Andreas Welsch 0:30

Welcome back for another episode of What's the BUZZ?, where leaders share how they have turned AI hype into business outcomes. Today we'll talk about how you can become an AI orchestrator in the workplace, and I'm so excited to welcome Sadie St. Lawrence to the show. Sadie, thank you so much for joining.

Sadie St Lawrence 0:47

Thank you so much for having me. I think this is the second time being on the show, so it's great to be back. Love watching these, love hearing what you're doing and the conversations that you curate. So it's an honor to be here.

Andreas Welsch 0:57

Thank you so much. Now the title of the show, we didn't or of the episode we didn't choose that by accident. You have some news to share. Maybe jump into that a little bit and maybe also share a bit about who you are and what you do for those of our viewers and listeners who might not be familiar with your work yet.

Sadie St Lawrence 1:13

Yeah, thank you. I just released my first book, Becoming an AI Orchestrator, a Business Professionals Guide to Leading, Creating, and Thriving in the Age of AI. And I have so much respect now for anybody who's written a book. Thank you. Yes. You have your own copy. Yes. So appreciate great product placement and timing. Yeah. I know you're on your second book now, so I have so much respect for anybody who's written one book. But it's definitely, I would say a labor of love, but also so fun to be able to put all your thoughts, particularly around AI when it's, such an exciting time in this space and so much to talk about in one space.

Andreas Welsch 1:51

Wonderful. I'm looking forward to diving in. I've already had read a couple pages that it arrived in the mail the other day. But I also feel it helps you. Articulate, clarify your thoughts at the time when it's so easy to just delegate to ChatGPT and copilot and Claude and whoever else you can do this work for me. But actually sitting down and think about how do I structure this? Is this really what I want to say? What are some other or additional angles? I think really sharpens one's perspective as an author as well. Great work for them. Yeah, I would

Sadie St Lawrence 2:20

say a lot of people came out and said, when chat came out that. Writing a book was dead and there's no point to writing it. I think the exact opposite. If you go through it, you realize that none of these tools will write a whole book for you. While they are helpful agents, it is still you who have to author it. And then you have to find your own kind of workflow. And for me, what. I ended up doing a lot of, it was actually dictating the book through my mic. I just felt like it was the easiest way to make it still sound like me and my voice. And for me personally, I found out that I can talk a lot faster than I can type. And so being able to get first draft out on paper by using this big podcast microphone worked really well for me. Awesome. You pretty much are reading a book that I just spoke out in, into this microphone.

Andreas Welsch 3:10

I think you can definitely hear that their voice and your tone in there for sure. Folks, if you're in the audience, I'm working on my second book it's called the Human Agentic AI Edge. That'll be out at the end of February. So make sure to get a copy of that on Amazon. That's all about how can you empower your team members? How can you empower your peers to use AI responsibly and responsibly in the sense that you don't just create the first draft and send it off and say, Hey, can you take a look at this? The recipient says, oh, come on. They just created with AI but didn't really spend a lot of time getting this from good to great. So how do you actually do this? How do you do that as a leader to empower and encourage your team members to use AI? But. Enough about that. Back to our episode and to our topic. Sadie, should we play a little game to kick things off?

Sadie St Lawrence 3:56

Yes. I love these games.

Andreas Welsch 3:57

Okay, so here we go. If I press the buzzer, you'll see a sentence and I'd love for you to complete the sentence with the first thing that comes to mind and why, in your own words, to make a little more interesting. Only have 60 seconds for your answer. Are you ready for, What's the BUZZ?

Sadie St Lawrence 4:11

Yeah, I'm ready. Let's go.

Andreas Welsch 4:13

Okay, so here we go. Okay. If AI were a band, what would it be or who would it be?

Sadie St Lawrence 4:24

Okay, this is perfect because I just wrote a whole book on AI orchestration. So it has to be a symphony because we, the human are the conductor, and AI is all of the instruments in the symphony. So it plays many different roles. Everything from the violin to the trombone, to the cello. It would definitely have to be a symphony.

Andreas Welsch 4:47

I love that. I've been waiting for someone to to give that answer because I'm a musician too. I play percussion and keyboards and a bunch of other instruments.

Sadie St Lawrence 4:55

So you are AI I was always wondering if you really are

Andreas Welsch 4:59

AI. I hope I just embody it in some case. But also hopefully there, there's a lot of human intelligence left as, as well. At the end of the day,

Sadie St Lawrence 5:08

we've met in person, so I know you are in AI

Andreas Welsch 5:11

But it does take a lot of orchestration, a lot of conducting and making sure that all the different players, all the different pieces, all the different parts come together. For sure.

Sadie St Lawrence 5:20

Yeah, I think my favorite part about the orchestration and the connecting analogy is that if you. No music. You realize that the conductor. It's typically one of the older people in the orchestra, and the reason why is I read somewhere that there typically isn't a conductor who's under the age of 40, just because of the amount of time it takes to truly learn and understand the music and to be able to lead something like a symphony. And I love this analogy so much because. It just goes to show the same thing that when working with AI, you still have to have all that background knowledge. You have to have all that skill. It's not farming it off to AI that there is just to assist you and to help you, but like you almost have to be, in my opinion, for some areas that you're working with. More knowledgeable and more skilled than you were before.'cause it will give you that first rough draft, right? Which is where basic skill is needed. But really to get it to that masterpiece, you have to have that deep expertise. And I think that's one of the reasons why if music and understand, like you'll get the nod, right? And so I think it just is such a great way to think about AI is like it's not replacing us at all. If anything, I think it's forcing us to be smarter, better, and go deeper into our own subject areas.

Andreas Welsch 6:41

And I think in music and work as well to pivot a little more towards the work side. For those of you who maybe enjoy listening to, to music more than making it. But yes it's gotten obviously a lot easier even to create music, Suno and all these AI music generators equivalent to creating text and copy and things with the text generators. But like you said. There is a art and a skill still to, to creating something to putting thought into it, to putting your expertise on into it, to doing research and yes, AI helps you do the research faster whether that's at work or for a school project or for a college project, but you still need to have enough of that expertise. But I'm wondering what are you seeing in your work with different organizations? How is work changing when Yeah. Sure. We can delegate to an agent, we can delegate to AI or we can orchestrate them. How's work changing?

Sadie St Lawrence 7:30

Yeah. So I would, back to the idea of the orchestrator, you have to have a very clear idea of what you're trying to do and what you want to achieve. Again, just as like people had. I'm old in AI, right? I've been in this field for 10 years. So 10 years ago when we were talking about big data and like giving people access to some of these models, the fear was how will anybody know it's the right results, right? Because we understand that any machine learning algorithm is going to spit out an answer regardless of if this answer is correct or not, you will get an answer. And so there's a lot of fear around that because. People who are not skilled in a particular subject matter of expertise may take that to be true. And these models have gotten much better in looking like they're true, right? But. The high. On the flip side of that, it just goes to show how much we need to have deep area of expertise and a true vision for how we're looking to use these models. And most importantly, what we're looking to create. And so how I see work changing is really shifting from doing to asking, from editing to narrating, from playing, to orchestrating, moving into a role that. Everyone, even if you're an individual contributor, you have to level up in the organization to almost think as a manager, because you won't have somebody now who's just distilling a task for you and giving it to you. They could, I could do that easier now with AI. So you need to think like a manager. You need to think like a leader wherever you're at in the organization, even as an individual contributor, because we have AI at our fingertips today.

Andreas Welsch 9:19

That, that resonates so deeply with me. I've been thinking about this over the summer as well. I'm just giving some talks in and keynotes. One, one for the Project Management Institute in July. And we're talking about how does, how, yeah, how does work change? How do you need to change? And what it came down to me for us. How do you delegate in many cases if you've been a leader in a business before it's becoming second nature. Maybe you've been fortunate to attend some leadership trainings becoming a first level leader, becoming a middle level leader. But in all of these meetings in and trainings what they hammer into is think about delegation. What is the objective? What do you want the outcome to be? What is the context? What other people, resources, information does the individual need to work with? How do you measure the output? What does good look like and what does a timeline or a deadline look like? But when you need it back in a field? A lot of these things we're now seeing as users, as professionals, as individual contributors using these tools that probably were more. Formalized frameworks for managers and leaders thus far. Now you need to know that too, right?

Sadie St Lawrence 10:23

Yeah. And what I would say is I see two mistakes. One, a mistake for managers not. Trying AI enough themselves and giving it to their teams to try when it's no, you're great at telling people what to do. So tell AI what to do. Put that skill to use. And then I see the mistake from the individual contributors on the flip side of you don't have any experience delegating task, right? You're used to be given things. And so you have to work on the opposite side, which is like. How do I delegate work? And so it's a funny world where both almost need to flip roles for a little bit, right? Of like cha, I know sometimes I've done different like work swap roles, right? Where you do somebody else's job for a little while. So I think we need to see more of that from a management and individual contributor, just so that it will get us more used to working with AI from that perspective as well.

Andreas Welsch 11:16

I've been seeing this lately in, in my work with manufacturing companies specifically smaller mid-size companies where the founder and owner are, same person. And even many of the managers were promoted to managerial role because of their expertise. We've seen this for a long time expertise as a stepping stone in into management, not necessarily people skills, not necessarily the coaching aspect. Not necessarily the more modern aspects of leadership. And I think there it's incredibly hard for many leaders and business owners to acknowledge, Hey, here's something new that I don't fully understand, that I don't fully know I'm not the technical expert in this topic, but it's really important for our business to embrace it, to learn more about it for our team members to learn more about it and to create that kind of culture and change. What are you seeing there and what's your advice for leaders who know? I actually should be doing something more with AI, but I'm not really sure where to start or how to start because I'm not the expert myself.

Sadie St Lawrence 12:14

Yeah, so first I would say. Get your hands. What? I just call'em, get your hands on the keyboard. You don't have to use a keyboard. You can use your cell phone. You can talk to it, but start using it yourself because you, it will open up your mind to the art of the possible. And this is not something like it was in the days of. Big data or switching to social media or Web 2.0 where it's like you need to have that technical expertise. Nobody needs technical expertise. So that's first and foremost. And then second, from a business perspective is you have to start thinking about this from a systems mindset. And I think this is gonna be one of the most in demand skills come the next decade just because. We need to make sure that we're establishing the systems to fully implement AI into our business. So everything from the standpoint of like how we're collecting data in our products and services, how we're storing and governing that information, and then how we feed this into the brain or the AI model that we can intelligently use that back in our business. And so I see a lot of. Executive teams looking to use AI but haven't set up that systems thinking mindset and really don't know the layers of their business from a technology perspective. And to me, you should have your tech stack mirror, or at least. Support your business stack, right? Your business strategy. And so if you haven't taken those key steps where you have evaluated and said, does this tech strategy, does our tech stack mirror what our business strategy is and support our long-term growth from a systems perspective, then you're gonna probably be left behind in the AI race or be spending a lot of time trying to catch up.

Andreas Welsch 14:26

I have a great example. At the beginning of last year, I met with the C-suite leadership team of an engineering firm here in, in the northeast in the us. They've been in business for 60, 65 years roughly. The CEO had has been with the business for about 45 years of his career and. They were looking to bring more AI into the business. So they gave a bunch of people copilot. They built a little community around it, but then they wanted to learn more about how can we use AI in other parts of the business and use it more strategically. We would love to do win loss analysis and figure out where we won, where we've lost and why, and if we're overpricing, underselling these kind of things. So we started talking about. What kind of data do you have? How do you do that today? It came down to I asked Paul, who's always worked on these projects, and Paul will tell me, I said what do you do if Paul is unavailable? Then I ask Jenny, and maybe she knows. So where does it exist in your employee's minds? And that's something that I see a lot on. On one hand, the recognition and realization we need to do something with AI. But to your point, the foundation is not necessarily there because. Previous waves of technology were delayed. Were maybe not categorized or recognized as being important. So many need to put that foundation in place as well. Yeah, and

Sadie St Lawrence 15:45

I think beyond just even a level of individuals are still doing the work, right? We have things in spreadsheets or we have a ton of tech debt. We also, what I've seen is. Overspend on a lot of technology where, you've bought 10 different solutions that kind of do the same thing. And so now you have data siloed in multiple places. And so maybe you've tried to stay current with each of the technology trends, but you've never had an enterprise architect or chief architect to really architect that strategy. And so for me, it always comes down to first architecting and what does the tech stack actually look like? And you'd be surprised how many times I've talked to CEOs and they're like, wait, this is all the technology we have and this is how it connects. And I'm like, yeah, no one's ever showed this to you. And they're like, no. And they start pointing to things and realizing oh, I get why this doesn't work. And so I'm again, a big fan of a picture is worth a thousand words. And I love like taking what is in a digital world and putting it in a physical world. Hence maybe writing a book. Why that was so fun.'cause it was like all the things in my brain.

Andreas Welsch 16:55

Yeah.

Sadie St Lawrence 16:55

Has to now get down on a physical piece of paper.

Andreas Welsch 16:57

Can you talk to our audience a little bit more about becoming an AI orchestrator? What else they'll find in the book?

Sadie St Lawrence 17:04

Yeah, so it really came from, actually three years ago is when this started, and I just noticed how much myself was changing in the way that I was working and the mindset shift that I needed to change to get there. And so this really starts from the beginning, which is how do we start to think about these systems? What is the history of AI? Most importantly. What is its capabilities today? And how do we update our mindset in terms of using these capabilities. So it's all about going through essentially the 10 different ways that I use it in my workflow, and then how do we make sure that we're using that responsibly? How do we put our own mask on first, and then how do we scale it up to our team? Again, I'm a big fan of before I have anybody do anything else, like I need to do that myself. And then scaling it up to my team, to my organization, and most importantly, ending with our community and giving back to the community. Through helping bring others along in this space as well.

Andreas Welsch 18:07

Perfect. And where can people find. Becoming an AI orchestrator.

Sadie St Lawrence 18:12

I don't, I think you have a new, I think you may have a new sub talent of holding up products. So I haven't known this about you, but you're very, there we go.

Andreas Welsch 18:21

I have one of my own copies, too, of the first one of the AI Leadership Handbook.

Sadie St Lawrence 18:25

It you can find it probably the easiest place is on Amazon, but if you just search for it, you can find it in all the major kind of book publications.

Andreas Welsch 18:33

Awesome. Thank you for sharing more about that. And I'm wondering as more technology and just the workplace, as more companies are thinking about how can we use AI, how can we use agents, how can we help our team members build agents? Probably not everybody is so excited about it. I see a lot of confusion. I see a lot of concern. Not just in, in the us I do good amount of work in Europe and in Germany as well. And I'm wondering, what do you do with people who don't wanna become an AI orchestrator who pretty happy with what they've been doing for the last 10, 15, 20 years?

Sadie St Lawrence 19:09

Yeah, so I'm a big fan of, not giving people advice unless they ask for it, right? So anybody who doesn't want to become an AA orchestrator, don't read the book. No, I'm just kidding. But I'm not trying to convert anybody who doesn't want to, but what I do try and help people understand is, again, getting your hands on the keyboard is so essential to be honest with you, I give talks all across the world and I'm just, as I'm sure you hear a lot of questions regarding safety and ethics of these models. And to be honest, I can tell a lot of the questions haven't come from a place where they've used some of the most recent models. Or understand what's been done. It's coming from an old news article, right? Yes. And again, this is our job is to stay up to date on this type of stuff. So I completely understand that everyone else may be maybe not reading the news articles, daily on this, but what I've found with individuals is. Typically when they start using it themselves, the threat goes away. Because they realize how intelligent, but yet how silly some of these models are, right? Yeah. That, yes, it has passed these scores, but it's locked in a box, right? And unless you prompt it, you aren't going to get anything out of it. And so I think for me, it always comes down to like, how do we enable people? How do we train people? How do we get more diverse people to the table? Using these tools, because they're gonna have different interpretations of it. They're gonna find new use cases for it, or they're gonna find problems with it. And so for me, it's all about like, how do we get good people in the game doing good things and testing and prototyping versus reading a news article and never trying it for myself.

Andreas Welsch 20:57

I think that's really good advice. Whether you're a leader, whether you're a professional, hands on the keyboard or on the phone. Try it out. There's hardly an excuse anymore. Most of the tools are free, at least to get started. But you said something. I have it in my

Sadie St Lawrence 21:09

car now, so I drive a test. And they put grok in my Tesla. And so it's one of my favorite ways I'm driving home and I can brainstorm or prototype and then I'm go from my car, doing hands free, talking back to my computer when I get in the office and have my full chat already work. Through, so you have no excuse anymore. You can do it on your commute in your car. I did see that one of, one of the car companies was looking at Microsoft, adding Microsoft teams into their car and everybody hated that. Maybe not everything in your car is a good idea.

Andreas Welsch 21:43

Yeah. That, that's for sure. But you said something earlier that I think was very relevant. You said an old. News article AI is advancing so quickly. Last month I gave a workshop at a financial services institution and the AI leader said he, when you come in, can you tell our people that corporate AI is very different from what's actually happening out there. So it's very regulated, it's very much boxed in, like you said it's probably three months, six months behind of what is actually out there in the market. Can you show us some examples so people understand it's not just. Transcribing meeting minutes and writing better emails. But

Sadie St Lawrence 22:18

yeah, I think one of them too is just the one that I get brought up a lot is how I can't count the Rs and the word strawberry. Right? And again, that depends on which model you're using. And whether you're having it think or not. And so it go, it just goes to show that you have to also be somewhat educated. I don't think it's like you need to get a degree in this, but yeah. At least maybe take a workshop on it, right? And or go listen to one of your talks, right? So where you talk about, Hey, this is why you wanna use a thinking model versus a non-thinking model. It's those types of things where it's yes, it can actually count the r the number of rs in the word strawberry, but you have to make sure you're using the right model to do that. The other one that I love to look at as well is there is a lot of the leaderboards on hugging face are really great. There's, if you go to hugging face and just type in like hallucinations ranking, it ranks all the models daily in terms of. The hallucination percentage. And that I always find really fascinating to share with people because I have screenshots like timestamps from three years now. And just to see how it's continually got cut in half, and also how more models have come into the game. And so I leave all the screenshots that I have from these benchmarks in my presentation just to be like 20, 23, 20 24, 20 25, and everybody's whoa. It's like literally doubling every year. Yes. Or getting cut in half every year. And again, just have some benchmark that you can go to, just so that you can measure against yourself what's changing as well.

Andreas Welsch 23:52

Now. There, there's obviously so much happening in, in the space. If we talk about the news for a little second it's crazy how much new information comes out. How many innovations come out. It's dizzying following all of that and trying to make sense of it. But one of the exciting things that I know you are talking you're not just talking about, but that you're actively working on, is actually how do we bring AI. Into the physical world. Can you talk a little bit more about that as the next frontier if you will, of what's on the horizon and what's already real today?

Sadie St Lawrence 24:26

Yeah, so this started a little over a year ago. I, started to notice there were a lot of pieces in the local city that I was a part of that had the potential to take advantage of the AI wave, but weren't playing well together or didn't have the vision for how that could happen. And to me, this was really concerning because I grew up in a small town in Iowa and I saw that what had. I saw something happen to my small town in, my 30 some years of existence where it wasn't able to transform and keep up with the times from a technology and economic perspective. And that town has pretty much disintegrated, right? And so I have a, I would say like a soft spot in my heart for how do we bring not just the coast. Of the United States, to lead the way in technology, but really essentially all the parts in the middle or the small towns, the medium towns, because I truly believe this technology is life changing, but most importantly, economically changing for a lot of people. And so we did some research at HMCI, the company that I lead, which is how do we bring small to medium cities along to take advantage of what's happening in AI and robotics. And so we signed a couple different models. One is an intelligent revenue reinvestment model that takes the power from data centers and reinvest it back into the community through workforce research and infrastructure. And then we design a. Framework to build out technology to build out AI and robotics ecosystems. And so that framework is built on three pillars. One is sustainable infrastructure, one is workforce and education, and then one is innovation of research. And this, we were lucky enough to get. The eyes of Nvidia on our work and they said, Hey, we're over here building AI factories. But those AI factories need to go into communities and the, to have it in a community, you need to have more than just a data center supported. You need to have people and you need to have innovation, and you need to have sustainability. The three areas that we designed, and so we were fortunate enough. To get a partnership with nvidia, we are fortunate enough to find a local city, the city of Rancho Cordova to join into partnership. And so this year we got started on building the first ever AI and robotics ecosystem as a flagship model for small to medium cities in partnership with nvidia. So very excited about that.

Andreas Welsch 27:03

That sounds really exciting, especially bringing all these different aspects together, bringing different parts of the ecosystem together and also, doing something meaningful, something measurable as well and helping you know, where the opportunities are. So fantastic to hear that.

Sadie St Lawrence 27:21

Yeah, we're really excited and as with anything new, going through an process, testing, learning and building out models that are scalable. And so I really hope that this is a model that many cities can take and implement, and that way we can have more individuals involved in the AI economy.

Andreas Welsch 27:42

So would be wonderful to have you on for another episode maybe later in the year to hear how things are going. I think it's, especially when there's so much talk about AI in business, in society, but it's still constrained to systems. To apps on your phone to things in the cloud bridging that, that space into the physical world, I think is really exciting and is the next wave that we'll be seeing. I'm convinced Sadie, we're getting close to the end of the show and I was wondering if you can summarize the key three takeaways for our audience today.

Sadie St Lawrence 28:12

Yeah, I would say number one, work is changing. It's gonna continue to change, but this is your opportunity to lead. There's never been a better time to step into the role as the conductor, as the orchestrator, and so take advantage of this technology. Boom, this te. Shift and step into your role as an AI orchestrator. The second thing that I would say is it's also a time for leaders to think more deeply about their business, their tech stack, and really make sure that they are thinking from a systems thinking perspective as that's gonna be what enables them to achieve their business strategy goals. And the last. Point I would just say is everyone has a seat at the table in the AI economy and I'm really excited to see what happens with our work with the city of Rancho Cordova and Nvidia and would love to have more be a part of it. So always open to others reaching out for collaboration.

Andreas Welsch 29:11

Fantastic. Sadie, thank you so much for being on the show today and for sharing more about what it takes to become an AI orchestrator. I need to hold it up into the camera one more time.

Sadie St Lawrence 29:20

I gotta pay you now for this because I'm just like your product placement is too good,

Andreas Welsch 29:24

always at an arm length.

Sadie St Lawrence 29:25

Yes.

Andreas Welsch 29:26

to show it. Folks, I hope for those of you in the audience, you enjoyed the conversation as, as well. Make sure to follow Sadie and on LinkedIn and connect with her there. So much good information that you create, that you put out there. I know you've been instrumental in helping also, women get more access to education connection around data science, so Women in Data. Take a look at that as well. And yeah. Again, thank you so much. I learned a lot. Obviously exciting, seeing how things are progressing in, in moving and hopefully you and the audience are thinking about how can I become an orchestrator as well, and what does that mean?

Sadie St Lawrence 29:58

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Always a pleasure chatting.