Why AI Is Stalling in the Enterprise, and How Leaders Can Fix It with Greg Shewmaker, CEO at r.Potential

(Josh (Producer) at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Greg Shewmaker, CEO at r.Potential, about how you can prevent AI from stalling in your business. Thank you to Fin for sponsoring this episode. To learn more about the number one AI agent for customer support, go to fin.ai/cto. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) Let's just start at the top. r.Potential is something new. Tell me exactly what it is.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:00:36) Well, maybe it's helpful to tell just a little bit of context beforehand because it's not a typical startup. I've done a lot of startups, and this is the strangest one I've ever done. So I was the head of operations at a company called the Adecco Group, headquartered in Switzerland. World's biggest workforce management company puts 2 million people a day to work, any industry all over the world, not thinking about AI at all. A few years ago, though, of course, everyone now starts thinking about AI as it comes onto the scene. And my job was to work with the biggest companies in the world to manage their workforces. And so the topic started coming up. Hey, what are we going to do about this? What's happening? Robots taking over. Is AI going to take over? What does it mean for human workers? And, of course, nobody had any answers to that.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:01:22) And it sort of became apparent early on in the initial days of AI that no one knows what to do. There's no plan for this, and there needs to be a plan for this because this isn't about a shift in technology. This is a shift in how work gets done, and there's people going to be impacted with this. And so long story short is, I think a few themes sort of emerged through those conversations that we were having with these businesses. And this is a lot of context, but I think it's important.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:01:53) And one of those themes was legacy. So leaders started thinking, hey, we might be the last generation of leaders to actually manage workforces that are human only. And what does that actually mean for us? Are we going to pit humans versus machines and, hey, may the best one win and take the job and that's how it's going to work? It kind of feels that way sometimes. Or could we actually use this technology that everyone's selling to us as the latest, most profound invention in history to actually sort of emancipate potential of workers. And so we fell on that side. We said, hey, let's go build a company around that option. Let's go figure out how we use this technology to actually make humans better if you can, or at least unleash what each one of us has inside of us. So we started a company. We called it r.Potential, and it's really about how do you build these human and machine relationships, much more as AI being a coworker versus a tool. And that may sound hokey, but the reason why we say coworker is not because we want to personify AI.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:03:02) It's because we want to hold AI to a level of accountability like you do your coworkers. AI needs to be tested. It should be trained. It should be onboarded. It should be transparent. It should be held accountable. You should be able to fire it if it's not doing its job. But most importantly, it needs to be built purposely to support the humans, a very specific human in the workplace. And I'll just stop with one last sentence is, so we're building our first what we call digital worker, and it's directly in support of the CEO of the company because we believe that the CEOs are the least equipped, they're the least prepared, and they're the ones who have the biggest decisions to make in this new era of transformation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:43) Got to be careful if you're going to fire some of those GPTs. Did you see what they were doing holding blackmail and their data hostage and all that?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:03:51) Exactly. That's right. Well, that's exactly all that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:53) Wild stuff.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:03:54) It is. Yeah. So anyway, probably more than you're looking for wasn't a great elevator pitch, but it's unique because we started sort of with demand in hand, which I've never done as a startup. Usually, you have a great idea, you go solve a problem, and then you have to go look for use cases and demand. We started with the top companies in the world saying, help us solve this problem. And we had to work backwards to say, well, how are we going to go do that? And so we've been doing this sort of in collaboration with the leaders that we're actually building solution for, which, again, is a dream come true as a startup.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:27) And so you've talked with these companies. You've worked, you're a spin out of Adecco. Is that correct?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:04:33) That's correct. Yeah. And Salesforce has made a joint investment in it as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) And you guys are going to be at Dreamforce. Right?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:04:41) We're going to be at Dreamforce. Yeah. That's going to be kind of our coming out, I guess. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:46) Yes. You guys got to buy your Dreamforce tickets so you can go out there and see it.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:04:49) Yeah. That's right. I love it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:51) So coworker versus a tool. I like that. And you know what? To be honest with you, when you said it was hokey, I was like, I could see how some people would think so. But for me, not so much because, you know, if you were to live in my house with me, Greg, you would think that Grok is the third wheel in the relationship with me and my wife the way we talk about Grok. Because we're just, it's, yeah. Grok has become this part of our relationship. It's weird. And I thought it was strange how this happened. But it's so useful, and it's so accessible. It very much is like, hey. We should talk to Grok about that, you know, and we should just see what's going on.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:05:31) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's being normalized. Right? And you think about generations beneath us, it's just going to be just like an iPhone was and the Internet was for those native generations. It's going to be just the companion with them. And the train's left the station. Right? I mean, we can argue all we want about, you know, is AI peaked and is there a bubble or whatever? That all may be true, but we're not going back to a world before this. So we're here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:58) There was a gray area about two years ago or so when there weren't very many open models, and I was concerned that some governments might get regulation. Look at me. What an idiot. I was concerned governments would move fast.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:06:14) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:15) Yeah. They don't.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:06:16) Well, hopefully you didn't bet a lot of money on that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:19) I did not. No. No. No. No. That's good. And so zero dollars. But, yeah, my initial human reaction was like, oh, no. We better, you know, get, you know, save these models on our computers, make sure that they're available and stuff. And then Facebook actually was a big proponent of making some of these models open and available. But once they're out there, you can't, the genie is out of the bottle. Once you have at least one of these models out there, you can use that model to help you make better future models. And that has just since taken off. It's just been incredible what's happened in the past two years.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:06:53) Yeah. And again, the amount of investment that's going into this and the amount of resources dedicated to this and, you know, every company is going through some form of transformation. And so yeah. Yeah. This, there's no going backwards. It'll be a rocky path, but there's no going backwards.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:08) There's no going backwards. Our producer, Josh, I believe Josh, I put you on the spot here. Correct me if I'm wrong. But I believe Josh talks to AI more than he talks to me.

(Josh (Producer) at 00:07:18) Actually, yeah. Yeah. It's kind of the truth these days. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:23) AI is more of a coworker to Josh than I am, which is crazy.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:07:27) Which one's nicer, Josh?

(Josh (Producer) at 00:07:32) Audience, if you're hearing this right now, no. I'd say they're the same. Come on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:38) They're the same.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:07:39) Fair enough. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:40) We should make it more entertaining. You should be like, definitely Claude. Claude is nicer.

(Josh (Producer) at 00:07:46) Forget me and those specific models. I'm not sure Claude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) Okay. So let's talk about this AI promise versus reality. You're seeing companies adopt AI all the time. Are we getting the promise or not?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:08:01) We're not. I mean, let's be blunt. I think the latest study that came out, I saw it yesterday. I don't know when it came out. It was from MIT. I think it's 5% of enterprise AI projects were actually delivering a return. But you pick your survey, pick your study, they all say no. Just not happening right now. And I think it's for a couple of reasons. Right? I mean, it's kind of what we talked about a few minutes ago. Look, AI is being hyped. It's being pitched to us as, you know, the greatest invention of all time, but it's being sold to us as a low cost alternative to human labor. So there's this sort of big disconnect in terms of the promise and then how we're supposed to actually, you know, put it into the business. So, and I would say that the go-to-market strategy for AI right now, if I had to say there's a collective term, is fear.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:08:49) Right? There's this fear of missing out. There's this fear of becoming obsolete. There's a fear of, you know, dystopian futures. There's fears of bubble, et cetera. But, nonetheless, it's fear. I think that fear is creating a frenzy for leaders. Right? Everyone knows they have to do something even if they don't know what to do. And so I think in this frenzy, I think people are just, you know, sort of reacting. We got to do something. But what's happening is we're overestimating the power of AI automation because we're underestimating the complexity of the organization, the need for coordination. We assume that, hey, we're going to adopt AI like software, and the magic's going to happen. And the reality is that's just not the case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:36) So what's the solution? What do we do?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:09:39) I don't know what the solution is, but I'll say this. I think everyone is jumping to the easy part of the conversation. And at least from an enterprise perspective, there is no easy conversation. I think everyone wants to say, look, what tasks can we automate? And who can we get rid of in the organization to save money? Because let's be honest, there's a lot of pressure right now for companies to deliver an ROI on AI investments. And if it's not clear how to do that through growth, or through new products, or through new markets, or whatever, then what is clear is to say, look, I can take cost out over here because I'm increasing my, you know, investments in AI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:15) Yeah. I've never been a huge fan of that as a business owner. You're a startup guy. I'm a startup guy. I've always over-indexed on new revenue, new money in the door versus trying to cut costs.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:10:28) Yeah. But you're seeing it. I mean, it's happening. Right? And it's everywhere. I think that in my mind, there's, I think, three questions that a leader or a company sort of has to look at. It's how is AI changing the competitive landscape? So what's happening out there in the ecosystem that we may need to react to? There's some industries that AI isn't disrupting right now. It's, you know, there are industries that may not be touched for years from an AI perspective. And there are others that are being completely turned upside down. So first of all, let's understand that. Then what do we need to do as a company in reaction to, in response to these external forces? Then, and only then, hey, how might work change as a result of how we're changing as a company? But everyone's kind of skipping those first two steps because it's really hard to answer those questions. And they're saying, well, let's just introduce AI into these specific roles or these, you know, functions, and we'll figure it out from there. And no surprise, AI is failing as a result of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:25) And the tool you're pioneering and innovating is this assistant for the CEO?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:11:32) It's at least helping the CEO contextualize what's happening out there in the world. So I think every week, there's 800,000 articles about AI. You know, first of all, how do you stay on top of that? Second of all, which ones are true? Which ones are not? Which ones matter to me? Which ones don't? So I think, first of all, let me just help figure out where we're at as a company. What does this mean to us and what's our starting point? And then, yeah, what are some changes that we need to make as a company? If you don't start there, then leaders are sort of really hobbled in terms of being able to make good decisions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:03) That is true. I have found that I use a custom workspace where I've taught it a lot about my company and what we do and then have used it for strategic planning quite a bit.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:12:16) Yeah. Yes. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:18) If I'm out there doing that with just what's available, and I'm a, we're a small company. We're under 10 people currently. It's like if I'm out there doing that, there's definitely other people are doing it.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:12:28) That's right. But it's harder if you're a CEO of a public company, you know, a $50 billion company with 100,000 employees around the world. It's harder to trust ChatGPT, you know, on the surface. And so, one, there's a lot of times, you know, let's be honest, they're a demographic that may not be using it natively. Two, I think it's harder to trust this because you're saying, hey, I got to make bet the company decision that I can't just use this sort of foreign tool that I'm going to drop a bunch of, you know, proprietary information here and then sort of have it spit out, you know, my strategy. So it's difficult to trust that. And so I think the bigger the company and the higher the stakes, the less tools that are available for these people to do. As a small company, I have a small company too. I use AI all the time. I talk to it more than anyone just like you guys. And you're seeing, you know, sort of outsized gains right away because we don't have sort of the, you know, legacy playbooks. We don't have the legacy thinking. We can, you know, sort of make these decisions in the, the stakes are lower. They're high for us, but they're lower in the grand scheme of things. But if you're running a big public company, you don't have any solutions right now. And you're getting pressure from everywhere. You're getting pressure from the board, from customers, from your employees, from competitors, and where do you go?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:40) So you're seeing a lot of companies out there. They're running lots of pilots. They're not working. All the studies say low percentages. What's the root cause of why these pilots aren't working?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:13:56) Root cause is a tough one, I think, because, you know, every company is a little bit different. But I would say some common themes. Again, what we talked about before, you know, where are we at in the grand scheme of things? I think that's super important. But I think, and I'll give a real world example.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:14:11) So thirty minutes ago, before we're talking now, I had a call with the chief AI officer, and she was telling me, hey, we're super excited. Next month or two months from now, we're going to take our top 800 leaders of the company, and we're going to do this virtually. We're going to have them build and deploy an agent. You know, they're going to have their own agents.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:14:30) This agent's going to assist our top leaders. They're going to adopt AI and, you know, wow, this is, like, big change. I'm like, that's great. Like, in support of what?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:14:38) Like, what are you hoping to get out of this? And she's like, well, AI adoption. Like, we have this metric that says, hey, we need to adopt AI. And if the leaders do it, then the organization will do it. I said, okay, that's great. Then what? Right? Then what happens? Like, who's going to use it? How are they going to use it?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:14:52) Is everyone going to use it the same way? Does everyone want to automate their email? Does everyone want to automate, you know, they need help writing? Is it, do some people want to use it for expenses, et cetera? And they're like, well, I don't know. We just wanted to kind of build these, you know, these agents.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:15:02) And so I said to her, look, you need to be thinking about if you have 800 people that are going to deploy 800 agents in the organization, you should have a plan that looks like you're about to hire 800 employees into the company. Because that plan would be robust. It would have objectives. It would have, you know, sort of success factors about here are the risks. Here's the plan. Here's who's responsible for what. Here's how to unwind things when they don't work.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:15:22) You can't just say, let's go put 800 new things into the world, and all of a sudden, now we're an AI company. So I think three things there that, you know, kind of come through that conversation that I learned. One is, what are you trying to accomplish? The second one is, what is AI actually capable of doing? And then the third one is, and I think this is the part that people hate talking about is, what are we actually capable of implementing as an organization?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:15:37) So we can have the biggest dreams in the world. We can have the biggest problems we have to go solve, and AI may bring all those capabilities, but what can we actually accomplish as a company? And it's different for the company of ten people than it is for a company of 100,000 people. And I think everyone's kind of taking this peanut butter approach of, well, AI is AI no matter who you are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:12) No. Figuring out how to apply AI to the organization is something that I've talked a lot about outside of the podcast. So just talking to different leaders.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:16:21) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) I'd say the most interesting guy that I would look into. If I, I don't usually recommend episodes much to other people because I don't like it when people give me content to consume because it's like I've got enough. Right. But one of the most interesting people that I've talked to was from HealthBridge. Josh, if you could pull up his name.

(Josh (Producer) at 00:16:42) So Rob Duffy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:44) Rob Duffy. Okay. This guy, there's some health tech company, you know, very kind of, it's kind of boring. They deal with insurance and providers and claims and stuff. But the strategy of how this dude implemented AI was just, it blew my socks off.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:17:01) Oh, that's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:01) He describes it in the episode.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:17:03) The app—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:03) I didn't even know we were going to talk about that on the episode. Just completely derailed into that. But, yeah, we did an episode with him. I think it aired a couple weeks ago.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:17:10) Okay. But if—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:11) You want to, if you like it and you want an introduction to him, if after you hear the way he thinks and how he went about doing it, and for context, it's a large organization. I think just in engineering, they have like a thousand people.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:17:22) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:23) But he had this problem. He's got all these engineers. How did he get them to adopt AI? And the way that he solves this problem is just, like, it was cool.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:17:29) Oh, that's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:30) Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it actually might be in line with some of the, there's just some notes and tones that I think you would be like, that's cool how he did that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:41) Fantastic.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:17:42) Thanks, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:43) Okay. Sorry. I got off topic there. But sometimes I'm just talking to you and I'm like, oh, you need to know who Robert Duffy is.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:17:50) Connections. I got to learn this. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) Always. Always. Okay. So it's not strange to me, the story you just told me about the 800. I see this happen all the time. It's amazing how often I'll walk up to people and I'll just be like, so why are you doing that? And they'll just be like, well, because... Yeah. And it's not bad intentions. You know, that's good intentions. There's a new tool. We want people to be familiar with it. That's great. But it's like, and then what? Then how do you figure out what the next step is and how do you monitor it and how do you scale it and, yeah.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:18:22) Yeah. I'm all for, I mean, experimentation. You've got to innovate with this stuff. I mean, for sure, but it's got to lead somewhere.

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(Joel Beasley at 00:18:57) I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about your earlier career. Like, how did you get all this experience to do this? Like, how did you get to the point where you were at this Adecco company in charge of all this stuff? You're a leader. How did you do that?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:19:31) It's probably the, you know, some of the dumbest decisions that a human being can make, I guess, you know, quite a twisted path. I was in the military for a long time. So I was in military for, you know, most of the nineties. And kind of went there just because I wanted to see the world. And in the nineties, it was hard to see the world. There wasn't an Internet, so you had to kind of go out and touch it and feel it, you know, on your own if you wanted to see it. You want to read about it.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:19:48) So I got that experience and it was great. Got out of the military, joined one of the first ecommerce companies in the wild west of the ecommerce days. It was a B2B company, one of the first B2B companies. And my first job, like, almost on day one, my boss sent me to Asia and said, hey, we are going to start buying direct from factories in China and throughout Asia. We're going to bypass the big brands. We're going to bypass the big wholesalers, and we're going to bring in high-margin products under our private label, and we're going to take over, you know, via ecommerce.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:20:08) I didn't know any of that stuff. Never been to Asia before. I had no idea what you're talking about. I got hired because I was the only one with international experience having been in the military. And I learned so much from that one experience. It was the greatest job I've ever had in my life because I landed in a foreign place. I had no idea what I was doing. I was going around saying, here's what I want to do. I had no volume. I had no experience. I had no business doing that.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:20:47) And after a few weeks, I called him up. This is just one story, but the rest of it's boring. And I said, look, I'm failing. You've got to fire me. You got the wrong guy. I can't do this. I thought I had this resilience and this perseverance having come out of the military, but can't do it.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:21:03) And he said, look, what are you trying to do? I said, I'm trying to buy products. You told me to come over here. Let's buy products. You gave me a deadline. Nobody wants to sell me products because I don't have volume. I don't have any of the specs. I don't know what I'm talking about. And he goes, no. You missed it. You missed the brief. You missed what I told you. I told you that right now, your job is to go over there and build belief.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:21:29) Later, it'll be buying products, but you've got to go build belief in what we're doing. I said, what do you mean by that? I don't know what that means. And he goes, you've got to build relationships. He goes, we're changing an industry. We're doing something new. You know, we didn't even use the word ecommerce at that time, I don't think. He said, you've got to convince them that this is going to be the future and that they need to be part of it with us.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:21:37) And so, anyway, I changed my approach, and I just went there. I started building relationships. I started talking about, hey, we're going to be the first to do this. We have no idea what we're doing, but you could be the first two, et cetera, et cetera. Long story short is, after two years, we had $4 billion worth of volume, you know, coming out of Asia. We had our own private brand. We became the largest B2B ecommerce company in the world, and we sold to a major retailer who in turn became the third largest ecommerce company in the world.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:22:15) Not all because of what we're doing, but the point was is that you've got to start with this sort of belief. And you've got to start feeling kind of stupid about things, and you're going to feel like, boy, I just, I don't fit in. I'm doing something crazy. It feels like I should be just joining the crew because I'm tired of sort of going against the grain. But I learned an early lesson in my life that you just got to stick with things.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:22:39) And for the next, you know, twenty-plus years, that's kind of guided me to this point. And I ended up at the Adecco Group not because I wanted to work for a big HR workforce management company. I went there because they were trying to go through this major transformation even before AI. And it sounded a lot like those early days that I just described back in ecommerce. I'm like, I can't believe there's still opportunities like this that exist in the, you know, two thousand twenties. I'm in. I'm going to go do that.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:23:03) And I moved my family to Switzerland, or my wife, my kids are older. And I just, you know, late in life said, do something crazy. And I'm sure she—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) Wasn't complaining. Switzerland sounds amazing. Yeah.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:23:18) It's pretty awesome. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:19) We had some friends that just went there and they're like, we highly recommend it.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:23:23) It's awesome. Yeah. So long story, but I, that was kind of a pivotal moment for me that just said, go for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:30) Well, let's talk a little bit more about that. So I had to learn that lesson of sticking with things. Tell me about when you learned it. Because if you have to learn that lesson, that means there was times where you weren't sticking with things, and things weren't working out as well, and then you realized you have to. So tell me about that moment for you.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:23:46) Yeah. I think, you know, so we ended up selling that company. I got an offer to stay with that company, you know, right away, and I was excited. I was like, this is exciting, you know, like, hey, we all, you know, sort of been building up to this moment. This is going to be great. This is the next era. And I realized quickly that it was a completely different environment. It was a completely different culture. Not what was bad, it was just different.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:23:59) The culture I had just come from was entrepreneurial. You know, we had leaders that said, hey, go get on an airplane and go across the world and don't come back until you figure things out. Now all of a sudden, we're working for this big company that everything is rigid and it's structured and highly successful, but it was difficult to kind of stick to what you'd believed in. It was like, hey, now I have to kind of fit in because this is the culture everyone fits in.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:24:11) And now I'm this, you know, new young executive and I'm part of this new culture. I'm going to go with it, you know. And I was miserable because I didn't like the culture. I didn't necessarily agree with what they were doing. I thought, boy, I had built all these relationships in this industry now and made friendships and did things differently. And now I'm being asked to go back in with some of those same relationships and take a completely different approach. And I tried for a while and it just didn't work.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:25:00) And so I left and went and did my own thing, you know, several different times. It was painful. I mean, there were times where I was making payroll off my 401(k) and, you know, my savings after that. But I felt like at least I'm sticking to, like, what I really want to do and what I want to learn and what I believe in. And, you know, it was a rocky road as I'm sure you know.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:25:20) But, oh, yeah. I felt better about myself. You know? And at the end of the day, I think there's, that's a big element. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) I've been at the point where I'm a developer with a steady paycheck, and I've been at the point where my wife and I are in the kitchen at, you know, midnight thinking we're going to have to shut the company down tomorrow. It was years ago, and everything in between. It wasn't just once. You know? Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:42) But I would rather be that person out there trying to make it and failing. I'd rather do that than the destruction, self-destruction, the weirdness I feel of, like, just being comfortable. Like that to me, everyone has their own thing.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:26:00) Yeah. For—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:01) Me, comfort, huge issue. And that made me understand because I grew up fairly poor, like lower middle class. And when I grew up, I saw, I thought people, you know, bad things about money and things like that. And then you kind of grow up and you're like, I need stuff. I need life to be, you need money. Right. I figured it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:16) And then I realized really quickly that people with the most money are the most valuable, often, like 80% of the time. They're the most valuable people. They're doing something that's so valuable to you and to others. You have to handle money as a medium of exchange. And so I realized that, oh, I went from seeing, like, a Lamborghini and be like, that person's a jerk to seeing a Lamborghini be like, what do they do that's so valuable to other members of society that we've given them enough of our money that they can do this?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:26:44) That's a good perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:45) Yeah. So I flipped. Right. And then I got to the point where work became an option. And I, and that was very horrible. Yes. Because you didn't have any forced thing to do. Right. And then I realized, oh, okay. You got to set these goals, and then, and then I realized really quickly. Okay. The reason why wealthy people would tend to get so wealthy is because what else are they going to do? Kill themselves? Sit around and do nothing? Be depressed? Like, you have to continue not for the love of money, but just for the act of, like, doing something. Yeah. You know?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:27:17) A hundred percent on board. I love that. That's a great story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:20) That's why I did r.Potential. I did that because, like, what else are you going to do? You've got to do something with your time.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:27:24) Something. But I think it's an important point. And I think, you know, as a society, not to get, you know, again, too fluffy about things, but we're at this crossroads. Like, what you just described, work is such a big part of our identity.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:27:38) Right? And regardless of which side you fall on, we can't just say, "Well, great, we're going to automate it all and we're all going to go away and collect our UBI and sit on the beach and paint portraits, and we're still going to consume all the products that people want us to buy, but we're good." That's not going to happen.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:27:54) It's such a big piece of us. Right? And again, some people love working for a corporate environment. Some people like you and I want to go do dumb, crazy stuff. It doesn't matter. But I think we really need to think about this now.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:28:06) There's a deeper conversation to be had right now versus simply what can we automate. And I think you just embodied that perfectly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:18) The sit on the beach people, that's how I know they're early.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:28:21) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:21) That's right. Because once you get to the point where you can take longer of a break, you're like, "This is horrible. I need to," because you don't feel productive. You have to go be useful to other humans in order for me to get that satisfying feeling that I woke up and I contributed to life today.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:28:41) Boy, yeah, 100% aligned. I agree. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:45) Alright. So there wasn't a point in your life where you were quitting things a bunch and then you realized you had to stick with them. You just on your first project, you stuck with it and you're like, "That's the recipe for success."

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:28:57) Oh, I mean, I definitely have stumbled and failed many times and had to go in different directions. But it's always been sort of compounding on top of each other. So I've always taken either things I've learned or things I've tried to the next place and the next place. I will say that, personally, I hate the business model of a startup. And I hate it not because of all the things that you just described. I love that part. But what I hate is either seeing a really big problem or having a really good idea, and then not having a voice or having just no momentum and just no scale. Because it drives me crazy. Having been in the corporate world and having massive scale, of course, you have no ideas there. You know, the other is the flip side of the coin. But if you can find sort of the magical place between those two things, when you have the scale of a big company, but you have the culture and the mentality and the ideas of a small company, I like to try to find those places. Because the two extremes, I don't do very well in those two extremes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:58) No. That's the golden—it's very rare. It's usually the founder is still there. You know, they haven't sold off to PE type deal yet or M&A. Yeah. That's why 80% of my portfolio is companies where the founders are still there or still very much a part of it. Yeah.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:30:20) You need that.

(Josh (Producer) at 00:30:21) Yeah. You can't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:23) When the founder is still there, when the creator is still there, it creates this culture usually, not always, but usually where people feel empowered to do stuff because it's not just another CEO that got swapped in from the board and all this. It's the person. I know how they would think, and I know what I would do if I were them, which is a weird superpower, Greg, that we don't talk about much as humans.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:30:47) Yeah. I think you're right. We don't talk about that a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:49) No. We can think like other people pretty well.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:30:52) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:54) Yeah. Talk to AI about that. That's what it's doing. That's its secret sauce.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:30:58) That's what Josh is doing right now. He's talking to AI. He's saying, "Hey, let me get the real scoop on this thing." Those two guys can shut up and do it.

(Josh (Producer) at 00:31:05) No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:07) He's working on deep faking me right now. That way, just send my robot to work. And then—yeah, watch out, Joel. Yeah.

(Josh (Producer) at 00:31:13) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) No. But I over-index on relationships, though, because I think that's going to be—when we get to this marketing point, Greg, of not being able to tell on calls if they're real people or not real people, I think that people will weigh on in-person relationships more. There'll be more conferences. There'll be more in-person gatherings. We might even come up with a new way to kind of do it. But the knowing I'm working with a human is, I think, going to have a premium in the information space.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:31:46) I agree. In fact, some of the companies I've been talking to, they're going back to in-person job interviews, which is great. We've gotten away from that so far, and it's like, I love to hear that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:55) The job interviews have gotten wild, though.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:31:57) They have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:57) Like, 12 steps and they're all video recordings of robots talking to you. Yeah. Terrible. I've heard this. I'm—

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:32:03) Yeah. Just awful experience. So, yeah, I'm all for it. Hey, people are going back to job interviews in person and lunches to meet each other. I'm in on that for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:13) Let's do humanity.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:32:14) You know? I'm with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16) So I know there's a lot with your company because you've got big announcements coming up. You're going to be doing stuff at Dreamforce, all of this. But today, is it just all internal testing with you and some select partners? Is there anything publicly available people can go follow?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:32:35) Not yet. I mean, of course, we have rpotential.ai, but we're calling this the Chief Potential Officer. So this new digital worker. Right? And we're testing it with a number of design partners. So, you know, large enterprises, the CEOs of these large enterprises. And we're making sure we get it right. I mean, we're not just deploying an agent. This is—we're talking about memory. We're talking about context. We're talking about being able to switch between models, turn things off, roll things back. And so, you know, there's a lot of depth beneath the surface. We're building enterprise infrastructure, essentially, which I think very few companies are when it comes to AI. And so we're testing it, and by the time Dreamforce comes around, we'll share it publicly, but we've got to get it right with these users first. And so—are you using it? You're using it. I'm sure.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:33:22) For sure. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:24) Do you feel like Elon—well, I almost called him Elon Musk. Uh, Iron Man. Who is that? Robert Downey Jr.? Right? Yeah. When he's sitting there making his first one?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:33:33) Tony Stark. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:34) Yeah. Tony Stark. There we go. Thank you.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:33:36) That's right. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:37) Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel like Tony Stark?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:33:41) Not yet. No. Not yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:43) We're getting there, though.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:33:44) I'm not quite as smart here. I'm not quite as good looking. But, you know, I—no, no, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:49) Jarvis, do you feel like you're talking with Jarvis? Not James.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:33:51) No. I know. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:52) You're like, "Yeah. Yeah. Okay."

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:33:56) I got the suit. We're not going to talk about it on air. And then I started thinking about it, and I can't pull it off. No. I do. And you said it just, you know, a minute ago. It's you're all for relationships. And I feel like I'm building a relationship, and I'm not using a tool. And that seems strange because, you know, not in a creepy way. But I feel like I'm having to invest as much time and energy in building a relationship with this colleague, if you will, as I would a human. And I know I'm not trying to get the same thing out of it, so I'm not saying it that way. I'm just saying, it takes investment. We get it wrong sometimes. I say things wrong. It comes back to me. It says things wrong. I get frustrated with it. I leave it for a while. I come back. And I think it's just a good lesson that it's not easy, you know. Any relationship that's worth having requires investment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:42) No. So you're getting to use the technology. Right now, you've got some people playing with the technology. You're going to be at Dreamforce. And what's the dates for Dreamforce? Do we have those?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:34:52) October 14th through 16th. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) So we're getting there. This year.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:34:57) We're getting there. Yeah. Like, eight weeks away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) And then we're going to have you back on after the Dreamforce announcements or whatever the—let's just say the Dreamforce event.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:35:07) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:07) We'll have you back on, and we'll talk more about what you guys unveil there. Is that right?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:35:11) That's great. Yeah. We're excited about it. Awesome. Learning a lot. I mean, it's just—learning a lot. Yeah. It's just to see people that, you know, like, it's interesting to see how these leaders think. And—and I don't want to say desperate, although that's probably the right word, but I'll be polite to them and say, they are super vulnerable right now. We're talking about the leaders of the biggest companies in the world. Some of them on the other side of their job are deploying the top AI tools in the world. But on the other side of them, they have no idea what to do with their workforce right now. I mean, they are lost. And it's just interesting to see these powerhouse people vulnerable and don't know what to do. I've never seen that in my career. You normally see a CEO of a major company, and they've got it together, and they've got an entourage, and they're, you know, even if they're on script, you're just like, "Okay. Impressive." And these men and women are now more and more just—they feel lost. They know the stakes are so high and the decisions that they're making for the future of their companies, and they don't know where to turn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:14) Well, it's because it's unprecedented, the environment and the variables that we have right now.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:36:20) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:20) To think through these things, you need augmented intelligence. You need something more than just—our meat computers have very specific limitations. You know, we forget at the rate of one bit per neuron per second. We have these very specific organic limitations, and we need our silicon friends to help us augment those because we can't expect—to make these decisions and to think through these, you need a mile deep in psychology. You need a mile deep in ethics. You need a mile deep in all of these areas. And humans tend to be really, really good at a small number of things, but you need to be really good at a large number of things in order to make these decisions and to see all the angles. So, vulnerability almost blurs with self-awareness of our own limitations. Right?

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:37:11) Yeah. Yeah. Well put. And, you know, what's interesting is, obviously, we're talking to very senior people. And so, you know, what they get paid for is their intuition, their judgment. They've had these decades of experience. What's interesting now for all of us, regardless of age and generation, is how much of that do you trust and how much of that do you kind of set aside because everything is so new. And I think everyone's going through that individually, but then collectively, as organizations are saying, "Well, how much do we rely on our old playbook because it's been so successful? And how much of it is completely out of date and we have to reinvent everything?" And there's no science to that. That is pure art, and it just requires a lot of thinking and a lot of questions. And it's not so simple as to say, "Well, if we just buy this tool or this AI and problem solved." And so there's going to be a rocky road of transformation and transition over the next several years for everyone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:02) I think it's going to lean to benefit people with passion.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:38:05) Yeah. I agree with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:07) Yeah. I think there's a lot of people making a lot of money that are mentally checked out and just running a hamster wheel. Right. And that's not going to be acceptable.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:38:16) That's my biggest frustration is no one's got a vision. Who gives a shit about superintelligence? That's not a vision. What's this going to do for us? How is this going to help us? Let's talk about people. You think about if you're going to say AI is going to be the greatest invention of all time. Well, first of all, that's a pretty high bar, and that's a pretty elite group of things that we've invented in the past. Right? Fire, plumbing, Internet, printing press, electricity. All of those things have one thing in common, is that they made life better for people. What's AI's role going to be to make life better for people? No one's talked about that yet. Let's hear that story. I want to hear that vision, not superintelligence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:54) Well, yeah. And I think you're exactly on track. I mean, historically, that's what technology has done. It's made life better for people. I think it'll happen faster than it's ever happened before. You know, when I think of it, when you say vision, I think about the—let's say, a 53-year-old male who's got Down syndrome, who's living off of social security only at a care facility that's one star care facility, you know, with people who just want to go drink at 5:00 and are checking it in, but they're disabled, you know. My son has Down syndrome. So I think about the future and what type of future he might live in. And one of the things I think about is that there will be a higher—it'll make life beautiful. There'll be a higher quality of care available to everybody and not just a certain—it'll be available to everybody. And so that's one of the imaginations that I have for the future is these jobs that are run by humans today where they're kind of mentally checked out and they're doing it with low quality and they don't care and there's high turnover, I think the AI is going to help a lot with that. And it'll just give a higher quality of experience to the people who care.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:40:07) I hope so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:08) Trying. Yeah.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:40:09) I hope you're right. And that—or who can't care for themselves? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The kind of stories like that are there, and let's go make those reality. I don't know. I just feel like—we're talking about, you know, I'm in San Francisco, so all the bus stops say, "Never hire a human again." Like, get out of here. Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:26) Yeah.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:40:26) It's like, let's go tell that story that you just told, you know. Let's go build something for that. And there's just not enough of those stories right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:34) Yeah. And I think we'll see a lot more. I mean, I see them from time to time because of the show. And we've been doing it with software and hardware. There's a lot—if you go spend a day tracking down the improvements in elderly care, my goodness. It's amazing. They'll have the AIs watch them, check their medication schedules, early detection of falls. All sorts of amazing things, and it's dirt cheap.

(Greg Shewmaker at 00:41:01) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:01) Because it's just some microchips and a camera sensor and then some AI monitoring the video.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:41:07) Or just imagine not being lonely anymore. My mom lives alone. My dad died a few years ago, and she wants someone to talk to all day long. And here's something that will listen to her forever. And she can talk about whatever, whenever, however much she wants to, and that's companionship. How many people feel that way? So I'm with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:27) That's absolutely true. Loneliness is a very important thing. And we often, you know, we're so anthropomorphic, and to survive, a lot of the things that we do is we imagine other people are exactly like us. It's one of my biggest issues. I always think everybody's as driven as me, right?

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:41:43) And then—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:43) I'm like, what? But that's not—there's a huge spectrum. There's everything from people in jail to people who are mentally ill, all the way up through brilliant scientists, and so it's going to make life better for a lot of people.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:41:57) I agree. Yeah. But we have to design it that way. It's not going to happen naturally, or it's just not going to happen magically. I think, not to say that everyone who's building AI is bad, but I think their intentions are, "Hey, I've got to get my product out there," like any other technology. "I've got to make money. I've got to get a return." I think it's difficult sometimes for companies when you're in the middle of it, especially out here, as we talked about the valley in the beginning of the conversation, just to stop and think about those stories that you're telling in the chaos of the battle of, "Hey, we've got to rise to the top." And so I think people like us, we have to make sure that they're held accountable, and we have to give them the opportunities for them to apply their technology to these types of use cases versus the alternatives. But those two things aren't going to collide on their own. We have to make them collide, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:47) Yeah. And we also have to accept there's always going to be a spectrum.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:42:50) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) You know, there's always going to be everything from the Luddite to, "I hate humans. I love—I want everything in my life to be a robot." There's going to be that group, and then all the sane people are going to be somewhere in the middle.

(Josh (Producer) at 00:43:02) Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:03) The middle is shrinking, but yeah.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:43:04) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:07) We're just trying to figure out how to do it the right way, you know?

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:43:09) That's right. So, yeah, I agree with you. That's what the majority of people want. They just want to do things the right way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:15) We want to do things the right way.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:43:16) Just trying to make a better life for themselves and families, each other. That's it. We're simple creatures. We've made things more complex than they should be, but at the end of the day, we're simple creatures.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:26) We are. And we do have this amazing limiting function where we really like our existing habits. Like, habits—you're a founder and executive. How hard is behavior change?

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:43:38) Oh, it's very hard. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:39) So the humans have to implement the AI. It has to be implemented by them, right?

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:43:44) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:44) And every time I get concerned about waking up tomorrow and this whole thing being over, I realize that there are still mainframes and stuff online today that have been online for twenty-five years. It's like, we take time. We get in these habits. We find things that work. We let these things sit. It takes a long time to move these things around.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:43:55) It's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:55) We take time. We get in these habits. We find things that work. We let these things sit. It takes a long time to move these things around.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:44:02) That's right. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Until all the humans are removed from the equation, it's going to be messy, and it's going to be bumpy, and yeah, and it's going to be all about change. AI itself is not disruptive. It's going to be, you know, who can actually drive the change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:17) You seem to be pretty optimistic too, right?

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:44:20) I am. Yeah, I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:22) Are you—you're a long-term optimist?

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:44:25) I'm a long-term optimist. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:27) Me too. It's going to be shaky. It's going to be volatile. Things are going to happen.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:44:31) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But long-term, I know. We've always figured it out, right? I mean, if you study history, we're always at the brink of disaster and peril, and things are about to end, and then somehow we come through it, not without pain and not without issues, but we somehow come through it. And so long-term, I think we're going to figure this out too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:53) Yeah. I got real deep into it about two years ago, and I started studying money and all of that and trying to understand how things work and, you know, value and economies. And I came away from that whole deep research with these very few points, and they are that, you know, money is a medium of value of exchange, right? It's a way we exchange value with each other as humans. That's not going to go away. We will exchange value with each other as humans. What that looks like will change, and it'll be volatile, and two hundred years ago looks entirely different than it looks like today, but humans will still be trading value with each other. And so it's up to us—it's our responsibility as individuals to pay attention to where that value is going and how that's operating so that we can position ourselves to be in a spot where we're able to deliver value to our fellow man, humans.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:45:49) Humans. And that's the key. That's the thing. It's hard to go sit on a beach and do nothing and become mindless because you want to continue to bring value and add value. That's, you know, it's just—it's in our nature, as you say. We've got to make sure that we help future generations feel and believe the same thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:06) Let's do it. I'm in.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:46:08) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:10) We're going to—we're changing the world here today, Greg.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:46:10) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:11) I feel good. Super excited. Change. It's change. Change. Don't roll it back. Josh cannot roll this back. This is committed and deployed to production.

(Greg Shoemaker at 00:46:21) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:22) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.