Kerry Bodine
Appearances
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
It doesn't matter what you think. All that matters is what your customers think.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I mean, there's all kinds of potential harms ranging from very small to really very broad reaching that would impact every human on earth. What are some potential positive effects unintended consequences. The example that we like to use when we're teaching this in our class is the ring doorbell.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
If you've seen some of their ads, they have this new ad out about all the moments of joy that the ring doorbell creates in terms of people dancing on their doorstop or pets running by, capturing people talking to their friends and telling them they got into a college or... you know, whatever it is.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But it's really an opportunity for you to amplify those potential positive unintended consequences in ways that are going to benefit the organization and potentially benefit others as well. And then for the negative unintended consequences, you've got to find ways to mitigate those. And there are lots of different tactics for mitigation. One of them being, this is such a big issue.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
It's gonna cause so much harm. We need to abandon this idea altogether. So the positive consequences, you wanna amplify the negative ones. You wanna mitigate and possibly even say, yeah, we're scrapping this.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
This is leadership in the age of AI. These are the really hairy questions that we all need to start being more comfortable grappling with. To your point, this is not going away.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
We got to figure this out pretty quickly, how we're going to make decisions, the frameworks and tools that we're going to use, our different thresholds for where we're going to stand our ground, where we're going to take accountability for things. One of the most ridiculous examples in my mind is the Air Canada example where...
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
They basically said, we're not responsible for the answers that our chatbot provides. Well, that's completely ridiculous, but it went to court and now it is on the books that, yes, you are responsible for the answers that your AI provides to customers. And so, you know, this is... I'm sure there's gonna be a lot more lawsuits. We're gonna have to figure things out together.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But the more that we can, again, take a pause and think about this before we launch, before we spend thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, not to mention just time, investing in something, let's take just a short period of time where we get people together who have different lenses from different parts of our business and we talk about this. Like why, why not do that?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I love that you just said that the tool, the consequence scanning tool can be used really quickly. We could talk about something and do it in five minutes. You could take a couple of weeks to do it, but that's nothing in terms of, you know, how long it's going to cost to develop, you know, a big AI product service feature, whatever it is.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And so take the time to do that, get out in front of some of those decisions beforehand. And then the other part of your question is we all need to get better at just understanding the types of potential harms. So there is psychological harms, there's financial harms, environmental harms. I mean, there's a whole list of the different types of harms, the severity of the harms.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
This is a minor harm or really severe harm. And then there's a duration of the harm as well, from acute to intergenerational. If you build an AI that denies a certain portion of the population home loans, that has intergenerational impacts, which gets us back to our long-term thinking. And so there's just many aspects of how we need to really start thinking about the decisions that we're making.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And we need to start thinking about it now.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And AI is even more unpredictable than humans. Exactly. And one of the things that I'm seeing in my classes and in my consulting is that a lot of leaders don't even really understand that there's... When you talk about training, there's the data and there's the model. And there are... different ways that you can train your AI employee by changing different parts of that equation.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I don't think most organizations are understanding just how big the data lift is going to be to create all of these magical AI systems.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And data, oh my gosh. I mean, again, this could be an entire episode, but I'm doing research right now on the AI readiness of organizations in terms of their data. And, you know, if you if you talk to anyone, there's data issues in any one system. And then you need to start connecting those systems and making sure that the data is consistent across all. Oh, my gosh.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Data is going to be one of the biggest areas that organizations need to focus on. And I don't think most organizations are understanding data. just how big the data lift is going to be in order for them to create all of these magical AI systems that they are envisioning.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
First of all, you've just got to understand what it means for data to be AI ready. You've got to understand all the different characteristics that that entails. You've got to look at your data management processes. governance, how you're dealing with privacy. I mean, there's all types of issues. How often are you updating your data that you're feeding into your AI? How often do you need to?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I mean, there's AI systems that can run on data from a couple of years ago, and then there's AI systems that require real-time data. Which type of system are you looking to build? And And then you've got to start doing an inventory of all of the different data that you've got in your organization. Where is data housed?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Not only within systems, but within business units, within different silos, functional units within an organization. And really what we need to have is much more collaboration between the business side of the organization and the IT side.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And we've got to have people and, you know, and we have people in these roles, business analysts and, you know, but their role, I think it's just going to get so much more important. We're going to need people who can translate from database language into, you know, what marketers are trying to achieve, you know, on the website or their mobile app.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
So we've just got to start collaborating and connecting those silos. This has been a message that we've been trying to get across for the past couple of decades with customer experience. And the organizations that heeded that call a while ago are going to be in a better place. But for organizations that still really are working in silos, you got to start working on that right now.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Customer experience is your customers' thoughts, emotions, and perceptions about all of their interactions as they do business with you. So it doesn't matter what you think. All that matters is what your customers think.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
It's both. So again, I think that role of, you know, akin to what is the business analyst today that typically sits in IT and can kind of be that glue, that translator. I think that role is going to be important. It may even morph into a very specific AI focused business analyst role. So I wouldn't be surprised to see that happen in this year and beyond. Yep.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And yeah, and there's also a technology piece that you can put into place that is going to help connect all of those different parts of your data ecosystem.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Absolutely. And so, yes, going to your current providers is a great step. I would also say if you are in the process, if you're doing an RFP for any type of technology, it's got to be a question that you're asking of any new provider that you're bringing into the ecosystem. How are you gonna connect with all of the other systems and platforms that we have?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And then the other thing, this is something that we talk about a lot in my class as well, is that a human-centered design team now has to include a data scientist. You've got to have someone from the data side coming in and providing that lens as to what you have today, what you don't have, how difficult different pieces are going to be to hook up.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Because your typical, let's say, product manager, UX designer, human-centered designer, marketing manager, that's just not the world that they think in. That's not to say that they're not... capable of learning that, of course. But, you know, it's just something that is new that they've got to start learning. And, you know, we've been through this before, right?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
We didn't have the web, you know, at one point, you know, and then mid-1990s, we started to have to take our existing roles and our existing processes and learn how to integrate them with this new technology. And then the same thing happened with mobile. And now, you know, and it's going to happen with something else in the future.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
So I would say embracing all of those different perspectives from different parts of your organization. I've always said, oh, you need to bring people from finance and operations and IT into your human-centered design process. But now that data voice is just absolutely critical if you're thinking about anything related to AI.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Yeah, so a lot of the material from the course is based on research that's coming out of Carnegie Mellon University, where I actually went to school and I'm co-teaching with a colleague of mine who we were in our master's programs at the same time. And he's now back as a professor there. So he- is bringing all of this research out to the professional community.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And so one of the things that Carnegie Mellon has found is that they tend to come up with solutions that require a lot of technical accuracy and therefore require a lot of effort to develop and therefore have a lot of risk involved if they don't operate in the way that we've envisioned when we're putting up sticky notes on a wall.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
So what the researchers at CMU have found is that rather than just going into a brainstorming process, you know, kind of with a blank slate, it's much more effective to understand not the technology behind AI, but the functional capabilities that AI has.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Oh, gosh. I think one of the things they get wrong is that they really have to go out and listen to their customers. So first of all, companies have all kinds of data at their disposal. And I'm sure we're going to talk about data later in our conversation. But really going out and having conversations
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And I really love this because, you know, the functional capability that we've all been gaga over for the past couple of years has been generate. Generating text, generating images, generating code, whatever it is. And now, of course, with agentic AI, we're focused on this capability of act. But those are just two of... eight very broad capabilities that we go into in the class.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And these examples of these eight great capabilities, as we like to call them, they're all around us. They're sitting on your phone. You use them every single day, but you don't think of them as AI because once a technology moves from magical to I just use it every single day, we don't think of it as that technology anymore.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
We don't think about Type Ahead as being AI, but it is, and we use it every single day, all of us. So that's one of the things that we really focus on in the class is getting folks who are not technical We do give them some background on, hey, here are the different types of AI models. And here are examples of each. And here's the type of data that each use and the data requirements.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
We give them that basis. But then we're like, you know what? You can forget about all of that and really just focus on what the AI does. And then use that as a platform for your brainstorming.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Oh, excellent. Excellent. Yeah, you know, I have been teaching human practicing teaching leading human centered design for decades. And it really hasn't been until AI came on the scene that our traditional methods, we really didn't have to change them all that much. a little bit here and there. But the non-deterministic nature of AI, it just means we have to start in a different place.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
We actually don't start with human needs, which to me, I felt my brain exploding when I saw the research on this. So yeah, it's been incredible. It's been a huge learning process for me. Really humbling too, to be like, oh, I got to let some of this stuff go. These things I held so tightly to, I got to let some of that go. It's really been just a huge learning experience. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
they can go to kerrybodine.com slash AI. And I'll have all kinds of information there. That's a page I update all the time with all of my latest thinking and classes that I'm putting out. So just a great place to go.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Talking to your customers one on one and really hearing what it is they're trying to achieve, what's going on in their lives, what's bringing them to your organization in the first place. People have very complex things going on in the background. And they bring all of that to your website, to your call center, however they are interacting with you.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Thank you so much, Lauren. And if I could leave with just one message, it's just to think about those long-term consequences of the actions and decisions you are making every day.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And you've got to really understand that complexity in order to serve your customers in the way that they expect.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
This is leadership in the age of AI. One of the tools that we are teaching is a framework called consequence scanning.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Exactly. And there are organizations that they have retail outlets, whether that's an actual retail commerce or a bank branch or whatever it is. And they do get the benefit of...
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
you know, having their customers right there, being able to, like you said, pay attention to body language and, you know, potentially have more in-depth discussions about what's really going on with someone when they are, you know, submitting an insurance claim or purchasing a dress for a big event, you know, whatever it is.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But those background stories are just as important when we're talking about digital interactions as well. The other thing, Lauren, that you just said about perceptions not equaling reality is that that's true from the customer perspective as well. And so they may be on hold, let's say, for two minutes to talk to a human.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But their perception might be that it was an hour and a half or just forever, just way too long. And so we have to find a way to marry up what is the objective reality and what is the subjective reality, whether that's someone in the business or a customer.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Well, the opportunity, like you said earlier, is around competitive advantage. Companies that truly get this, they win in the marketplace again and again and again. The challenge is that it's a long game. When you are investing in customer experience, you're not going to see...
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
The results tomorrow or next week, you've got to have some degree of patience and just know that this is going to pay out down the road. Now, how far down the road that's going to be different for every organization and the degree of investment that they're putting in. But companies that are relentlessly managing every single decision to their quarterly results, they're not going to get this.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
They basically said we're not responsible for the answers that our chatbot provides. That's completely ridiculous. It went to court and now it is on the books that, yes, you are responsible.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
They're not going to get the strategic benefits of truly investing in customer experience like you and I are talking about.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Right. And the important thing to realize is that this is not an either or. This is not, oh, we just make these grand plans for somewhere down the road and hope that they'll work out. Like, yes, we've got to make quarterly plans and all that. But the important thing to realize here is that quarterly earnings are We weren't born with those. Those aren't embedded in our DNA.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
They were invented at a certain point, and I don't remember the exact year, but during the 20th century because we wanted to create more transparency into how organizations were doing. We didn't want to wait for those annual reports. And so there is some benefit to them. Totally. But we've we've really like, you know, just just focused on them.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Honestly, I think everyone is struggling with that. One of the things that I really focus on is just helping organizations take their customers' perspective, looking at the entire customer journey from the outside in and looking at where the pain points are, you know, where there's frustration, even hidden pain points, like
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Things like waiting for a response from an organization that, you know, it's invisible to an organization, but it's a very real thing to a customer to be waiting hours, days, weeks, way too long to be hearing back with an answer. So taking the customer's perspective. And then the second piece is looking at what's going on behind the scenes, right? People process technology policies.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I mean, there's so much more compensation. Compensation drives so much in terms of the behavior of an organization and helping them realize how all of those factors that are hidden behind the scenes, how they bubble up and really do impact the customer experience either directly or indirectly.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And once they can start to see some of those things, they realize that decisions that they might have made about a policy years ago are now catching up with them. And they start to realize that the decisions that they're taking today are going to impact the organization and the customer experience in years to come.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But really, this whole topic of taking a long-term approach, it really is my passion project right now because I feel that it's just so necessary in our organizations, in our own individual lives even. Because we are at a point in human history where we have at our disposal the tools to really make change. significant changes in the world that we live in.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And we've got to start thinking about those long-term consequences. And along with that are the long-term benefits of really taking a beat right now to say, hey, what's the potential impact of these decisions that we're making? What do we want to create right now that's going to pay off in dividends in the future?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
What's inspiring me right now is actually really personal. I want to create a better world for all of us who are alive right now and all the generations to come. I also care a lot about the planet itself, regardless of humans on it. And so, yeah, again, we're really at this inflection point.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
There's a lot of issues around AI and the natural resources that it takes for us to consume all of these AI-enabled technologies products and services. And I want to help people and organizations make better choices so that we can all create a better world. Thank you for saying that.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
So I'm teaching this course right now on AI, and it's all about how to evaluate and select the right AI projects to work on. Essentially, projects that are going to be high value and low risk. And one of the tools that we are teaching is a framework called consequence scanning. Consequence Scanning was developed by this UK think tank called Dot Everyone.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
They have now closed up shop and their work has been taken over by the Ada Lovelace Institute. I love this because Ada Lovelace was our first woman entrepreneur. computer scientists, but they have taken it over. And actually it was Salesforce who really popularized this tool in recent years. So right back to the heart of your podcast. Here's how consequence scanning works.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
You take a two by two grid on the Y axis, you put positive and negative. And then on the X axis, you put negative. unknown and known. And so for any decision you're going to make, and this could be about, should we implement an AI chatbot? Should we move to Seattle? Really, it can be used for just about anything.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And when .everyone created it, this was really probably not intended to be used with AI, but it works perfectly for AI. What are the positive intended consequences of this whatever it is that we are thinking about developing and launching into the world. These are going to be, of course, the reasons why you're thinking about this as a feature or a product or a service in the first place.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But then you have to think about, okay, what are the negative known consequences? And you might think about, well, why would we have negative known consequences? Why would we do anything that we know is going to have negative consequences? Well, think about Uber.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And Lyft, when they launched, one of the known negative consequences was that it was going to completely disrupt the taxi industry and all of the people who depended on that for their livelihood. You know, it was not great for the people involved in that, but it was certainly a known negative consequence that they were absolutely aware of.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Then you think about, OK, what could be some possible negative unintended consequences? And this is really where you've got to go deep and think about, OK, what if people misuse this? What if hackers come in and want to to take advantage of whatever service that we're creating? What are the potential harms that could impact people? Animals, the earth, global markets.