Lead with AI: Turning Tech Anxiety into Leadership Advantage | Tracy Sheen | Episode 352

Scott McCarthy [00:03:57]:
Tracy, man, welcome to the show. So good to have you here today.

Tracy Sheen [00:04:01]:
G’, day, Scott. How you doing?

Scott McCarthy [00:04:03]:
I’m doing fantastic. I am super stoked because we’re going to talk about AI and technology. And I’m going to be brutally honest. I use AI a lot. I’m all about tech and all this stuff, literally. We built ourselves a new home, and I swapped out our light switches for smart switches. I think I swapped it, like, 30 light switches. Like, I can control my.

Scott McCarthy [00:04:30]:
Almost all my lights at my house from my cell phone, which really freaked out my wife the other night because she was home. I was not. And our kid that I was just talking to you about was playing with the lights through the Google home.

Tracy Sheen [00:04:43]:
Gotcha. And she suddenly, like, was calling you, going, our house is possessed.

Scott McCarthy [00:04:47]:
Like, what the hell? It’s. Yeah, the house is possessed. Anyway. Yeah, yeah, it was hilarious. Anyway, I say all that because we’re talking about AI. I use, I think, three different AI tools to produce, help me produce these episodes, which is awesome. It is phenomenal. But now let’s get into how leaders can use AI, because one of the things I hear about from leaders out there is, like, leadership is all about leading people.

Scott McCarthy [00:05:22]:
You know, ones and zero people, if you know what I mean. But, like, legitimate, actual people. So I want to hear your thoughts on this. I want to know what you think about that statement and that kind of feeling that’s out there right now, that, I guess, you know, kind of scaredness. What do you think?

Tracy Sheen [00:05:40]:
Yeah, I think it’s overwhelmed, to be honest. Like, it’s just, you know, it’s just that one more thing, like, oh, man, here we go again. You know, like, just gotten used to having to deal with social media being a thing, and now, like, now you’re throwing AI at me. I think it’s really interesting, you know, you say that you’re all in on AI. You know, the thing for me is everybody already is, whether they know it or not, you know, just because you’ve switched all your lights out to smart lights. Fantastic. But if you’re watching a streaming service, if you’re using Google Maps, if you’re using, you know, loyalty cards, any social media, you’re already in AI and playing with it every single day. So I want to kind of take that, like, oh, I’m scared of it off the.

Tracy Sheen [00:06:31]:
Off the counter, because you’re already using it, right? Like, now you just need to. To rope that bull and bring it in and actually start to tame that sucker a little bit. So that’s that’s the first thing to kind of get, you know, get out in the open. Is that nothing to be scared of? We’ve all been using it for years. For me, AI is really the new leadership literacy. So if we kind of think back to the 80s when, you know, financial literacy was. Was the thing, I really, for me, is that new leadership literacy that we need to be harnessing and using as a. As a collaborative tool rather than a competitive tool.

Scott McCarthy [00:07:10]:
Oh, I love the final point there. Collaborative tool Vice, the competitive tool. Because the thing I’ve been saying for a long, and I’m trying to get my team to understand is like, hey, this isn’t here to replace. Let’s use this to enhance. Let’s use this to be more efficient. You know, let’s call Spade, Spade right out of the gate. Yes, there will be jobs that will disappear due to AI. Got it.

Scott McCarthy [00:07:32]:
But those people can get rerolled into different roles. They’ll move on to different things, and, you know, life will still carry on. Like the printing press that caused, you know, some people lose their jobs. Poor guy’s hand is no longer cramping because he’s been writing the same page for 500 days in a roll over and over and over. Right. So, yeah, it’s just an evolution.

Tracy Sheen [00:07:57]:
Absolutely. And you know, exactly what you said. We’ve lived through this so many times before. You know, when. When the Model T rolled off the production line, everybody who was shoeing horses was like, well, what are we going to do? You know, did. They didn’t see the future of, you know, petrol bowsers or gasoline bowsers and infrastructure for roads and everything else that goes along with it. So you’re absolutely right. I can’t see that, particularly at the moment, AI will not take your job.

Tracy Sheen [00:08:32]:
But if you don’t learn how to leverage, manipulate, and utilize AI, you’re probably, you know, on your way out. So it’s the people that are picking up the AI tools and starting to make their current roles redundant that are going to be the ones that leaders look at and go, hey, Scott, I’m going to keep you. Because you clearly know how to use these tools for good, to make the company more efficient or to increase productivity or whatever. But AI as a. As a tool for leaders, you know, for me, it’s about keeping. You’ve got to keep the humans at the center. AI enhances, as you said, but it doesn’t replace that empathy. It doesn’t replace judgment.

Tracy Sheen [00:09:15]:
It doesn’t replace trust. That’s the human in the loop.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:18]:
Awesome. Love it. Human in the center, human in the loop. We gotta have it now. You were hinting at, like, the positivity side of this. I really want to dive down this. This kind of chain. So what’s your best advice, you know, out of the gate, to start for leaders? Like, you know, where do we start? Start? Because I think that’s probably.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:38]:
Sometimes I find when we have events like this, and I literally was coaching one of my subordinates today about this type of topic. And just bear with me for a second, because as I just reminisce, but I find the most difficult points for people to figure out is one, how do we start? And two, as we say in army speak, what’s our desired end state? Or in simple terms, where do we want to go? I find those two things the most difficult for people to define. So when it comes from an AI perspective, what’s your advice there for leaders to say? Hey, how do we start? And then where the heck do we even want to go with this?

Tracy Sheen [00:10:19]:
Yeah, look, you’ve hit on a really. A really valuable point. You’ve got to have a learning mindset right now. The days of kind of being able to sit on your hands and wait for stuff to come, it’s gone. So you need to be encouraging and you need to be adopting a learning mindset. So whether that’s you committing to reading one AI article a week or a podcast or you trialing a demo tool or whatever, but you need to be adopting that curiosity and that mindset. I think in terms of leadership, for me, it starts with the people, right? Get a team conversation going together and really, you know, get them to have a. What’s.

Tracy Sheen [00:11:06]:
What’s the one thing that’s really annoying you at the moment, Scott? You know, like, what’s the one thing in your job that is bugging the living, you know, hell out of you? If you could get rid of that one thing, what would it be? You know, what are our clients telling us that is the bottleneck? What’s driving you bonkers? Because it’s taking up way too much of your time that you’re actually doing the stuff that you love and let everybody have a bit of a, you know, a bit of a bitch fest around the table about, oh, my God, you know, I didn’t start this role to do this. You know, it’s taking up all my time putting stuff into Excel, spreadsheets or whatever. Let them get it all out, because that’s the goal. You know, that’s where you can go, okay, awesome. Let’s throw that all up on a whiteboard. And now let’s figure out what, as a group, what’s the one thing that we want to, we want to give, give a go first. You know, small steps, big impact. You don’t have to overhaul a whole business overnight.

Tracy Sheen [00:12:03]:
Pick a pilot project, pick something that’s a personal learning journey for a team or for a department and pilot that and get them to really take that leadership role and that charge forward for the business to kind of go, okay, we are going to, you know, put a scheduling tool in place over the next 30 days. And if we do that, we know that it’s going to save us, you know, five emails a week to that one client trying to get a time together to have a chat, whatever that one thing is. But agree as a team, if we can get that one thing sorted, you know, look for the quick win like you do when you start a gym. You know, find that quick win, find the low hanging fruit and, and build on it from there.

Scott McCarthy [00:12:47]:
You know, what I’m hearing from you there is just, it’s basically the very simple principle of, you know, that 1% rule, right? Like 1% improvement and then let’s, let’s do it on a daily. And I love that. Like what’s that one thing that you can’t stand doing that maybe we can go ahead and automate. God, heaven forbid. Like we get rid of this TPS report, but please, let’s get rid of this TPS report. Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know if you get that reference. Yeah, I don’t know if you get the TPS report.

Tracy Sheen [00:13:20]:
Right. Like as soon as you put the word in there, I’m like, I feel you, Scott, I gotcha. But what, tell me what a TPS is.

Scott McCarthy [00:13:28]:
Oh no, it’s a TPS reports out of a movie called Office Space. Phenomenal movie from the early 2000, had Jennifer Aniston in it. I love it. I reference it all the time. So the listener who’s listening to this show is probably tired of me mentioning TPS reports because it’s probably the number one thing. Talk about gotcha.

Tracy Sheen [00:13:50]:
I mean the big thing there though is that one thing, like as you mentioned, because what happens, we’re overachievers, right? As leaders, we’re always looking for the extra. How can we just squeeze that extra bit of juice? But when we do that, that’s when we typically go into overwhelm and do nothing. So we might end up with a list of 10 things that we want to do that’s fin. But pick one, right? The moment you try and do more than one thing, that’s when the focus gets scattered. The overwhelm creeps in. The, you know, oh, it’s too hard. I’ve just got to do this first. That all creeps in and nothing happens.

Tracy Sheen [00:14:31]:
But if you all commit to, like, okay, this is our one project. This is the thing that we’re going to pilot and we’re going to see that sucker through, then as a team, you’re all kind of, you know, pushing towards that one end goal where you can hold, you know, each other accountable. Scott, what have you done today to move that thing forward? You know, like, as you check ins, as you’re everything you’re all on, you’re rolling in the same direction. I don’t know how many tired cliches and metaphors I can pull out to say the same thing. But it’s, it’s keep the one thing. The one thing.

Scott McCarthy [00:15:04]:
Yeah. No, and, you know, I want to dive deeper into this, you know, one thing. Because you mentioned, like, There could be 10 things, which is 1 million percent, right? Like, I literally, as soon as you said that, like, like, I had the picture in my mind and I’m army guy, won’t be shocked, probably won’t shock you, but, like, I’m big on prioritization, like, priorities, priorities, priorities. But you know what? I want the listener take away from this. And I’ll let you rebut my, my point here. If, if, or think you’re throwing your thoughts, but when I think of prioritization and I’m just like, prioritization in this 10 way you’re talking might not be the biggest bang for your buck, but what it might be is the one that enables the team or gets the team using it the most or gets the team settled with it and gets them, you know, confident with it or comfortable, what have you, maybe that is actually the priority here, not necessarily the one that’s going to give you, like, the biggest return on investment. Because I feel like business leaders and especially, you know, entrepreneurs who are like, budgets are tight revenue, like, how can we, like, maximize. I got to maximize because I got to feed my kids, family over here.

Scott McCarthy [00:16:19]:
I want to maximize my roi. So I’m going to go after this one. But maybe, you know, short term, yes, but long term, no. What are your thoughts there?

Tracy Sheen [00:16:29]:
You’re right. I think often when, when, you know, we look at smaller organizations and we’re trying to prioritize, you know, we’ll quickly Go to the. Oh, but if we can just automate our entire supply chain, like that’s our one thing. Right, but if you think about that, how many steps are actually in that one thing to, you know, automate your entire supply chain? So, you know, if you come up with this grand scheme that, okay, we’re going to automate the entire supply chain. Awesome. But what does that actually mean? Like what, what’s the first thing that you would need to do? Does that mean the first thing you need to do is get a up to date inventory or a stock take of everything that’s in your supply chain? Then actually that’s the one thing, you know, so instead of kind of coming up with some big umbrella political turn, it’s actually really breaking it down to kind of go, okay, that, that sounds, that sounds great, Scott, but what does that actually mean? Like let’s, let’s pull that back. Let’s, you know, let’s, let’s pop the bonnet and have a look at what that really looks like on the inside.

Scott McCarthy [00:17:41]:
No, 100%. And let me tell you, as a guy who’s currently working on automation of the Canadian Armed Forces supply chain, it is a difficult beast to tackle. You’re not automating that thing, let me tell you. But I love, I love your point though. What I hear from you, all jokes aside, here is, you know, taking that big thing, that big problem, let’s break it down to smaller problems that are easier, you know, easily chewed up, eaten, you know, taken care of. Right.

Tracy Sheen [00:18:12]:
How do you eat what we do?

Scott McCarthy [00:18:15]:
Right, One bite at a time, just like everything else.

Tracy Sheen [00:18:18]:
Chunks.

Scott McCarthy [00:18:20]:
Yeah, absolutely. Which, you know, makes it more manageable for you, makes it more manageable for your team, enables you to actually, you know, watch your progress. So I absolutely love it because I find what happens with leaders out there is they end up in analysis paralysis because when they don’t break it down into smaller bits and they just don’t. Back to earlier. Just don’t know where to start.

Tracy Sheen [00:18:43]:
Yeah, yeah. And we often end up then, you know, as you said, with the analysis paralysis. But the other thing that happens then is we end up with that, that sunk cost thing, right? Oh, well, I’ve bought into this system because I was sold that that’s going to solve all my problems. Now we’re six months down the pathway with this thing and we’ve dropped a couple of hundred K and half the team hate it, so they refuse to use it. But we’ve got to keep pushing forward. Sometimes it’s actually quicker in the end to slow down at the beginning and go, okay, what does this really look like? If this is our end game, what does that really look like? You know, let’s pull out the sticky notes and sit down around the table and go, okay, if. If automating our supply chain is the end goal, where does that start? Okay. Oh, George, you put the orders in.

Tracy Sheen [00:19:40]:
Okay, what does that look like? Okay, George, get up on the whiteboard and write that down. Okay, well, that’s the first bit. Then what. Who does that go to from George? Oh, Jane. Okay, Jane, you do the. So, you know, once you map out that entire journey, you might go, there’s the piece. You know, it’s the piece from Jane to George that is getting caught in a bottleneck. So that’s the piece we need to start with.

Tracy Sheen [00:20:04]:
We can actually find something there that’s going to speed that process up, which is then going to cause, you know, a bit of a domino effect that’s going to make everything else easier after that. It might be like you said, you know, the end result doesn’t end up being that you automate the entire supply chain. Because you might realize along that way that actually we kind of still need here, here and here, a human to go, oh, yeah, we’re doing good. No, something’s gone pear shaped here. We need to pull that out and have a look at it. So you might realize by. By chunking it down like that that the actual win is not to automate the entire process. It’s to automate this chunk and then have human oversight.

Tracy Sheen [00:20:50]:
This chunk then have human oversight. But you’re not going to do that if you don’t sit around the table with everybody, even if you think they’re not involved in that process. Because you’ll be surprised, you know, oh, marketing actually has a say in that bit. Or legals need to double check the contracts or. But you’re not going to know that unless you’re all sitting around the table together.

Scott McCarthy [00:21:10]:
No, and I love this. You know, this is like, this is why the human element is so important still, because you need people to, you know, identify all these steps. And then I would argue maybe even more important, identify the risks and maybe the risks in automation. Because there’s gonna be some steps where like, ooh, if we automate and there’s a problem, like there’s. This is the risk associated with that because no one will know. Okay, well, how do we mitigate? And then you kind of go down that radical. So absolutely love that. I love that line of thought.

Scott McCarthy [00:21:47]:
See, it’s super practical, something that the listener out there can dig into. Now, we talked a bit about the fears at the beginning. We’ve talked about bringing it on and that 1% and kind of chewing the elephant a little bit at a time. I’d love to dive a little bit into culture and organizational culture around this, because that’s gonna be another bit, right, that you’re gonna have to. That people are gonna have to fight, especially those in, like, highly regulated industries or like, unions involved and all these different things. Because like I said earlier, I’m working on a modernization plan for my work. And the first thing out of my mind every time. Out of my mouth, sorry, every time I talk about it is this is not about replacing jobs, right? So, you know, have to build the culture as we’re building the capability too.

Scott McCarthy [00:22:46]:
So I’d love to hear your thoughts there about how leaders can help build that culture to embrace this new technology, to use it so you don’t end up with, as you mentioned earlier, that sunk cost fallacy of like, oh, we got half the team using it, the other half not using it, etc.

Tracy Sheen [00:23:04]:
Yeah, there’s a couple of things in that for me. I mean, the first is that, you know, this isn’t about the world going digital. It’s about the world going intelligent. And leaders now need to redefine what leadership actually means. And for me, that’s really learning about how to lead with technology and not fear it. So it’s back to that, you know, leadership AI being the leadership literacy of the current era. And I think, you know, building in that adaptability into the culture and really allowing and encouraging curiosity and encouraging adaptability and understanding that I now is just a piece of being an adaptable leader or a piece of building an adaptable culture. Because things are moving so quickly.

Tracy Sheen [00:24:08]:
We need to build in that confidence to fail fast fail forward, right? Like, oh, okay, that didn’t work. That’s okay. Like, let’s just move on to the next thing because we’ve learned X, Y and Z from that. So we know now that we don’t have to go down those paths. We can, you know, chop it there and move on. I think with the, you know, it’s all about bringing in that. That learning mindset and thinking through now that these AI tools are, you know, assistants. So it’s back to that being collaborative, not competitive.

Tracy Sheen [00:24:42]:
We’ve got to treat them like we would a smart intern. Right? I see so many times that we organizations bring in this AI tool, they go, oh, My God, Scott, we’re going to put in like AI. It’s going to be great. We’re going to automate this. We’re going to da, da, da. But they don’t train it right. Like, they just expect the AI to suddenly, like, know what it’s doing. So I’m, I’m really about saying to people, treat this stuff like you would an intern.

Tracy Sheen [00:25:11]:
Treat this stuff like you would a new employee. You’ve got to set it up for success. And that’s part of the culture, that’s part of the leadership to go. If you’re bringing something in, you’re enrolling a new team member into your organization. So what’s the first thing you do on day one when Scott joins the organization? You probably organize a morning tea. You show them around the office. You go, hey, this is what we do here. Here’s the lunchroom.

Tracy Sheen [00:25:40]:
Your breaks are here, here, and here. Here’s your policy and procedures manual. You know, this is Karen in hr. She’s the one you got to watch out for. But everyone else is pretty nice. You know, you set Scott up for a successful, you know, run into the organization. And I think our leadership teams now need to be thinking about AI and culture in exactly, exactly the same way.

Scott McCarthy [00:26:06]:
Love it. I love warning off the AI tool that Karen in HR is the one to watch out for for.

Tracy Sheen [00:26:12]:
Yeah, we always got to watch out for Karen and hr.

Scott McCarthy [00:26:16]:
All the Karens listening to this show just growed and stopped and now they’ve un. Subscribed. Thank you, Tracy. I really appreciate that.

Tracy Sheen [00:26:24]:
Apologies for that. But now we can really get to all the Karens. We’re actually revolting. It’ll be 5pm on the hill. Bring pitchforks. I’m kidding.

Scott McCarthy [00:26:36]:
But you know, let’s get back to the point. Like, I. What I really enjoyed is, um, you know, you know, training it like it’s a smart intern. That was phenomenal, by the way. But it’s so true because, like, everyone’s just like, oh, do this. Like, no, like, even the tools I use, I’m still very deliberate about, like, okay, this is what I. This is what I need out of you. Here are the parameters with which I need it, et cetera, et cetera.

Scott McCarthy [00:27:02]:
And I even, I even use my own delegation tactics to. That I use with my team on my AI. Like, do you have any follow up questions? Like, I’ll even put that in there.

Tracy Sheen [00:27:13]:
Yeah.

Scott McCarthy [00:27:13]:
And yes, it does. Let me tell you every time. Okay. Which is great. And I think one of the tricks I like the Most and I’m trying to hijack your show here, but one of the tricks I like the most is when I do something, you know, I’m writing, you know, writing a document or, you know, doing a presentation or whatever I’m doing with the AI tool, I’m like, okay, you are now, you know, audience, whoever this is for, look at it and tell me what you think. And that is so super powerful. So for the listener, they’re like, that is like my number one trip for ChatGPT or any AI tool of that nature. Like, and you’re doing up, let’s say, you know, I use it to help craft my emails to my team.

Scott McCarthy [00:28:05]:
Like, to my, you know, I’m like, hey, write me this email about this topic. Here are the sub points I want to hit. Here are the details to incorporate this type of tone, whatever. And then, you know, spit it out. I’ll review it, I’ll edit it. And then I’m like, okay, you’re now one of my team members and I’ll explain to what my team member is like. And like, what do you think about this message? And it, like, it’s fine, you know, and I just fine tune it. It’s phenomenal that way.

Scott McCarthy [00:28:32]:
It works so well.

Tracy Sheen [00:28:33]:
Do you think it’s interesting that. And it’s this bit of a phenomena that I don’t kind of understand how it came about, but it seems to be here. And that is that we buy a AI tool off the shelf. Let’s say it’s ChatGPT or, you know, any other kind of large language model or whatever. And, and we just assume that it knows. So we’ll go write a social media post and so it writes a social media post and then we go, oh, that’s really beige. And then we shut it down and we don’t play with it. We, when we’re talking with humans or we’re sitting, you know, you talking about your, your young boy earlier, jumping on.

Tracy Sheen [00:29:16]:
And you had to, you did a FaceTime Facebook Live with him and you had to kind of cut him off for a while because he did. Like, you’ve got to teach them. So why do we think that AI is going to be different to everything else that we’ve dealt with previously? You know, any, any child growing up, you’ve got to give it parameters. Okay, you are going to do this. We need it done by this time. As you said, here is sub points. Here’s what I want you to understand now. You go and design that any way you want as long as it fits within these parameters.

Tracy Sheen [00:29:50]:
Have you got any questions for me? Okay. No. Awesome, go. It’ll give you something back. You go. Great first draft. Okay, now I want you to think about X, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think, you know, if, if, if any Karens that are still listening, take nothing else away.

Tracy Sheen [00:30:06]:
Take away the fact that you need to think about your AI like a colleague. Sit down across the table. I chat. I call mine Linus, as in the Peanuts character that used to drag around these security blanket because that’s what it’s become for me. But it’s also a bit of a nerd joke about the old Linus software. But my point is I treat it like I’m sitting down and having a coffee with a mate. G’. Day.

Tracy Sheen [00:30:35]:
How’s your morning going? You know, I’ve been watching this. Hey, we’re going to work on this today because that puts me in the frame of mind that I am treating it like a collaborator, not a competitor.

Scott McCarthy [00:30:48]:
Love it. I love it. Now we’ve, we’ve talked a lot about, you know, today and how we can use AI today and how, you know, how we can implement it steps and culture and all kinds of amazing stuff. Sorry, Karen. And you know, it’s been fantastic. But I’m also a very proactive, future thinking type of person. I think leaders out there need to be. I’d love to hear your thoughts on, you know, where is this going is my perspective.

Scott McCarthy [00:31:20]:
We are just, we’re at the tip of the tip here. Like this is like, we’re the, we’re like the first snowflake on top of the iceberg. And by the way, I’m from a place in Canada where I see iceberg all the time. I don’t know, they’re what’s so amazing about them. They’re just big hunking chunks of ice. Anyway, I digressed but you know, we’re at the very top of that thing. It’s a long way down. So where do you see this going? And most importantly, how can leaders prepare their teams for where this is?

Tracy Sheen [00:31:48]:
Yeah, look, shake the Magic 8 ball, right? Like that’s kind of, we can have a guess and we’ve got some pretty good kind of indicators of what’s happening this year. But you know, as I say to my clients all the time, ChatGPT kind of came out of nowhere in 2022. Deep Seq came out of nowhere, you know, well from left field, honest. So these big strides, I think they’re still going to kind of come at Us from left field and we’re going to have to go, okay, that’s the thing. Now let’s deal with that. We can push forward and we can kind of, you know, have those ideas. So the next big thing that we’re seeing happening right now is agenic agents and I’m sure you’ve probably heard of them. That’s where we’re moving away from interacting or just getting tasks completed to it actually being able to take that task and then complete it to a sequence.

Tracy Sheen [00:32:49]:
So like a workflow sequence or I’ll give you an example. I was speaking at a, at a conference organizer summit last week and they were talking about organizing know, restaurants for participants coming to venues, flying in from other countries etc and you know, they were saying how much time it takes to ring restaurants and get bookings and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we just hooked up this agent, it took us about half an hour in a workshop. We hooked up this agent and got it starting to ring out and inquire about bookings for X amount of people with this kind of dietary requirements and yada yada yada. So it was able to again gave it the parameters we’re looking for X amount of seats on, you know, blah night, these are our dietary requirements, etc. And we said, you know, 20k from the hotels that people are staying at and let it go out and ring and do the bookings, right? Or give us the, the pricings and things. And then the human was able to sit down and instead of making those hundred phone calls, just look through a list and go, okay, here are our options, you know, and then run that through the AI and get a report back to kind of go, okay, well within budget, here’s what we can do. So that’s the, that’s the stuff that’s kind of happening now.

Tracy Sheen [00:34:08]:
That’s the next big thing in terms of the next, next big breakthrough. The thing that I’m really watching is the crossover between robotics and AI. So I think that’s a really interesting field and I think we’re going to see a lot of progression in that, you know, over the next 12, 18 months. Because we’re starting to see a lot of robotics that are, you know, the dexterity is off the charts now. You know that one of the hardest things that they’ve, they’ve been trying to get robots to do is tie shoelaces, right? Because when you think about that from a human perspective, it is actually a really difficult thing to do. And they’re at a point now where they can get them to do that. Right. So if you think about, and I don’t know what workforce conditions are like in Canada, but in Australia we’re having a really hard time getting workers into certain regions.

Tracy Sheen [00:35:03]:
Like we just don’t have enough people to do the jobs. So when you think about, you know, okay, maybe we can deploy X amount of robots to, you know, build the housing or you know, wire or do the electrical or maybe it’s aged care, you know, places where humans are getting injured from lifting patients or doing dangerous work. I think there’s a huge opportunity and of course we’ve got the, you know, the, the unions and things that we’ll need to navigate what that looks like, but I think that’s a really interesting area. China recently launched their very first AI hospital. I don’t know if you heard about that. That’s fascinating to me. So completely AI driven. AI doctors, AI nurses, AI admin, can treat up to 10,000 patients a day, has a success rate for respiratory illnesses over 85% which is off the charts compared to human intervention.

Tracy Sheen [00:36:04]:
You know, you think about being able to deploy that into war torn locations or third world locations or regional locations. Like there’s some areas in Australia we just can’t get doctors. So I think there’s a lot of very quick advancements to be made and a lot of really interesting, you know, flow on areas for what does that mean? So in terms of leadership, what does that mean? I say to my guys all the time, look outside your own industry. If you are looking, if you’re in healthcare and you’re looking in healthcare, you’re missing the stuff that’s coming. If you’re in healthcare, look at what’s happening in mining, you know, look at what’s happening in agriculture and then think about, okay, that’s interesting. How could that idea be deployed in my area? What would that look like? If I just tweaked that concept and implemented 1% of that into my, my culture, my team, my area. Because it’s when we look, you know, peer over the fence and kind of go, what’s going on over there? That I think often the real, the magic happens.

Scott McCarthy [00:37:14]:
Wow, that was a lot.

Tracy Sheen [00:37:16]:
Sorry.

Scott McCarthy [00:37:18]:
No, no, but it was, it was like, it was awesome. Like I did not hear about that hospital in China. That is incredible.

Tracy Sheen [00:37:25]:
Yeah.

Scott McCarthy [00:37:26]:
And yeah, wow. The robot thing sparked me because I was at a exposition in Chicago for work this year called Promat and I had a robot serve me ice cream.

Tracy Sheen [00:37:41]:
Yeah, right.

Scott McCarthy [00:37:42]:
Nice sprinkles.

Tracy Sheen [00:37:44]:
Did it get the sprinkles Right. What was the ratio of sprinkles to ice cream like?

Scott McCarthy [00:37:49]:
Oh, I did not, I didn’t do the calculation. Sorry. But it was a good, it was a good serving of sprinkles on the ice cream, let me tell you. No, it literally it. So you handed it a ticket which had a QR code on it, which told it, okay, give me ice cream with sprinkles. You could have picked a bunch of different things. It went over to the ice cream maker, pulled the cup out of the cup holder and then put the cup underneath the ice cream and pulled the lever for it to come out and did the good serving and then took that, went over, took the spoon, went to the sprinkles, took the lid off the box of the sprinkles and then used the spoon to scoop up the sprinkles and spread it onto the ice cream. Put the ice cream, or, sorry, the spoon into the ice cream, handed it to you and then gave you a fist as it left.

Tracy Sheen [00:38:39]:
Wow. See, that just blows my mind. Right like that just. It’s incredible, my mind. And when you think about it.

Scott McCarthy [00:38:46]:
And then here’s, here’s the kicker. So you, here’s the kicker to finish off the story, one of the guys I was there with for work went to Vegas for a personal trip and he got served drinks at the bar by a robot.

Tracy Sheen [00:38:58]:
Yeah. A lot of the cruise ships now have robotic bartenders because like you said.

Scott McCarthy [00:39:07]:
It’S hard to find people. It’s hard to. I don’t know what happened, but it seemed like the workforce seemed to get. Disappear since COVID and has not returned. And everyone is, you know, you look around, everywhere has help wanted signs. Yeah, exactly. You know, and you, you mentioned a great point about, you know, unions and stuff like this. And that’s one of the things which I have to rub it as well with my project.

Scott McCarthy [00:39:35]:
I’m like, don’t worry because I literally have a list of things which we are either not doing or we’re not doing good enough. And what are we going to do? We’re going to automate and then the savings of, of personnel we have through automation, we’re going to put them on these, this list of items here because we need to do better. Like, we’re supposed to be doing better.

Tracy Sheen [00:39:56]:
Yeah.

Scott McCarthy [00:39:56]:
And like. Yeah, so don’t worry. This is about.

Tracy Sheen [00:40:00]:
And that’s the thing that gets me. Right? Like it’s, it comes back to this, you know, collaboration, not competitive like that. That’s what I keep coming back to all the time. It’s not, don’t see it as an awesome them, you know, see it as we cannot get people to do these jobs. So don’t even worry about is AI going to take the jobs. We can’t get people to do the jobs. Like let the AI do the jobs that we can’t get the people to do. And then, you know, our humans can level up and become the creative strategic leaders that we need them to be.

Scott McCarthy [00:40:34]:
Love it. Tracy. My God, we’ve covered some serious ground today. Probably enough ground to cover Australia. Is there anything that you would think would be important to a listener that we haven’t touched yet?

Tracy Sheen [00:40:48]:
We didn’t even get to talk about the, the silicon based computing or the, the mushrooms that can move based on light now. So I think, you know, I think we’ve got a lot of stuff that we can talk about. We’re gonna have to do more podcasts, Scott. I think it’s going to come down to that. Just be curious, you know, be curious. Adopt a curious mindset. Adopt a learning mindset. Be adaptable.

Tracy Sheen [00:41:13]:
Look at it as a collaboration, not a competition. And treat your AI like you would want to treat an intern or one of your own kids. As you said, you know, this thing is like three year old. It’s still walking around and bumping into walls. It’s never going to be as clumsy, as slow, as latent as it is right now. So you have a fabulous opportunity to get on the wagon now and ride this sucker for, you know, for all it’s worth.

Scott McCarthy [00:41:46]:
That’s, that’s a great way to wrap this up. Tracy, again, this has been fantastic. Final question, show how can people find you, follow you, be part of your journey? Shameless pog. Have at it. It’s all about you.

Tracy Sheen [00:41:58]:
Awesome. I send a smoke signal up. Check me out on LinkedIn. You know, I’m pretty much all over the place. Just usually add the.comau because I am based in Australia. You know, you might need to whack the.au on the end of anything if you’re looking for me.

Scott McCarthy [00:42:14]:
Awesome. And for the listeners, always it’s easy. Just go to the show notes of this episode which is always leadonboss.com forward slash the episode number in digits and I’ll take you to show notes and all the links are there. So thank you again, Tracy. Taking time out of your busy schedule. Really appreciate it.

Tracy Sheen [00:42:31]:
Thank you, Scott. It’s been great.