See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 34 The Thursday Night Finish: How the "Hidden 10%" are Using AI to Outwork You.
Alex: I'm delighted to welcome Greg Shove, CEO of Section and six Time CEO with wonderful exits of companies that redefined employee communications. And now Greg is redefining what it means to be a super company. Greg, welcome to the pod.
Greg Shove: Alex, thanks for having me. Good, to be here.
Alex: Well, Greg, let's start with Section. And what does it mean to be a super company in the age of AI?
Greg Shove: Well, we have a point of view at Section, Alex, that AI transformation needs to start at the bottom of the pyramid. We think about it as a pyramid. It's kind of our mental model, if you will, meaning the workforce, the workforce. AI transformation can be represented by a pyramid. And the bottom of that pyramid are actually the workers, you know.
Alex: Right.
Greg Shove: Your current workforce. And that's the foundation on which you'll build the rest of your AI transformation. So that means get your workforce transformed first with AI, which is the hardest thing to do, right? If you're an organization, as you know, as a startup it's easier, but once you get past 10 people, once you get past, you know, two pizzas, whatever that is, you know, 16 people, what, whatever. Once you get past 100 people who work a certain way and have a certain set of workflows and systems and data, you know, moving that, changing that, transforming that to be AI enabled AI first is really hard, but you got to do it. Our opinion is in a wall to wall employee transformation, every employee getting to where they're working with AI every day is going to be the way you can then automate workflows, then build agents, then reinvent business process, you know, then reinvent even the products and services, you know, that you want to, that you want to market to your customers. With AI, we don't think this should be done top down. We don't think it should be done by squads of consultants that you hire, you know, externally. I think this is too important. You know, I get it. You know, companies need consultants and it's always great to, you know, get McKinsey to do your strategy and Accenture to do the heavy lifting. But you know, I don't think that's mostly going to work out. I think that this transformation is for the best and the brightest of your workforce. And my point of view is you'll probably shrink in certain teams, some of that workforce, but your obligation as a leader is to get everybody as AI enabled as possible. some of those teams you Might grow with more headcount some. As I said, you might shrink. But I'm not a big fan of of the block, Jack Dorsey strategy. You know, let's lay off half the company first and see what happens. And then see what happens and then figure out which agents will come in and do the work that, you know, it's, my point of view is pay for, invest in the whole workforce. AI enable AI enable them, you know, become an AI first organization. Yeah, sure, teams will change in terms of size and composition and you'll have to deal with that as best you can. But at least when, if you do lay off people, you're laying off AI enabled people back into the workforce where their chances of re employment much m higher. Yeah. You know, and, and by the way, employees know what should be automated with AI and they know the ri, they know the risks. They're not stupid. Yeah, right. Employees know there's some risk, but they know that, you know, if they, you know, they also could be the architects of their future. and because they know what workflows and what systems and what data might get replaced with AI sort of products and services and workflows and they should do that work.
Alex: it's funny you say that. We've also seen that some people just really, they may not be in that position, but with AI they feel like they just got their extra iq, extra kind of awareness about what needs to happen and they kind of thrive and just find themselves another position. Right. So it doesn't even have to be a zero sum game. Some people just, you know, thrive in that kind of a, you know, environment that AI provides.
Greg Shove: Yeah, that's right. Or they might, they might turn around, say, lay me off, but I'll be a contractor back to the organization. But an AI powered contractor. Right. Or they might start, they might start an AI powered company, which would be great too. I think there's, I think by the way, the new business formation numbers, the recent ones were fantastic. And I don't know if that's, I don't think it's yet necessarily AI related, but I do think we're going to go through a period of an explosion of entrepreneurship and new business formation here in the United States. I think it's going to be a good thing. I think we need it particularly because I do think there'll be contraction in other parts of the labor markets, obviously. So I think that I'm hoping that
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Greg Shove: we'll see hundreds of thousands of new businesses launched and I think there could be really great small businesses I think what's going to happen or maybe again I might have drunk my own Kool Aid here but I do think that when you think about offline startup business formation, very high numbers historically. Right. Think about sort of Main street, you know, restaurants and service businesses and retail and so on. Maybe in knowledge work AI can unlock that level of new business formation. Right. Where almost anyone can do it. You don't need a lot of capital, you don't need a big team, you don't need very technical people. Right. I do think going to be possible with AI. I, I think I'm hopeful anyway that's going to be good for the US economy in our society.
Alex: So Greg, one of, one of the things that struck me when I look at your background, I'm familiar with one of your previous success story, a company called First Up. You started a social chorus.
Greg Shove: Yeah.
Alex: Led it for you know, dozen of years and founder, CEO or chair and that is very much kind of employee led communications. Right. And so is that this sort of, is that the lesson that you've taken from that experience of leading you know, premium employee comms platform that you need to, you can't just do it top down, you have to do both?
Greg Shove: yeah, I think a little bit of that. I think it's also like I'm Canadian, I sort of root for the underdog and I think often the employee is the underdog, you know and you're right. First up wasn't focused on workforce, communications. It was focused on blue collar sort of non head office workforce communications. I always thought that employee was kind of in the dark and never knew what was going on and a second class citizen quite frankly inside the company. and I think in this moment I do think a lot of workers are anxious. A lot of workforce is unsure what's the next move here and what do I do individually or as a manager, what I do with my team. So I do have this point of view that obviously we lead from the top but we can also lead and change from the, from the bottom or from the foundation which is our workforce. So yeah, I tend to side with the worker more than the CEO I guess. Although I, although the people that report to me would probably not say that.
Alex: So let's say there's a CEO or a senior leader of teams that's listening to this and let's say they're in their 40s, maybe 50s maybe but you know more more mature but a bottom line they're not like AI Born was AI in their.
Greg Shove: Almost none of us are AI Native. If you think about AI Native.
Alex: Right. Those are kids, certainly in the leadership positions. Exactly.
Greg Shove: Yeah.
Alex: And, and they, they, they buy into your vision of I want to build a super, super company. They see the potential there. They have their own fomo. They are accountable to shareholders. The, board is putting pressure on them. What do you do? What do you do? What are three things you could take away as a senior leader right now that you can start doing to move your organization towards?
Greg Shove: Yeah, I mean, the first thing, the first thing you got to do is use. I mean, it's just so obvious and simple. It's hard to do, though. Often the simple things are the hardest to do. Right. You got to use AI yourself in a meaningful way and probably every day. And so you cannot lead not understanding how this stuff works. and I don't mean, oh, I use GPT to ask, you know, to get parenting advice or medical advice. Sure, that's a good way to use GPT at home. But you got to bring AI, whether it be ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini doesn't. I don't really care which one it is. You got to bring it into your work life. The very first thing you need to do is set up a paid account. Sure, you can use free, but like, you're a manager, you're a leader. Like, like upgrade, get the best features, you know, get the mobile app on your phone and so on. But, you know, pick a platform and get it into your work life in a pretty significant way. The, the. I think there's two ways to do that.
Alex: How do you measure that? Like, is it amount of time that you spend with your agents? You know, do you have agents or you just talking to a chat? Right. Like, how do you know that you are investing? Like I hear some CEOs say, oh, you know, I'm now allocating mornings, you know, Tuesday and Wednesday morning, you know, two hours I'm just, just playing around. Right. Like, so there's that level of thinking
Greg Shove: versus I. I don't have that time. I wish I did. and most of my AI play time, frankly, it's happening on the weekends. unfortunately, I don't think it's about time spent. I think it's about tasks completed. Right. A set of output or decisions improved. So I think about it in two ways. Can I outsource work to AI that gives me back time and. Or can I optimize decisions by using AI as a thought partner? So I think every executive should do two things. Use
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Greg Shove: AI as a thought partner for every medium to high stakes decision all the time. And that might be a 5 or 10 or 15 minute conversation with AI every day. And that's enough, right? You can rol play with AI, you can ask AI, you know, strategic questions like how, how you, how would you use a thought partner? You have one available now, 24, seven for 20, 20 bucks a month. Who's smarter than you, smarter than you? Why would you not do that? And the other thing I would do is build a chief of staff. An AI Chief of staff. If you're a leader or manager, you may have an assistant, you probably don't these days, but you know, you can create one. So whether, again, whether that's a CLAUDE project or a GPT project or a skill which just got released the last couple days, or if you're that comfortable with Claude and you can use cowork, you know, that's more advanced. Again, I don't think it matters and I think it could just be you're prompting, you know, your chat tpt. But basically think about this as can I build a chief of staff or you know, you know, a great assistant with my AI and see what value that that generates for you. The biggest issue I have is leaders don't understand the capabilities here and don't really appreciate what their own employees are going through, which is not just technical, not just like, how do I do it? But what it feels like. I m. I think we're underestimating the anxieties, related to these technologies because the media keeps hyping all the anxieties right around. Gonna take our jobs. We're gonna be on a beach getting a UBI check. No, that's not gonna happen in America. You know, so like, it's just this craziness, that the media just, it's, you know, it's either gonna be a world of abundance or a world, a world of unemployment. Like that's not helpful to anyone, but it does create anxiety. So I think as a leader you've got to use these tools so you can appreciate. Oh no, wait a minute. The AI is actually pretty good at this. Actually the AI is better than me at this part of my job. And like, you need to feel that because that's what your employees are now feeling. And as you know, it's engineering first. So if you're a software company or a company that you know, uses software and develop software and a lot, a lot of businesses do now that aren't Software companies, software engineering, and software engineers are the canaries in the coal mine. And they're going through these, they're going through this real kind of existential, emotional kind of crisis right now because they're realizing the AIs are 5x10x is good. I mean the parts GPT, OpenAI and anthropic has, have been very public now. They have self interest to do this but they've been very public recently around some of their new capabilities have been 100% AI coded, 100% of the code generated by AI. So if you're a software engineer, that's a little freaky. And so if you're a leader of those engineers or a leader of a company that has those employees inside of it, you've got to understand I think and more deeply appreciate what's going on here because the transformation you're asking people to do is pretty significant and it looks pretty scary, which is you're not going to be coding. That doesn't mean we're going to lay you off because by the way, when you have a high writing code you need a lot of other work being done which is both architecture, qa, you know, design, product management. so again some of the headcount might shift but anyway, I just think
Alex: leaders, you gotta lead, you gotta wear the shoes. So. And yeah, there are typically two types of people I think in at least in the broad sense. So there's, there's always the late adopters in the organizations, right? They're, they may be afraid but they're not moving. And then there's people that are always kind of ready to jump on the next bandwagon or just see an opportunity to grow. There may be a little bit younger, but it's more mindset, right?
Greg Shove: Like it's more money, it's a growth mindset. I'm old and I figured this out, you know, three years ago. So if I can figure it out, anybody can. I'm not technical.
Alex: So how do you find that the best companies are creating excitement and vibe about what AI can do for their business? I think I've heard you, you've had some ideas of like, you know, celebrate AI success stories but like let's dig in. Like top five.
Greg Shove: Yeah, sure.
Alex: Like things you could do to get, to get everybody.
Greg Shove: Here's the good news. It's not rocket science, but it is hard work. Right. Like when I, when I look at what our clients are doing successfully and what we've done successfully at section and we're a small team. There's only 40 of us at Section. We do the work of about 60 though now. But you know, if you look at what we've done and I'll share some of, some of what works, the good news is you'll hear it and go, that's not that, that's not that hard or that's not that unique. And it's not, it's just that you have to do it and you have to do it like every week or every month. And likely for the next several years. I mean these AI models, these capabilities just continue, change and accelerate. Right? So this idea that I can do my AI trans information in a month, like that's
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Greg Shove: what not to do. And I hear this all the time from CEOs because they think this is software. CEOs who don't use AI really use it besides maybe summarizing email. They think AI is like more software like an ERP or a CRM. That's the number one flawed kind of assumption I think around AI transformation. Oh, we're going to deploy this like we deployed some other software like Microsoft Office or an upgrade to Salesforce and you know, after a month we'll be done but, and everybody will go back
Alex: to work, do the training, do the training, training. Everybody's gonna be all trained, up
Greg Shove: and we'll have maybe a couple spotlight on some, you know, the best people that did it. The best or whatever. Like you know, it's, it's so nice.
Alex: Put it in our lms.
Greg Shove: Put in there with lms. Exactly. In the newsletter. It's so stupid. It's so stupid and naive and just betrays the fact that you've never actually used these technologies in your day job. So yeah, here's what works. Hackathons work, it's simple. But hackathons work. Get people building stuff with AI and not just the engine engineers, the salespeople, the marketing people. Just get the, get these tools in people's hands, create time for it. Not the hackathon on the weekend but like I interviewed the CEO of Zapier recently and they are a software company I admit. So. But they close for a week and all functions basically said okay, do the minimum you can in your day job. And basically we're going to run a one week long company, Hackathon. We're actually going to do this this summer for Section. I've never done a week hackathon, but we're actually going to do that. We're going to really Give people a lot of time. That's one second. Yeah, we talked about this.
Alex: So hackathon slash Sprint, like basically it
Greg Shove: doesn't have to be like you got to build a software product, it's like play with these things and then be able to talk about what you did with them. So you know the accountability of you got to do something with it, you know, but you know, make a GPT or make a Gemini gem, which anybody can make, right? Yeah. And so you know, you know, hackathon, pretty lightweight hackathon. The software engineers will be more serious maybe and try to do, you know, try to do the hard shit. But you know, the salespeople can do the simple stuff like me. Right?
Alex: Okay.
Greg Shove: absolutely. AI shout outs. You have to talk about what's working and not working. You have to talk about it in a, in a typically a centralized place. When you distribute this too quickly, all the learnings and kind of lessons are kind of hard to access. So I think centralization of the knowledge in the short term, meaning the next year or two or three is, is the right thing to do. So people know, oh, go to that Slack channel or that team's channel, you know, and I can read about what's going on and sharing. Right. we do AI shoutouts at team meetings. It's weird. The first time we did it, this is like two and a half years ago. Yeah. Oh, we're gonna do a shout out to Claude, you know, a shout out to gb. I don't think these, these are not, these are not sentient, technologies. They're not on the org chart. They're not humans obviously, but you know, shouting out just like, hey, here's how we're using it, here's how we're not. Right. Third, you have to have, you have to have a head of AI that. I'm sorry, you do suck it up.
Alex: What size company we're starting, what size?
Greg Shove: So we're 40 people, we're hiring ahead of AI. And, and this is because I, I in the last six months got increasingly frustrated that we weren't moving fast enough. And we're an AI company and we use AI every hour. I'd say almost every employee uses AI pretty much at least every day and I'm sure many times a day. And I still wasn't happy because I could hear and see what others were doing, I could see what the engineers were doing and I was realizing the business funct function. Still they're busy. It's hard. This stuff is hard to work With.
Alex: Right.
Greg Shove: But when you get it to work, it's like, whoa, so I'm hiring ahead of AI. I made the offer on Friday. He accepted. He starts in a month. And so. And we're 40 people. I would argue any organization more than 25 to 50 people and up needs at least one head of AI and probably more. And again, maybe that position goes away. We don't have, we don't have a head of Internet now. We don't have a head of mobile at most companies. We're not likely going to need heads of AI in a couple, three, five years.
Alex: You still have a head of digital transformation than some of these big companies do.
Greg Shove: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's how Accenture stays in business, is convincing you you need it. Right. anyway, so you need it.
Alex: And they still deliver a lot of PowerPoints, which I find I always found particularly ironic for.
Greg Shove: Yeah, I mean, good luck with that.
Alex: Let's start with the paper, first version of so on this. So let's say you're, you're, you're somehow wandered in here. You're under 25 employees. who is the head of AI? Is it the founder? CEO?
Greg Shove: Yeah, founder. CEO. I mean, in any organization, actually, I think, listen, every organization all the way up to the top follows the lead of a CEO. I mean, we just, we do whether we want to or not, or whether we mean to or not. We do what the CEO cares about, everybody else cares about. And like, it just, it just cascades. You know this. Right. So if you're, if you're not into it, your executives aren't. If executives aren't, that means your VPs or directors aren't or whatever. Yeah. you know, and then, and then that's. And that's when. That's why change goes to die at the manager level.
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Greg Shove: The change goes to die at managers because they didn't get it from the top in any rigorous or consistent way. The manager, line manager is in a tough job, right? And they're busy and their teams are smaller than they used to be, and so on and so on. And that's where the change goes to die. And what the line manager knows but doesn't, really doesn't, or suspects, but needs to really expose. And I mean this in a good way, 10% of every team are AI, like active. we know this. As you said, there's always 10% of an organization that's an early adopter. And here's how I think about it. It's pretty simple, remote work for the companies that do you know, do run a remote work organization or even hybrid. The bottom line is which is of course a post Covid phenomena. Primarily what that meant was the work week ended Friday at 1. That's the advantage of remote work to the average worker. Get your shit done by Friday afternoon, you're done. AI for those who are using it inside of organizations, and they are, 10% of the organization is maybe 5 in the federal government, maybe 15 or 20 in a more ambitious company. Whatever. Those early doctors, their work week now ends Thursday night.
Alex: Wow.
Greg Shove: they're just not telling their boss and the manager is like, what's going on? But that's what's going on. What's going on is we always have early adopters. As you said, we've always got growth mindset people. They're typically younger but not always. And they're like, oh, I can figure this out. And whether you let me do it or not, like unless, you know, I'm going to bring my GPT to work, you know, on my phone or on my desktop and I'm gonna, I'm gonna get the advantage, I'm gonna get the edge. and I'll go walk the dog. And I'll go walk the dog or take a yoga class or maybe make dinner for the kids. I mean that's not, not a bad thing to do at the time. The company's. So that's m. That's my third or fourth thing on the list is find your champions and celebrate them. They're not slackers, they're not weirdos. They're actually, they're your agents of change. They're your champions.
Alex: So that's, that's hand in hand was the shout out to AI because typically there is somebody and that's change that's doing that.
Greg Shove: Yeah.
Alex: And then we want to celebrate them,
Greg Shove: rock them and yeah, you're not, you're not cheating. What you, the first thing you want to say to them in every organization is you're not cheating. Oh, that's great. That's great. Everybody. I mean again, we're, we're in our bubble here in Silicon Valley. We think everybody's working with this way. Well, no, they're not. And you get out into the corporate world or even just, you know, anywhere, you know, change takes a while. So this AI stuff is spreading, but slowly not in consumers lives. Here's the weird thing, right? Consumers love AI. Yeah.
Alex: Your kids are doing the homework.
Greg Shove: Kids, are doing their homework. Parents are, parents are getting parenting advice. You know, everybody's got an AI therapist now, it seems, at least based on the billboards on Highway 101 in the Bay Area. But I mean like, we love it. Like, this is not a, this is not a debate. Meaning consumers love AI. There's 2 billion active consumer, users of AI around the world, probably right. India, is the second largest market. China maybe, soon will be the second largest market and so on. Like these are big markets growing fast on the consumer side, people bring it to the office and they get confused because they, but they get confused where they run into the usual stuff. Stuff it's banned or you can't connect the data or don't use that one. Use Microsoft Copilot. Well, if you want to slow your AI transformation, deploy Microsoft putting rules. Yeah, yeah, and use and Deploy Copilot. I'm sorry to say it, but like, I get it why you want to do that, but man, if you're a small organization, just, you know, get going with chat. GPT for teams or Claude for Teams or, or Gemini if you, if you like. You know, we're a Google shop at section in terms of our workspace. So finally Gemini is a decent model. So now we're, you know, we're pretty evenly split our usage across GPT, Claude and Gemini. Just let people get going. Back to your original question though, because I love it. What I ask if you're 50 and above.
Alex: Yeah.
Greg Shove: The tough conversation I have with leaders, if you're in that sort of age range would be if you're closer to 60 and you can, you might want to retire, you know, like really ask yourself, do you, are you willing to make, are you willing to make the investment and effort required to live, work and, but really lead in an AI first world? If you're, again, if you're in the knowledge economy and you're resistant, please don't, please don't stay in the seat. As a leader, you're doing a huge disservice to your team and company because they will follow your lead. And if you're on the sidelines, if you're on the fence, if you're resistant, then you're doing a disservice. And if you can, you're better off to go to the golf course or however it is you want to spend your retirement days. If you're in that 40 to 55 range, I want you to be very intentional in this moment and I want you to be very serious about becoming AI enabled as an individual for yourself. Because I think if you don't you could, you know, I think it's going to be tough and I think some of those people will leave the workforce
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Greg Shove: and have a hard time getting back in it. And I think so, you know, be careful. I want again, if you have, because you have by the way, something that the world needs and your company needs, which is experience, we need human judgment to decide what work the AIs do and what work is good enough from the AI that we're going to actually use it versus throw it away. Because we're going to throw away a lot of AI work because it's so cheap and it won't be very good. Right. So I want, I want good humans with experience, but I need them fully AI enabled. I, you know, because I can't, you know, otherwise they're the sand and the gears, you know, they're the humans working the old way. And it's going to really be everything down. Yeah. Slow everything down.
Alex: And the seniority. The seniority signals certain things.
Greg Shove: Yeah.
Alex: Now one of the questions related to that is that in theory, the, the, the more experience you have, the more mature you get, the more you start paying attention to that Stanford course we were talking about the interpersonal dynamics.
Greg Shove: Yeah.
Alex: you may, you get regulated, you maybe don't take things as seriously. So maybe like, maybe if I'm 25, I'm more freaking out about AI disrupting everything. But people who are in 55 already have seen a lot of changes and they're like, all right, I can make through it. Right. So there's that there's a trust that you build with customers, there's ability to talk to customers, particularly in the enterprise or regulated verticals. So what is your take on, the role of those softer skills? External management?
Greg Shove: Yeah, great question. I think this is how I think about hiring anyone right now, Alex, at any level. And this, I would say my opinion has evolved even recently, even recently in the last few months because of how AI, because how AI is evolving so quickly in its capabilities. So my opinion today, when I look at anyone to hire at any level, to bring inside one of my companies, I think about this way, an AI maximalist, like that's not. AI proficiency is not enough AI proficiency. AI proficiency two years, two years ago. Sure. It was new two years ago. Right.
Alex: Yeah.
Greg Shove: but like I want people that are. Yeah, yeah.
Alex: So that's non negotiable. That's.
Greg Shove: I'm building GPTs, I'm building whatever. Claude, you know, I'm using Claude co work. I'm Building Gemini gems, whatever, like it doesn't matter but like you are building assistance or automations for your personal life or your work life. Like that's, that's cost of entry, a high level of curiosity and hands on keyboard, you know, coaxing the coaxing and using these technologies to find productivity gains, find cognitive improvements, table stakes. So like a kid coming out of college today, because that's how they are. You need to be that way at any stage of your career in my opinion today the second thing I'm looking for is do you have one or two more is great human skills that are high and could maybe even go higher. Like are you coachable? And do you understand that these skills are going to be so valuable in an AI world? But I want them also maximal. Like I want if you're a storyteller, if you're a good listener, if you're a great coach, if you're good at aligning teams, if you're a good presenter, you know, I want, yeah, absolutely. Like, like we're going to need people that can still do all those things. In fact they're going to be more important in a world where again I have a Silicon Valley view which is more software. But I think we'll see this in a lot of other, I mean consulting obviously agencies, you know, knowledge businesses. They're so much easier to build and stand up. It's so much easier to build software now that we're going to be flooded with a lot of shitty software and, and a lot of good software. But my point is the buyer is going to be overwhelmed. They're already, they were over.
Alex: Already over.
Greg Shove: Like every time you looked at one of those, you know, market maps, right? How many competitors in a category you'd be like what I mean, you know, and now that, how many more
Alex: spam do you get now?
Greg Shove: Yeah, exactly right. Six months ago it's going to be 100. They look personalized, they look personalized so that, so that whole go to market motion I think is even more challenging. And so this idea of like trust and persuasion and sort of quality human interactions, that's why sections investing a lot more in conferences, both in person and virtual. Like we think the bar is rising for kind of sales and marketing, especially to the enterprise. I think that problem is going to get sort of worse so to speak, meaning a lot of new entrants, both software and services, you know, into these, into these industries and into these verticals. So how ah, do you stand out? And I Think that's good marketing. And good marketing comes from, you know, mostly good humans and some automation. anyway, so yeah, I,
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Greg Shove: I think the, those skills.
Alex: So basically two main, to summarize, like, and I think that's really important, distinction. There's the MADIS maximalist optimizer and then there's a satisfier.
Greg Shove: Ah.
Alex: And, and historically the happier people in many times were been satisfiers. Like I'll do a little bit good enough, I'll hire some brilliant people, motivate them. and that's going to be my kind of AI. I'm open, but I'm not going to allocate that much time to it. And that's not good enough anymore for majority of the roles. Okay. And then there is the humanizer, which is almost the other extreme. but you're really sharply identifying things that we believe AI won't be that good at or though the success of AI will create more of a need for that software capability.
Greg Shove: Yeah, I think the way to think about it, to summarize Alex, would be are you someone at any level that can manage AI to generate higher returns than someone else because AI is not free. The prices have been dropping like crazy. That's been good, for us in terms we're not paying a lot for AI. 20 bucks a month gets you great AI. But when you kind of look at an organization, the AI or inference spend, it adds up. So increasingly as a CEO, I'm going to be looking for individuals. Can you leverage AI the right way? Because I'm paying for those tokens. I'm buying that AI. It's on my expense line as a line item. And by the way, at section Inference is our third biggest expense, meaning people first. Very typical in software companies. Companies people first, other software second. Salesforce, you know, marketo, all that stuff, HubSpot, whatever. Inference is third. Soon, probably middle of this year, Inference will be second, meaning I'll be spending more on AI than all my other software combined. It won't ever probably get to the level of employees, of course, but like it's going to be my second biggest line item. So using that to good effect to generate revenue and margins and happy customers and all that stuff. Operating efficiencies, the individuals, leaders and teams that can do that, that's first thing. And then the second thing is, can you get others rallied around and following your lead on your pro, on your projects and on your decisions. Those are the human skills. Right. And I need both. I need someone who can deploy inference yeah. And get others to agree that that's the right thing to do. Right. Yeah, kind of management 101. so I, yeah, that's, that's the combo I'm looking for.
Alex: For Love it. As we wrap up, we've talked a lot about what we could be. Should be doing. Need to be doing.
Alex: What should we stop doing? What's your not to do list for the modern leader?
Greg Shove: I love that question because I use this mental model of cut and create. You know, McKinsey would call it like efficiency and growth and charge you a million dollars. I like cut and create. Just really simple. What do I cut cut and what do I create? And so we should be cutting stuff that we are not very good at or we don't like to do. Right. Particularly that's repetitive. So I think we should stop, we should stop doing stuff, in part by passing it off to AI. Some of it, by the way. We might realize we didn't need to do it anyway. You know, just a lot of not. I think this is what AI is exposed. A lot of knowledge work is busy work.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Shove: And I think that, you know, the reason a lot of knowledge workers are exposed to AI, meaning, you know, it's because they haven't leveled up their work. They've they've allowed it too much of it to be busy work. So what I want to cut is busy work. What I want to, what I want to add is like, you know, create new things. Right. Create, create higher value. By the way, the one of the things a leader or manager has to do in the age of AI is come back to the team in a year, maybe sooner, depending on the team, and say, what are we going to do at the time that we save? If you're not having conversations with your team about, hey, we're all going to use AI and be more productive and save time. If you don't also follow that conversation pretty quickly with here's the other stuff I want to do, like let's tackle these projects and these decisions and have more fun and create more value. If you don't do that second conversation, everybody's sitting around saying, oh, we're all going to be more productive and we're going to save time. So we're going to get laid off. Some of us will get laid off. no.
Alex: Interesting. So create the roadmap for the future.
Greg Shove: Create the roadmap for, hey, we're going to take all this other shit work and give it to a high. You know, we're in marketing, there's a bunch of stuff we can push off to AI Email personalization is something you already said. But by the way, when we do that, we add up. We're going to save some time, guys. We add it all up and let's take that time and reallocate it. And here's some projects that are always on our to do list that we never get to. Or here's some higher value things we can do and add more value to the organization. And then employees like, oh, I get it. Like we're not just going to cut, we're
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Greg Shove: going to create. And we have to move through the cut phase faster to lower anxiety and raise our horizons. So every leader must take us through this phase, this cut phase faster so you and your team can see, how can I create, how can I create more value? You know, hopefully new products and services, hopefully new revenue, hopefully new jobs.
Alex: Beautiful. Well, I think everybody is building a roadmap. How to learn more about what you're building. Greg, where can people find you?
Greg Shove: Yeah, ah, sectionai.com. just go there and yeah, sign up for one of our events. They're great. We try to give a giveaway and share as much knowledge as we can. Again, in a very crowded side.
Alex: Here comes from the top.
Greg Shove: Exactly right. Like just share the knowledge.
Alex: Greg, thank you so much.
Greg Shove: Yeah, likewise. Alex, thanks for inviting me.