The Rise of Agentic AI: Meet Your New Digital Workforce

Kieran Gilmurray brings three decades of technology expertise to this fascinating exploration of AI's rapid evolution and its profound impact on business and society. With characteristic clarity, he cuts through the hype to deliver practical insights on how organizations and individuals can harness AI's transformative potential.

tldr:

• Exploring agentic AI as digital teammates that can handle complex tasks with minimal human intervention
• The measurable business impacts: 30% productivity improvements, 7-15% sales growth, reduced operational costs
• Why AI implementation requires a top-down approach with clear executive sponsorship
• How today's workforce expects AI-powered tools, creating a "digital Darwinism" that companies must navigate
• The importance of creating a three-legged stool of business strategy, people strategy, and digital strategy

The conversation begins with a historical perspective that contextualizes today's AI revolution. "AI is an 85-year-old overnight success story," Kiran explains, tracing the journey from early computing through various technological inflection points to today's sophisticated AI systems. This historical grounding helps listeners understand why current developments represent something genuinely revolutionary rather than merely incremental change.

Most compelling is Kieran's discussion of agentic AI – digital workers that function as teammates rather than tools. Unlike previous automation technologies that required explicit programming for every scenario, these AI agents can be assigned missions and accomplish them with remarkable flexibility and resilience. From managing emails to conducting research, creating content, and even booking travel, these digital teammates are already transforming productivity for early adopters. The business benefits are substantial: 30% productivity improvements, 20-40% innovation increases, and 7-15% sales growth.

For business leaders, Kiran offers pragmatic guidance on implementation, advocating for a top-down approach with clear executive sponsorship. He warns against the pitfall of endless pilots that never reach production – what he calls "proofs of cost" rather than "proofs of concept." The key is aligning AI initiatives with tangible business outcomes: revenue growth, cost reduction, improved customer experience, or risk mitigation.

What makes this conversation particularly valuable is Kieran's ability to balance technological optimism with practical realism. His message is clear: AI adoption isn't optional but strategic implementation is essential. As he puts it, "Spend more time prepping so that your execution is seamless."

Wondering how to navigate this technological revolution? 

Listen now to gain invaluable insights from one of the world's foremost AI strategists, and discover how you can position yourself and your organization to thrive in an AI-powered future.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Kiran Gilmorie
• 1:13 30 Years in Business Technology
• 2:39 Major Technology Shifts Over Time
• 5:21 The Mass Adoption of Generative AI
• 10:27 Disruption and Digital Darwinism
• 12:55 Generative Engine Optimization
• 16:20 Understanding Agentic AI
• 22:16 Digital Workers as Teammates
• 27:39 Education and Workforce Evolution
• 30:50 Top-Down AI Implementation
• 33:36 Real Business Results from AI
• 35:49 Final Thoughts and Resources

Transcript

Audrey: 0:20

Thank you has been named a top 50 global thought leader in agentic AI, gen AI and manufacturing, a seven-time LinkedIn top voice okay, we all know that and the world's top 200 business and tech innovator. Kiran has also, if you did not know this, released a new book on agentic AI. And if there is one thing Kieran does better than most, it's really cutting through the hype and getting straight to how businesses and individuals can use AI to radically transform how work is done. Kyrian, welcome to the show.

Kieran: 0:52

Oh, thank you so much. Indeed, I'm delighted to be here. I've watched from afar, so now to be part of the show was a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to this and hopefully, the goodness, I can give your listeners some value, because that's what this should be about.

Audrey: 1:04

Definitely so. Tell us, kieran. I know you have been in the AI space for quite some time. Just tell us a bit more about your journey and how has that evolved over the years.

Kieran: 1:13

Yeah, about 30 years, which is quite a long time when you think about it. But there's time to go. I can't imagine being in any other sector other than business technology because it changes all the time. But back in the day it's quite interesting thinking that I started in the 1990s and then, yeah, I know all of a sudden, audrey, aging myself really badly. But we're back. You know DOS days. We're back Windows 95 days. We're really back just before the internet really kicked in.

Kieran: 1:38

And the exciting part has been watching it all unfold. And it's interesting now watching AI, which I was doing over 20 years ago, being described as the latest hottest thing. But AI in itself is an 85-year-old overnight success story because the term was invented in 56. But lots of new technologies come out. The only thing that has happened it's got cheaper, it's got quicker, it's got better over all of those years. I can't ever imagine going back to 30-year-old tech. But by goodness, your learning is certainly formed by experience. So if folks aren't practicing and playing with different technologies, I recommend they do, because there's nothing wasted on your journey If you open your two ears, close your mouth and play and listen to all the things that are happening and the interesting people that are out there. A lot of fun over the last 30 years, and if I have another 30 years doing this, that will be a career well spent.

Audrey: 2:29

Wow, that was like a superpower for you to have all the experience. Now, what has been that you know, tipping point or the biggest shift you've seen?

Kieran: 2:37

Yeah, there's been lots of different shifting points. You know so, if I go back, audrey, believe it or not, we now take email and texting for granted, but back in the day you used to have to turn up to something called a phone box, wait in a queue and hope the person was in the other end of the phone. You know so, as mad as it seems, email and text was crazy. The spread of mobile phone, and particularly smartphone technology, was absolutely pivotal. All of a sudden, another leap. Then, the next minute, the Internet. And and when we say the internet, we're not talking about the first iterations, where the world was promised a new way of working. There would be no such thing as offices or physical stores, but working technologies, working websites. That was extraordinary then. Years after that, it was crms and databases and case flows and online logging and tracking systems. After that it was ai, back in the day, where you could start to do some great narrow ai things. So I remember turning a business from a 30 million turnover to a 90 million turnover in only three years, all off the back of AI and great decision insight. You know really, really powerful stuff.

Kieran: 3:34

And then in recent years it's been chat, gpt, it's been the metaverse, it's been blockchain, it's been artificial reality and virtual reality, so it hasn't been one thing. This is a journey where the ingredients of the cake have constantly changed and the only thing that's actually happening, audrey, is that the cake is getting more delicious by the time. The odd in the carpet, the odd mistake, the odd thing that was promised to us that never, quite at the time, realized its potential. But all technology matures over time and it finds its place and ultimately, if it's of interest to you or I as consumers and notice the great explosion of generative AI or the social media, it's when you or I start to use it at scale does the technology really explode. And all of those technologies have gone through pretty much the same transition very academic or very niche, overinflated expectations of what they can do and over promised because the marketeers jumped in on top and had to sell it. Yes, I know, we're naughty, naughty, naughty.

Kieran: 4:27

And then, all of a sudden, people started to use the tech, very often differently than the manufacturer first designed or described it, and then it adopted mass scale consumption. And again, as I said, things have gone better and better. Imagine not having chat, gpt or one of those variants today and hoping to come to work, to get work done to the quality and the scale and the fun and the speed and the removal of what I described the robot on me without that tech. I can't imagine living without it, and that's great technology, the same as my mobile phone email, texting, whatsapp, audible or anything else. It's now just part of our lives, and aren't they so much better for it? Assuming we are in control and not controlled by it, of course, course.

Audrey: 5:03

Yes, and I love your cake analogy, right? I mean, it's so interesting and so fun that we get to have our cake and almost eat it. Now you mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned a lot of big shifts, so some people talk about, you know, gen AI being like the dawn of the internet, and you also talked about, you know, that whole journey that people are taking with the tech. Where are we now in that adoption of AI? Which stage are we in this new wave of things?

Kieran: 5:28

Yeah, it's kind of a mix because we're all at different stages. So, whilst chat, gpt and I'll use that as an example, but assume I mean perplexity, you know, claude, or any of the tools at all, for some they haven't even seen it yet. That's the extraordinary bit. I was looking at some statistics the other day that showed the number of American users and you'll be surprised how many don't actually use yet. Then there's some of us who've been at this for three or four years, because most consumption and most knowledge happened around November 2020, november 22nd, 2023, when 3.5 come out. But three was out years before. Two was out years before. That transformer technology was, I think, 2019, so I knew some people who were playing with this a long time ago. But that's okay, that happens. You know, not everybody understood. You know bitcoin blockchain before it come out. Not everybody adopted a mobile phone day one or day zero. You know, some jump at anything and just love tech. That sounds like me at times. You know where you want to see it, play with it, touch it and find out where it can be used. Some are very cautious, you know. They wait until price is right, they wait until the technology is in a good space. They wait and they learn. Some are in the middle. They're watching those who jump and those who wait and wonder what to do.

Kieran: 6:31

So Gen AI when you look at the numbers of people using it and the scale that it reached in comparison to, you know, say, instagram or Facebook, it has outstripped them. I think it was 100 million users in three months and those numbers have grown and grown. I remember, you know, six, eight months ago, I said look anybody who's involved in SEO or PPC. You better watch out because the number of people who are using these tools on a monthly basis is extraordinary. And people wrote back to me saying you know, no, you're exaggerating, you're a little bit crazy. And at that stage it was maybe 300 million users. I think chat gbt themselves thought it would be January the 1st 2026, before they would get to a billion users. I guesstimated it would be a lot quicker it would be September, and we were both wrong because it was last month. So if you have a billion monthly users of ChatGPT and I haven't touched Google or Bing or BARD or whatever variation there is in the last 18 months that's a heck of a lot of people who are now doing what I call generative engine optimization, or businesses need to do that to get found, compared to anything else you know. So again, we've over tipped the scale. The numbers who are using the technology is growing exponentially. I can't see that changing, and the reason is now, when I type in a question or a prompt, as it's known, all of a sudden I'm getting the rich answer that I always wanted and I'm not getting, you know, a page full of ads for whatever better phrase, and then I'm not having to hunt, and then I'm not having to dive through a lot of information. I'm not having to put it together myself. This technology is doing it for me and that's useful and the uses that I'm seeing.

Kieran: 7:55

Audrey, I was talking to a chap yesterday who's a gardener and what he's doing is taking pictures of the garden before on his mobile phone, typing in a prompt and showing a prospective customer what the garden could look like immediately. His competition are drawing on a computer-aided design screen. You know someone else is doing interior house design. Someone else is now using, you know, chat gpt to do their monthly training and development plan. I was with a group of people on monday. One of the ladies is going to japan. We wrote a prompt and all of a sudden we had a three week fully costed itinerary doing amazing things, staying in amazing places where she never even imagined, and those things we can now do.

Kieran: 8:30

But if you are some of the big travel companies, you're being disintermediated. If you are some of the CAD companies specialising in garden design or interior or living design or kitchen design, you're going to be disintermediated. So now we're at a pace where the mass adoption is growing and the interruption and disruption, the Shumterian disruption of businesses is starting to happen at a scale, and this is like a snowball going down the hill. It's getting quicker and quicker and quicker and now I'm starting to see people running to catch up with very few ahead of the snowball. But let's see where we get to, you know. But I expect there's going to be more of this. I expect it's going to get more exciting. I expect people are going to find more uses and if companies and we don't adopt AI and generative AI, then it's a little bit like saying I'm not going to have email, I'm not going to have a smartphone and I'm not going to use the internet. I think they will miss out, but the scale and speed of this transformation, that's the bit that's.

Audrey: 9:27

Wow, and I think it's really incredible to see how fast AI has evolved in just a short span of time. Like even for me as a copywriter. When ChatGPT first launched, it was maybe like an intern level writer. Right now it's easily a midway to senior copywriter and it was just in a short span of a year. The quality of output really impresses me but also scares many of us, like what you said, because AI is coming for a lot of the more traditional jobs, and what is your perspective on that? How are people going to evolve, you know, with this huge snowball that you just talked about.

Kieran: 10:00

Yeah, it's interesting because I think there's two or three schools of thought. You know one of those who are going to fear it and are starting to panic, but not wondering, not knowing what to do. There's those like me. If you turn around, audrey, and say, kieran, do you want to be doing what you're doing in five years time? The answer is absolutely not. Bring technology on and change my role and make it easier, make it more fun, so I can be freed up to do other things. And there's others in the middle who are always going to be cautious, you know. So you end up with middle watchers the refuseniks, or gloomers as I call them who say the technology will not work and we shouldn't be touching it, and those who will jump at anything.

Kieran: 10:32

I think the folks in this instance who are going to jump at it make it part of their job. So you know you mentioned copywriter there. Then what about a second draft of anything and everything I notice? Now, if I take an example, you know those people who are writing email copy to do sales or marketing. Statistically proven statistic from a behavioral psychologist that I know only 36 percent of us are emotionally intelligent. They've written generative AI application that re-transforms our text and our emails to be more AI, more emotionally intelligent, and what they're noticing is a 20% uplift in sales, a 20% reduction in calls coming back in and upset customers because they're getting them right the first time. So if we can add these tools into our mix in much the same way that we added the internet, email, graphics tools or whatever else, we should be able to produce better copy, better results, better outcomes and my personal belief in this world because everybody fears that technology is taking jobs it'll take some jobs. It always has. It'll transform a lot of roles, but guess what it always has. So today there's a lot less saddlers than there are software engineers, and in three and five years time there'll be an awful lot less software engineers than whatever it is. We're going to have local tool tool people or whatever else.

Kieran: 11:41

But I'm an expansionist. I believe that we can grow the pie like we always have. So we've grown the economy. It doesn't matter whether obama worried in his exit speech that automation was going to kill jobs. It didn't matter whether whether Kennedy in 56, another American president said you know, mainframe technology is going to destroy jobs. Great technology has expanded the market. Great technology has resulted in new and, dare I say, better roles, but so long as we capture the value ourselves and don't allow the technology to take the jobs from us. So I hope that my role grows. I hope that technology takes lots of the stuff that I'm doing. I hope I can add it to my skill mix to grow the pie, to do better work, to encourage more people to buy things from me or allow them to achieve more. So bring it on, audrey. Bring it on.

Audrey: 12:21

Wow, and I love their mindset right, because you're taking it with this kind of enthusiasm as well, whereas people who might be on the other side of the fence might be a lot more cautious or more doomsday-ish. But I think AI is here to stay, regardless of your mindset, so if we are going to embrace it, might as well embrace it with a smile. Now, kieran, you also talked a bit about GEO, right? So generative, of course, being able to use AI to search for content and SEO is no longer as relevant. This is a very new topic for many business owners and our listeners. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how people should start optimizing for generative engine optimization? Steve?

Kieran: 12:59

Yeah, so let's break it down and explain what it is for people who don't know. So traditionally, people have adjusted their websites, adjusted the format of their content with different style headings, with website maps. They've done all of those things that they need to do to allow, for example, the google search bot to happily index the website, find keyword density, to allow it to put it back into its recommendation engine, so that when someone searches for, you know, hairdresser in belfast, then the bot should have done its job, indexed all of the websites that are around this area and presented back to those who are searching after the ads. Unfortunately, now you know something that's highly relevant and that's fine. When we're using google, which is the dominant search engine in europe, all that works. But now if you're like me and all of a sudden I don't use google very much anymore, I go straight to chat gbt and I do all of my work in chat gbt, then I'm not on google in the first place to be presented with ads and therefore, now that is the journey that's starting with a lot of people. So I mentioned ChatGPT alone a billion people using it on a monthly basis. Well, the world's population is eight billion, the number of people who own smartphones and computers is probably about half of that. Therefore, you know, up to 25% of people are there thereabouts maybe a little bit lower are now following my lead, are now following that methodology.

Kieran: 14:14

Now these same engines for want of a better phrase have their own bots, and their own bots are going around scouring the internet looking for information that they can put into the websites to present it back to users. So what you now have to do is adjust, and the technical name is your robottxt file on your server to welcome in the bots. Now you have to build the sites in a way that they search and index. So for longer articles, I would be doing, you know, tldrs to make the structure of the site you know more available in addition to saying welcome, and I would build out the site that allows their bots to index. The bots index in different ways.

Kieran: 14:47

If it's helpful, afterwards I'll share an article not mine, by the way. It's just really useful that I found on the internet that talks about the technical aspects of building out your website to get found and presented on geo engines and again, some of the less technical stuff that you and I can do for our blogs that we hope will allow us to be found on these engines as well. So there's lots of things you can do. You need to rebuild and restructure, but it doesn't mean a complete rewrite of your website. It's just being conscious and again going back to the most important thing, that your customers, your prospective buyers or your viewers have particular habits and therefore, whatever those habits are, be they, you know, google, bing or whatever else, or a chat, gpt like engine, whatever they want we need to present it so that we can be found by it.

Audrey: 15:29

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's also changing so quickly. Right, but having a bit of understanding and context at least will allow you to start preparing for this new wave. Another word, another keyword of us. What Chair GBT would like to say is agentic AI, and I know you recently wrote a book about it. This is very new for many of us, even for myself at this point in time, for those of us, even for myself at this point in time, for those of us who are unacquainted with this term. What on earth is it? Can you explain it to a five-year-old? That would be my prompt. I need chat GPT to help me now that I've forgotten to think.

Kieran: 16:01

So the oddity is here and this is the bit where we're looking at AI and it feels new and generative AI and it feels new as well. But, as I mentioned, ai has been around for decades, absolutely decades. Arguably. The term, as I said, was invented in 1956 when mccarthy went with, you know, two dozen researchers to dartmouth to try and recreate the human brain. So lots of what we're seeing is is the same as before. Now, gen ai. It is novel, uh, to a high degree it's using deep learning, and deep learning was invented, you know, pre-90s. That just wasn't the technology of the data or the processing power, cheap, accessible data possible to allow us to build out the transformer models, to allow us to get deep learning to work, to present what looks like a very intelligent answer. And, as you said, audrey, you know, in a year things have moved. It's not going to take, you know, another 10 years to get to chat GPT, version 10, the speed of this and the scale of its nuts. Numbers of years ago there was something called robotic process automation, and so, numbers of years ago there was something called robotic process automation. And what robotic process automation was? Digital workers looking at what you were doing on your screen, recording what you were doing and then playing it back. If I give you the parallel example, in an Amazon factory you have robots who watched or were trained to do exactly what the shelf stackers and packers were taught to do, and the physical robots went and did a lot of the jobs that humans in the factories were doing. Now you've got or had robotic process automation or intelligent automation that looked at what you and I were doing. So they looked at what we were doing on our computer screen. So if we were in the finance department and someone sent in an invoice, what we would do is we would open up the invoice, we'd extract the data, we'd put it into an Excel sheet, we might update our finance system, we might update our CRM. We'll send them back an email saying we got your invoice, don't worry, your money will be paid. That's a very repeatable, logical, sequential step, and intelligent automation or robotic process automation allowed you to scan documents, read computer screens and update databases or CRM applications changed or something in that order changed or some new type of invoice come in. They were not trained to do it and they very often broke and were relatively brittle and fragile, particularly when it came to internet-based applications, we've got history. Now what you've got is a new version of digital workers. Except the digital workers this time are sitting on top of generative AI models or engines. So, if you can imagine their training data is a trillion or a couple of trillion bits of data big.

Kieran: 18:16

And now, instead of having to explicitly get a PhD coder in to tell a digital worker what to do, now you just give it a mission so you can basically start going on a browser and OpenAI released this the other day. I start hunting around for holidays. My digital worker is observing what I'm doing and then it says, ok, do you want me to go book the holiday? And it will go if it's connected to your calendar, if it's connected to your bank account, which they're now opening up as connected tools or tissue in these applications, and it will go and book the holiday, book the hotel, book the flights, book the taxis, you know, book you on day trips and go and do all of these things for you. You've just given it the mission, and the likelihood of it breaking and failing is very little. Now you may want your digital worker to come back and seek your authorization, otherwise you could find yourself, you know, doing crocodile hunting when you never wanted to do crocodile hunting.

Kieran: 19:05

But, as digital workers, you give them a task or a mission.

Kieran: 19:07

Book me my holiday, you know, or here's a whole sequence of emails. I want you to go through my email list. I want you to answer every single email, I want you to prioritise it, I want you to book my calendar out, write my meeting notes and do a whole host of my work so that I can do really nice, more interesting and more valuable work on a daily basis. So think of it as Jarvis and the Jarvis that you always wanted. And now they're here.

Kieran: 19:29

They've been here for a while and they're going to get a lot clever, and this isn't just a software robot. So if you go to Belfast International Airport, your burger is going to be served by a digital worker. That's a physical robot that's able to interact with you. If you start to go to some hotels in Singapore, they're attempting to introduce service robots that look at your face, remember you, help you get served, help you get brought into the building and really start to greet you in a way that you wanted to be greeted, as opposed to a dumb terminal that allows you to check in and nothing else. So we've now hopefully got one or more jarbuses in our life to make us less robotic, allow the robots to do all of this hard but essential but boring work to free us up to do all the things that we ever wanted to do.

Audrey: 20:09

We hope wow, and I'm so right. It sounds so amazing right now but in reality, with what OpenAI has released, with what you've seen, how good are these agentic AI so far?

Kieran: 20:21

Yeah, really good. So you know, I was looking at a couple of low-code applications and a couple of agents over the last numbers of days because as soon as this comes out, of course I want to play with it. So to play with it. So I wrote very quickly in low code I'll not name the app because there's lots of them and you need to find the app that best suits you. All of a sudden, I had my email categorized, my email listed, my emails responded to, and all of them presented in my screen in front of me. Where, no, I want to be a human in the loop, I don't want to doing it by itself at this stage, but I'm basically going yeah, that looks about right as a response Done, that looks, looks right, you know. So all I'm doing is clicking and pointing. I now know don't need to build anything. You know, I looked at an agent. I was playing with it to see if it could go and book my next trip and my next travel, and it did, bar one or two little mistakes. But we train people in our teams that takes a moment or two to do that and these agents are the same.

Kieran: 21:05

What's the exciting bit plus the scary bit audrey is when I looked at agentics and started writing my book six, eight, nine months ago, this was at the start of the curve. You know it was the technology sector, like myself, who started to see the usage of these particular tools and thought, wow, this is going to be amazing if the technology develops in time and I'm thinking the technology is going to take, you know, 18, 24 months to really get into a space where this is going to be valuable on a daily basis to you or I, not theoretical technology that might promise the world in a later date. And lo and behold, look what's happening now, months and months and months beforehand. While still not perfect, the speed and the scale at which these agentic bots are being developed and put to real use is extraordinary. So for us in the social media space, I've looked at what I call content flywheels, where now you've got agents. If you point them to the right sources, your competitors you know, particular websites, blogs or whatever else can go out and scour all that information based on criteria that you have set to bring it back. Then you can have your copywriting agents Rewriting the content for all of your social media platforms. You can have your agents building. You know Agentic videos so you can use digital digital workers recorded off your own screen and voice to create digital you that can be distributed as part of this content. And then you can have other agents your ethicist, your ethical AI bot, your responsible AI bot checking all of the content to make sure it's secure, it's not making anything up, it's not harming anyone, it's in your pitch and tone and voice. And then you give another set of agents that can go out and distribute all this content across all of your social media platforms. And that's not difficult.

Kieran: 22:38

If you're meeting a particular prospect or target company, I can get agents to go out, research the market, research each of the individuals that I'm going to meet, undertaking a full disk or psychometric profile of them based on information on the Internet.

Kieran: 22:56

I can get the agents to go out and look at all the different products, their competitors, read your annual reports, find gaps in your market by reading your competitors' websites and whatever else, and then present to you on a one page, a business document that says here's all the things that you should be saying. Here's a presentation that I've put together, showing you what you need to say and what you need to do. Here's the conversation you need to have with these particular individuals, because they're more optimistic and more tech savvy, less cautious and more and less risk averse, and and and and and and. That can all be presented in my diary, sent to me in an email, and my diary booked out with me preparing for the meeting properly, and then I can go into a meeting. My agents can record the meeting and distribute all of the actions and the meeting notes afterwards. That's's not tomorrow, that's today's technology.

Audrey: 23:35

Super powerful. You also mentioned it also mentioned like your agents being. I see them almost like teammates with different functions, right? So how do they interact with each other and can they at this point in time, and how does it work in a simple term, yeah, it's interesting because what you're talking about there is as opposed to single tasks.

Kieran: 23:53

So at the moment when people got ChatGPT, they typed one task prompt. You know there's rewrite my email, rewrite this article, find me some information on the internet. What you can do is put multiple agents together and to your point exactly that, consider them as additional work colleagues. And it's not just that you or I can engage with our own Jarvis or sets of Jarvis's, but the robots can start to then engage with each other and then start to hand off tasks. Now, that seems a little bit far-fetched, but think about it.

Kieran: 24:21

Very often we work with other people in our work. We need to do a particular piece of work. We are, for example, researchers. The researchers then take the information handed across, for example, to copywriters or analysts. Those copywriters or analysts might hand it across, for example, to copywriters or analysts. Those copywriters or analysts might hand it across to proofreaders or ethicists. Think of it as the same thing. I have researcher bots, I have analyst bots, I have ethicist bots, and we code those to know when to hand over everything in turn.

Kieran: 24:45

So whilst on paper, theoretically, it sounds all a little bit crazy, all we're doing is basically mimicking the actions of people or groups of people to allow us to undertake, you know, what was considered complex tasks. But if you look at this technology, it's been around for numbers of years and that's why I'm saying sometimes there's nothing new. Your Tesla motor, for example, or your Waymo in Los Angeles or San Francisco, that's an agentic tool. So what you've got is you've given a particular bot or robot a task move me from A to B. It's using other bots and other AI and other tooling to allow it to work out where it's going, work out the dangers, work out what to charge. You work out the route, and and and, and, and and complete that mission and then move on to the next side of things.

Kieran: 25:26

So this is just an evolution. It is bots working together completing tasks it's been programmed to complete in much the same way that we have and here's the part you can look at this as a threat and for some jobs it will be so. For example and this is not to be discourteous would I recommend as many people become software engineers? Well, we do need software engineers, because we need software that is secure, accessible, well-designed. We need software engineers to engage with people to create great tooling, but AI can now create code 57 percent faster than your average coder and can make it secure by default and can make it accessible and can write up all the notes in the documentation and then then, then, then. So jobs have changed. Jobs will change. Bring on the digital workers, because if you and I can get an army of workers working for us, imagine what you and I could achieve on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Audrey: 26:14

Definitely. This also brings me to another interesting question. Right, I feel like right now, things are evolving so quickly that, if you have young children in school, the teachers themselves are also struggling to keep up with this new wave of change. And, let's say, people who have just graduated? Now they are finally entering a workforce in which never before they have seen Everything is changing. So how should students or people who have just graduated navigate this whole maze of change?

Kieran: 26:40

Yeah, we have to be careful with this because, you're right, I train a lot of university professors, lots of teachers, around the UK and globally as well, and that's the key bit. Our educators, I think and it depends on your country aren't necessarily the most valued profession, but those are the people who are preparing the next generation of kids, the next generation of workers doctors, medical professionals, health professional, financial accountants or whatever else. We need to treat them with a lot more care, we need to value them a lot more and we need to give them the education they need to provide the education for for so many others. But they're not necessarily getting that, maybe south kore being a great exception, maybe Saudi Arabia the same, but other countries. Teachers aren't as valued and are maybe not as invested in as much as I would want them to be. But here's the kicker and here's the rub the generation that's coming into work at this moment in time, the Gen Zs and soon to be Alphas. They're Uber's children. It's no longer that they were born digital natives, now they're born AI natives.

Kieran: 27:33

So the tooling that we're using that you and I have had to learn they've been using it anyway. I take my 18-year-old son. You know, earlier on he came in to me I'd asked him to do a couple of tasks for me because he's working for me this summer, and he wrote yeah, it's done. And I said how we can do that in seconds as opposed to, you know, taking half a day. And he thinks nothing about doing that because this tooling is a natural part of his being, and the same with his colleagues and peers. Now the problem happens is that when they're going into work, what they're used to is very smart, intelligent, personalized, low-code, ai-driven ways of working, engaging, playing and learning. And then they're coming into a very analog workplace where the age of the average worker and their knowledge about all these tools is not where it needs to be.

Kieran: 28:20

And, for example, I was in Lisbon's Topps Business School six, eight months ago. I had a bunch of CHROs from the best companies in the country talking to the students about all the things that they would offer and everything else. I met the students at halftime because that was my role, my chairing, my mission, and I said you must be excited by what you heard. And he says no, we'll not work for any of these businesses. We're using this and that and the other tool on a daily basis. It's making us more productive, more creative. That feels like that's going back to the dark ages. We're never going to work for these companies and you're going oh my goodness, we are in a place of what I call digital Darwinism. If you don't adopt these tools, you're not going to survive as a company. If you don't have these tools, you're not going to keep your workforce and you're not going to attract your workforce.

Kieran: 29:03

But the key thing here, audrey, is not about hiring a group of Gen Zs or soon to be alphas, and believing they will fix your business.

Kieran: 29:09

The real question I'm seeing this across every country because I work internationally, across every sector, because I work across every sector is how do you bring every generation of the workforce into this AI and digital way of being helping them that give them the knowledge and the tools and the skills that they need to navigate an increasingly AI and digital world, to allow them to produce products and services and deliver in a way that this current new generation expect and you and I, who are increasingly sophisticated users of all this technology, want and need and know is possible.

Kieran: 29:41

So the real challenge is educating the educators and getting every generation and every business ready for what is a snowball that is just getting bigger and quicker and quicker, and we need to do that now and that involves everyone at every level. You know schools, certainly, businesses absolutely, and government organizations and government groups to encourage people and encourage their learning with these technologies. Otherwise, the person themselves won't be as employable, the business will not be as competitive and the country itself will fall further behind. Because when I look around the globe and I work with lots of governments, when I see some of these countries that are embracing this technology, they're already years ahead, not months ahead, and that gap is only getting wider on a daily basis at each of those levels.

Audrey: 30:23

Yeah, and it's very interesting that you mentioned that the workforce, or the companies, need to be the one that's being prepared for the new generation, instead of the new generation preparing themselves for the workforce, and that was a very interesting perspective. But for companies, let's say they have existed for a long time, let's say a brick and mortar story, and now there's AI and they're thinking, okay, I need to adopt it, but I don't know how. How do they even begin as an organization? Is it a top-down thing? Bottom-up approach? Where do they start?

Kieran: 30:50

Yeah, I've tried both, to be honest, and the bottom-up is really, really hard. Why I say it's really hard is that to get attention inside a company, you need to be very successful and, let's be honest, the bigger organization need to be quite political and therefore, pushing from the bottom-up, there's a lot of weight coming down and therefore, pushing from the bottom up, there's a lot of weight coming down. If this becomes a top five executive or board agenda and which it should be, must be, needs to be, can't not be then, all of a sudden, you've got the team that make the decisions. You've got the team that everybody is watching. You've got the team that can remove blocks and provide the funding to make this work. So, top down and I don't mean you're the chief financial officer, the CEO, when you throw it across to your IT team and say, look, I want you, it manager, you know, to digitally transform and make my business AI intelligent. It's not that you need a business strategy, people strategy and a digital strategy which includes AI, combined together like a three-legged stool, all working in sync to allow you to create a business that is intelligent and digitally driven, but of people at its core and therefore, top down with budget and ownership. That is much more effective than anything else and that starts with the education of the board and the executive team to understand the art of the possible but also the art of the practical, and it involves everyone getting involved, because I've seen too many companies doing ai pilots. They call it proofs of concept, I call them proofs of cost and something that is never going to make it into the real world. And the danger is not only lost money but wasted time when your competitors are moving beyond, and then the loss of faith of your staff. By that I mean I know one company that did 223 gen ai pilots. They're a global company. When I asked the cto how many of those are going to go live, she said none and smiled and I went my goodness, now they're multi-billion.

Kieran: 32:30

That's why and says, look, nobody wants to get left behind. So everybody's trying everything but nobody is doing the basics, which is look, this is great technology, but if everything looks like, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, it doesn't mean it's right for every single moment. There needs to be a business case behind it. It needs to grow revenue, reduce operational cost, improve staff or customer experience, improve your operational risk stance or something that is, you know, p and l tangible. Otherwise, you're going to spend a lot of money and a lot of time doing stuff and, as interesting as stuff is, stuff always gets called out and is never funded. This technology is really valuable. It does really work when it put into the right hands and used correctly and that's not. But you would be amazed at the number of people who get it wrong. And we're not talking about small companies, we're talking about big, small, medium government and everything else in between. So that education, direction and business case piece at the top end absolutely essential.

Audrey: 33:22

Interesting. What kind of actionable or measurable results have you seen that you know your clients or the people around you have gathered because of the right use of AI? What is possible?

Kieran: 33:33

yeah, I'll give an example. You know, and let's go back 15 years, you know turning a very traditional insurance business that was based on inbound phone calls alone into something that was massively actionable. You know, turning it from 30 million into 90 million by using AI and data analytics. You know, boom done. You know, boom done. You know. I look at companies and I look at individuals. Even if they just use chat, gpt, all of a sudden they can get back 10 hours a week, 10 hours a week in time that they didn't have and now they can invest that time.

Kieran: 33:57

That's not me, just me seeing it. If you look at Harvard reviews, look at work that was done with Procter Gamble by Ethan Mollick and colleagues, where they looked at pre and post, you know usage of any of these tools and people were 30% more productive. You know 20 to 40% more innovative and certainly more creative. If you look at the sales figures that are evidenced, you know I can give you mine, I can give you McKinsey's. You know 7 to 15% more sales. You know a reduction in operational costs of 8%, you know, and at the right numbers of millions. All these things make sense. So, whether it's more productivity, more creativity, better quality work, reduction in repeat calls, more sales, operational efficiency, much happier customers. I see all of these metrics, but all of these metrics are predicate upon, you know, actually understanding your business, putting AI, generative AI and great data analytics and automation and great people into the right seats on the bus and then driving in the right direction so that you end up at a destination that makes sense.

Kieran: 34:50

Too many throw a lot of people on the bus, don't know where they're going, and then they get out a map when it's too late. You don't want to do that. So a little bit of look. Spend more time prepping so that your execution is seamless. Don't jump and run and start hopping around the place and then trying to negotiate amongst too many people where you're going to go. It's never a fun journey when you don't have somewhere planned. You know it's much easier if the bus driver is putting you in a route where you know where you're going to go and the destination is well planned, well organized and a heck of a lot of fun for everyone at the end of it.

Audrey: 35:19

Yeah, and it's so interesting. I love using this analogy with my clients as well. I always say content without strategy is like driving a bus, right, but you're not going in one direction, you're just going all over the place. And it seems like it's the same with AI, right. If you don't have that roadmap, you don't have that vision, you don't have that objective that you want to achieve. You're just going to be playing and experimenting and not seeing those results that you're looking for. So, kyria, maybe what is one final thing you can share with our audience? If there is one takeaway you want them to know, what would that be?

Kieran: 35:49

yeah, look, please don't hope this technology will go away. It really, really won't. You know that that is digital darwinism or ai darwinism in the extreme putting your hand in the sand and hoping it won't look. It's fun technology. So if you want to redesign your garden and your interior of your house, you absolutely can. If you want a fitness and diet plan you know that's interesting where you're not paying your fitness trainer a hundred dollars a month, you can absolutely have that and a thousand things more. Plan your trip to japan, do whatever you want.

Kieran: 36:14

It's really cool tech. So, personally, use it, start to play with it. It allows you to do so much in a much more informed way. If you're a business, there are real economic benefits, you know, real top line sales, real bottom line operational improvement. Your margins margins can increase If you give it to your staff time and time again. Research after research, train right, given the tools that they need, your staff are happier. They're more productive than ever. Therefore, it would be madness not to do it. So the tech isn't going to go away. Point it in the right direction. Give people the training, the support, the mentorship and the tools that they will need and you will be surprised how much you gain from such a what I call cheap technology, but a massively powerful technology and used in the right hands. This is wonderful.

Audrey: 36:57

And I love to quote Chad GPT here. This is a revolutionary piece of tech, so if you're not using it, you are missing out. Kieran, thank you so much for that rich and insightful conversation. Now, where can our listeners find you and where can they find your book?

Kieran: 37:12

Yeah, so the book is published globally on. I think there's about 13 or 20 different Amazon sites, so it's on there. Type in my name, ciarán Gilmourie in Agentic AI, and it's in Audible as well, if you prefer to go in Audible, if you want to learn more more, I think I've released my 333rd article the other day for free, on every topic, including this. That's on LinkedIn, and if you search for me on LinkedIn, there should be one or two of me, but I'm definitely there. Or if you want to go to kierangalmariecom, I'm there, or Substack or Medium, or or or. I'm on most social media channels because I build it once and distribute multiple times.

Kieran: 37:43

But I love helping people. I love sharing of a philosophy, audrey, that says all boats rise on a floating tide. So you will be amazed at what I give away the books I largely give away as well, but I put them on to Amazon. I put them on to Audible because the money that is raised from selling those support a social housing charity in Ireland and therefore I would adore people if they find value in my articles, I would adore if they bought the book, because not only will they be gaining very relevant knowledge, that will be an absolute essential in the next couple of years, but they will be helping a gorgeous cause for an organization that does some amazing, amazing work on a daily basis.

Audrey: 38:18

Wow, guys, if this doesn't convince you, I don't know what will. So please check out Kieran's book and please reach out to him. Kieran, thank you again for joining us on the show and thank you, folks, folks, for tuning in. Don't forget to hit the bell for more actionable AI and marketing insights. We'll see you next week, take care.

Kieran: 38:34

Thank you very much. Good luck everyone.