Zach Giglio Podcast Transcript
Zach Giglio joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome Technologies home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Zach Giglio. Zach Giglio is the CEO of GCM, an award-winning agency that shows organizations how to leverage cutting edge AI technology to become more efficient and profitable. He is certified by the Wharton School of Business and AI Strategy for Business and is a curriculum committee member on the AI at the US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Organization Management.
Renowned for his insights into the fascinating convergence of AI and business. Zach is a frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences, a TEDx speaker, and was recently honored as one of Charleston’s 40 under 40. Additionally, he conducts intensive AI trainings and implementations tailored to equip organizations with their requisite knowledge and skills to effectively harness ai, fueling their operation, sales, marketing, and administration abilities, and driving revenue growth.
Brian Thomas: Well, good afternoon, Zach. Welcome to the show.
Zach Giglio: Thank you. Very happy to be here.
Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate you making the time. Hailing out of Charleston, South Carolina. I’m in Kansas City, so again, appreciate you traversing the time zone today of an hour. Yeah. But, uh, Zach, let’s jump into your first question.
You’re certified in AI strategy by Wharton and lead in AI implementations at GCM. How do you bridge the gap between a high level AI vision? And the messy reality of execution in organizations.
Zach Giglio: It’s a really good question. So it’s really important that we bring in the beginning of an AI implementation down to the human level and what people are doing on a daily basis.
So it’s one thing to have a vision, like you said, you know, we want to save time, we want to become more efficient, we want to grow our business, we wanna have a bigger impact. But actually putting the pieces together to start that journey is where a lot of companies fail. And in fact, the data shows one of the top.
Reasons people don’t actually get into an AI implementation is because they don’t know where to start. And so here’s just a simple checklist that we kind of run through ourselves and encourage other people to do, to turn a vision into a reality and taking your first steps. So we want each person who’s gonna be involved.
So you really wanna start with your champions, maybe 12 people in your business, really, no matter how. Big it is. We want them to make a list that essentially has items that you would give to an intern if that intern were starting tomorrow. So these are 10 things that you would give to, to the intern, which automatically filters for anything that’s too complex and also stuff that you can give to somebody who doesn’t have the major institutional knowledge that you have in your role or something like that.
Of those 10, then I want you to, or I want people to go through and see which ones check these three boxes. They’re simple. Meaningful and part of the work that is already being done. Another big issue that people have is they try to use a new technology like AI in a new way of working, like engaging with AI in new areas of work.
But if you, if you do that, you’re creating a lot of friction and you’re gonna have a really hard time getting off the ground.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. I know it’s really important just like any project, but I like how you kind of broke that apart for us is you gotta bring that implementation down to that human level, making sure the right puzzle pieces really are put together.
That’s key. And again, get the right folks that. Touch the organization, know the organization, make sure you identify those champions early. So I really appreciate that. And Zach, many leaders worry about misuse bias or failure in AI rollouts. How do you advise clients to build trust internally or externally when deploying ai, especially when people are skeptical or afraid of being replaced?
Zach Giglio: Yeah, so I think that is extremely important and again, speaks to considering the human being as part of this program. You know, we want to consider this actually more as a change management program as opposed to a tech implementation. I think when we see a lot of companies fail or get into trouble with some misuse of AI is when they look at it as just a piece of software or technology, and they give it to people and hope that they use it in the best way.
And so what we advise people to do is as a first step is to create a policy, an AI usage policy, which at very least determines and outlines what are responsible uses of AI at our company. What do we allow? What do we not allow to be put in and to be used? How transparent are we internally and externally with our clients or owners or whoever about how we’re using ai?
So I think that’s first a lot of people worry about. You know, putting proprietary information into ai, but then they themselves don’t have a definition in their organization of what proprietary or confidential information actually is. So I think starting with the policy is gonna give the leaders the confidence to, to get their team moving forward with ai, and then also give people that safe space to know where their guardrails are.
Now as far as getting. People to actually trust this process. It’s funny, the, maybe one of the harsher ways to put it is there are people who are reluctant. To use AI because they’re worried that it’s gonna replace them and there’s two ways to go about that. First is to understand that AI is not discerning in the sense that it is only looking to replace people who are using it.
Whether or not you use AI has nothing to do with whether or not AI will eventually or could eventually replace you. But the other and more important thing is the leader setting the tone and the vision inside the company. So again, if you consider change management principles, a big part of that is the leader setting the tone and vision and communicating to people why this is happening and how it’s going to affect them.
So I’ve been in a room where there’s been two different situations with the initial AI champions and we’re doing an implementation. One room is where the leader has communicated that vision and has had a conversation with everybody in the room about why they are doing this and what it means for the business and what it means for them individually, and that room is much more comfortable.
We have open dialogue and we get to actually get to work a lot quicker. I’ve also been in the room where the leader maybe hasn’t done as good of a job as they could have communicating. What we’re doing and why we’re doing it. And people you can tell are very apprehensive and nervous and very closed off.
And they feel like certain things about them and about their work should never go into ai ’cause it’ll make them replaceable. Where really the idea is that AI is an extension of. At least in this moment, AI is better, an extension of people’s abilities and of people’s work and are able, is able to operate very well when someone has expertise in their own, in their own field or in their own role.
So if the leader communicates the vision, tells people why we’re doing this and what it means for their role, which in no case that I’ve ever seen so far, means to replace them. It usually just means to get more out of the current resources that they have. People will be more open and willing to engage with AI and you’ll have a much more successful rollout.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Really. Do I like how you said the term, look at this as a change management process, not a tech implementation. I think that’s really important. And of course foundationally, starting with that AI policy, making sure there’s some guardrails, some governance a strategy in place, right.
Also, when that leader of the organization is setting that tone and the vision communicating, explaining the why. Obviously we’ll go a long way and reduce a lot of that anxiety within the organization, so I appreciate that. And Zach, you speak about AI as a junior employee, something to guide correct. And grow rather than just a tool.
What are the best practices for onboarding AI into teams? So it augments rather than disrupts human work?
Zach Giglio: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, we talk about it as a junior employee and one of the main components of a junior employee is that they do not have the domain. Expertise that the leadership or that people who have been in their role has.
So people who are using ai, they are the ones who are responsible for being the knowledge experts and having the experience and expertise in their role. And then to be able to deploy AI accordingly. It’s where we start using ai. Outside of our roles, of our areas of expertise, will we start getting into trouble?
So for instance, if I’m not a lawyer. I might be able to go into a foundational model and write a legal contract, but I have no idea actually how to even brief the AI or prompt the AI to even write the legal contract that I want, and then when I get the result. I don’t have the experience to gut check it or to be able to look through it and understand what is missing or what is off or what is wrong.
It’s the same thing if you’re looking at a construction company and we’re using AI to do like precon estimation or safety analysis. If I don’t have that area of expertise, I’m gonna have a hard time really getting a good product out of it, and then gut checking and looking at the output to make sure that it is accurate and that it works.
And so we want people to consider. A the, their use of AI as if they were man managing a junior employee. So their a junior employee is ambitious. It’s trying to make a name for itself. It’s rushing to finish tasks, which is great, but at leaves it vulnerable to mistakes and also how you engage and brief a junior employee if you just go in and yell an instruction at a junior employee or an intern.
And then you get a output that is not actually very accurate or useful and walk away. I mean, then that junior employee is not gonna be around for very long and you’re not gonna get a lot of use out of that person. But if you go into that junior employee and you start describing the ideas of the goals, the objectives, give it the historical data that it, that maybe it needs the context of the organization.
Examples of work that you’ve done before. That are similar to the output that you want to achieve in this instance, you will get a much better output with a junior employee. And the same goes for ai. So I think just using it in that lens, some people have this. Grand idea that AI is this all knowing machine that will be able to like, make them better at their job.
And it’s it’s actually not true. AI will make them do more of what they’re already able to do, but it’ll also help them do more of what they’re not able to do. So if they have good processes and good experience and expertise, AI will help them scale that. But if they also have poor processes and poor expertise or lack of expertise and ability, AI will help them scale that too.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. Appreciate that. I like how you kind of broke that out a little bit, using AI or you view AI as a junior employee providing a deep context and instructions and things that it can help on the again, lower level tasks and that human is the senior, more knowledgeable employee or manager.
Maybe in this case, but explaining that relationship certainly does help. And again, at this point in the game I think that’s great that we share that with people that are, ingesting AI into their organizations today. So I appreciate that. And Zach, the last question of the day, looking ahead, what kind of future do you hope to contribute toward between business, society and ai?
What legacy do you want GCM or your work to leave behind and how organizations use intelligence responsibly?
Zach Giglio: Yeah, so I, we think about this a lot and it’s a reason why we work so hard and why I travel as much as I do and why, we are as busy as we are because we believe very much in the mission and are trying to be a part of.
Basically the new way that society is going to behave for the, for as far as we can possibly see into the future. So, so there, there’s really a few components of that. So the first thing is this is, artificial intelligence. And at least the evolution of natural language processing, which led to the launch of chat GPT on November 30th, 2022 is the most transformative technological breakthrough of our lifetime and, and maybe of this society.
And so it has the opportunity to truly level the playing field to allow people with fewer resources to punch above their weight. And compete with maybe those who have more. So it’s this tremendous opportunity not just for the American economy, but for the global economy, for anybody with an idea and with a good work ethic and a desire to get more resources out of what they currently have or get more use out of their current resources to, to bring their ideas to market.
And that, that in turn will create a more resilient economy. You know, the more. People that we have engaging in the economy, the more small businesses and entrepreneurs who are pushing forward particularly using AI to help them do that, the more resilient the economy will be. The more, the better ideas we will have, the more diverse ideas we will have, the more diverse products and ideas we will have in the market, which will serve as better.
So that’s number one. So we want to contribute to that and get as many people as possible to use AI in, in ways that are safe for them and for their organizations. The other side of that though, is at the moment, if we think about the advent of social media and the impact that has had on society, we didn’t really understand, I don’t think when Facebook launched.
And everything else after how that would impact society. We, we thought that there was just this fun things to find your friends that you, went to in grade you know, went to school with in grade school or high school and things like that. But actually social media, as has completely reshaped the way that we function in communicate as a society, both good and bad.
And what we have seen is there’s really only a few people at a few companies who made decisions on how social media platforms were built, how the algorithms. We’re built and how we essentially communicate now as a society, and it’s a little bit too late for us to have much of a say in it that is gonna pale.
The impact of social media will pale in comparison to the impact of social, of, of artificial intelligence, which will be completely layered on top of every single thing that we do in society. There will be a component of artificial intelligence in healthcare, in education, in work, in construction, in financial services, in absolutely everything that we do.
And at the moment, just like social media, there are only a handful of companies and a handful of people who are making decisions for how this technology is being developed and how we will use it. So what we believe very strongly in is getting more and more people to use the technology so they have more informed understanding of what the technology actually is.
What it isn’t, what its benefits are, what its dangers are. So when it comes time for us to go to our elected officials and regulators and weigh in and give our opinion, we’re doing it from an informed position. And so we want people to learn and understand this technology and of course, get its benefits so that together as a society, we have a better chance of shaping how artificial intelligence is being built to benefit us all and not just relying on a couple people to get it right.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Really do, and I agree with you. It’s probably one of the biggest technological breakthroughs and opportunities of our time. This will certainly level the playing field for individuals, contractor, small businesses, to compete with the big boys. But really at the end of the day, if we do this right, better ideas, better products in a better world as long as people are informed about this technology and we do keep that governance and guardrails in place.
So I appreciate you unpacking that for us today. And Zach, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Zach Giglio: Thanks, Brian, I really appreciate it.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Zach Giglio Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
