AI Should Be Done for Human Good

Tommy Martin (00:00): Over 90% of artificial intelligence deployments are failing in companies, not because the AI is bad or maybe the workflow is bad. Not because of those things. They’re failing because they didn’t think through change management with people.

Jason Beutler (00:18): This is Shift! where we talk with leaders about the moments that changed how they operate.

Kendra Beutler (00:22): Let’s get into what’s shifting today.

Jason Beutler (00:26): Well, hey, welcome back to the Shift! podcast. Today we have Tommy Martin, CEO of The Tebow Group. Tommy, it’s great to have you all with us. It’s just fun to have a friend just to get

Kendra Beutler (00:35): Heads

Jason Beutler (00:35): Up and learn more about you and your history. Tell us your journey. How’d you end up becoming CEO of The Tebow Group?

Tommy Martin (00:41): Well, not just CEO of The Tebow Group, but also not just a friend, but also a business partner with Robosource. And man, we are so proud to be business partners with you all at Robosource. You’ve worked wonders for our business at The Tebow Group, but we also see the way that you’re trying to use AI as a force for good. And we’re so proud of it, so proud to be connected with both of you. So with that, yeah, how did I get here? Man, I started out as an accidental business owner. Didn’t initially go to business school, any of that. I was actually a triple major in Bible youth ministry and music. And turns out I’m really bad at all three of those. I hope to be good at my Bible someday, but I will never be good at music the way that your son is.

Tommy Martin (01:30): I got started in business because I wanted to marry a girl and I needed a job. And fortunately, as of a couple weeks from now, she’ll be my wife of 25 years, but I just needed a job and this guy I knew needed an intern. And so I started and I was in the copy room. I didn’t even know what kind of business it was. And eventually I figured out, oh, this is a financial firm. And then I fell in love with it. And so ended up over a 25-year journey, built some really incredible financial firms, some of them from the ground up. And we are so blessed. We had a couple of those firms go nationwide, like a rocket ship, ended up with one of the top 10 fastest growing financial firms in the country for the better part of a decade. And ended up exiting from that firm when I was 35 years old.

Tommy Martin (02:18): And after two days of retirement, my wife looked at me and she was like, “Oh my gosh, you need purpose.” She was so right. I was twiddling my thumbs. I was following her around like a puppy dog. And along the way, because of our family situation and dynamics and our faith, we fell in love with this organization called the Tim Tebow Foundation. And some of your listeners have probably heard of this guy, Tim Tebow, former football player, but has really done so much more off the field than what he did on the field. But we had fallen in love with the mission of the Tim Tebow Foundation, the work they were doing in the fight against human trafficking, the work they were doing to shine a light on individuals with special needs, the work they were doing for children with life-threatening illnesses. It just hit our hearts exactly on point.

Tommy Martin (03:12): And so we decided way back then, this is 11 years ago, we decided we did not need our own family foundation because we loved the work The Tebow Foundation was doing so much. And so we just threw in. And through that, I got to know Tim’s team. And then about four years ago, Tim’s team called and they said, “Hey, we really need somebody to run the business side, The Tebow group, so that Tim can spend more time and his wife Demi can spend more time at The Tebow Foundation.” When they came to us and said, “We need somebody to run the business side so Tim and Demi can spend more time on the impact side,” it took my wife and I four minutes to say, “We are all in.” And that was about four years ago and I pinch myself almost every day. So that’s how I ended up as CEO at The Tebow Group.

Tommy Martin (04:00): And people say, “Well, what does The Tebow Group do?” Really three things. First is we oversee the social media and everything that encompasses the Tebow brand. So they’re really actually surprisingly uncomfortable having their name on things and having it be about them even though they’re often in the spotlight. We have over 20 million social media followers that they’re following for something, whether it’s inspiration or challenge or encouragement or they have a deep need, whatever that may be, we really want to try to make sure we’re meeting their needs. Then we oversee Technology Lab. We actually incubate some technologies, ultimately trying to use artificial intelligence as a force for good. And that’s ultimately what connected us with Robosource. So I’m sure we’ll get to that. And then also we oversee the more traditional investment side of what we’re up to, but we want to make investments that aren’t just trying to get great returns, but are also trying to have a serious impact.

Tommy Martin (05:05): We also see lives impacted in a really positive way. And if we can put all that together, it’s a pretty powerful force of nature. So yeah, that’s how I got there.

Kendra Beutler (05:17): Yeah, it sure is a great story. I love it. So Tommy, tell us, looking back at your childhood or the years you were growing up, are there any pivotal stories that kind of changed your course?

Tommy Martin (05:27): So for sure two of them. So number one, I grew up as that very typical latchkey kid in the late 80s, early 90s. And some of your listeners don’t even know what a latchkey kid is anymore because we would never allow that today. But

Tommy Martin (05:43): What it basically was, was I was one of those kids I would walk home by myself from school and then I would let myself in the door. This is before electronic keypads on doors. So literally I had to get the key out of the hidden rock, put it in the door and open the latch. And so a latchkey kid. But what it meant is I had almost every afternoon that I got to hang out and just live in my own world of imagination and creativity. And it just sparked this incredible creative side in me. And I distinctly remember as a fourth grader, I started reading one of my mother’s college chemistry textbooks and there was an experiment where you could basically make a device that would go bang. And so I built one of those devices in my backyard and I made an entire pile of leaves go bang.

Tommy Martin (06:40): Fortunately, my face was no longer on top of that pile of leaves because I had walked away 10 seconds earlier. So that was me as a fourth grader, just super curious and imaginative.

Jason Beutler (06:53): And reading a chemistry book.

Tommy Martin (06:55): Yeah. I mean, I’m still a really weird guy, Jason, but I was an exceptionally weird kid. And I had this sporty side, but I also had this wickedly nerdy side. So I always felt out of place everywhere I was, but that’s definitely a defining time in my life. It really created this just immeasurable curiosity and ability to keep myself busy and dream about what’s next. The second one is like the two of you, at least my freshman year, I went to this college called Taylor University, a small Christian college in the cornfields of Indiana. And when I was there my freshman year, they had this thing called Spiritual Renewal Week. And during Spiritual Renewal Week, you go to chapel every day. And for freshmen at that time, they would actually take attendance. And it was the same speaker every day for the entire week. I thought that was a terrible idea.

Tommy Martin (07:54): Well, I went that first day, that Monday of that week, and the speaker was just absolutely incredible. He was phenomenal. And actually, I think Jason was there at the same time. And so the last day of the week, the speaker brought his daughter with him. And I took one look at her. And as a 17-year-old, I was like, “I am out of the game for the rest of my life.” He’s just a Indiana pastor, but brought his daughter with him when he came to speak that Friday. And we met, headed off, and in a couple weeks we’ll celebrate 25 years of marriage.

Kendra Beutler (08:33): That’s amazing. So tell me, you’re a freshman, a lowly freshman. You see this guy speaking on stage with his daughter. How on earth did you get to actually meet her? There was no social media back then, right? Y couldn’t Snapchat her.

Tommy Martin (08:42): No, no. There was no snapping, no DMing, none of that. So for those of your listeners that have a faith side to their life, this may make sense, but I really think it was a God thing. I was going to visit a friend’s dorm room and went by, that friend wasn’t there, so I left a note on her door. Well, little did I know that my future wife was also walking to that same door at the same time, saw me already there, so skipped on past, but was able to say to her friend later, “Hey, some guy just wrote on your door. Who the heck is that?” And it was me. And she asked her friend basically is he off limits? And her friend was like, “No, no, he’s all yours.” And she was like, “Well, great. He’s all mine then.”

Kendra Beutler (09:33): That’s amazing. What

Tommy Martin (09:34): A

Kendra Beutler (09:35): Great story.

Tommy Martin (09:36): We were literally going to the same dorm room at the exact same time.

Kendra Beutler (09:42): Wow.

Tommy Martin (09:43): I love it. So they called me later that night and said, “Hey, come over for game night.” I didn’t know it was a setup, but I was sure thankful it was a setup. And

Kendra Beutler (09:53): The rest is history. That’s amazing. That’s

Tommy Martin (09:54): Right. That’s

Kendra Beutler (09:55): Right. That is amazing. I love it.

Jason Beutler (09:57): That’s awesome. So you start an internship, you start going, you’re working your way up. As you’re growing through your leadership, what way of thinking did you have to let go of in order to make a leap in leadership? I

Tommy Martin (10:10): Think the hardest thing by far, making that leap as kind of a successful type A professional, I think this happens for a lot of people. It was really hard to make the leap from me thinking I have to be the one to do the work if I want it done right. Especially when you’re growing your career as a professional, you’re trying to portray to the world, “Hey, I’m trustworthy. I’m good enough at what I do. You should hire me to go do it.” And so here I had to develop those muscles, almost sales muscles, which is very weird for me to tell somebody like, “Oh, here’s how amazing I am.” But to pivot to leadership where you’re really building up the team as the experts doing really great work for the customer, the client. And so that took me a number of years. For somebody to get really, really great at something, usually they have to start when they suck at it.

Tommy Martin (11:10): And so that’s sometimes the case with a new employee that you’re training or somebody that you’re mentoring or taking under your wing. Almost by definition, they’re not going to be as good at you initially at doing the thing unless you brought in some high powered person from the outside, which the more and more confidence you gain as a leader, the more and more you actually get the confidence to do that. But when you’re in this in between phase that I was in, it’s like, well, okay, I can’t afford that high powered outsider, so I’m always going to bring somebody in that I’ve got a mentor. And so by definition, they’re not going to be ready to be as good at me at that thing yet. But how do they get better? They have to go through those reps. They have to have those at bats so that they can practice and get better.

Tommy Martin (12:03): And then the really cool thing that eventually happened, eventually you see people rise to the occasion and they end up being better than me at the thing. And I have some incredible colleagues, people like Cameron Heasley and Lauren Oshman who are part of running a financial firm that I helped to build, and they were people that I got to mentor along the way. They’re both way better advisors than me today, way better. And so it’s just giving people an opportunity to shine and not thinking the world revolves around me. If this work’s going to get done right, I’m the one that’s got to go do it. That’s a massive bottleneck in a business. And so I just had to fight my way through that, continue to mentor people along the way, hand off more and more, realizing ultimately, you know what? There are going to be times that they mess up or there are going to be times they’re going to do it differently than I would’ve done it.

Tommy Martin (13:10): And that’s okay. Those are all learning opportunities for us to get better and go further faster.

Jason Beutler (13:16): Do you ever feel like you’ve made it with that or is that just something you’re always learning?

Tommy Martin (13:22): Yes. I think I can say that, Jason, because, and here’s why I say it. Now that I’m in this CEO seat, I wake up every day feeling inadequate to the role. I’m relying now on the shoulders of the giants that have gone before me that have invested in me when they didn’t have to, that said, “You know what? We see something in this guy that’s worth pouring into.” People like one of my dearest mentors, Rick Phillips, that guy had no business investing in me and he just took me under his wing. He’s like my big brother to this day. I could call him about anything and there was nothing for him to gain and he just took an interest in my life and my success and I’m so grateful. And so I think I’ve hit that point, Jason, where I realize as it relates to my current role, man, there’s a lot of gaps and things I could do better.

Tommy Martin (14:20): And then for our actual day-to-day business things that I’m responsible for, our marketing team, our brand team, our chief marketing officer, Colin Wilson, he runs circles around my knowledgeability as it relates to social media and videography and cinematography, all the things that he’s responsible for. I’m grateful. I know nothing about those domains, so I get to relax and just trust him to do the right thing. And then he just constantly surprises me by not doing the right thing that I though, but doing a way better right thing than I ever would’ve even dreamed of.

Kendra Beutler (15:03): Shifting a little bit, when we first considered a partnership with The Tebow Group, Tebow Foundation, I know one of the things that Jason and I are most intrigued about was how the Tebow Foundation so early on was using AI for good. Can you share a little bit about that? I’ll

Tommy Martin (15:18): Go into the pieces that I can, Kendra. We keep some of it under the hood because we’re fighting some of the worst evil in the world. But one of the things I believe is that Tim Tebow has said this so many times to our team and I love it, but every time light meets darkness, light wins every single time. And so for us, we know that the bad guys, the people that are out there hurting children, we know that they are using technology for evil and we want to be a counter force to that. I’ll give you an example. Kendra, one of the things that Tim did, this is before he and I had gotten connected, but he became the founding investor in an AI company that is one of the leaders in pattern recognition. They use AI and this is a book from dear friends of ours, Sean Johnson and Andrew East, and they could match this book by only matching a little fraction of this cover, way more than when you’re on TikTok and you click on it and you want to do an image search.

Tommy Martin (16:26): Think of that on way advanced version of that. They only need a half a percent overlap. Tim met this team of developers. He was at a conference for child rescue efforts and this team of developers was at a booth over in a corner and nobody was talking to them. So Tim went over, he went over just to be kind, but when he saw what they could use their technology for in the fight against human trafficking and the fight against child exploitation, Tim immediately called our team and he said, “Guys, I don’t care what they need, connections, cash, get them whatever they need because we want this technology to succeed.” So Tim became their founding investor and that company has gone on now. I’ll give you a case study, I’ll give you as much as I can of a case study. A three-letter agency called our technology partner and said, “Hey, there are two girls for sale on the internet right now.” And this was not like the dark web, this is just the normal internet that you and I would go to, at least we used to.

Tommy Martin (17:31): These girls were for sale just on the normal internet and law enforcement didn’t know where they were. And so they asked this company, “Hey, could you guys help us figure out where these girls are based on the image?” I won’t get into all the details, but in less than a half hour using this world-class pattern recognition software, this company was able to figure out exactly where those two girls were in the world, and less than two hours later, local law enforcement had them rescued from being trafficked. And that was one of the earliest experiences I got to see as a new CEO for Tim and Demi at the Tebow Group. That was one of my first experiences I got to see using AI as a force for good, that it could actually be deployed to help rescue children in real time. And I was hooked, like sign me up, wake me up early.

Tommy Martin (18:27): If that’s what I do for the rest of my life, oh my goodness, sign me up. So that was just an early example, Kendra. And so we’ve invested in several AI companies now. We just have this thesis of we really want to get behind great people that have great products and they’re using them for a great purpose. I’m stealing all of that from the Tebows, by the way. None of that is mine, but that’s how Tim and Demi have always done their investing. And so that’s what we look for, for AI companies. It’s the people, it’s the product, it’s the purpose. And if those three are there and they fit, then man, we’re all in.

Kendra Beutler (19:07): Yeah, I love that because I think sometimes when we tell our story, people say, “Why does the Tebow Group invest in an AI company? Why do they care?” And it’s fun to get that, I think that background that it’s not you guys necessarily care about AI, you care about what can be done with AI. We talk about shifts on this podcast, but early on it wasn’t that Tim was like, “AI, yes, we want to use that.” It’s that he was really drawn to what it could do to save kids.

Jason Beutler (19:30): I think one of the other things from my standpoint is just actually getting to interact with Tim a little bit around that, and it’s genuine. I mean, he is passionate. And sometimes when you’re across celebrities, you’re like, “What they put on the TV is not what you see behind the scenes.” But that is not the case with Tim when I’ve interacted with him, especially on these topics. It is genuine and fun to watch.

Tommy Martin (19:51): People ask me all the time, “Are Tim and Demi as passionate as they seem? Are they as kind as they seem? Are they as faith-led as they seem?” And my answer is it’s actually more than what you see, because I get to be around them day in and day out, probably see them at their worst, and they’re still just freaking heroes of mine.

Jason Beutler (20:12): I can second that from just a little bit I’ve been involved with, so that’s awesome. So Tommy, we often talk a lot about the shifts that are impacting society, the world, us individually. What are some shifts that you personally got to observe from up close and personal?

Tommy Martin (20:28): Jason, in the financial world, so let me take you back to 2007, 2008. We went through this massive market meltdown. The stock market dropped about 40%, and it was mostly tied to this bubble that had happened with housing and mortgages and not thinking about risk and just giving out crazy… They had reverse amortization mortgages where literally you knew every year you were not going to pay enough where your mortgage was going to go up in your balance. If you owed $400,000 last year, by the end of this year, even if you make all your payments, you’re going to owe $410,000. And somehow we as a society though, this is a really good idea, and it ended up blowing up in our faces and really hurt our economy. Well, that happened to be when some friends and I were launching a financial firm.

Tommy Martin (21:25): And what happened, there were two shifts that I think occurred at that moment, or three really, that had a massive impact in propelling us for huge success in that financial firm. Shift number one, the existing financial advisors were burying their heads in the sand because they were too embarrassed to call their clients like, “Hey, you’re down 40%.” Even though there’s nothing they could do about it, instead of picking up the phone and just staying close to their clients, they just kind of buried their heads, a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them. So that opened up the door where these people were ripe to have a conversation, and we had no clients going into this time period. So for us, it was just this completely open ocean, completely blue ocean to go make phone calls and meet people and try to meet their needs when they were in this tough situation.

Tommy Martin (22:24): So the second thing was the financial world was really moving from the role of a financial advisor being, “I’m going to be your expert at everything,” to all of those expert functions were moving to the home office and the advisor was just becoming a relationship manager. We were on the cutting edge of that to say, “We don’t need really, really smart tax or investment people because they’re not generally great communicators. We need great communicators that we can have the really, really smart tax and investment people in the home office. We only need a few of those people, but we need a lot of great communicators.” And so that allowed us to scale the expertise of those world-class tax and investment folks. We didn’t have to have a lot of them. We just needed a lot of great communicators and we found some incredible communicators. And then this one’s a little more fun on the technology side, but we were getting referred to clients all over the country, but we didn’t want to have to travel and meet with them because you don’t know how it’s going to go, all those things.

Tommy Martin (23:40): Again, this is back in 2008. We started doing video conferencing as our primary mode of meeting with clients back in 2008. Let me put it in perspective, most of the financial industry did not make that shift until COVID 12 years later in 2020. We were 12 years ahead. This was like back GoToMeeting, WebEx. But what was crazy is the video and the audio were so bad at syncing, what we would do is we’d jump on a video call and we would get the client on the phone for the audio side so that we could show our screen and talk through concepts, but that we would have good audio over the telephone. And so we created standard operating procedures around that structure. And again, the financial industry didn’t fully make the shift until 12 years later in 2020. So that’s how far ahead we were. So these aspects of the advisor being a communicator instead of an all-knowing expert, that allowed us to scale by having those experts at the home office where they could propel lots of great communicators.

Tommy Martin (24:55): We were early in that. And then we were really early in video conferencing, which allowed us to expand nationwide when all the other firms needed a local presence to expand into a new city. We could expand into every city in America because we embraced video conferencing.

Kendra Beutler (25:13): Fascinating. What made you decide to do that? Did somebody just have the idea?

Tommy Martin (25:18): We were just young and naive and didn’t know better, and we didn’t have an established way that we felt the world had to operate. We were entrepreneurial. We’re like, “Hey, we’ve got this problem. I’m tired of traveling every day to a new city to meet with one client at a time that just got referred to me. So how do we solve that problem?” We see this little tool called GoToMeeting and we’re like, “I don’t know, let’s give it a try.” And then it was clunky, so we’d practice on each other and then it got better. And then we figured out how to use a phone so that it would be even better. Yeah, it just ended up all coming together. Again, that’s what propelled us to being one of the top 10 fastest growing financial firms in the country in that time period. That’s

Kendra Beutler (26:08): Nutty. Rookie Smarts, a book we read once about having someone that’s new, they come in with all these brand new ideas, right? Someone who’s new to something instead of all the preconceived notions that we have. So I love that. Yeah.

Tommy Martin (26:21): I

Jason Beutler (26:21): Love it. Is there a book you’re reading right now that’s like, “This is good. People need to know about

Tommy Martin (26:26): This one.“ Oh my gosh, yes. So I showed this earlier, this book, “The Courage to Commit” by our dear friends, Sean Johnson and Andrew East. Sean was a Olympic gold medalist from USA Gymnastics and Andrew East, a former NFL football player, but they’re just two of the most wonderful humans in the world. They just came out with this book and it’s really talking about we live in a society today that doesn’t want to commit to anything. By definition, we love the fact that we can just swipe. I don’t have to commit. I can just swipe, but what type of life does that lead to? And it turns out that near everything incredible in life takes an uncanny level of commitment. Marriage, having a great marriage takes an uncanny level of commitment, building a business. You guys know this as well as I do. It takes an uncanny level of commitment to go build a company, and yet we’re teaching an entire generation that you shouldn’t commit.

Tommy Martin (27:34): We wonder why mental health is at these all-time lows and people are struggling. It’s hard to buy a house. All these things, it’s like I committed to building a company when I was 19 years old. I committed to staying married to a woman for life when I was 20 years old. It’s like the difference in where I am today was I made these uncanny level of commitments, and coming from an Olympic gold medalist, I mean, Sean made commitments way more intense than I ever made. I work with two of the most intense humans I’ve ever met, Tim Tebow, who’s a three-time Heisman finalist, one of the best college football players of all time, if not the best, and his wife, Demi Tebow, a Miss Universe from South Africa. They’re some of the most just driven people that I’ve ever met, but they committed to what they wanted to be great at and look at what it’s helped them achieve.

Tommy Martin (28:35): Look at the platform that it’s given them. I’m so excited about the message of this book. I told Sean and Andrew, I said, “This could be one of the most important books of 2026. It’s just that meaningful. I’m making sure both of my boys get a copy of this because I think it’s that important.” You all have been so generous to let me talk so much, and we just talked about this financial shift, but I think one of the coolest shifts happening in the world right now as we speak is this massive momentum that artificial intelligence has, especially agentic artificial intelligence, which I didn’t even know that term before meeting Jason and Kendra, but I sure do now. I want to hear what got you excited, Jason, about this massive shift. I mean, you’ve been working on this not just for a couple years like most of the world, you’ve been working on this for decades.

Jason Beutler (29:36): For me personally, it’s always been helping people do meaningful, impactful work, and that means getting rid of some of the mundane. If you know me at all, I hate mundane work. Mowing the yard, that has got to be automated by now. It is ridiculous that I have to do it. This passion about figuring out how to eliminate some of the mundane things so that people can focus on the strategic important and relational aspects of business and life and how it’s done. So how can we use computers and intelligence? And the fact that it can make decisions now, that excites me so much because now it can actually help me. It’s not just me telling a computer to do something and it halfway does it well. It’s now actually doing it well and helping make decisions. And that shift, it causes you to have to rethink.

Jason Beutler (30:24): Every process we have, you kind of have to start from scratch on it. That excites me because again, it’s a different way of approaching the same problems we’ve always approached, but it’s so much more natural and relational and I actually think magnifies the human. That to me is where I get excited.

Tommy Martin (30:40): Jason, after getting to know you and Kendra and Robosource, one of the things that was really clear to me just spending a few hours with you both was how much is possible with artificial intelligence? But you were this breath of fresh air where it wasn’t about, oh, you can just go gut all your people. From the very first time we were talking, it was about magnifying our people and allowing them to step into their superpowers at a whole different level because we could get rid of all this garbage work that somebody’s got to do.

Kendra Beutler (31:16): And

Tommy Martin (31:16): So that was really exciting to me, but I always knew we were in way over our heads with just trying to muscle through it like I think a lot of businesses try to do. They just say to their people like, “Hey, start using AI. What does that even mean? How are we measuring effectiveness?” And then with this stigma that AI is just going to replace jobs, there’s zero incentive alignment for the day-to-day employee to just go use it. For us, we knew we needed a partner that knew what they were doing when it came to these things. And so that’s what became very apparent with Robosource, this practical, not just deploy AI, but deploy AI in a manner where change management can actually occur. I’m a huge proponent of lifelong learning. I think especially in a service business, one of the most underutilized line items in the P&L is R&D, research and development.

Tommy Martin (32:16): Because when you think about a service business, you don’t usually think about research and development the way you would with a product. But in a service business, where does the R&D need to happen? It’s with your people. An executive coach of mine about a decade ago, he said, “Tommy, what’s your budget for research and development?” I was like, “Nothing.” He’s like, “Yeah, it needs to be at least 5%.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And it was, “What are you spending to develop your people?” And so he really ingrained in me this philosophy of if our people aren’t where we want them to be, whose fault is that? Mine as the leader, do I actually have a budget line item to help my people develop? And so we do. And I also personally deploy that. So every year I try to do one of these executive education courses at a top institution.

Tommy Martin (33:07): And this year I took an artificial intelligence course for executives at Stanford University. And it was awesome because my son is also out there as an undergrad. And so I got to hang out with him that week, but I also got to learn from some of the founders that have been behind artificial intelligence like Jason for the better part of a couple of decades. And what was so fascinating to me, they showed me this stat that just blew my mind that over 90% of artificial intelligence deployments are failing in companies because they’re failing, not because the AI is bad or maybe the workflow is bad, not because of those things. They’re failing because they didn’t think through change management with people. That’s what really has hit me with Robosource. And I think as we talk about shifts, this is where I think y’all are onto something in such a powerful way.

Tommy Martin (34:09): Jason Kendra, I think it’s just maybe your process brains. You looked at and said, you saw that really early and you’re like, why aren’t people adopting AI? Because we are taking them out of their natural normal workflows and trying to put them over in some new thing. We all already have way more apps and connection channels than any of us are comfortable with. And so what you guys said instead is, okay, what if we let people operate in their normal working mode? This is such a fundamental aspect of deploying AI. I really believe it is the most important aspect of the shift for AI to be successful. It’s deploying it in a way that you can just use it without friction in your normal day-to-day workflow. And if I had to summarize the lessons that I took away from that Stanford course on artificial intelligence for executives, what they really recommended was you take every single job and you break it down into tasks, and then you just look at which of those tasks could be automated through artificial intelligence.

Tommy Martin (35:20): And in most jobs, it turns out it’s somewhere between 40 to 80% of the tasks that could be automated. It’s a lot, but it’s not all of them. And that’s what should give our people this incredible confidence that, okay, this doesn’t have to go replace me. Maybe in these extreme scenarios, maybe 80% of my job as it used to be goes away, but great. Now we can take five of those roles and let somebody that’s really good at strategy or creativity or relationships or sales or whatever it is, we can let them take on more roles, but way less parts of more roles. That was a really powerful exercise. And I think every company needs to be going through that exercise if they don’t want to fall behind. But then, okay, great, we figured out which of these tasks we can go automate. How do we do it in a way that creates as little friction as possible in our workforce so that we’re not part of the stat of 90% of failed AI deployments?

Tommy Martin (36:32): Well, that’s where Robosource comes in so powerfully. And yes, we are unashamedly partners at Robosource, but I have seen what they’ve done inside of our business and it is just absolutely incredible. Our team can go launch workflows out of Slack. They don’t have to go learn a new program, a new process, a new software, and it just works. And it goes and does all the things that they used to have to spend lots of wasted garbage time doing, and then it allows them to just do the thing that we need them to do, which is to think about the most important strategy of that thing that they’re working on. It’s been just an absolute honor and joy to partner up with you all at Robosource because the way you are deploying AI, I really believe it’s the right way. And I think if people want to make that shift, I think it’s the way they have to do it or it’s just not going to work.

Tommy Martin (37:34): That’s being proven over and over and over.

Kendra Beutler (37:37): Well, thank you so much.

Jason Beutler (37:38): Tom and you. Thank

Kendra Beutler (37:39): You so much.

Jason Beutler (37:39): Appreciate you.

Kendra Beutler (37:41): Yes, we appreciate your time. We know it’s valuable. Appreciate you, guys

Jason Beutler (37:44): And that’s Shift! brought to you by Robosource. If this one hit home, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Kendra Beutler (37:51): And if you’re ready to see what automation could shift for your business, head over to processcoach.ai.