In this episode of Innovators Inside Podcast, Ian Bergman speaks with Geoff McQueen, Founder and CEO of WorkSights AI, about how artificial intelligence is changing the way businesses operate, make decisions, and lead teams.

Geoff is a serial entrepreneur who has built and exited multiple companies, including a platform that helped thousands of professional services businesses manage client work, workflow, and operations. Now, with WorkSights AI, he is focused on a new opportunity: using AI to help businesses understand what is really happening across the organization.

The conversation moves beyond the usual discussion of AI productivity tools and automation. Instead, Ian and Geoff explore a bigger shift: AI as a company-wide intelligence layer that can help founders, operators, and innovation leaders make better decisions, support their teams, and compete in a faster-moving market.

Here are the five key takeaways from their conversation:

1. AI in business is moving beyond individual productivity

Many companies are already using AI at the individual level. Employees use tools like ChatGPT to summarize documents, write emails, review legal agreements, research topics, and speed up daily tasks.

Geoff sees this as the first phase of AI in business. It is useful, powerful, and already well underway. But it is not the full story.

When 50 or 100 people inside a company each use AI individually, the organization becomes more productive. But the business itself does not necessarily become more intelligent. Each person may have their own AI assistant, but the company still lacks a shared understanding of what is happening across teams, clients, projects, and operations.

That is where Geoff believes the next major opportunity begins.

For business leaders, the lesson is clear: individual AI productivity is valuable, but it should not be the end goal. The real opportunity is to ask how AI can improve the organization as a whole.

2. The next wave of AI will reshape workflows and operations

The second phase Geoff describes is AI-driven workflow automation. This is where AI agents begin to handle specific tasks, processes, and functions inside a business.

Examples might include customer support, helpdesk workflows, internal operations, reporting, or other repeatable business processes. In some cases, AI may complete work faster or more consistently than humans. In others, it may free people from repetitive tasks so they can focus on higher-value work.

But Geoff is also realistic about the risks. He expects the AI agent and workflow automation space to go through hype, disappointment, experimentation, and disruption. Companies will invest heavily, some projects will fail, and the labor implications will create real tension.

For founders and operators, the takeaway is not to avoid AI workflow automation. It is to approach it with clarity. Leaders need to understand which workflows are truly ready for automation, where human judgment still matters, and how to manage the organizational impact of these changes.

3. Organizational intelligence may be the third wave of AI

The biggest idea in the episode is Geoff’s third phase of AI: organizational intelligence.

Instead of thinking about AI as a tool for individuals or a way to automate isolated workflows, Geoff argues that AI can serve the business as a whole. This means connecting company context, digital signals, audit logs, workflows, and activity across systems to help leaders understand what is really happening inside the organization.

Most companies already create enormous amounts of digital information. Documents are edited. Calendar events are created. CRM records are updated. Projects move forward. Clients receive attention. Issues emerge. But much of this activity is invisible unless someone manually looks for it.

Geoff’s vision is that AI can read and interpret these signals, then surface useful insights for managers and executives.

This is not about replacing leaders. It is about giving them better visibility.

For innovation leaders, this shift matters because it changes the role of AI from a task tool to a decision-support layer. The companies that learn to use organizational intelligence well may be able to move faster, identify problems earlier, and make better strategic decisions.

4.  Dashboards do not tell the whole story

One of the strongest points in the conversation is Geoff’s critique of dashboards.

Dashboards are useful, but they are limited. They show numbers, trends, and outcomes. But they rarely explain the full story behind what is happening.

When a dashboard shows that something is wrong, leaders usually start asking qualitative questions:

Why did this happen?
Who has context?
What changed?
Which client, team, or process is involved?
What is the narrative behind the number?

Geoff argues that most of the information that moves a business forward is qualitative. It lives in context, activity, communication, behavior, and patterns. Numbers matter, but they are often only the result of deeper dynamics inside the company.

AI can help by reading across business activity and surfacing the qualitative story that leaders often struggle to find.

For founders and operators, the practical lesson is simple: do not rely only on dashboards. The best decisions come from combining quantitative data with qualitative context.

5. Managers will need to become better coaches and entrepreneurial leaders

Geoff believes AI will change what it means to be a manager.

Many managers today spend too much time coordinating, communicating updates, and sitting in meetings just to understand what is going on. This limits their ability to coach, solve problems, support their teams, and lead strategically.

With better AI-powered visibility, managers may be able to enter conversations already informed. Instead of asking a direct report for a basic update, they can ask better questions:

What is blocking you?
How can I help?
Why is this project taking more attention?
What do we need to solve before this becomes a bigger issue?

This shifts management from status collection to coaching and problem-solving.

Geoff also believes that entrepreneurial leaders will have an advantage in the AI era. As AI makes it faster and cheaper to build, execute, and test ideas, companies that empower entrepreneurial thinking will be better positioned to compete. Organizations that stay rigid, political, and overly focused on traditional management structures may be disrupted more quickly.

For leaders, the message is clear: AI will not remove the need for human judgment. It will raise the bar for it.

Final Thoughts

AI is making it easier than ever to build products, analyze information, and automate work. But Geoff makes an important point: easier building does not mean easier business.

Entrepreneurs still need focus, customer understanding, strong go-to-market execution, and deep knowledge of what they are creating. In fact, as more people gain access to powerful AI tools, the market may become noisier and more competitive.

That means the winners will not simply be the people using AI. The winners will be the people using AI with judgment, context, and a clear understanding of the problem they are solving.

For founders, operators, and innovation leaders, this episode offers a practical and forward-looking view of AI’s role in business. It is not just about productivity. It is about visibility, decision-making, leadership, and the future structure of work.

As AI continues to evolve, the most important question may not be, “How can this tool help me work faster?”
It may be, “How can AI help the whole organization become smarter?”

Have a question for a future guest? Email us at innovators@alchemistaccelerator.com to get in touch! 

Timestamps

🧠 00:00 Welcome to Innovators Inside

👋 01:22 Meet Geoff McQueen, Founder and CEO of WorkSights AI

🤖 04:57 The three waves of AI in business

🧩 09:38 Using digital signals to understand what is happening inside a company

👀 13:27 Why AI should support leaders, not replace human judgment

🧠 15:14 How AI can surface insights without hallucination

🏀 17:17 The NBA coach metaphor for modern management

👥 21:26 What AI adoption looks like inside organizations

⏳ 25:28 Where AI adoption is heading next

🛫 28:10 Why leaders need a new mental model for organizational AI

📖 31:34 Why qualitative context matters more than numbers alone

🧑‍💼 33:22 How AI changes the future of managers and leaders

⚡ 35:09 Why entrepreneurial leaders will have the advantage

🏚️ 37:05 How incumbents can be disrupted faster than ever

🛠️ 39:33 How AI helps small teams build faster and cheaper

🚀 41:35 Why now is the best time to be entrepreneurial

🧭 46:26 Why AI should amplify human intelligence, not replace it

Full Transcript:

00:01:00:14 - 00:01:02:02
Ian Bergman
Welcome to innovators inside.

00:01:02:07 - 00:01:03:09
Geoff McQueen
Great to be here.

00:01:03:11 - 00:01:20:13
Ian Bergman
Yeah, well, it's exciting to have you on the pond. It's exciting to meet you. We've got a serial entrepreneur who's got some big ideas around innovation in organizations and enterprises writ large. And I'm pretty excited to learn about. What do you think you're ready to kind of dig in?

00:01:20:14 - 00:01:22:20
Geoff McQueen
I'd love to. Man. Let's go.

00:01:22:22 - 00:01:46:03
Ian Bergman
Amazing. So for folks that don't know you, you know, really pleased to welcome Daphne Queen, founder and CEO of the what sites AI. Yeah. You know, tell me a bit about your story. Tell me a bit about how you came to be sitting here, you know, on the podcast talking about innovation of what it means in the world.

00:01:46:04 - 00:01:55:03
Geoff McQueen
Yeah. No. Great speaking man. So I'm a serial entrepreneur, which is another polite way of saying professionally unemployable. I've started.

00:01:55:05 - 00:01:56:11
Ian Bergman
It's a compliment.

00:01:56:14 - 00:02:21:19
Geoff McQueen
Yeah, yeah. I'm okay with it. So, yeah. Started for companies now. And most recent one, I exited my third company. I exited a couple of years ago. It was a platform for managing all of the client work in a professional service business, and over the years got the real pleasure and privilege to work with about 4000 businesses, mostly subs, including some really big names and and so got to understand sort of how they worked.

00:02:21:20 - 00:02:45:03
Geoff McQueen
Workflow was very central to the product, you know, making sure that the great works of their clients and profitable basis. It sounds boring, but frankly, it's kind of like where it's all at from a business point of view. And so yeah, it was great to be able to, to help so many companies to really sort of streamline and systemize their operations in this critical but often back office stuff.

00:02:45:03 - 00:03:07:08
Geoff McQueen
And after exiting that company took a little bit of time and then decided to get back into the game because some glutton for punishment and started a new company called Work Sites AI, which is a that's the name suggests an AI platform, but it's really a continuation in some respects of my professional life work, which has been to use technology because over very much in the gig and I love it.

00:03:07:10 - 00:03:31:07
Geoff McQueen
But using technology to help the people running businesses to to be more successful and to create more successful and prosperous businesses, because I believe that, you know, being a father and, you know, I've got three young kids now, I care more about the future than I probably did before that. And I just look at, you know, what is what is future prosperity for our communities and our societies look like.

00:03:31:08 - 00:03:55:02
Geoff McQueen
And I think businesses and entrepreneurs play the critical role in creating that future prosperity. And so my, my sort of, I guess focus is to apply, create and apply technology to help those people that are already giving it their all to, to build in scale businesses. I want to help them to be more successful at doing it where possible.

00:03:55:03 - 00:04:18:14
Ian Bergman
And that's awesome. And I think it's a really good jumping off point for our conversation. Right? Because like as we record this, we can reach our hand out to any random headline, pull it out of the air, and more likely than not, it's going to be some question scare story, you know, aspirational sci fi statement about what AI is doing in our lives.

00:04:18:14 - 00:04:41:25
Ian Bergman
And let's let's be clear, like you're talking about helping people do their best work, but they're doing it in an environment that's actually changing around them pretty quickly and in some cases, pretty fundamentally, where jobs that have had significant enterprise value for mentally of the year seem like they're on shaken ground. So, you know, to to get started.

00:04:41:27 - 00:04:56:29
Ian Bergman
What what you see in the world that caused you to say not just I want to jump back into entrepreneurship, but this is the problem I want to tackle. What are the macro trends? What's the future? Your vision just kind of like your process there?

00:04:57:05 - 00:05:28:10
Geoff McQueen
Yeah. So when I was when I was getting back into it, I sort of looked at the AI for business landscape because that's my lens, right? And the first part of it was, I think of it like three legs of a stool, if you want to try and have that metaphor. And so the first leg of the store or the first phase, or whatever you want to call it was, was really that using AI in a business or a workplace context as an individual?

00:05:28:11 - 00:05:47:27
Geoff McQueen
So, you know, I was having to go through some legal agreements as one does, and instead of sitting there with a 60 page agreement and wishing I drank coffee instead, I was able to load it up into check GPT and say, hey, I'm looking at this, this and this. Can you let me know what looks like market terms, where the edges are?

00:05:47:28 - 00:05:51:14
Geoff McQueen
And of course it came back in, did an amazing job.

00:05:51:15 - 00:06:04:21
Ian Bergman
This first leg of the things we're all familiar with, right. Like review the documents, produce the content, copy, edit me, do the search. You know, give my email. Super important. But as you said, individually empowering.

00:06:04:22 - 00:06:33:22
Geoff McQueen
Very individually empowering. And what I realized in a business context was that like 50 or 100 people, getting that individual benefit is still transformative and really important. But in a sense, it's not the whole story. And so then you look at the next leg of the stool, and I think it's going to be an area where there's a lot of disruption, which is around workflow in agents, where you can effectively do like what farmers used to do.

00:06:33:23 - 00:07:01:26
Geoff McQueen
You know, they used to get around with the plow and a bunch of oxen and, you know, farm hands and power field. And now they sit there and enjoyed the tractor that drives itself, and they produce ten times more food than they ever did. And don't break a sweat. And so, like, there is an aspect of this next phase where parts of a possible workflow, whether it's helpdesk and support related or other things where the AI can actually do the, you know, an almost as good, if sometimes better job than a person can do.

00:07:01:26 - 00:07:16:17
Geoff McQueen
And and that that's agency can workflow stuff, which is very much focused on doing particular tasks or particular functions. And so that's the second leg of the stool, this kind of workflow automation. And and frankly, a lot of it is, is going to be lever replacing.

00:07:16:19 - 00:07:36:04
Ian Bergman
Yeah. So we have the individual empowerment which you know, we feel like sometimes we fear is later on the timing sometimes not. But really there's like just tools that we have in our tool that we have the workflow which yes, can be absolutely labor replacing freed people up to do else. What's the third leg of the stool.

00:07:36:07 - 00:08:01:07
Geoff McQueen
So the negative stool is like it's the one that is the least defined in my opinion. And that is instead of treating the business is just a collection of individuals using this stuff or a series of disparate workflows that are just doing their thing. Instead, it's actually looking at the business and AI, empowering the business as the as the customer, as the user, or as the entity of focus.

00:08:01:09 - 00:08:20:28
Geoff McQueen
Because if you think about something like open claw rolling out, you know, 100 open core instances, one for each employee that connects to each of their own OAuth kind of integrations doesn't really give the business overclock. It doesn't give the business that AI system. You really need to flip on its head and focus on the system.

00:08:20:29 - 00:08:23:23
Ian Bergman
Yeah. So that individual teller. Yeah, yeah.

00:08:23:26 - 00:08:47:17
Geoff McQueen
And so this third leg of the stool is what I'm focusing on with worksites, AI, which is where all of the data, all of the context, all of the agents, all of the insights are focused on the business as a whole. And then the leaders and the individuals in that business get to be beneficiaries of that kind of holistic view.

00:08:47:20 - 00:09:02:28
Geoff McQueen
But it's focused initially on the on the sort of the company as the core or the the center of it. So it's like the brain for a business that is AI enabled, as opposed to each of us having our own little exoskeleton individually or the workflow going a bit faster.

00:09:03:01 - 00:09:20:29
Ian Bergman
But this is cool. I mean, on one hand, I am incredibly intellectually engaged and breed right? Like, this is such a neat concept. On the other hand, it's a little tough for me to wrap my head around what it means to think of an entity or organization of the customer user. But like one thought occurs to me, right?

00:09:21:01 - 00:09:37:29
Ian Bergman
I'm always fascinated by how much knowledge exists at the intersection of human conversation within an organization, right? It's never captured in the data set, but it kind of exists as people have a meeting and discuss. I mean, is that what we're talking about? Like, what are we? What are we talking about here?

00:09:38:02 - 00:10:14:09
Geoff McQueen
It's a little bit of that. It actually, funnily enough, it's initially about AI enabling and learning from and creating memory from the things that are already digital but frankly ignored unless the organization gets hacked. So every cloud platform of significance has these things called audit logs or other forms of information that basically can tell you what's going on with documents or calendar events or Sierra updates, like you name it, anything that gets touched creates this, this like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb thing.

00:10:14:09 - 00:10:49:26
Geoff McQueen
Right? And and right now all of that information lives in every cloud products of significance. And no one does anything with it unless they get hacked into the security guys. Use that information, try and work out with the bad guys. Got to and and so what I'm doing with worksites, AI is effectively liberating that information to make it useful to line managers and executives, because knowing what's going on in a business is a big part of what makes leaders effective.

00:10:49:28 - 00:11:22:09
Geoff McQueen
I mean, if you don't know, what's happening is really hard to make good decisions. And today, because there's so much information, we've basically had to create these other ways as humans because we're still running an operating system, i.e. our mental bandwidth is still much unchanged when we came down from the trees. Right. And so our ability to go at the speed and with the bandwidth of all this information that's going on in a company with 50 or 100 employees, that's, you know, like everyone's busy, you just can't keep hold of it.

00:11:22:09 - 00:11:51:28
Geoff McQueen
So instead, what you end up doing is you take all that qualitative insight that happens when each individual person is part of part of doing their work. And you, you end up distilling it down into a couple of KPIs, and you use dashboards to try and understand what's going on. And then when the dashboard isn't quite like something's not right at the dashboard, the first thing you do is you call a meeting because you know that the dashboard is is just like a poor imitation of reality.

00:11:52:01 - 00:12:18:10
Geoff McQueen
The reality is in the qualitative information. So then you have a meeting to understand from different people who've got insights and knowledge what that qualitative story is. And it turns out that if you take that, that information that's already coursing through every business today in its digital fashion, not even having to, like, try and get to that kind of just conversations in a whole way, stuff which is great, but also really hard.

00:12:18:11 - 00:12:38:26
Geoff McQueen
Instead, you can use the stuff that's already there and then AI enable that. So imagine, you know, imagine you had enough time in the day to see what was going on in the air, at the clients that were getting the most amount of attention, things that were going sideways, things that were going well, like imagine hypothetically, you had that time.

00:12:38:28 - 00:12:56:05
Ian Bergman
The dream as a, as a, as a leader, the dream. But but and I, I mean I feel was pain like you know, I don't the organization I wasn't even all that large. But there's, you know, orders of magnitude more complexity and activity than I could ever and then set on so, so that the promise is a bit of a dream.

00:12:56:05 - 00:13:16:07
Ian Bergman
But, you know, there's I have interesting questions around here. I'm going to come back to the whole world, going to AI on behalf of the business. It felt as an entity in a second, as a whole, radical going to go down. I want to start with this one because the business have to be functioning well. Or do you presume that?

00:13:16:09 - 00:13:27:07
Ian Bergman
Tell me about that. Because. Because what I hear is like, okay, we make an analysis in a digital twin, and that becomes the brain that that assumes that whatever is actually happening is the right thing to be happening in the business.

00:13:27:13 - 00:13:49:21
Geoff McQueen
So surely this is no. And this is where, you know, give my fellow technologists a hard time. I think this is one thing that just drive me mad is we think, okay, technology can help and therefore we extend it and think that technology has to do all of the solution. The technology is the answer to everything. And it's like, not really.

00:13:49:21 - 00:14:34:07
Geoff McQueen
So the technology can help to improve that, that visibility and create those insights for the humans who are the creative, who are the problem solving, who have the social capital amongst the organization or with partners outside the organization, like the people aren't the problem. The problem is that the amount of information and the speed that the business is moving, and this is only getting worse with whether it's you call it AI slop or whatever, it's it is our our wet matter hasn't been able to keep up with this from before the days of email and and so the the objective that I'm seeing here with AI enabling the company is what you do, is you

00:14:34:07 - 00:14:53:22
Geoff McQueen
effectively start to give the leaders and the managers and the people doing the work, that insight and visibility as a as a tool that helps them to actually keep up for the first time instead of being an arms race where first there was email and then there was slack, and now there's, you know, all the all the AI.

00:14:53:25 - 00:15:14:26
Geoff McQueen
And we're constantly limited from a capability point of view as leaders to have visibility and understanding of what's going on. Instead, we're actually, for the first time, AI can actually understand this torrent of information and can distill it and do the hard work of reading, but none of us have the time to do and then can give us insights and be be helpful to us.

00:15:14:27 - 00:15:34:04
Geoff McQueen
And so what I've been seeing in the product and in reality, with the data that we're now working across dozens of beta accounts and, you know, 10 million records, what's really interesting is you get the outer read all this stuff, and then you tell it with skills what you want it to do. So you give it a persona and you tell it what you are aiming for.

00:15:34:04 - 00:15:59:19
Geoff McQueen
And then as it reads it, it goes, Here's something that's a little bit off to the side. I should probably bring to the attention of my executive, or my leader or my master, and then it basically sends you that information distilled. And when you want to go back and check the receipts, you can it's not hallucination land, but you're not having to do all of the initial kind of, you know, discovery.

00:15:59:19 - 00:16:04:07
Geoff McQueen
So the AI can do all of that for you. And that is the unlock. That's the mental unlock.

00:16:04:08 - 00:16:33:17
Ian Bergman
I mean, you got your little birdies out there, you know, your Westeros, the spy network, but also directed insight and like, you know, you you kind of headed off my next question, which is, hey, if you're creating something on behalf of the organization at this third pillar of AI is your organization, who's actually the customer, right. Because I think, I think right now you're praying into that as well as the leaders and managers, the people that steer the organization.

00:16:33:20 - 00:17:09:27
Ian Bergman
But, you know, to that end, I love the I love the idea as a leader that I can have, you know, more directed insight into activities. What's going well, I can send out an agent to sort of ask announcer questions. Right. This is extraordinarily appealing. And I want everything that you just described. I also have some really big questions around what this implies for how we need to change as managers and as leaders, right.

00:17:09:28 - 00:17:17:21
Ian Bergman
Because this isn't just a tool in the tool belt. This feels like a very different way of running a company. Right? Might emerge.

00:17:17:23 - 00:17:40:29
Geoff McQueen
Yeah, I think you're right. And so I'm an MBA fan, and I spent years living in the Bay area and watching Steph and Clay and and particularly watching Steve Kerr, the coach, really actively coaching that team and all coaches do. But there was something I think was special about watching him on the bench, just, you know, really being a part of it.

00:17:40:29 - 00:18:12:29
Geoff McQueen
And and I just I think about what it's like to lead a company or to be a manager, even if it's just a team of 2 or 3 people. And imagine that those NBA coaches, instead of standing there on the sideline and watching every play and and really being involved, but not on the court physically. Imagine instead, Steve Kerr was sitting in the locker room staring at the box score on his phone, and then the whistle goes for a timeout and he runs out of the court and he sits in the huddle and he goes around.

00:18:13:00 - 00:18:30:22
Geoff McQueen
He goes. Draymond noticed he got two turnovers because he's seen it on his little dashboard right. And Steph I can see you're a bit cold beyond the arc. And it should be. Maybe you get the ball a little bit more into Clay's hands because because he's he's running a bit hotter today. Your team would look at you like what business have you got being a coach?

00:18:30:23 - 00:19:02:10
Geoff McQueen
Why would I listen to you? You're not part of this. Like you're sitting there looking at a freaking box score, not watching the game. And I feel I feel so, like, frustrated for great managers who want to be great coaches and developers of their team in their talent. But they're sitting there, particularly in a distributed or remote world where they're stuck looking at dashboards like the box score in the locker room instead of actually being part of it with their team.

00:19:02:10 - 00:19:23:22
Geoff McQueen
And so the idea of this, this technology being able to finally catch up the speed our web matter can work at with the speed that the business is running at, so that we can then sit in a conversation and already know what's been happening. So then we can be a coach, we can be a problem solver, and we can be a leader.

00:19:23:22 - 00:19:44:10
Geoff McQueen
Whereas most managers today spend most of their time in meetings and God hate the meetings. And yet what are they doing in that meeting? They're communicating either up or down and they're coordinating. And it's it's just incredibly frustrating that they go into these these meetings with their teammates. We can go, hey, what's the latest? Let's go around the table.

00:19:44:11 - 00:20:10:17
Geoff McQueen
It's just stupid. And so if we can unlock that human dimension, this is a thing that drives me mad about some of the AI stuff. Yes, there is going to be some aspects where it's like labor replacement with tokens and and that's going to be really hard. I get it, I get it, but I still feel like at the end of the day, we are a society and we are groups of people that work together to solve problems and create things and help our customers.

00:20:10:17 - 00:20:28:14
Geoff McQueen
And if we can unlock those things that make us valuable, special, creative and frankly feel alive in our jobs instead of just moving TPS reports around, then then that feels like something that's really compelling.

00:20:28:15 - 00:20:58:15
Ian Bergman
I'm bought in your story. You're painting a optimistic, humanistic picture, right, of how I can support change and organizations and like it is compelling. It's not just the lovely green background you've got. It's sort of a lull in me into a sense of optimism here. The light blue Devils, that right you are. You are fundamentally painting a picture where that requires significant organizational behavior change.

00:20:58:16 - 00:21:26:19
Ian Bergman
That requires people to do the very hardest thing for any human to do, which is paint patterns and behaviors and think in a different way. Like we may all want to be, you know, player coach managers, but many of us haven't grown up in that environment. To talk to you a bit about what adoption looks like, what changed looks like, and what do you see as the stumbling blocks and accelerants there?

00:21:26:19 - 00:21:32:20
Ian Bergman
Because it has to be more complicated than just saying, hey, I'm going to swipe my credit card, which I say I.

00:21:32:22 - 00:22:03:08
Geoff McQueen
You make a good point and it's something I've obsessed a lot about. So my last company, we change the system of record for how you manage all your clients, your projects, your timesheets, and your billing. Talk about open heart surgery, right? Like transplant, massive change management. And so I definitely know that feeling. And I've been through that now, as I said at the top thousands of times, the exciting thing about this stuff is it doesn't require anywhere near that much brain damage.

00:22:03:13 - 00:22:25:08
Geoff McQueen
So from a technical point of view, nobody has to change what they do. You keep using the tools, you're already using them. Keep working the way you've been working, and the AI is able to understand that without you needing to update the thing even once. So that's really important. Like it's it's there is almost no change management on the tech techie side.

00:22:25:10 - 00:22:45:04
Geoff McQueen
On the human side. The other good news is we're already doing the things that we should be doing, and this just helps you to do them better. So to give you an example, every manager worth their salt should be having a one on one in the calendar on a recurring basis with each of their direct reports.

00:22:45:04 - 00:22:49:17
Ian Bergman
You would think, although I think Jensen Jensen might disagree with you.

00:22:49:20 - 00:23:20:03
Geoff McQueen
Well, Jensen has the he's earned the right to change the rules. Yeah. If you're. Yeah. Let's say you're not Jensen. You're not running a few trillion dollar company, and you have a bunch of people that report to you that you want to make sure that they're they're aligned, that, you know, any issues that come up can be addressed when they're small, you know, get them as molehills, not mountains, those sorts of things.

00:23:20:04 - 00:23:45:27
Geoff McQueen
Right. So you go into this conversations. And unfortunately for a lot of managers, it starts off as being like, hey, so, you know, give me an update on what you've been working on and how things are going. And you know, like, right again, instead, what I've seen with works, say AI is you type into it and I do a bunch of work with one of my team members, Olga, and I'm like, hey, can you just give me a summary of what August been working in the last couple of weeks?

00:23:46:01 - 00:24:06:28
Geoff McQueen
And if I wanted to, I could ask it to give it to me in the lyrics of a country western style, which I've done just for the giggles. And because it already knows from like an overall system point of view. Again, nothing is installed on anyone's computers. There's no like change of behavior. It's just using that security log stuff that everyone already has, and it's amazing.

00:24:06:28 - 00:24:21:17
Geoff McQueen
It's able to be like, okay, this is this is what's been happening. And so then when you go into that conversation, you're not you're not like the NBA coach who runs into the huddle at a time out from the locker room, you actually they're going, oh, notice you've been working on this this and this. That sounds really good.

00:24:21:17 - 00:24:50:19
Geoff McQueen
Is there anything that's holding you up or blocking you or. It looks like this is actually like looks like this is, you know, been a really big project. And, you know, what can I do to help unblock you? You know, those sorts of things. So again, we've already got the techniques and the tools. We've just been effectively in such a massive deficit because of our wet matters operating speed that we've had to just basically suck at it.

00:24:50:20 - 00:25:01:27
Geoff McQueen
And so I don't think there's a huge amount of change. I think all of us know as managers, like cutting Golden Rule and doing to you and be like, hey, Billy, you know, she's been working on such and such. How can I help? It's not that hard.

00:25:01:28 - 00:25:28:28
Ian Bergman
I have to admit, I'm usually such a glass half full. What can I have to admit? I'm perpetually skeptical when it comes to, you know, asking people to think about doing their jobs in a different way, even when they want to. Right. But but, you know, but but that's a, that's a longitudinal that's a time problem. Like it will inevitably shift if, if the world's going in that direction.

00:25:28:28 - 00:25:58:03
Ian Bergman
But let me ask you this. You talked about your street colors. I actually love the framework, the individual orientation, the workflows and then the stuff you talked about. The third pillar, the one you're operating in as being the most amorphous. But what do you think about it from an adoption timeline perspective? Like, is this where organizations are going to go first, or are they going to lean into the workflows and the, you know, support system, things like that, and why?

00:25:58:05 - 00:26:09:13
Geoff McQueen
So the first pillar, where it's an individual experience, is already well underway. So I feel like on a time scale that's that's done. It's not done. But it's, you know, it's underway right.

00:26:09:14 - 00:26:14:28
Ian Bergman
In the beginning. But I take the point, like, this is what people are doing today. Yeah. Yeah.

00:26:15:01 - 00:26:42:08
Geoff McQueen
I think the agents is there's going to be a lot of frustrations, disappointments and false tools. I think the, the, the agent piece is probably the, the furthest kind of on that crazy list of the whether it's the Gartner hype cycle or hype curve or whatever they call it. But that thing where it's like, you know, everyone thinks they're going to have flying cars next week, and then it's.

00:26:42:15 - 00:26:50:28
Ian Bergman
Right, and then you fall into the trough of disillusion, then, you know, hope to crawl out of the end. But if you later, you're already in the hall. Yeah, yeah.

00:26:50:28 - 00:27:20:11
Geoff McQueen
So I just I can see tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars being dropped on AT&T workflow rollouts. And, and there's going to be a lot of missteps and a lot of things that don't work. But that's the nature of experimentation, discovery. It's just that I think that area is going to be an area that's going to be really uncomfortable, because when the underlying economic thesis is we have less humans that we have to employ and and that affects a lot of people.

00:27:20:11 - 00:27:43:01
Geoff McQueen
And so when those initiatives go sideways, there's going to be so many pitchforks ready to go, because people have rightly, you know, got an ax to grind to many tools in the tool shed there. But anyway, you know what I mean? Like that's, that's going to be the area where there's going to be a lot of investment, a lot of hope and, and just a bunch of drama.

00:27:43:01 - 00:28:10:08
Geoff McQueen
And I still feel like that's going to be a massive unlock for for productivity and performance. But it's it's going to be something that's going to play out with a lot more, I guess, drama and it's going to take longer, I think, to actually get a tug together. The third leg of the stool is the most amorphous because it doesn't really have, I think, a lot of a framework we can lean on mentally, right?

00:28:10:09 - 00:28:39:10
Geoff McQueen
Like ChatGPT was a better Google. Like people could kind of get that and then it's used it more. They realize actually this is a lot more than that, but they at least had a mental framing that they could they could grow like type things into a box. That gives me an answer. The workflow piece. I think also you can grok it because you can just look at like people do X, they resolve tickets to Y, you know, whatever it is, you can then just imagine that you've got a machine that can answer those questions instantly.

00:28:39:13 - 00:29:01:10
Geoff McQueen
This third one is more amorphous because the idea that you could actually have technology, that means that instead of being limited to the 60 degrees of what you're looking at right in front of you, you got technology that can be watching the other 300 and then bring to your attention or give you visibility so that you can make better decisions.

00:29:01:15 - 00:29:36:17
Geoff McQueen
It's I mean, probably the metaphor is like what it was probably like for Air Force pilots when they didn't have radar Awacs and it was limited to what they could see. And now one of the most important jobs in the US Air Force is this, you know, controller who effectively tells the F-22 pilots where to go. And those pilots fight to get a particular person as their person because their visibility is unparalleled compared to any particular operator, any, any particular pilot.

00:29:36:17 - 00:30:16:25
Geoff McQueen
And so I feel like that metaphor, that mental framing in business, we just haven't had it, it hasn't been possible. And every technology change that has occurred has made it harder and harder to imagine, because the amount of stuff going on is continued to grow exponentially. And yet our wet matter has not changed. And so I think what's going to be interesting is, as folks, as folks like and literally turning it on as a three click process, like you do the old ground and the systems comes to life because the data is already there, and then you start to like, oh, this is this is new, this is different.

00:30:16:25 - 00:30:28:22
Geoff McQueen
But we don't have a good mental framing for it. So it's I don't know, I describe it sometimes it's like, you know, an army of McKinsey interns costing you a few bucks a day that can basically just, you know, do all of this grunt work.

00:30:28:23 - 00:30:52:28
Ian Bergman
Well, I love that. But I need look like, you know, the, the mythology of the of the executive command center, like, that's not new. Whether it's the star direct bridge or any sci fi that has, you know, scrolling screens and interesting things, you know, like whether it's powered by the dashboard way, the mirrors, you know, like the mythology there is not new.

00:30:52:29 - 00:31:03:04
Ian Bergman
What I think I'm hearing is that technology has perhaps started to catch up to.

00:31:03:07 - 00:31:30:08
Ian Bergman
The situations created by technology, and not just computers, but like telecommunications or anything, you know, in terms of its ability to help the human understand it. And that's actually really interesting because this is executive organizational empowerment is a military name that you're better off that this is actually really interesting because what you're really talking about is helping the decision maker make incredible decisions.

00:31:30:10 - 00:31:34:10
Ian Bergman
And that is I mean, I mean, I want this, I desperately want this.

00:31:34:15 - 00:31:56:03
Geoff McQueen
And most people making decisions and making, I don't know, 100 a day. And most of them are small and not particularly consequential. And the, the I guess the sense that I had going into this process was, you know, whether it's the power BI wave or the dashboard way that you talked about from a decade or 15 years ago.

00:31:56:05 - 00:32:03:11
Geoff McQueen
The thing that's interesting is that those were all quantitative insights that are all right.

00:32:03:13 - 00:32:04:13
Ian Bergman
Yeah. And they are.

00:32:04:14 - 00:32:22:13
Geoff McQueen
And most of what goes on in a company that moves the needle is not a number. The number is the outcome sometimes. And you can gain the numbers. And as soon as you see a number that's wrong and a dashboard, what's the first thing you do. You go and you go from the quant and you go and look for the qual.

00:32:22:17 - 00:32:35:14
Geoff McQueen
You go for the qualitative. Why did this happen? Who do I talk to? How can I understand this? You're doing it by being qualitative again, because quant is just a facsimile of reality as best as you can construct it.

00:32:35:15 - 00:32:58:21
Ian Bergman
Well, not just polity, but but narrative. I literally all the other day, like said, like I need the narrative explanation of what happened here. I, I, I completely I completely understand it. So, you know, I think I bought it, like I said a couple times, I bought into the vision. This is really cool. I don't know how it plays out.

00:32:58:23 - 00:33:22:08
Ian Bergman
But let me ask, let me ask you this. What are what are some of the hill? What are some of the attributes, the capabilities that start to matter large in a world where we have this organizational level intelligence operating on our behalf, does that does that change how we think about who's going to succeed in the world?

00:33:22:09 - 00:33:24:10
Ian Bergman
I don't care, I want to know what to do. Try to.

00:33:24:11 - 00:34:03:04
Geoff McQueen
Yeah. Yeah, I think it does. So I've got this this sort of, you know, I guess, thesis that manages particularly in like, sort of knowledge worker type environments that we're familiar with have have really had a tough, a tough time with it over the past decade or so, especially in the pandemic. And, and I think those managers, unfortunately, are really doing it tough, in part because their role has become attend meetings to be a communicator and a coordinator.

00:34:03:11 - 00:34:39:22
Geoff McQueen
And and that's that's really frustrating when you would rather be a problem solver in a coach and a leader and empower and, and I think what this kind of third leg of the stool changes is, it changes the the communication from being factual to being motivating and, and truly engaging, and it reduces the communications needs significantly. And I also think because you're not having to do the whole, like catch me up to speed with what's going on qualitatively because it's there.

00:34:39:23 - 00:35:09:23
Geoff McQueen
Right. And the system will tell you proactively as well when there's stuff not just did everyone read the compulsory reading before the meeting type stuff that actually like, no, it tells you every day what's going on. So I think what that will do is it will empower individuals in the business that are more entrepreneurial as leaders, and it will threaten, frankly, people who are solely managerial as leaders.

00:35:09:26 - 00:35:40:22
Geoff McQueen
And and I think my sense of what's going to transition over the next decade or so is the companies that have that entrepreneurial. Not everyone will be, but the ones that that encourage the entrepreneurial managers and leaders will be the ones that come out the other side of this in great shape, and the ones that are rigid and obsessed about how many people do I have in my org and have their fight once a year for budget?

00:35:40:22 - 00:36:11:16
Geoff McQueen
And it's a really big knock down, drag out experience. I think those guys are going to get massively disrupted because the ability to execute so much more quickly with the kind of phase one and phase two or the stool leg one, stool, leg two stuff, and then empowered by stool leg three is going to mean that you can you can basically have, you know, a new incumbent come up and really completely disrupt your role while you sit there fighting about budget.

00:36:11:16 - 00:36:37:28
Ian Bergman
And I think the sobering reality is that that's the bloodbath we're going to see, right? I mean, if history has taught us anything, it's that in a number of companies walk off the cliff, eyes wide open, and, you know, leaders and individuals will realize this, even we'll be unable to present it. But it is interesting because I think, I think you're painting a vision where maybe, you know, it's not just about like the incumbents failing and like, that's fine.

00:36:37:29 - 00:37:05:07
Ian Bergman
Getting into original organization placing. It's about. Yeah, it's greater destruction. Right. But the pace like, you know, the the the pace might increase the opportunity to disrupt an incumbent might producing really actually just be talking about you know, this is the thing that gives that entrepreneurial mindset the leverage and the superpowers they need to achieve their vision faster, which is a very interesting way to think about this.

00:37:05:09 - 00:37:39:16
Geoff McQueen
Yeah, that's that's what I predict. And I actually think it's less less of Willie incumbents do a Kodak or a Xerox and, you know, screw it up disciples. I know that's probably going to happen a bunch, but I also think that there's a bunch of incumbents, from a cultural point of view, that can effectively have this entrepreneurial transition if the leadership wants it to have it where they can basically, you know, my one of the talks I give is called the Manager Extinction.

00:37:39:17 - 00:37:53:28
Geoff McQueen
I mean, it's like this, the managers, the people who have got manager in the title right now, I'm going to go extinct, but they're going to need to transition to become entrepreneurs and leaders, because the act of managing is is not a great use of their time in their life.

00:37:54:01 - 00:38:13:25
Ian Bergman
But that's very like I think we just like I we talked about this a bit before the show, but like, you know, I've been a line manager. We've all been there. It's an awful job in many, many ways. I'll just repeat that to whoever wants to hear it. It sucks. Like I feel so much pain for them, but but, you know, empowerment leads to risk and uncertainty.

00:38:13:26 - 00:38:36:04
Ian Bergman
Risk and uncertainty are the antithesis of how a lot of efficient organizations work. And so, you know, you are effectively, in my mind, taking the claim that the successful organizations and the ones who are finally going to listen to the words that have been said for many, many years and say, you actually have to embrace risk. You actually have to embrace internal creative destruction.

00:38:36:04 - 00:38:49:07
Ian Bergman
And that's not new. I mean, like, you know, been talking about this for decades. So in New York City, so like but maybe, maybe it's now become more real.

00:38:49:09 - 00:38:56:22
Geoff McQueen
I think that's the likely reality, because someone could sit there and say all of these right things, but then behave differently.

00:38:56:25 - 00:39:01:02
Ian Bergman
Which is what happens. Like, yeah, this is the guy. What happened? This is a corporate innovation.

00:39:01:03 - 00:39:26:23
Geoff McQueen
Yeah. If they get their 5 or 10% top line number that they set out in there, you know, that's all like in a in a steady state environment. Then they could say all these things not do any of these things. And what's the worst that's going to happen. Well, if you're blockbuster and you joke about the Albanian army or that was a blockbuster, it was cable TV joke about Netflix, you know, like, yeah, sometimes you're going to get crushed.

00:39:26:26 - 00:39:29:29
Geoff McQueen
But that wasn't super frequent so.

00:39:30:01 - 00:39:33:25
Ian Bergman
Well, and it's slow. Like we forget how long it took. It did take a long time.

00:39:33:26 - 00:39:59:23
Geoff McQueen
It's just like a really long time. Whereas now the ability to execute faster and do a lot more is like nothing we've ever seen before. Like works AI as a product. I've been able to build that with a small team for about 1/100. The cost in time and time duration and dollars of time like headcount. Then it would have would have cost to have done in my last company.

00:39:59:23 - 00:40:04:02
Geoff McQueen
And I've got that AB test really close by in time series.

00:40:04:07 - 00:40:12:15
Ian Bergman
I mean, that's wild, right? Because we're we're separated by, you know, and bingo digit number here. We're not you know, that's pretty wild.

00:40:12:16 - 00:40:23:20
Geoff McQueen
And that's just that's just one example man. Like if you think about any other industries, like no one should feel particularly comfortable right now.

00:40:23:22 - 00:40:28:20
Ian Bergman
They don't I talked to a lot of people. No one does, including me.

00:40:28:21 - 00:40:36:15
Geoff McQueen
But that discomfort, that discomfort is what creates the opportunity, right? Like, like, you know, that's that's the other side of the same point.

00:40:36:16 - 00:41:03:17
Ian Bergman
There's the friction that leads to the error and all that. And I do fundamentally believe that I love this three, three pillars of the stool framework and to the stool. And I think this is a fascinating discussion, partly because I think you're painting a high likelihood vision of the future of organization. So I want to but I want to direct you to the last segment in the podcast.

00:41:03:20 - 00:41:31:04
Ian Bergman
Totally. The other entrepreneurs in the world. Right. So I know you mentor dozens or hundreds of entrepreneurs. You've been a serial entrepreneur yourself, and you're talking about the importance of the entrepreneurial mindset, even in incumbent organizations and looking at your experience, looking at the folks who are talking to, what's the advice that you are given to the people that want to build and drive change?

00:41:31:05 - 00:41:35:19
Ian Bergman
Like, you know, what are you telling? How are they going to operate in this world that's coming?

00:41:35:21 - 00:42:00:04
Geoff McQueen
I don't think there's ever been a better time to be entrepreneurial than today. Like most of the time, our challenges are that we don't have enough resources. It's not that we don't have enough ambition. It's not that we don't have enough vision. It's not that we don't have enough, like, frankly, good ideas that would be beneficial if they came to the world.

00:42:00:07 - 00:42:22:11
Geoff McQueen
Our limitation is generally resources, right? Don't have enough money. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough money to be able to afford people to give us a multiplier of time. Right? Like it's just it's all of that limiting factor. Now, more than any other time in human history, those limitations are reduced. Are they eliminated? No, they are not eliminated.

00:42:22:14 - 00:42:43:15
Geoff McQueen
This is still going to be competitive. This is still going to be hard. But you're going to spend so much less time on the crap that doesn't move the needle. Like, just imagine you're signing a lease only the most time to spend getting a lease. Sign. In my last office in San Francisco, I would spend 5% of that amount of time now, 95% reduction because of AI.

00:42:43:16 - 00:42:47:26
Geoff McQueen
And so and you just laid that across everything, right? This is insane.

00:42:48:02 - 00:43:08:03
Ian Bergman
Well, and and I love that. And I love this because you're coming to this from an abundance mindset, right. You're kind of get this from a like the entrepreneurial mindset has all the tools in the world and they're and they're compounding, which I think is really true. Is there a downside? Is there a cautionary tale that you sort of talked to entrepreneurs about.

00:43:08:04 - 00:43:39:03
Geoff McQueen
A little bit? I think because I'm mostly working with tech entrepreneurs. I think one of the things that I've seen a little bit is because the AI is so good at giving you something that looks great very quickly and easily, and vibe coding is a good example of this. You can very easily get yourself in some serious trouble because you don't actually understand what's in the scaffolding and you understand what foundations, what's underneath it.

00:43:39:03 - 00:44:05:15
Geoff McQueen
So I think there is a need to be very thoughtful about where the most important things are and how they're hanging together. And, and, you know, understanding there's really not a shortcut for understanding, like even a lease agreement. It might be a good shortcut to not have to plow through 40 pages of boilerplate, but you really do need to understand what happens if this what happens if that, what happens if this.

00:44:05:15 - 00:44:25:15
Geoff McQueen
You need to ask those questions and you need to know them as human intelligence so that you can stand confidently with your feet on the ground and know which way you're going to move next. So I think there's a potential risk about a sort of overreliance on, you know, assumptions that everything's fine just because you haven't seen the disaster yet.

00:44:25:17 - 00:44:43:23
Geoff McQueen
So that's one thing. And I think the other thing is the the kind of superpowers that you can harness, your competitors can harness to. And the thing is that the market that you're hoping to serve and help is actually harder to reach than it's ever been before.

00:44:43:25 - 00:44:45:28
Ian Bergman
A bit of the noise in the system.

00:44:46:01 - 00:45:22:07
Geoff McQueen
No. Well, yes. But so the Facebook and Google drop have made it incredibly hard for, for you to reach your, your market. They just have they've such that all the value that should have been broken up years ago. But that's not going to happen. So so that's that's unfortunate. This is the way it is. Right. So this is this is not the the the grand days of the mid 2000 where we had web 2.0 and, you know, like you could have direct access to the customer because they could put in a search and find you, you know, search trafficking click through rates are down through the floor.

00:45:22:11 - 00:45:41:27
Geoff McQueen
It's just it's miserable right. And so that's miserable. Which means you've got to work harder to get those initial customers and do much more of what they talked about across the the chasm where, you know, you build a tight, ideal customer profile and get traction and word of mouth, and you effectively earn your place as the as as the winner.

00:45:41:29 - 00:46:03:23
Geoff McQueen
So that's that's harder. And then you add to that the fact that the costs of starting and the ability to actually shift and create something are so much lower than they used to be, that not only is the ability to get through that doorway to the customer harder and smaller doorway or more expensive or whatever metaphor you want to use.

00:46:03:26 - 00:46:26:07
Geoff McQueen
You've got ten times more people trying to get through the same door. So entrepreneurial. This is the best time, but it's still not a cakewalk. This is still going to be hard work, because that go to market and and engaging the market is still, frankly, a big challenge. And it's not getting any easier.

00:46:26:09 - 00:46:51:07
Ian Bergman
Well, I think that's I mean, I actually think that's a really interesting note because there's there are things that are enduring about work and the human condition. I mean, not to, you know, kind of wax philosophical, but it is it is true, like there are no shortcuts. And, you know, friend of the pod division thing came on a while ago, super compressor and talked about, you know, the atrophy of intelligence when we look for shortcuts.

00:46:51:11 - 00:47:18:28
Ian Bergman
And the interesting thing is, I think what you're pointing out is that, you know, these things may look like shortcuts. It might look like a shortcut for me as a manager to understand what's going on in my organization. If I treat it and if I treat it as such, it might feel good. But if I treat it as know, like, these are tools that help me make the right decisions as a human to help me analyze the right things, ask the right questions, do the right work, whatever your amplifier.

00:47:18:28 - 00:47:37:10
Ian Bergman
So I think that's a good I think that's a good gotcha. Because we live in a we live in a world that feels magical right now. It does feel like people can do things, you know, but tech can do things on their behalf. And that feels very dangerous to me. Like doing our work for us is dangerous. Helping us do our work better feels great.

00:47:37:15 - 00:47:59:05
Geoff McQueen
And I think you're right that it's it is about helping us. It's not about like there are things that are going to replace certain roles, no doubt. And that's going to be really hard, especially because the kinds of roles are replacing are the roles that people watched their uncle or, you know, someone living in the Rust Belt and went, they should have gone to college and, you know, they'd be okay.

00:47:59:08 - 00:48:13:11
Geoff McQueen
I was like, yeah, that was true in the 70s and 80s, you know, and the start of the 70s, America's graduate college rate was like 10% in the last year, like a number of people with college degrees as well. After third, like, you know, it's it's a big transition.

00:48:13:13 - 00:48:40:29
Ian Bergman
It's not the differentiator anymore. And it's a different generation. I yeah, though I think that's really interesting. Well, if we could go all kinds of directions, but, you know, one thing at a time, I mean, what you're building is fascinating. And I appreciate you sharing the thought process for the environment in which you're operating for listeners that lot to follow, a lot, you know, besides maybe just heading to workforce website, where should they go?

00:48:40:29 - 00:48:44:28
Ian Bergman
Are you on LinkedIn? Do they head to the website? Where's the best way to see what you're doing?

00:48:44:29 - 00:49:08:19
Geoff McQueen
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. Jeff McQueen spelt Joseph the kind of Aussie English way. So Jeff McQueen on LinkedIn. I've got got a blog as well that you might find. And then if you want to check out worksites AI, we're in beta right now, so anyone who wishes they could get better visibility into their business go to work sites, got like, you know, vision not location.

00:49:08:19 - 00:49:10:21
Geoff McQueen
So worksites AI.

00:49:10:23 - 00:49:31:09
Ian Bergman
And we'll have all that linked in the show notes. Like I'm not just saying this for posterity. My team is going to be going to work. It's done. I will tech it out. Yeah. Really appreciate you coming on. Innovators inside sharing what you're working on. This is really cool. And we truly are living in a pretty fast changing world.

00:49:31:10 - 00:49:41:10
Geoff McQueen
Yeah, we are subsiding. And thanks for all the work you do with your team and helping so many startups to get past that incredibly exciting and fledgling early phase.

00:49:41:14 - 00:49:42:16
Ian Bergman
Cheers. Have a good one.

00:49:42:17 - 00:49:44:16
Geoff McQueen
All right. Thanks a lot. See you later. Bye.