Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, we’re back to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
This is Jeff Amerine here, excited to continue the conversation with Tim Creasey.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right, man. We had a great episode where we talked about all things AI and Tim gave us some really, really good tips, tricks, tools, insights in how to best use AI. And today we’re going to be talking about the research and the deep dive work that Tim and his organization is doing specifically in the use of AI for organizational change, management and transformation. Tim, great to have you back with us.
Tim Creasey:
It’s a pleasure to be back and thanks for having me again.
Jeff Standridge:
So we talked last episode about this being a three-peat, so would this be a four-peat or a quadrepeat?
Tim Creasey:
It’s almost like the triple and the home run and hitting the cycle, I feel like.
Jeff Amerine:
Grand Slam, right?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, there you go. There you go. Very good. Very good. So AI, we gave our listeners and if you want to go back and just pause right now and go back to the last episode with Tim and hear him describe kind of the fundamental basis for AI and then talk about some of the tools that he’s using and that we’re all using for AI and him give us some really good insights on how to use it. That might be a really good starting point if you’re not tremendously familiar with AI.
Jeff Standridge:
If you are, then let’s talk about organizational transformation and change management and some of the work that you guys are doing there at Prosci.
Tim Creasey:
Perfect. So yeah, Prosci at its core, right, is a research organization that asks questions about the changes that are happening and how to make them more successful. So we had AI and automation start to hit the research radar, you know, over the years as a major change facing organizations. And then of course, when, you know, GPT-3, three and a half came out end of 2022, it became abundantly clear. This was not…
This was a technology that was going to impact change practitioners, both how they did their jobs, but also the kinds of changes they were going to be supporting and the organizations that they’re going to be working within. So going back to sort of our core research routes, we put together a study that was conducted at the beginning of 23, published later in 23, focusing, there was actually five core questions. I’ll run them down and then we can kind of dive into them and see which ones are interesting to look at.
The first was what are the primary reasons you’re not using AI tools and technologies in your change management practice. And interestingly enough, of the 600 or so people surveyed, about 50%, we’re still not using AI in their change management practices. We are tracking that number live and over time because I expect that number to be going up pretty dramatically, especially here as we step into 2024.
Second question is how are you currently using AI tools and technologies in your change management practices? We’ll deep dive into that one for sure. The third is what impact are the tools and AI tools and technologies having on your change management work? And then the last two are a little farther out. What potential opportunities and what potential concerns or challenges do you foresee for AI and change management over the next two years?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. So let’s talk about very high level. Why not? I’m just curious. There are more than anything, but then how are they using it and what’s the impact been? I think, what do you think about that, Jeff?
Jeff Amerine:
That sounds good.
Tim Creasey:
Very good. So primary reasons they weren’t, you know, at the very top of the list, uncertainty and experience came in at about 20%. Lack of relevance and use cases came in next at about 17%. Lack of knowledge, 16%. Limited access and resources, 16%. Time constraints, data security and privacy, and organizational maturity at the bottom. So a lot of them are still really individual concerns, right? I don’t know where I can go use it. I don’t know where it’s safe to use it. I’m not sure what I could or should do with it or the outputs. It’s still like, I still think there’s a little bit of that stigma. Like, is it okay to say we used AI or not? So I think, I don’t know, are you experiencing any of that in your clients or in your organizations that you work with?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, what I would say is when we do show it to folks or I share with them how I got an output that they asked me for, the wonderment, the wow, the big eyes saying, whoa, I had no idea. Show me how you did that.
Jeff Amerine:
Similar, yeah, similar kinds of experience. I mean, I think there’s occasional experimentation, particularly the SMBs, the small to medium-sized businesses, oftentimes are concerned that they’re gonna do something that is not gonna deliver value or they’ve all heard about hallucinations and the different things that can occur. So there’s a fair amount of FUD, I would say still in the market from people that haven’t really gone all in to look at it.
Tim Creasey:
And I know we can send people back to that first episode. We talked a little bit about how we used it with nonprofit leaders. But one of the things that happened in that session, I think, was really demonstrating to them before their eyes, the power of the tool. And so, you know, remember those old kind of like fortune teller shows where they’d pull somebody out of the audience. And I was getting ready to teach these nonprofit leaders about the power AI. And I was like, I’m going to pick one of these nonprofits, pull them out of the audience in air quotes and really demonstrate the power of AI with them. And so we grabbed one of the nonprofits in the audience. One of the AI intern tasks I use AI a lot for, I call text flex. So taking a chunk of text and then flexing it in a different way. You can flex it for length, flex it for tone, flex it for audience. And AI, generative AI is really good at that text flexing based on what it does. The example I give is I have a 250-word, you know, my long form bio that marketing wrote. But if I’m submitting for a conference, they want it in a hundred words or 120 words. And so I show people, I put it right in and say, make it a hundred words, make it 140 words, make it 80 words appealing to scientists, make it 150 words appealing to engineers, make it 75 words in French, you know, just to demonstrate some of that flexing. So we took this nonprofit. I said, go read their About Us page and give me a 200-word version that would appeal to, you know, community executives and a 150-word version, they would appeal to company millennials in the area. And I actually watched the fear dissipate off their face about this whole like, oh gosh, what do I even do with AI? Right. And we took those descriptions of the organization and built them out a little bit. And so overcoming that uncertainty, that fear, I’m not sure what to do with it. I think is really around people stepping into engaging it in, in a different way.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. So then talk about how are they using it and the impact that they’re seeing.
Tim Creasey:
Yeah, the how are they using it? And I’ll start with the impact actually, because I think you’re right. People get a lot of that kind of wow factor when they see the output of generative AI. I think unfortunately, a lot of people saw tomato soup written recipes written in Willie Nelson’s voice as their first, right? Like some of those really fun, very first exposures and the output was amazing, but you’re like, I’m never really going to need it.
Well, every once in a while I’m gonna need a tomato soup recipe written in Willie Nelson’s voice, but it’s not really that important. So where are people actually gonna find the value? So this is what came right out of the research. Increased efficiency 30%. And that’s that kind of time saving, time-freeing, right? The efficiency gains we get. And it’s the time that we would have spent us looking at a screen, right?
It’s the planning time, the building agenda time, the writing first draft time. It’s that planning time that we get that time savings, enhanced communication, support and content creation, facilitation of idea generation. Right. And I know with an innovation audience, that notion of a place to just get large sample sizes of ideas that we can start to connect those dots from improved workload management. And then, so that’s kind of rounds out the list of the impact they’re seeing. So I’ll see any comments or thoughts on, I bet you it’s not, those are not impacts that are change management discipline specific, right? Those are impacts that a lot of folks are gonna experience.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh, using it for those, those tedious mundane tasks that require thinking and iteration, right? You’re already going to have to iterate on whatever you come up with the first time. So have someone else come up with the first draft and let you iterate that versus having to create from nothing.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in essence, in many ways, our enterprise is a media or an education company. And we’ve got a few people that are essentially professional journalists on board that have written articles almost exclusively with AI and then they edit it. And just to see how well it resonated, they ran the article in publications talking about innovation or startup scene or whatever it was. And at the end, they said, could you tell that this article was 90 % generated by, you know, chat GPT or Jasper or whatever else. And so it’s a good demonstration of how it really can be something that allows you to do more with less. And it allows, if you get actual interns on board early with understanding how to write a good prompt, it makes them immediately useful as well. Uh, and it gives them a set of tools that they might not have had otherwise. One other thing I would say about it, and this is, this is something where I think it needs to start. I teach a new ventures course and I said, unlike probably all the rest of their academic instructors, I said, please use these AI tools that are freely available. When you’re coming up with your executive summary, when you’re doing your pitch deck, use it. You still have to make sure the content jives with what you want the venture to look like, but use it. I think we need to get the students exposed at the earliest possible age to using the tools rather than thinking I’m cheating or somehow I’m cutting corners because it’s going to make them better ultimately, I think.
Tim Creasey:
Absolutely. And I want to tell you a couple of different stories here on this. I think, right? Yeah. Figuring out how to use these tools is the reality of access to information that kids have these days. And so the story I tell is my father-in-law, diehard Tigers fan. Imagine back in the day, second grade, there’s a game on Tuesday night. When does he find out the score of that game,
right? Wednesday morning, if the paper got delivered before school, he found out the score. Otherwise, no, he walked to school not knowing the score of the game. And if no of the other kids found it could be by the time he got home, like access to information, the limit, you only had so many books in the library, you had to pick one up and take it home, right? That’s the only information you had access to.
Jeff Amerine:
Absolutely.
Tim Creasey:
Kids these days do not have access to information like that. They have access to information in a whole new way. So kudos, Jeff, right? In terms of teaching them how to lean into an access and tap into the information. The top two use cases that came out of our change management research was communication support and content creation, which is exactly what I think you’re talking about right here. And I actually built one of these, my GPTs and within chat GPT, I built it to write like me. So I opened up the GPT and I said, first, we’re going to agree on what a good writing style guide would look like that you could hand to a ghostwriter so that they could write. And we agreed on all, you know, tone, voice, sentence structure, use of the passive jargon, yada, yada. Then I gave it 13 of my favorite articles that I’ve published on LinkedIn. These are all in zeros and ones. They’re already out there and they captured the tone. This is how I want to write, right? These are the best examples of what I want my writing to be like. I had it analyze those and then create a writing style guide. And then I told it to use that writing style guide. And so I’ve got one called the Tim translator. So you can drop any chunk of text in and it will translate the exact same size. It tries to keep it the same length, but it will translate it into the way I write or the my ideal way I write. And then I built another one called the Tim bot. So it has the writing style in terms of how it has a response. But then I fed it 180 pages of podcasts that I’ve delivered over the last couple years. These are all zeros and ones up on websites already. I just pulled them all into a document and said, read this. This is that wing of the library that I want you to be really familiar with. And this is the way I want you to respond. So you can just go ask it questions about change and innovation, about digital transformation, the future of work. And it will, it’s wild, right? When you start to weave these pieces, pieces together.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. I, um, I, when you speak to different groups as frequently, Jeff, perhaps as you and Tim, you and I all do, and many times it’s on the same content, right? I many times will forget which group I’ve said what to, and it’s like, have I, have I already, did I already tell you that? Or was that yesterday when I was speaking to someone? And so I have found it to be useful in giving me fresh ideas. Hey, this is the topic. You know, to your point in the last episode, Tim act as though you’re an expert on blank and give me three to five speaking bullets or key points with, with speaking bullets under each purely as a way for me to augment what I’m already going to tell them and maybe even freshen it up a little bit.
Tim Creasey:
You want to hear what I did just last night? So I gave a keynote last week for it was an HR conference here locally. The topic of the presentation was resolving the paradox of being both more productive and more human centric at the same time. So I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing on this. I tried to write a book in twenty twenty two and crashed and burned and work, but I still it’s something I find near and dear and I like to talk on. So I end up with, you know, it’s a keynote, so really visual, really fast. It’s 90 slides for 60 minutes. Not a lot of words on any of them, right? So I have a PDF of the keynote. I feed it in and actually have now extracted a synopsis, an article of the keynote based just on the visuals that I used to build and tell the story. Now I’ve refined it and added, you know, I’d made sure that there’s a couple of pieces where it missed, but to be able to take a visual keynote that I delivered on Thursday and be ready to publish a 1500-word synopsis on the topic is, it was wild to be able to kind of pull those pieces together.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, and, and if you recorded it and generated a written transcript, it would do the same. It would be able to do that as well. Right. So, but.
Tim Creasey:
I would have been able to do it even faster. I even asked the sound guys at the back of the room. I was like, is there any way I can get a recording of this? Because do you know how rich having the zeros and ones of all the words I’m about to say for the next hour is now that we have this power of our marketing team? I deliver a webinar, right? So I’ll do a webinar at 60 minutes long. My marketing digital video person was showing me the tool she’s using and she gets all apologetic. She said, I’m sorry it took so long. It took it about 45 minutes to do what it just did. And what it did was slice it into four, three-minute clips for one-minute clips, five, 30 second clips, six, 15-second clips, all transcribed and hyper or hashtagged to trending topics and going on right now. And she’s apologizing that it took 45 minutes for the, it took me an hour to speak the whole webinar. And now in 45 minutes, I have those assets coming out the other side. So yeah, the power is, there’s a bunch of learning applications where you feed videos in and it starts chunking it out.
Jeff Amerine:
That’s another really good point that you made, Tim, about there was actually in our Fuel AI ML accelerator company, started by the guy that ran AWS’s computer vision department named Humphrey Chen, and it’s called Clipper. And it essentially will take all this accumulated digital content you have and clip it up into segments where it’s searchable so that if you want to find out when was the speaker talking about that certain thing, you can go right to it. It’s just…
Pretty spectacular. And of course, there’s an AI component to how that works as well, but it’s amazing. Some of the things that we’re going to be able to do with content ways we never imagined just a few years ago.
Tim Creasey:
And to me it is the digitization transformation that enabled it, right? Once things started to go to zeros and ones, you used to write pen and paper, anything you put on a keyboard back in the mid-90s, right? Think about the very first movement when all of a sudden homes are starting to have computers in them. Well, now everything’s going to zeros and ones. That cell phone in your pocket, all the music on it, every picture on it, every text that’s ever been sent on it, that’s all zeros and ones that we can now access in a whole different way with generative AI. So.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, let’s close out perhaps with maybe some of the challenges or concerns that some of your research uncovered.
Tim Creasey:
Very good. So the biggest, you know, the longer term challenges, I think it paints a picture for where we as leaders can start to step in and help the organization shore up. So the biggest concern and challenge at the top of the list was lack of understanding and fear. So that just fear that stops us from moving forward. Number two is governance.
And so lack of understanding and fear, we can start to address enterprise level with learning and development. Governance was the second biggest concern or challenge. The lagging evolution of the change practice, you know, if there are still paper and pencil change practitioners, they may lag and fall even further behind as this new technology comes online. Security concerns.
And certainly that’s where we’re going to lean into IT governance, data security, to make sure that we are doing things right and doing the right things with the data we have access to. Job displacement, and I think always going to be a concern. You know, because one of the phrases I heard at the very beginning of this AI journey was, you’re probably not going to get replaced by AI, but somebody who figures out how to use AI is likely going to replace you if you don’t. And so I think that’s the displacement we need to worry about.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. Well, and, and, you know, if you think about repetitive lower end tasks, right? You talk about the intern, not the Oracle from the last episode. Um, it’s, it’s those lower level tasks freeing you up to operate at the top of your license is, is where the real value is. And I, and I agree with you. If, if, if I don’t learn to, to operate at the top of my license, I will be replaced by someone who can.
Tim Creasey:
And Jeff, the very next concern, the last one on my chart is loss of the human touch. And I think your point just now is my counterpoint to the loss of the human touch. Is that when we free up that time, we help people hit that level that they’re able to get to, right? So.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, yeah. Very good. Very good. Any parting words for us as we land the plane on this episode around AI?
Tim Creasey:
You know, I’d encourage folks, it is gonna be a journey. We talk a lot in the change space about how change is a process and it is a journey. It is gonna be journeys for each of us individually as we lean in to figure it out. It’s gonna be journeys for organizations to understand where they can get efficiency gains, growth opportunities, and true transformational opportunities. There’s gonna be full industries that, given how they deal with words and zeros and ones, they’re going to be flipping over as well. But none of this is written yet. This is all capability that we all get to figure out how to flex. And the opportunities we have in front of us, the issues we’re trying to address, we have a unique ability to solve them in a new way with this new tool. So yeah, I’m very excited for what we all have in front of us. And encourage your listeners to lean on in and go back to that first episode for a couple of really good prompt tips.
Jeff Standridge:
So, so Tim, tell our listeners where they can connect with you at and how they can get in touch with you.
Tim Creasey:
Very good. So yeah, Prosci, we are the ones that help organizations deliver more successful change. So Prosci.com. I’m going to be most active on LinkedIn. So if you track me down on LinkedIn, you’ll be able to find access to, that’s where the bourbon inspired stuff happens in the evening as well, which is a little more fun sometimes too.
Jeff Amerine:
Very good.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. Very good. And that’s PROSCI.com, prosci.com. Correct. Very good. Jeff, any parting shots from you?
Jeff Amerine:
No, thanks for coming on. It’s always a treat. I mean, you go down avenues and to a level of depth and interest that I know it’s a treat for our audience. So thanks again for coming on.
Tim Creasey:
Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you all.
Jeff Standridge:
This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining. We’ll see you next time.