Bryan Schielke 0:00

All right. Well thanks again for joining John. This is uh great and I'm I'm looking forward to chatting with you and and hearing what you have to say today. So I'll jump in and get into this first question here. You often say AI should make people more human, not less. What does that philosophy look like in practice for today's business leaders?

Jon Cheney 0:16

Yeah, you know, a lot of people think that AI is gonna come in and take all of our jobs. And I think it will take some jobs. But it's gonna take the jobs that we don't want to do, right? Like as a very basic example that I've used in the past, right? If you're flipping burgers at McDonald's, right, this repetitive task, you know, what is the flipping burgers equivalent at at your business, right? Something that's repetitive, mundane. You're not learning anything by doing it again over and over and thousands of times, right? Let's let robots do robotic things, is what I'm saying, right? And that allows us to spend more time talking to people, right? Talking to customers and really developing relationships. And I think that, you know, AI, there's a lot of people that look at it and say, oh, well, AI can make music and AI can make videos and AI can write code and it can do all these things. And so humans won't be needed for that anymore. No, no. There's no value to any of the things that AI is building there if there's no humans to consume them, or maybe just as important, if not more important, more humans to push them and promote them and have them actually go and accomplish a purpose, right? I don't believe that we're going to have a future where AI is just doing what it wants to do for itself, right? Ultimately, AI serves humanity. And if harnessed correctly, you can have it serve you too.

Bryan Schielke 1:32

Totally agree. I love that. That makes sense. You've built multiple technology companies, had a successful exit, and now lead an organization dedicated to AI adoption. What surprised you the most about how businesses are approaching AI today?

Jon Cheney 1:45

I think most businesses think they're approaching AI, and they're not really. They're still using AI like it was presented to them two or three years ago when ChatGPT first came out, right? They're still sitting there just, hey, I'm gonna ask it to do this, it's gonna answer, I'm gonna say I don't like that, change it, and you're gonna argue with it for a minute, etc. And you know, that is AI usage. You are talking to, you know, AI frontier models and things like that, maybe, or maybe you're using the free version of ChatGPT. But but the reality is AI is so much more than that. Today, AI is a genetic systems that work for you. Right now, I'm sitting here, you know, talking to you, Brian, and work is getting done in my company by AI agents, right? They are working for me. And I have people working for me also, that's cool, right? But I have agents that are just doing things, that are monitoring everything that I'm doing, that are, you know, following up and doing tasks that it knows I need to be doing. I've got a computer sitting right here that, you know, it's it's building something right now for me. It'll be working for the next hour, hour and a half until it asks me another question. But you can actually put AI to work for you, right, at this point. And that's that's where I think a lot of people are missing out, at least on the opportunities. I am today easily 10 to 20 times. Like if you look at the number of tasks I can complete in a day, I'm doing 10 to 20 times today what I was, you know, three years ago. And that's crazy, right? When you really think about that. That's a thousand to two thousand percent increase in productivity, right? And I'm also doing things, by the way. I have to say this. I'm also doing things that I have no business doing, that I would have no business doing three or four years ago, right? Like legal work. I'm doing coding. I'm not a coder, I don't know how to develop code. I'm building a game. I'm actually on this computer right now, I'm I'm actually building a video game right now that is kind of a factory-building game. It's kind of fun, just to see if I can do it, right? I'm gonna build it, I'm gonna publish it to Steam, and I'm gonna make a million bucks with it. I'm gonna see if I can actually build a real high quality game solo with my AI, right? And that's that's just so, I don't know, for me enabling. Anything I think of, I can just do it, right? And AI fills in the gaps. And and so many people are still using Chat GPT as just a replacement for Google, and that's cool, it's good. Keep doing that. But man, push that thing, push that thing farther, and now you're really using AI.

Bryan Schielke 4:11

I love that. Yeah, that's no limits, right? Do whatever you want to do with it. That's so cool. All right, perfect, great answer. Well, let's uh jump into the next one here. Many leaders think adopting AI means buying the latest tools. Why do you believe strategy matters far more than technology itself?

Jon Cheney 4:28

Yeah, I mean, I was just talking about this, right? You can buy a tool and put it in front of them, but if they don't know what to do with it or don't even know what's possible, right? They're still just sitting there in that use case they've been doing for the last few years of just asking questions and waiting for an answer, then they're not going to get out of it, right? What the company hopes they'll get out of it. The reality is that they're probably just adding cost instead of actually, you know, doing something, moving something, moving the needle in a way that's going to make them more money or save them money because things are actually getting done faster. Now, I think I think a lot of people have figured out how, okay, I can write an email faster now, or maybe I can analyze a document, right? Or, or, you know, hey, I wonder what this legal document really says, or hey, maybe it can give me an idea on how to get out of some contract with a cell phone provider or a gym that they don't want to pay for anymore. Whatever it is. And and people have figured out some of those basic things here. But what really moves the needle out of business is not just the tool, it's the leadership, right? It's the people at the top that are saying, okay, here's what I want you to accomplish. You know, one thing I'd love to do when we work with companies and I go in and work with them, or a team heads in, and you know, one of the things we'll challenge the CEO to do, we don't want the invitation to come from us. We want the challenge and invitation to come from the CEO to say, all right, I want you to use AI to completely replace your job. I want you to figure out, each of you in this company, how can AI do your entire job so that you could sit at home and your job still gets done? If you can figure that out, you're gonna get a raise, you're gonna be put in charge, you're gonna become the manager, you're gonna become all these, whatever, right? It's gonna open up opportunities. The people that take it seriously and figure it out, you will be the new leaders of the company. If you don't and you sit back and you want to let other people do it, that's fine. But you know, you're not guaranteeing that you're gonna have a spot in this new economy. You have to step up. There is individual responsibility here. And, you know, if five different people on a team of five figure out how to replace their jobs in all different ways or they all work together to do it, and great, that's amazing, right? But go and do this. Go and figure out how to do this because we have to operate like this, or else we're gonna get beat by others. And so that kind of leadership, that kind of bold invitation is something that really wakes people up to say, okay, this is real, this is here. I need to pay attention.

Bryan Schielke 6:47

Absolutely. That's fantastic. Yep, it starts at the top for sure. Love that. All right. Let's jump into the next one here. You're helping companies become AI first organizations. What are the biggest mistakes you see businesses make when trying to integrate AI into their operations?

Jon Cheney 7:02

Well, I think a lot of people don't know what AI first means, right? They're like, okay, well, am I asking ChatGPT to answer a question, or am I just approaching a task in a totally different way that wasn't even possible before, right? You know, I was just talking earlier about how I'm building a video game just to see if I can, right? And that's because I know what AI is capable of, right? I know what it can do. And so that's one of the first steps. You got to know what it can do so that you can think AI first so that it does actually impact your operations. Here's an example. The other day I was sitting there with my team and I was thinking through this business model that we wanted to just kind of, you know, explore and say, okay, what what kind of impact is this really going to have to our bottom line? What how much more money can we make with this? What does this really mean? And I was sitting there building, you know, a little financial model in Sheets on Google Sheets, right? Just a spreadsheet. And I caught myself. I was like, what the heck am I doing? And so I instead opened up a tool called Replit, which is just a vibe coding platform. And I gave it, I said, hey, this is what I'm trying to think through. This is what we're working on. Here are the variables I want to think through. And there's probably a couple more, but I need a give me a little piece of software or a web page here that will allow me to have dials and sliders and things that I can test different levels of assumptions and things like that. And it's like, I got you. I know what's going on here. And two minutes later, boom, I had this website up that was showing, you know, infinite variability in instantaneous views of like, oh, yeah, this is what it does, you know, moving the curves and showing the profitability and all these different things and all this crazy cool business stuff that, yeah, I know because I've run a business for many years and I know there's lots of other people out there that are better than me at even figuring those things out. Guess what? I'm gonna beat them, those people that are even smarter than me, because I can use AI to make a tool that knows it even better, and then I can instantaneously have a tool that I can use. And then if I need to push out a financial model, you know, a CFO is gonna enjoy looking at, then I can totally have the AI do that as well. I can totally do that. But the reality is thinking AI first or AI natively is knowing, okay, I need to approach this problem where I need I have this task that's gonna take me eight hours. Well, maybe I can build a system that can do the task for me in 20 minutes. And I'm gonna take 30 minutes to build that system, and then it's gonna do the job for me in 20 minutes. And instead of eight hours, I only took one hour, right? There's real savings, there's real operations. And then maybe that tool becomes something that you use every day, every week, every month, when you're closing something out, when you're running commissions reports, whatever it is, right? Stop doing things the way you were doing them in 2004. Change. You have to know what's possible, and you have to actually say, okay, is there a system we can build here? AI has completely flipped the script on software. Of course, you wouldn't take time to go build your own commissions report or your own little financial modeling software, you know, for some random business case that you're thinking about. And of course you wouldn't do that in 2020, right? Because it was going to cost too much. You'd have to go pay software developers. It would take a month to get it pulled together and it wouldn't work and have to be updated and maintained and all these things. Now you can build software in five minutes, right? By just explaining it in the same way that you would talk to your 10-year-old about something. And it will build something that's completely useful, absolutely something that can move the needle in your operations today. And so you have to, you have to again learn what's possible and then start doing it and just say, okay, this is how we do things now. This is the new way to do it. If we're not doing this, we're wasting time.

Bryan Schielke 10:33

That's absolutely true. Yeah, the acceleration is unbelievable. Love that. All right. All right, let's hit the next one here. You frequently talk about protecting human agency in an AI-driven world. How can leaders embrace automation without losing creativity, critical thinking, and meaningful human connection?

Jon Cheney 10:50

I mean, that's all that we have left, right? Is those things. Creativity and human connection. AI can't do those things. AI can't even really be creative, right? You have to be the creative one. You're the creative director, right? What AI does is it, you know, it gets all the little worker bees that put it together, that build that 3D model. And actually, you know, if you come up with an idea for a 3D model, hey, I need this character that does this, you know, for you know, for my game example, right? Then AI can actually go and do that, right? And so you don't need the skills, the technical skills, or even to hire people that do the busy work anymore. That's what I'm saying in the beginning, right? Get rid of the busy work and you get to sit above all of that and be the creative director and then direct all these different agents and things to do things for you. And that is still an amazing creative process, right? Being able to create with words is pretty cool. That is a, some may say, godlike power, right? You read Genesis chapter one, he's creating with words, right? And if you really believe that, and I do, then this is we are just, you know, scratching the surface. We obviously can't create worlds yet, but we can we can create emails and we can create websites and PowerPoints and images and videos, and heck, maybe even a video game and even music, right? I'm a musician, right? And I and holy cow, I can do so much more with AI, right? And I'm a good musician. I have many albums. You can go look me up on Spotify and all these things. I I publish piano books. I've my entire life I've played the piano and I'm really, really good. But what AI enables me to do is create and iterate faster and even try new things that previously would have taken me a week of work of slogging through, writing this down, and I wonder what this sounds like and sequencing all these things together. I could just say, hey, throw this in and do this and try this kind of angle. Oh my gosh, that actually does sound amazing. That's so cool, right? And even from a fun creative standpoint, you know, I took, and I'm making a little video on this right now because it's so it's on my mind, but I uh love the music from Jurassic Park, and I also love jazz music. And so I recorded myself playing a little, just kind of my own little version of Jurassic Park. And then I took that, uploaded it into a program called Suno. Suno that and I said, hey, you know, turn this into like a kind of more jazzy arrangement, whatever, and and you know, add some drums and add some bass and add this and whatever. So I kind of gave it some creative direction, right? And it came out and it's just like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. And then even if I never put that out anywhere, obviously I, you know, John Williams owns the copyright to that. I can't, I can't go publish that as my own work. I can potentially publish it as an arrangement of that. But but what I could do is I was able to in Suno then take the piano piece, extract what's called a MIDI file, right? Which is just all the information, the notes that are assigned to that that a computer can read. And then I opened it up in orchestration and, you know, so that I can actually have the sheet music. So now I have this amazing new piece of sheet music that I can learn. And I can, you know, obviously I can, I'm good enough to sit down and just listen, listen to it and figure it out on my own. But I can now take that and I have got this brand new piece of sheet music that's totally original. It absolutely was built with my inspiration. It was built based on my playing and performance of the song that I then had it just turn into a little bit more jazzy idea and gives me some chords. And honestly, I can continue learning, even though I am an expert level top 0.1% pianist in the world. I can continue learning and AI can help me become a better pianist. And I can have tons of fun playing this new cool jazz arrangement, and I can be human, right? And I can, I can retain my agency of going and building and doing what I want to do with it. But AI, again, gets rid of the drudgery. One thing that I just cannot wait for AI to be able to do, no software can do this yet, and it's really difficult, is I compose music, right? And I just want to be able to sit down, compose it, and then boom, the sheet music is just done. And it just works. And there's a lot of reasons why computers can't do this. You would think it's easy because it's just note duration and whatever, but I want it to be able to listen and I want it to be able to maybe you have to upload a video so it can see where my hands are because sometimes they cross or maybe they move up here or whatever happens. And anyway, long story short, I believe that AI can enable us to do just so much more and allow us to be human in ways that AI can only dream of doing.

Bryan Schielke 15:12

That's unbelievable. What a fantastic example. That is so cool. That is very cool. And yes, I will definitely go and look up some of your music for sure. That's awesome. Uh, that is definitely a skill that I do not have, but I enjoy my music, so I like it. All right. Uh last question here. Looking ahead five years, what do you believe will separate the companies that thrive because of AI from the ones that get left behind?

Jon Cheney 15:36

Yeah, I mean, it's just a matter of getting started. You just gotta do it, right? You can hire someone like me to go and help you, and we do that. We work with hundreds of companies and help them figure out AI. But the reality is, whether you hire me or not, you gotta do something. You just gotta get started. And not only that, you gotta push it. You gotta push AI until it breaks, right? Because if it hasn't broken yet, you haven't pushed it far enough. I'm a whitewater kayaker, love, love going, and and I'm a I'm pretty good at that too. I'm class five and I can get into big gorges, big things, and you know, I'll go kayaking some days and and I won't tip over one time, right? And what I know is that okay, I'm pretty good, but I also know that I didn't push myself hard enough. Right. A lot of people are like, oh, I'm trying to go down. I didn't even roll today. I didn't even, you know, whatever. But the reality is when you roll, it means, hey, you hit something that you weren't you weren't comfortable with. You did something wrong. And whenever I roll, if I can, right, I'll go back up and I'll try to do that again. I'll be like, okay, I'm gonna try that move again. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit that eddy, or next time I'm coming down, I'm gonna try that again until I can get it right, and then I'm gonna push myself to the next level. And I don't know, for me, I find it the most joy in life when I'm progressing. If I'm just I go and I golf and I just hit every shot perfectly, and you know, it feels cool for the moment, maybe, but what I really like is, man, I have been trying to par this hole for years. I haven't been able to do it. I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna try this different approach, I'm gonna switch clubs here, and I'm gonna whatever it is, right? And eventually you nail it, it feels good. That progression feels good. And so you can't, but you can't reach that progression if you're not pushing yourself or trying new things. And so go in, break things, make mistakes, run into walls, and learn how to go around it. But if you do that, you will just learn. I've done that for years, and again, that's why it's put me in a position to be able to help companies do that at scale. But yeah, I just I think the the difference between the companies that are going to be around and not be around, right? Go the way of Blockbuster, right? There's gonna be lots of companies that just say, you know what, I'm I've I've been doing this for 15 years. I've been working, my business has been fine for 25 years, I'm just gonna do it, right? I don't care if you're a plumbing business. You know what would happen today if I was starting a plumbing business? I would start from the very beginning, AI native. By the way, I know nothing about plumbing, and I'll eat your lunch if you're a plumbing company, because I can do it with AI. I won't have any staff handling any invoicing. I will barely have any customer service staff, but I will give my customers unbelievable customer service because AI is going to do it all. I'm gonna have agents taking phone calls, I'm gonna have agents sending emails, there's gonna be automatic notifications everywhere. And because my overhead costs are $100,000 a month less than yours, I get to charge less and still make money. And if I can charge less, produce a great product, and still make money, I'm gonna beat out my competitors, right? And so those that figure out AI are gonna be the ones that are on top, those that just sit around and say, eh, I'm just gonna keep doing it my way. That's fine. But it is a decision that you're making to not progress. And because you're not progressing, you will regress.

Bryan Schielke 18:39

100%. And it seems pretty obvious, but yeah, you're right. There's still a lot of people that haven't or sort of woken up to that yet. So we'll see how that goes.