Kevin Surace Podcast Transcript

10
Kevin Surace podcast transcript headshot

Kevin Surace Podcast Transcript

Kevin Surace joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.

Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.

Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Kevin Surace. Kevin Surace is a Silicon Valley innovator, serial entrepreneur, CEO, TV personality, and edutainer. Kevin has been featured in Business Week, Time, Fortune, Forbes, CNN, ABC, Fox News, and has keynoted hundreds of events from Inc. 5000 to TED, to the U. S. Congress. He was Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year, a CNBC Top Innovator of the Decade. World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, Chair of Silicon Valley Forum, Planet Forward Innovator of the Year nominee, and featured for five years on Tech TV’s Silicon Spin, and inducted into RIT’s Innovation Hall of Fame.

While he has a technical background with 94 worldwide patents, he is known as a highly dynamic speaker who is a true entertainer that is funny, excites people, educates and energizes audiences to action.

Well, good afternoon, Kevin. Welcome to the show.

Kevin Surace: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Love doing these things. I know we traverse the globe and try to make things work at different times of the day or evening. So I do appreciate your flexibility and Kevin, I’m just going to jump right into your first question here with a career spanning numerous groundbreaking innovations, what initially sparked your passion for invention and entrepreneurship?

Kevin Surace: Well, look, I think curiosity, you know, I, I’m curious about how things work and therefore I’m curious about problems and what problems there are to solve and then curious about how to solve them and then curious about solving them. Right. And I think curiosity is a great, great skill to have as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as a, as a CEO, uh, as a founder.

One of the things I find certainly having been in Silicon Valley for the better part of 40 years is we love to create all kinds of solutions that often are a great solution looking for a problem. And the problem with that is you don’t sell a lot, right? So I have this adage of you should come up with solutions.

For people with real problems who have a lot of money because they will pay you and or businesses that have a lot of money, right? So it’d be certainly great to solve some food crisis in a far off country But that might be better off left for a non profit rather than a startup for example, right? So look for problems that are real problems real pain points for people who have real money That will pay you to solve that problem and then you can build really big businesses.

Brian Thomas: I love that. Really do. And we talked to a lot of entrepreneurs on the podcast, a lot of folks out of Silicon Valley as well. And number 1, yeah, curiosity is key in order to innovate and grow and expand and create solutions for problems. And then to your other point, I love the fact that, you know, we get a lot of first time entrepreneurs that jump in, um, And they say, I got this awesome solution.

Well, where’s the problem, right? So I appreciate that really do. And Kevin, you’ve been at the forefront of AI advancements, including developing one of the first human like virtual assistants, Portico. How do you see generative AI reshaping industries and daily life in the coming decade?

Kevin Surace: Well, look, when we invented the virtual assistant back in the nineties.

Ultimately, that technology got licensed to Apple for Siri and Amazon for Alexa and everybody else, pretty much, right? It was based on those, uh, sort of core inventions, and at the time, we envisioned that our virtual assistants would be true agents. In fact, the company that I was at where we developed this and I led the team was a company called General Magic that had invented software agents.

During that period of time in the nineties. So the concept of agents has now been around, uh, the better part of 30 years. And, and now we can empower those agents with real AI, with real understanding, with real thoughtfulness, right? This is a breakthrough and that’s certainly where we’re going right now.

We’ve had gen AI that we can. And it answers, but basically it’s kind of like, uh, having an English major, well studied English major next to you. Right. I like to say, for example, you might write a blog post using, uh, you know, chat GPT or co pilot or Gemini, you might rewrite an email or write an email response or text response, and people say, well, that isn’t really me.

I’m using this thing. What, you know, one first thing, your competition’s using it and everyone else is using it. Number two, important to remember. You’re not an English major. Probably not. It’s possible, but mostly, most of us are not. And it is. It’s very, very good at language. Specifically English, but other languages as well.

It learned a trillion phrases, right? The prose that it’s going to use, the sentence structure it uses, the words it uses. It’s not that I don’t understand them, but I wouldn’t have used them in the first, you know, hour of sitting there trying to solve this problem. And now, in 30 seconds, the problem’s solved.

So this is absolutely brilliant. I can still edit it and change it. So look, just like Excel changed everything we ever did with math, generative AI, specifically LLMs, Are changing everything we do with language and the multimodals, which is like text to video or text to images are changing everything we do with generating illustrations or photorealistic pictures for our presentations and other things.

And instead of going out and hiring people or sitting there, you know, clumping along, trying to make something boom, there it is. And it allows you to be far more productive and expand your brain power to 10 X or 50 X or a hundred X brain power. So this is, I mean, it is the biggest thing to come along in technology, certainly since the smartphone.

And before that sense. Probably the PC on the desktop and in between the web itself. Those were all huge advancements in productivity for humans. And this is another one. Where’s it going? We’re going to see agents over the next few years, do more of our bidding, go get the following things from the back office, go check on tickets for me, et cetera, et cetera.

And. We’re ultimately going to see this turned into humanoid robots, we’re already seeing this, but we’re able to train these robots now at a much faster pace, and so don’t be surprised if you have a humanoid robot in your home five years from now, potentially doing the dishes.

Brian Thomas: That’s amazing, you know, so Jetson’s here, right, finally, but doesn’t come too quickly.

But I like the point that you highlighted is in order for us to adopt, we’re all going to have to get in and start to leverage some of the technology. Obviously our competitors are using it today. And if you’re not doing it, you’re going to be left by the wayside. So appreciate you highlighting some of that stuff.

Kevin, Kevin, as a seasoned keynote speaker, you’ve inspired audiences worldwide. What key messages do you hope listeners take away from your talks on AI, digital transformation, and disruptive innovation?

Kevin Surace: Oh my, there’s about 10 hours of messages in those three things. So look in AI, stop playing and start working.

When I I’ve given keynote speeches over the last couple of years on Gen AI. And, and what’s great about Gen AI is you don’t need to know Python to talk to the AI. You just know English and you can talk to AI, right? Problem there is, is. You ask people to raise their hand if they’re using, say, ChatGPT or GPT 40 or Gemini or Copilot.

And a lot of people raise their hands. And then I say, Now keep your hand up if all you’ve done is play with it. And pretty much most of the people keep their hands up because that’s all they’ve done is play with it. They got no work done. And I say, listen, stop playing and start doing. Right? As Yoda would say, do, don’t play.

The point is, you want to stop playing and start doing. Do real work. And when you do real work, you start to learn. You learn how to prompt. You learn how to prompt better. You learn how to edit better. You learn how to ask things in a more succinct way to get a better result. And you start producing real output and content and you start multiplying your brain power.

So you’ll want to use these tools and actually use them for real work, right? That’s the first thing on AI that is job one, do real work, right? Like, you know, you’re going to have a note taker on the system that will listen to everything that you and I say, and it will put it into text, right? It’ll be speech to text.

And then not only that, it’ll take that text and summarize it for you. And you can just put the summary out. That’s work you used to have to do. And so. These kinds of AI note takers and summarization technologies are, you know, boosting your brainpower. They’re giving you two or three X brainpower just right there, and you don’t have to do that work in terms of disruptive innovation.

That is a cultural change. You’ve got to be able to tolerate and encourage risk. In your organization, you want people to take certain risks, not to risk the entire business, but they have to be comfortable with taking risks and offering up risky suggestion. Disruptive innovations are by their nature, rare and highly disruptive, right?

And so someone has to stand up and come up with this idea. So an example would be open AI. They start at first and you know, they, they’re not sure what they’re going to do with the transformer. And someone there had an idea of, I know, why don’t we just go out and eventually work our way to a trillion tokens, we’re going to learn, you know, a trillion sentences, let’s say a trillion phrases in the English language.

And I’m sure a lot of people around the table would have looked and said, you’re crazy, that’s going to cost billions of dollars, literally billions. But someone else said that’ll cost billions, but I’ll just go raise the billions, you know, got this friend at Microsoft, we’ll get the money and we’ll get access to, to their servers to do this work.

So as crazy as that sounded, it was a complete breakthrough in technology. And it took a company willing to risk billions of dollars to see if the experiment would work. University couldn’t do it. Most companies couldn’t do it. In the end, big foundational models today are only coming from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, you know, a handful of others, right?

You have to be really large company to afford the billions of dollars it takes to play. So those are disruptive ideas, disruptive innovation. Not all of them cost billions. Sometimes it costs nothing, but it’s seemingly impossible. And lots of people will want to stop you from disrupting an industry. And they’ll tell you that it’s a crazy idea.

Microsoft And you have to encourage a culture in your company to not tell people that it’s crazy to embrace it and open your arms and encourage them to keep providing more disruptive ideas and try as many of them as you can carefully without risking, you know, the entire company or a tremendous amount of money.

So anyway, that’s a couple of the items out of your questions.

Brian Thomas: Thank you Kevin. I appreciate you highlighted quite a few things in each example there around AI digital transformation and then disruptive innovation, which innovation in itself is something that does take a whole new mindset to get a culture to jump into that.

But I love the examples you shared. Especially we got to get that muscle worked up as far as digging in and starting to leverage A. I. And not just play with it. And Kevin, the last question I had for you this evening is your ability to innovate across industries is remarkable from A. I. Driven building management to soundproof drywall.

How do you stay ahead of trends and identify areas right for disruption?

Kevin Surace: Well, the best areas that are right for disruptions are things that you find in your life or in your business life, right? Meaning, you know, soundproof drywall and I’m no chemist, but I became, I hope the expert in the field of soundproof drywall because I invented the darn thing.

How do you go from AI to soundproof drywall back to AI? Well, there was a problem and the pain point was Everyone was hearing noise through the hotel and, you know, hotel walls and, and in condos and town homes and people were getting sued and all kinds of things. I go, there has to be a better way. You know, how can I convert acoustic energy to something else?

Right. Conservation of energy says I have to convert it. It doesn’t just dissipate. And so I sat down and said, I’m going to read for several weeks and I’m going to become. An expert in the nichiest of all fields, right? Making soundproof drywall. And in the end, I invented soundproof drywall. We built a company around that.

Today that is a billion dollar product line. And it’s a game changer for all builders who build any kind of multifamily or obviously sound studios and high quality hotels. So it’s fascinating. And again, it gets back to find a real problem that real people with real money will pay you to solve. And then you can build a big business And that was a real problem.

So I’ve always looked at each industry. I think a little less like Alon does, you know, Alon will say he’s a polymath. I, you know, he can understand everything in every industry that may be for him. But for me, when I approach a new industry, I go, okay, what’s great is we have the web, I can learn, I can read every patent in that niche of a field, right?

See what other people have done. And then I can see if there’s room for. A new solution, because if there is, and there’s a real pain point, and there’s a problem, you’ve talked to people and they’re willing to pay for that pain point. You know, you can build another company and look up the virtual assistants came from that, right?

The idea of Portico and my talk and magic talk and the quest virtual assistant and onstar GM onstar, which we built and the onstar virtual advisor. All of that came out of the necessity for having access to information while you were driving. Because we didn’t have screens, and of course you couldn’t really look at a screen anyway, we had phones with tiny screens on them, right?

So, but it was the era in the mid to late 90s where email and calendaring, you know, became commonplace. But if you were driving, you had no access to any of them. So wouldn’t it be great if I could just call my virtual assistant and she, she, her name was Mary, Mary. I could say, Mary, read my email. Hi, you have a message from Brian Thomas.

Let me read it to you. I’d listen. I’d say, reply to Brian. Okay. That’s fine. What would you like to say? Okay. This is in 1998. 1997. That is the service we had up. You could do email. It would actually receive faxes too. Email, voicemail, calendar. It would read websites to you. So you say, go to this website and tell me what it says and it would.

Stock quotes. She would answer your phone for you when other people call you and schedule appointments for you if they’re people that were in your contact list. This was in the 90s. So I’m a little disappointed that we haven’t, you know, Siri hasn’t come that far, right? In fact, it’s still behind versus a lot of things we did then because we really envisioned this as your personal assistant Why pain point people were driving cellular phones new email new calendar new But I lived on it and I needed a way to interface to it while I was driving So that was the was the pain point and it turns out it was a real pain point

Brian Thomas: Thank you. Love the examples. Obviously, the soundproof drywall, but again, having that personal assistant at your fingertips, especially when you’re remote, maybe in the car driving that sort of thing. I appreciate you highlighting those examples, but at the end of the day, and this goes back to really the whole premise of the message here is finding that problem and building that solution that somebody will come in and pay or has a need to pay for that particular solution.

So, Kevin, I appreciate that. Thank you. Kevin, it was certainly a pleasure having you on this evening and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.

Kevin Surace: Thanks, Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Thomas: Bye for now.

Kevin Surace Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.

Subscribe

* indicates required