As artificial intelligence becomes more rampant and finds its way into all aspects of work, the future surely looks bright. However, utilizing such emerging technologies requires utmost care and proper guidance. Joining Doctor Awesome is Andi Mann, Global CTO and founder at Sageable. He talks about the benefits of having a Chief Technology Officer, the democratization of technology, and the many opportunities for innovation brought upon by AI. Andi also shares valuable insights about the possibility of having a three-day workweek and how working from home gave collaboration a new meaning.

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The Future Of AI And Work – A Conversation With Andi Mann

Welcome back to the show where we are talking in the present but talking about the future. In this episode, we have Andi Mann, who is a thought leader and a CTO. I am excited to speak with Andi about the future of work and everything that he’s doing. Andi, tell us a little bit about yourself so that we can know what it is that we’re going to be talking about.

Dr. Awesome, thank you so much for having me. I’m originally from Australia. I’m a global guy. I’ve been around the world. I’ve worked in five different continents. My entire life has been around information technology. The whole future of work is interesting to me because I’ve lived the dream to a large degree. There have been lots of triggers. Throughout my life in UK, Australia, and here in the US now, I’ve been remote and working with remote teams as an individual contributor, manager, executive, and now as a consultant and advisor. I’m interested in this topic to see where it goes.

I started getting into the whole idea of a chief information officer or a chief technical officer. I’m an entrepreneur. I employ about 200 people and we’re at that point where we’re debating, “Is this somebody that we bring on?” Can you tell our audience what your job entails and why, even for a small business, it might be interesting, especially considering all of the new technology that’s coming, why they might be interested in hiring a CTO or a Chief Information Officer?

Technology is everything for most organizations these days. You run so much of your business and your life and your people with technology. Anything from managing your smartphones and managing privacy and security about the data transmitted there to the applications you’re using to communicate with others in the world, run your business, and do your accounting, even as simple as that, there are lots of choices to be made and lots of bodies of knowledge, which tell you how to make those choices if you’ve got your 10,000 hours in and that experience as a technology leader.

That’s what I’ve been in my career and still am, understanding what’s coming, what’s happening now, and how I plan for future technology while still implementing something that’s going to be working for me to make my business better, and to make my people’s lives easier, reduce the amount of toil and thrash that our workers and people do by providing more assistance by computer systems to do that work for them, to free up creativity, innovation, and imagination.

 

 

The role of a CTO or a CIO is very much to look at the opportunities in technology and implement the things that are going to work now for horizon one and also horizon two into the future. By making sure that you’ve got the best technology in place, your CTO or your CIO will be able to help your people be more efficient, more effective, and set you up for the future.

I always wondered about this. One of the first guests I had on this show was a professor of business at Carnegie Mellon. He was unsure if this was going to be democratization of technology. If I had a food truck or something like that, rather than have a CIO or something, if I had the ability to have some technology that leverage my food truck so that I could be more productive or reach more people, he wasn’t sure if it was going to be democratized like that, where everybody would have more advantages in getting their business out there or if it was going to be in the hands of the few people that could afford this technology. As a large company that’s able to have someone like yourself on staff, how do you feel that the feature is going to look like?

I actually do buy into the idea of this democratization of technology. I’ll give you some examples. You talk about a food truck. Great example. A small business maybe employs 3 or 4 people, a couple of cooks every now and then. Maybe it’s even smaller. Nowadays, when you go out to food truck parks and so forth, half the time, you are swiping with your phone. You’re using Stripe or you’re using Square. Maybe you are using newer apps like Toast.

By the way, I love food and food trucks, but if you are a food truck operator, you are probably a good cook, a chef. That’s where your specialty is. That’s where you are going to make money. You are going to delight your customers by creating these amazing food products. What you are maybe not so good at is billing, accounting, and taking those orders. If you can literally outsource that to this third-party technology, if you know that technology exists, then you can focus on your core competency. You can do what makes your customers super happy to work with you.

The challenge is, how do you find out about that technology? I don’t think a food truck needs a CTO, but I do need a technology advisor of some kind to help them understand the difference between using a Toast, Stripe, or Square. Which one is better for your business? Which one’s going to set you up in the future?

I absolutely believe this democratization will happen. Don’t get me wrong. William S. Gibson said, “The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed.” That’s absolutely true. Not all individual operators will be able to get this technology, and a lot of work happens in person so you can’t necessarily do it remotely with technology like a lot of people are doing. I think the technology that helps people drive their business forward, service their customers better, and get the best out of their team is pretty democratizable.

The technology that helps people drive their business forward and bring the best out of their team is pretty democratizable.

Let’s go to a slightly larger business, maybe something like a buddy of mine where we have about 200, maybe 500 people. I bring somebody in like you. Are you building that technology yourself or is it mainly working with vendors? What does that look like for a small to medium-sized business?

For a mid-sized business, you’re probably going to get a VP technology level person, someone who’s senior and has a lot of knowledge. They’re not necessarily going to be your staff in that same way that maybe your CFO, your Chief Financial Officer is, for example. You’re going to get someone who can help you across the whole business. You’re going to need a polyglot, someone who knows about the end user technology. If you are selling things to your customers directly, they may need to know about web stores and payments. Obviously, you need to know about security and compliance to make sure they’re not getting hacked, breached, and leaking your customers’ data. They also need to know about the internal facing technology, things like how do you use productivity apps, email, or document writing?

How do you manage your laptops? If someone loses a laptop, what data is on that and how can you make sure it’s not leaking and so forth? This is what a CTO type of person, maybe full-time, maybe even fractional. I’ll tell you, once you get to about 100-odd people, you’re going to want someone who can make these decisions, who understands the landscape, who can protect your data and your customers, and who can make that customer service positive.

I would actually think that a CTO of around that size is going to do so much for you because they know. They’re the experts in technology. They can take the technology and show you what you can do to do better and focus on what you do well and what your team does well. That’s what a CTO would do for a mid-sized business.

I’ve known a lot of CTOs and CIO as well, similar concept. Typically, a CTO is more externally facing. A CIO is more internally facing. For a business like 100 people, it’s going to be 1 or 2 people who are doing all of that. A lot of it will be choosing the right external vendor to do it for you. As a CTO, I don’t put hands on keyboards and write code. I can, I have, but I don’t anymore. A lot of what I look for is how I can find the right cloud provider.

You don’t actually even have to do anything. You offload that work to someone who’s that’s their core competency. I would not sit down and program applications for you. I could get some contractors to build a small application, do something, upgrades to your mobile app, and stuff like that. I could even hire a whole team of engineers if that’s what we needed as a business. I’ll tell you, my first thought, especially these days, is to look to cloud computing providers and other vendors. I’m much in a similar position. I’m running my own small business. Most of my services are cloud services because I want to focus on my business and my core competencies.

That’s what we’ve experienced. Everybody’s experience is that technology is almost like a utility these days. Power and light and stuff like that, you have to have somebody who’s able to handle that. You’re hands off. Especially these days with all the interesting headlines coming out, like artificial intelligence is going to change the future of work or this or that’s coming down the pipeline, sometimes I worry that those things are added expenses.

 

 

Now I’m paying for the cable internet. Now I’m paying for the power. Now I’m paying for water, and now I have to pay for AI because it’s a new thing. I wonder how you see the presence of some of these emerging technologies. Is this going to be something that’s going to be more like a utility, is it where we’re accessing it through vendors, or is it going to be something that is a little bit more ubiquitous?

I like to think of AI as augmented intelligence at this point. I know enough about AI and programming and language and stuff. Most AI is a series of complex if-then statements now. It’s not really artificial intelligence, although we’re starting to get to a point where we can pass Turing tests. We can’t distinguish the AI from human. We’re definitely getting there.

It will change everything. It’ll change the whole landscape of business from small business to large business. We’re already seeing significant impacts, which might be a bit precipitous for some of these large technology vendors. The Silicon Valley darlings are laying people off because they’re going to get AI to do that work. This is going to affect a lot of people. I’m actually very optimistic about it that it’s going to augment human intelligence a lot more than replace it, at least in the midterm.

This could be a revolution as significant as the internet itself. We totally changed the way we do business, the way we do commerce, and the way we communicate with friends and family. I think AI has the opportunity to do that. There are also a lot of other technologies coming down, things like quantum computing that changes the world of how fast we can process and how much data we can work through. There’s a lot of technology coming down the pike, which will change the way we live and breathe.

I’m pretty optimistic that they also help people do more intelligent and useful things. We’re going to have to work through some economic changes. As we replace humans, and this will happen, replacing humans with artificial or augmented intelligence, at least to some degree, then we’re going to have to find out how we live as a society when the future of work is, “I’ve only got a couple of hours a day because mostly I’m doing AI.”

However, just like with the internet and going back to the Industrial Revolution, motor cars, and all sorts of things, we see hundreds of new types of jobs and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of actual new jobs being created because of these radical revolutions in technology. We’re going to have to rethink what we believe in the world, what we believe of work, how we do work, and what work we as humans do as opposed to what the systems and computers will do.

I think it’s going to be a radical change. It’s going to be Amara’s Law. Amara’s Law is that you overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term, but you underestimate the impact of technology in the long-term. That’s where we are now. We think AI is everything that’s changing everything. We’re laying people off because of it, but we’re not there yet. We will be, at which point, to your point, it’ll be very democratized.

It’s still specialty enough that you’ll get it from external vendors, but it’s going to be a little bit like your smartphone. You download an app for a use case. The use case might be chatting with a lawyer because you want to use the right language for that. It might be creating a new brochure for your business and it’ll do it soup to nuts. You’ll use an app for that or a service because you don’t want to do it yourself as much, but it’ll be in your hands. It’ll be in your control. I do believe that.

I hope so. I think that the idea of control is something that scares most people. A similar technological breakthrough is 3D printing in my field. In the surgical field, 3D printing is making inroads now, but it’s in the hands of a very select few. It scares a lot of people in healthcare because it becomes this other thing that separates these big corporations from a smaller organization. In theory, it’s about control. I want to have the control where I have my own 3D printing service and something along those lines that can allow me to make what I need to make rather than having to go to somebody else and basically ask for it or pay for it.

I hope that that ends up the way that you’re talking about, which is that we all have a little piece of it so that it can be much more democratized as opposed to giving more credence to the larger organizations becoming more wealthy. I hope that that’s the way that it happens. It’s certainly something that I’m seeing like the beginning stages now. I’ve honestly haven’t seen a revolution like this other than the internet. The internet, when it first came out, was so democratized. Many people had the ability to do well and I hope it’s going to be like that. I do think it’s going to be like that. In general, these technological revolutions, it could go either way. I tend to be on the optimistic side.

I did want to talk with you a little bit about artificial intelligence because I know that’s something that everybody’s talking about these days. The idea of artificial general intelligence is leading to downstream ideas and opinions about how much we’re going to work. Are we going to have like a three-day work week, like you said, that can focus on creativity and stuff like that. Do you think that’s going to happen? How do you feel about how all these things are going to shape out?

I am pretty optimistic about it. I’ll tell you a little fun way of looking at it. You look at your Netflix queue and you look at all the things that Netflix is recommending to you and it’s like, “Is the algorithm that good?” At this point, I think we’re still in the early days where the algorithm isn’t that good.

I don’t know. I think it’s too good. Three hours later I’m like, “I should stop.”

It certainly happens, like on a Facebook or YouTube or something. You get video after video and there are challenges there. It gets you down rabbit holes sometimes. I love to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. They do suggest things to you. That can be scary. I do think sometimes they’re listening a little bit too much on my apps because they do suggest things that I think I’m talking about. I don’t think I put that into a search engine.

It’s so interesting. They’re so perceptive, honestly. I’m happy about that because I’m gaining value from it. I enjoy watching Netflix. I enjoy reading about different things. I think that is a good thing. That it is pretty perceptive.

Part of me thinks it’s not going to be so impactful. We all know these things take off exponentially. You talk about generative AI, general purpose AI. That’s pretty spectacular. I’m using it now. I do a lot of writing. A lot of the way I write is I take bullet point notes. It’s still my words. It’s still my interest. It’s still my thoughts, but it’s going to take me an hour or two to put that into prose. I can start editing it for a blog article, brief, or research report for a client or something. What I’ll do is put my bullet notes into ChatGPT like, “Make this prose.”

Simple stuff like that. That’s already here and it’s pretty effective. In the longer run, one of the things I do when I’m looking to innovation, I’m looking to drive innovation. I run innovation programs for my clients and I have in the past, using historical sensing to understand trends and patterns. When I look at these revolutionary technologies, you are absolutely right.

You pinned it. The internet was very democratized. Remember when every webpage was a personal homepage? That was great. Some of it was great. Th not everyone was on the internet. It was early adopters at that point. We kept going. Now we’ve got good access. There’s also problems about the capitalization to make it less good of the internet in general because of commercial interests. We’ve got to watch out for that and I think with AI as well.

Where is the breakpoint on AI between truth and fiction? What is the goodness for humans versus the goodness for corporations of AI? I did a lot of conferences and speaking engagements and stuff and there was one conference where their call for papers and the speakers, they made up people with presentations that didn’t exist to meet their DEI quotas. That’s not good for humans. That’s good for corporations. For two years, no one could tell the difference. That’s problematic. When I look at these patents, when I look at the mind map of past revolutions, it’s the elites that get access first.

In technology, that means people like me. I’m not that elite, but I know about tech and I can adopt it quickly. I can be that early adopter. It gets scale, so the price comes down and then it splits into specific use cases and that becomes even more specific and it becomes even cheaper. It becomes easier to use because we’ve moved from the marketplace of everyone to the marketplace of maybe you working in your practice. The specialization of that AI becomes more important. You don’t end up using general-purpose AI. You end up using specifics of like your 3D printer, for example.

I’ve got a 3D-printed crown. It’s your specific technology. That’s not general-purpose 3D printing. I’ve got a 3D printer out here. I can print spare parts if something falls off my shed. If I want to have a coaster that looks a certain way, I can print that myself. That’s general purpose. You are using better technology, which is probably very expensive, but over time will come down as more and more people get to use it.

This is the pattern. Even fibers in the Industrial Revolution. Now we can spin it at home and make our own stuff. 3D printing, internet technologies, I believe that’s the pattern with AI. It’ll go to a very general purpose. It’ll come down in price. We’ll start splitting it up into specific use cases. It’ll be so super useful and easy to use that it will become part of the substrate of our life. That’s what I hope. That’s what I think should happen. The future is so opaque.

Artificial intelligence will become so useful and easy to use that it will become part of the substrate of human life.

I look forward to the specific use case scenario that you’re talking about, because it would be great if I could have a small team of people that tailors this technology, whether it’s AI versus 3D printing versus whatever to suit my needs. That would end up at being a better product for the end consumer because now, we’re making a square peg, fit a round hole. We’re like trying our best with the technology that exists. If I can have a team that’s able to do that and tailor it a little bit, I think that would be something that would be beneficial not only to myself, but also to the patients that I take care of if I’m not in healthcare, like the consumers that are coming to my business.

I look forward to that, especially AI being able to do that where I can tell AI, “I have this computer program. I want you to tailor it in such a way that the 3D printing is this versus that.” When someone picks up the phone and it’s like an AI assistant, they say this instead of that, as opposed to having to go with through some go-between with a large organization that might have a lot of bureaucracy and it might be very expensive. I look forward to that scenario.

I honestly think that the internet is that scenario now. You can get a designer to help you build a beautiful website that’s very professional looking, that’s able to do a million different things and can boost your business. That’s the way that I look at technology in the optimistic sense. I’m glad to hear that somebody who’s in it is seeing that same outcome. I think that we’re both hopeful for the same thing.

Just think about laptops or personal computers. What was it back in 1960s? I think it was the head of IBM, if I’m not mistaken, who said there’s a market for around six personal computers in the world. This is someone who should know the opportunity in front of them and totally didn’t. It’s hard to think about these things in the future, but the arc of history has been towards democratization of technology. Look at phones. To look a simple use case, call waiting. That was something only businesses had because they had switchboard operators and people pulling plugs and stuff. Now it’s on my cell phone. No big deal.

Digital cameras were very elite. They were specialists. It was only for super pros. They started to come out in a different way. Now, again, same device that’s in my pocket now. It’s a digital camera. I do believe this arc is towards democratization. It’s logical, too, because it comes out of capitalist and out of capitalism and about making more money for the companies who are doing it want to build at scale. It’s almost the case in economics at this point that if you build at scale, then you will bring prices down. You will get to market saturation, at this point, you will need to find adjacent or different markets at which point you will specialize. It’s logical in terms of our capitalist economy, but it’s also the pattern of history.

I think so, too. I want to switch gears here and talk a little bit about how you think that work is going to change in the future. We hinted at the amount of work that human beings are going to do. I know Jamie Diamond says that we’re going to eventually transition to a three-day work week. How do you think about that? Do you think that that’s going to happen?

I do, actually. I think it’s almost inevitable. History molds its own arc quite a lot. I’m not excited that now we’re looking at AI to replace creativity. Gen AI uses languages to create new words and phrases or it uses existing art to create new art. It’s all about this existing body of knowledge. At the moment, we’re seeing a lot of AI creating new art. I think the real opportunity for humanity is for the AI to create work, to do work. Freeing up people for it. There are theories that if you let people do whatever they want to do, some of them will work, but a lot of them will create art. I do think that’s an interesting idea.

Art is an imaginative thing. It’s an innovative thing. Out of art comes good technology innovation too. I run my brainstorming sessions as freeform artistic exercises to get everyone to participate and put their ideas out. You know brainstorming. No bad ideas. I think freeing up people will become necessary. I actually think UBI, Universal Basic Income, is probably inevitable. I don’t know how it happens.

As I said before, we must fundamentally rethink how we look at work, life, and society. I do think a UBI or a 3-day work week, 4-day work week at least is almost inevitable because the computers will take away so much of the mundane work. It won’t be evenly distributed. The computer cannot dig a ditch. The computer cannot do all sorts of medical procedures that you can. It’s about freeing up humans to do what they’re uniquely able to do.

Having a three or four-day workweek is almost inevitable because computers will take away so much of the mundane work.

Over time, we will see a four-day week. There are already studies about this. There are always studies about productivity. Most people are only productive any given day for 3 to 5 hours anyway. It’s about human attention spans and so forth. We’ll free up humans. Jamie Diamond says some interesting things, like we’re a technology company with a banking license. That was Jamie Diamond, too. I think he’s got some interesting ideas. He keeps trying to push people back into offices. I’m not a huge fan of that, but he does have other good ideas about what business looks like in the future. Yeah, I buy into that.

I hope you’re right. Especially in healthcare, there’s this idea of looking at human beings as we got to squeeze every last little bit of productivity out of them. I like the fact that coming from the business sector, there’s a lot of view of productivity that’s not based on time. It’s based on things that are achieved. I wonder if it’s going to be translated to everybody, just like you’re saying.

One of the things is culture also. Are we going to be able to keep pace with some of these other countries that have ridiculous work ethics, that are working round the clock and stuff like that? I wonder if that idea of competitiveness is going to have any inkling on how this all shapes out. You’ve worked internationally. How do you feel about that?

That’s definitely going to be an issue we need to address as a global society. I am very global. I’ve worked all over the world and I already see some of this work being outsourced to India, Malaysia, and to other low cost, high work areas. It’s definitely going to be a challenge. We’ve seen this for the last 30, 40, 50 years. We’re still not dealing with all the fundamental changes that that’s imposing on us.

Certainly, in manufacturing, we’ve already gone to that route where certainly in the US, there’s been a decline in manufacturing and good manufacturing jobs. Now we’re outsourcing to various countries, such as China, India, and other regions, for auto parts. Mexico, as well, obviously, for things like auto parts. We’re doing it in electronics as well. It’s about specialization of labor. It takes me back to my studies of economics and where we are better.

America’s better as a knowledge industry generally. There are all sorts of things where you’re going to have to service individual customers in person right there, especially for this high-knowledge, high-value service like you provide. I know you can’t do that by telehealth. It’s hard to give someone a feeling by telehealth. I’m sure you do a lot more than that. It’s definitely not going to be distributed evenly. You can’t build a house remotely, although there’s robots that are starting to build houses with 3D printing. These things will happen. They will change. We will see a movement of traditional jobs and labor to different areas. The competition is going to be a challenge. I do think that we’re going to need global politicians to come together in some way.

Maybe there is no hope. I do believe that as a society, we are looking to better ourselves across the board. The US specifically is very much a knowledge economy nowadays. We create, we invent, we innovate. We might outsource the manufacturing, the physical instantiation of some of this. Silicon Valley’s brought a lot of that back to America. A lot of the commercial reality of our creativity and innovation is actually happening in computer systems now, which are global already. You can’t outsource those. I think there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for knowledge, insight, creativity, innovation coming out of every country, including the US.

I hope so. I always feel like it’s based on wealth distribution. I always feel like the we have the luxury of being a knowledge-based economy because we can spend the money to have other people do it for us. I hope that all of those other societies do become more knowledge based. From a humanity perspective, I don’t want them to work that hard. I see some of the stories that are coming out of some of these countries and I feel terrible that these people are working so hard that their lives are so difficult. I hope that eventually changes, which is why I’m so bullish on humanoid robots.

I can’t wait until that’s something that’s ubiquitous and able to accomplish some of these more mundane tasks for us. On the same token, I do hope that this stratification of tasks gets a little bit better. I think that that’s something that is not at the place where I want it to be now because I outsource our offshore stuff for my business now, and it’s stuff that I don’t want to do. It’s something that I’m going to pay someone a much cheaper wage than I’m paying myself to do something that I don’t want to do. For some reason, it doesn’t sit right with me. I want to make sure that there’s some equality of tasks there.

I think about this a lot, about this democratization of data, of technology. We have to lift up all society. I do believe that. Technology is a good way to do that and help that. By the way, I know this to be true in my own world. When I’m outsourcing computer programming, that’s a very common activity in large businesses to hire a group of 50 or 100 people in Bangalore or Beijing or somewhere. Actually, South America now as well, by the way. Latin America, we have good outsourcing there. I’m discovering historically areas like Ukraine as well. I used to have a dev lab based in Kyiv. The interesting thing is that you are helping them in their lives when you do that, because that’s a better job than they’re getting locally.

You are probably going to pay them a little bit better than locally as well, because of exactly what you’re saying. You feel like I should be doing more for these people to help them up. I can save a lot of money, but I can still pay them a little bit more than they might otherwise get and make their life better. I see that as an opportunity to help lift up other people. There’s a lot of concern about globalism taking jobs away and so forth. I also look at that as giving people work and helping people uplift their situation. Support their mom in the countryside where they couldn’t otherwise. Little things like that. Working from home has been revolutionary for people who couldn’t otherwise go to an office. I’ve got a disability or maybe I’ve got children or a sick mom.

I need to be at home and take care of them. Now I can do this work. Maybe I can do it three days a week and take care of my mom or my sick kid the other two days a week. I like to be optimistic about this, but I don’t disagree with your point that there’s significant exploitation going on as well. I’ll say from my own personal experience, I try and do exactly the office. I try to make sure that when I’m working with people in low income countries and lower socioeconomic statuses, I can help them uplift a little bit. I think that’s a great opportunity for us as a society.

I like that outlook and I appreciate that optimism. I think that’s something that frames the whole situation in a much more beneficial light. Can you tell me a little bit more about work from home? I feel like that’s something, until you said it, I was not very bullish on. I felt like it was a luxury for white-collar jobs and honestly, not even a luxury for all white-collar jobs, because I can’t work from home. I have to go into the operating room to do my surgeries. I can’t do that in any location. How do you feel about that? I feel like that is something that I know before we started, you were saying that you were a very big proponent of. Tell me your thoughts on work from home.

I live in Colorado. There are a lot of rural communities here. I go out into the world. I ride my bike around, see these small towns, probably 100 people. It’s like, where’s the future for them? What’s the opportunity for them? They’re looking at getting in a car and driving to Denver every day, back and forth. They’ve taking up an hour of their time to do that. They sit at a desk and they have maybe a couple of phone calls. They tap away on the computer. They do their work. They might hang out with someone in the coffee room for a while. That’s good. Social interaction matters. We are still humans. They might have a meeting with someone in another office. They get on their computer and do it via Zoom, then they get in their car and drive home.

There’s a lot of waste in that system. I look at some of the productivity metrics and systems that we use. I look at a lot of things like the Toyota way. I look at my own world in computing with DevOps. It’s a whole new way of working together to produce better outcomes. Collaboration is important, but also productivity. I do believe in the human aspect as well, that work-life balance.

Working from home is a whole new way of working together to produce better outcomes.

I’ve actually worked remotely myself for about 25 years. I was an individual contributor. I was a small team lead, a group manager, a vice president, a C-level executive and now an independent consultant. I’ve done all that working remotely and mostly from home, even in different countries. I’ve gone traveling while working. I did a trip to Seville a couple of years ago. I spent the evenings having fun, but I spent the days doing work. I rented a WeWork style temporary place.

You are right. I’m super privileged that I get to do that. I’m a white middle-class, well-off male in a technology knowledge area. Do I tick all the boxes for privilege? Of course I do. However, a lot of my people didn’t. This is an interesting thing. I do believe in the productivity of work from home and remote work. I also believe collaboration and innovation are contact sports. When I was running my own team, my last role, I was the CTO of a public company. Part of the mandate there was to send everyone home and terminate all our leases. As a CTO, that was a lot to do with me enabling my team with technology to meet, so collaboration tools, video tools.

Also processes and procedures. How do I contact you? How do I expect you to be working? If I call you, can I expect you to answer that phone? If you are working in the office, I’m walking up to your desk and I’m talking to you. Replacing some of this, but getting rid of that two hours of climate-changing commute, that wasted time. You talk to people about commuting, it’s like, “That is two hours every day I never get back.” It makes people angry. It literally kills people. Traffic accidents. I know I can measure my people. You talk about measuring activity, by the way, versus measuring results. That’s a big part of it. I see a lot of my peers measuring activity metrics. Things like number of lines in program code.

If you’ve got efficient programming, then you don’t need lots of lines. That’s not a good metric. Measure the outcomes. Get people into offices to collaborate every now and then. We would have quarterly offsites with my leadership team. We would have each group have quarterly offsites. They always came together and talked and they did things that were important to do in person. Brainstorming sessions, whiteboarding sessions.

We didn’t sit down and do Zoom videos. The laptops were closed so that we could interact with each other. We’d go out and have dinner. We’d get to know each other as humans and as people, which is important. What a lot of people are missing with this work-from-home and remote culture is that you’ve got to still work with people. You still have to collaborate and know who people are. All business is personal, just like all politics are local.

Ultimately, you need to know the humans you are working with and you will get better outcomes and better results. I also think that remote work is super good for equality and equity. I talked about certainly working moms, for example. Being able to do away with the cost of healthcare because, let’s face it, if they’re going to work, if they’re going to be productive for five hours a day, let them be productive in their time while they’re taking care of their life as well.

Taking care of sick people. People with their own disabilities. Maybe I can’t drive to work because maybe I’m blind, but I can do call center work at home. That work from home thing, I know for a fact through my own metrics and my metrics are things like release to production of new production systems, new revenue from those new systems delivered to my business because customers are buying what we’re selling.

I actually was metricised on some commercially economic things like EBITDA. Am I keeping my cost down by reducing my spend on real estate? I’m able to meet my EBITDA goals. From a business perspective, I do believe work from home works. Yes, it is for the privileged in so many different ways. I can’t dig a ditch from home. I can’t even look at someone’s teeth from home. I don’t know, maybe you can. Maybe there’s technology there. Ultimately, you have to go and work with someone’s face.

Lots of people have to go and work with people face to face. Retail. There’s no work-from-home for the lowest-paid workers in our society. I definitely agree that’s a problem. However, if we can free up climate-changing gases, cars that are killing us, if we can get more people into work so that they can then spend in their local community, not necessarily the downtown areas, then I think that brings everyone up again. I am actually very bullish on it. It’s very positive, but a lot of people don’t get the full benefit and some people will get no benefit. It’s true.

If more people can spend more time in their local communities, the more everyone can get back up again.

I was coming into this conversation with an opinion, but you’ve definitely at least made me reevaluate my opinion. I hadn’t thought about a lot of the things that you’ve said. I hope that all of the things that you’re saying come to fruition. I do know that even from my own personal experience, my wife works from home and it provides a lot of real benefit to taking care of our daughter and making sure that all of the admin stuff of running a household is taken care of.

We have to separate that when you go to the office. When you’re at the office, you’re doing the office stuff. When you’re at home, it is a little bit more of a blended mix of things that you can do. That’s very, very interesting. We are getting close to the end of our time, Andi. I want to end with the three questions I ask my guests. You can see from my background that science fiction is a huge influence on me and my life. I like a lot of the utopian views of science fiction. That’s where I gain a lot of my inspiration from the future. Where do you gain your inspiration from the future?

I actually gain my inspiration from the future through some science fiction. I like the old-school stuff like the Asimov stuff. Asimov invented all this stuff in his mind. That didn’t come true for 20, 30, 50 years. It worked when it did. I do look to older science fiction for these ideas and so forth. I look to people like you. I look to futurists and other people. Much like you, I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but anything that makes me think differently is going to be a positive thing for my ideation. I look to people in my world at every level. It’s one of the things that I learned writing this book. The head of technology for a large bank in Australia always used to meet with interns once a month because in his words, he said, “They don’t know what they’re not allowed to do.”

Meeting and talking with young people. I love to talk. I’ve got nieces, nephews and godchildren. I love to talk to them because their imagination is sparky. Some of it’s outrageous. Asimov was pretty outrageous for a while there, too. Listening to people who don’t know what they’re not allowed to do are interesting. New employees in my world, bring a new employee and show them an application and go, “What would you change?” Listening to people at all levels.

I do believe and I’ve written about this, that executives are not necessarily the greatest font of innovation because we’ve been around for a long time following a lot of rules. We’re a bit stuck in the mark. When these young people come into my world, I’m always interested to learn about them. I think not one source. Futurist podcasts, technologists, there are a lot of those people in my world who I respect greatly. Even other CTOs like myself. I’m in a couple of societies where I get to share blue sky thinking with other CTOs about what could technology be for our business in five years. What could it be for us in twenty years?

We have these sorts of brainstorm sessions. If it was down to one group or source, I would say young people, especially really young people, because they don’t have preconceived notions. They’re thrown straight into a modern world without learning the history of it necessarily in their early years at least so they don’t have these constraints that we all do and these preconceived notions.

Talking with young people and getting their ideas and asking them questions about their life and what they want to do next year or in ten years, for a 7-year-old, 10 years may as well be 100. You do talk about flying cars and all this other stuff in your background, space missions and stuff. Young people get me so energized about the future because I think they’ll make it a different world that we can’t predict and it’s going to be pretty awesome.

I look at the things that my daughter’s into and the way that she thinks about the world. It’s interesting to see how a brain works with no limits. With no preconceived notions, no biases, and the pure raw aspect of imagination. I echo Asimov being such an influence on me because, again, he was able to come up with this stuff and look at the things that might be a problem and have solutions for them, the Three Laws of Robotics. I think that he thought like, “Humanoid robots are going to be an eventuality. How do we make this be something that benefits humanity? How do we make something that this is something that we can coexist with?”

I’m so bullish on humanoid robots. Actually, the next guest after you is going to be a guy who’s here in Massachusetts and is designing a lot of robots for the agricultural aspect. I look forward to talking with him. That’s a cool thing to know about you. I appreciate your insight into that. My second question is, of all the technologies that you come across on a regular basis, what is the one that most excites you? We’ve talked about 3D printing, AI, all these different things that are coming down the pipeline, but what is something that you see an article about and you’re like, “I got to read this?”

There’s so much. I read all the AI articles because I’m still trying to figure out are we there yet? What do we have to do to get there? It doesn’t excite me. It interests me greatly. I’ll tell you, what excites me is this. Video. The last company I worked for was a video company. They did enterprise video. I’m not a video expert, by the way. I went into that company as a systems programming expert to help their systems get better. Even though it was a technology I wasn’t fully capable of, I had great people. I do believe in leaning on great people all the time. I went into that company not understanding the depths of what video is going to be capable of.

We’ve gone in leaps and bounds over the last few years. I’ve been, like I said, work from home, work remote for 20, 25 years. Historically, not even on video because I didn’t have that capability. Twenty-five years ago, webcams weren’t a thing. You couldn’t do anything. You had to go into an office to use telepresence. Now we’ve got video. We’ve got automatic translations. We’ve got these video backgrounds.

We’ve got automatic background, so now people working from home don’t have to show off their kitchen or their living room or anything like that. It gives people privacy and confidence. Apart from that, the automation that can happen. Automatic transcription. We’ve seen that on YouTube and stuff. Automatic translation. We’re starting to see real-time translation. I could have this conversation with someone who I can’t actually talk to.

I’m a global traveler. That would be so amazing. A little Babelfish in my ear, yes, please, the 3D stuff, the telepresence stuff, being in the room with you. You are on the East Coast. I’m in Colorado. We can be in the same room together. By the way, I’ve done some of this with the HoloLens, the Microsoft version. Working with remote teams, doing problem diagnosis on computer system problems. We’re literally all in the same room. We’re drawing on the same physical whiteboard. It’s all being captured by video and transmitted to us in these glasses. I feel like I’m in that room with them.

This thing is going to be incredible and does get me excited for everything on a gamer. Everything from gaming and 3D interactive immersion gaming to collaboration with my team without actually having to have an offsite. I’m bullish on remote because video is almost there. I’m excited what we’re going to do with video for humans, for work, for play, for connection, and for collaboration.

Normally I ask three questions, but when you brought up gamer, I got to ask a fourth question. I’ll save the last one, but I do want to have a follow-up question. What are you playing now? What is your game of choice?

Now, I’m on Zelda, the second one, Tears of the Kingdom. I’m only about 120 hours in, so I’ve got a fair way to go.

I finished the main storyline and I’m enjoying myself. It’s such a great game to waste a few hours in and get back to real life. Last question. Ten years from now, where do you see your role as a CTO? It’s going to be obviously very different with all the technologies that we talked about. What do you think the future’s going to look like in ten years?

It’s something I wrote about in this book. The I in CIO stands for a lot of things. It stands for Interpersonal. How do you get people to connect over technology? It definitely stands for Information. How do you make sure people have the right information to make the right decisions at the right time? It also stands for Innovation. I think my future role as a CTO, a CIO will be all about guiding innovation for people who don’t have time to understand the technologies.

Years ago, technology wasn’t so hard. Most people can understand most things, engines and physical stuff. Now, it’s all hidden and difficult. We are getting to use it. We still don’t understand it. I think a CTO, a CIO, in ten years’ time, will be fundamentally about guiding and putting guardrails in so people can’t fall off the road. Nowadays, it’s a lot of roadblocks, stopping people doing things so they can’t go forward.

 

 

I think the future role of a CTO or CIO is very much about innovation, guidance, putting the barriers on the side of the road so you can’t fly off the freeway, making sure your car has appropriate brakes so you can slow down when you need to so you can’t put too much risk into a process. It’s not stopping people from doing innovation, encouraging them, helping them, giving them the right tools at the right time, the right technology at the right time to be able to connect, collaborate, and innovate.

It’s a strategic role more than a hands-on role. As I said, I’ve already walked back from putting hands on keyboards and writing code. I guide other people on what code to write. Over time, AI is going to write a lot of the code. My role becomes much more of a guidance one, setting goals and boundaries and making sure that I’m removing roadblocks to make that happen. I fundamentally believe that’s the role of technology leaders going forward. It frees up the other leaders to focus on their areas, marketing, sales, operations, production, and making that a cohesive unit. That’s what I think my role will be in the future.

It’s very technical now, but over the next however many years, it’s going to become more and more broad and more and more far reaching, which I look forward to. I think that the leveraging of technology is going to make a better consumer experience. Thank you so much for speaking with us. We got a lot of great insight. You have a lot of optimistic visions about the future.

I appreciate the fact that some of these things that I was pessimistic about, you’ve changed my mind on. The whole goal of this show is to get people excited about the future and look at it in a positive light. Thank you very much, Andi, and thank you to all of our readers. Please like and subscribe. For the people who are joining us next time, we will see you in the future.

 

Important Link

• Andi Mann

 

About Andi Mann

Andi Mann is Global CTO & Founder at Sageable, delivering strategic research, consulting, and advisory services to help visionary leaders achieve success in technology innovation and digital transformation.

With decades of achievement with enterprises, vendors, startups, governments, cloud providers, and consulting, Andi is an accomplished digital executive, winning strategist, and trusted advisor. Mann is also an award-winning multimedia influencer, public speaker, and content creator for countless conferences, seminars, webcasts, podcasts, journals, and broadcast media.

Prior roles include Global CTO at SaaS video provider, Qumu; ‘DevOps CTO’ and Chief Evangelist at cloud analytics provider, Splunk; VP Product and Strategy, Office of the CTO, at enterprise software vendor, CA Technologies (Broadcom); Managing Research VP at industry analyst, Enterprise Management Associates; and Product Owner at content management vendor, Mobius Management Systems (Rocket Software); after over a decade in Enterprise IT roles in banking, insurance, manufacturing, government, and oil & gas.

Mann has presented worldwide including at Web Summit, Collision, Mobile World Congress, Gartner Symposium, IDC Directions, AWS Re:invent, Google Cloud Next, SAP Sapphire, IBM Think, InterOp; created and delivered mainstage keynotes (up to 12,000 attendees) at Splunk.conf, VMworld, CA World, CloudExpo, CIO 100, CIO Summit, Innotech, and DevOps Days; appeared live on CNBC, Sky News, DMRadio, TWiT, and The Cube; featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, eWeek, Information Week, ZDNet, CIO Magazine, TechTarget, ComputerWorld; and many more.