00:00 Introduction to Humans and AI in the Workplace Podcast
01:22 Fast-Tracking AI Adoption in the Middle East
06:50 Societal Transformation and Individual Freedom
09:10 Organisational Adaptability in the Age of AI
11:01 Fundamental Values in AI Development
Welcome everyone to the Humans and AI in the Workplace podcast. Over the last few years, it's become clear that artificial intelligence, AI, is one of the most impactful and disruptive transformations in the workplace. As a leader, you may be wondering how to get started and how to do it in an intelligent way. Or you may be stuck on how to overcome some of the people issues and human bottlenecks your AI has crashed into. We are here today with Dr. Debra Panipucci and Leisa Hart from AI Adaptive, and our special guest, Patrick Beraud, from Tonomus Venture Studios in Dubai, to discuss today's topic of getting the fundamentals right for integrating humans and AI in your business.
Thank you for joining us. I'm Leisa Hart. And I'm Dr. Debra Panipucci. This is part B of our guest episode with Patrick Burrow, venture builder, technologist, and business strategist. We had a really great chat in our last episode with Patrick, where he shared his insights and experience from his work in Dubai at the Tonimus Venture Studios. If you haven't already listened to part A, we really encourage you to do that as it seeds the topic of addressing the fundamentals in your workplace for humans and AI to be successful. In this episode, part B, Patrick shares how AI adoption is being fast -tracked in the Middle East and what lessons we can take from that to apply in our workplaces here. So let's dive straight in.
So having worked in multiple countries and you're currently based in Dubai. Yes. What do you see Patrick in terms of adoption of AI?
Interestingly enough, I've been based in Dubai because I work for Saudi I'm involved in the whole Middle East ecosystem, including the American system, because we have a massive office in Silicon Valley. We have many tech -adventure builders. So I wouldn't be able to say much about the Australian ecosystem, but what I can say definitely for sure, the way the trend is going when it comes to the adoption of this type of technology into the workplace,Even when you take the Middle East, what they want to do is what I'll call collaborate. They don't want to have this closed loop system which might not deliver the potential that we are talking about. So for example, take Dubai. Before I left, I just read that they release their own large language model. It's really good, publicly for free for everybody in the world to just use it.
I know companies down there mainly working on a large language model, just the Arabic version. So it's not just English, it's just the Arabic version. And they are releasing it publicly. So there is this drive to collaborate with the world. And there is this drive to take the technology also, to use it internally, to deploy into the various parts of the organisation, whether it's HR, whether it's finance, things like that, to just add value and try. And of course, there's always a fear of, what's happening? to happen to our data, we have comparing data and things like that. There is always that fear and that fear is always going to be there, it's never going to go away. The good news is that although everybody's raising that fear, my data, my data, my data, everybody's using it, using it, using it, using it, so.So that's a good news part. So there's a big drive for collaboration and there's a big drive of let's try. And especially, you know, you should see Dubai Moto. So the Moto is always like, let's do that. The next day they are doing it.
Yeah. Wow. That's the thing about Dubai. That's the thing about Dubai. Do it. Do it at scale. Yeah. As big as you possibly can. Yeah. They want to be the biggest of, I mean, if you do something great here in Australia, they want to do it better than that. So the bigger of that or something. They don't mind taking somebody top engineer from here to them. They're going to do it. Trust me. So, I mean, to come back to it, there's a massive collaboration and there's an embrace, like active embrace of the technology into organisation. How did they get that? How will it pan out? I don't know. But how did they get that? I mean, if you look at the division, these people are aiming towards, right? You get to admit that you cannot close off and succeed.
You cannot close off. And if you cannot close off, what does it mean? Are you going to replicate already what is this? That's not a vision that you state. If I talk about Neom, for example, it's a futuristic city. Go and check it out. It's way beyond anything that you could imagine now, but they were able to paint that picture. Now, if you close off, how are you going to build that?
Right? If you just take what is this new world and replicate it, that's not a futuristic city. So you want to bring the brightest mind, the whole world, right? Together and say, you know what? I want to take that risk. So they have a culture of wanting to - Taking risk. Taking risks and experiment. And experiment it. And just having a go. Exactly. And if you don't take the risk, what do you, I mean -
Of course, risks come with consequences, but they are taking the risk.
Are they taking calculated risks though, Patrick, or are they just, the look on your face says no. You've known Dubai maybe 25 years ago, 30 years ago, Dubai wouldn't be where they are today if they were playing safe compared to 25 years ago, 20 years ago and where they want to be with all these things that they're talking about, if they're safe, they'll never be there. So coming back to your original question, there's a drive of collaboration with the world over there. There's a drive of experimenting and testing it, which also show their risk appetite. Yes, there's a massive conversation about this, I don't know what I'll call it, safety, like data, how you use it, and all these things that come around, and ethics or not.
But that does not stop embracing the technology.
So what do you think in the context of humans and AI in the workplace to sort of supercharge workplace performance? What do you see as the wow? So that's the wins, the opportunities and the watch outs. Watch out. Interesting. This is a very interesting question. Usually I use the word wow in a different context. So I really like your question. So I mean, talking about the wins and which is that is going to...
accelerate how, what, and why you do things. And which means I see every employee as what I'll call a 10X consultant or something like that. And what I mean by 10X consultant is here is Patrick, here is what Patrick does, but because of all this agent that I call AI, Patrick is able to deliver 10S of that value. Yes. Wow. That's the...
That's no longer even a question in my mind. It's already happening. In my world, I've seen it already happening. So that's a big win. In terms of opportunity, I think I will look at opportunity from what I call societal perspective. If you look at the transformation that the internet brought to us, because of that now, we create trillions of economy, worth dollars of economy. And...the opportunity that AI is going to bring, the way it's going to transform our society, there are new business model, new value creation, new value delivery stream that will be created, which means our economy will grow a lot more and become much more bigger than it is now. So I kind of sense it to free you, but it's another level of individual freedom.
And when we talk about individual freedom, people think it's just about, I should be able to say what I want to say. No, it goes way beyond that, right? Individual personal liberties is what? You know, you deliver value, you get your money, you take care of your family, you do it when you want to do it, how you want to do it. That freedom, right? To exchange value. So now the exchange of value sometimes more often than not is happening between big companies. And the AI should put in a way that we can exchange just the value that we need at a time that we need, where do we need it without all this big, big, big organisation. They'll still be in part from big organisation, don't get me wrong, but I should be able to give you all you need, should be able to give you all I need.
So Dr. Bob Johanson, he works for the Institute of the Future and he talks about it as everything is highly distributed. Bingo. Yes.
Yeah, that's really cool. So you can work anywhere. You interact in different ways. You can live in a separate country to where you work. He wrote a book that came out in 2018 and I was talking about that concept well before we hit the pandemic and people decided they could work from anywhere. But yet highly distributed is a really interesting point. Organisations have to build adaptability within their teams.
But a key part of that is people also personally feeling like they've got mobility to move around and change roles and build skills and stay within an organisation or an industry or even move but have the skills to have that mobility. Yeah, that mobility, that freedom. That's right. And the problem is currently that organisations are not structured for that. So we know that agile thinking has tried to create T -shaped people and that's been not so successful. But even just having the employees having a level of enterprise thinking where they can see how all the pieces fit together and think about the downstream and upstream impacts of their decisions and actions, that still doesn't yet exist in a lot of layers of the organisation. Yeah, and you particularly need that at that leader and senior leader level. You know, usually how does it happen, right? You don't get that until the people who are not changing are left behind. You have this new from Kodak moment or this kind of thing. So you are left behind.
Adapter DIOS, I don't know whether that's the correct term. So what's your watch out? It will be very easy to start talking about data when I say watch out. So I will actually go to another level than that, which is...
And I don't know if I should say this. The first thought that came to my mind when you say watch out is I wanted to say by developing the technology, don't overly try to control it. That's what I wanted to say. And we know also all the fear that people are talking about that if we don't control the technology, how it's going to be detrimental to the world, things like that. And I tend to go against it and say, don't control it. Because if...
your fundamental, which is where I'm coming back to again. If your fundamental are correct in terms of your value system, something like that, and you infuse that into it, the AI is going to behave like that, it's not going to be detrimental. The only reason you try to control the development or democratisation of that technology is if you're also fearful that some of your behaviours,
you have a question about some of your behaviour, some of your own value system, then you may want to control that because you are not thinking it shouldn't be used against yourself, it shouldn't be used, you know, things like that. So, what, watch out from my perspective is like, watch out who are you.
Yeah. So watch out for the weakest part of your organisation currently. Yes. Your organisational culture, your organisational system, your organisational processes, your organisational value system. I would say value system. Watch out for that. Leave the technology alone. Watch out for the most vulnerable part of that. You get that right, the rest will fall into place. Go back to the fundamentals. Yes, actually go back to the fundamentals. That's how I'll put it.
Amazing. Hey Patrick, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to speak to your listeners. For all of our leaders listening today, we hope that this episode and the previous episode with Patrick have given you some actionable insights for fast tracking AI adoption in your workplace. We have more on our website about the fundamentals in AI adoption if you want extra resources.
Thanks for listening.
