Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:00:00] Is your business ready for AI and is your team ready for growth? In this week’s episode, AI strategist Kelvin Wiggins explains why failing to adopt AI puts businesses at risk in a range of ways. He shares practical, quick wins that can free teams from repetitive work using AI tools. Then leadership expert Sue Barrett explores how communication must evolve as organizations scale. Highlighting the role of empowered team leaders, clear channels and embedded values to help keep culture and purpose alive during growth. From SoundCartel, I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist, and this is Business Essentials.
The risks of business not embracing AI
Our first guest is Kelvin Wiggins, CEO of AI Connection for Business. What happens when a business chooses not to embrace AI? Sydney based Kelvin explains the cost of standing still, including lost opportunities for innovation and growth, rising costs and shrinking customer expectations. To get started, Kelvin outlines for me the biggest risks businesses face in not adopting AI in today’s market.
Kelvin Wiggins: [00:01:14] Grace, so I think that the risk there is that if you’re in a business that you’re using traditional legacy systems and you choose not to adopt it, what’s happening is our entire society that we live in, the government infrastructure, everything we do on a daily basis is adopting to AI, whether we like it or not. It’s just progression. And so if you have a business that’s doesn’t have the tech, they simply won’t be able to plug into the wants and needs and expectations that consumers expect from a business in the future. And so the risk is there that your client base will slowly get depleted because you can’t offer them the service that they expect today. And eventually that business will be non-existent. That’s the risk. If you choose not to adopt it, you’re putting your business at risk of surviving. It won’t survive.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:02:07] So when businesses decide to stay with legacy systems, rather than embracing AI driven transformation, does that pose a risk specifically to their ability to innovate or scale or pivot?
Kelvin Wiggins: [00:02:18] Yeah, it poses a risk to all of those. But more importantly, it’s people will kind of use an excuse not to change if they can help it. Especially big businesses with big infrastructure because there’s a huge cost associated. The longer you leave it, the bigger the cost. But the real cost is that you’re actually costing you and customer base by not adopting it. So it costs you in many ways. It’s just that some you can see financially, some you can see in sales targets and some costs you can’t see. But the message that you’re sending to the market is that your business or the thought process with the people that are leading that business don’t see your vision to change, and the businesses that have done that simply won’t do business with you, because you don’t have the smarts to plug into the effort that they’ve made to make the change.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:03:13] And speaking of cost, what would you say to business leaders who are perhaps concerned that AI adoption is too risky or too expensive right now?
Kelvin Wiggins: [00:03:20] Look, whatever the cost is associated to making the change right now, it’s only going to compound the longer that it’s left. And what will happen is you’ll get to a business. We’ll get to a point of no return where you only have a certain amount of time to make the change. And if the change is not made before that point, then it will just become too expensive for a business to invest in the infrastructure, and the return on investment won’t be enough to cover the cost. So the earlier you do it, the better. The longer you leave it, the more expensive it’s going to be. And so like we talked about before, client bases will slowly be depleted. The expectations of the business won’t meet customer demands. Well, what customer expectations? And so the expectations that clients expect from their businesses now can only be provided by using various types of AI. It’s not possible to provide a new, fast, quick, efficient, data driven service using legacy systems. It’s like putting a second story on an old foundation of a house. You just can’t do it.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:04:34] Yeah, it’s a case of needing to rip off the band aid in some ways.
Kelvin Wiggins: [00:04:38] Yeah, look. It’s progression. You can’t stop it. It’s happening whether people like it or not. Unfortunately, there’s been. Ai has a misconception that where everybody thinks that AI is there to take over the world and their jobs and take control of their life, where in reality, the fact is that various types of artificial intelligence. It’s just a tool or a vehicle to help us be better at what we do. Artificial intelligence is like a we learn to ride a bike. Once we’ve learned to ride a bike, we can go places that we could never go before at different speeds. Same with cars. You know, at one point when electric cars first come onto the scene, everyone was like, oh, that’ll never happen. But now it’s part of our daily life. And artificial intelligence is the same. It’s just a tool that we should all use to explore. Different avenues can take us new places. It can do new things. You still have control of it. You just have to learn how to use it. And you don’t have to be Einstein to learn how to use artificial intelligence. Anyone can learn various types of it for day to day living.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:05:49] So Kelvin, you equip teams with the knowledge and AI tools they need to stay ahead in today’s fast paced market. What are some examples of some quick practical wins or improvements using AI that business owners tend to be pleasantly surprised by.
Kelvin Wiggins: [00:06:04] The use of AI to automate repetitive tasks is a quick win. And so it doesn’t matter if you’re an employer or an employee, a lot of employers do expect their employees to be tech savvy to a certain point. Or, you know, you can any type of repetitive task that you’re doing within your role or responsibility on a daily basis. A lot of those tasks can be automated using various types of basic AI. And that could be an admin roles or sales or reporting. Reporting is a big one. Look, I’m using AI tools myself now to write deep research reports using AI tools that in the past I’ve paid between 20 and $50,000 for someone to write them, you know. And an example is that those those reports have taken roughly 30 days to come back. Now I can use an AI tool, a deep research ChatGPT version, and write that within four hours in one night. And so that’s, you know, that’s an example. Does that put people out of work? No it doesn’t. Again, it’s I think if people use these tools to speed up what they’re doing or cut out all of those repetitive tasks to focus on more productive things that streamline workflow or improve the business’s performance.
Kelvin Wiggins: [00:07:29] But, you know, sales and marketing reporting, they’re really quick wins, and then you move into more operational type technology that, like we’re building at the moment for various industries across mental health, security, education, real estate, finance. So in those industries, we’re building operational Agentic AI complex, Agentic AI solutions that increase the performance in the bottom line of those industries and provide technology to different businesses within those industries. That is a service that’s never been able to be provided before, simply because we haven’t had the technology and now we do. So especially in mental health, you know, we we have a piece of technology now that can assist in many different ways. People that haven’t had that communication methods before or the support or the ability right across from domestic violence to autism to aged care. You know, there’s some really smart technology out there now that can help people in unfortunate situations, and we simply haven’t had that tech before.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:08:40] My last question is about, I suppose there are some risks involved with using AI, and you hear some sort of stories about people I don’t know, using it for legal advice on ChatGPT when they perhaps shouldn’t. Obviously that’s not wise, but I wonder what practical steps should business leaders take today to manage the risks associated with adopting AI. How could they avoid common pitfalls and set themselves up for success in the AI era?
Kelvin Wiggins: [00:09:04] Yeah, look, it’s a good point. The responsible use of of AI is up to the individual or the company. I think it’s a very important. And we are actually writing course material to deliver to businesses right now are about around the responsible use of artificial intelligence and its user. Beware. Right. And it’s like the old saying for a database, it’s the data you get out. It’s only as good as what you put in. And various versions of different types of AI, like ChatGPT or large language models, that you ask it a question, it’ll give you an answer. Now those answers are kind of direct. The system is being built to give you answers in a certain way, and so you have to have the ability to understand what the output is. And you also have to understand what your information you’re asking it to give you. So it is never safe to take what a large language model or a a grok or a ChatGPT spits out and says to you, this is ABC. You always have to have the knowledge to understand whether that could be true or not. But more importantly, you need to understand what information you’re putting into it and understand what information is coming out. It’s not a teacher, it’s an information provider.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:10:31] That was Kelvin Wiggins, CEO of AI Connection for Business.
Communication during times of growth
Now to communication for scaling. Growth brings opportunity. But it can also challenge the way teams communicate and stay connected. When a business moves beyond its early tight knit structure, informal conversations no longer work as they once did today. Sue Barrett, founder and CEO of Barrett Consulting Group and the Selling Better Movement, explains how leaders can design communication systems that support collaboration, protect company values, and prevent silos from forming as organizations scale. To begin our interview, I asked Sue what communication challenges tend to emerge when a business moves from a small, close knit team to a larger multi-team organization?
Sue Barrett: [00:11:20] I often get brought in when they’ve moved to the larger team, because what’s basically happened is that lovely magic that you have with a tight knit group where we can all just sort of, you know, we just communicate. It’s kind of organic and it’s working. There’s really no channels, we’re just organic. But what happens is it turns into chaos because you’ve now got scale and you’ve got these businesses that have lost that lovely general chats that you have when you’re small. So what’s really happening is when you hit 30, 50 or 100 people, those informal channels actually break down completely and suddenly you get kind of this telephone game effect. And, you know, people then try to circumvent that by sticking in communication apps. And then if you’re not clear about what your processes are and what your purpose is and and your direction as an organization and have no clear steering instruments for people to engage with each other and collaborate effectively, then you just have a mess. And silos form and it just disconnects all of these natural touch points. So, you know, one department’s interpretation of a customer first approach clashes violently with another quota driven approach. So it comes back to sweep the staircase from the top. Clear strategy, clear purpose, clear processes in place, and then how you actually connect people so that they can actually have connection and channels of communication with each other as well. So the challenge, of course, with the digital world is everyone thinks an app’s going to fix everything that can just jam up the system even more. So those tools are tools to serve better connection and communication, not a replacement for communication. So the challenging, exciting part for people is that from small teams you can be vague, but in larger businesses you need to be much clearer and concise about what you want people to do.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:13:12] That’s great. I’d love to dig a little bit more into, I suppose, what works or what is needed. So what communication channels and leadership behavior shifts are needed when scaling? You know, if your business goes from ten people to 50 or 100 plus.
Sue Barrett: [00:13:26] Okay, so from 10 to 100. Well as I said everything changes. So you have to move from informal to deliberately designed communication with multiple channels that serve different purposes. So you have to ditch the idea that everybody needs to be in every meeting. Instead, you can create sort of tiered channels so you can have asynchronous tools like WhatsApp or teams, communication for daily operational updates and quick questions, that kind of thing. You might have a monthly or quarterly hands on for the big picture, and this includes shared stories and things like that. But you want to keep it tight to say, 45 minutes and have it be heavy on visuals and stories. So light on bullet points and history lessons. Then you want to have what I would call cross-functional guild meetings. This is where people from different teams swap insights and shared challenges. And this prevents then the silo effect happening and it creates, you know, a lot of that shared journey together. So you know, if we have you know, it team is working with other teams and so on and so forth. So one of the best things that we can encourage leaders and teams to implement is also creating a shared library of resources where these stories and things can actually be accessed by people and new people coming on board.
Sue Barrett: [00:14:46] You know, this is what our strategy is. This is our communication process and so on. And these are our goals and objectives. Now when we look at leadership behavior, particularly from hero founder. I’m doing air quotes here to orchestra conductor. All right. So this is this shift because of course it’s really hard for those who started. It’s their baby. You know it’s my baby. And these people are messing with it. So we have to kind of build a bridge to get over ourselves as founding leaders. And you’re going to be sort of moving from being the expert in the room to being someone who’s actually because you could be a bottleneck. What you have to do is become like a teacher or a coach, and empower others to lead and hand over your brainchild, your baby to these people. And this actually means delegation. And the hardest part is to let go of perfection. So these are just some things I thought might be useful for people. And I’m looking in the mirror myself. Don’t worry.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:15:46] Yeah, I was thinking, look, a lot of us, including myself, could probably think about letting go of perfection. It’s always good advice. So as a company has grown a little bit, what role do middle managers or team leaders play in keeping the company’s voice and values alive. And how can leaders enable and empower these kind of middle managers?
Sue Barrett: [00:16:04] Okay, so I have a bit of a challenge with middle management mindset because it’s usually not adventurous and it’s usually just perfunctory and ticking numbers and sending in reports. That is not good middle management okay. I mean Australia, some of the stuff we do in terms of lack of innovation is what I call middle management culture. So not to dish on middle management, let’s look at what good middle management actually looks like. If you work that properly and create the conditions for them to be magnificent, they are the keystones of your culture at scale. Okay, so they’re either your greatest cultural multipliers or your biggest failures. And so here’s why. Because you can’t be in every room anymore, okay? They are you. They’re their version of you. And they are going to be translating your vision into daily reality. They’re going to be able to coach people and model what we want to see. And this is in those sort of thousands of micro decisions that the founder slash, leader, slash CEO of a bigger organization isn’t going to see every day. So how we need to involve middle management so they just don’t become box tickers or checkers is to involve them early in strategy, help them craft the initiative and help them create the change that they want to see in their teams, and train them to be really good at listening, understanding people, facilitation, storytelling and make sure we give them air time in terms of leadership meetings as well. So they bring what’s happening in these different teams. So it’s really important that we create a listening upward environment so that these team leaders can challenge, you know, the boss’s assumptions about stuff, share what’s really happening on the ground. That’s where businesses fail when that disconnect happens. So middle managers are so important. If we set them up for success and help them actually be the best thing that our businesses need.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:17:59] So you mentioned middle management culture in Australia, which you know, can be a little bit lacking in innovation and perhaps a little bit stuck on box ticking. Is this kind of different culturally to other countries like us? Culture sometimes has more of a reputation for sort of, you know, being a bit more innovative with the whole Silicon Valley scene and so on.
Sue Barrett: [00:18:16] Well, yes, you could go to US culture, but that’s pretty dysfunctional at the moment. And there’s lots of problems with that too. And they, believe it or not, have a very hierarchical structure inside their businesses. And I’ve worked with US businesses, and I’m the sort of person that quite happily goes to the top or wherever I can. And when I’ve actually challenged some of these leaders in the US managers, well, why can’t you go and talk or we can’t do that? I go, why not? And they go, you just don’t. So do not be kind of fooled that us is the best because it’s not Australia. We have a more egalitarian thing. But I think what we lack culturally, generally speaking, is that we need courage and conviction. We have so many amazing innovations here, yet we do not actually operationalize it and commercialize it. We sell it offshore. I mean, we are not short of ideas and innovation, but too many people get stuck on shareholder return and profit maximization rather than actually building out amazing businesses that actually could do incredibly well here. We like Goldilocks, right? We’re just the right size. We’ve got all sorts of stuff, so we’re not lacking innovation. We are lacking courage to actually run businesses that we can actually grow and scale. And I know this might sound completely weird, but the country that has the most innovative, entrepreneurial and competitive culture for change is China. And that’s ironic given it’s supposedly a communist country. But just look at AI innovation there and things like that. Compared to the closed system in the US, I’m doing a lot of work on helping people understand how to use AI. I’m not an AI tech expert, I’m an AI user. And guidelines and systems and procedures expert in that space, and China’s innovation and progressive culture in terms of how to take advantage of all these amazing things, is outstanding compared to places like the US, for example.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:20:15] So back to what we were speaking about, you know, communication throughout change. How do you keep a consistent leadership voice and values alive when you can’t personally be in every room anymore as your company has scaled up?
Sue Barrett: [00:20:27] Yeah. Well, this is kind of the existential challenge of scaling. So you’ve built something with your voice, your energy, your values, and now you need to actually have it live beyond you. So here’s a framework that you know, I have used and I help other businesses adopt. So what you want to do is hardwire your values into the system and soft wire them with stories, if I can use that metaphor. So what hardwiring Means is that you’re embedding your purpose and values into the machinery of business. So at Barrett, you know, our values are showed up when we hire people. And, you know, when we work together with each other and those sorts of things. I mean, from a sales perspective, I’ve built the Selling Better movement, which is about the ethics and values of of human centered ethical sales and business practice. And it’s got AI references in there now, how to use AI ethically. So if anyone who knows me knows that I have been on that for the entire 30 plus years I’ve been running this business. Right. So that’s hardwired. And then the soft wiring is about the stories. So you want to be able to create shared library of stories that actually exemplify your values in action. So, you know, imagine how many stories I’ve collected over the last 30 plus years of, of doing this kind of work, some of which I’ve shared with your listeners. So leaders need to think about what these stories mean, because we all keep evolving.
Sue Barrett: [00:21:50] And you may have these core stories and things that you or the core values, but the stories. As you evolve and change and develop and grow, the stories evolve and change and develop and grow. So I think that’s really important. And if people want to be able to do, I don’t know, an annual audit on these sorts of things, you know, look at what decisions actually reflect the company’s values. If not, where is the disconnect. And so you can document your decision making processes. And I think the final thing would be, as I said, evolve the voice. Don’t fossilize it. So your voice shouldn’t be about perfectly replicating you. It should be about the principles you stand for, finding new expression through others. You know, when a team leader tells the story about our values in their authentic way, that’s not dilution, that’s multiplication. So when I go out and I meet people and they can replay back what I’ve been working on them with, and they tell me stories about what they’ve done. Honestly, I am joyful about that. I love it. I mean, I have people I haven’t seen for like ten, 15 years. They go, Sue, I always remember when you said everybody lives by selling something, and this is how I’ve been doing it. That’s what you want. And I think that really helps businesses stay true to themselves, but evolve and develop as the world changes and they evolve and develop and change.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:23:11] That was Sue Barrett, founder and CEO of Barrett Consulting Group and the Selling Better Movement. Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode. Follow Business Essentials Podcast across social media and head to www.BusinessEssentialsPodcast.au for more. Business Essentials is a SoundCartel podcast. Producers are Nick Schildberger, Nicole Goodman and myself. Technical production is by Pete Letts. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist thanks for listening. We’ll bring you more business essentials next week.
