Inside Out Culture

AI with Bruce Daisley

• Inside Out Culture • Season 1 • Episode 30

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In this episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast we talk to workplace culture expert Bruce Daisley about artificial intelligence, what’s hype and what’s not?


Key topics covered include:

  • The impact of AI on culture
  • The impact of AI on jobs
  • Why most organisations still aren’t using AI
  • Why emotional intelligence is still the key differentiator
  • What you can do to educate yourself about AI


Find out more about Bruce:


https://www.brucedaisley.com/

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/brucedaisley

https://eatsleepworkrepeat.com/bruce_daisley/ 


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Join us as we reveal strategies to close the gap and craft a workplace where values are not just spoken, but lived and breathed, paving the way for a more authentic and engaging organisational culture.


Instagram: @insideoutculture


Email your questions to: insideoutculture@gmail.com


Receive the Culture Leaders Action Sheet: bit.ly/iocpmail

Colin:

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast, where we look at insides of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside. I'm Colin Ellis.

Cath:

And I'm Cath Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organization, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.

Colin:

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think.

Cath:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast, and this is one of our guest episodes that we have been really excited about. Con and I have chatted on and off wanting to look at this topic around the role of AI in culture and particularly if we could get the guests we really wanted and we have, so Colin who's with us.

Colin:

Yes, I'm delighted that we are joined today by Bruce Daisley, and Bruce is a best-selling author of three books the Joy of Work Eat, sleep, work, repeat and Fortitude and a highly regarded keynote speaker. And having led some of the most fast-moving, high-profile companies in the world, bruce understands there's a big difference between what might work in theory and what works in reality, and he's now one of the most respected thought leaders on the subject of workplace culture and the future of work, and his discussions are always filmed, always filled with practicality, warmth and humor. And you know what, bruce? We love? A bestselling author on the inside out culture. But it's the last three things that got you the invite. Who's got? Practicality, warmth and humor.

Bruce:

So no pressure. Thank you so much for having me Long-time listener, first-time caller. In fact, you and I had lunch, didn't we, colin? Because I was a super fan of your podcast. So, yeah, I'm delighted that I got the opportunity to come and talk.

Colin:

So it's also worth mentioning that Bruce himself is also the host of the highly successful Eat, sleep, work Repeat podcast, and if you haven't listened to it, you should absolutely go out and listen to it. Somebody asked me recently oh, what podcasts do you recommend? I recommended three culture podcasts. They were like is that all you listen to? I was like well, it's not all I've listened to, but it's mainly what I listen to because there are so many great ideas out there. So in a way, this is a bit like one of those cartoon mashups where the Simpsons meet the family guy. I don't know what that makes me.

Colin:

Probably Peter Griffin, I would expect we're going to talk about AI. Let me start with a statistic and then let's really have the conversation and unpack where we are with AI. What do people think about it? When are we going to get any kind of gains from it, if at all? So Upwork did a survey recently about two and a half thousand people in the US, uk, australia and Canada, and 96% of the executives said that they expect AI tools to increase the overall productivity, with 81% acknowledging they've increased demands on works in the past year, and yet 77% of employees said that AI has actually decreased productivity. Are people sick of it, bruce? Are people sick about hearing about AI and artificial intelligence, this, that and the other? Is that where we are right now, would you?

Bruce:

say. I definitely recognize some of that because a lot of people, I think, have either experimented with this and maybe saw evidence of the hallucinations and thought you know what? This is slightly overhyped. I do see a big contingent of people who fall into the category of saying no good's going to come from this, and quite often a lot of creative people really sort of talented, creative people have fallen into that camp. Do you know that old Douglas Adams rules for technology?

Bruce:

Douglas Adams, the author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Douglas Adams broadly I'm going to ruin it, but he said something like anything invented before you're 18 is natural order of things and has always existed. Anything invented between the age of 18 and 35 is new and exciting and presents big opportunities. Anything invented after the age of 35 is the end of civilization as we know it and must be destroyed. And there's a lot of truth in that. A lot of people have sort of looked at this.

Bruce:

Here's one bit of evidence College students 100% of them are using AI. When surveys have been done, they can't find anyone who isn't using it. But when we look at the workplace, there was a survey by the British Chambers of Commerce that said that only 25% of employees, of workers, say they routinely use AI as part of their job. So the Douglas Adams rules of technology are giving us a fair pointer, I think, for how we're embracing this. And look, I think that's one of the challenges going forward. Can any of us look at this with a fresh pair of eyes, or have we made our mind up on it?

Cath:

So mindset is important, isn't it? When we're trying to do something new, when we're trying to understand, actually, whether it's technology or whether it's simply how do I improve performance in any sense? And as somebody with an Olympic background, I kind of am always thinking we don't really lean into our full capacity, that we have, that our mindset determines what happens. So what sort of mindset, what sort of ways of thinking, what sort of perspective? So what sort of mindset, what sort of ways of thinking, what sort of perspective should we bring to help us unlock what AI could do in a positive way?

Bruce:

I think a lot of it is about practical optimization. One of the best things I saw is that no doubt there's a lot of noise around this and a lot of us are saying you know, ai is going to transform our jobs. It's not helped by the fact that I'm not sure if you saw that organization, klarna. Klarna came out and said, oh, we've replaced a quarter of our workforce with AI agents and, interestingly, they came out about six months later and say that only just a few weeks ago they said, oh, we are hiring new people again. And the interpretation of the Financial Times was they felt that Karno was trying to pump up the tires of their valuation by saying we've seen the future and it's robots and so things like that aren't necessarily helpful.

Bruce:

An interview and he said one thing that he wants to do is he says I think our first goal with AI needs to be to try and create 10% growth. I love that because it's so achievable, it's so practical. It's like if someone said to your organization could you grow 10% faster next year by using new technology? It feels sort of touchable, doesn't it? It feels like the sort of marginal gain, the incremental gain that I think you would expect and accept that maybe some innovation is delivered. And I think the best part about that is that it produces a mindset which says to us okay, this is not necessarily revolution, but this is optimization and this is a tool that's going to enhance your workers. And so I think that's got a practical way for any of us to think about this. What's the 10% improvement that AI could give?

Bruce:

Now I chatted to someone from Specsavers this week and they were sort of publicly on the record talking about it and they said you know, they've implemented with a small team, they've implemented Microsoft Copilot and they're just using a sort of very practical application to try and get these things done. And I think the spirit of the conversation we had was adjacent to the way that most of us use technology in our private lives. Probably you never saw an ad for Uber, or you never saw an ad for Uber, or you never saw an ad for Instagram, or you never saw an advert for LinkedIn. But either someone said, oh, give this a go, or you saw them summoning a taxi with just tapping the screen of their phone and you thought what witchery is this? And you thought and I think that is one of the critical things like the word of mouth, and the word of mouth and building word of mouth inside organisations is probably quite an important baby step for us to think about here.

Cath:

That's interesting. That's also very democratic, isn't it? So just a quick comment I like that because actually building word of mouth that's involving the community, isn't it? That's about all of us, not just the people at the top. So I really like that kind of idea of that rippling through, yeah, but there's an interesting attitudinal element, isn't it?

Bruce:

Peter Kyle, the business secretary, a couple of weeks ago got caught Brilliant freedom of information request that someone put in, but someone said I want to see chat GPT requests Amazing, what genius journalist. Anyway, and some of his requests were what policy should I be doing here? What should I do on this? Actually, this is a textbook example of how these tools can get us out of a rut, because no one's saying that he would say press, go and implement that as policy, but what they are saying is that he's maybe going to learn. Yeah, I didn't get what I was looking for the first time.

Bruce:

Can I make my prompt a bit more expansive? Can I actually make it a bit more simplistic? Can I say tell me what they're doing in Japan, tell me what they're doing in different countries of the EU. It was a really good example. The interesting thing is it was met with criticism. It was met with the normal group of people saying, oh, that's not how you do things, and actually I think we need to all go overcome that. You need to all think okay, well, how can we embrace a bit of sort of technologically diverse thinking? I think you know it was a textbook example of how to experiment with these things to find where the good stuff lies.

Colin:

I think part of the problem and we've all seen this for organizations who do digital transformation projects they never get the gains that they expect and then kind of 10 years later they actually start to see some of expect and then 10 years later they actually start to see some of those gains. And I read some interesting research called the productivity J curve if you draw a J is that there is an initial dip in productivity because it takes time to learn the new systems. We have to redesign things like workflows. The culture inevitably has to grow and evolve and I love the experimentation piece that you talked about with spec savers. And then, just as that kind of adjustment period kind of turns, that's when we start to see some of those costs.

Colin:

I think it was Goldman Sachs who said that they don't expect to see any kind of return on AI until 2027 from a business perspective. But that's only if people do it in the right way. And similarly with digital transformation work, really the culture needs to change before you implement the tool. I think many organizations my sense, annie, is they're rushing to say we're going to adopt it, but there's no guardrails, there's no thought given in the way that Spectrevers did it. Well, how do we do this? What do we want it to be used for? Do you get that sense as well?

Bruce:

Yeah, no doubt, absolutely. I mean, look, you know, the critical thing is, I suspect all of us, when the first interest in chat GPT came around, we all had a go and maybe we witnessed some of the hallucinations. These products have definitely got better. But even three months ago I experimented with Google's Gemini, which the reason why I mentioned this now is because about a couple of weeks after I did this it got significantly better. But I said, look, all three of us here are interested in business and performance and culture. So I said to it can you give me in the area of team dynamics, can you give me some papers that I should be reading, the latest papers about team cohesion, right, the sort of geeky stuff I love reading. Anyway, he recommended me seven and I said and I want you to tell me these have got to be real. I need you to check these are real. And even with that caveat, it came back with seven papers and four of them didn't exist and I was spitting feathers. I was absolutely furious about this because I was going to read them. Anyway, a couple of weeks later they launched their deep research product and I have to tell you, it's night and day because now you go to that and it costs you about 20 quid a month. You can normally experiment with it for free initially. And you get now and you get proper papers. And for me, I was telling you, colin, that now I read a paper like that and because I'm self-taught, I'm not at a college university, I go to it and I say I'm reading this paper. Can you give me your perspective? In addition, can you tell me three or four papers that have cited this paper? So you basically get to see the future. What did that influence? And it's been revolutionary for me. So look what's that story got. It's got the health warnings that these products have got, but the speed that it will do this work. We would be foolish to ignore the benefit that these things are providing. So you know, definitely comes with a health warning, but I think they can be transformational. I love listening to.

Bruce:

There's a podcast called. They went route one on this. They called it the artificial intelligence show. It's called. Anyway, I listen to these two chaps every week and what I like about it is they tell you the latest news on this. But in addition, they give you applications.

Bruce:

So one guy he said he was about to do a keynote presentation. He uploaded his presentation that he'd given to ChatGPT and he said coach me on how I did. And it came back with prompts about how he staggered his speech. It gave him pointers about how he was talking. Now you know, this is dazzling right and I wouldn't have thought to do that. And so you know, look, here's the opportunity for all of us here is that this is revolutionary technology, and the danger of trying to appear like we've got a really clear answer on this might end up being a limiting factor in our own development here.

Bruce:

There's a really interesting thing that those two chaps say who run that podcast? They say the vast majority of people who are thinking about AI right now and training and learning how to do it, doing it in their spare time. They feel that their organizations are failing them. And I chatted to a chap who builds an app for a very, very well-known car brand, actually, and he said, oh, all of my coding now is done by AI. I said, all right, and what's the company philosophy? What system do you use? He said, oh, our company philosophy is we don't use it. So he has his own account with.

Bruce:

Now companies are being left behind, and here's the challenge is that, unless you're going to think about how you can get these things on board with all the health warnings, you've got to train people what the pitfalls are. We saw those lawyers who ended up using chat, gpt and they ended up citing case law that didn't exist. All those health warnings we can train. But there are big opportunities that we're being presented with here and I think we need to overcome some of our maybe sort of cautionary notes, cautionary elements, and we need to overcome that because I think there's a big opportunity for us to really make step changes, of improvement.

Cath:

So to do that, we might want to think about what's the culture change that will enable us to ask those questions. Yeah, what is it in our culture that's stopping us, that makes us feel afraid? And for me, there's a huge part about having a learning culture and it's interesting you quoted Satya Nadella earlier, who's very famous for changing Microsoft from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all culture. There's that sense that curiosity is just part of what we do and experimentation is part of what we do, so there are some things that potentially we've not been creating. A culture that sets us up for this.

Cath:

I think collaboration is another aspect, because inevitably, I think it's quite hard to experiment on your own. You sort of experiment a bit, but then you sort of want to check your notes because actually, just like when you're listening to the show, you go, oh, that's a better question I could have asked and I can get there quicker if I also get other people on this. So what is it we need in the human culture that's going to help us really grab these opportunities from the AI?

Bruce:

Look, I'm really interested in your perspective. I would say that a couple of important things. Right now, most of us, the old truism is beware the busy manager, and most of us are overloaded. Beware the busy manager, and most of us are overloaded. We don't have spare time in our day to get things done. And so, you know, we've got to do a degree of system thinking. We've got to say, if people are going to be experimenting with this, what are they stopping to do? What are they stopping doing? Because the idea that somehow friends of mine who have very demanding, busy jobs, I've said to them have you played around with this at all? And they've said to me I'm going to be honest with you, I'm too busy. I've used it at home. I've very nature of experiments. Failure is one of the options.

Bruce:

Here's an example I prepared for a presentation last week and I really loved this, largely because it really appealed to my main obsession. I loved this example and I played about five pop music songs, big hit songs from the last year or so Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso, tate McRae's, greedy APT by Bruno Mars and Rosé, like these big hits. Anyway, I said what have these Adore you by Harry Styles, these are big bankers. And I said what have all these songs got in common? All these songs were written by Amy Allen Possibly never heard of her because she's like a sort of LA songwriter. Now Amy Allen says she's written seven songs a week, every week, for the last seven years. Amy Allen has had seven hits. Now there's a really interesting lesson about that, because this woman just won songwriter of the year at the Grammys. She's the best of the best and most of what she does fails.

Bruce:

And if we've got this idea that the experiments that we do are all going to be winners, then effectively we're creating this need for perfection that I think is unrealistic. So my view would be number one, create the space for innovation and number two, create permission for it to not work. So we're going to try a few things and if they don't work, we're going to come back and share what happened, and I think that, for me, would be an important element of culture. And to the point of culture, you raise this really interesting thing that I saw, Cath, which is that that Sam Altman, the chief exec of OpenAI, was asked. Well, now a lot of this coding is being done by the computers.

Bruce:

What would you advise talented teenagers to go and study and he said, okay, maybe being a software developer, a programmer, is important now. I would strongly advise soft skills Now. I think this is for anyone interested in workplace culture. This is a really critical lesson. This means making sure that your team have got the capacity to be empathetic with each other, to be good with customers, to listen first, to do all of those the good stuff that we've always talked about. I suspect it's never going to be more differentiating than it will be in this new era we're about to enter.

Cath:

I think that's so interesting and I think we see that time after time. Don't we in the World Economic Forum sort of future jobs? All of these surveys? What are the skills that we need? Nobody's moving away from the human skills of leadership, resilience, empathy yeah, in that sense of leadership, resilience, empathy yeah, in that sense.

Cath:

So for me, I keep hearing people talking about we need to collaborate better, and we haven't yet. We don't know how to collaborate. We all work on our own, even if we're in a team, we don't share with another team, and what I see is that we taught collaboration, we put it on the values, but we don't live it and actually we don't grow up collaborating. We grow up proving ourselves in our exams. We're very individualist culture. There's a lot of show. You've got the answer and it's almost who can use ai better? Can I put in a better question than you? And that's madness. For us to be competing, isn't it when we can move so much faster if we say I tried this, I tried this, oh yeah, what if we now go here and what's someone else done? But we're not set up.

Cath:

So for me, I'm really interested in helping leaders unpick why the collaborative behaviour isn't there and actually you know the incentives that are preventing that and, of course, incentives often get in the way of failure. You know, in this sense, that, well, it's all very well saying, yes, we accept failure, but I've got to hit these numbers and I've got to do this, and that's not written in any of these numbers. So you know again, I often then come back to this sense of what does success look like? Are we clear about all of the elements required in that picture and are we rewarding them? Are we really developing them? So I think, yeah, it's so interesting that every time I have a conversation about AI, and so I think, yeah, it's so interesting that every time I have a conversation about AI, we get round to soft skills, human leadership, those things we don't not discuss them. They actually end up being back in the centre, which is so we don't expect it. But then why wouldn't we expect it? Actually? Because we are using it to help us make progress.

Bruce:

Yeah, there was an additional thing that I think really plays into the workplace culture discussion. One of the things it's a really interesting challenge of all of this is that if we could do our job of thinking about this now, we've got to sort of look down the road and work out where we're going. But one of the things that I saw discussed online a couple of weeks ago was people said okay, well, if you vaguely suppose that we are going to get to some level of general artificial intelligence where computers are sort of as good at humans as at some of the thinking stuff, then one that differentiates is not going to be intellect anymore, it's going to be agency. They use this juxtaposition. They said the thing that will differentiate success then will not be who's got the bigger brains, but what you're doing with it. How are you bringing it to bear? What we can give agency to people, it seems to be transformational in terms of their own motivation and them feeling like they've got a stake in something. Well, let's have a look at what we've done to work in the last 10 years. We've taken all of the agency away. We've layered people with bureaucracy, even to the extent.

Bruce:

Have a look at this. Here's a test that anyone listening to this can apply to themselves. Have a look at your diary today. How much agency were you given today about how you use that most important asset, your time? Because I suspect most people have got half an hour free today. Now, if that's going to be the differentiator, if that's going to be the differentiator, if that's going to be the magic that determines what success and failure is, then how do we rewire our organizations for that? That's a really exciting for culture, people. That's as good as it gets right. How do we give agency to people? But it's also something daunting, isn't it? Because I did some work with a pharmaceutical company. That was just a really good illustration of this. They said to me come and run a burnout workshop. This is not a good story. By the way, I did not come out of this story.

Bruce:

They said come and run a burnout workshop.

Bruce:

It's like a kickoff. How many hours Does anyone here spend more than 15 hours a week in meetings? Every hand in the room goes up. Right, I've answered something here. Does anyone here spend more than 20 hours a week in meetings? A woman at the back piped up, put her hand up and said I'm going to stop you there. We all spend 40 hours a week in meetings.

Bruce:

I was like right, great, we've set the first. We've identified the size of the problem. Now let's work out how we can fix this. How? And she said I'm going to stop you there. We're not going to do any less meetings, any fewer meetings. It's like okay, let me tell you, what followed was the worst 90 minutes in business history. Because I have no answers for you here. If the patient isn't willing to change, I cannot solve this burnout problem. But it's a good illustration, isn't it? A lot of us are in this zone where we're absolutely frazzled by the amount of meetings we've got. We know that our organizations would be a bit better if we just had slightly fewer meetings. We just can't do it.

Cath:

Yeah, I so love the autonomy piece, because I think we should have realized this without AI as well, because it is an intrinsic motivator, right, it's one of the things that helps us to be at our best, to do our best work, whether it's with tech or without tech. So we've been really stupid anyway, and I think that's part of some of the productivity issues we've had. You know, it's a key element in there. So I think it's so interesting. It comes back again and that's why we're not set up culturally how we need to be. I saw a research recently saying autonomy is much more powerful than purpose, and organizations have been sort of overplaying the purpose card. I mean it's important, not saying it's not important. It is an element. Again, it's an intrinsic motivator, but actually we're missing this big one because actually we've stifled the autonomy so much as you're saying there that we almost oh, how do we get that back? But yeah, I think that is absolutely, colin, that's our world, isn't it?

Colin:

It's totally our world, and it comes back to some of those themes that we always talk about, particularly this agency piece, bruce. What's needed from an AI perspective is curiosity, creativity, innovation, resilience all of these things, none of which anybody's got any time to do. I work with an organization they had one of their values was curiosity. I did a similar kind of thing. Get out your phones, have a look at your calendar. Last week, how much time did you spend being curious? One guy laughed out loud as soon as I asked the question, which immediately answered it. It's like One guy laughed out loud as soon as I asked the question, which immediately answered it. You know it's like ah. I'm like yeah, so it's zero. And you're right, Cath.

Colin:

Organizations are so concerned with telling people that they have autonomy. Then they tell them what the purpose is. They tell them what the vision is usually badly written. They tell them what the values are, and then they stuff their calendars full of unproductive activity, which means that they've got no time at the end of the week to do the things that they really need to do. They feel wrung out. They take that home and it's all collapsing around us and then we wonder why they're really skeptical and cynical about AI Crazy.

Colin:

So I think, just to round this up, we are naturally positive on the Inside Out Culture podcast. So we and Bruce, you called it right at the start there are gains to be had from AI. But I think organizations need to think differently and, much like the Specsavers example, they need to think how are we going to do this? How do we give people autonomy over it? How do we treat it as an experiment so that actually we create some blueprints for people to follow, such that when we actually do adopt AI more broadly if that's what we're going to do then we actually are more productive. We're not saying we're more productive. I think that's what we're saying right.

Bruce:

Yeah, no, absolutely. That's exactly it. And look, you know, some of it is baby steps, experimenting. Maybe, you know, maybe some people in the organization who are more open to this. Let them do it. Let these people be the heat seekers. I did some work with a professional services company and the sort of organization that, because they talk about proprietary data, they built their own custom AI and they said what had happened was everyone had tried it once, it hadn't been very good and no one had used it again. Now, if you can find there's a few people in the organization who are willing to push on through that and learn how to use it better, then let them do it. Let them be the guiding light rather than trying to drag everyone else into this future. Let some people be the torchbearers, because eventually people will follow them Fantastic.

Colin:

All right, so we always end the podcast with three actions people can take, which we include in our knowledge sheet that we sent out. If you want to get a hold of the knowledge sheet, you can subscribe at any time. So the thing to do is understand the role that AI will play in the workplace. I think just a little bit of reading is what can we expect from AI in the first place? The second thing is to be curious about how you can leverage the technology to your advantage. You know, don't just kind of ignore it. Think about how. You know, be curious about how can I actually use it to enhance the work that I do and then really uncover, from an organizational perspective, what gains can we make through a focus on soft skills. How can we give people agency over their conditions? How can we give people agency over the decisions they make with regards to to the use of ai?

Colin:

Bruce, it has been. It's been absolutely brilliant. I always, I always think you can tell how good a conversation is, about just how quickly the time has gone. It has been fantastic to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your insights yeah, huge thanks.

Cath:

I mean a very empowering conversation about AI, which is important because it can feel overwhelming, and actually I feel so excited about the opportunities and how we can really start investing in the human culture we have around it to make sure we get the best out of everything.

Bruce:

The honor's all mine. Thank you for having me.

Cath:

Thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture Podcast.

Colin:

Please remember to like, subscribe and, of course, share with others who you think may be interested.

People on this episode

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Cath Bishop

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Colin D Ellis

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