team, like, what the hell is this? And it was so clear to me there that this was this superpower. And my career stack's always been up through the product management, product, product side. So translating technology, the customer benefits, the customer need back to the architects. And uh that's a name we've been flying in.
SPEAKER_02So when you saw that for the first time, when you the way you just described that, uh similar experience, the way I remember it too, I remember the first time I installed uh TCP IP on a Windows 3.1 machine. Yeah, that's a long time ago. But I remember pulling up Mosaic, the Mosaic browser that Mark Andreason, that was the precursor to Netscape. For those of you know, you know, uh Andre Anderson Hor Andreas and Horowitz, um, the investment firm. But he it was that kind of like wow, like what it could do. Did you like when you saw GPT, did it just did it have the same kind of like the vertebrae, I don't quite understand it.
SPEAKER_01It was like when I, you know, yeah, four modems, the 24-8 modems, and then you know, uh internet speech. So yeah, I I couldn't I didn't understand how it worked. I couldn't believe it was kicking back. You know, I hadn't really internalized what probabilistic systems are versus deterministic, and uh and we just started doing uh Zoom calls with friends, and then that turned into ChatGPT, which ended up being for a while the largest ChatGPT users group. Uh and we would just get on every Monday, we'd have a couple hundred people there, and uh Stephen, someone said, Oh, I just saved four hours doing an RFP, and that'd be like the bullshit. You know, pull up your ChatGPT 3.5, show me. And to me, it was critical was that this was a technology where there was zero cost, zero learning curve, and high value. Usually this new new stuff is high value, but there's some type of learning curve or um cost you have to put in in terms of learning or installing, and uh that didn't exist here.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think it's interesting when you look at tools like Claude and what it the direction it's going, I would say more the enterprise. I mean, ChatGPT obviously has enterprise clients, but they're definitely taking, they're gonna have ads, they're gonna definitely take a different route. And you know, when you were at First Fuel, you were a VP of product. I mean, this is really, real enterprise AI, right? And this is analyzing buildings. I mean, you know what it takes to put uh enterprise software. I mean, how do you think it has the impact to get like how does it get into an AI strategy? Like, how do you want people to think about that?
SPEAKER_01Like Yeah, how do we want c companies to think about AI strategy?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, like it's a differentiation. Like when when when you want thing peop people to think how GP ChatGPT is like an enter like is an enterprise tool, it's not just about how you want to implement it, but what does it have? What is the power for someone like yourself in product?
AI As An Enterprise Capability
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think well first and foremost, I want everyone to helicopter up and not view AI as a technology. Technology is what executives buy, purchase, and plug in down the organization. We need to think of AI as a capability. This is a capability, and capability you have to grow in your organization here. Uh, and that means there's new skills, new processes, new systems, and it's that profound. Uh so the um idea of how it's going to impact the um enterprise, you know, it's three or three different levels. You can put AI into your product and handful of companies like Salesforce or John Deere physical products do it. You can have AI to automate a system or process your 350 people in your call center, for instance. Or you can have AI um radically improve the productivity of individual employees or small teams. And that's what the enterprise version of Chad GPT or Claude are doing.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think you made a distinction. The pre-call we had, I haven't been able to stop thinking about this part, is the financial valuations might be a bubble, but adoption is not, which is what you kind of went to, right? And you look at it as adoption per person, per company, per country, right?
SPEAKER_01It's every metric on use is going up. Uh Warden's done a really good study where they look at the same employees year after year after year, and those employees, individual employees, are using it more. More employees at companies are using it. Agents now are using more tokens here. So the token explosion from the usage is going through this. And usually we haven't seen that. Usually you had the financial bubble, which is before the financial bubble is based on hope and speculation that the usage will come. This is usage and the financial bubble, and that's why this is so different than past um hype cycles.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, when you said once you digitize intelligence, that intelligence can start digitizing other parts of the stack, right? And then we've never had a tool that could create better tools. I think that's the profound kind of thought. When you think you you kind of had us kind of helicopter hire, that's that's the the the we've never had a tool where you can speak in your own language.
SPEAKER_018 billion people in the world, you know, what 24 million speak uh can code in Python or Java or something. Eight billion can speak their own language. You can talk to machines, it can talk them back and tell you how to use it. We've just never had that. And now it can not only tell you how to use it, it can tell you how it's going to improve itself, which we're now just starting to see the recursive software elements of that coming into production, which was kind of a pipe dream even 12 months ago.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was before we just started the recording, I was telling you like I've been using N8N, I've been using, you know, connecting Claude to Obsidian. I mean, just the fact I can create my own real personal like rag, not more than even more than that, but it's just gonna learn from me. It's a question of like what at what point will it start to even learn and how it can improve itself, right? I think that's every person's gonna it's gonna become easier to do that. You know, I you know, I would say I'm a little more technical than most, but um but like I said, I wasn't a developer and I can do it now, which is I think an incredibly differentiating part of this is you can like you said, you can ask it and can help you
Democratized Coding And Recursive Tools
SPEAKER_02figure it out when you couldn't do it before, right?
SPEAKER_01Well and Steven, we seen these ways before. Before YouTube, yeah, only people with sophisticated equipment could do TV shows. Now Mr. Beast and others. So we've seen that the democratization of the studio, we've seen the democratization of the radio. Now we're seeing the democratization of the coding with the uh vibe coding and no code tools that you talked about.
SPEAKER_02That's exactly right. Uh, I think about, yeah, yeah. Speaking of Mr. Beast, I mean, my son is my nine-year-old son is kind of obsessed with him. He's got a ha he's got a half a billion, is it 500 million? Five. Yeah, five hundred million subscribers. He's the highest, you know, the the highest uh you biggest YouTuber on the planet. And when you watch his stuff, it's just engaging, like how he kind of cracked that the algorithm. But more so than that, I mean, my nine-year-old wants to, I mean, I'm not gonna let him, but he wants to set up his own channel. And it's like he has the power to broadcast his game, and it's just it it the what he what he will be able to do in you know 10 years when he's in high school is just I can't even fathom it. You know, and I want to uh you know, I wanted to bring up, you know, we've got this continually an innovation race. I mean, it could be positioned as other things, but these the frontier AI companies that you have at your conference, you talk to, I mean, you would say like they're the most powerful entities in the history of mankind, humankind, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean the the
Tech Giants And Governance Reality
SPEAKER_01top five tech companies of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, uh the world are meta. I mean, they're more powerful in all countries except for maybe China, U.S. You know, they have to What do you think it means for governance, though?
SPEAKER_02What do you think it means for geopolitics? I mean, what we're dealing with, you know, this is taped on the 13th of April, so we're dealing with, you know, straight up for moves being blocked, right? It's like, what are we gonna be, you know, what does it mean for for the for the for the doom loop potentially, or did it not become a doom loop?
SPEAKER_01I'm not sure if it's a doom loop, but it's definitely I mean, we've already seen the flex. I mean, recall just I don't know, four or five years ago where Congress called all the uh social uh media giants down to Congress and they basically laughed at Congress. I mean, there is no control. Meta's got 3.2 billion people. That's more than China. Uh they've already influenced elections well before the age of AI. Um, we've never thought we'd see five years ago, we'd see companies worth a trillion dollars, much less two trillion dollars. We're gonna see companies worth four and five trillion dollars in the next 10 years. Uh Google itself is kicking off four to eight billion dollars of free cash flow every single week. So is Microsoft. Uh, there's no trust busting coming from the U.S. federal government. There's certainly not in Europe. Europe's dead in this front. And uh the government is uh open to business on influence. So we're living in a very, very different world where, you know, the the super powerful countries, a handful of them, and certainly a super powerful um tech companies are just getting more powerful. And that's that's the reality full stop. We can argue about the the extent of it, but the reality is true and it's not changing, and we gotta understand how to uh live and navigate this world.
SPEAKER_02Well, you th you know you and I talked about, and we're both uh students of history, you know, when we think back to the automation
Where Jobs Shift And Surplus Flows
SPEAKER_02era with like Henry Ford, right? When he uh put together his company and drawing people in to build the Model T, which is at scale, and he figured out the assembly line process, he doubled wages so workers could afford the actual things they're building, like the cars that they that they were building, they wanted to be able to use them. Like, you know, it it was kind of unprompted. Do you think there's a kind of a 2026 version of that that anyone's gonna make it, or maybe in the next year or two? Because despite all the layoffs that are happening, I think there's what are you seeing when you talk to uh companies?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think there's two things. One is I think one is where the surplus goes. So when there's automation, surplus is traded in the company. Here it can go one of four places, it can go into government taxes, it can go back to the owners in terms of higher lots of private equities doing that, go to the um workers, that's what Henry Ford did, higher wages, or it can go to customers and lower prices. So we're seeing that loop be, you know, a lot of people that have experiment now. We haven't seen a lot on the higher wages side, although you could argue Netscape, uh, I mean Netflix has got, you know, you know, $500,000,000, $800,000 average wages over there. They might be an example of it. We've certainly seen it from um Amazon and lower prices here, and certainly uh back to shareholders we're seeing it. So that kind of uh rootless innovation capitalist cycle that generates is continuing at a much faster pace. And what that means, the reality is we're gonna have a lot more disruption. More job disruption is gonna come. You know, if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, I think when it started, it was like 90% of the people in America worked on farms, and within two generations it was down to like 20%. We're gonna see that.
SPEAKER_02Now it's three. I think it's three now. Is it three now? Three.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and most of those are factory farms. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right. That's right.
SPEAKER_01So we're gonna see the same thing happen really fast. We we've already seen things like Price Waterhouse say they're gonna hire a third less uh college graduates over the next 10 years, and that's thousands of positions. We've already seen every CFO I talk with, when someone leaves a company, you do not get that rep back unless you can prove that AI can't do it. So uh there's um uh material change happening in many sectors, not all sectors, but many sectors.
SPEAKER_02I think it's when you when you look at that, and then even further when the AI starts creating AI, and you meant you kind of start touched on that uh, you know, earlier when that loop closes. I mean do you you've had philosophers at at the conference, like people that are I would say more philosophical or directly like what happens to the to human agency? I mean, are we the are we still primary drivers of innovation? Are we gonna hand it off? It's uh I think that's it's a really good question. I mean, um it's a little scary for thought, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I mean, Jensen's pretty clear in NVIDIA without AI, they couldn't create the most recent chips. So um, you know, the the reality is that we're gonna have more and more products that are only gonna be able to be created by AI, and we're starting to see software go there. Now, the king the good news is everyone thought the internet's gonna take all the jobs they did, and everyone thought the ATM was gonna kill all the tellers. You know, we morphed as a society that different value adds, but it doesn't mean that disruption's not um very real for the people caught up um uh in this big change. And if you know how to know how to manage robots, you're gonna you're gonna have plenty, you're gonna if you know how to manage teams of robots, you're gonna be have plenty of job offers.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I for one will get my contractor's license and get robots so that I don't have to deal with people trying to like, you know, redoing my kitchen. I mean, because to your point, I mean, I've I've used this example. I grew up with uh my my dad was a home builder. It's like, I'll tell you, he would love nothing more than to have a bunch of guys that can hire a bunch of robots that can hire hang drywall 24-7. No, no worries, you know, but it but you have to still manage that. You still have to be. I I think the the the change right now is so fast is that there's not enough time to find the you know the new jobs, the creation. I think in another five years we'll be there, but it is going to be very painful. But those new opportunities will be there. Do you see have they talked about new types of job roles like you know, like an orchestrator or other types of emerging job? Like we didn't have a web developer, you know, like we didn't have a product designer, you know, it's you know, 20 years ago, right?
SPEAKER_01You never heard of like UX. Uh so I mean we're starting to see some of them. I mean, uh internal automation specialists, we're starting to see that more often. Uh we were a couple calls last week where people started talking about kind of a director or manager of explainability. Uh we ex Oh, interesting.
SPEAKER_02Manager of explainability.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Wow. Use it use a security. I mean, 30 years ago, we barely had directors of securities, then we had hacks, then we have CISOs, and it went up here. These regulated companies are under tremendous regulation and legal downside if you can't explain why it turned down your cancer. So I have AI turning down or making decisions about, you know, health insurance claims or whatnot. You're gonna have to explain that. And it's different than observation AI is just saying how it happened, it doesn't say why it's happening. So there's a whole so that's another category. You know, um that the bigger area that I see is finding traditional jobs that have AI infused in them. So marketers who know how to use AI for SEO and video creation and can triple the effectiveness of a single dollar marketing budget. Uh a sales rep who knows how to use um uh AI can be double as productive as the one not using AI. So that kind of product manager, the software developer, uh so those are the ones that companies can say they just cannot find enough people who've had the one to 200 hours on these tools and they can demonstrate uh competence.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, look, I mean I I know many, I'm sure you do too. Many have been laid off in that space, right? And did it affect them? Did they have the are they going to retrain? Some will, some won't. Some will just be like, I don't want to do it.
SPEAKER_01Mentality, Steve. We've done we've trained about 15,000 people in our instructor-led um training. And there's it's it's like left-handed or right-handed. There's this bell curve of people. Some people gravitate to the new like you do, and and some it's just really, really hard for them.
SPEAKER_02Well, tell yeah, let's talk. Tell me, tell yeah, share the audience. I don't think the audience, I'm not some listening, know you like talk about that. It's a great program. Talk about like how that
Secure AI Training And Change Management
SPEAKER_02helps and kind of makes people help people with the transition. Can you dive into that that what you put together? It's really awesome.
SPEAKER_01One of the service offerings we have at GI Insights is um uh AI training, uh 101, 201, 301.
SPEAKER_02And uh if you're really But it's different than the generics, there's a lot of generic stuff. It's very different. You take a different approach, which I think is important to to emphasize and really unpack. I think so.
SPEAKER_01I think yeah, well, thank you. The um so we focus on uh training inside the enterprise or the company. The sweet spot of that is confidently using AI with secure employee chatbot and confidential data. That's the sweet spot. And to get there, you need a couple different things. One, you need to have a secure employee chatbot like Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini. You need to have employee use policy that's set and discussed. People need to talk about it. Steven, you tell me it's okay for me to take my most profitable customer information out of Salesforce and stick it in this machine. I've read everywhere on the internet that these machines are not safe. You know what that reminds me of?
SPEAKER_02You know what it reminds me of? It's the same case that Salesforce went through in 2003. Because back then, for the many who are starting their careers don't didn't live through this, they had this thing called application to service providers, where SEBL or big systems were kind of virtualized, or you had it in your house, in-house. Businesses, like they had act, they had all these like, you know, on the server, in the and the fact that they were like, I'm gonna put my customer data or customer contacts on this thing on the internet. It a so it's funny that Salesforce went through the same thing as people didn't trust it. Correct, correct. And now we're in the same, it's it, it's again, we're revisiting in a different thing, but it's the same. Correct.
SPEAKER_01There's a big change management challenge, right? Right. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, I think you you clearly think in uh you know bigger terms. I mean, when you see this, do you how do you look at the pl uh at us civilizationally? Like how do you look at this kind of transformation when you talk to companies? Like, what do you what do you see for the next say five years? I think ten years is even stretching.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I'm more of a realist. I grew up in Ohio, and when I was growing up, yeah, the Midwest got gutted by China and NAFTA. And we all saw coming. Everyone said NAFTA's gonna take 15% of jobs and it did. Everyone said China's gonna take 15% of jobs and it did. And there's now places in Ohio, like Kent, Ohio, where I'm from, that used to have three Fortune 500 companies headquarters there, and now they're gone, and real real estate prices haven't moved in 25 years, been flat. And and population is declining. So we're clearly gonna see changes, and what's gonna happen is the wealthy is gonna get wealthier, the the um the disparity is gonna get good, and the concentration of wealth is gonna unfortunately gonna continue. And uh, we have to decide as a society how much we care about that. Um, but right now that's where it's going. And if you know how to navigate this and you have the personality, you'll be okay. But there's gonna be a lot of people left behind, and um, it's gonna be a real challenge. And the politicians are gonna jump on it. I'm surprised we still haven't seen politicians saying that we can't have a million immigrants come a month. The United States are gonna work for $2 a day, 24 hours a day, these AI agents. We gotta stop these AI agents send. And um, you know, the fear and the frustration is gonna go, and it's gonna hit a lot of the um the white, or not the white, but the middle class, the accountants, the uh bankers, the lawyers that you know have you know sixty to three hundred thousand dollar jobs that they thought were secure and that are gone.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's I I remember this uh short you put up. It was a YouTube short, I think, or Instagram short. You were like playing around with like financials, like what it, you know, the plug-in from Claude. And it's like I, you know, I I think about how much I can do now with that. That, you know, I'm I was never king of the pivot table, but now it's like, okay, I need you to do this and make and it and it can do it. I'm like, it can do the things that I wanted to do, but it didn't know how to like literally code in Excel. Uh I think it's just that kind of even just those small things can if people can see its power, I think it's gonna make people and I I I've been I'm actually interviewing Dr. Andy Hines in a few weeks. He's uh wrote a book called After Capitalism, and we were talking to he he was a professor of mine at Houston, University of Houston, and we've talked a lot about the shift from monetary like value creation to like what do people have? They're gonna have assets, they're just gonna monetize assets. Well, there's gonna be a whole raft of people that are not gonna be able to afford those assets. It's like, what is it? Are you gonna have basic universal basic income? All right, is it gonna be a transfer? I I don't have the answer to that, but we defin like you said the politicians are gonna, if they're smart in the next, maybe not the midterms, but for 2028 are gonna be capitalizing on that because there's gonna be a lot of people that
Agents And The Widening Advantage
SPEAKER_02want an answer. They need an they need it, you know, need an answer. But you know, your your conference, GAI World, which is uh coming up this fall again, it's third year, fourth year, fourth year, September 28th.
SPEAKER_01Fourth year at the Science Convention Center. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, you you anchor Boston AI week. I mean, I'm we're both you and I are both uh Mass Massachusetts. So there's other terms for us here in Mass Massachusetts, but what's the focus? What's the conversation that you want the conference to have that you that it hasn't had yet? Like what are your what is your hope for this? Because I think it's it's a great leading to like where we are and with the world. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01What's what's one of the things we like about a conference? It's in September, and uh we really aim and work hard to track teams from companies. So last year we were fortunate there were 17 companies or some 10 companies sent tables or bought tables eight. So they brought the entire management team or the entire cross-functional team to get aligned on their going into next year's planning. So it's a really good uh kind of planning cycle as they go in the Q4. Second thing is we really focus on lessons from innovators that are in production. People have kind of gone over the um the horizon, learned a bunch of lessons, they're coming back and telling the rest of us what they're learning. And we're really gonna be focused this year on uh agents. Obviously, it's uh becoming the year of agents. It's so clear to me that we're all gonna have personal agents at home, we're gonna have personal agents at work, uh, and the whole open claw movement that really really validated a category of personal agents, all that security stuff is now getting solved, and that's a whole nother uh vector of innovation and um productivity gain.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I we and you and I talked about, and we both worked in startups. You know, I I had uh put out startup equation years ago, and it was like, you know, that framework, but now it's like we talked about the AI as a co-founder or multiple co-founders, right? Not just that productivity tool, but the entity that helps you like build and decide and scale. Do you think with agentic, like, do you think the AI co-founder's here? Or you think we're kind of rehearsing for like 2027?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think uh the I think we got a long time of you know subject matter expert in the loop. You know, I think with stage four cancer, you want a doctor next to the AI. I think for founders, you still want a real founder next to the AI. So AI infused processes are gonna go. Uh, but for important things here, we're still gonna have human in the loop here. But I do think we're getting to the point where I know in our company, we're 20-some people here. I don't want a decision made without someone getting Claude's opinion. You know, for last week, we have the saying internally, have you asked the robots? We're always saying it. That's a good idea. Software robots. But last week. Did you talk to a robot deer robot today? We had one of our um uh marketing people, you know, they're doing a landing page for the website or for the conference, and they sent to me, said, Paul, what do you think of it? And I said, Well, what did Claude say? And they had not, we put in Claude, Claude had three or four. So I told you I did not want a decision making on signing a contract, doing a marketing campaign unless we get this digital co-intelligence that's smarter than 99% of us opining on it, so we can at least have two different uh views on it. And that's what companies are going on right now. It's just on information. Steve, it's gonna start going on process. How should I set up my SEO? What's an agent base here? Well, how should I think about uh raising money? And that that value add of going from kind of research up to basic processes to um more complex or uh intermediate ones is happening very quickly.
SPEAKER_02So I love to do like kind of I want to get perspective on as let's put our our our futures hat on. Signals one thing we do all the time, look for those kind of edge, those edge moments, those things that are happening on the periphery. So for you, like what are you watching most closely right now that most people you think are just kind of sleeping on it? They're just not even aware.
SPEAKER_01I mean, that's a good question. I mean, one challenge I'd be interested in you what you're saying is that when ChatGB came out, the innovators and the bulk of the market were right next to each other. With this explosion technology, we now have the innovators way out here in the bell curve of where everyone else is still getting further and further apart. So the the gap between where the innovators are who are using it and the um middle of the market, it continues to grow. That's why there is no fast catch up on this. And the gap that's most interesting to me is watching in one industry, the gap between maybe a leading uh company's adopting it versus their competitors. What's going to happen is they're going to get the productivity gain, they're going to get the top talent going to go over to the uh firms here and capital. We have uh Wall Street, uh both the public markets and private markets asking us all the time, how do I know if this company's really CIO or AI forward? How do I know if the C the CEO is really driving a change we want? And if they are, I want to give them a valuation premium. I want to put more capital on them, and I want to short and take capital away from the Lagroards.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the one that you had asked, like what I I've been watching, I think the one there's one area that I don't think a lot of people are seeing for just because it's just it's and it's rightly so, it's a signal, is uh orbital data platforms. I think that the solution for artificial intelligence, the energy requirements, the commercialization, the real kind of killer app for commercialization of space is building orbital data platforms because that is going to and and and using some sort of market system where people can buy and trade like a commodity, access to tokens, access to storage. You had mentioned like you're gonna see four or five trillion dollar companies, XAI and and uh SpaceX are gonna go public. That is, to my guess, that's gonna be the first two trillion dollar company.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean they're talking about a million, uh 1.75 trillion. And you know, how mosquito's talking about that. I mean, there's plenty of energy once you get out into space here. It's exactly and and things that were, you know, kind of um seemed out of the realm of our kind of mammal brain is happening everywhere. You know, look what's going on in cancer detection, look what's going on in coding here, look at what's going on uh in in and autonomous vehicles here. So we've got this uh Cambrian explosion on these innovation sectors on all different um vectors in the uh tech market. And it's breath just breathtaking. I used I used to want to be alive in the Renaissance because I thought that was a cool time a lot. Way more interesting and fun things are happening now uh than ever. Yeah, we have things like penicillin that I think are cool.
SPEAKER_02That's what's um we have we have things like you know, running water, indoor plumbing, you know. No, as I I am a big fan of the renounce, I mean, and the history of it and just the transformation. But yeah, penicillin, big fan. So you know, instead of going year years back, I mean what do you think? You know, 2030, 2035, what do you think the work is looking like for the people that got it right? We get it right. What do you think it what do you think it looks like?
SPEAKER_01You know, I think the um I mean this it's hard to speculate.
SPEAKER_02I'll I know we're pragmatic, so just have fun with it. No, we're not there's no holding to it.
SPEAKER_01I remember the first time I went to India, it was in '98, '97. It was such a dichotomy. It was a billion people, half lived under with less than a dollar a day. And I remember being in Bangalore, walking down the street, and it was this beautiful modern Microsoft building, and next to it was a beggar. Mercedes-Benz and then someone in a cow. So this dichotomy of, you know, uh then a country in change, I think we're going to see a lot more. We're going to see walking dead companies next to supermodern open AI spin-offs. Uh, and it's really going to be a the disparity of the technically advanced and have and have nots. Uh, I think unfortunately, we may not want this, but the trend line is for that to continue here. And uh, you know, I think the real question for governments is how much social unrest uh will that imbue and can we do much about it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I worry about digital feudalism. I think that that you know, the surveillance, because I mean that's kind of dystopian of it, but what for what it looks like for people that got it right, I think there's gonna be not just the upper, middle, like lower class, I think there's gonna be a a layer of a c uh of people that will it's instead of the we call them the bullshit jobs, like people that have real val, you know, the value in society, I think that's what's gonna be different. I think there's gonna be real ways that people will communicate their value instead of just instead of just replicating the Fordism or the the Taylorism, you know, the f the factory models. I think that's what's gonna change the most is the way we work, how we think how we think of work, how we think of recreation, how we think of I'm optimistic that it changes how our relationship and I we are tribal, we are greedy people, is but in the end though, humanity is resilient and we rise to it all the time. And I think for us as a whole, I think there's uh I believe we'll finally kind of I think we'll finally be able to move to the stars. I think we're going to solve a lot of diseases for people like Alzheimer's. I think cancer is gonna get I I think a lot of things are gonna get conquered. New challenges will emerge, but at the same time, it'll change the way that we've had to live with ourselves for the last few hundred years, and that's you know, that's what I'm I'm optimistic of.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we did go from uh Greece and Roman epit uh uh uh epics to you know the Middle Ages. So we have we have seen you know a downfall, but hopefully uh that's certainly uh I think very possible and certainly what I want, and everyone does.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I want a fault tolerance, uh a fault tolerance system for uh humanity, the uh the uh continuation of the species.
Adapt Tomorrow With These Habits
SPEAKER_02But you know, I think you know, as we kind of wrap things up, I'd I'd love to get a you know, you know, people listening to this, what what should they, you know, learning from this, what should they do differently tomorrow? Like they're gonna get up, about their work, you know, you have some great you guys have trained a lot of people, you've helped a lot of people, you've really been a great leader in communicating the the value of this and not kind of stripping away the BS. What should people take from this?
SPEAKER_01I think first and foremost, it's time to adapt and not complain. This is not 2023. 2023 is when we were sitting in Miami, it was beautiful weather, and way out there was a hurricane. And we were debating if the hurricane is going to come, is it gonna blow off. The hurricane of change is here now, 2026. And it doesn't matter what your view on it, it doesn't matter if you don't like it. The only thing that matters is how do you start adapting for you, your family, your grandkids, and the number one way to start adapting is what Steve, you're already doing it, is you have to pick up these tools and start understanding them 15 minutes a day. One of the things that's wonderful about this tool is if you don't know how to use it, you just ask it. Chat GPT, create me a prompt that shows the difference between the Renaissance and today, and it will calmly walk you through. Uh, so that that's that's one. So you gotta adapt. Second one is you need to find a learning community, a learning buddy, a community, so you have tribes of people, people you know and love and trust that are learning through this uh uh adaptation phase we're going through here. Because that's how you keep your sanity, that's how you calibrate. If you try to do this by yourself, it's overwhelming and you feel like you can't teach up. So you've got to find um uh two or three other people uh to do it. And third, I would ask is I think the history um is pretty clear, Steve, that there's gonna be wonderful opportunities for just smaller teams. We were talking earlier about Mr. Beast. I mean, he's a fantastic reserve, all these musical artists, so there's gonna be lots and lots of little niches. You know, somebody that's a specialist in you know, digital restaurant reviews in Boston that's making a good leading for the family here. So if you have a passionate area and you have some Hutzpah, there's a lot of good opportunities for you.
SPEAKER_02That's great. And I, you know, where can um uh people should definitely you should all check out the training that they do and um definitely the core then the conference sells out pretty quick, so I definitely encourage people to uh get signed up uh and you know get some sponsorship and go. What where do people find you and where do people find the conference?
SPEAKER_01GAI insights.com and come there. You can uh go to GAIWorld.com. That's our annual conference. Uh it does sell out every year. We've been fortunate in that. I suspect it will this year. Again, uh the thirst for that is uh practical information is really, really high.
SPEAKER_02And you have a great his Substack, everybody, you should check out. That's how I first got connected. That's how I first found Paul. So that's GAI Insights on Substack, right?
SPEAKER_01GI Insights and Substack, and you type in Paul Bayer at just Substack and it'll show up. And we have two to three issues there. One of the things we do rare is we have a daily AI show where we rate articles EIO, essential, important, or optional. And each salary I go through and just do a review of the it used to be three or four articles per week that were essential. Now it's eight to ten. I mean, it really is a lot going on.
SPEAKER_02You are you are scanning signals, man. Speaking of the futures to my heart, man. So, well, Paul, thank you so much for being on show. It's been great having you, man. I I just was excited to get you on to share this because I people more people should know what you guys are doing. So thanks for the time today. I appreciate it, man.
SPEAKER_01Appreciate it, Steve. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Thanks.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to the Think Forward Podcast. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms under www.thinkforwardshow.com as well as on YouTube under Think Forward Show. See you next time.
