WEBVTT

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Lee, what is your organization
doing to drive

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AI adoption internally?

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Well, we have a program called AI for Us.

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We just launched.

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Thank you very much to
BCG to help us doing it.

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It's a top-down and bottom-up program.

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So a year, a year and a half ago,
we tried something top down.

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It failed miserably.

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Technology is easy.

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The change journey is much harder.

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So this time, we started
out top down, bottom up,

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and the bottom-up program
has just been awesome.

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So you guys helped us to really pull
together an incentive program,

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a measurement program,
a marketplace for AI,

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and then we just empowered the team.
And it's been awesome.

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We have over a hundred ideas every week
coming up in the first few weeks.

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And then we just take
those and leverage them.

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So that to me is like—the catalyst has
been the bottom-up part of the journey.

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John, what challenges are
companies facing when

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it comes to scaling AI?

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A big part is what we were talking about
is driving adoption and making sure that

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you get that excitement on the floor for
the people that are actually needing to

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use it.

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So designing a program that is really
tailored towards that, that's a big deal.

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Then the next piece is obviously getting
into the technology transformation that

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you sometimes also need to do to
implement agents,

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to implement AI technology.

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And what we've designed here is making
sure that all of the ideas that have

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potential to be kind of bigger changes
for the organization get the right level

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of priority and the right level of staffing
after it, but not to start with, right.

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And many organizations make the mistake
of starting top down, doing it big,

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but also splintering and fragmenting
their effort over many different

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initiatives, which is just not
getting to the ROI that

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many organizations are looking for.

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Yeah.

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And top down, we have,
basically we have three,

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but really we have one initiative.

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We're going to deploy agent space,
and we're going to make it work,

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and go from there.

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And so by having that intense focus,
I think is what's really helping us top down.

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And then, you know,
the excitement from the bottom up,

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meeting that in the middle,
that's where I think we're getting the

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sweet spot.

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Lee, what advice do you
have for leaders who

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are looking to drive bold change in tech?

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A bit of carrot,
a bit of stick works well.

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So you know the carrot for us is the
incentive we've got.

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We just announced today the first Q1
award winners for the AI for Us program.

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We'll do that every quarter.

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We're going to run an AI summit at the
end of the year.

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They're going to fly 50
people to New York,

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and they're going to have a great time
with us kind of with all the things

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they're doing.

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So that's the kind of
carrot and the excitement.

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And I personally, you know,
check everything they're doing,

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and I'll connect with people individually.

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So really leading from the top.

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But the stick is also there.

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So yeah, we've borrowed
a few BCG measures,

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should we say, to help us track progress.

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So I can tell you that Google Cloud
Consulting is the highest user of Gemini

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in Google of any entity.

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I know the percentage,
I know the percentage of the others,

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and I can track the progress we're making
and those sorts of things.

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So a bit of both is working well.
But mostly in this in the AI space,

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it's mostly carrot.

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What innovations are you
looking forward to?

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There's a lot of new technology coming
out every day.

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So if anything,
with agent space that we're implementing

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together with Lee and his team,
it makes it much easier to deploy agents

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very quickly.

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And I'm also excited about the ability
for agents to collaborate—to work with

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one another with MCP as a new protocol,
agent-to-agent communication.

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So what you do is you can unlock a lot of
other systems to talk to each other and

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agents to talk to each other using a lot
of standardization that is now being

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launched by Google and by other vendors,
which is very exciting.

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It really unlocks new opportunities.

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I'd take all of that and then
I'd plus on top of it.

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So I think if you look at agents today,
they're searching, they're understanding,

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and they're acting.

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The acting piece is the
most exciting piece,

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and it's the piece that's not
quite there yet at scale.

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When we get agents to act and,
like you say, agent to agent to act,

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it's going to be transformational in
every organization that we work with.

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So I'm that's the bit that really excites
me is the act piece.

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Thank you so much.