The Path to AI (Guest: Doug Shannon)

Andreas Welsch: 0:21

It's Star Wars Day today. So let's see if you spot all the references throughout our show. I must say though, I actually don't have a bad feeling about this. So in any case. Today, we'll talk about creating a path to AI. And who better to talk to about it than someone who's done it firsthand. Doug Shannon. So I know the force is strong with this one. Hey Doug. Thanks so much for joining.

Doug Shannon: 0:52

Yeah. Thanks. Andreas, it's a pleasure to be here.

Andreas Welsch: 0:54

So hey, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself who you are and what you do.

Doug Shannon: 0:59

Yeah, I'm Doug Shannon, Intelligent Automation Leader in the space. I talk to many companies, different colleges, and really just help, drive the community forward and in providing my knowledge and what I've gone through to help others really just, strive for more or just see the so they don't, others don't fall in the same like potholes or issues as things that I've seen in the past.

Andreas Welsch: 1:23

That's awesome. And I know you're very active on LinkedIn as well, so I really love your passion for this topic and sharing this with the community. I think it's awesome what you're doing. Yeah, I appreciate that. So for those of you who are just joining this stream please drop a comment in the chat maybe at which age you watched your first Star Wars movie. So we keep it within the theme. And while you guys are doing that, maybe first question for you, Doug. What do you think? Should we play a little game to kick things off?

Doug Shannon: 1:52

Yeah, that'd be great.

Andreas Welsch: 1:54

Perfect. So this game is called In Your Own Words. And I got this buzzer here. So when I hit it, the wheels will start spinning and when they stop, you'll see a sentence. And I'd like you to answer with the first thing that comes to mind and why. So in your own words. And to make it a little more interesting, you'll have 60 seconds for your answer. Again, for those of you watching live, drop your answer in why in the chat. I'm really curious what you think here. Doug, are you ready for, What's the BUZZ?

Doug Shannon: 2:35

Ready.

Andreas Welsch: 2:35

Okay, perfect. Then let's do this. So if AI were a character from Star Wars, who would it be? 60 seconds. Go.

Doug Shannon: 2:51

Sure. If it was a character, it would be probably C3PO. So being a. What's the name? It's not Astro Mc Droid. He's a like a personality kind of droid. So it's basically taking different cultures, different people and understanding how to work with them, right? So a bunch of different processes put together in a way that creates a matrix of just information that can be mitigated or. Controlled or spit back out. Like you get something in, Hey, I have these things. Since he has a model in his head to go, oh, I know that language, I know that culture. I know what they're saying. Here's what they really mean and what they're saying. It's a protocol droid actually. Yeah. So if AI was a character, it would be a protocol droid. Fantastic. And I think, with C3PO there, there's a lot of focus, right? And on things that you need to do. And so I guess your focus determines your reality.

Andreas Welsch: 3:48

It's great that you finished it within the one minute. That's perfect. Now I remember you were on the Manny Bernabe Show a couple of weeks ago, and that episode was titled AI is Overrated. Start With Automation. Do or do not. There is no. Let's be realistic. Where do you see things going there and what would you recommend from your own experience that people do and get started on their path to AI?

Doug Shannon: 4:25

Yeah. I think the biggest thing is understanding that there is a lot of hype. There's a lot of hype in every industry right now. You could talk about hyper automation, you can talk about hyper scaling. You can talk about in general, like digital transformation, some of the higher end stuff. Even AI, right? So AI you need to make sure you have all of your bases filled ahead of that. So what you're talking about is you need to make sure you have your business process mapping. You need to make sure you have some kind of RPA, robotic process automation starting. It doesn't mean you're gonna get all the good things, but you'll get some things out of it. And it, it starts that process of changing your company's culture, changing your company's way of thinking to upscale those people and those employees to understand, Hey, where do we go next? And I'm really understanding what that digital, work looks. From there, then you go to the, automation side of doing full end-to-end automation of processes and whatnot. And then you look at, building intelligent business process mapping so that then even your mapping of those processes is really being more handled and more controlled, so your quality is better and you have that source of truth that you're starting to build out, that data center the information is going in, and then you build out your intelligent automation. You then from Intelligent Automation, you can power your Power BI stuff. You can power all of your data and your dashboards. And then you can really start to look at doing hyper automation. Which I usually consider hyper automation, you hit it and then you go back and you work it again. And then you hit that point where you're doing hyper automation again, you kinda go back. But AI can help maintain that. So if you want hyperautomation, you're gonna have AI in. In the end state really being driven by all these other automations, all these other business processes, to really get to that end state of having a full-fledged AI that can maintain itself.

Andreas Welsch: 6:15

Fantastic. So that, that aspect of culture, I think it is a very important one. And when you say, start with RPA, then move into other things, how do you see this play out over or what period of time or what an engagement like this look like it's a project based, is that big bang type things.

Doug Shannon: 6:38

Yeah. I think every organization, one way to look at it from the business side is no one project is going to change the whole entire organization or enterprise, right? So same thing with like automation. So if you just do RPA, you're not going to change the entire. Now if you do RPA and you do those band-aid, basic low-hanging fruit, get those out of the way to give your people more time back, and then you drive that to be more robust and more rigor and more governance to get to the automation side then, yeah, you start, you just grow. You're gonna grow that. And when you grow as a platform in your automation space. The company and the people that work with you and that team are going to grow as well.

Andreas Welsch: 7:24

That's fantastic. So bring people along on that journey and get them to work with you. That's fantastic. Yeah. So it's just having a quick look at the chat. Seems those of you that have then have responded started watching it quite early in nine and 12, so that's awesome. Good time. Must admit for me, It was the early thirties, not the early teens.

Doug Shannon: 7:48

But I probably about 9 or 10. Yeah. Enjoyed it.

Andreas Welsch: 7:54

So yeah, like you said, right? Build that path, build it into the future. And I guess like this guy would say, always in motion is the future. So along those lines, I'm wondering continuing down that path of culture. So what type of culture do you need to create to get ready for AI and how did you do it in your role?

Doug Shannon: 8:18

Yeah. Culture's big, right? Because you're using automation as an influencer, like a change agent, right? Or an agent of change. And so there's actually two secrets that'll share on your show, but you just don't talk about too much unless it's like internal stuff. But overall, you want the first one out of the two secrets that you want. Movement, right? So that movement is going to be. There's many ways to get it, but you want to be like the kind of the weird guy in a way. Like you wanna be the weird team that's talking about it enabling it, really getting it out there, showing what it can do. And then when you get your first. A person that says, oh, hey, I'll go try that automation thing. Let's see what happens. You really wanna support them and you want to engage and say, Hey, like this is how you do this. This is how you work with us here. Let me like hold your hand and walk you through the steps because you want to enable them to feel comfortable with the process and build that trust. And so the first part is movement and the movement is very much about enabling that person and not only just like taking'em through the process, but show them when they, when you get that ROI from helping them build out this automation. Make sure they know that they have, that they did that. Provide them the ownership and the direct value and say, look, you by working with us, save this amount of money. This is your ROI. Go tell. Let's go together. Tell leadership. You save this much money by enabling people and enabling other teams to work with you. And providing that ownership really provides value to them. And then that's where it goes into step two of the secret sauce of things. And that's really. Fear of missing out. So literally you can say, Hey look, I saved this team a bunch of money and they worked with us. Save money. They have value, they see ownership. Do you want that too? And they say yeah, of course. Like why aren't we saving money? Why aren't we saving time? We get time back, we can do more, we can innovate, we can actually do the things we really wanna work on, versus these reports that take one or two weeks out of our month to get them.

Andreas Welsch: 10:19

Yeah it's a great that you mentioned that, and I've seen this in my own experience as, as well, right? That, that once you show somebody. Hey, look, dangle the carrot in front of them and say, Hey, this is what we've done with Joe in finance and this is what they've been able to achieve. Built that momentum.

Doug Shannon: 10:36

And yeah, I think, like I said, FOMO effect.

Andreas Welsch: 10:43

But I also heard you say something else. It's when you work with individual people, how have you set that up in your in your roles so far? Was it approaching individual people? Was it with sponsorship from the top? Were there formal automation programs? What's worked in your experience?

Doug Shannon: 11:02

The the biggest thing there's always two ways to do anything. A lot of times it's going to be like your ground up approach and that's very like road showy. That's hey, here's what we do, here's how we do it and here's why it's good. And then there's the leadership approach of which sometimes, it depends on which ones you get. You either come from the top down or you come from the bottom up, or you do both at the same time, or you do one to get the other one to get buy-in. A top-down approach would be leadership saying we need automation and we need it, especially in the days that we're in right now, where, we need more efficiency, we need ways to be more impactful or build in like a way to pivot when we need to, so that we can actually be a more established like business and companies can do more with what they have. So there's a top down approach and then there's the bottom up approach, which is varied, But sometimes you need to do the show and tell, to get leadership to see the why. And then once you can actually build that interaction, and again, like you're building trust, not only trust with the users and the employees of your company, you're building trust within your own organizations and your own leaderships and your directors and everyone really to ensure that they know, oh, this is an option. Now we can actually take this run with it. We can tap these individuals, we can tap this center of excellence that does this automation stuff. And really, they can help us drive value. And it's not the RPA team or the automation team driving the value per se, enforcing this. It's we're enabling people to want to save time on their own Taking jobs. We're not doing anything crazy. It's literally giving time back. And that's the key, because then people, everybody wants time back more, more and more people every day. We need time back to watch all these Star Wars movies that come out. That's why we're here, right?

Andreas Welsch: 12:53

Perfect. Hey and by the way, looking at the chat again comments from Christina and from Doug and others seems that this really resonates what you're sharing here, right? Christina said, a hundred percent, crawl before you run, starts with RPA, build a path to AI. Doug said, Hey, fear of missing out. Brilliant. And, the other thing that I hear is obviously when you start with RPA, you move towards intelligent automation. You want to get to AI, so there's always a bigger fish. So the part that I'm curious about is, what were some of your biggest learnings moving from RPA into intelligent automation over to AI? What should our viewers take away here, or what should they learn?

Doug Shannon: 13:37

Yeah. The biggest takeaway would be it goes back to just like culture and being that change agent and then that agent of change, right? It goes back to the everybody out. A lot of people out there, right in general are saying like, AI's gonna solve everything. We're gonna go down to the local store and pick it up, and that's gonna to change our world and it's gonna be great. You can take three to six months on an AI project. You can make things happen. You can see results. And then what happens is the users and the people or the processes that pre precursors that AI experience or that AI workflow or that model will change and then it doesn't work anymore. The same thing happens if you go all in on intelligent automation from the get go. You may see that your stuff breaks a lot more because you don't have the amount of a good stable base to come from or a good source of truth, right? So if you have all your data and it's clean data or even use automation to clean that data or find a way to put data into that data so you don't have a data swamp and it is to clean, then that data that comes out of there is going to be much more valuable and be able to have metrics about, and all these other little tools that you need to ensure that your data and your analytics and your algorithms are not going to have issues. It's really at the end of the day it's about upskilling the employee. Making sure everybody gets involved and feels that they're supported and enabled to be ownership of their data and stewards of that. And then it's also the ability to just to really just drive home that value and let others join into that.

Andreas Welsch: 15:17

Okay. So what I'm hearing is definitely a a lot about power to the people, right? Empower, enable, so that they can lead this, that they can shine, but with the CoE in the background that does prepare them for the job they want and they need to do. Yeah that's awesome. In my experience there's no such thing as luck. But I'm so glad that this has worked out today. So let me maybe quickly summarize, because I see we're coming up on. So what I heard you say was first start with automation before you move towards AI. And it's like the old crawl, walk, run. Like Christina said in the chat. Secondly, bring your people along. After all you need folks who can advocate for you and who can advocate for your program and who are enabled to do these things themselves and talk about it in a way that shows the value and builds more momentum. And then I think thirdly, also, like you said, it might not necessarily be a straight shot, right? But you need to get better at it and you better need to get on the path to AI if you want to reach your destination. So like I said, we're getting close to the end of the show. Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your experience and learnings with us. Was really great to have you.

Doug Shannon: 16:40

I appreciate it Andreas. It's fantastic talk. And May the fourth be with you.

Andreas Welsch: 16:43

Exactly.