Good Enough Isn't

People-First AI Transformation: Mohammad Anwar and the HUMAIN First Framework

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People-First AI Transformation: Mohammad Anwar and the HUMAIN First Framework Featuring Mohammad Anwar, President & CEO of Softway and Culture+, and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author

Episode Summary

Mohammad Anwar is the President and CEO of Softway and Culture+, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and one of the more honest voices in a conversation about AI that tends to be dominated by hype. Mohammad built Softway from a one-man software shop he started at 20 -- out of necessity, not ambition -- into a 300-person firm, only to nearly lose it all by 30 when the chip on his shoulder calcified into full-blown arrogance. The turnaround came from an unlikely place: a University of Houston football comeback where the coach credited love as the reason his team won. That moment launched a three-year behavioral transformation that tripled Softway's revenue, improved EBITDA margins by 43 percentage points, and eventually produced two Wall Street Journal bestselling books and an entirely new business, Culture+, built on the idea that love is not a soft concept but the most powerful strategy a leader has. In this episode, Mohammad and Myles go deep on why 78% of workers believe their jobs are not safe in the age of AI, why 90% of AI pilots are failing, and why the answer in both cases is almost never the technology -- it is the people. Mohammad walks through his HUMAIN First framework, unpacks the critical difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and makes the case that the organizations most likely to win the AI era are the ones willing to put humans at the center of the strategy first.

What You'll Learn

  • Why 90% of AI transformation initiatives fail -- and why the root cause is almost always people, not technology
  • How Mohammad's HUMAIN First framework resequences AI rollouts to lead with human readiness before process and technology
  • The difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and why measuring AI success through volume or token usage is the wrong metric entirely
  • Why "behaviors eat culture for lunch" -- and how behavioral change, not strategy, is what actually drives organizational performance
  • The concept of "choose your hard" and why the path that feels easier today almost always becomes the harder one tomorrow
  • Why the leaders best equipped to understand and deploy AI are those who understand humans -- because AI is, at its core, built to mimic human intelligence
  • How AI, when used intentionally, can make us more human at work rather than more robotic -- and why that reframe changes everything about how you approach adoption

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Mo Anwar

22% of people out there who've been you know, surveyed have shared that they think their jobs are safe, which means 78% of people think their jobs are not safe in the age of AI. It's upon us as leaders to really help through this transformation and this AI revolution that's coming.

Myles Biggs

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the show. On this podcast, we are driven by truth, sometimes the hard truth. We believe it's imperative to be relentless for results because if you're not, your competitor is. We're obsessed with how to be better every day because that's what our customers deserve. And if you can set aside your ego, if you can truly be no ego, then we're the show to help you go all in because good enough isn't All right. Like I said, everyone, welcome back to the show. It's your host, Myles, here once again. And today, our guest is the president and CEO of Softway and Culture+, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and someone who genuinely believes, and has proven, that love is both a business and change strategy. So we're very pleased to welcome to the show Mo Anwar. Mo, welcome to Good Enough Isn't.

Mo Anwar

Thank you. Thank you, Myles, for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation with you.

Myles Biggs

Likewise. And I definitely wanna come back to this idea of love as a strategy, but before we do that- I'm sure that, you know, when you were a teenager, you weren't walking around telling everybody, "When I grow up, I wanna prove that love is a business strategy." So I'm curious- That's funny what did you wanna do? Was it always what you're doing now or did you have different plans for yourself?

Mo Anwar

No, when I was a teenager I actually wanted to become a pilot. That was my-

Myles Biggs

Oh, interesting

Mo Anwar

dream was to become an airline pilot, but definitely that's not what I ended up doing. So No here I am speaking to the world about how love can be a business strategy. That's, uh, not- Wow never in, on my mind did it cross that that's what I would be doing.

Myles Biggs

Yeah. And so when, when did the path towards pilot diverge towards, something more business related?

Mo Anwar

My sophomore year of high school that I realized that I wasn't gonna go become a pilot because I have, uh, elder siblings who are pilots, uh, in my family, and they told me the market is really bad. You don't want to become a pilot. So they steered me away from becoming a pilot and I ended up doing my computer science degree instead in college and started my business in college actually when I was 20 years old is when I started my, a software company.

Myles Biggs

Yeah. And so, you know, I saw that when I was reading up on you. You went to the University of Houston, studied computer science, like you said.

Mo Anwar

That's right. Go

Myles Biggs

Coogs. So I'm always curious when people start, like, businesses in college. Did it- Mm-hmm start as, like, a school project? "Hey, for this capstone come up with this fake business," and then you were like, "Oh, this actually is something"? Or did you o- You just, you were consciously starting a business to build something while you were still in school?

Mo Anwar

I actually did not have in pl- have in my mind that I would even start a business, right? I thought I was gonna go work as a software engineer, and this is like, you know, when I was in high school, it was the late '90s, and this is when, uh, software engineers were getting, uh, Porsches as sign-on bonuses to join the dot-com companies and so forth. So that's what I thought I would do, is go get a good job and get my Porsche as a sign-on bonus. But, uh, by the time I was getting into my junior, senior year of college, uh, the market had actually crashed. The dot-com burst-- bubble had burst, and, um, the economy wasn't doing very well, and jobs weren't easily available. And in fact, that's when outsourcing had started, where things were being shipped off to India in the early, early 2000s. And I... You know, my family is from India, so I, I had the opportunity to either go back to India and work as a software engineer or figure out how to stay in the US and, and do something. And I decided that I'm gonna take advantage of my Indian family origins, and I decided to start a software company and get my brother to hire programmers in Bangalore, India, and we just started this business. And I'm here consulting clients, um, on technology projects, soft- custom software projects, and I'd have engineers in India hired and build the, uh, softwares for us. And that's kind of how I started the business when I was 20

Myles Biggs

That's super smart. Yeah, it's if someone's gonna outsource this, why not me, right? Is sort of the thinking.

Mo Anwar

Exactly. Make the connections. Instead of outsourcing myself, I decided to stay here and just hire engineers there. Yeah. So that's kind of what got me into the whole business to begin with, out of, uh, necessity and desire not to go to India is what forced me to start the business.

Myles Biggs

So you're 20 years old, and you're the sort of face of the company in the States meeting and, like, selling the work to then outsource it. I don't know what you looked like when you were 20 years old. I very much had a baby face. In fact- one of the reasons why I have a beard today is because I looked 12 without one, and I remember in- my first job out of college, I started to recognize that people started treating me very differently when I had a beard versus not have a beard, the level of, like, seriousness they took me. So I'm just imagining you at 20 having to battle some of that same ageism- Oh, yeah so to speak, right? You're, you're trying to be the business owner in the room, and people are like- Yeah "Wait, what?" Yeah. "You're still in school." Like, what were those early days like, and what were some of those call them losses or setbacks, and how has that shaped you when you look back on it?

Mo Anwar

Yeah, I, I definitely got asked how old I am many, many times- as I entered client conversations. And, um, you know, at times I found myself lying that I was 25, 27 because I would just get point-blank asked the question. And even today, believe it or not I've had the business for 23 years, and there are rooms I walk into with some C-suites, and they're like, "Wait, how, how young are you? Like, are you the CEO? We were expecting someone much older." And so I still get those kind of reactions, but I actually take it as a compliment today. Yeah, so I still get asked even today what, "Hey, you're, you look quite young for a CEO of a technology firm, and how is it that you've had it for 23 years? Like, when did you start, like, when you were 10?" Uh, you know, so- I still get comments like that. But like I said, like I, I take it as a compliment. But back in the day, I did approach it with, like, a chip on my shoulder whenever people- Yeah would ask. I'm like, "Dude, this shouldn't matter. What should matter is the quality of my work or, uh, you know, what I do." And so I'd always have a chip on my shoulder to prove people that I could do this despite my inexperience that they perceived. And I used it as fuel to do even better work. That's how I kind of addressed it back in the day.

Myles Biggs

Do you recall the moment where it shifted from chip on my shoulder, I'm gonna prove you wrong, to, like, waking up and looking around and having that feeling of like, "I did it. We're here"? And what was that like?

Mo Anwar

You know, yeah, I did actually. So 10 years after starting the business, I had you know, I was barely 30 years old, and I had 300 employees, like about 100 of them in the US and 200 in India, and I'm a barely 30 year o- 30-year-old CEO. Eventually got my Porsche, driving my cars. And then since I wanted to be a pilot, I went and got myself a pilot license, and I, I used to fly planes across Texas as a 30-year-old. So I was literally living the American dream. And let me tell you, it actually got to my head, Myles. That chip on my shoulder- Yeah to proving other people wrong turned into arrogance, turned into me being power drunk, and, uh, it was my way or the highway, and I thought I was, you know, ruling the world, and I could do whatever I wanted. And that actually hurt me, so much so that I almost went bankrupt. In 2015, 2016 I was on the verge of bankruptcy. I was hemorrhaging cash, losing employees left and right. And in a deep moment of introspection, I recognized that, this wasn't the economy, the market our team, our clients, but actually my fault. I had, uh, become so arrogant and, uh, you know, my ego was so big that I forgot why I started the business and what the purpose was for, and, and all of the above and, and I almost destroyed my company. But fortunately I learned about the concept of culture of love from American football, watching my alma mater, University of Houston play and win a comeback victory. And I was so inspired by that comeback victory that I heard the coach attribute love and culture of love to the resiliency and the comeback victory, that it inspired me to look at myself and see if I love my team and care for my team. And the resounding answer was I didn't. And so I went on a journey of transformation where I needed to change my behaviors to put the needs of others before myself and practice empathy, vulnerability, forgiveness trust, empowerment inclusion, and all of these attributes that I had taken for granted and never considered. And that actually saved my business to where we not only saved, but we became thriving again, and we tripled our revenues, improved our EBITDA margin by 43 percentage points, and we found ourselves doing work with, large and, global companies, not just doing technology work, but then eventually doing culture work out of demand by our clients because they had witnessed our transformation. And, uh, it gave birth to me traveling the world, teaching 1,400 leaders how to lead with love from 46 different nationalities and different backgrounds, and it resonated, and they all asked me to write a book. And here I am. I've now published two books on love as a strategy and, um, doing work I never thought I would do as a teenager. But I guess the path got me here eventually.

Myles Biggs

Yeah. There's so much to unpack in what you just said. Yeah I wanna go back, but before we come back to the love, when you say you almost went bankrupt. Mm-hmm. You know, 30, you said you looked around and you bought yourself the Po- Porsche, you're flying planes, you're riding high, literally, in the sky- Yeah in a plane. Yeah. And then it starts going downhill. You know, I've heard the phrase before that, uh, trust or success or anything, right, you earn it in drips, but you can lose it in buckets. So- Mm. Wondering if that resonates with you, and if you can recall, like, when did the buckets start throwing the business out, right? You started going downhill. Was it one thing- Mm or just all of a sudden it was this cumulative effect? Mm-hmm. And then... I know, sorry, this is a multilayered question, but... And then, like, how do you even wake up and realize that? Because if you are... You do have that arrogance, and you got the chip on your shoulder. It's an identity shift to look around and have that moment where you admit, "This is my fault, not somebody else's." And

Mo Anwar

it

Myles Biggs

just had to be an interesting moment for you.

Mo Anwar

Yeah, I, I, first of all, I resonate with that greatly. The statement that you said about, the bucket going away in buckets or however you said that analogy. I resonate with it and for me, it was a cumulative impact, uh, effect. It was a lot of things had to not be in the right place at the right time. But when I look at the nucleus of all of the things that happened around me, I could blame external factors all day long. But when I had a serious look at myself, I couldn't attribute those things for what got us to near bankruptcy. And I could only look at myself and realize that no matter how things around me were changing and things were moving, had I had the right center for myself and our company and our culture and care for the people, none of those things would have impacted us. And so I, I was able to recognize that it was myself. But I can also tell you the football game was a big catalyst.

Myles Biggs

Yeah.

Mo Anwar

But I also had some coworkers of mine who were, who are also my co-authors of the book, who, practiced the courage to speak truth to me and have honesty, uh, moments with me where they told me things that weren't being said because I had lacked self-awareness, because my ego had clouded how I saw myself or how others perceive me.

Myles Biggs

Yeah.

Mo Anwar

And they had to have the courage to speak truth to me, and I, I owe them a whole lot of gratitude to not only having the courage to tell the person who signs their paycheck that I'm being a jerk, but also still being there beside me, having grace for me, having forgiveness for me, and being on a journey committed to, uh, giving me that feedback. Even today 10 years out, I still get a lot of feedback from them and that they've committed to seeing my success as their success. And so I think there's something about the team environment and the culture where we're out here to support each other, and we don't show up to work just for ourselves, but for the teammates beside us. And that's exactly what Coach Herman spoke of in the football game post ba-- post-game in, in the press conference. And, and I see us living it out today and our teams fighting for each other, showing up not just for themselves, but for their teammates' success. And that has allowed us to become innovative, creative, think outside the box, be inclusive, be resilient, and it's helped us, uh, build the high-performance nature of our team started to mimic a lot of the football team's culture that Tom Herman had spoken of, and I see the results of it every day today. It's made us very resilient, innovative, creative, be able to tackle any type of challenges, external, internal, and, you know, we've created a culture of high performance as a result of this journey. I mean, we're doing things we never thought we'd do. We wrote two books. We've, um, created products, experiences, changed our whole business model multiple times over, and- Yeah we're still doing it. You know, we're still very adaptable and resilient as a result of all of this.

Myles Biggs

Yeah, I can tell you, you really believe it 'cause even that phrase you just said, you know, we wrote two books." Even if it's your name with the byline, you're saying we 'cause there are other people involved in helping make that happen, which is- Totally which is great. And s- something I was thinking about when you were talking, this idea of, looking around and you can point your finger at a lot of other people, but ultimately it's on you and how you react and what you do. And I think, I just think that level of personal accountability is missing a l- in a lot of places in the world, and it does start there. Because whether you're the CEO of the company or not, we're all the CEO of our own lives, right? And we can all blame a lot of other people, but, no one's forcing us to do anything we don't wanna do at the end of the day, for the most part. I know there's edge cases, you know? But we c- we get to decide, and it's-- Once, once you make that decision and you start, like, happening to things versus just it happening to you, y- you can do so much. And I, I think that's wonderful. And just the point that I hope no one's listening thinking, "Well, that doesn't apply to me," 'cause it absolutely does apply to everyone. Totally. Yes. Um, so let's talk about the, from negative EBITDA to tripling the percentage, I believe you said. That obviously doesn't happen overnight. Takes a lot of hard work on yourself first, and then with the team. You have this moment where you realize it. Where do you begin? Where do you go from there?

Mo Anwar

I mean, definitely don't do what I did. So I-

Myles Biggs

That's why we're talking to you- Oh, you mean it so the audience can-

Mo Anwar

Yeah

Myles Biggs

can learn from what you did.

Mo Anwar

Yeah, so I, you know, I saw this, uh, football game, this, uh, miraculous comeback victory, and then I found myself on a high and, excited but also introspective, and I decided I was gonna host another town hall with my company with both India and US employees like th- this is like three weeks after I had done layoffs of 100-plus employees, and- Okay everybody's, like, gathered around, "Okay, this is it. We're shutting down And instead I, uh, decided to bring everybody one-- br- everybody together, tell them about the football game, and then I told them, "I love you all." And everybody about just jumped out of their seats, and they were like rolling their eyes and like, "Who the hell is this guy? Who snatched his body? What just happened? Is he on crack?" Um, and stuff. And, um, so you know, like people were very skeptical and they were like something is, "Oh, he's just impassioned from this football game. It's just all talk and it's another flavor of the month." And yeah, that was reciprocation almost immediately because they just thought I was crazy and, here's him coming after this game and just saying something, you know, that, makes no sense. This is the same guy who just-- who used to berate us, yell at us and now all of a sudden he's saying, "I love you all." So I did that, and that wasn't the right way to do it because I realized soon after that I needed to walk the talk before I talk the walk. And so I committed to not do things like that and just prove it with my actions in consistent, disciplined ways where I was able to show up and put the needs of others before myself. If that meant I was the first one to the office, brought people coffee, stayed in the office if people were late, doing overtime. I stayed until the last person le- left, brought them dinner, served them, found every opportunity to put their needs before mine, and realized that my job as a leader isn't to lead them, but it's to serve them. And it took me like a year, year and a half, uh, of a journey where I also had to learn to become vulnerable, apologize, take ownership for my mistakes. And, um, only after that did the team start coming along beside me in the journey where they realized that they too needed to now change. Because let's admit it, uh, a lot of the people had modeled their behaviors after me and all the bad behaviors after me. Sure. So, so because I, I have an outsized influence, and now they too have to unlearn all those bad behaviors and come along beside me in committing to go on a journey of leading with love. And so it took intense amount of effort, consistency, discipline, determination to show up in different ways till people were able to dismantle their beliefs about who I was, how I led, because I definitely deserved those beliefs about me. But until I went on a journey of, um, showing up differently for long periods of time did those beliefs change. And after that they came beside me to help me. And that's what kind of really transformed our entire business eventually, where we, you know, were able to overcome the deficits get through our seven-figure debts and become a positive profitable company again while tripling our revenues. It took ab- took us about three years of this journey.

Myles Biggs

So that's, that's interesting. I'm wondering, not that-- I don't wanna say that's it, right? Because I'm just thinking about all the factors of a business, right? There's so much that goes into a business and how you generate revenue and how do you go from debt to, revenue positive. And so did you make any other changes in the business besides how you're showing up that led to that, that increase in the bottom line? Or is it really now just this idea that people were bought in, they're not just doing a job, they're working for each other, they're following you 'cause they believe in you so they're willing to go above and beyond, which means they're serving the customer to a higher level, which means happier customers, which means they buy more, and then it's a positive flywheel versus a negative one That's where it's like, is that it? Was that all it was? Or like just curious if there were- No was any other factors 'cause it's a significant- Mm-hmm difference you're talking about.

Mo Anwar

Yeah. It was a complete transformation, right? But it began with behaviors. Behaviors are the bottom line. Yeah. So the way that we define culture is that culture isn't the perks and benefits, you know, uh, that really define it because, you know, there are lots of companies with lots of perks and benefits. Right.

Myles Biggs

Ping pong table

Mo Anwar

and, you know- And ping pong tables, ice cream parlors, goat yoga, you know, all of those things exist in the Silicon Valley and but that is not ultimately what culture... Culture is the way we treat each other, the way we behave with each other, the way we interact with each other in the meeting rooms, on Slack or Google Chat, down to how we email each other, right? Like, ultimately, it comes down to the behaviors that we demonstrate with each other. And what we believe is your processes, your systems, your policies, they're underpinned by people's mindsets and behaviors. So for example, if trust and, uh, empowerment is not experienced inside of the walls of your organization, you'll institute processes that are there to verify trust, which leads to inefficiencies. It's counter to why you input processes or systems in place. Same thing with like if inclusion and empathy is not experienced inside of the walls of your company, then you might institute a technology or make a technology decision that excludes a whole user group, which is again counterintuitive to innovation. So what we believe is no strategic layer or process or systems can exist the way they are without the right behaviors that, and culture. And so behaviors are the bottom line. So what began as a behavior change journey for me and around me led to people thinking differently about problems, thinking differently about systems and processes because now they were feeling more psychologically safe, and their creative side of their brain actually started to operate, uh, not from a place of fear but from a place of inspiration and motivation. And they were inspired to change things, change policies, change procedures, to come up with innovative ways of doing work. How do we treat our customers? How do we, change up things that are status quo, which no one can explain why do we do things the way we do? And people started challenging each other, and we knew how to get through conflict. We knew how to transform through it versus avoid it. So all of these behaviors ultimately underpin high performance, which then leads to better systems and dismantling old systems and replacing them with more efficient, effective, innovative systems. And that's how I f- that's how we unlocked our full potential. So it's not like I had a strategy. It's not like I thought this is what the outcome was gonna be. I just began this journey where I just didn't wanna be a jerk anymore. And then these were the unintended or intended outcomes of that journey

Myles Biggs

I forget who said this quote, but it reminds me of a quote somebody said about the idea that culture eats strategy for breakfast or lunch. Pick a meal, right? Yes. But that's what you're describing, right? It's-

Mo Anwar

Correct.

Myles Biggs

Sometimes you, you oversh- It's by Peter Drucker. Is it by Peter Drucker? Great. Um, it's like you can- Peter Drucker, yes you can over-strategize to try to make up for a lack of culture, but if you have the strong culture, then the strategy almost takes care of itself.

Mo Anwar

So we have a saying. First of all, we wholeheartedly believe in Peter Drucker's saying of culture eats strategy for breakfast, but we have a saying that if culture eats strategy for breakfast, then behaviors eat culture for lunch. So that is how important behaviors are because without behaviors, you can't even have a culture, and then without the right culture, you can't have, uh, effective strategies.

Myles Biggs

Yeah, it makes so much sense. Just the building blocks. Like a culture is just a set of behaviors and how we show up as a collective unit.

Mo Anwar

Correct.

Myles Biggs

You know?

Mo Anwar

Correct.

Myles Biggs

So you figured this out for yourself. It took three years. I'm sure there was a moment where you were like, "There's no way we re- we could replicate this. This is just us." And then you're talking to people. You share a little tidbit, and it helps. Like how did... So then how... What was the moment just like, like I'm gonna start this business in college. Now you have a business within a business almost, and you start, you spin it out and start packaging this. How does that work?

Mo Anwar

Yeah. So, it, like I said, it came out of de- customer demand. So we were working with a very large customer here in the Houston, Texas area where we, we had been working with them for almost 10 years on a lot of technology work, and our stakeholders that worked with us, uh, from this large Fortune 5 company started let's just say they started hanging out with us. They'd invite us to their campus and keep us in meeting rooms longer and longer and longer, and they'd do their own work, and we'd do our own work, but they just liked hanging out with us. And, um, strangely enough, they came, came to us one day, and they were like, "Hey you know, we seem to like hanging out with y- your team more than we do with our own team. Can you help bring a little bit of your culture within our walls? And, uh, we think you know us enough that you can help us." And we're like, "Hold on. We're here to help you with technology. We're not a culture company, and we don't do this." And they were like, "No, we really think you can help us because we've been with the big four consulting firms, and our leaders come back with T-shirts and mugs, but nothing ever changes here." And, um, they kept insisting. We were flattered, and we said no. And then a couple of weeks later, they came back to us and were like, "Listen, we've seriously considered it. We really think you need to do it, and we're gonna pay you." And we were like, "Wait, speak less. We got this. We'll figure it out." And next thing you know, um- they went to their senior leaders you know, vice presidents and presidents and told them, "Hey, look, we really think SoftWay should help us with our culture and leadership transformation initiative." And they were like, "Wait, they're just... They're the tech company. How will they help us? They're not even in culture and leadership." And these middle management stakeholders of ours are like, they put their reputation on the line, and they vouch for us as unproven vendors and got us a pilot to experiment. And the pilot was an extreme success, and next thing you know, they green lit us to travel the world and train fourteen hundred of their leaders acro- uh, in 10 different countries and where they flew in from different parts of the world. And, and all we did was speak to them about how to lead with love and shared our story, and that was it. Uh, we didn't do anything beyond that. But that experience was so powerful that every single country we went to, people from different parts of the world, different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different you know, professions would come to us and say, "This is so powerful. You all need to write a book." And we then realized, wait a minute, maybe we exist in this world for a higher purpose, which is to bring humanity back to the workplace through love. And we kind of found a new purpose, a new calling, and doubled down on it, wrote the book eventually, and then the book became a Wall Street Journal bestseller in eight weeks. And the next thing you know, we're getting calls from all over the globe- asking us to be keynote speakers at conferences or help, uh, different organizations with their leadership programs or culture programs. And so now I found myself saying, "Okay, we need to start a new unit, uh, inside our Softway called Culture Plus," because people were very confused about why is a tech company doing culture?

Myles Biggs

Right. Yeah.

Mo Anwar

And, uh, you know, in 2020, 2021, ESPN Plus, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus- For sure was all like a big thing. So I'm like, "Let's go Culture Plus." So we, we created a new brand called Culture Plus and put all our culture and leadership services under that umbrella, and it still exists to the date. And Softway is still a technology firm, but we've had to go through another pivot again, which is with AI, and I'm happy to step into that whenever you're ready.

Myles Biggs

Yeah, I was just about to, to take us there because I'm thinking about what you said about that moment in an all hands where you just laid off 100 people and you said you love them, and everyone's looking at you like, "What in the world is going on?" I feel like every headline I see these days are software companies that are going through- Mm-hmm some amount of restructuring. There's the narrative out there that AI's gonna take everyone's jobs and replace us or, Insert whatever scenario, right?

Mo Anwar

Yeah.

Myles Biggs

And I, you know, I know from just chatting with you briefly before we hit record that your philosophy matches Levels where our conversations internally aren't about Level taking people's jobs, but it's about changing people's jobs and how it can enable you to do your job better or can do a part of your job- Yeah that you used to do and now you can do something else, versus it just replacing humans entirely. But no matter which way you look at it, if you're going for the pure efficiency gains where you're gonna lower headcount and increase, robot count, for lack of a better phrase, or you're gonna keep the humans and make them superhuman by giving them these AI tools, it's transforming the way we work, right? It requires a shift. It's all new and different, and it doesn't feel like it's full of love a lot of the time. We can start with your experience, like at Softway. You go from you need to hire a developer to code this for you to now me, literally, a corporate communications major in college, I'm coding things, which I never thought was possible. Yeah how have you dealt with that in, in your own org?

Mo Anwar

Yeah. So, 2024, when I got to start playing with ChatGPT, initially I didn't really make much out of it. And then as it got, pretty advanced o-over the course of the year, I started to have sleepless nights because I realized my entire business was near obsolescence from a software technology standpoint. My engineers, I have like over 100 engineers, all they do is custom code, right? Software engineers. And I realized that now AI can do what they do and much better, much cheaper, much faster. For like basically I could outsource a engineer's job for $20 a month now to write code. And I realized my whole business model is now at near jeopardy. My software technology, software c- c- you know, custom software development is-- can be replaced with AI and as a service I don't, I don't have a long runway anymore. And so I began to really question what does this mean and why is this happening yet again? I'm near coming to another situation where I don't know, if we're gonna be near surviving or not. But As I started to explore AI and play with AI more I started to realize that, wait a minute, AI isn't actually here to take jobs. AI is actually here to make us more human again. Because I recognize that in the workplace, through my work in culture, that humanity has already been sucked out of the workplace. You're not allowed to be human in the workplace. You're not allowed to bring your human conditions. You're, you know, you- you're asked to, save your issues outside the door, save your tissues for another thing outside the workplace. Don't bring your emotions. Don't... we're so busy that we don't even have time to do one-on-ones. We don't even have time to socialize with each other. We're social animals as beings, but- Yeah and the, the work has kind of made us very monotonous, robo- we're-- Essentially what I could say is like, humans have become more like robots, and when I saw AI, I saw robots becoming more like human. And-

Myles Biggs

Interesting

Mo Anwar

it was very eye-opening for me that my chatbots that I communicated with were far more human and empathetic to me than even, you know, how we see each other as coworkers. We barely even take the time to, understand what's going through each other's mi- uh, you know, lives. We barely know anything about each other. We're a surface layer in the workplace. And so I looked at AI as an opportunity to offload a lot of the monotonous work, the robotic work to robots so that we can do what we do best, which is we need to commune together as a society, as, uh, social beings and co-create, collaborate, get through conflict together, innovate, and do things that the robots don't have on us. But every time I've spoken to leaders or people in the workplace, they say they don't have time. They don't have time. They just don't have time. And let alone, they don't even wanna come into work anymore because they're like, "I'd rather work remote because I don't wanna be around my coworkers who probably are not fun to be around." So- I saw AI as another revolution to change the way we even work with each other. I realized that AI is actually allowing us to offload a lot of the robotic work so that us humans can do the work that we're humans are meant to do as social beings, which is to communicate, collaborate, co-create, get through conflict together, and innovate together. And, um, you know, the environments in the workplace today are people don't even wanna go into the office. People wanna work remote. People don't wanna spend time c- co-creating and collaborating because they see it as burdensome coming into the office because our environments and our cultures are not allowing us to be human. And if AI can take over all of the monotonous robotic work, we can probably finally start being human with each other and make us uniquely the most powerful species on Earth to do what we do best, which is when we come together as humans and do great things together. AI is finally gonna give us that opportunity to do it because I think it's over the course of the last few decades, we've lost our ability b- to be human in the workplace.

Myles Biggs

Yeah. That's an interesting perspective. I've, haven't heard that one about how AI will actually help us be more human so that's interesting. I hear the same sort of, uh, objection that you said around, "Okay, this is all great, but I don't have time. How am I supposed to do all the things I'm supposed to do and learn this whole new technology? And if I learn this whole new technology and train it on how I do what I do, am I just gonna lose my job?" And what I have found is interesting, it's like the only way out is through. You know? It's like the best way to learn how to do it is to use it for all those things that you have s- you don't have time to do, and then figure out how it actually buys back your time a little bit. But then what I'm seeing, even personally, is that it's not actually giving me more time, and this could be a me thing, like I need to actually allow it to give the time. I'm just filling the time with other stuff. I'm getting faster at doing the things, so it doesn't mean I have less to do, it just means I can now get more done in a day, more done in a week, and so the pace has actually increased versus like space has opened up. And I'm curious if you've seen or heard the same thing or how you work with companies to, you know, I guess keep some of that space so you could be more human and not just like pedal to the metal all the time.

Mo Anwar

Yeah. I can share my personal experience and then, uh, speak at it at a large perspective. But, you know, personally for me as a CEO of a company, I, I always find myself very busy. And since I've started to use AI I have found a lot more time to have social conversations like the one that I'm having with you, or having one-on-ones or speaking at events where I can actually offload a lot of my work to AI. So for example, right now I have Claude Cowork. It's already scripted to go check my emails, craft my responses already, and I just have to go look at the draft and send it out. That saves me about hour and a half, two hours a day. I have all of my meetings transcribed with AI, so I have found myself not taking meeting notes, not being distracted on my laptop- Sure not having a notebook out. I can actually now see the other human across the table eye to eye, listen to them empathetically, and actually get more effective outcomes from those meetings, even with my customers. Because I'm not worried about, "Oh, am I gonna remember what they said? Am I gonna remember that action item?" Right. "Am I gonna forget what they're saying?" And so what I've seen is not only have I found myself becoming more effective, more human, but I have also started to be able to be there more for my family because I'm not mentally strained trying to remember things because I know AI's got my back. Yeah. So I have all these Claude Coworking scheduled tasks that I've set up that goes, looks through all my meeting notes, uh, identifies all action items, and keeps a sorted like a Trello board ready for me saying, "Here are all the action items from yesterday that you gotta take care of." So I'm not even mentally, cognitively having anxiety that I'm gonna forget anything. So I'm showing up more present at home with my children and my family. And then I'm at a hospital today. It's ironic, trying to advocate for my father, and I also have a special needs child. I visit the doctors a lot of the times, and I can tell you there are two scenarios that I already see AI helps me. Number one is when I have to go doctor to doctor and they, they always have me explain what did the other doctor say? What did the specialist say? What happened? How did it go there? What did they say the diagnosis was, and what kind of reports did you do? What kind of tests did you do? And I'm sitting there thinking, "What do you think, I'm a healthcare professional?" Like, remember every single freaking detail. And now I just use AI to record everything, and I go advocate for my son, I advocate for my father, because I'm just able to pull up. I'm like, "Hey, I'm gonna record you because I don't wanna go to a doctor and try to explain what you just said when I go back to the pediatrician or a neurologist or a specialist." And then the other thing is I see these medical professionals, they have lost bedside manners because they're using their computers to do all the entry, look at the reports, look at all... They're so worried about all of these processes and procedures that they gotta document that they at times forget that they're speaking to parents of a special needs child that is... I'm thoroughly concerned about what the future of my son's prospect, and this doctor barely even looks into my eyes to help me understand what's going on with my son because they're so busy looking at the computer, putting data entry and looking at reports. Now imagine if they had an AI transcriber that allowed them to consult me looking face to face as to the parents of the child and have empathetic conversations and explain themselves so they're not worried about, "I gotta get these notes right so I get my billing right, so I, you know, I don't get dinged by the insurance companies." That's what's top of their mind, not what the parents are going through or what I need to consult them on. So when I started to, like, see all of this stuff in my personal life, I started to see AI as an opportunity to actually make us human again and stop operating like machines and robots. That's kind of where-

Myles Biggs

Right

Mo Anwar

that inspiration came from.

Myles Biggs

No, it's a great point. And my example, it comes down to self-awareness again, right? Like the moment of you realizing you were being- Yes not the type of person you wanted to be and so you made a change. It's like I've realized I'm so enamored with learning all these new tools, and it's so fun to build stuff with CloudCode or Cowork. And so when I create more time, I'm like, "All right, let's try this next thing I want to try," and you just go and go and go, and you could spend all Saturday building an app and all this stuff. But y- at the end of the day, we have to make the choice to, to let it make us more human and not just even- Correct more robotic. It comes down- Correct to us still making that conscious decision because all the, all the reasons you gave are a hund- are great. Like you can have it do all those things. It's, it's int- the whole debate around the technology is interesting is 'cause like the technology itself is not evil. People want to vilify it, right? But it's like anything. And fire can be a life-giving element or it can be destructive, right? It's like how you use it-

Mo Anwar

Correct

Myles Biggs

is what it comes down to, and that's the part that's still up to us. And so it's important to not just go through the motions, still have an active role, think through how you're using it, how it can help you, and not just how it can check the box. You said something earlier about processes, I forget, but it was through the context of trust, I think. When there's not trust- Mm-hmm you put all these processes- Mm-hmm in place to verify trust that things are happening, and the doctor- Correct example brought that back up for me. And if you can strip that out and you can just be present, it leads to a better experience for everyone. For the employee, they're gonna take more pride and enjoy it more. The person on the receiving end, the customer or coworker, is gonna have a better experience. The product will be better.

Mo Anwar

Speaking of choices, we have this, um, there's a whole chapter in our second book called "Love as a Change Strategy" because when you look at AI, it's change. It's rapid change that's gonna impact-- Uh, i-it's basically, I think it's gonna change the course of human, human race, right? And how we are gonna It's gonna change the course of work, the world, everything, for the good or bad. Both are possible. As long as we are at the helm of it, we can use it for evil or good. But I think it comes down to making a choice. You said it and we have a saying which we borrowed, of course, but we've elaborated on it, which is choose your hard. A lot of the times when we find ourselves choosing, we think we're choosing the easy path and avoiding the hard path, but it's just a myth. A lot of the times, the easy today becomes harder later. And so choosing the right hard, there's no easy, there's only hard and harder. So we are choosing the harder path under the premise that, oh, it's easy today, but it actually gets harder later. So when we say, "I don't have time to learn," when we say, "I don't have time to go learn this technology so I can harness it to give back time," we're making an active choice of choosing the harder path, which is, what's easy today, don't learn, don't spend the time, but tomorrow when your job's at stake and you're like, "Holy crap, I didn't take the... I didn't make the choice to learn so I could be the person in my job who knows how to use AI." Because indeed, the idea is we're making an active choice today not to embrace or adapt to AI because the cat's out of the bag, and the reality is AI is not gonna replace us. It's we're gonna be replaced by humans who know how to use AI. So if we have an active-- we make an active choice today to say, "I don't have time to learn to adapt," it's a path we're choosing that's gonna get harder. So choose your hard it's hard to save money. It, you know, the saying is, "It's hard to save money, but it's harder to be broke, so choose your hard." Yeah. You know? No, you're speaking to me. Yeah. So, so basically it's the same... Yeah, that's the concept.

Myles Biggs

Yeah. My hobby is, uh, like ultramarathons, so like I'm- Mm. I'm running a 100-mile race this summer, and I've done it once before. Oh, wow. And last year I did a full distance Ironman, and not realizing, and I've subscribed to that, like those are hard. I've chosen- Mm those as hard things to do. But in doing those things, I'm choosing that hard over the hard of like, I had been very out of shape not that long ago. Mm-hmm. And that's hard. That was a different type of hard. Mm-hmm. And so now I'm choosing it, so I like that.

Mo Anwar

Yeah.

Myles Biggs

But let's flip that, right? Because right now for AI, for a lot of people, it doesn't feel like a choice. It feels like it's being forced on them, right? Company initiative comes in, everybody gets a Claude seat. We're gonna do a token leaderboard, which we've seen in the headlines is not the way to go. Token maxing- Right is a real thing that people game the system. But it's still happening, and it's use AI, and they're just told, "Use AI." Mm-hmm. "Well, how do I use AI?" "I don't know. Use it. Figure it out." And it's like- Yeah forced as a thing. Yeah. And it doesn't feel like a choice. Yeah. So from a change, a change perspective, you know, there's ways to do this and ways not to do it. So-

Mo Anwar

Correct

Myles Biggs

can you paint a, paint a picture for me of if I'm- Yeah someone listening in this podcast, C-suite executive in the organization, I'm grappling with how to roll out AI in a way- Mm that has love at the center and, and love as the strategy. What does that look like?

Mo Anwar

Mm. Yeah.

Myles Biggs

Cause I feel like we have a lot of examples of- you know, there's the- of the wrong way to do it. Yeah. But not necessarily a good blueprint of this is the right way to do it.

Mo Anwar

Yeah, totally. So, you know, twenty-two percent of people out there who've been surveyed have shared that they think their jobs are safe, which means seventy-eight percent of people think their jobs are not safe in the age of AI. Wow. That's a huge, huge number, right? So- That's a huge number it's upon us, it's upon us as leaders to really help through this transformation and this AI revolution that's coming. And unfortunately, unfortunately, my experience of working with different organizations through their AI transformation journeys has... I've noticed that these leaders themselves haven't really understood what AI is. They're treating it like another initiative. It's like another tool. "Hey, IT departments, go roll this out. It's just another tool. Just go roll out Microsoft Copilot- Yeah and we'll get people to start using it." And they themselves are not using it. They themselves have not understood the mechanics of AI. They themselves don't even understand the, how A- AI operates. They are in fact treating it like another deterministic software platform that's been rolled out. And so their lack of knowledge and understanding of AI makes them ill-equipped to lead a transformation initiative for AI and getting people to embrace AI, right? And of course, it's riddled with fear. Everybody's fearful of AI, and it's our job as leaders to help dismantle that fear. And when we actually add on to that fear by saying, "Thou shalt use this as your performance metrics," we are not helping them open up the innovative side of the brain. In fact, everybody's going into fight-flight mode or freeze in the state of fear. Yeah. We've created so much fear, and we're exacerbating that fear in the workplaces, and we're not doing our jobs as leaders to help dismantle the fear and the misunderstanding about AI, and that's because our leaders have chosen the easy hard, easier hard by not trying to go learn about AI themselves. And so when they are not learned about AI, how do we expect them to lead organizations through AI? So that's my biggest number one complaint is leaders are complaining they don't have time, but I actually see that as busyness has become the new comfort. Our leaders are so comfortable being busy that being busy is the excuse for doing the hard work. And as leaders, we have to take the responsibility to go understand this latest and greatest revolutionary technology, which is a general purpose technology, appreciate the mechanics of it, understand the risks of it, get to learn, start walking, living out AI, and then let's bring other people along in the journey. And there's a lot of data out there also that leaders who actually embrace AI are more successful at leading AI transformations for their organizations, are higher likely to get change readiness and AI readiness when leaders themselves have started to apply it and demonstrate by example of how it's making them more effective but also more human again. Then people come beside and say, "What's in it for me? How am I gonna get value out of this instead of just having the fear of my job being replaced?" So leadership at the core is responsible for the failed transformation efforts. It's a harsh statement that I will take the criticism for, but I will say it because I, I believe in what I'm, I'm saying. Secondly IT departments are second to blame, but no fault of theirs because the leaders are just throwing this responsibility over to IT and saying, "Hey, IT, it looks like another technology initiative. Can you take care of this?" And they're responsible to get people to adopt to a new revolutionary technology that's gonna change the course of humanity and s- leaving it up to them. And these are engineers or technical folks who probably are more distant from understanding humans than machines. Yeah. But also have been, have been trained on deterministic softwares, rule-based logics, and automation systems that are unlike AI. I say the best people equipped to understand AI are those who understand humans. Why? Because AI is h- is literally here to mimic humans, how it thinks, how it hallucinates, how it's creative, how it communicates, how even the neural network is built as around the anatomy of a human being. So if you really wanna understand AI, you have to understand humanity and humans, then you'll know how to leverage AI more effectively. But if you think it's just a tool, that's a technology that just does... It's a widget, then you're gonna go about it the wrong way, and you're just gonna force it down the people. People are already scared, and there's a lot of fear-mongering around AI because, unfortunately, the leaders in the public sector have been using AI as the reason for layoffs, right? Just to get their shareholder value up there. And that fear already exists. And then here you have initiatives inside of organizations saying, "Thou shall use AI or else," and we're adding to that fear, so we're not helping. We're not leading effectively, and we're not even taking the time to appreciate and understand. It's... It reminds me of the two, three decades ago when Scrum and Agile were a big thing in the technology space. There were leaders who came and said, "We are going to become an agile company," and then they, they'd announce that through the command and control meetings I see the same thing happening where like everybody should use AI while the leaders are not even embracing AI or understanding AI.

Myles Biggs

So that, that is... Those are good examples. It's like what not to do, right? Don't force it on people if you're not using it yourself. Don't just- Yes delegate it to the IT department to roll out because you're considering it a piece of technology when it's significantly more than that. Correct and the best people to be able to leverage it are the people that understand humans, 'cause that's... AI is trying to interpret human beings. So how do we follow down the path more of "Here's what to do," right? So- Correct what we should t- what we should do is leaders should know how to use it and model that behavior like you did when you modeled your- Mm-hmm I'm gonna stay late when you're staying late, and people s- they want to emulate what you're doing because you're literally leading from the front. It's the same thing with AI. So we could do that. But if it doesn't, if it doesn't go through IT, like where should it go, you know? Like you mentioned- Yeah Agile and Scrum back... There was a thing with like the digital transformation, everything has to go mobile. Yes. Like we've seen these arcs- Yes before where there's like a-

Mo Anwar

Yes

Myles Biggs

a czar installed for this thing. Yeah. I'm sure you're seeing that here as well. Is that the move? Should there be one person who's, who should do this? Mm-hmm. Or does it get democratized in some way?

Mo Anwar

So number one, I... it's the leaders just don't need to use it. They need to understand the mechanics of AI. And the analogy I use is, you know, AI comes with a lot of risks, right? But people don't understand what those risks are, so that can make it dangerous. But also similarly to driving a car versus flying on a plane. When I'm driving to the airport, or a typical person driving to the airport, will sit in a car and drive to the airport, they have more chances of having an accident driving up to the airport than flying in a plane. But yet those people are more nervous and fearful of flying in a plane than driving in their car. So what's the psychology behind it? It's that as humans, we understand the mechanics of a car. We know when you don't change your oil what happens. We know when you don't have the right tires or the tread, you could have an accident. We know what happens when we don't wear our seatbelt, when we don't stay in our lanes, don't use our indicators, right? So we basically understood the mechanics of a car, and we know how to manage the risks that come with a car, so much so that we'll even sit in an Uber with somebody else, stranger driving a car, and we're not fearful. But the minute we get in a plane- Well, even one step

Myles Biggs

further, people will sit in a

Mo Anwar

Waymo-

Myles Biggs

Yeah when there's no driver in the car because it's still driving. Yeah.

Mo Anwar

Correct. And then you, you go into a plane and all of a sudden you're nervous during takeoff, turbulence, landing, and you're really scared. And the reality is that there's a lot of fear of the unknown. A lot of... Most people don't understand how planes fly, what are the mechanics behind the plane, let alone who is even flying the plane. And so when we are flying in planes, the fear of the unknown has us very much in fear. So when we look at AI, AI is such a novel technology that people have not understood it yet. People don't even know the mechanics of AI. 99.9% of the leaders don't even know why AI hallucinates, right? And so when you have leaders and people don't understand the mechanics of AI, you're already starting from a place of fear And so when we wanna lead transformation efforts inside of organizations and we don't address the fear and the mechanics of the fear, that's where it can go wrong. So the first step is we need to learn the mechanics of AI. And I'm not just talking about how to use ChatGPT or Claude. I'm talking about how does AI even behave? How does it learn? Why does it hallucinate? What is an LLM? What is an agent? Understand the mechanics of AI. So that way we can-- Once we understand the mechanics of AI, we know how to manage the risks that come with AI, and you feel confident in when to roll it out, how to use it, which use cases to use it. Can I use it in a HIPAA-compliant environment? Can I use it in a financial institution where I have to protect the customer information? What are the best business cases? Do I use it for mathematical calculations? No, you don't. You just use a deterministic software for that. Don't ever use AI to do math, you know, because it's not meant to do math. It's meant to do probabilistic stuff like forecasting, analysis, insights, generative AI. What is even generative AI? If n- ninety-nine point nine percent of people cannot tell the full form of GPT I have surveyed this. I ask people, "So use ChatGPT. What does GPT stand for?" And they're like no idea." So you have people not even understanding the basics of AI. By the way, GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, and most people don't even know that, right? So when you have people leading AI initiatives that don't even know the basics of AI and their number one excuse is, "I don't have time," but they're the instead in charge to lead AI transformations, you're already set for failure. Yeah. So the first step is learn, educate your staff, not how to use tools, but the mechanics of AI. Then comes the tools, then comes applied strategy. That's when people will know, "Oh, this is a perfect use case to use AI, not this use case, because I understand how it behaves, how it operates." And the cool thing is, the best way I have had to learn AI is I draw parallels to human behaviors because it is trying-- People are trying to make AI ultimately reach artificial gener- general intelligence just like a human. So if you want to understand mechanics of AI, just understand humans and you've got 80% of it down.

Myles Biggs

Okay, so that was the step one on the leaders actually understanding it, not just using it, which is a, a great differentiator. Correct. But then back to my, like my czar of AI question, right? Like- If you're, if we're rolling this out in an organization and we're trying to lead the change, where does it come from? Should there be just a standalone AI department? Is it, if it's not run through IT, if it's a human thing, does this become an HR thing, if we understand people? Or how have you seen it be the most successful?

Mo Anwar

Yeah. So this is a transformation. This is a transformative technology. It's not just a tool or a widget that's just gonna bring in efficiencies. It's fundamentally going to change the workplace as we know it. We haven't had a revolution in the workplace for almost 150 years, the same hierarchical structures of command and control structures have been in place for 150 years to create maximum efficiency. But in the age of AI, those models are about to be completely disrupted. These are not gonna work in the age of AI. So this is a transformative technology, and so the best people equipped to lead AI transformation has to be leadership, executive leadership, because this is such an imperative revolutionary technology that is gonna disrupt the marketplace, disrupt the workplace, disrupt how we know how to even interact with each other, disrupt the way business is done, and disrupt hierarchical structures. So this is not something you just offload over to IT or HR, but this is a executive leadership imperative that we take seriously, learn about it, understand it, put mitigations in place, manage the risks, but also do right by our organization, our customers, our employees and roll it out in a way that is people-centered and people first so that we can bring people alongside us in this journey. I would say ultimately, executive leadership has to take the helm of AI transformation, and what that means is they're gonna have to choose their heart and choose the heart to learn, understand, embrace it, so we know how to roll it out, how to bring it into the organization, because it is gonna revolutionize everything. I don't even see current arc structures being the same anymore. I don't see how we've typically had C-suite-

Myles Biggs

Just what, what's your prediction there? If it's not, if it's not the typical pyramid-

Mo Anwar

Yeah

Myles Biggs

what do you think it looks

Mo Anwar

like? Yeah. I actually think the current structures of how we have promoted leaders is going to be completely dis- disrupted. So if you think about how middle management layer exists today and how people have come up in middle management is about a very different type of characteristic and traits of people have been promoted. So middle management is predominantly with people who have been good skilled workers, who follow orders, who are very disciplined, and do what they're told to do, and those are the people that make it to middle management. In the age of AI, those skills and behaviors are least valuable. You actually need people who are outspoken, challenging, creative, disruptive to harness the power of AI. So your current arc structures that the wor- are most of our capitalistic world is in- instilled with is gonna have to change if we need to live in the age of AI because those people who are promoted, s- trained, valued are no more going to be valuable in the age of AI. You need people who are creative, who connect the dots, who challenge the norm to use AI to even be more innovative and creative. People who just follow orders cannot adapt to AI because they, they just don't know what to do with AI. That's interesting. And so I see arc structures being completely have to be dismantled. You're gonna get generalists over specialists because AI can come beside you doing all the specialty work. So who are you gonna... Who's gonna be best equipped to use AI are gonna be the generalists who can be strategic and connect the dots, not the super specialist people who've been promoted up in the chain. So, like- Yeah. So you- it's gonna disrupt the whole arc structure and arc designs.

Myles Biggs

What about measurement do you think? Mm. You know, like I, I, I made a joke about token maxing before because that's- Mm. We're seeing that is not- Mm-hmm the way to measure it, and there's stories- Yes of companies spending half a million dollars in, uh- Mm like a silly amount of time because they forgot to put a cap on the budgets, and then people getting rid of their leaderboards because people were just gamifying it and spending all this money but not actually producing anything. So we need to use it. We're still all figuring out how to use it the best way, when to use it- Mm when not to use it. Like you can still use Zapier for certain things. You don't need to spin up a, a web app to do the thing that a Zap could do, but, people are doing it. Correct. So what do you think the meas- Like how do we know we've arrived? What's the measurement of success where it's like- Yeah we've transformed. We're running a transformation- Yeah effort and it, it's complete now.

Mo Anwar

Yeah.

Myles Biggs

How do we know?

Mo Anwar

The reality is even the measurement techniques that we've had in the past is not applicable in the age of AI. So everything was meant to find efficiency. It's all about efficiency. Our measurements are mandated by or inundated with efficiency calculations. Efficiency was the king. In the future of AI, effectiveness is the king, and how you measure effectiveness is not the same as efficiency. So for example, today, what we value as efficiency is volumetric. How many things can we do in one meeting? Can we get through 10 agenda items in a meeting? Then that's considered e-e-efficient, and efficiency is given all of the limelight And what's efficient is not always effective. I can go to a meeting that has 10 topics that we try to run through because we just wanna check the box saying, "I've done this, I've done this, I've done this, I've done this," because my measurement is if I get through my meeting with all my agenda items, yay, I succeeded. But if nobody in that meeting got any value out of those 10 topics on the agenda, then that was an ineffective meeting. And until we reframe that efficiency is not the same as effectiveness or efficiency does not garner effectiveness, our paradigm of how we measure it is not gonna work. And so what's happening is we are measuring in the AI age with old methods of measurement, which is efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. And as long as we keep measuring efficiency, which is like how many tokens did you use, right? Just because I use more tokens, I could be writing a, a bedtime story with more tokens. How is that a measurement metric? Like who the hell cares about how many tokens I used? We're just using Oprah instead of Sonnet

Myles Biggs

and doing the same thing and spending way more tokens, right?

Mo Anwar

Exactly. Yeah. So, so you see, we've even got our whole measurement philosophy wrong. And so I think the future of measurement has to come down to measuring what's effective. And what effective... What is effective doesn't always mean it is efficient. For example, in change, most people try to be very efficient. A CEO is like, "Oh, I'm gonna change all of this, so you know what? I'm just gonna send out an email saying, 'Hey, from tomorrow we're gonna use Microsoft Copilot.'" Yay, good luck. Now, that was efficient. Got one email, shout out to thousands of employees, and great, look at me. Done.

Myles Biggs

Changed.

Mo Anwar

I did. Done. I've already communicated. But what would've been effective was if they did a town hall, if they took focus groups, explained to people, understood their fears, had conversations to educate them on why they shouldn't be fearful of Copilot because it isn't gonna replace your jobs. Well, guess what? That seems it's not efficient because you have to spend all this time. And guess what? The leaders are time poor, so they're always like, "I don't have time for that." So they choose the efficient route, but don't realize it doesn't translate to effectiveness, and then they come out and declare, "Well, that was a failed initiative AI is not producing the results it wants because they think they did the job and AI is failing. And I think the leaders are failing because they're choosing efficiency over effectiveness.

Myles Biggs

That's a great soundbite. You got a lot of them in this podcast, Mo. You got the choose your hard, efficient over effect- Yeah effective over efficient. That's-

Mo Anwar

Yeah

Myles Biggs

I think all this is helpful because at the end of the day, what you're really saying, because in many ways you're sidestepping some of my questions, which is fine, but it's because- Yeah we're all figuring it out still, right? Like this isn't- Correct there is no published playbook. It's like this is the- Correct exact way to do it. We're all in this moment- Correct together. History will look back and say, "That was the way to do it." And right now we're, we're all writing it, right? Like it's who-- We will figure it out together. But what you're giving is helpful because they are guiding frameworks- Mm-hmm to operate within as you're figuring out the tactics. And it's if you choose some of these north stars, you can make sure you're headed in the right direction, which is, are helpful reminders for people. 'Cause it's easy to get swept up in the hype and the mania and the headlines and, "I created a million-dollar business in five seconds. Here's my prompts." Comment Claude and, and buy my audiobook for what... You know, like all the stuff that's out there, it's just noise.

Mo Anwar

Yeah.

Myles Biggs

How you break through it- Correct these are ways to do that, which is helpful. And not forgetting- Correct. Correct going back to the name of your book about love as a, a change strategy. That at the end of the day- Yep these are people that we're working with- Yep with real feelings and emotions and fears, and you can't just treat them like the agent you're building and get right to business. Like we have to understand that, and when we understand that, it'll be more effective, to your point.

Mo Anwar

Correct. Correct. So- and another quick, another soundbite if you want is like- I'll take it, yeah um, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, uh, honesty unlocks efficiency and empathy unlocks effectiveness. So I'll say it again. Honesty unlocks efficiency and empathy unlocks effectiveness. So we need to have both ultimately, but when we are not being honest, when we are not being honest with ourselves, we develop all these kind of processes and checklists and things like that because we're afraid of being truly honest about what's going on or honest with ourselves, and we create these unnecessary processes and things to disguise efficiency, which just becomes a check the box activity. And then until we truly understand that when you're leading people through change, if we don't lead with empathy, we're not going to be effective. And so ultimately, fear can be a change strategy. I won't-- like in certain cases, fear is a very good motivator to get people to change. But love trumps fear every single time when it comes to change because fear, while it's a strong motivator, love is always stronger in motivating people to change. And so how do we curate experiences and change strategy that i- is effective from a people standpoint is what's gonna lead us to success, right? To the, you know, digital transformation, that era, eighty-five percent of them failed to realize its true potential or whatever they had forecasted and ninety percent of the eighty-five percent of the ones that failed was because of people reasons. They didn't bring people along in the journey. They didn't consider people challenges. They didn't consider people emotions, people's fears, and they just try to drive, drive, and they wouldn't realize its value. So similarly, today's AI initiatives, ninety percent of AI pilots are failing. But when you look under the hood, they're failing not because of a poor technology choice or a poor tool choice, but because no one's addressing the people side of that change. And so when we can think of people first, then we can lead to the change. So we have a Humane First is what we call H-U-M-A-I-N. It's a-- I know it sounds kind of, you know... My, my daughter would say that sounds very much like a dad thing. But-

Myles Biggs

Gosh, Dad,

Mo Anwar

stop. But when

Myles Biggs

you write it out, you have- Humane you know, the AI is capitalized because I've seen it to-

Mo Anwar

Correct

Myles Biggs

to make the point, right? Yeah.

Mo Anwar

Correct. So Humane First, and the key is how do you lead change or transformations for AI with-- where you bring in the people side of the strategy first. So most of the time, it's tech first. It's like, "Oh, I love Copilot. Copilot's our strategy." And then they say, "Let's roll it out, and then we'll figure out how to get the people onboarded," right? So most AI transformation strategies start with tech first or process first, and our argument is you gotta start with people first. And so we have a framework where we say people first. The first step is you, Sorry. Elevate the human elements. So how do you elevate the human elements? You elevate the skills that are crucial for human elements, which is our communication, collaboration, co-creation. The, the soft skills that they called- Right I believe are critical skills. You elevate those, and then you skill them with the knowledge and training about AI. So that's step one. Step two is you evaluate and eliminate with the process. So you look through your processes and evaluate it, and if you... You should ask yourself this question: If I was to restart my business today in the age of AI, would I even do this process? And if the answer is no, eliminate it and replace it. Then the third step is the technology, which is you augment and automate. So when you ultimately get to the third stage of your strategy, you look at what will I use the technology to augment the humans? Where will I use AI to augment humans to partner with them? And where will I automate with AI autonomously without the humans? And when you go in that order, you will have people ready to co-create with AI, you'll have processes that you can eliminate and replace with AI, and you'll have the right technology decisions of where you should institute it and what you should institute. So this whole paradigm of AI transformation- Yes many of the organizations go tech first and don't succeed. When you go people first and start there, you have better chances of succeeding with your AI transformation initiatives. So that's... I think ultimately I'm answering your question, what's the right way to do it? Yeah,

Myles Biggs

you absolutely did. Yeah. That makes so much sense. And then, then you're able to get the transformation complete and still have a company, right? Like you're not just- Correct forcing it, and you have that moment where you're spiraling, and then it's just like, oh gosh, you're scrambling to hire people back, and you've lost all the trust, and you've dug a hole. You can do both. You can maintain the culture and make it a, a great place to work while still preparing for this new reality that we're all facing with how AI's gonna change everything. We talked about a lot, Mo. Talked about a lot, and I appreciate all the nuggets you shared. Where can I send people? We can put some links in the, the episode notes for this. I know you've got a couple books. We can put the links there. Do you want us to send them to your website? Tell the people where they can learn more about you if you've, if you've intrigued them and they wanna follow up with you, read a book, find your company, all that good stuff.

Mo Anwar

Yeah, I'd say, uh, softr.com, our company website, is the best resource if you're looking for AI transformation related, uh, resources and information. We have quite a bit of really good content, uh, over there and information on our framework if you're looking to adopt a humane first approach to your transformation strategy. And then with respect to change management and change and culture, uh, loveasasstrategy.com would be the best resource for thought leadership on how to create people-centric and human-centric organizations and- Yeah lead any type of change, whether that's, you know, M&As, org designs AI transformations, whatever change th- you can see how you can lead it with love, including leadership and culture. Uh, those are the two websites I would say would be the most valuable for anybody to get resources. And of course, if you're at a bookstore, please look for our books, "Love as a Business Strategy" and our recent book, "Love as a Change Strategy." All Amazon, Barnes Nobles, any major book, audiobooks, e-books, everything, all available on all the major outlets, including brick-and-mortar stores. Um, you, you should be able to find them.

Myles Biggs

Well, thank you again so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And to all of you listening, thank you for tuning in once again. Make sure you hit that subscribe button to the podcast so that you never miss another episode, and we will see you next time