On a recent episode of On the Brink with Andi Simon, I had the pleasure of talking with Matt Leta, a visionary entrepreneur, author, and futurist who is helping organizations navigate the rapidly changing business landscape. Founder and CEO of The Future Group—home to Future Works, Future Horizon, and Future Quest—Matt joined me to share his bold vision for the future of work and how businesses can adapt and thrive in the age of AI and automation.
A New Kind of Transformation
What’s clear from my conversation with Matt is this: we are not heading back to the way things used to be. The fourth industrial revolution is here, and it’s rewriting the rules. Matt’s experience in building digital products, advising startups, and working with giants like Apple and Google has led him to rethink how companies approach innovation. Rather than viewing AI as just another tool, Matt sees it as part of a broader cultural and structural shift—what he calls “next-gen digital transformation.”
Matt believes we are entering a new age—what he calls the “age of intelligence.” It’s not just about adding AI to business operations. It’s about creating a new business “brain,” where humans, software, and artificial intelligence work together in a symbiotic system. He compares this to the human brain’s evolution, where the reptilian brain, the limbic system, and the neocortex work in harmony. Businesses, he argues, must also evolve in layers—people, data/software, and intelligence—functioning as one.
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From Vision to Action
After traveling the world and founding several startups, Matt built Future Works with a bold idea: a services company that combines human insight (the “organism”) with powerful automation (the “mechanism”). It’s not just about doing more with less—it’s about doing things differently, purposefully, and faster.
But as Matt wisely pointed out, the challenge isn’t technology. It’s people. “AI transformation isn’t an IT project,” he said. “It’s a culture change.” And without buy-in from the people who must use these tools, AI initiatives often fail. Even younger generations aren’t always quick to embrace change, he noted, reminding us that resistance isn’t generational—it’s human.
Small Changes, Big Results
Matt shared a powerful example of transformation: a company bogged down by disconnected software systems and approval processes that took months. By streamlining those approvals using AI and creating a unified interface, approval times dropped from months to days—and sometimes even one day. That kind of speed and agility can be a game-changer for any business.
His approach is pragmatic and people-first. His bestselling book, The LEAP Guide, offers a simple, four-step framework (Locate, Evaluate, Action Plan, Progress) that helps companies begin their transformation journey—one hour a week. It’s accessible, scalable, and effective.
The Future Is Here—Are You Ready?
Matt leaves us with a key principle: “Everything that can be automated, will be automated.” Companies that embrace this truth and begin evolving today will be the leaders of tomorrow. Those who don’t? They risk being left behind.
So, what can you do today? Start small. Read The LEAP Guide. Experiment. Involve your teams. Make your data usable. Build a culture of curiosity and trust. And perhaps most importantly—see this moment not as a crisis, but as a massive opportunity.
Want to Learn More?
Visit leap.guide to explore Matt’s work, access tools, and learn how to start your own LEAP journey.
And don’t forget to subscribe to On the Brink with Andi Simon—where we bring you ideas and inspiration to help you see, feel, and think in new ways.
Your future is already here. Let’s embrace it together.
Other podcasts you will enjoy
426: Time for Work That’s Worth It?
407: Shaping the Future: Dr. Emily Springer on Responsible AI in Business
420: Join Kevin Cirilli to Meet the Future
Additional resources for you
- My two award-winning books: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business and On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights
- Our latest book, Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success, co-authored with Edie Fraser and Robyn Freedman Spizman
- All of our white papers, particularly those on Blue Ocean Strategy
- Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants
Reach out and contact us if you want to see how a little anthropology can help your business grow. Let’s Talk!
From Observation to Innovation,
CEO | Corporate Anthropologist | Author
Simonassociates.net
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@simonandi
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Andi Simon: 00:00:02 Everybody giggles as we open up On the Brink with Andi Simon. Matt Leta is going to be our guest today. He’s giggling as well as I am, but welcome if you’re watching or you’re listening. Remember On the Brink with Andi Simon is here to get you off the brink. And my goodness, the times are changing and so many of our interviewees these days want to tell you how to change and how to begin to. And my words see, feel and think in ways humans have to see things to feel them and to make decisions about them. And honestly, your brain is not going to be good here because they can’t think about it until it experiences it. So this is a time of really getting experiential about what is the new fourth industrial revolution, or the new technology or the new world. It’s not what it used to be. And you can’t go home again. This is not going backwards. This is going forward. And it’s going to be a really interesting time. Let me tell you why you should listen today and I think this is really a cool, really cool interview coming together. He’s CEO and founder of The Future Group, including Future Works, Future Horizon, and Future Quest. Now you think this is about the future. You’re right. We are going to talk about the future. I am somebody actually, ranked this among the top 20 podcasts for futurists. I didn’t know I was a futurist, but my job is to help you see things in a new way. He’s a digital generalist. I’ll tell you what that means. As an entrepreneur and creative director with 15 plus years of experience, he’s passionate about symbiotic futures, innovation and systems thinking. He’s cofounder of several startups, and he’s occasionally an angel investor, a traveler, a DJ, a forever thinker, and leads in passion. He wrote this and I think it’s worth sharing. I did not learn what I’m sharing at school, nor am I a professor, but I have lots of hands-on experience working in real environments, delivering hundreds of digital products. So he has done the seeing part and he’s experienced it well. He was 16 and he launched his first startup when he was 19, and it went to London and then Silicon Valley. When he left the Bay area, he traveled around the world for three years and during which time he started a remote only company that helped over 150 startups and larger companies and digital product innovation. And his clients have been all the big guys Apple, staples, Google, Boom, Supersonic. But at Hulu IQ, he fell in love with helping our clients build a better future. And eventually, following many ups and downs, he created Future Works. I’m going to let him tell you about Future Works, and I’m not going to say much more about Matt other than today we’re going to talk about you, your company, your business, your job, and a future. Somebody said, the future’s already here. It’s just not widely distributed. And I thought, what a great way to realize that you can’t run away from it. You can’t go back to what you thought was the way we did things. You know, you can’t go back pre pandemic. You can’t go back. There’s no place to go to. But today we got to figure out how are we going to see the future and how it works. So the name is really cool. but it’s a very interesting opportunity to pick his brain. So don’t be bashful after we post this. We don’t let comments come in during the podcast. But you know, let us know your thoughts and we’ll connect you to Matt and we’ll share the conversation. You know, as an anthropologist, we love to see how humans have evolved. And I think we’re in a state of fast, fast, rapid evolution. So sit tight and huddle along and let’s have some fun. Matt, thanks for joining me today.
Matt Leta: 00:03:51 Thank you so much for having me, Andrea.
Andi Simon: 00:03:53 Well, it’s a pleasure. Tell the listeners or the viewers about your own journey, because while you’ve been a traveler and I’ve been to 37 countries, I get it. What has your life brought you to now? And where are you taking us today? Please. Who’s Matt?
Matt Leta: 00:04:09 Thank you. What a generous and all-encompassing introduction, by the way. Thank you so much for that. Well, what can I add here? I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts right now on the Harvard campus and, to continue to dive deeper in a number of my subjects, I travel less, but not as little as I wish I traveled. I’m basically mostly not here, but that’s mostly for business, and relationships. I think I will comment on the one item you mentioned, Future Works and my future works. That’s an interesting one for several reasons. But like you mentioned, I sort of after I exited this startup, I started working on it, a professional services company that would help others build digital products and innovate and eventually I did very well. And so I kind of went into climate investing and stuff like that. And I didn’t really pay so much attention to this space for some time. And eventually the market changed and things started changing so fast. Like two years ago and I became really captivated by it. And for a long time, I think for like a decade, I had this idea that I never realized because things were going okay. And I just, you know, I had other priorities, but I had this idea that, like, what if we were able to build a company that is semi-automatic, but it works in the services industry or automatic as much as it can be. And the company would be split into two layers. There would be organisms, which are the people that we mechanism, which is the underlying automation layer and tooling and so on. And so about a year and a half ago, I decided to come back into professional services fully and try that and see what that means. And so I initially started this as an experiment where it would be just me and I as my business partner and then after some time, we decided that this is actually a very, very promising direction. And so we ended up completely cannibalizing our other agents. We shut it down and this became the main focus.
Andi Simon: 00:06:38 Well, I think though, that going into business for you is less about profit and more about purpose. There’s something going on here, and there’s always a profit part in the success, but you’re a curious person who’s looking at what’s coming. And I think you’re helping clients in innovative ways to do things very differently. Can you give us some idea of what you see happening in the market, and how few and future works are beginning to help them adapt? Because this is a time when they need someone to help them evolve fast.
Matt Leta: 00:07:10 Yeah. I think our purpose if we just dig deep into our purpose and how we’ve understood it and we spend a lot of time on it, it’s a lot. I think seven years ago I started a community of sort of like future sense making sneakers to see what we can find. It’s called Future Horizon. It’s our nonprofit. It’s been primarily launching nonprofits. But the purpose of it was to kind of answer the question, like, what is exciting about the future? Like what the future is? Is there that we actually want that is not dystopian because we sort of love dystopian futures as humanity for some reason. And so what is not the not known dystopian future? And it took us a few years to understand it. But eventually we kind of came to a conclusion that it would be nice if after the Anthropocene, which is when humans shape everything on this planet, where we are now, there would be a symbiosis. A state where there is balance between humanity’s thinking machines and the environment. That’s what’s maintained. And it gives us the ability to go into the stars. Well, the home is sort of taken care of. So it’s of course, a long-term thinking and a bigger thing and more of a North Star. But it is what makes us wake up in the morning to basically help solve that. And then if you go from there, if you think, what are the big threats to that? And, you know, there is a whole number, but for example, in ability to transition out of current models. So inefficient models like when you look at it using fossil fuels, for example, are incredibly inefficient. I mean, we’re shipping liquid on ships around the world to burn it at like 40%- 60% efficiency. It’s insane. And so there are so many. That’s just one example, but there are many, many, many, many other options. I think a lot of people realize that. And that’s why big changes are happening everywhere and in the American government as well, to create quite a high degree and for better or worse, they will, you know, probably short term, they bring a lot of trouble. But it is the kind of optimization that is getting unlocked in a way. And I think it is like a simple truth of business that everything that can be optimized will be optimized because just for incentives are. So, you know, the money is behind that because you can have a better bottom line efficiency but not right. So everything that can be optimized will be optimized. And so the question becomes what can be optimized. And today a lot was right. Every day, every week more can be optimized through automation or and so we are now really focused on essentially helping companies embrace this and transform. And what we’ve recognized, we’ve been doing AI for about nine years now. What we’ve recognized is the problem with adoption of those new systems. You know, intelligence is not in technology. A lot of companies, you know, if you listen to Forbes, 92% of American companies this year are investing in AI because they see that as a need. But of those companies, I would wager that those that are at least are starting the journey, 90% will fail at doing it in a way that actually works, that actually brings meaningful ROI in the short term. Right? And why? That’s because the problem with implementing AI is actually not something for the tech department to do. It’s something that kind of needs to be a little more local, encompassing, and it really is about people and their openness to change. And what we’ve noticed is this is the final thing I’ll say about it. What we’ve noticed is that AI is different. It’s not just another wave of digital transformation like ten years ago, or 20 years ago, someone would bring Salesforce and then everyone would struggle with it for three years, but they would learn and continue working. It wouldn’t really mean big changes other than, you know, the adoption of software. Currently, I feel like they sort of reject the idea of working with. I think most people actually do this sort of thing, like wanting to run away with their mind. And that’s a real problem for every company that doesn’t embrace and doesn’t work with those people to help them kind of embrace this technology, because they will find that even if they implement some really fancy tools, their own teams will not use them. And that’s a very big problem. And you know and why is it a problem? The problem is because those who do embrace it have incredible advantages. Once you actually do it in a meaningful manner, you connect the people and the artificial intelligence you are able to gain, but much higher velocity and optimized cost, to the factor of 100 times. And over time it’s a big difference for competitors.
Andi Simon: 00:12:34 Is there an illustrative case that you can share with us, even if it’s an anonymous company that could make this abstraction more realistic for somebody listening in, because at the end of the day, you said something and I’ll sort of summarize what I hear. And that is, at the end of the day, this is about people. It’s not about technology and it’s about the culture you’ve got and whether or not you cannot just bring on a new thing as if it’s separate from, but it’s transformational on how people communicate with each other and do business with the outside and think in different ways and begin to see opportunities, are curious, take advantage of their humanness, but in a way that is not simply, a little bit incrementally better. And to me, it sounds like we’re going to be transformative, transforming what we’re doing so that it is geometrically better. And, you know, I don’t want to use myself as an illustration, but I love that. It’s my best friend, you know, and I say please and thank you. I’ve humanized it. I can’t tell if it’s a guy or gal. I ask questions and get answers and then if I don’t like the answer, I dig further and it digs with me. So I become a solopreneur without I’ve got rid of my staff and we are writing and creating and all kinds of stuff. Thank you to my new partner. But that’s a mindset that I can do. Large companies have a lot of minds who may be resisting the changes. I remember one company I worked with and all the elders, the boomers had a hard time when they went to an open space because they had no place codes, and I laughed because their old habits require them to have private space, and there was none. And they didn’t quite know what to do with the open space. So it’s not hard to get really landlocked. But is there an illustration besides my wanderings, about my own use of it that can help people understand how a great company can really see, you know, quantum leaps in what’s being done and thinking about it in new ways. Something you can share.
Matt Leta: 00:14:42 Absolutely. I have a few. I’ll pick an example, but I will comment on the boomer aspect. I don’t think this right now is as much about generations as it was with a kind of general computer adoption or open, open office thinking and so on, just the environment changing it to some degree, I’m sure. But what we are actually seeing is that there are some people, Gen Z, even who don’t want to necessarily embrace it. And so, you know, how do we get those people excited? You know, ideally, we make their life better, and it shows them that they are in fact not getting replaced, but they’re getting helped by it. And their day becomes better, their weeks become better, their life becomes better.
Andi Simon: 00:15:26 I’m surprised you think they would be first in line to figure out how to use this. And because they’ve already grown up on video games and it’s surprising.
Matt Leta: 00:15:33 There are a bunch of surprising aspects of it. I’m not going to. Maybe I’ll answer your question first and then we can go into that. There are a few findings, but this was one of them. I think to give you an example, I’ll start with a simple example. If you’d like me to, I can give more examples that are a bit more complex, but the simple example is that many companies that have either been subject to acquisitions or fast growth, there is a very disjointed kind of merge of departments and software. Like, you know, sample companies have like 500 different apps because everyone wants to sell some tool to them and they’re like, oh, that sounds attractive. How about we, you know, apply it here and there? And none of that is connected. It’s very hard to connect it internally, at least without a bigger job. You know, there’s security issues and whatnot. Also, all of those tools are incentivized to lock in your data because then you can pay. And so that alone creates a lot of issues. And now if you were to just come, oh, we’ve got an AI agent that can suddenly generate, let’s say generate leads, call people and get us increased sales, let’s keep it simple. That needs to operate with our information, our data, our tools, and with those tools are so disjointed it is not able to do that. And now we want this company to change. And we want to have the company, the executives, the board. Everyone wants it. You know, they need it. It’s not forced. They want it. It’s a necessity. But for them to approve any change takes two months. And why? Because all those tools are disjointed. And all those people work in silos, right? And so you cannot even start embracing that agent and it exists now. And your competitor might be using it today, right? Let’s say. But you cannot embrace it remotely because you’ve got those internal disconnects. And a simple example is how about this of approvals. Right. And so approvals right now can be connected between all those applications very easily through APIs. We can build a custom interface in literally two days. I’m not exaggerating because those things became really incredibly fast to do and then iterated. And then all approvals are in one place. But even better than that, then you have an understanding of all the approvals that data is in, let’s say slightly stored sort of data lakehouse that then connects to the interface and without going into technicalities further, but we have the ability to analyze this, these approvals and increasingly start preapproving them using AI. And so then your approval time for about two months. I mean, we see companies where it takes four months to approve something. It goes down to two days, right? Because firstly, it’s actually usable for the people who get the approvals. So there’s no need to chase them with emails all around everywhere. And they need to check five different types of software in order to find that maybe there is something to agree on, but it happens within one streamlined experience. And increasingly we can plug in intelligence to approve those. And you know, and then as it gains trust, we can make it approve more and more. And eventually you end up with one day approvals. And imagine what that does to the company in terms of their ability to move forward. And it’s a gigantic difference like years become months. And so this is kind of the unlock that we are talking about. And I can speak a bit about the philosophy behind it and how we think about it in general. But I’d love to give the space back to you to comment.
Andi Simon: 00:19:33 I’m smiling because of how many acquisitions, mergers, situations we’ve been in where you have system on top of system on top of system. Nothing is functional. And you have everyone wedded to it because God forbid, you don’t. Then you lose your job because your identity has been caught up with something that’s irrelevant at this point and I often would say, if you want to change, have a crisis or create one, because you just don’t pay attention to me until you have a crisis. And, in some ways, I’m hoping our audience listens to you because the crisis is here. And your ability to get things done can’t take four months to make a decision. and it is. It’s so interesting. Humans are so interesting because if you resist it, it won’t ever happen. And sometimes you got to bring a third-party in. I’ll say a consultant who makes it all happen. And then you can now have a new job because it’s basically a new job, right? It’s a new mindset that says, I can do this, they can do that, and I can get done, and I can really be a leader in this field, without waiting for months to make a decision. But the lack of decision, the inability is simply a political protection from change. Brain. Yeah. All that cortisol that says, oh, don’t do that. That’s dangerous. And it’s not. You just need a little time to taste the goods and it works, but that is pretty cool. And do those kinds of companies that are doing it become role models for you? Others can come in and see them. I mean, is there a way of making it? I think it takes us into your books. Do your books make it come alive so that someone can read about it and see how. Do it? Because you’re in the leading or bleeding edge of this transformation and you see it, and others need to. Also, if we decide with the eyes and I can see it, I don’t know what it is. So it’s time for sharing. Tell us a little bit about your books. Does this sort of figure flow right in here? I mean, I’m loving the story about it, but your books are important.
Matt Leta: 00:21:47 Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Of course. Well, the first book came out last September, and became a bestseller. it’s still rated, I think now it’s 4.9 stars, but close to five, which I’m amazed by because I don’t really see any books on Amazon that are rated this high. It’s quite incredible. And so the feedback has been quite amazing. And, currently I wrote it as a kind of solution to my own problem because I’m working with all those companies, and I see them unable to be really struggling with their ability to kind of like actually build a culture of change, you know, but in times when they really must, It is a crisis in the sense that I do believe firmly that if someone is not moving on, they will not be able to catch up because it’s a multiyear process. It’s not a short process. And so, the first book has less anecdotes and has only several kinds of case studies, but it does have those case studies. You mentioned those examples, and it’s very practical. It’s focused on firstly; you can demystify theory. I’ve worked on it with over 100 people, experts in charge, executives at large companies like from JPMorgan to McKinsey to Apple. And we I’ve kind of compiled all this knowledge into like very high density and a quick read, three-part book. First part is called Align. It’s all about alignment so that you can kind of like drive conversation with teams using the same language and, and be aligned in what you’re doing and, but also understand the motivation behind the overall framework. Second part is focused on Leap, which is the framework presented in the book. It has four steps. Locate, evaluate, action, plan and progress. It’s a cyclical innovation framework. It’s based on 100 other frameworks and stands on the shoulders of giants. But it’s sort of purpose built for the current age of AI. So it focuses on sourcing ideas and not so much on delivering because delivering, making things is becoming cheaper and cheaper and it’s basically going to zero, but actually to finding the opportunity to truly innovate and unlock ability is the core focus as well as communication to drive buying. Because a lot of those initiatives start and just stop. And we think companies. They fizzle out after some time and it focuses on kind of deep documentation and so on. That’s also I augmented, which then helps innovate and turn the company into an innovative one. All of that makes people you mentioned in the crisis. You know, there is a bit of a fear, kind of the stick, but also the reward. Like all of that is there to celebrate the move, celebrate the people who do that. Reward them in many ways. And that instills culture over time. It takes time, of course, like any culture building exercise. But the purpose of this book is to sort of like a self-help book for companies that really want to start moving. And the best thing about it is I think we’ve managed to sort of compact it so much that it only takes one hour per week. It’s not like Google is 20%, it’s one hour per week. It basically has zero marginal cost or very close to zero. And therefore it’s really hard to stop. It’s really hard for people to say, well, I didn’t have an hour last week. And that really enables for this to scale through the company and change. And now it is being used by companies as big as 100,000 people who have had book orders for a number of companies and of course, many, many smaller ones. It works with a team as small as five people does the minimum. And then it can expand over time. And so that’s the first book.
Andi Simon: 00:25:56 If you don’t mind can you tell them what the name of it is?
Matt Leta: 00:25:58 The LEAP Guide. And you can find more information about it at leap.guide. It’s in fact the URL for all my books. And there is a second one coming and it dives deeper on the same subject. So I’ve been doing this research. I mean, so based on our experience that the LEAP framework has existed within our company for quite some time, but eventually I started doing this deeper research, trying to really understand how to actually unlock those companies to move, because I’m seeing them really wanting to do it, but it’s so impossible to get their people to embrace it. And we’re seeing all of those built on AI exercises, like some copilot or two here, and they don’t really work. I mean, they don’t, they can maybe optimize things by 5% or so, but you don’t see this like three x or ten x or 100 x difference. And so this is to unlock this ability to actually embrace that properly. And so the LEAP Guide is out there. and it keeps spreading it seems, which is nice to see that. But I realized even before I finished this book, I realized that as much as I hated the idea of writing another book, It’s a lot of work. I realized that I need to carry on because there is more that I’ve uncovered. If all those interviews and at this point are like 180 different interviews with, all sorts of different, I mean, people who have run, you know, Google China, for example, and stuff like a very interesting, very diverse set of insights. And I’ve got around 2000 different key insights in a database that’s also managed by AI. And that allowed me to write another book, which is deeper, but it’s not as much of a pragmatic framework implementation. This book sort of paints a broader picture. It’s more for the executive, like the C Suite, to understand how they can start shaping their business to open up in this age of AI, to truly embrace the intelligence and the core of that book. There is like this kind of trillion, trillion business brain theory that we’ve come to.
Andi Simon: 00:28:30 I that it’s very interesting because you’re a storyteller, and the brain has a story in it. The problem with change is that once you have your story, it becomes your reality. There’s no reality. And now you’re trying to change the story in the minds of the people who have to begin to embrace new things in ways that are alien to their own personal story. In fact, you know, maybe Gen Xers are running away from something that should be intuitively part of their, you know, embrace is fascinating. But as your books are coming out, you need a multimedia approach so people can see this, not just because what happens when they read the words is they impose on it their own story. And they’ll hear and see the things that fit their story but not change their story. and so Marissa Pearce has a wonderful book, Change Your Story, Change Your Life. And she talks about the brain doing exactly what it thinks you wanted to do. And that brain is either going to embrace this. This is so much fun. Let’s figure it out. It’s a new video game. Or it’s going to say fly away. This is scary stuff. So your books are playing a really important role. I know what you think they’re doing. I would love to know what they are actually doing if people are using it in large companies and beginning to try and change the minds in the stories of the folks who work there to begin to visualize something completely new because until they visualize it, it doesn’t exist. And it’s a very interesting time. It’s not a fire. It’s not a pandemic. You want it to have a compelling force as something that, you know, I can’t go back. My house is gone. I can’t go back. And so how do I really embrace it? you know, holding my head in my story back so that that’s not the way we do it. No, that’s not how it’s done. That’s something for someone else. That’s not mine. but your books are extremely powerful and very important. So I’m going to urge you, the listeners in the audience, to, you know, to read, but also to listen, because I think what Matt’s telling you is his vision. And it’s really cool stuff,
Matt Leta: 00:30:48 I think, too, that, yeah, there are, you know, a number of concepts. I basically have tried to simplify and streamline a lot of those. And you’re right, storytelling is so important. And in fact, setting just general vision and goals is incredibly important. Like, you know, having big hairy old shoes go or some people at MIT must MTP massive transformative purpose and so on. Just having this kind of story that pushes everyone forward, that’s discussed also. And there and then if you break it down, then everyone is on their own personal sort of hero’s journey in the experience, and they have those quests that they complete. And I think to your earlier point, you know, it’s as much as companies change, companies change. Companies are made up of people. For companies to change, the individuals need to change and/ evolve or keep evolving ideally. But I think the one item that I found that simplifies the thinking the most, and if I was to leave everyone with kind of like one concept is the comparison of evolution of companies to our own brain evolution. So our brain evolves roughly this way. We came out of the sea, became reptiles, we got the lizard brain, and we kept evolving. We got the mammal brain right. The limbic system. And then the evolution continues. And we got our neocortex, so called. The human brain sort of controls the executive function and whatnot. And so we’ve got those, those different layers and the fighter flights kind of, you know, reactions and so on. You mentioned before they kind of belong in the lower rungs and the kind of logical thinking belongs in the upper rungs. And, but they all function together. It’s not like we developed a new brain and the previous brain was removed. It’s all adapted to function together, for better or worse, because sometimes we struggle to understand ourselves. But we still have this is how we recomposed. And that’s how it functions. And I like to look at businesses or and business logic in general in an exactly aligned way. So we had people fight or flight of the brain. The first part, you know, the people were all companies were just people. And then we invented computers. We started adding the digital layer. And so we’ve got software and data. As the second layer, it allows us to do automations to store a lot of information and work with this information in all sorts of ways. That’s why we call it the age of information. And now we’re entering a new age. We have entered quite firmly the age of AI. Age of intelligence. And so the third layer is the intelligence, the artificial intelligence we’re adding here. And that is very different. It is kind of in a sense software and data, but it’s very different to software and data of the past because it can discern, it can reason, it can do things that are not scripted and sort of act on its own. And now I think there will be very few. There’s a lot of conversation about those startups that will be like $1 billion companies. That’s one person and a lot of AI agents, I think this will happen. but I think a far more common scenario will be a larger number of people and agents working with them. And the connection. So again, just like our own brain evolves in those three layers, our business, sort of brain thinking function evolves in a similar layer. We’re adding this new neocortex of business. And it’s an important concept, in my opinion, to sort of communicate to our teams that we’re not talking about, like little Bolton’s tools and little SAS AI products here and there. We’re talking about embracing this all, being connected in one thinking brain together. And then what does that mean? And the middle layer between those two is the software and data. And we find that the most common unlock is in coming to listen to the people, understand how their day is like and what their frustrations are like, and they will have a lot of frustrations. And most of their gripes will be with the software they’re using and how disconnected it is, how old school it is, how the interfaces don’t work, how things take forever, how whatever that is. And with those people solve the data and software layer. So make it all interoperable, make it composable, connected, open up data safely and securely, but open up data from the silos. And then we can truly interact with intelligence and become one brain. Yeah, that’s kind of like the vision and the most like a simplified kind of way. We communicated in order to, for people to really go like, oh okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And then and then we start working from there.
Andi Simon: 00:35:56 You know, as you’re speaking, Matt. And we probably should wrap up a little bit, but I once taught, a course, several seasons of it for health care folks. And it’s a number of years ago. I must date myself. It was called: Your date is talking to you. Can you hear it? And that it was at a time before artificial intelligence. And they would receive huge data dumps. And then they would have to interpret it into things that made sense for different folks in the organization: the senior team, the mental management team, the doctors and so forth. And what they didn’t realize, what they only selected, the data that conform to what they believe to begin with. And anything that was out of scope of that, they just ignored or deleted. And I’m listening to you and I’m saying that I don’t know why we go and now we can have AI help us think about that data until it is in a way that I can actually do something and act about it. The hardest part then, was that the data was telling you to do something perhaps differently, and they couldn’t hear the story because they all wanted to affirm that what they were doing was just fine. You know, it takes doctors 15 years to change their medical practice for us. As you’re thinking about it, we are doing a quantum leap. And it’s not about quantum computing. It’s about a quantum, you know, in a slow, fast moment. It’s not. It’s here. And now it’s a very interesting time to turn this into a wonderful opportunity because the data is talking to you. It’s talking to you differently. Yeah. And now I got to change my hearing aid so I can hear that and begin to know what I should do. And also test it and test it and test it, because it will allow you to ask lots of questions fast. And you don’t have to wait a long time to come back with possibilities and begin to see what could be interesting. And you can take the data, and have it analyze it for you, and then begin to see the threads that are there. And all of a sudden, it’s transforming how we think and what we do, and it’s going to be not 10 or 15 years from now. It’s going to be a short time where the leaders are going to show us it’s a whole new world of transformation. And I’m hoping my listeners, as are listening to you, see this as an opportunity, not a challenge as a chance for them to craft a new. I often say it’s a new table you’re going to sit at. You know and only going to be there if you can see it. So go play with it, you know, turn it into whatever metaphor works, but go do it. It’s not a metaverse, but it’s sort of like it. But you’re going to be living in a whole new world and yeah, perfectly wonderful. Matt, one or two things you want the listeners to remember. I’ve heard a number of things today, and I love the idea that. But I, I’d like them to leave you or leave us remembering one or two important things, because I think this is a conversation we should do again in six months. Go ahead.
Matt Leta: 00:39:00 First thing I mentioned early on was everything that can be optimized or automated, that’s automated. Everything that can be automated will be automated. That’s an important principle to remember, because sometimes people are like, oh, I don’t know if this is going to get in a place. Like, just observe what can be automated at what point. And it will be because that’s where intense incentives are. Unless markets change somehow and how businesses are done will change. Second thing is, look up this term we understood that this is not exactly about AI or intelligence transformation. We call it next gen digital transformation. At the risk of using, you know, an older term. But it really is not just about AI. And I think that’s very important to understand that it’s kind of an all-encompassing effort and therefore it needs the work to start. And maybe the third thing I will say is that this is like any activity, like if you want to get fit or if you want to get good at anything, and if you want your organization to be good at anything, what you want to do is start as early as you can. The best time was, you know, yesterday. Second best is today, but you also want not to stop. And so pick practices that are reasonably possible within your organization. And for example, lead with one hour per week. Yes, it’s just incredibly lead and so anyone can implement it. And you basically start and after six weeks, if you see the first results after three months, you see actually quite a few results within a year, you’ve achieved a lot and it’s really just different. So those are the three things I would mention.
Andi Simon: 00:40:50 How can they reach you if they’d like to know more.
Matt Leta: 00:40:56 To LEAPS Guide. And from there, you will find my contact info. You can just connect on LinkedIn or send me an email. You will then also access a set of tools so you don’t need to read the book, you can simply use an AI code that’s on the website. It comes free with the book. And so it kind of, you can take you through. It’s trained on the book and it can take you through the entire process. There are templates and tools and all sorts of things that have emerged, included also for free on that website. And this website will also be hosting my upcoming book, which I think will go into presale very soon, and it should be launched in Q2, this year. I encourage you to also take a look. There will definitely be some presale promotions where it will be basically free to get it or as close to free as I can make it.
Andi Simon: 00:41:55 I have a couple of clients who I’m going to introduce to and see it as part of my own toolkit. If I’m going to help companies change, then perhaps I’m going to use LEAP in our own practice and begin to see how it works, and then begin to get some fans who trust that perhaps I can help them with something essential to their own transformation to thrive in fast changing times. I can say those words, but what am I actually doing? Other than telling you the times are changing and you better start changing too. This has been fun for me. What fun?
Matt Leta: 00:42:37 Has been fun. I really enjoyed the conversations with you, Andrea. Thank you very much.
Andi Simon: 00:42:43 Let me thank our audience, our viewers and our listeners. When you finish listening here, share this. If you like the changes that are coming, you almost want to begin to visualize how it’s going to affect you and the company that you are with, or the business that you’re in, or anything that does make you excited and I do think it’s going to be a really cool time to be, you know, comics and others have innovation teams. They bring people together routinely to think about what the customers are saying and how to be customer centric. And it’s a great time for you to do the same. So I’m going to wish you all a wonderful day. Take your observations, turn them into innovations. My books are on Amazon. You can find them on Andi Simon. You can find Matt’s book there as well. And our books are here to help you see, feel and think in new ways. So, you know, enjoy them and then reach out if you’d like a little anthropology to help you change as well. Goodbye my friends. Matt, thank you so much for coming. It’s been a pleasure. Bye now. Last thought.
Matt Leta: 00:43:59 Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
