People and Projects Podcast: Project Management Podcast · Andy Kaufman, PMP, PMI-ACP

PPP 500 | When AI Becomes a Digital Colleague: What Leaders Need to Know, with former Google DeepMind Futurist Steve Brown

·41 min·2 clips

Steve Brown splits AI agents into offload, elevate and extend types, calling offload 'taking the suck out of your job.'

1. People and Projects Podcast episode 500 features Steve Brown on his new book The AI Ultimatum, covering AI agents, humanoid robots and leadership decisions about when to act. 2. Host Andy interviews Brown, a futurist who worked at Intel, where he sat in the standards group next to the USB team, and at Google DeepMind in London. 3. Brown's central thesis is that AI leaders face an ultimatum with two sides: an urgent cost to inaction, since competitors may 'start playing a different competitive game,' and a duty to proceed responsibly. 4. He divides AI into classic predictive or discriminative AI, which classifies and clusters data in tools like email spam filters and Spotify or Netflix recommendations, and generative AI, which creates new data using the transformer Google invented in 2017. 5. Brown contrasts 20th-century thinking, which uses technology to cut costs and risks 'automating away' a brand's differentiation, with 21st-century use of AI to boost employee creativity, throughput and decision-making, and he suggests starting with employee experience before customers and operations. 6. He describes three agent types, offload, elevate and extend, and defines orchestration as deciding task by task whether a human, an AI agent or a robot should do the work and designing the handoffs between them. 7. Walmart's approach uses audience-specific super agents, including Sparky for customers and Marty for merchandisers, with separate agents for developers and associates, partly so payroll data is not exposed to customers. 8. Figure, a company less than three and a half years old and valued at $39 billion, has had robots working at a BMW factory in South Carolina on X5 production, and Brown expects humanoids in logistics, warehouses and hospital support roles. 9. On fear of replacement, Brown cites the adage 'you won't be replaced by an AI or a robot, you'll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI better than you do,' and he predicts a rewired social contract by 2040, with DeepMind's CEO saying cures for all disease could come by 2035. 10. Leaders, project managers and parents weighing how to respond to AI will find this useful.

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