About This Episode
Artificial intelligence has quickly become one of the defining forces influencing business, but many organizations are still approaching it as a cost-cutting exercise rather than an opportunity to create new value. In this episode of the Future of Work® Podcast, Frank Cottle welcomes Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, to discuss why today’s AI moment represents far more than another technology cycle.
Brian explains why organizations stand at a crossroads. One path focuses on improving yesterday’s business through automation and efficiency. The other embraces AI as a catalyst for innovation, new business models, and entirely new forms of value creation. Throughout the conversation, Frank and Brian explore leadership, trust, workforce reinvention, AI augmentation, entrepreneurship, organizational culture, and the growing responsibility leaders have in guiding people through unprecedented technological change.
The discussion also examines why smaller organizations may be uniquely positioned to compete in the AI era, how AI can expand human capability instead of replacing it, and why curiosity, imagination, and courage will become defining leadership qualities. For executives, entrepreneurs, and workplace leaders preparing for what’s next, this episode provides a thoughtful roadmap for building organizations that grow through innovation rather than fear.
About Brian Solis
Brian Solis is Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, where he leads vision and strategy for ServiceNow Futures, a global network studying emerging technologies, business transformation, and customer behavior. A world-renowned digital futurist, nine-time bestselling author, and international keynote speaker, Brian has spent decades helping organizations understand digital transformation, AI, and business reinvention through research, advisory work, and thought leadership.
What You’ll Learn
- Why AI business transformation is fundamentally a leadership challenge.
- The difference between automation and augmentation.
- How organizations can use AI to create entirely new value.
- Why trust has become one of leadership’s greatest responsibilities.
- How AI can expand human capability rather than replace it.
- Why small organizations may outperform larger competitors in the AI era.
- What “capability overhang” means for organizational performance.
- Why individual AI fluency is becoming a competitive advantage.
- How curiosity and imagination fuel innovation.
- Why asking better questions may become the most valuable leadership skill.
Transcript
Brian Solis
[ 00:00:03,080 ]I remember the first time I heard the term AI psychosis, where people had fallen into the trap of using the tool and having its constant affirmation. Fool or blind you as a user there have been some really wild stories of people sort of losing themselves to AI, but then you could look at cognitive decline and with offloading your cognitive offloading— where you you give your thinking to it— versus collaborating or building with it or augmenting with it.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:00:30,150 ] Brian. Welcome to the Future of Work podcast. Really great to have you here.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:00:35,200 ] You’re considered one of the world’s most important digital futurists, so I’m really looking forward to our conversation today and maybe hearing a little bit about your new, your new book— one out of the nine bestsellers so far.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:00:49,989 ] So we hope we can peel some of that out of your brain as we discuss the future of work and see where it goes.
Brian Solis
[ 00:00:59,410 ] Well, Frank, it’s an honor. I just had to get that in there. I’m really excited to be here with you. It means a lot. So let’s pull some stuff out of each other’s brains.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:01:09,940 ] Well, that’s it. Mine is, you know, like you never know what’s going to come out of mine, but I know it’ll come out of yours. It’s great. You know, we’re in the AI thing. We’re completely immersed in AI. It sucks all the air out of the room and every room that we’re in right now from a business point of view.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:01:26,240 ] Do you think companies are a real pivot point? Or do you think it’s just a matter of everybody’s playing a variety of catch-up?
Brian Solis
[ 00:01:34,240 ] It’s such a good question. And I’m going to talk to you not as a futurist, but someone who’s in the moment.
Brian Solis
[ 00:01:42,020 ] This moment is one of those crossroads where we are either going to do our best to extend the livelihood of yesterday’s organization— or we’re going to realize what net new value creation can look like at scale. And what I mean by that. Is AI is largely viewed today by executives and boards as a tool for efficiency gains and cost cutting.
Brian Solis
[ 00:02:19,750 ] All good, goes toward profitability.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:02:22,020 ] Are those mutually exclusive, though?
Frank Cottle
[ 00:02:25,980 ] Well, efficiency gains should be growth.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:02:30,250 ] Um, uh, and you know, you’re cutting the cost of growth on the one hand. On the other hand, cost cutting. It’s just like running a side through the middle of the organization— seems what’s been happening.
Brian Solis
[ 00:02:45,980 ] Yeah, I guess. So to your point, is it mutually exclusive?
Brian Solis
[ 00:02:50,430 ] Let’s put it this way. What we’re seeing is, in order to pay for AI, costs have to come from somewhere.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:02:59,700 ] Okay.
Brian Solis
[ 00:03:01,710 ] And efficiency. Can be faster, cheaper, more scalable.
Brian Solis
[ 00:03:09,700 ] Sometimes better, sometimes not. And so, like we could jump right into, for example, a case that was just publicized by Ford where they let go of 350 quality engineers in favor of an AI investment to do the same job only to find out that quality went down and they brought people back. In order to have human oversight over the AI and the the happy story, there is that it got them back on the JD Power and Associates list for better quality.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:03:42,580 ] Well, there are two points I want to make there. First, that’s why I drive a Chevy.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:03:48,660 ] And I’m in Texas, baby. I’ve got to drive a Chevy.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:03:53,420 ] But the other thing is. If you were one of those 350 that they let go. Would you have gone back to Ford?
Frank Cottle
[ 00:04:03,780 ] And if the answer is, well, it depends. Maybe some people had a need. They had to have a job, but they couldn’t get one. But others, let’s say that’s a 50-50 mix. And then when you look across the board and you say, well, Microsoft, 12,000, Google, 8,000, Facebook, all these massive layoffs. Does that mean those people will probably never go back to work for those companies?
Frank Cottle
[ 00:04:33,450 ] It’s a little irritating. They don’t trust them.
Brian Solis
[ 00:04:36,910 ] Trust, I think, is a car. Trust.
Brian Solis
[ 00:04:40,000 ] Let me come back to trust because I think it’s going to take us in a different direction.
Brian Solis
[ 00:04:44,680 ] I understand and appreciate your point as a human being. The principle of it makes it very difficult to answer that question. Also, the economics, the reality of today’s economy, is that people might have to go back. They might actually feel thankful that they get to go back in many ways. But I do see your point. This is a moment where we’re watching students boo. speakers at graduation commencements because of how they feel about AI. The narrative, the headlines that we see about AI taking jobs and companies. cutting costs to pay for those AI investments. I mean, it certainly doesn’t make people feel good. If they still have their job, I’m sure they’re fearful of losing it.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:05:30,780 ] Well, yeah, and it’s funny, we’re a smaller company. And we are about 60 or 70% across the bridge from being a traditional company to being, I’ll say, fully AI native. Um, And our investment has been.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:05:50,640 ] De Minimis. We don’t see it as a major capital expense or major investment. Yes, there’s change management. It is an interesting phenomenon, I will say, as we all work more remotely or in hybrid models and things of that nature. One of the things I honestly, and I am going down a rabbit hole here, but one of the things I honestly love about is we actually have gotten to know each other better in different ways.
Brian Solis
[ 00:06:20,540 ] That it’s so true.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:06:22,480 ] You know, you see my house, I see your house. I know you’ve got a couple of dogs and you know, I’ve got a dog and we, you know, I’ve had cats walk across the camera. I mean, just all sorts of things in our personal lives that we wouldn’t bring to the office, but it’s part of who we are. And maybe we should be bringing them to the office. Well, sticking back to the topic.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:06:46,130 ] Performance enhancement tool, not headcount tool. That’s where we should be going. Do you agree?
Frank Cottle
[ 00:06:52,620 ] AI. All about performance enhancement, not head count reduction.
Brian Solis
[ 00:06:58,090 ] I hope so. Because look, I’ll explain why. Because as a human being, obviously, we don’t want headcount reduction.
Brian Solis
[ 00:07:04,860 ] But.
Brian Solis
[ 00:07:06,830 ] I refer to it as augmentation. I think about it as an opportunity to allow us to grow, to learn. unlearn to do what we couldn’t do yesterday, tomorrow, to be able to increase not only capacity, but capability.
Brian Solis
[ 00:07:24,460 ] That’s the future of work. And that takes design, vision, architecture, training, empowerment. I do also see a world where we want to improve yesterday. Only because we decide that that is what we want to take forward, that it has been deemed worthy to take forward with us. So it’s a balance of both, but I am in the camp of augmentation and it’s where I spend most of my time exploring opportunities.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:07:52,580 ] Well, you know, when you say ‘exchange yesterday for tomorrow,’ that doesn’t mean yesterday was bad. Thank you. That doesn’t mean your day wasn’t productive. It just means you’ve made a discovery, I guess I’ll say, that there is an opportunity.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:08:09,370 ] of finding a better way of doing things. that will be more productive for a greater number of people.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:08:16,560 ] worldwide.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:08:19,099 ] That’s what the hope is.
Brian Solis
[ 00:08:20,490 ] Yes.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:08:21,850 ] What we’re seeing is a lot of the A lot of the negative feedback, those boos at the graduation speeches and commencement speeches and stuff. Those are coming from resource utilization, major data center development, and the disparity— the growing disparity of haves and have-nots that is visualized as part of this AI. Leaving large numbers of people behind.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:08:53,280 ] How do you rectify and balance all of that?
Brian Solis
[ 00:08:57,600 ] I would say that when we see that level of pushback, and this comes back to the earlier part of our conversation where the word ‘trust’ had come up.
Brian Solis
[ 00:09:07,490 ] In every one of those scenarios, ‘trust’
Brian Solis
[ 00:09:11,150 ] is either been lost or it has not yet been built. So when we see students booing, ‘Thank you.’ Yes, yes. So when we see booing, that is an abject failure of leadership in the educational world. In the media where the story that’s making its way to students about AI is one of, perhaps, it’s going to eliminate your ability to get the right role on graduation. Maybe it’s affected someone you know or love.
Brian Solis
[ 00:09:47,670 ] Maybe it has you scared about your future prospects in your career because, at some point, AI will take it over. So these are things that have not been dealt with, or managed, or communicated otherwise in mass. And so this is an opportunity I feel for leadership.
Brian Solis
[ 00:10:06,410 ] To recognize that they’re not immune to any of this either.
Brian Solis
[ 00:10:11,870 ] That. AI can take anybody’s job. But technically, it’s not AI taking someone’s job. It’s a person saying, that that job is going to go. and they can blame AI for it, so this really is about leadership, because at the end of the day, AI can do whatever we want it to do. It can make us better, it can make it smarter, it can make us do things that we that we couldn’t do without it before. It can’t do without us, or it can replace us. I think that comes down to a human choice.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:10:41,250 ] Well, you know, that goes back to the first question about catch-up versus pivot. To me, it looks to me like a race to outdo one another with saving. If Microsoft saved X, then Google has to save 2X. It looks like they all have to outdo each other on the one hand, and that’s not leadership, necessarily, in my view. When you go pivot, something to pivot. A pivot should have intentionality.
Brian Solis
[ 00:11:11,870 ] Hmm.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:11:12,570 ] And that intentionality should have planning of how to deal with some of these things. So, if we’re at a pivot point that’s intentional rather than a race— it that is a catch-up. Um, we might be really uh much better off, but candidly, I don’t see it. I see we’re all doing something. But it’s, you know, my AI is bigger than your AI.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:11:35,920 ] And one thing I’ve learned in life is there’s always someone with something bigger than you’ve got.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:11:41,070 ] Doesn’t matter whether it is.
Brian Solis
[ 00:11:42,610 ] You’re in Texas, Frank.
Brian Solis
[ 00:11:45,510 ] That is true.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:11:46,950 ] That is true. It could outdo us all. But that’s bigger than Texas. But no, it really comes down to.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:11:55,560 ] Um, whether you want to just have something bigger or whether you want to have something truly better.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:12:02,460 ] And that is a big difference.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:12:05,910 ] Um, and uh, I think it’s important to recognize right now the intentionality of all this as opposed to the Oh, we’re racing and I’ve got to get ahead of you.
Brian Solis
[ 00:12:17,650 ] It certainly feels that way, especially especially when, as a human being, it’s it’s it’s impossible to catch up with certain models outperforming other models and then that flips the next week and then an entirely new company comes out and now we’re looking at new types of models and so it is.
Brian Solis
[ 00:12:37,040 ] It is difficult to get your arms around it. especially when the market rewards a lot of these decisions that are being made right now. So, for example, when we saw Jack Dorsey announce a 40 percent reduction in workforces and the market that they, I think, propped up the stock by 24%. These are indicators that reward the types of behaviors that we’re seeing. So it takes an innovator, it takes a bold leader to say, ‘I think we’re going to try something different.’ And I think that this balance lies in this. conversation you and I were having about automation versus augmentation or iteration versus innovation. We have to balance both. You can take the best parts of yesterday to continuously invest in profitability, growth, the things that are going to deliver that linear return. But I do believe that if we start exploring, if we start asking different questions, we start exploring new possibilities. If we, as leaders, start to say it is okay to challenge conventions, it is okay to ask questions.
Brian Solis
[ 00:13:38,940 ] That we don’t have the answers to, but we’re gonna empower one another to go figure this out, you’re going to eventually unlock exponential opportunities. And so you can get this linear growth. and eventually, this exponential growth opportunity, where I believe, as an optimist, the delta between the two is positive disruption. So you are positively disrupting yourself toward growth versus someone disrupting you by exponentially growing, because we focus too much on efficiency and cost cutting.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:14:09,990 ] Well, I think you’re right.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:14:14,190 ] I’m a person who’s always run our companies based on some core values— not just growth.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:14:21,160 ] things that I think are important to do. Me as a human being and the things that I want to be.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:14:28,640 ] understood or recognized for. Growth is good. We have our growth. but growth at any cost or every cost in some cases. Um, usually, we headed, in your view, for a crash of 29?
Frank Cottle
[ 00:14:48,230 ] Because the valuations, if you look at the companies and the valuations, and you say, ‘How long will it take to pay back this?’ or create a return— let’s say a 6% return— on these valuations, and you can say, ‘That’s like 60 years out That’s 80 years out.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:15:12,060 ] Every investor that invested in this will be dead by the time those valuations are recognized.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:15:20,140 ] Are we headed somewhere that’s pretty dark? In their opinion.
Brian Solis
[ 00:15:24,630 ] I, uh, I hope not. And to be, to be fair, um, the answer is probably in some cases, likely, just like we saw in 1999. However, the ecosystem continuously seems to reward itself. So, I, I hope not, for the the sake of all of us. But if I could, if I could, kind of take a step back and look at where I think we can make an impact on this stuff.
Brian Solis
[ 00:15:54,990 ] If the tools are valuable.
Brian Solis
[ 00:15:57,080 ] That’s one thing.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:15:58,440 ] And they are, I think, is my opinion. I would say yes. They are.
Brian Solis
[ 00:16:03,240 ] And then I think it becomes a matter. So let’s take this concept of leadership.
Brian Solis
[ 00:16:08,860 ] Often when we talk about leaders, we think of like a hierarchy. And so I don’t want to take that away because we still need that leadership hierarchy. But now I want to say, if you and I believe that there’s value in these tools, and we also know that there’s value in these tools if we think about performance and augmentation.
Brian Solis
[ 00:16:25,880 ] Now it becomes a leadership conversation about my relationship with the tool, your relationship with the tool. This, I think, is as much about becoming the hero in our own story versus waiting for someone to come and save the day for us. So I think that.
Brian Solis
[ 00:16:44,160 ] If I can study the potentiality of this stuff in my work to do what I did yesterday better, and then to also unlock the things I’ve always wanted to do or I never knew I could do, and I’m investing in that.
Brian Solis
[ 00:17:03,180 ] I’m investing in my growth, and I’m changing the dynamic and my value in the market for those who would perceive that as value.
Brian Solis
[ 00:17:12,950 ] The reason I share this is because I think this is the opportunity where we can take these conversations and make them far more, not just productive, but valuable.
Brian Solis
[ 00:17:21,990 ] i remember reading this open ai research report earlier in the year that talked about what they had found called the capability overhang which was in their research they found for those who don’t know this In their research, they found that there are Most people don’t take advantage of everything that ChatGPT can offer. We can assume the same is true for Clod and any other tool out there.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:17:44,890 ] well excuse me for interrupting but they say Science has said for decades, decades and decades, that as human beings, we only use about 7% to 10%. of our brain’s capacity itself.
Brian Solis
[ 00:17:58,240 ] yes what was that movie with scarlett johansson uh when she was able to unlock Greater use of her bro.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:18:05,720 ] Yeah.
Brian Solis
[ 00:18:06,540 ] Yeah her no not her that was the the the dating one that actually was a prophecy in its own right Yeah, yeah, it was.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:18:18,080 ] No, I remember that movie, but that’s really what it is. um AI helps you to unlock and helps you to imagine. uh the challenge is do will we get lazy and depend upon it and therefore it will control us or will we unlock the next 10 of our brain which has gotten us this far uh and say wow i just doubled down on my brain power and who knows what we’ll create Oh!
Brian Solis
[ 00:18:45,300 ] I just unlocked my brain.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:18:47,410 ] Lucy. Lucy, Lucy, Lucy went to her goal. She went as a her, you know, so it’s okay.
Brian Solis
[ 00:18:55,080 ] There you go. Yes, yes. And so exactly. So what OpenAI found was that, so we don’t we don’t use these tools to their full potential, but there are people who get close and they found the people who, obviously, it’s the minority of users, but they what they call the capability overhang. They were 7x more capable with OpenAI than everyone else who just uses the tool. Okay, so now you have 7x over the people who use the tool in the spectrum. Which is still a minority of people who don’t use the tool at all. Yes. What we’re now starting to see is about an 80-20 rule.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:19:35,532 ] Right now, right.
Brian Solis
[ 00:19:38,470 ] So yeah, we’ll give it the Pareto principle. And so, what we now start to see is this migration of this personal leadership we’re talking about, right? So, as someone in the hierarchy of leadership, I need to recognize that this is happening inside of my organization. There are people who are far more capable with the tool because of whatever self-motivation that exists there or high performance attributes or whatever it is. And so, I have to recognize that there’s a gap within my organization, understand what that gap is, and then also how to close it in a way that moves or lifts people in a direction. That’s going to be advantageous or beneficial to the organization to unlock new value. And then I have to figure out how to bring other people along for the journey as well. So why I share this with you is because that capability overhang is an example of how companies don’t. yet realize the potential they’re sitting on.
Brian Solis
[ 00:20:40,530 ] To drive growth.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:20:42,350 ] I agree with that. I definitely agree with that.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:20:47,850 ] I’m a real simple guy because. I’m not as smart as you are, don’t have access to all your resources.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:20:55,140 ] but I’ve noticed something in our little company: I’ve got about 150 people using AI in our company in one form or another. To your 80-20 rule. That’s our user group. Uh uh, overall, because it’s almost like it’s built into every job description now, I noticed one simple thing.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:21:15,000 ] The people that are those outliers, that are those— huge, huge performers that are getting that seven-to-one performance benefit over the average one-to-one benefit, which is what I will say about the averages.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:21:29,790 ] They’ve all done one thing without instruction or without even knowing it. Talking to each other nothing.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:21:41,180 ] They’ve all named their AI.
Brian Solis
[ 00:21:43,610 ] Oh wow.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:21:45,770 ] My, I don’t work with Claude. I work with Corey. I work live. Nova, I work with them. They’ve named their AI, and they’ve created a co-identity with it on their own.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:21:59,920 ] Those are the people that are stepping out 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 times ahead of everybody else. They’ve co-identified with AI.
Brian Solis
[ 00:22:09,360 ] Oh.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:22:09,690 ] And that one thing— Good or bad. I don’t know if it’s good or bad.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:22:15,530 ] Is, I think, an observation.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:22:19,630 ] Um, you know. So.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:22:23,180 ] That’s. That’s. It’s just something to think about. That’s so powerful.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:22:29,830 ] Co-identity.
Brian Solis
[ 00:22:31,820 ] That’s so powerful. I remember when When ChatGPT first launched, I remember forming my own little board of directors with it. So my board of directors had Steve Jobs, it had had Walt Disney. And I tried to select people that were going to challenge my thinking in the way that those individuals had inspired me in my work and my career. The interesting thing about it is that I found myself over the years, individually, this is why kind of coming back to that individual leadership, your relationship with AI. Because there’s no playbook there, not teachers really teaching us yet about what research has hasn’t shown us in a way that’s I don’t want to say it’s not scientific, but we haven’t, we’re just starting to see the impacts of social media on our lives and ourselves now, all these years later.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:23:29,700 ] And we’re starting to outlaw it for for those people we don’t think are prepared to deal with it.
Brian Solis
[ 00:23:34,410 ] That’s right. And I feel like we’re going to see the same thing with AI. I remember the first time I heard the term AI psychosis, where people had fallen into the trap of using the tool and having its constant affirmation.
Brian Solis
[ 00:23:49,810 ] Um, fool or blind you as a user. So like, oh, Frank, that’s the smartest prompt I’ve ever seen. Frank, you’re so right. I didn’t catch that. You know how it. It interacts with you. And some people sort of succumb to that where they feel like this, they lose their sense of defense.
Brian Solis
[ 00:24:10,620 ] Around how they use this and not guarded, there have been some really wild stories of people sort of losing themselves to AI. But then you could look at cognitive decline.
Brian Solis
[ 00:24:21,290 ] With offloading your cognitive offloading, where you give your thinking to it, versus collaborating or building with it, or augmenting with it. And so this personal relationship, I’m a big champion for.
Brian Solis
[ 00:24:35,820 ] Us as individuals.
Brian Solis
[ 00:24:38,140 ] Learning how to challenge ourselves to unlock greater capacities of our brain, our potential. With a tool that is so very easy to give your thinking to it, just in the name of increasing speed. Because that’s certainly what I see a lot of. People are going faster with it. Look at LinkedIn comments, LinkedIn posts, look at the number of books that are flooding Apple Books or the number of apps that are flooding the App Store.
Brian Solis
[ 00:25:10,160 ] Speed. Not.
Brian Solis
[ 00:25:12,600 ] Growth or augmentation like that’s it. It’s a real easy trap to fall in. So I think this leadership is hierarchical but it’s also very personal.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:25:20,530 ] Well, you know, it’s funny. We’ve been banding this saying around for years because we’re not a big company. We say it. It’s not the big that eats the small, it’s the fast that eats the slow.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:25:31,840 ] Yeah. Uh, uh, really. Speed is elemental to success. Of any sort.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:25:43,380 ] Look at any athlete. Doesn’t matter what, fastest person usually wins. Look at any company. First out the gate that can stay ahead of the others usually wins. Look at governments, the first ones to make major social changes. Thank you. And correct them.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:26:01,000 ] Usually comes off pretty well. Speed is elemental to everyone’s success.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:26:10,940 ] But you always have to make sure with going back to your Ford employees, your quality control on speed is equally important.
Brian Solis
[ 00:26:20,240 ] That’s a really good way to put it. I talk about this as AI Darwinism.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:26:25,110 ] Yeah, yep. But. I can drive a car really, really fast.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:26:31,310 ] Get faster from point a to point b, but if I crash along the way, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
Brian Solis
[ 00:26:37,960 ] No, no, exactly. Exactly. What’s that saying? Uh. The second mouse gets the cheese.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:26:44,990 ] Yes. Sometimes. Hey, IBM and Dell. Perfect.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:26:50,870 ] True, true, true. Second mouse got the cheese. Okay, you could have said.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:26:59,710 ] Bye.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:27:02,140 ] Xerox and Microsoft and operating systems going way, way back.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:27:09,419 ] Or Xerox Park and Apple older than you know, operating systems, all these things, the second mouse does get the cheese. The younger sibling generally has more success than the first sibling.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:27:26,670 ] Uh, you know, when it comes to like, because they learned growing up. My older brother always got in trouble because I won’t do that. You know, I won’t do this, I won’t do that. They learned a little.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:27:39,300 ] Um, Yeah. It’s funny thinking about it as a parent. Well, let’s get back to our digital future of work going on here. Um, small companies. The small companies have an advantage over large companies when it comes to change management adaptation.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:27:56,120 ] Because that’s the biggest. Small and medium enterprises under 500 people.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:28:03,320 ] Employ 70% of all the people in the United States. So, um, do they have an advantage? Um, or will do larger companies, because of their resources, even though they’re moving slower, have an advantage?
Brian Solis
[ 00:28:24,080 ] It’s.
Brian Solis
[ 00:28:26,060 ] I’ll answer it this way. They can have an advantage if they want to. And one thing we hadn’t touched on was the connection between where AI is and where AI is going. So, as you know, better than anyone, we see AI as personal productivity, and then, as we shifted to more of an agentic enterprise, we see that scaled productivity.
Brian Solis
[ 00:28:52,740 ] And. If we then build on that automation, augmentation, and conversation, what is it that we’re scaling through AI agents?
Brian Solis
[ 00:29:02,220 ] If we are going to indeed explore net new value creation in the work that we do, so let me let me put this this uh in a simpler format: if i you have 20 minutes to an hour of your time a day, what are you going to do with that hour? And those people who explore that potential now, not just to save the time, but do something with it, like reinvest back into the system itself.
Brian Solis
[ 00:29:33,690 ] This is where smaller companies can gain exponential competitiveness because they now will scale—say, it’s whatever that ratio is, one human to 10 agents. They can now perform like a much larger organization. So, say, the average company of 500 and they multiply that now by 10, they’re competing at this level of a company. Whereas, let’s say, the same 50,000-person company is just simply automating.
Brian Solis
[ 00:30:05,540 ] This now, when we’re seeing it with AI natives, these are companies you’re seeing that seeing that adjustment.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:30:11,140 ] No, that that’s right. I guess that begs a question. Interesting questions we were talking about layoffs earlier— is the real problem from an employment point of view? The boos that were coming from the crowds of those college students.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:30:26,910 ] The layoffs?
Frank Cottle
[ 00:30:28,550 ] Or the fact that you know, I’m gonna launch the next unicorn, but I only have three people.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:30:35,270 ] I didn’t need to hire 30 people. So it’s going to be the problem, the layoffs, or the fact that I can grow a good-sized company, create value for myself, for my clients, for my family.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:30:47,790 ] With a far fewer number of people in the future.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:30:52,480 ] So those people. That would have been hired won’t be. Et cetera. Or you flip it and say, no, no, no, those people could go do that same thing themselves also.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:31:04,400 ] So you’re going to have this explosion of productivity.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:31:08,060 ] Overall, which we see a lot of times. Um, back in the early 80s, the aerospace industry went through this massive flux. Okay, and I remember we dealt with Boeing at the time, and Boeing said, ‘Oh, we have these outplacement offices and this and that. We put all these consultants in these outplacement offices, and they were going to give them jobs, the aerospace engineers.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:31:31,410 ] About one out of three of those guys started their own company.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:31:34,700 ] You They said, ‘Well, let’s see. I’ll ride the six-month outplacement program. And during that time, I’ll take an executive suite, which was us.’ I’ll take an office for one person. And then I’ll get a buddy who also got laid off. And we’re going to start a new company. And we’re going to sell stuff back to Boeing. or to anyone else for that matter. And we see this in formations, in entity formations right now going on in the U. S. We track bureau labor statistics and the entity formations.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:32:07,560 ] Usually the number of entities, legal entities, corporations, LLCs, etc., grows at about the same pace of the U. S. economy.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:32:18,560 ] In the last year, it’s grown at twice the pace.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:32:21,920 ] entity, new companies being formed. Micro companies.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:32:26,360 ] Okay, and you mentioned posts on LinkedIn and posts you know the ones that are hitting you uh to buy something from them you know and it’s all these new companies have just been formed to do things you know we can integrate this we can speed up that we can do this we can do that and you look at their history and say, ‘Oh, this company’s been in business for 10 months’ and there’s only three people that really work there. They’re making massive claims.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:32:54,940 ] They’re doing their marketing with AI. Um, but uh, where’s the shift going to come from?
Brian Solis
[ 00:33:04,260 ] I really I really want individuals to hear this— not if and if you’re an individual as a leader, I just want you to hear this as a person.
Brian Solis
[ 00:33:17,100 ] What you, AI fluency is no longer enough. Meaning, like I know how to prompt.
Brian Solis
[ 00:33:24,460 ] You we now need to gain.
Brian Solis
[ 00:33:27,770 ] This vast level of expertise, understanding that it’s not going to go away. It’s only going to become more capable. And so when we think about that capability.
Brian Solis
[ 00:33:38,480 ] That’s our moonshot right now. We’ve got to close that for ourselves and for the people around us, the teams around us, because that’s where everything’s going. And to your question about the future of work and the size of companies. Because the people who figure that out, when they have an idea.
Brian Solis
[ 00:33:57,150 ] When they recognize something is is painful and they ask, ‘Why do we do it this way If they ask, ‘Why couldn’t we do it this way?’ Those people will have the capacity to go and experiment a great capability with AI.
Brian Solis
[ 00:34:11,880 ] To essentially lay the groundwork for a new company. And they can scale.
Brian Solis
[ 00:34:18,850 ] With agents and because they’ll know how to do that. So for example, I have a dear friend of mine.
Brian Solis
[ 00:34:25,850 ] Who he’s a he’s a serial entrepreneur.
Brian Solis
[ 00:34:28,820 ] He’s always been proficient in code.
Brian Solis
[ 00:34:32,429 ] And when he realized that he could augment his capacity through AI.
Brian Solis
[ 00:34:40,190 ] I’ve never seen anyone so productive. He now has three companies at the same time that he’s running with AI agents and is just generating revenue on all fronts in ways that just— where he needed a large company to do just one of those things in the past. So it is possible. Is possible for us not even having the level of skills that he has to reach levels of skills that can allow us to flourish in these new domains. And if I’m the leader of a big company, Frank. I’m also going to want that because I don’t want to become irrelevant. So I’m going to want people to help us learn, unlearn and grow as well.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:35:22,480 ] Well, what you’re saying is this is a very pivotal moment, not just for business.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:35:29,700 ] But for humanity. For individuals overall and humanity at large. If that’s the case and we’re running a little long on time here, so I’m gonna ask one last shot at it. If that’s the case, if we’re at that pivotal moment, for both humanity and for business.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:35:49,180 ] What’s the one thing?
Frank Cottle
[ 00:35:51,460 ] In your experience, that you can advise. A leader. Whether it’s a one-person company or a 500,000 person company, that they really should be looking at. In order to keep their values, and still achieve the goals of their growth that they want to do.
Brian Solis
[ 00:36:15,470 ] Can— can I— instead of just saying one thing, can I give a couple of things?
Frank Cottle
[ 00:36:20,400 ] Oh man, yeah, no more than three, no more than three.
Brian Solis
[ 00:36:26,320 ] One. There’s there’s the obvious answers that you have to believe in this.
Brian Solis
[ 00:36:34,200 ] Pivotal moment and you playing a role in doing something about it. And that you have to take that first step. Because you have it to be bold.
Brian Solis
[ 00:36:46,640 ] And to be courageous is not.
Brian Solis
[ 00:36:50,100 ] With the absence of fear. You can still have fear, but we all need to believe in this moment that it is bigger than we realize.
Brian Solis
[ 00:36:58,010 ] But what to do about it?
Brian Solis
[ 00:37:02,200 ] We have to ask the questions we’ve been afraid to ask. It’s like this, it’s like that. Old doctor thing. Like, ‘Oh, I’m afraid to go to the doctor because I don’t want to find out what I might have Yet we know that that’s not best for our longevity and for our health. And this is that moment. We’ve got to start asking some some really hard questions, and we have to be willing to maybe forget the answers we thought were right, and to explore these opportunities. And that’s— what I’m doing. The other thing that I’m doing is recognizing that. I don’t know what I don’t know. And this has now become my uncharted map for understanding where I try to want to be, where I want to be, identify where at least that. So I can figure out. How to get there. And then how to bring people along.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:37:51,490 ] You see, we have to ask ourselves, a question.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:37:55,300 ] Challenge things, what is the one question you would ask yourself? We know you don’t know what you don’t know. You never did and you never will.
Brian Solis
[ 00:38:03,960 ] Hmm.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:38:04,720 ] That can’t be it.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:38:07,480 ] What’s the one question you would ask yourself as a leader or as an executive of any company? Because it all has the same structure ultimately.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:38:17,090 ] That you need to ask yourself right now. Uh, in order to take advantage of what’s around us.
Brian Solis
[ 00:38:26,440 ] When there’s it’s your choice between two questions, oftentimes I think the premise of the questions we ask are rooted in how, how can we be faster, how can we drive more, greater efficiencies, etc. I think the ‘why’ or ‘why not’ are two more important foundational questions, and the reason we’ve been taught to not ask those questions we’ve stigmatized them.
Brian Solis
[ 00:38:56,340 ] They sort of indicate that we’re not following the rules or playing along.
Brian Solis
[ 00:39:01,250 ] The reality is, for example, why do we do things this way? Why couldn’t we do things this way? Those are the door openers for curiosity. Those are the door openers for wonder and imagination. And those are the things that I think we got taught out of us, as Sir Ken Robinson would probably have said, or he did say. That as children, we had those gifts. We had those superpowers. And throughout our education system, throughout work, we’ve just been groomed, we’ve been trained, we’ve been rewarded to follow these rules and to not ask those questions, but those are the questions where I have found some really incredible things on the other side.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:39:45,880 ] No, I think the ‘why’ is it. And as crazy ideas as I come up with, I’ve been taught that ‘why’ is important. Because I’ll say something to my loving wife, and she’ll say, ‘Why the heck do you want to do that?’ Uh huh. And I have to answer it.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:40:07,740 ] And if my answer is still good, it’s explained to me.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:40:12,040 ] My answer was no good, uh, and I think we do we do need to to ask that a lot right now.
Brian Solis
[ 00:40:18,879 ] Yeah, I’m with you.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:40:21,320 ] Well, Brian, I want to thank you very much. It’s a joy talking to you. It always is. And I look forward to the next time we get together.
Brian Solis
[ 00:40:28,160 ] Let’s do it. Let’s do it. I appreciate it, Frank. Thank you very much.
Frank Cottle
[ 00:40:32,370 ] Take care.
