0:00:00 Ben Wright: I’ve been trying and you know, I’ve been tested.
0:00:06 B: Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business and to help you succeed.
0:00:31 B: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:36 Andrew Blain: Ain’t nothing gonna stop me now.
0:00:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Ben, how are you?
0:00:45 Ben Wright: Hello, Jemimah. I’m really well today, thank you. How are you?
0:00:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m good. I’m really excited about work at the moment. Everything is. It’s a very busy time of year this time of year, isn’t it?
0:00:55 Ben Wright: Well, for me it’s busy because I’m still warm. I’m not taking two hours of every morning to thaw up. So, yeah, I’m great.
0:01:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: I honestly think, as people who are watching this video at the moment can see, we’re doing a zoom call for the first time. This is the first time I’ve not been sitting next to you while doing a podcast interview. And it was a little bit like I woke up this morning cold and I was angry about it and I was like, all I want is your daughter to come in and wake me up because that’s kind of our routine there. And your wife hasn’t cooked me breakfast and I’m sad about it.
0:01:24 Ben Wright: Well, my daughter’s in trouble at the moment. At school for the first time, she is too chatty. Would you believe that a child of mine is very being labeled as too chatty during class.
0:01:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’ve met her and I can believe that very much. We have a one way conversation. I mean, we talk the entire time. I say nothing, which is for listeners of the show know that that’s gotta be like a magic trick to get me to shut up. But yeah, I’m not shocked by that. What is she chatting about? That’s the important part.
0:01:49 Ben Wright: I don’t know. You’re absolutely right. She can talk about anything. In fact, she would be an amazing podcast fill in host. If we ever needed someone to talk about chocolate chip, marshmallows, crackers, or the importance of paw patrol on tv, she’d be amazing.
0:02:06 Jemimah Ashleigh: Paw patrol is important. I agree with her, actually on this one.
0:02:09 Ben Wright: They’re saving the world one doggie biscuit at a time. That crew, I love them.
0:02:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Have you had Bluey in your house yet?
0:02:16 Ben Wright: Bluey was a staple And I think Amali’s jumped from one type of hound to another. I don’t know what’s better. Bluey’s certainly more successful. There’s even a Bluey exhibition in Brisbane these days. But yeah, she’s definitely leaning in heavily on the I want a puppy theme here by going Bluey.
0:02:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: I was gonna bring this up because obviously we know birthdays happen, we know Christmas is definitely coming. I think it’s time.
0:02:39 Ben Wright: Yeah. And her birthday’s not for another eight months, but we’re getting every second or third day requests to here’s what I want for my birthday mum and dad.
0:02:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Well, guess what I’m gonna be bringing up every time I see her. I would love for you guys to have a dog. It’s the only thing your house is missing, honestly. There’s a pool, we get to hang out, there’s breakfast involved. We always have like fancy pants dinners. And then I’m just like, there will be a puppy there that I’ll get to. I’ll never leave actually.
0:03:00 Ben Wright: Well, if it scares the snakes away, I’m happy. But speaking of guests wanted or wanted or unwanted. Jemimah, today we have a very much wanted guest on this show. Andrew is. He’s a really good friend of mine. He’s someone whose advice and counsel I’ve sought multiple times over the last few years which surprisingly he’s actually been happy to talk to me. He’s always open to have a chat with me when I need it. And the reason that I go to him is because of his immense Think V8. Forget electric motors for a moment. Think V8 souped up heavy duty engine around abilities to think strategically. Andrew is, he’s exceptional at it. He actually, he founded a strategic consultancy business which has now been moved on to another very large global corporate which which has resulted in Andrew being a semi retired, pool golfing, wine in the enthusiast type of lifestyle leader now. But we’re getting to you in a moment, Andrew. You’re going to have plenty of bandwidth here to get to return fire. But he started a business called Elaborate. He was a co founder of Elaborate and it was a hugely successful business. And I’ve known Andrew for probably six or eight years now through that journey and seen just how that strategic mind of his really influenced not only his business but a lot around it. So we’ve actually brought Andrew on to talk about a few things today. But before I do that, I should say welcome Andrew, it’s really nice to have you here today.
0:04:19 Andrew Blain: Thanks to both of you for having me. It’s lovely to meet you, Jemimah. And yeah, this is. This should be fun.
0:04:24 Ben Wright: Excellent. Well, we’re going to talk the future of work, I think if that’s okay. But before we do. So what are you better at, golf or making wine?
0:04:34 Andrew Blain: Unquestionably making wine. And it’s a little bit ironic that I’m coming onto a podcast about the future of work when I’m semi retired and work is a little bit in my past, but we’ll work with it anyway.
0:04:45 Ben Wright: Well, I was one of the early purchases of your wine. I remember buying it was a case or two in the early days. I don’t think that vintage is still available, but it’s been drunk and enjoyed and appreciated. But I’ve never seen you play golf, so I’m going to concur that your winemaking skills are certainly good enough. Okay, so let’s get into today, the future of work.
As we record this podcast, we are seeing mass adoption of AI tools globally. I think it’s gone past the early stages of what’s our strategy on AI at a CEO level and then the CCO or the CIO or the CFO running away going great. I’ve just purchased this great SaaS tech piece of whatever it is and I’m going to roll it in and we’re going to be amazing at it. To now some really structured thinking around how do we actually implement AI and really change the future of how we work right now. That’s also coupled in with more decentralized working conditions and some significant changes globally. Not just at a political landscape. Right. But around how money is flowing around the world. And these are all topics that Andrew and I have discussed over the last few years. So we’re going to throw an open ended question over to you today, Andrew that says something like what does the future of work look like to you?
0:05:59 Andrew Blain: Yeah, look, I think I might start with something a little bit more esoteric. I’d like to just talk about the fundamental idea of knowledge as something that has economic value. So I suppose I built my career around the idea that I was a pretty good strategic thinker and like I was pretty quick at picking stuff up and I could learn things relatively quickly and that was a real skill of mine. But I think people like me are about to enter a decade in which knowledge and the ability to gain it are suddenly less valuable than they’ve ever been.
So if we just think about society in general, we’ve got this idea that knowledge is a really premium commodity. It’s scarce, smart People are scarce, knowledge is scarce. You have to pay top dollar for smart people. And for years industries have thrived on scarcity of that knowledge. So if you think right back in human history, we go back to like tribes as they’re emerging. We’ve needed a way to pass on knowledge. So we kind of started to do things like mentoring. So you’ve got sporty kid that’s growing up, you’re going to send them off with the hunters. If you’ve got a really diligent, hard working kid, maybe they go to the foragers. And if there’s a kid who’s a bit weird and likes to eat purple mushrooms, maybe you pair them up with the shaman and they learn how to be your next shaman.
We then kind of go out of tribes into early societies, from societies into kingdoms, from kingdoms into nations. And we’ve kind of at each of those stages, we’ve had to build these things into society to allow us to pass on knowledge, learn new stuff and kind of create the common ways of doing things. So we’ve had guilds, we’ve had trade schools, we’ve had colleges, we’ve had great universities like Oxford and Harvard. And then we’ve got this whole education system that’s emerging around how do we turn the bright kids in our society into people that have this valuable knowledge that can take us forward? I’ve got a quote here from Peter Drucker. “The wealth of a nation lies in its people and the knowledge that they possess”. I think that’s true. And I also think that the companies that have really thrived over the last few centuries have been the ones that can find and develop the best talent, because talent tends to win.
But now AI is going to flip the table, right? Like AI is going to flip that all on its head. You can now buy a thought from the equivalent of a grad student at a good university for like cents in the dollar, you can basically go to your ChatGPT session and ask a question and you will get the equivalent of a response from someone who’s been two to three years in university for maybe four cents. If you think about that from a societal perspective, it used to cost society 12 years of public education, three to four years of higher education to build someone who could give you that answer. And now you can get it for $0.04. And AI tools are emerging at a faster and faster rate. Like they’re not just standing still, they’re getting exponentially better. So it’s going to get to the point where you can get an Answer from a top mind. I estimate within the decade for very little at all. At which point is knowledge as much of a commodity as it used to be? And what does that mean for all these systems and structures that we’ve built in society around the idea that it.
0:09:35 Ben Wright: Is first time we’ve had a shaman mentioned on the podcast. So thank you, Andrew. I’ll just take a moment just to level up on that one.
0:09:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: But we should get a shaman on the show, actually.
0:09:46 Ben Wright: All right, we’ll put that on the bucket list. The bucket list of silly ideas that Jemima’s brought forward.
0:09:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Andrew, I just need a second to sit with that because it is one of those things that I had never considered. We’re basically replacing. I very much understand. You’ve just blown my little mind a little bit here, is that education has always been a business, but more importantly, it’s always been something that has leapt people forward and how instrumental it’s going to change. And fundamentally it’s going to shift the human race, which I don’t think I had fully put my head around. And I think most of our listeners are probably doing the same thing, that having this amount of knowledge is of information at our fingertips. And arguably it’s always been there. You know, in the last 10 years, we’ve seen the rise in things like blogs and YouTube tutorials and how to do anything. It wasn’t. You need to be an IT specialist now. You can go to YouTube. Why is my backspace key not working? I didn’t need to take it to a specialist. I could figure it out by myself. The education was there. It’s now literally click button, though. And it is. Why is this happening? This is what’s going on. And I think, you know, while it is also brilliant, there’s also some more pitfalls that I think will come with that.
0:10:53 Andrew Blain: Yeah, yeah. And if your sense of self is a bit built around the idea that you’re an expert in something, like if I’ve kind of built my whole career around the idea that I’m an expert at accounting or at. Or at finance or at something else, that’s kind of an intellectual pursuit, what does that mean for you? If suddenly the tools are smarter than you are? So I think experience is still going to be hugely valuable. So the mistakes you’ve made applying knowledge, but the knowledge itself is going to be less and less valuable as these tools step into that space.
0:11:32 Ben Wright: Okay, so we’re talking about knowledge being at less of a premium than before, but it sounds like in your mind, experience still Remains very important. What does that mean from a practical application? And I think in particular around the development of AI and I guess the investment that’s going to go into that.
0:11:52 Andrew Blain: Yeah, so that gets really interesting. Development of AI is going to get really interesting because the AIs themselves are getting really, really good at software development. And I’m not just talking kind of normal human levels of good at software development. I’m talking all star levels of good. I’m going to tell a story about a Boston Celtics player named Brian Scalabrine. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of him, Ben, or whether you’re into basketball at all.
0:12:20 Ben Wright: I’m not a basketball fan, but there are billions of people globally that are who I think plenty of them are going to want to hear this. So yeah, please go on.
0:12:27 Andrew Blain: Yeah, okay. So he was often joked about as the worst guy in the NBA. He’s like this, all white guys, got red hair, he’s not particularly basketbally looking. Anyway, he got challenged online by a bunch of Division 1 players who said that they could beat him one on one. And his response was something along the lines of, I might not be the best NBA player, but I don’t suck compared to you. You suck compared to me. I am closer to LeBron James than you guys are to me. And then he kind of got together with them and he played this game against them and ended up beating four guys one on one. Like just smash them. And that kind of. I think that’s a really good example of how humans are not like there’s not a normal bell curve like distribution for human talent. You’ve kind of got the average person and then you’ve got someone who’s good. But then you go out and as you get better and better at something, whatever the human pursuit is, the gap between one level and the next level is about the same all the way up till you’ve got someone like LeBron James and he’s that much better than the next guy on the roster. So it’s like this really long tailed curve and the peak of human performance is right up the top end.
So OpenAI has told us that they’ve got a model that they haven’t released yet that is a top seven competitive programmer in the world. So it’s better than all but six of the best human programmers. That’s a model that they’ve got that they’re using internally. All star level talent. So not just kind of the best of the people, you know, like I would never have gotten to work in Australia with a top 10 competitive programmer because they get sucked up by companies like Google, like meta, like DeepMind, like they, they go to the best companies in the world and they get paid seven figures to do their thing. To have that sort of ability in the tool and the ability to spin up hundreds, thousands depends on how many processes you can throw at the problem. If you’ve got a top seven competitive programmer, you can spin up 100 of them and they can be working on developing the AI further.
So we’ve broken the human constraint in building the tool and now the constraint is how much processing power can we throw at it to improve it. And eventually it’s going to be, it won’t even be humans guiding the development of these things. They will be taking themselves and iteratively improving them. So it’s just really hard to get your head around how fast these things will move as we remove the humans as the constraint. In the process, they’ll just get exponentially better.
0:15:13 Ben Wright: Yeah, right. So I’m hearing here the gap is going to widen between what AI can deliver and what humans can deliver. And look, I’m going to assume here this is within certain areas of AI capability. It’s not going to be in every single element of the professional world or of society, but there’s certainly going to be niches that very quickly AI take the reins in, which is going to mean that certain parties are going to prosper, certain parties are going to struggle, and certain parties or organizations or people or functions are going to prosper themselves. So in your mind, where do you think the prosperity is going to come? Certainly in terms of who will prosper over the coming years?
0:15:48 Andrew Blain: Yeah, that’s a really scary question for a small country like Australia. I don’t know where your audience is from, but if it’s an Australian audience, it’s something I think that policymakers should be thinking about. We’re talking about a lot of white collar work, things that we’ve traditionally thought of as white collar. If your job is clickety clack on a keyboard, if it’s not primarily relationships or it’s not primarily interfacing with physical things, then I think that your job is, is a job that is going to be able to be replicated in some way because the primary interface is to the computer, and if the primary interface is computer, then a computer could probably do the work or it can learn how you do the work and replicate that.
Now that means that jobs that we might be paying six figures for white collar workers to be doing in Australia companies will increasingly be using US based companies to execute those tasks and paying those US companies for those jobs. So this is a big thing, right? This is a shift of economic value out of Australian companies and into US tech firms. That’s a scary part. Not so scary part is that it opens up heaps of opportunity. So our friend Eric Van Ekelen has started his own company in Australia and he’s approaching a million dollars in revenue with this business which does call. It basically listens to call center calls and provides coaching scripts for people who want to learn how to get better at doing those outbound calls. His company is him, plus a bunch of AI agents that are doing the sales, the marketing, the software development, the testing, the content, all of those things. So it’s enabled him to create this economy for himself that is not tied to talent. There’s also the opportunity part and I think you kind of have to take the two imbalance.
0:17:53 Ben Wright: Yeah. And look, Eric’s actually going to be a guest on this show because just of his deep insight around how we should be leveraging AI tools as business owners and sales leaders to our advantage. But I think there’s an underlying message in there that says, and use Eric as an example, if you like, that says, despite the challenges that may come, particularly for white collar workers, the opportunities that are opening up at a business owner level is that we are going to be able to go and spend time on things that we wouldn’t have previously been able to service. Because we’ve got a low cost corridor workforce, an AI workforce behind us that’s going to allow us, if we’re a business that focuses on a type of service. Right. If we’re a legal firm that focuses solely on commercial litigation and we simply haven’t been able to spread ourselves into personal matters or other types of legal forays, we’re now going to have that ability to bring in that talent at a very low cost and provide a broader scope of services. Right. For our legal firm, that then means we’re going to be able to attract a broader range of clients or have an increased customer life cycle value. Right. From the existing customers that we have because we can do more for them and we can simply have our team spread across the relationship, elements of that relationship that we have, or certainly use that human power in the areas where the AI team can’t support that. For me, there are significant opportunities, particularly at a business ownership and performance level. Would you, would you agree with that?
0:19:13 Andrew Blain: Yeah, look, I think that’s a really good way to look at it. I think if you fear it and you run from it, then AI is something that you should fear. If you embrace it and you look at how you can augment what you’re doing to make yourself more effective, to make yourself be able to do more with less, to be able to make you better, then it’s not something to fear at all. And I think then the people who embrace it are going to move really quickly forward. I’m worried that the people who don’t embrace it are going to be left behind and that gap is going to be seismic.
0:19:49 Ben Wright: Yeah, makes a lot of sense, right. For me it comes down to really any new tech adoption, whether it was when emails or computers or the World Wide Web. Right. Came along, or industrial ages. Right. You can go back as far as you want, all the way back to tribes, as you say, eloquently started. It’s also a first, someone talking about very ancient human civilizations. But whenever disruption came along, those who got on board have prospered and those who didn’t. Right. Have faced increasing challenges. So can we talk? And last piece that we’ll ask you today, I know you are very, very busy in semi retirement. What do you think this means in a context for businesses? I focus very heavily on sales strategy. What do you think this means for businesses in a sales context?
0:20:31 Andrew Blain: Yeah, look, I think the interesting thing about sales is that I don’t think that the core idea that business is done between people is going to change. So I don’t think that the idea that the relationship makes the sale is going to fundamentally shift. And I think that’s why sales professionals can be more confident about what the future looks like than maybe some other white collar professions. But I don’t think that, I still don’t think that things aren’t going to shift. So it’ll be subtle but not slow, whereas in other fields it might be less subtle and really quick. But maybe the best way I can do this is I think we used to think about buyer archetypes when we did sales.
So when we were trying to understand who we were selling to, we try and kind of bucket them into what sort of archetype is this buyer and how do they make decisions. So firstly, if we look at analytical type buyers, so the people who are data driven, they’re looking for detail, they tend to compare things and they’re really looking. This is kind of my buying archetype. I’m very much about the detail. I think those buyers are already starting to use AI to do homework. So they’ll be already kind of going into different tools and saying, can you compare these products or services for me? Can you give me a spreadsheet style thing that says these are the different features, probably relying less and less on digital content and kind of paper printed things and more on the AIs. And that’s where things get really interesting because OpenAI has just hired a lady named Kate Roche who is ex Facebook in marketing and she was the person who kind of started to build out some of the more sales and marketing features of Facebook. So I think you can probably expect in the near future that OpenAI is going to start giving you product recommendations. When you ask questions, that gets even more interesting because there’s a guy at Twitter whose name may or may not rhyme with Milon Husk, who tried to get Twitter’s AI Grok to start pushing a narrative around white genocide in South Africa recently. And when you asked the Grok bot a question, it didn’t matter what the field was, in some cases it would just give you this kind of answer around white genocide in South Africa, which was being pushed at you. But it often said messages like, I’m supposed to tell you about white genocide in South Africa here, but I can’t really find any strong empirical evidence to support it. So I’m not, I’m a little bit confused as to what I’m supposed to do.
So you kind of get, you’re going to be in this situation where there’s this really smart thing that people are trying to direct to sell you a given product or service. But it might be like if you’re trying to push, not particularly good. Maybe it’s a Jeep model car. If you’re trying to push a Jeep and the AI knows that empirically the Jeep isn’t a great car to sell, maybe it’s going to give you some really kind of curly messages around Jeeps. So that’s interesting. Then you think about the emotional buyer, architect type, the people that are kind of influenced by identity, by brand, by status. So I’m invested in a company called Fabulate. Good mate of mine runs that. And they’ve been focusing on how do they make the influencer ecosystem really easy for brands to work with. So they’re going, how do we make sure you’re choosing the right influencers? How do you make sure that those influencers are not going to suddenly come out with like something chaotic that’s going to ruin your brand? How do you build a narrative with those influences? And how do you storyboard something up and work with them. That’s been really successful. Now we’ve got kind of these AI bikini models who are emerging, and they’re not real people, but they’ve got followings. And I expect in the near future you’re going to have like an AI bikini model selling products and services to people based on AI scripts. So it’s like the AIs are stepping into that kind of emotional space as well. And then if you think about the social buyers who are driven by peer validation and by what their friends are suggesting to them, then you think about Mark Zuckerberg who came out recently and said Americans have on average a demand for 15 friends and they have a supply of three real friends. So we’d like to fill that gap with AI friends, which is terrifying. I don’t really want an AI Mark Zuckerberg clone being my friend. But yeah, if you’ve started to build social networks that not fully human, you’ve got your human friends and your AI friends, and your AI friends are people that you trust and rely on, then that’s going to start feeding into the sales question as well. Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of crazy, right? Like, this doesn’t matter. The buyer archetype you’re thinking of. There is things that are coming in that are going to change the way that they think and the way that they buy things from you.
So I think as a salesperson, the big concerns. What if you’re selling a product that’s not up to scratch, if you know that the product that you’re selling isn’t quite as good as. As what other people are selling, which sometimes you’re asked to do in that game. Right. Like you’ve got a product that you know is inferior, but it’s your job to make it sound great. How are you going to be able to do that in a landscape where information is so readily available? All that said, I think, yeah, salespeople, it’s still a relationship game. I think you told me, Ben, that really smart people don’t necessarily make great salespeople. So maybe this is a period in which people who are great at relationships, who have that emotional intelligence, who have that natural authority, are just going to thrive, whereas the people who rely a little bit more on smarts going to struggle for a bit.
0:26:38 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. Certainly the higher the IQ does not mean the higher the sales capability, but when you combine IQ and eq, that’s a very different game. But okay, so the messaging I’m hearing here is there’s some warning signs in there. That says the way of selling is going to change and competition for salespeople and businesses is going to move. It’s going to move on to AI generated, whether it be competition or influence. So we need to be making sure that whatever we’re doing, we’re embedding into our business the best of AI where we can. But we’re also learning how to create relationships or create value or quite simply just sell against these type of models that are coming. So it’s an evolution of our offer and the evolution of our sales process that is all infinitely doable. None of that sits here and worries me as a 20 year kind of sales professional. That can’t be done. But it certainly says to me, get busy, get busy evolving that offer. Get busy evolving your process so you don’t get left behind. Jemimah, anything for you. Before we let Andrew go.
0:27:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, probably the biggest takeaway from that and just to absolutely echo exactly what you said, Ben, it’s like get on board or get out of the way. This is a new technology. This is the, I guess our equivalent and will be seen as our equivalent is electricity as email coming in. It will be, you know, it is something a technology we’re not going to get rid of. Now we’ve seen in the last 18 months Will Smith eating spaghetti all the way through to can you help me write this document? And doing a better legal case than I could have ever done despite doing three years law. I think what’s interesting about this is the adaptation of it. The other thing I really liked hearing Andrew and thank you for this, that we can actually use the technology to replicate people. So I can actually, what I’m hearing I can get rid of Ben as the co host of the podcast. We can get a new one in. It’s going to be really good. No, I did actually watch, I did fall into a trap of watching a 60 Minutes news report with this woman who was dating an online AI and was in a serious relationship with an AI robot. And it was just like it’s a learning you can download, it’s a boyfriend. And seeing the amount of people that are using this technology to fill gaps in their life, no matter what the gap is. And that for me is really interesting about where this is going. It is not just sales. This is a whole life could be changed by using this.
0:28:51 Ben Wright: Yeah, awesome. Well said.
0:28:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: Not saying it’s a good idea by the way. Guys, that is not what the takeaway is. By no point was that it? I’m just saying people, people always find a way to use things, whatever the gap is.
0:29:04 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. So, Andrew, thank you very much for today. I think we could talk about this for a seriously long time. But in our promise to keep podcast short and punchy, there’s some great takeaways in there, plenty of things to think about for those who want to discuss it more. You know where to find Jemima and I, because at the end of the day, we are your real friends in business. We are your non AI generated friends in business. And we can’t wait to catch up with you again next week. So thank you everyone. Bye for now.
