The Hidden Future of Generative AI Revealed with Charlene Li

The Hidden Future of Generative AI Revealed with Charlene Li

Kelly Kennedy : Welcome to episode 264 of the Business Development Podcast. What if the biggest barrier to AI in your business isn't the technology, it's your imagination. Today, I'm joined by New York Times bestselling author and disruption expert Charlene Li, who has spent over 30 years guiding the world's top companies through the internet, social media, and now the AI revolution.

We're diving into how to lead through disruption. Thrive in uncertainty and turn chaos into clarity in the age of generative ai. Stick with us. You don't wanna miss this episode.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal, and we couldn't agree more.

This is the Business Development Podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In broadcasting to the world, you'll get expert business development advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business, brought to you by Capital Business Development CapitalBD.ca.

Let's do it. Welcome to the Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy : Hello, welcome to episode 264 of the Business Development Podcast, and today it is my absolute pleasure to bring you Charlene Li. Charlene is a renowned expert on disruptive transformation, leadership and innovation.

As a New York Times bestselling author and sought after speaker, she has spent over three decades helping organizations and leaders navigate seismic shifts in business and society from pioneering digital strategies during the rise of the internet to advising 14 of the Dow Jones Industrial 30 companies, Charlene has consistently been at the forefront of global change.

Her work has transformed how companies embraced disruption, enabling them to not just survive, but thrive in the face of uncertainty. Charlene's latest focus on the impact of generative AI and leadership in the age of rapid technological change positions her as a leading voice in shaping the future of work.

What sets Charlene apart is her ability to empower leaders to turn confusion into clarity, helping them embrace disruption as an opportunity for growth, whether through her groundbreaking research, bestselling books, or transformational coaching, Charlene's mission is clear to challenge conventional thinking and inspire bold, confident leadership.

Her impact is felt not only in boardrooms, but across industries, driving the future of business, one disruptive idea at a time. Charlene, it is a true honor to have you on the show today.

Charlene Li: Thank you so much for having me.

Kelly Kennedy : We talked about it briefly before the show, but I'm really, really excited for this show.

I like all entrepreneurs and heck podcasters, we're trying to figure out what the heck do we do with this new AI thing? And I, like I said, said before the show, like, I don't know what my excuse is. Like I'm 35, I should be like well versed in ready to play in technology, right? I'm a millennial, but my gosh, like, it seems like a lot.

Charlene Li: It is a lot. I mean, it came onto us and burst on the scene so quickly and it's been almost two years now if you think about it. Yeah. And so we're like, wait, we must be falling behind. I'm suffering FOMO from this. And yet we have this other thing called fogey. Fear of getting in. Yeah. So I think we'll talk about that a little bit today.

Kelly Kennedy : No, that's it's absolutely incredible. And, you know, I'm very excited. You know, I look at, you know, I look at cell phones because I feel like that's the only thing that I can even compare it to that's advanced like so quickly. Right. It's like, I remember being a kid in high school and being like, wow, this is amazing.

I have a camera, like I have a camera in my phone, right? Like, I think I had, my first cell phone was the first camera phone. That's dating me a little bit. But I remember that being so incredible and the fact now that we walk around with super computers, I do, I do so much business on my phone, I do my banking on my phone, everything for the most part we can do from our phones.

Couldn't have even thought of that at that time. Right. And so I think it, I, I look at AI right now and how absolutely incredible. Chat, GBT is some of these other AI programs that are coming in. One that's one that's impacted business in my field well, has been like meeting transcriptions, automatic meeting transcriptions are incredible.

I don't know how we lived without them, but it's like year one, like you said, it's been like we're two years in. Like this is the very beginning and you know, I try to imagine what that can mean. But I look back at that kid that had that camera flip phone and he could not have imagined the supercomputer that I walk around with daily now.

And so there's no way I feel like that I can tell what 15 years from now looks like in the world of ai.

Charlene Li: Yeah, I, I'd like to say that the biggest constraint of us using AI today right now isn't the technology. The technology is far outstripping our ability to use it. The biggest constraint is our imagination.

And we, we, again, to your point, we can't even imagine what we can do with this. Yeah. And I can say as somebody who began my career at the very beginning of the internet, I graduated from business school the same month that the worldwide web was invented. Wow. So we were sitting there and I remember publishing my first newspaper and we were like, no, this is, this is hard work.

We had to hand code everything. And then my second job was also with the newspaper and our job was to put 120 of them online. And we did this with straight HTML, no cascading style sheets. Wow. So everything had to be hard coded. And so tho those were in those early days. Like really just trying to figure out like, how do you even put our arms around what this stuff can do?

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. It's it's incredible and I can't wait to get into it. You know, you're the expert in this. You're gonna tell me how it's gonna happen. I'm excited. But before we do, you know, take us back, take us back to the, the beginning of the worldwide web, you know, who is Charlene Li? How did you end up on this path?

Charlene Li: Yeah, I, I graduated from business school and most of my classmates were going into consulting. I came from consulting. I had an offer to go back and have my tuition paid for. It was clearly hard to say no. And then or go into investment banking. And I decided to go into newspapers because I could see that this thing called the internet was coming up.

We had things like Prodigy, comper, and a OL, and I went to the San Jose Mercury News, which is in the middle of Silicon Valley, and my job was to figure out. What are we gonna do with all this stuff? So one of the first things I did was to help our advertising department sell internet advertising. Wow.

Banner ads, basically.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Yeah.

Charlene Li: Remember the problem. And so this was in 19, early 1995. We went online in December, 1994. Wow. And so early, early on I could see that the internet was going to disrupt newspapers and I wanted to be in the middle of all that. And so I've made disruption the cornerstone of my career of keep running towards it.

And as an analyst at Forrester Research, my job was to talk about new trends. And I joined in 1999 and was covering internet media marketing. So that was the beginning of the.com boom. I did the advertising sizing of that. And you predicted also that it would, it was going to start crashing upon itself, which is what it did.

Wow. And then did search, did email marketing and cover the rise of social media, and wrote my first book in 2008 called Groundswell Around How Companies Can Use Social Media. Started my own firm called Altimeter Group. I, again as an analyst firm and as a startup analyst firm, really competed against people like Forrest or Garner and IDC and then sold it in 2015.

Wow. So lots of hands getting dirty and digital transformation. And now the newest thing to hit the block is generative ai. So here we are, and I'm working on my seventh book, which we'll publish in January called Winning with Generative ai, the 90 Day Blueprint for Success.

Kelly Kennedy : My gosh. And I, like I said, I said before this, I cannot wait until this comes out.

I'm, I'm gonna like pre-order this thing. I see how important this is going to be, even though I can't see it. You just know, like every once in a while you just feel it, right? And it's like, the moment I saw chat, GPT, I'm like, how is this even existing? Like, it blew my mind. And even like back then chat GT 2.0 or whatever it was, at that point, it was, it was good.

It wasn't as good as 4-O, what we're working with now. Right. But it is absolutely incredible. And I just think about like, how can we integrate something like this into all of our business operations? And, you know, you chatted about it before, but like right now, we have people that are avoiding this like the plague.

Why are, why are there people that are afraid to implement ai? What's happening?

Charlene Li: First of all, it brings up an existential question. Well, it's really good at writing, but I'm a writer. Mm. So if I start using this, I am, I, it's basically saying I can't write anymore. And that's not the case.

It's saying that as a coder, it can code better than me. As a manager, it can manage better than me.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah,

Charlene Li: It could do all these things better than me. So I am gonna put that off for as long as possible because it's an existential question. There's also issues like, well, it's not that good, right? It's, it could be taste me, but it's also not good.

So it makes mistakes. It does these things called hallucinations and makes things up. You can look at it two ways. It makes things upwards, highly creative. And so those pros and cons to the way it works. So again, as something new, we dunno how to use it. And a lot of the work I do is demystifying what AI is.

Yeah. And teaching people how to use it effectively, how to write good prompts, and more importantly how to have a conversation with it.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And again, not expecting it's gonna be Google, it's gonna give you an answer. It's, you're going to have to have a conversation with it to be fine with, to get the, at the answer you want.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Yeah. Tell me, what was it that called to you about writing this book? Were you like a little bit on the fence about it with it being so new? Like talk to me, talk to me about like that process.

Charlene Li: I was working on another book about wisdom and how do you develop wisdom as a leader. How do you manage it, man?

Learn it intentionally get wiser. And when this came on the scene, I'm like, oh my goodness, this is completely groundbreaking. So I put that other book on hold and started looking at this, and I realized early on that 70% of what I do is made redundant by this tool. Wow. And that also everything of me was inside of Chat GPT.

So if you tell the GPT, you are Charlene Li, and then you start asking me all sorts of questions, it will answer as me and do a pretty darn good job of it.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow.

Charlene Li: So I'm sitting there going, wow, what am I gonna do now? I'm instantly replaced by this thing. I could see a future of that. So what am I going to do when I'm in there?

And. It's, nobody needs to hire me anymore. So we're not at that point yet. Yeah. But it's getting pretty good. I mean, I can create avatars now using a specialized version of these tools to do a pretty darn I imitation of me.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. Wow. Talk to me about the avatars. Like I want to hear about, 'cause we talked about this briefly before the show, and I was like, what?

So you can essentially create a version of yourself. That is essentially chat GBT behind the scenes, but it mimics you perfectly. Like, like would I be able to tell that it's not you?

Charlene Li: You can tell it's not me. It's not quite like me, it's not as expressive as me. Yeah. But the content it creates, I, I created a script using my data.

We find it a bit because I wanted to do a few things differently, but the script is essentially AI driven. I feed it, give it to the model, and it has these prerecorded videos of me using it as its data. I went to a studio and shop video, three angles, different outfits and things like that. And it, it just, it can perform the script.

So it's from waist up, so it's got, it's got hand motions and everything.

Kelly Kennedy : Yep. Yeah.

Charlene Li: Head movement. So it's, it looks a lot better than it did a year ago, I can guarantee you that. Wow. And it's just gonna keep getting better.

I wanna be able to scale. I can't be in front of all the audiences I want to be.

Yeah. And oftentimes they're asking me to deliver it in a different language. So I can now go and deliver a speech and Czechoslovakia to a particular audience, let's say, as car dealers about how to use Journal of ai. And I can do it completely in check.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow.

Charlene Li: And so it would be, the script would be generated by me.

I would be customizing it with ai. I would be reviewing it, approving it, sending it off, and they could see that. And I could show up with my avatar also. But it's really, I mean that avatar is passable.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: But I also have an avatar that's linked to my database and can answer q and a live with video, my voice in any language.

And and, and be able to be incredibly me. Wow, it's not a hundred percent there. I would say it's about 70% there, but it's getting better and better.

Kelly Kennedy : That is absolutely incredible. So you could ultimately create a full speech that you're gonna deliver, across, call it 150 different countries if you wanted to.

And it can be done essentially by you creating it behind the scenes with AI behind writing the speech once and essentially having it converted hopefully correctly, to the right languages. Is that the future? Is that really what we have coming down the pipe for us for, for like the future of, of human speeches?

Charlene Li: I think, yeah, I think so because if you think about the training needs and, and one of the reasons I did this was to create scale in that a lot of people were asking for training and they wanna customize for their organization for different levels and abilities and different roles. And it's really difficult to do that at scale.

But with ai, I can literally feed it all the parameters. It'll generate the scripts in each of the videos to the point where I could potentially sc have a course that's built for you with your learning strengths and differences. So are you an audible learner? Are you a visual learner? Are you an experiential or kinetic learner?

How I can do exercises and if you're not responding correctly, it would give you more exercises in those areas. So the days of one size fits all training and learning would be in the past, regardless of whether you use audio or video or anything. But just the fact that we can skin training for each person's needs and their strengths for the way they best learn is huge potential for organizations.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. Wow. I I recently interviewed a gentleman named Dr. Robert Pearl, and he wrote a book called Chat, GPT md, and he co-authored it with chat GPT, and I was like, what? And he was just talking about how powerful chat GPT is honestly as a, as a like a diagnosis device, right? He's like, honestly, you can basically put in whatever your symptoms are and chat GPT with some pretty impressive accuracy can let you know like, Hey, maybe you need to go see a doctor because this is maybe what's going on.

Like, he basically said, stop Googling things, start Chat GPTing things. That is a much better solution. But I remember being blown away by that because for me it still seems so new. It still seems like. Untested technology, but really not the case.

Charlene Li: It's pretty knowledgeable. And again, you put garbage in, you get garbage out how you ask a question.

And so if you ask a question and say, Hey, you are a doctor versus all A GPT or you're a specialist and I your nose and throat, whatever it is. Yeah. And I am, you know, you're giving information about yourself, your background, your age, your preconditions, and you have, it's going to give you better results.

So if you just ask about a condition versus giving it lots of detail as a doctor would have but it can also give you lots of different perspectives that a single doctor wouldn't have. So doctors are using this to their advantage. Yeah. They're taking the entire medical history. I mean, some people come in with thousands of pages of medical history.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And the doctor can say, summarize us with this particular issue that this person's having. And they'll get a very succinct thing. In fact, go look at these lab reports. 'cause he's almost. So this is making it a lot easier for people like doctors who have a lot of information to be able to understand the patient, but also for the patient to be able to log into their own medical records.

Yes. And understand and take more have more agency over how they manage their health.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah, that was kind of what he said. He's like, at the end of the day, it's putting the power back in the hands of people. Because especially with the medical industry, for the longest time, all the power has been in the doctor's hands.

You go in there, you sit down and you hope for the best. Right. They're the experts. They're the ones reviewing all your data. But now he was mentioning that like the future is that your entire medical history will be essentially in a chat GPT. I don't know what kind of access we'll necessarily have that, or if we will, maybe we will.

It'd be pretty incredible, but. I was just thinking about that, and maybe that is truly what the benefit of AI is going to be, is that it's really going to empower individuals instead of it necessarily taking our power away. I think if we flip the script and say, man, what can this do to empower us? We're gonna be incredibly surprised.

Charlene Li: Well think about how we access our data today. We don't, yeah. We have very little information of our preferences, what our history has been, our, our search histories, our browsing histories. Those all sit in places like Apple and Google and Microsoft, places like that, Amazon, and we don't really have good access to that.

Well, imagine the table is being flipped. I have my AI on my local devices and I have access to that data, and then I will let other people get access to that for a very short amount of time to do whatever it is that they need. So if you need to verify that I'm 21 to be able to come onto the site, you can just get that information and you can actually verify that.

Using blockchain again, hopefully it gets a lot cheaper. Less expensive to do this. Yes. But for me to be able to understand my needs and my AI to go out there and meet my needs, find whatever it is that I need, I, I can't wait for my AI travel agent to show up.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: Who knows that I really like to sit and seat 21 C on United Flights.

Yeah. And knows that which days I like to travel and maximizes my points and understands all the parameters. I would never impose that on a real person.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: But I can ask my AI to do that.

Kelly Kennedy : Yes. It honestly, when you talk about it like that, it's more like a superpower than it is like just a machine. Right.

Like, it's like if you just had access to like all the knowledge on the internet and then was able to leverage that to do things for you, you know, like you said, book you the, the flight you want, book you the seat you want, make sure that you get the best table when you land, whatever it is. Like, my gosh, that is absolutely incredible.

You know? How far do you think we are from that?

Charlene Li: I don't think we're that far. I, I think within the next year or so, we will have these types of agents, I call them it's agentic ai, AI agents who will do things on your behalf. And the biggest barrier to that is trusting it. Yeah. Right now we have something called human in the loop.

You know, if you're gonna have AI do something, you want a human in the loop because you wanna check everything before it goes soft and does things.

Kelly Kennedy : Sure.

Charlene Li: And with agents to work, we actually have to trust it. So there's this huge gulf that we have to bridge between agents doing the work, what we want it to do, and us trusting it to do the work correctly.

So we need more and more these sort of mini experiences with it to trust it. And over time we'll be more comfortable giving it that responsibility. I look at it as this way, it is a very good recent college graduate. They know a lot of stuff. They sound really good and they know nothing and so you would give it some work to do and then you're like, come back.

First of all, do you have any questions before you go off? And they usually have a gazillion questions and then you go, show me your work before you make any decisions because I dunno if you know how to do this. So when I ask GPT or whatever these tools are to do something, I always add something at the very end.

I go, before you start, please ask me any clarifying questions you may have. Wow. That is a lifesaver because it'll just ask me a bunch of things that I hadn't thought of and they're really relevant questions and then it goes off and does work every once in a while. I'm very proud of myself. It doesn't have any questions for me, but almost every single time, I would say once in a hundred problems I have.

It doesn't ask me any questions 'cause it's so straightforward, but most of the time it comes back and asks me three to five different questions so that it's that incredible. It's fantastic.

Kelly Kennedy : I've never had anybody give me that advice. That is absolutely incredible advice. And, and obviously I'm gonna flip that back and say, how the heck did you learn how to prompt this thing correctly?

Well, is there a book on that too?

Charlene Li: No, it's actually inside of Chat GPT and Claude in Gemini, they actually have guides on how to ask questions, how to prompt really well, do you give it a role? Do you give it context instructions? You be very clear about what kind of output you want. So they're in there, they're buried, but they're in, and after a while you use these things.

What I realized was it's just treated like a person who you were, that you're delegating to who doesn't know anything, doesn't know you, and so you're going to want to, instead of thinking about it as prompt engineering, where you're trying to make the perfect prompt, you are thinking as a prompt conversation.

It's gonna be a conversation over time. Yeah. So I use it to write my book. And so I would say, here's a bunch of ideas. Mash it together into an outline that looks something like this and makes these points. Yeah. And it comes up with something like, that's not that great. What about this? Or sometimes I'll be working through an idea.

I'm like, what's the difference between value creation and value capture? 'cause I'm writing a section on strategy, for example, and it kind of gives me those and I go, how would I relate to this framework that I have? And then we co go through conversations and I come up with something called AI competitive flywheel.

And it's after quite few conversations. Yeah. And it's, and I go, what about this? How about that? And it's just pulling these things in. So it's a very, very smart sounding board and thought partner for me as I do my work. And the fact that I voted on top of my data, it's like talking to myself.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: Plus A GPT behind it. So it's incredibly beneficial, especially as a solo practitioner as a former entrepreneur, again, as a CEO of an organization, it is lonely. You have no one else you can talk to. Yes. So having this companion this incredible resource to bounce ideas off, am I crazy? Like, am I doing this the right way?

I have to have this tough conversation with a candidate or with my employees. How do I approach this? I have to write a really heartbreaking letter to somebody about a loss that you suffered. How do I phrase that?

And so it just kind of gets you over that initial hump and helps smooth a lot of things over that are just difficult in our lives and just makes things a little bit easier.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. So it's so much more, it's so much more than just the tool, isn't it? It's going to be, you know, even if, even if you're not seeing it as one today, like, let's chat about it. COVID really shone a big, bright light onto the mental health challenges of our world, right? We were all struggling, we were hiding it like crazy, but we were all struggling.

And COVID came and they're like, Hey, big, bright light. You have challenges. And I think one of the greatest things that came from COVID was our ability to humanize people was our ability to say, you know what? I get it. Life's happening, right? Like we're killing it at work. We're CEOs, we're founders, we're entrepreneurs, but like, we're still living real life.

We still have, you know, husbands, wives, partners, kids, friends, challenges going on behind the scenes. And we put on that brave face and it kind of said, Hey, you know what, like it's all the same. Like, you can't hide, you can't pretend you're Mr. or Mrs. CEO today and then go home and be struggling at home and, and not have that affect you in your day to day.

And so I think. The mental health aspect was a huge win if we want to come outta COVID with a win. It was the fact that I think mental health has become top priority for organizations, for individuals, for families, and I, I, you know, I look forward to what that means, but I still think, like you said, there is a reluctance to share certain things.

There is a reluctance, you know, whether you're in therapy or not. There's some things that you don't really want to deal with. Do you think that that's something that like chat GPT can help with in time?

Charlene Li: Yes. A again, the fact that you're talking to a machine that's gonna be highly empathetic. And, and, and again, just to, to that point, we think of this as machine that could, could, could possibly empathetic.

They are, the machine can be extremely empathetic. There was a research study that looked at Reddit in a particular, actually about doctors who were responding. It's called asthma. Ask the doc and Doctors Who Respond and they fed the same questions into GPT chat, GPT and had it, you know, generate the responses and then gave both responses from a doctor and chat GPT to an independent panel blinded it and said rate all of them.

And GPT was better in terms both quality and empathy Wow. Than the human doctors. Wow. So the reality is these tools don't get tired. They don't have empathy fatigue. They are not sitting there judging you. It's somebody again. So that shame, that vulnerability that comes with saying something.

There's an opportunity to exercise that a different way. And yet at the same time, you wanna be careful because they're not a replacement, at least right now for a full fledged therapist.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: So I use it to coach myself. I take these wonderful transcripts of my calls. Yeah. And I'll be like, that was not something went wrong in that call.

And I'll feed it in. Like, what could I have done differently like that? I didn't feel like I got to the point, it'll point out at different timestamps. This is what you said, this is what you could've said to be better.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow.

Charlene Li: And like, wow, that's great. But you have to be open to that, you know, to that kind of scrutiny.

And a coach would never be able to listen to all of my conversations. And yet I can give this coach this leadership communication coach that's in GBT, all of my transcripts and say, give me coaching on ways I can improve.

Kelly Kennedy : Please bring me into your process about how you are teaching your GPT, you know about yourself.

Walk me through this process and maybe walk me through why, why people may want to do it.

Charlene Li: Sure. I'll give you an example. What I use it for in particular is to be a good book editor for me. So I wanted to understand my writing, the context of the things I'm writing about. So I took my last book. I've been writing newsletters and articles for the past three and a half years.

So through all those in there. And of course I have different drafts of my book all in there too as well. So it has full context. And part of the reason I created this custom version is I don't wanna have to do that over and over again.

Kelly Kennedy : Sure.

Charlene Li: Each time I start a new prompt, so it's actually called Bookwise Editor inside the Chat GPT and I use it to help me brainstorm and think about things.

Thought partner and edit things. I tend, if I'm actually writing or drafting pieces, I tend to go use sonnet inside claude.ai because I just want it to be more lyrical and captures my voice better. Yeah. But then I just put it back into chat, GBT, to, to actually do the editing. And my editor so appreciates it because when she gets a copy, it's pretty clean.

But I'll tell you, she took a chapter of mine and completely moved things around because she understands a business reader better than anyone else, and she also knows me really well. So she can parse through it, read through it, put it aside, come back to it, and does a fantastic job in a way that Chat GPT can't.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: So it's helps me get to a clean copy so my editor can really focus on the content and thinking on behalf of the reader. Not have to muddle through a lot of grammatical errors. I actually had to go through and say, it's great that you're emulating my voice, but you're also emulating my grammatical mistakes too as well.

So please fix them. Don't put them in in the first place.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Well, yeah, like, that's it, that's kind of one of the things that I noticed with Chat GPT, is it really just wants to please you. Right. And at the end of the day, it may, it may do those things. It may tell you things that aren't true about yourself, or it might tell you, it'd be like, oh yeah, like of course you're the best business podcaster, whatever else.

It's like, no, there are definitely better business podcasters Chat GPT, but I appreciate you. But it's funny, like you do have to be really careful with it on that front, because I think, you know, I mean, I, I wasn't aware that it was necessarily tracking everything that we talk about on chat GPT until later.

I was like, oh, okay. Like. I need to say, like, if I want an honest question that isn't necessarily designed to make me feel good, I have to say, you know, forget what I've told you, or forget what we've learned. And based on that, if I ask you this question, give me an answer back based on, the internet data you can find or like whatever else.

Because I didn't realize, but it was learning everything that I was typing into it good and bad.

Charlene Li: You can see it, it says memory updating. Yeah. Like what are you ing from this? You go back, you know, you erase that from your memory. Yeah. It's, so, it's, it's an interesting question 'cause we really don't know what's in there.

Wow. And how it's being used. Mm-hmm. It is a complete black box. So at different times I can tell it's making up stuff and I go, that's not real, is it? They go, oh no, no, I'm sorry about that. And I go, please be very careful. And there's research that says that. Please be very careful. My career is dependent on this answer.

It'll give you a better result. Amazing. So you can do different things. And also during certain times of the year, last year I found that in December the answers weren't coming back as well because it had learned that when people do things in December, because it's the holidays and stuff, they're not as diligent and complete in the way they work.

So I thought it could slack off too. So, you know, there are different things. It's, it's amazing because you don't, wow. You don't realize it's doing this. And they're like, why are the results not coming? 'cause there are these benchmarks you can run. Yeah. They go, why are the results not so good? And realize it because it's summer.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, we're at the very beginning of this. We do not know really how it comes up with things. Yeah. It comes, we know the process by which, but why it put this here? We really don't know why it did that. And you can ask the same question multiple times and you will get different responses. In the same way you could ask me a question and I'll respond to it just slightly different every single time.

Kelly Kennedy : Sure.

Charlene Li: It's the way newer networks work. It's the way our brains work.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. Wow. Okay. I have to ask you, you know, during your research, was there anything that like scared you a little bit about what the future of this could be?

Charlene Li: You know, I make my life and I center my life on having an adventure and disruption in my life all the time.

Yeah. So there are some things I'll go, wow. But it doesn't necessarily scare me. So this is partly me being comfortable, being uncomfortable. The thing that scares me the most about AI right now is that we're not taking it seriously. Yeah. We're not actively thinking about how we can use it for good because we're so afraid it's gonna be used for bad.

Kelly Kennedy : Mm-hmm.

Charlene Li: The technology is neutral. It can be used for good or for bad, and I find that. There's a lack of leaders stepping into this void and providing leadership on how to use these tools and providing information and guidance and steering people towards good usage of these tools. It's been out for almost two years, and most organizations don't even have a responsible AI policy in place.

Kelly Kennedy : Mm-hmm.

Charlene Li: We haven't. We don't understand what that looks like, what it means, and I think it's so incumbent upon us to say, this is how to use it well, to be aware and set standards and tell the vendors out there also, this is what we need you to do. And so in the absence of that, guess what happens? All the nefarious players come in, so that's what I worry about the most, is that.

The good people, the people who are going to use it in a responsible and ethical way

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: Are not showing up. And that's why I'm so passionate about this.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Yeah.

Charlene Li: Like, we need to show up.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. And there's so few of you out there, right? Like, it's so funny because, you know, I went looking for AI experts for the show because I'm like, we need to talk about this.

And you know what, there's not a lot of you out there, there's not a lot of people out there saying like, Hey, like we need to talk about this. Like, it's not just a toy. It's not just for fun. I know we're having fun with it, but like you're absolutely right. Like there's, it's a tool that, that is neutral, but it can be used on a multiple different ways.

And as a kid who grew up in the nineties and love Terminator that terrifies me.

Charlene Li: And the best way to keep that from happening is to get right into the middle of it.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And make sure that we're being responsible about the way we're using this, about training people, what responsible AI looks like.

And putting in the hands of everyone. And I like to say it's not AI that's going to take your job, it's someone using AI who's gonna take your job.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And so when organizations go, how do we make our employees less anxious about ai? And I go, give them the tools, have a strategy about how you as an organization are going to use it.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. And

Charlene Li: be very clear, right. To say we're going to use it to automate tasks. That means some jobs are going to change and some jobs are going to go away.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: But we've got quite a bit of runway for that to happen. And in the meantime, we know that new jobs will be created and hopefully we can make some sort of transition.

Yeah. Between those two.

Kelly Kennedy : You had a post today on LinkedIn, which I really loved, and it was talking about the green light, red light essentially policy that A CEO had enacted trying to get his managers to start utilizing ai. I thought it was excellent. Do you wanna chat about that?

Charlene Li: Sure, yeah. The CEO said we're gonna be AI ready, AI first.

So everybody needs to learn how to use the tools. We're gonna give you all training. Here's a list of tools, and every single person in the company is going to have a light next to their name, green Light. If you're using these tools. Awesome. That's great. You're using it, you're understanding how it can be transformative.

Yellow light if you're getting into, you're trying it, but you're not a hundred percent careful, but you're in the game. Awesome. And a red light if you're doing nothing.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And then he laid a line in the sand and he said, in six months time there would be no more red lights. You either be yellow or green, or we will have had a conversation about if you are insistent on not using these tools, then this is not the right place for you.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Yeah.

Charlene Li: It's a recognition that this is a tool that's required for us to be, especially knowledge workers in the same way that we have to learn how to use computers and email and collaboration teams like Teams or Slack or whatever it is.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: It's a requirement.

Kelly Kennedy : Well, you know, you think about it, there was a time when nobody used Microsoft Office and now you can't get a job if you don't know Microsoft Office, right?

Like there was a time before all these things, right? I, you know, I, look, I'm in business development, so there was a time before CRMs where my desk was just covered in business cards and I had a Rolodex and everything was tracked on an Excel spreadsheet. Like, thank God we're not doing that anymore. But I'll be honest, I was slow to hop on the CRM train.

I, I fought it tooth and nail because I knew a different way and it worked great and I was an idiot. But it took me a while to like get up to speed and be like, okay, no, no, no. This is dumb. This is the stupid thing. I need to learn this CRM. And now I'm, I'm a huge CRM advocate. I pump them everywhere I go.

I teach about them, I do all that. But there was a time when I didn't wanna buy into it and I kind of feel like maybe we're in that same place with AI, with, with some of these companies.

Charlene Li: We absolutely are. Just think about all the technologies that come before this. I like paper. Oh, taking notes on email.

Computers might actually be better. I don't do email.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: No, you have to. So there are a few holdouts always. But again, some people like, I'm never going to do a meeting that isn't in person.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: You know, we can't have anybody working remotely and then the pandemic hit. Yeah. And so what you find is people who are adaptable, people who are agile in the way that they look at the world, they look at technology from an optimistic point of view rather than a pessimistic are going to be better positioned for this.

So we know there are technology optimists and technology pessimists, technology optimists. You don't have to worry about them. If anything you need to tell them slow down. Be careful.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: The technology pessimists, you need to provide them scaffolding. Yeah. How do you show them to you? How can you use these tools to do the things you already know how to do?

Create presentations, write emails brainstorm things. Again, integrating it into the way that you work every single day is a way to do it. So when I do training, I train people to use chat GBT in three ways. First of all, we train, we show them how to turn it off the model training. So everything they put in there is more or less you have a pretty good sense it's not gonna be showing up in Chat GPT.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And then we show them how to create content. So writing, presenting, so, 'cause everybody does that. We teach it how we teach, how to do research with it, and then how to use it as a thought partner, as a sounding board. And from there you can branch off into so many different things. But those are the three core skills to master.

To have that foundational scaffolding to be able to then jump off into more advanced things to do.

Kelly Kennedy : Can you take us into the 90 Day Blueprint? I might be like pushing your book a little bit. I know it's not out yet, but I'm curious. Talk to me about the 90 Day Blueprint.

Charlene Li: Yeah the first section is all about getting ready.

So the very first one is about forming. Again, the whole purpose is to have you create a generative AI strategy.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And I like, we like to say this, use cases are not a strategy.

So when I come to an organization, I go, show me your strategy. They show me a big, long list of initiatives.

I'm like, that's not a strategy.

Then they go, what is? And I go, that's a plan, but it's not strategic. So we believe that a strategy is one effective one for ai. Is one that supports your business strategy at the core of your business strategy, how does it help you become more competitive? How does it help you figure out where to play and how to win and journey of AI could even shift the places where you play because of new capabilities and skills that you develop.

So it is a strategic tool and if you have to look at it from a strategic perspective, right from the very beginning, otherwise it would just stay at that sort of productivity and efficiency level.

So the book lays out in the first chapter week basically how to form your team and get them up to speed.

So a lot of, bit of this training team and I also, we, we actually advise having a minimum viable team, smallest team possible with somebody who's strategic, who understands the technology, is customer or product focused, and also has hr. And the missing piece has always been HR. HR is typically not at a table because like, this isn't a, this is not an HR issue, this is technology.

No, it's, it is everything to do with transformation and people are at the heart of every transformation. The second week is all about having responsible ai like you need, I like to say if you're gonna be a Formula One driver with this amazing fast engine.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: The Formula One drivers would say our ability to go fast is dependent a hundred percent on our brakes working.

Because you will not feel confident going at the maximum speed unless you are a hundred percent confident that you can slow down and break whenever you need to.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: So have to have good brakes with responsible and ethical ai. Then it's all about the strategy, understanding how do you create value through productivity, through better engagement with your customers and also around innovation and disruptive transformation.

New opportunities for revenues or customer bases putting out together. 'cause you make choices. Into an 18 month plan. And we say 18 months, a six quarter walk. Because you need that longer time horizon to know you're going to make investments now to be able to reap it a year and a half later. 'cause it takes a long time to build transformations.

Yeah. And then we get into all the nitty gritty deals. How does culture change? How does leadership have to change? How about your processes, your data, your technology stack, all the nitty gritty details to actually put meat on the bones of your strategy.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. Wow. That is in depth. I, my gosh, you're man, two years though.

Hey that's the timeline basically. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I can see it because nothing happens in, you know, at the speed that we kind of wish it would. And, and any type of big rollout, like, that's gonna be hard. Plus not everybody's gonna get bought in. Can we talk a little bit about, like, that kind of challenge?

Because are you running into, you know, when you're working with companies, are you running into, you know, founders and CEOs who are reluctant to buy into this technology right now?

Charlene Li: Very much so. And, and they're like, do we really need to do this? And my answer is like, did you really need to get online?

Which, you know, you, you can put it off for a little while, but eventually you're going to have to.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And here's the thing, if you move into it faster and better than your competitors, you will have an advantage. Granted, it will be temporary. Yeah. But it may be enough for you to create new areas of competitive advantage that your competitors cannot follow you into.

A new entrant cannot come in because you've created a bigger moat that your customers will be able to see and understand new customers that you can go and serve, or you can serve your existing customers, or you can be more productive and lower your cost of production. Yeah. So there are so many advantages, and I ask CEOs and founders, what are your biggest strategic challenges right now?

They go, oh, it's these three things. I'm like, well, let's see how join a AI can help you with those three things and bridging those gaps. And they're like, oh, we never thought of it that way. I'm like, exactly.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: So at the core, this is a strategy problem and we're going to use technology to fill the gaps of your strategy, who are going to look at your leadership and saying, where are the gaps in your leadership?

How can I help you be a better leader? What about your culture and the thing I studied before this was disruptive transformation in my book, the disruption mindset. Yeah. And we had four different types of leaders and employees inside the organization, realist optimists, who are really good at actually implementing the future that they can see.

The evangelist proc, the agent Provo Provocateur, who is, who talks a great game, disrupt or die, but doesn't do anything. Yeah. So you pair them with the competent manager, who actually, the steadfast manager who is just executes like crazy but de doesn't in the feature. And then my favorite group is all the worried skeptics.

They don't like seeing the future. They don't really get much work done, but they are the ones who can help you see around the corners as long as they agree with the strategy. If you have leaders or managers in your organization who do not agree with your strategy, then you need to have a different conversation with them.

Are you on this bus or are you not? Are you on this road, in this journey with us to where we want to be in the future, which is our strategy. If you're not buying into that, then we need to have a different type of conversation.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Yeah. I've talked with enough leaders on here to know that it only takes one or two rotten apples to really sink a ship.

And it's crazy. It's crazy. 'cause they'll, you know, you'll talk to them and they'll say, yeah, and we made the call to let these people go. And our organization changed overnight, I think. I think sometimes we forget how impactful one or two individuals can really be.

Charlene Li: Yeah. It's some, the biggest advice I give when I'm coaching CEOs hire slow fire fast.

Yeah. You know, you know pretty quickly whether somebody's not gonna be a good fit or not. Or you know, that if you're going in this strategic direction, they may say the things that you want to hear, but they're acting in a very different way. It's not congruent and that's not good for your organization.

It's not healthy. So nipping that in the bud right away is, is really important to say, are you on this bus or not? And it's fine. I'm, I, I try not to think of them as rotten apples. It's like, this is not a fit with what you wanna do, so let's go find you. And I give them a commitment to say, we are fine.

Another place for you to work. Wow. That's going to match your strengths. My commitment to you is to maximize your potential as an employee, either here at my company or someplace else. So, and as long as you feel and understand that, you're gonna be completely honest with me.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing.

That's amazing. You've been at this an incredibly, incredibly long time. Your ability to foreshadow and see what is coming is, probably second to none at this point. Talk to me, what does the future look like? One of the questions I was just like, it was on my mind the whole time is I know you're already thinking like AI is out.

That's fine. That's old news. What are you seeing coming down the pipe in the next five to 10 years?

Charlene Li: I, I look at the Agentic AI space and the ability for that to really change our lives, but we have to have trust in it. We don't even trust our colleagues to do a job. Are we going to give it to a machine so that I think it's gonna take a lot longer than we anticipate, because the technology will be there, but our ability to change and trust is going to take five, 10 years.

So the technology's always going to exceed what we can actually handle. In terms of that transformation. So I see that happening and once we become comfortable having AI there, it releases us to do many different things, which is why I was focused on wisdom. What happens in the world where knowledge is no longer the way that you distinguish yourself, that you know something, that somebody else doesn't, you're an expert in something.

We prize knowledge, we, we teach knowledge in our schools 'cause we can measure it. What if knowledge is no longer the province and domain of people, but of machines. Wow. And so what happens to us then? What will we value And. That is going to take a generation, but a generation is not a long time. No. And this is why I was so focused on this whole space of wisdom, if we can make better decisions, is 10% better decisions.

And I, and I define wisdom as the ability to make good decisions. Yeah. And you can be a wise person and fall out of wisdom and make foolish decisions. So how do we stay in wisdom? My hope is that we can use these tools to tap into a deeper wisdom that we have, and that we're going to need a lot more wisdom in order to use these tools in a wise way.

So we need wise leaders to deal with a future where knowledge is just basically a commodity. And my hope is that in our schools, we'd spend equal amount of time having people acquire wisdom as we do acquire knowledge.

Kelly Kennedy : Mm-hmm.

Charlene Li: Starting from a very young age. So it, it, I think it's going to look very different in the same way that education now looks completely different from the way that we grew up.

Kelly Kennedy : What about what about the connection of people? And I think like one of the things that I've noticed, especially with our kids and you know, these upcoming generations, is that they've spent so much time interacting via a smartphone, via a computer, via, you know, video games or whatever, that they struggle a little bit with the actual human to human interaction, does that get better, do you think? Or do you think that We just continue to go down this path where we use machines to talk to each other.

Charlene Li: We were, again, we started using machines to talk to each other with things like the telephone and e even with paper. And so we have been on this transition, this is happening a lot faster.

So we as adults, parents, so we look at our kids like that's crazy for them to communicate that way. Yeah. And they're thinking this is the most awesome way. I can have eight different conversations going on with three, you know, 16 of my different friends all at the same time. And it's. Why isn't that the way the world communicates?

You know, the fact, the fact of the matter is, is the things that make good relationships are good communications and the way that we communicate will always change and involve depending on the technologies available to us. It doesn't diminish the strength and the power of those relationships.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: I have had just Twitter based conversations over the years with people and I meet them for the first time and it's as if we had been speaking to each other the entire time, even though it was the first time we've actually spoken ear to ear, face to face. Wow. So it's, it's, how do you do that? This is the way we form relationships now, and it's not to dimension, they're just very different.

From, again, somebody I see on a regular basis. So I want us to be very careful to put our judgment of what is a good relationship based on the way that we think about what's the best way to communicate. 'cause it's not necessarily.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: So are people awkward when they first meet face to face? Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And so do I worry about people not having enough social interaction times? Yeah. And frankly they do too.

They understand how important that is.

And we also know how awkward teenagers are, period. Yeah. And it may actually be better for them not to have interactions. I don't know. I save them a lot of grief.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. I've struggled as a parent. I have, you know, our kids aren't that old. Our oldest is 10. But you know, they've, they've lived on their tablets and I like, multiple times, me and Shelby, my fiance, have sat down and, and said like, Hey, like, did we screw up? Like, mind you, we, I, it is like you go down a path so far, you're like, well, if we take these tablets now, they're gonna like, they're gonna hate us.

Like we, there is a point of no return. But it is a serious struggle because on a certain level, I kind of feel like. I've sold them out to technology and when they should have been having a childhood, you know, playing on the park. But once again, I'm relating it to my childhood, but what else can you relate it to?

But I, you know, there are times where I feel like, man, I could have been a better parent or I can still be a better parent, but the decision is hard.

Charlene Li: Yeah. My kids in their twenties, I keep saying that to myself. I could still be a part of parent, I guess I still have time to redeem myself. The, it never ends.

So I, I look at it this way. We do the best that we can.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: And as, and I hope, always believe that our leadership at work is influenced by our leadership at home and vice versa. Yeah. So we take these learnings and apply them to the workplace and say, how do we think about grooming our employees? And one thing that I hear from people is like, well, ai, you don't spend as much effort, so you're gonna be lazy.

And it's not valued as much as you didn't put as much effort into it. It's like if I were to write a love letter to my partner. Instead of me writing it out, I use GPT to make it more lyrical. It has still my feelings into it. Yeah. But it's making it better. Is that devalued compared to me writing a mediocre poem versus a poem?

Kelly Kennedy : No.

Charlene Li: Which one is valued more? Sure. And some people will say the mediocre poem, and I'm like, no. I value my feelings being expressed in the best way possible. So if we, again, are going to apply different value sets to something based on the types of relationship and also on our value sets ourselves.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: So I ask people to be, be made open-minded to this.

In that it's change and you're, it's going to be a lot easier change. I'm not saying you're wrong or something else is right, but be open to it. Be able to see it. Appreciated the value and the effort that people behind it. And try not to put too much of your own emphasis and value on things but in, in judging that something isn't as valuable because people didn't quote, put as much effort into it and use ai.

Kelly Kennedy : Thank you for that because I was, honestly, it's been a struggle. It's been a struggle because I kind of feel like as a millennial, I've grown up on both sides, right? I remember not having any of this. I remember no internet and you having to remember your friend's phone number to call them from a landline, right?

Like, I remember that. And then I remember the full shift to where we are today. Like, I think as millennials, we're in this really unique generation who have really lived both worlds. And I struggle with that as a parent. And I know I'm not alone with that because there's a part of me that loved that world, that loved that come home when the lights turn on and you, you wa waited for your show to come on at six o'clock at night.

'cause that's when Disney played or whatever, right? Like there's a part of me that misses that, and then there's a part of me that absolutely loves this crazy technological generation we're ending up in. I just think navigating it because it's so new and because there's no one who's done it before us, you can question almost every choice you make.

Charlene Li: This is why the moral compass, the principles are so important in this stage and why we need leaders just to bring it all back. It's incumbent upon us in that void of having role models or firm ways to say, this is the way to do it. Mm-hmm.

Is to say, well, how would I approach this? How do I take all of my experience, all of my wisdom, to make good decisions at this point with a technology that no one has ever seen before?

Yeah. No one has ever seen these circumstances. We're making it up as we go along and admitting that sometimes we're going to make the wrong choices.

Kelly Kennedy : Yes.

Charlene Li: And then feeling comfortable enough and strong enough in our own vulnerability to say, that was a mistake. We're gonna go back. Yeah. We do things in a different way.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. I never thought about it that way, but you're absolutely right. It's like literally path finding, isn't it? We're we're out there with our machetes cutting the lines. My God. Yeah.

Charlene Li: But what does a leader do? Yeah, A leader is creating change. And if you're not creating change, then you're not a leader.

You're a manager of the status quo, which is fine, but if you truly wanna be a leader, you're gonna step into that void, into that emptiness and fill it.

Kelly Kennedy : My gosh. Okay. Well, I got one last main question on this then. How can we lead better in a time of new, how can we do it better? How do we get the bravery to just make that choice and move forward?

Charlene Li: I think courage and bravery is when you don't know what the outcome is. And so admitting that, admitting that you're not in control, admitting that you don't have all the answers, and what you do have are a series of really good questions. You put that forward to your team and say, I don't know what the answer is, but I know we need to go this way.

Mm-hmm. I'm pretty sure this is the direction to go in. So here are my questions that we need to answer to go in that direction. And I welcome any other questions that you all have, and together we will figure out the answers and we're going to take a lot of wrong terms, but we're hopefully making progress towards that future.

And also we have a great relationship with failure. This is the number one thing I find that leaders and organizations do not do well. And you have to feel very comfortable and have a great relationship with failure. And what I mean by that is it's not that you're afraid to fail, it's that when failure comes, all that shame.

That comes with it is out the window. He's just like, Ugh, it didn't work. Yeah. Why didn't it work? Let's look at all the reasons. Yeah, and we're further away now. We're at 80% of the way. We're much better than where we were off and now here's a gap that we have to fill. So you are remo. You're moving that negative emotion with not having hit goals and say, now what do we do?

Do we go back? Do we make other decisions? Because how can we fail? How can we consider ourselves a fail? If the thing that we did was our best, we did the best that we could, given our decisions and given the information that we have, we made the decisions we could. How can that be bad? At least we're making decisions and moving forward.

Yeah. So I think that's, it's a, it's the same thing that leadership has always been. Leadership has always been about making choices and decisions without full information about having that bravery, as you said, that courage to move forward, and very importantly to have confidence. And I think of confidence as the thing that you get that when you have confidence, it's a difference between being anxious about something and being excited about something.

Mm-hmm. Because the circumstance is gonna be exactly the same, right? Yeah. But when you have confidence, and I define confidence as knowing that no matter what happens, you're going to be fine. You're going to be okay. And so as a leader, you step into that void. You go, here's the future. I don't know what's gonna happen, but we're gonna have these guardrails.

We're going to stay safe. We're going on this journey together to the very edge of our comfort zone, and we're gonna stay at that edge. Because that's where it's funny. Crazy.

Kelly Kennedy : Oh my gosh.

Charlene Li: And we're going to be okay because if you stumble and fall, I will be here. If I stumble and fall, you'll be here. And we're doing this together and we're gonna be fine.

Now let's get going.

Kelly Kennedy : You are an exceptional leader. I'm just gonna start, start out by that. Like, that scares most people. Most people don't like being right on the line. The line is scary. And I, you know what I mean, I commend you for running an entire career on the line. It's been incredible. You are incredible.

And you know, I just wanna thank you first off for joining us and sharing this knowledge with our listeners. And before we close out today, I just wanted to hop into, you know, obviously we've been talking about winning with generative ai, which is a book that is coming out this winter. Actually at this point it'll already be out, but I will have teased the bejesus out of it as we've got up closer and as I know that it's out.

And I'll be posting about it as well. 'cause I can't wait to read it. But talk to me. You do all sorts of things. You do consulting, coaching, you do public speaking to crowds of like 10,000 people. Wow. Talk to me, what are some of the things that you do?

Charlene Li: I obviously do writing research, so again, tons of stuff.

I do a live stream every week and publish every week from that. I do a lot of speaking. I will do advisory, so less so bring an entire team, but really advising executive teams on how to think about disruption in these new technologies. And occasionally I'll take on a coaching assignment with a CEO or somebody senior about, guiding them through about how to be the best leader possible in a disruptive time.

So that is my passion. It is to help people maximize their potential maximizing human potential by catalyzing transformation. So if I can inspire people and give them confidence that they can get onto this road of transformation Yeah. And that they're gonna be okay. Yeah. Then that's a really good day.

I, I sat 12 CEOs recently down with their own Custom GPTs and gave them just a little bit of training. And I said, take something that you're doing right now, use a custom GPT and do it this way. And we did it for maybe five or 10 minutes and their minds were blown. Wow. And their ability to now then understand the power of generative AI was completely transformed.

And it took about 10, 15 minutes total. Wow. So we can see this type of transformation very quickly. And that's what gets me excited is when I can strip away that fear, that concern that keeps people from stepping into the unknown. They can step with confidence into the unknown. That's a great day for me.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. Yeah. It's it's a little bit unreal, but I can totally see what you're saying. Right? What, what you need to do is create a mind shift and that mind shift doesn't need to take hours or days, or months or years. It needs to take, it can take 15 minutes under the right circumstances.

Charlene Li: And again, I'm, I'm calling in these incredible leaders, or leaders in so many ways and there's this one area they're just unsure about.

And so we can tap into their strengths and their ability to think about the future, think about their organizations, think about their people and channel that into that direction. Then it becomes so clear. The problem is you're trying to teach 'em about a technology. They won't care. If you teach 'em how to use that technology to accomplish one of their top three goals, they will be a hundred percent attentive.

Kelly Kennedy : Yes. It's all about it's all about the perspective and the reason why.

Charlene Li: I, people always ask me how do I get my leaders involved? How do I get them excited? I go understand the top three goals.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah.

Charlene Li: Because they're good leaders for a reason. They are really good at accomplishing their top three goals.

Yeah. And they won't do anything else. And so your ability to change your top three goals is nil your ability to make the thing that you're advocating for, relevant to them through the lens of those top three goals extremely high. So focus on that.

Kelly Kennedy : Amazing. Amazing. And if people are listening to this right now and it's resonating and they want to work with you in some capacity, what is the best way for them to get ahold of you?

Charlene Li: Yeah, they can just email me, charlene@charleneli.com, can come to my site, Charlene Li.com, read all about things and follow me on LinkedIn. That's where I publish most of my current content.

Kelly Kennedy : Amazing. Charlene, this has been absolutely incredible. Thank you for taking this hour with me.

Charlene Li: Thank you so much for having me on.

Kelly Kennedy : Until next time, this has been the Business Development Podcast and we will catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been The The Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.