speaker-0: Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. Very excited to have another episode for you today. we have a very special guest in the studio today and we'll give it to you for a quick introduction.

speaker-1: Yeah, thanks Channel and I'm I'm excited to be here. I'm Corey Erkenbrack, I'm the chief technology officer here at Vasion. ⁓ I've been at this now for a little bit over a decade, ⁓ and it's been a lot of fun. ⁓ and the one thing I would say, Chan, because I I think we're gonna talk a little bit about transformation today, right? ⁓ I've had I've had the pleasure and the opportunity throughout my career to really be a part of some major transformations. If you think about early on from a waterfall transformation into an agile development transformation, I had opportunities to actually lead that transformation inside of a hardware company called Intel, which is really kind of interesting. When you think about the cloud migration transformation, like applications, workloads, et cetera, et cetera, moving from on-prem into the cloud. I've had an opportunity to be part of that transformation, which was really fun. That actually triggered the next security transformation, which is really round zero trust. Like and I've had opportunities to be part of building solutions and leading the way on digital transformation. And I can't be more excited about what we're gonna talk about today, which is the AI transformation that's right in front of us. And it's really gaining a lot of ground. I mean, it's been two years since that initial view of ChatGTP now. And ⁓ man, it's it's there's a lot of transformation happening. So I'm excited to be here and talk about that today.

speaker-0: We're we're very excited to have you. You you clearly have a lot of experience and being at the forefront a lot of these major changes ⁓ in in in the tech world and in the real world. And ⁓ so today we are going to talk about an article that you recently wrote called Why AI Success Starts with Teams, not tech. So ⁓ tell us a little bit just about what inspired you to write this article in the first place.

speaker-1: I think that as I think about as I've been involved in a lot of transformation, I'm always about, okay, what what's causing the transformation? What is the thing that's going to be really transforming? Right. And and a lot of the prior transformations I kind of talked about, one of them was a process-based one, which is all about helping knowledge-based get knowledge workers get better at their job and do them easier. ⁓ and that's agile development methodology. Another couple of transformations were technology transformations in conjunction with kind of ⁓ you just need to change behavior on the end user, like zero trust. You just, ⁓ now I gotta do like 10 MFAs to log into something or whatever that looks like, right? But it's on the back end, there's a lot of technology change. As we started getting into this AI transformation, I was looking at it thinking, like, okay, this is gonna fall in one of those buckets. Like it could be a process change that we need to do, or it could be some technology with a little bit of process change, and it's just gonna evolve that way. But the more that we've gotten into AI. You realize that it's not that. It's actually a foundational change to the way that specifically knowledge workers do their work every day. It's not a software thing. It's not a technology thing necessarily. It is about a fundamental reimagining the way that you, Channon, do your job every day and what that change is going to be. And that's why I was thinking like. It doesn't matter. Like a lot of people are so excited about the technology and they're they're they're stressing over like which model should I deploy? What vendor should I buy into? Where should I go? And they bring that in-house, lay it out, and it doesn't get adopted. It's not about that. It's about fundamentally reimagining and getting people to think about, I gotta change my job. I gotta quit thinking about AI as a tool for me. It's actually a worker or a partner or a coworker that I'm gonna work with in the future. So that's what got me super excited about this this idea that no, like we're we're missing the mark sometimes. We're not thinking about this in the in the way that's really playing out in the AI space today.

speaker-0: As I was reading the article, you know, there's this there's this part that says the real challenge sits in the chairs every day. Meaning for us as individual contributors or those that are using the technology, are we just thinking of it in terms of, ⁓ this is a tool that's over here that I can use when I need to, or is this an actual partner, like a team member that I have at my disposal? And I I internalized that because I realized that I was doing that very thing. I was not thinking of it in terms of this is a powerful partner rather than It's just a tool. So so I wanna I wanna get into ⁓ you you make a comment in the article, building AI ready teams isn't about teaching people how to use Chat GPT or or any other chat bot, but it's about fundamentally transforming how every employee approaches their work. Talk to us a little bit about that.

speaker-1: Yeah, you know, it's it's it's really interesting. ⁓ you know, over the holidays, Microsoft ⁓ secretly kind of did a survey. They they f they they followed 300,000 people who are using Copilot. And out of that survey came some super interesting things. One of the things they learned is about 80% of those 300,000, which is a lot. A lot. A lot of those employees or users actually kind of fell away from using Copilot after only three weeks on the job. After like which is which is really interesting when you think about it because AI is supposed to be the biggest transformational thing. Why would why would they not find value in doing that? And it comes down to this whole point of is like you have to rethink the way you're doing it. ⁓ and To rethink the way you're doing it, you can't approach it as just a tool, another software tool, which is what they were doing. The other interesting point that came out of the survey was that those who kept going on, the 20% going on, the bulk of those people were actually a little bit more in the leadership or management space. So they were managers or leaders or vice presidents or even execs. By the way, are the most excited about AI. And the reason they're most excited about AI is because they fundamentally in their job get work done through other people. Like when you become a manager or a director or VP, fundamentally your job shifts, right? From you the one who's doing all the work to now you're doing a little bit of the work and you're getting work done through other people. Well, what they found is that AI all a sudden is highly used. among those people who know how to get work done with other people because it becomes a worker. It doesn't become a software, it becomes yet another worker. Now you got human and AI both trying to do the job. And as a skill set man, I know how to manage that, right? From a from a leadership perspective. Right. And this is why they like they've an they've analyzed and said that's one of the reasons why we believe the eighty percent of those workers kind of fell away from co pilot. So when When we say that the biggest problem is those people sitting in the office chair, it's not the managers, because that's not the bulk of the company. The bulk of the company that are the individual contributors who are doing the work. Those individual contributors have to completely change their mindset. They have to become managers, whether they want to or not. Like in the in the engineering space, we talk a lot about this as you're a developer today, but tomorrow you're gonna be a creator or an architect. You're not just a developer anymore. You've got people are gonna who are gonna develop, you're gonna lead that development. So that's why it's a c it's a complete reimagine. It's a complete rethink. And whether you wanted to be a manager or you never wanted to be a people manager, you're gonna have to be an AI manager to make this thing work.

speaker-0: That that is a brilliant way to put it. And and I again I'm sitting here just internalizing this even more than when I read the article. And because that is that is exactly what needed to click for me. So you you mention that there are three essential transformations that have to take place, right? And and ⁓ not only that, but but you say leaders have roughly three years to transform from experiencing intimidation with AI to achieving empowerment. through AI. ⁓ so I'd I'd like I'd like to to jump into that a little bit. Transfer one transformation one being the mindset shift nobody talks about. You've already touched on it. What else can you tell us about that?

speaker-1: Mindset shift is probably one of the hardest things. ⁓ and this has happened throughout history, if you think about it, ⁓ it on really key, key kind of innovations. And a lot of it's been ⁓ in kind of blue collar work or manufacture work. ⁓ like so for think think about it like the invention of a tractor, right? All of a sudden you got a bunch of workers there who are saying, like, ⁓ my gosh. I'm gonna be out of a job. Like this is just gonna take my job. I'm not gonna be able to do anything else. I'm gonna be going on welfare because the tractor's here and it does the work of me and my all all the people I work with in the field, right? And people get tied up in that. And even in AI, you hear that same philosophy today. It's like, ⁓ you're gonna bring AI in and you're replacing my job. In fact, social ⁓ media and news reporters today, what you hear is you hear like, ⁓ Amazon just cut 30,000 heads. And the reason they're saying they cut it is because they're bringing AI in to replace those heads. You hear that all the time. Well, as an end user, you're like, well, I don't want to accept AI because that's gonna take my job. Like I'm gonna fight back against it. I don't want to do it. But what's interesting to me is that in every instance in history, Human beings are remarkable pe people. They transform. If they think about a mindset change, think, ⁓ the the tractor's coming. Well, dang, what if I became a mechanic? I actually could get paid more. And that's an important piece now that all of a sudden I get a job. So it's a mindset change thinking, like, okay, what I'm doing today is not gonna be the same. What I'm gonna do tomorrow is potentially gonna be different. And what amazes me is that you hear all this news about people losing their job for This or that. What the news doesn't talk about is the hundreds of new jobs that have been created that need to be done in order to support and maintain this new imagined world of AI and humans working together. There's so many opportunities for us. And that's the first mindset is you got to get outside of yourself saying, like, okay, I got to accept change. Change is going to come. What I'm the way I'm doing my thing today is not going to be the way I'm going to do my thing tomorrow. But that's okay. I'm actually probably gonna be in a better place. Let me make that mental transition saying it's just gonna happen. Let me let me change from, ⁓ I have to go to do that to ⁓ I get to go do that opportunity. That's a fundamental mindset of change. Not everybody's in a position to make that right now. But those that do are gonna be the ones that go. Now you mentioned, like I said, I th I think it's a three year horizon. That's kind of a prediction for me, right? Like I I I just look at Two years ago when ChatG2B kind of entered the market, what's tr what's kind of trended and how fast things are moving. And there's still a lot of technology that needs to be brought to market and discovered to make this change. But within three years, I think that everybody, like everybody who does any type of work in, especially in the knowledge space, needs to transform into being able to manage digital workers and to be able to get work done through them, which is a fundamental change. And if we're not there, then I think that There'll be other opportunities for sure. But that's gotta be a mindset change. And that's one of the hardest things.

speaker-0: You know, I I've I've spoken with a lot of other, you know, professionals, coworkers, but but you know, friends or family members that are in in other job roles that where where AI could become a big part of it. And they have they have this fear, they have this reluctance because there's this element of, ⁓ I'm I might not have a job or or maybe some I I know a few who have even already been let off because of ⁓ some of these things. So I think you're absolutely right. But you say something in the article that I really loved and it is show teams that AI native workers become more valuable, not less, because they can accomplish things that were previously impossible. ⁓ so AI native meaning that this is this is just part of who they are now. Right. Is managing an AI worker ⁓ and and that allows them to accomplish things that before they couldn't have, like a tractor as opposed to a hand plow.

speaker-1: Exactly. And if you think about like, okay, if I'm an AI native worker, meaning I know how to manage digital workers. And I know I know you probably feel this way today, Chen. And I know I feel this way. I think every and I felt this way in every job I've ever done. There's all the things that I think are most important that I put my focus on and I get done. But there's always this backlog of things. I always think like, Man, if I had a few more hours in the day Or I had I had somebody I could just say, go do that stuff that I just never get to. I could do a remarkably better job than I'm doing today in the job that I currently have. Right. I mean, this is a it's a daily trade-off of every day. You come into work, you're like, okay, I only got this much time. What can I get done? I'm gonna focus on that most important. What did my boss say was most important? ⁓ I'm gonna focus on that, right? Even though I know that this other thing could be highly valuable, I just I'm not gonna get to it. I can't. So this idea of saying like Now all of a sudden you can do impossible stuff. Like it's impossible for me to do that. But if I if I woke up in the morning andor even at the end of the day before I went to bed, I said, Hey, here's a list of things. Mr. AI, I didn't get to, Mr. Coworker. Can you can you wrap these up before I wake up in the morning? And it goes to work and it's able to do that for you. It's not making you less valuable as a person. All of a sudden, people are looking at you like, ⁓ my gosh, Corey, you got all the things you d thought you were gonna get done plus this more stuff, you become more valuable from that perspective, right? Because now all of a sudden you're getting all that list of other stuff done that you never were able to do before.

speaker-0: You know, I think this of all the things in in this article, I think that was the point that I took personally to be the biggest thing is this is not something to be afraid of. It's not a change to resist. This is something that is going to help escalate me in my career. We were talking a little bit about this before we started the podcast of how how much growth people see ⁓ here at Vasion and ⁓ and and this is an incredible thing. But one of the things that that Vasion has done and that you, as the leadership, has done, is you want all of us to understand how to make this transfer transformation. And this leads into transformation number two, which is upskilling as strategic imperative. And one thing that you mentioned is the role of a technology leader isn't just to build, but to enable the entire company to succeed through AI. So talk to us a little bit about. The decision to to make this transformation within Vasion and some of the the things that you're seeing happen with that.

speaker-1: I've loved working at Vasion because we're a very tech forward thinking, innovative company. And ⁓ you know, originally, like when when all of a sudden, you know, ChatGTP hit, all of a sudden those people who had a background in AI or machine learning were very valuable. Like every company in the world is trying to hire them. You heard crazy stuff, like almost like pro-athlete type contracts getting written for some. machine learn language PhD guy to come work with what they're doing, right? Reality is you can't hire your way into AI native. There's it's there's just fundamentally not the resources available and it's not possible. You also, when you if you took that approach, you're also going to bring in a lot of very educated folks who have ideas and you probably fundamentally miss some of the pieces that your current Teams capable of building out, right? So you have to start thinking about how can I upskill the people I have. So first of all, you got to deal with mind shift, s shift change, right? Like, are people making the mind shift? If they are, then how can we help them? And there's some things that we've done here. Like, for instance, you know, I I've ⁓ been working with a local university here down ⁓ down in the valley, ⁓ Utah Tech. And we ⁓ they were putting together a machine learning AI course for certificate-based ⁓ course. And I jumped right in. Like I heard it early, they were putting it together. I helped them design the the courseware. And then we put we opened it up to all of our engineering team said, look, we'll we'll help fund some of your opportunity to go learn this. And we had a bunch of takers who went and learned that. So upskilling, like teaching core skills of what's coming, super important. That's the way you're gonna hire into ⁓ as you move forward. So that's that's number one. Number two here at Vasion is that we took a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, kind of that the idea of like which model should we use, what shouldn't we do? And we finally got to the point where, you know what? Let's bet on the models and the company. Let's bet on the company we think is going to go somewhere. So we brought in actually Claude Anthropic into the environment and we made it available to anybody who wanted to use it. And we've seen a lot of people start using it. But what we noticed is that it was one of those kind of co-pilot things where people get excited, use it for three weeks, kind of fall off. And so what we've been doing lately is we've been saying, okay, we've got to help design and enable people with digital workers. So right now we have a team who's actually taking our AI strategy. And they're actually creating standard, almost templated digital workers that we're gonna be rolling out to every employee. So the idea is like, you know, when you show up at Vasion as a new employee, you're gonna show up and be hired. You're sitting in new or orientation day, you're filling out all this stupid paperwork, which I'm hoping maybe you're using Vasion product, you're actually doing it online, doing some digital stuff, but we'll go go there another time. But you're filling out paper, IT comes in, they give you this nice, beautiful laptop, they give you these keyboard and mouse, they take you up, they sit you down, they get you all logged into the system. At Vasion, they're also going to hand you a digital worker. And they're going to say, Here's you, a digital worker. And by the way, let me show you how with just a couple of commands, like, hey, prepare my morning brief, how it will go extract all of the meeting notes you had yesterday, all the action items. It will formulate all the f stuff, all the priorities of things you should be working on, what what focus it'll help you assist for prepping for things. Or at the end of the day, you'll say, hey, summarize my day. It will summarize all the work that you did. And then it's like, okay, hey, create my ⁓ status report sending up to ⁓ my manager. That's that's like the first rev. Next rev that will be come and saying, okay, Channon, you're a marketing guy who's doing a podcast. How can I do that podcast for you? Like what can I do for you? So that's the next drive. So we're We're all in right now enabling digital workers for every employee. Our objective this year is to have every single employee have a digital, at least one digital worker. I suspect we'll have lots that will have more than one digital worker. And we'll have those workers calling agents to do work. And that's how we're enabling and that's how we're upscaling. And we'll be coming out with trainings, working closely with our HR organization to make sure there's certifications in place. We'll be certifying all of our employees on these types of ⁓ digital workers, making sure that they wear it and we'll be training on how to become a manager or a leader, not of people, but of your team, you and your partners in the digital space, in the agent space.

speaker-0: And and I've I've seen it on my side, I've seen it on the on the marketing side, ⁓ and and it has been in incredible. This this assistance and this push from leadership to help us. And in the article, you say the goal is building judgment, not just technical proficiency. And and I have seen that and I have already seen the the positive outcomes from that, not only in my own job, but in teammates and and even even cross-departmentally. where I collaborate and and I've seen the the result of that. Moving into transformation three now, restructuring how teams operate. So we've gone from an individual adopting this mindset of AI native to leadership helping members of the organization become AI native. Well once an individual is, then what? And I believe that's that's what we're going to talk about now. you say Traditional team structures don't work for AI native organizations. Now this may catch some people off guard. Tell me what you what you mean by that.

speaker-1: Yeah, so if you think about a traditional ⁓ organization, and even us today at VASIN, there is siloing that happens, right? Usually most organizations they have a sales organization, they have an RD organization, you have a marketing organization, you have a finance organization, right? And and you silo on purpose because you bring people in who are experts and you set goals and objectives that deliver outcomes as that organization. To the business, right? Whether it's sales hitting forecast numbers, RD delivering product, whether it's marketing, getting leads, like that's what you focus on. That's how it's been done for a hundred years or more. And it's probably evolved a little bit over that time as you think about it. Well, now that as you start getting into AI and you start thinking about, okay, I'm a manager of AI and now AI can help me do the impossible thing. All of a sudden, those lines That sometimes actually get in the way and slow you down. The line between RD and product handing off to product marketing to get marketing to hand ⁓ to marketing for campaigns, to get that, then enable sales for content sales, and then have like all of those traditional handoffs that you try and smooth out and make as clean as possible, all of a sudden start to gray a little bit. Cause if I now have an agent and my agent just can automatically talk to the marketing agent, all of a sudden I can smooth that handoff out and I can make that super thin from that perspective. So you'll hear sometimes people will say, yeah, they're gonna see a flattening of organization happen across the board. That scares people. That's one of the hardest things. And honestly, it's a flip of the switch. Where before I was saying like individual contributors are scared because of mindset change. I might and I don't I never wanted to be a manager. Now I gotta be a manager of something, you know? ⁓ now it flips. Now it's leaders who are saying, Man, I built my career. Like I am the best sales exec ever. I'm the best technology exec ever. All of a sudden they have to sh they get they flip because now they get scared in the fact that like, wait a minute, are you telling me that there's somebody over in RD who has a marketing agent and a sales agent that's doing building the product, doing marketing, doing sales, delivering that out. All of a sudden there's all this grayness that happens and this flattening. I think we're on the edge of that. Like I don't know many companies who are doing that, but I think we're gonna wake up one day and there's gonna be a one person billion dollar company because of the way that you can manage the agents across the board. And that now makes leaders. So this is so when people are afraid of jobs, it's not just ICs, it's everybody. But this is where the leaders start getting worried, like, well, what will I do? But again, there's lots of opportunities in saying I get to transform and reimagine what I get to do and get to drive. Because there's a lot of frustration sometimes between those hard lines of siloed stuff that you can actually solve for. So restructuring is going to be a the third transformation that that company has to undergo to truly get to AI native, to truly become a company that can deliver operationally at the speed of AI. Like that's just gonna have to happen.

speaker-0: You know, this is this is something that when you when you look back on this Time, maybe 10 years from now, 20 years from now, the next generation of people that are taking our roles, this will be that fork in the road. And you you mentioned this, you allude to this in the article where those who adopt this and really learn how to use this AI native ⁓ mentality, they are the ones that will become the leaders. They will be they will be the innovators, they will be the the ones that are building the companies of tomorrow or taking today's companies to the next level. And and you say something here that I found just so poignant, which is restructure around outcomes, not functions. And and everything that you've just said is is the power behind all of this. Is yes, there's a lot of transformation and there's a lot of change, but what it leads to is every bit as powerful as something like a tractor transforming the way that we harvest food. We are we're coming up on time. Corey, this has been awesome. Probably could talk to you for an hour, but ⁓ just really quickly before we go, I just would love to get your thoughts on this principle, A AI native within Vasion and how you have seen this affect what we're trying to do as a company, which is intelligent print automation, you know, helping helping other organizations with security modernization and and really just taking their business workflows to the next level using Vasion. How has this affected us? helping our our customers and partners.

speaker-1: Yeah, you know, it's it's it's incredible the opportunity that's unlocked for us as we think about trying to achieve our vision, which is make digital transformation attainable for everyone. If you look at the world today, like I don't know a single business. And if you're out there, please let me know. I don't know a single business who doesn't have to deal with some type of physical or digital. documentation and paper. Like that's just how it is right now. And in fact, when you think about AI, AI is fed on top of of context, right? Which comes from data. And a lot of that data is locked up in physical paper or in back office type stuff. So when you think about what's happening in the AI space and what we excel at, what we've spent a decade or more at, which is all about how do we make printing simple? Whether you're printing as an end user from a file print in an application, or your system is printing for you, like in an EMR or an ERP, producing labels to deliver food, or labels to identify people in healthcare. Whatever it is, right? We've gotten really good at managing that. And we understand the physical side of the solution. What's remarkable though is we've also been launching our digital side of ⁓ products too, that we call Automate, which does things like eForms, signature, e-signature, storage, and it has powerful workflow that can do things like interrogate documents using the latest AI that you want to choose, like whether it's ⁓ BDA from AWS or ⁓ Cohere. Or any other models, like you can click in and you can interrogate documents in our workflow stuff. And all that's super powerful. But how does that really help a company digitally transform? Because that's shit, that's helping them. They become more digital. Like we, we, we do a lot of this. Like, first of all, we modernize, like we get rid of, we get rid of infrastructure, move you to the cloud. That's a modernization, that's a digitization. We then help you consolidate by bringing all the end users. All the systems, all that stuff together under one powerful platform. And then finally, we help you automate those solutions. But where the rubber hits the road for me in all of this is has to do with the the action of printing, or if you do file print. Like for a long time, people are thinking like, okay, paper is the blocker to digital transformation. I have to get all of my documents digitized, then I can be digital. Again, who does that? Papers built on every single company and every single process, and a lot of processes. I shouldn't say every single one, but every company has paper processes or document processes. So to get all that digital is really hard. So that doesn't go away. So the power comes from this. Like if I if you could inject and make that file print, which by the way, every application in the world has a file print. oldest mainframe to the most modern new stuff. And almost every system that does critical print has a print action capability, has to have it. Every single one of them. And I would argue that there's not a person who's in in in their life working who doesn't know how to do file print and doesn't do it, hasn't done it. They know how to do it. They know how to find it in an application. It's not a problem. So what if Speaking of change and mindset change and bringing transformation to people, what if you didn't have to change the way people behave? And when somebody goes file print, so say you choose to print something, and what if you were able to take that and instead of actually sending it to a physical printer, or maybe send it to a physical printer, as well as sending that off to a powerful workflow after you digitize it automatically with nobody even knowing? Like what if you could do something like that? That all of sudden takes print from being the blocking to digital transformation to being the enabler, the integration, the way that you might actually start to to use it, to print, to use the digital transformation from print. Right? It changes the way that that works fundamentally. And that's what we're about. Like we're trying to we're gonna make that that kind of that print button, that print action intelligent. We're gonna do things like with our native AI print driver. The ability to say when you print this thing, if you need to send this thing to signature, don't send it to the printer. Go ahead and automatically send it into workflow, which by the way, we scan it, we find the signature zones, we zone it out, we set it up ready for you to send for signature. Or maybe you're saying, hey, I want to print that PO over and I need it to be interrogated. And before you send it out, I need to redact some information from it to be able to modify just your file print and have it come out. redacted without knowing to follow my security and compliance guidelines. There's a million different opportunities when with all the things that people print. And it's all about saying, okay, how can we make that print button more intelligent? And how can we transform that into digital and really and you know basically get to our vision, which is to make digital transformation attainable for everyone. Who can't file print? Right. We can make it attainable for everyone. That's how we're going to do it.

speaker-0: That is incredible. And and this this element of intelligent print automation, though many people have probably not heard that term yet, they will for this very reason is we are we are helping companies literally transform how they do business. Corey, ⁓ it has been fantastic having you ⁓ on the podcast. I'm sure we will have you back again in the future. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. ⁓ we will have a link to the article ⁓ that everybody can can check out. Again, it is called Why AI Success Starts with Teams, not tech. ⁓ and Corey, we really appreciate it. Thanks for coming in.

speaker-1: Thanks, Shannon. It's been been great to be here. Appreciate it.