This episode features an interview with Christina Kucek, Executive Director of Intelligent Automation at CAI. She has over 15 years of consulting experience in delivering cutting-edge implementations in Conversational AI, natural language processing, and robotics process automation. At CAI, Christina guides clients through their automation journeys while delivering innovative solutions. In this episode, Shawn and Christina discuss the impact of AI on employee experience: from onboarding to accelerating workflows to building in ethics.
This episode features an interview with Christina Kucek, Executive Director of Intelligent Automation at CAI. She has over 15 years of consulting experience in delivering cutting-edge implementations in Conversational AI, natural language processing, and robotics process automation. At CAI, Christina guides clients through their automation journeys while delivering innovative solutions.
In this episode, Shawn and Christina discuss the impact of AI on employee experience: from onboarding to accelerating workflows to building in ethics.
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“Employee retention a lot of times can be impacted by their first week or two of employment. They get their machine, their access to all the systems that they need. They get their email, it's already set up. They show up on day one and they're ready to go. That impression that you make as a company on their new employee will help us retain our best talent. That reduces our cost overall for trying to recruit people and train people. That retention piece is really valuable.” – Christina Kucek
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:44): Rapid fire questions
*(07:13): Christina breaks down CAI and her role
*(15:57): How AI impacts employee experience
*(28:22): How AI will affect the amount of work for employees
*(36:43): The future of augmented intelligence
*(45:23): What’s next for Christina and CAI
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Links:
Connect with Christina on LinkedIn
Connect with Shawn on LinkedIn
Shawn Pfunder: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Cohesion Podcast. And today I'm joined by Christina Kucek, Executive Director of Intelligence Automation at CAI.
Shawn Pfunder: She has over 15 years consulting experience in delivering cutting edge, Implementations in conversational AI. One of the big reasons that we have her here today to talk about. And also natural language processing, robotics process automation. Christine is a certified project management professional. Ooh, the PMP.
Shawn Pfunder: There we go. They still do PMBOK? Is that a thing?
Christina Kucek: They do. Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: Look at that. Look how smart I am.
Christina Kucek: Body of knowledge. You got it.
Shawn Pfunder: And a scrum master with expertise in agile methodologies and process improvement. Christina, welcome to the show.
Christina Kucek: Thank you so much for having me.
Shawn Pfunder: This is going to be a lot of fun.
Shawn Pfunder: I have some rapid fire questions to get to know you a little bit better. Not super personal, unless you're like, no, I really want to get super personal. Then we can ask those questions as well. The first one is, what's an insult you've received that you're proud of?
Christina Kucek: Ooh, my family calls me nerd pretty often, like my family and my friends, they call me a nerd.
Christina Kucek: You'll probably figure that out why, but I don't consider that an insult. I've embraced my inner nerd. She's here.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, there was a time when it maybe was, I don't know, like once Revenge of the Nerds came out and then the internet.
Christina Kucek: I feel like it's cooler now.
Shawn Pfunder: It's pretty cool. Geek, I think that's cool too at this point.
Christina Kucek: I'm into it.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, you're in. What are the top five most opened apps on your phone?
Christina Kucek: Oh, probably Kindle. I read a lot of Kindle books. Safari, definitely. Audible. Uh, Instagram's probably up there, uh, and I have a chat on AI app that I have been using, it's competing with Safari now, it's using the chat GPT interface, yeah, so I've been asking that a lot more often, honestly.
Shawn Pfunder: Very cool. Is it doing the audio back and forth? Can you, are you doing, are you typing things in?
Christina Kucek: Yes. Well, when I have a question that comes from the backseat of my car, like from one of my kids or something pops into my head while I'm driving, yeah, I can push the button on the app and just ask it and it'll just tell me the answer.
Christina Kucek: So it just, you know,
Shawn Pfunder: it's pretty cool. I mean, a lot of these, you could choose the voice that you wanted. I mean, I guess you could do that with Siri and what's the other one? No. Oh, Alexa. Alexa.
Shawn Pfunder: I guess Google. Yeah, whatever. Yeah.
Christina Kucek: Better not say her name out loud. She'll talk.
Shawn Pfunder: You met. I know it's doing it right now.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, geez. I got to turn that off. There we go. Sorry, Siri. No, not right now. There's a, you mentioned reading. You're a big reader. What, what are you reading right now? It's on Kindle. Or what are you listening to on Audible? Kindle.
Christina Kucek: Yeah, oh, happy, happy with this question. Two nights ago, I downloaded this book, Weapons of Math Destruction, so I'm excited about that.
Christina Kucek: Told you, I wanted to, I'm a nerd. I was preparing for the new Dune movie, so I downloaded and re read the first Dune book.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, wow.
Christina Kucek: Yeah. Oh, I read a good one about AI. It's called Power and Prediction, the Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, which, I tried to convince other people in my organization to read and I lost my audience in a big way.
Christina Kucek: I thought it was a page turner.
Shawn Pfunder: They're like, go back to Dune. Let's talk about Dune. Because if I don't read it, I'll watch the movie and we can talk about it.
Christina Kucek: Totally.
Shawn Pfunder: This is really compelling to me and we'll get into more AI. I mean, a lot of us are just, I mean, maybe I'm pretty optimistic, but a lot of people Myself on my bad days, I'm like, AI is going to destroy the world.
Shawn Pfunder: And it's related to ethics, like when I think about it. Tell me just a little bit more about that. How do you sort of bake that in for humanity or for people or for workforces?
Christina Kucek: Yeah, I mean, we talked to our clients about this a lot. I actually went and got a certification on that as well about implementing ethical AI because I wanted to be able to speak intelligently to it.
Christina Kucek: I just think it's so foundational. Setting up the groundwork, what are your marching orders? How are you going to address AI concerns from energy consumption, right? Because it, it requires a ton of GPUs to maintain these large language models. And if you're going to use them every day and just the energy consumption alone, but in all regards, security, how are you going to talk to people about, um, You know, this is what we persist.
Christina Kucek: This is what we won't. This is how we're going to leverage your data. This is how we won't. I think it's really important in order to dispel the fear of AI and of these technologies to be really clear and like, say it loud, say it proud. This is how we intend, right? To, to use this data. And our companies had a really awesome policy where we implement our own solutions, where like, we're not going to use it for feedback.
Christina Kucek: Yeah. Unless we explicitly tell you, but in any of these, you know, interfaces, you are just safe. You upload a file, you can ask questions about it. We just want you using this to accelerate your work. So Big Brother isn't watching you. We're just trying to give you these capabilities to, to accelerate your work.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, I love that. I love that. Well, speaking about where you're at now, CAI. So, of course, I try to do homework, go onto the website, look at everything that's going on. I guess. Explain to us what CAI does. Cause it's, it seems big. Uh, like when I, it's not just simply like, Hey, we make, uh, AI chatbots or Hey, we help you with talent at your organization.
Shawn Pfunder: Like what is CAI focused on? What do they do?
Christina Kucek: CAI is a global technology services firm. We have about 8, 700 associates worldwide and we've been in business for over 40 years. Our expertise lies in really using talent and technology to power the For our clients, colleagues, and our communities, our solutions are really based on providing benefits to clients in both the public and commercial sectors.
Christina Kucek: And our neurodiversity employment program is near and dear to my heart. My team is neurodiverse, right? We have a mixture of neurotypical and neurodivergent individuals, and it makes our team so much stronger and better, and that's just the way that we operate.
Shawn Pfunder: So when you work with clients, I'm going to bring up this neurodiversity thing, I do, we Nerded out getting excited to talk to you about that because it's something that CII puts front and center, which is really cool.
Shawn Pfunder: But is it, you work with companies and then you come up with custom solutions, strategies. Is it really, I guess, personalized, it's kind of a straight, tailored to a particular company, you kind of meet with them and pull together things?
Christina Kucek: It can be. I mean, we implement in a number of different ways and I think that we have like more, Bespoke approach, right?
Christina Kucek: We have our standard approach where we'll work with their team and say, you know, what are your goals? Like, I can't speak as intelligently as our folks from that practice, but what I know of them is that they can do custom solutions where you have a team. Neurodivergent individuals that are doing things like automated testing or coding or different, typically, IT roles.
Christina Kucek: My team, we trained our managers and we just said, all right, let's give this a try. Onboarded team members, trained them up in our technology stack and they brought all of their skills and, you know, talent to the table. And they've just become amazing team members. Really defying all the stereotypes that people have about, you know, this group.
Christina Kucek: So it's really fascinating how much we've been able to achieve. I'm really proud of that part of CAI. We have a lot of heart. We're a privately owned company, so we get to do a lot of really cool altruistic things all over the world. Yeah. That's pretty cool.
Shawn Pfunder: Take that, all you hardcore publicly traded companies.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, big business.
Christina Kucek: Big business.
Shawn Pfunder: So you, what do you do there? And I guess that was kind of a lead up to that. Knowing what the CAI does in general, what's your focus?
Christina Kucek: Yeah, so, I'm the Executive Director of Intelligent Automation, which is a pretty fancy title.
Shawn Pfunder: That's fancy. I know. That's awesome. Yeah.
Christina Kucek: But really, I get to work with our clients talking about kind of the art of the possible.
Christina Kucek: What can they do with these technologies, with automation, with artificial intelligence? We had humble beginnings where we RPA program kind of early in that You know, that technology life cycle, we were early adopters. So we've leaned in hard in hyper automation, which we kind of define the way Gartner does with trying to automate everything you can and introduce AI solutions to extend the capability of automation, to really accelerate that.
Christina Kucek: Business. So I get to work with leaders to talk about the art of the possible and then advise them on, well, here are some technologies that would probably be best options for you. And then help them understand how do we get to ROI from here, right? You have this idea. These are the technologies we should use.
Christina Kucek: And this is how you get your return on investment in the short term, medium term, long term. Cause like, What's that saying, like, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? Yeah. Right? You have to, you have to, like, break up some of these, these massive goals that they have and approach it incrementally to really get the value.
Christina Kucek: Clearly, I love my job.
Shawn Pfunder: You, too, totally love your job. And you could tell. They've been around a long time, CAI. Since, you said forty years, is that what you said?
Christina Kucek: Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: So since the, you know, the, the, 80s, uh, that's been around. Has it, has the focus always been similar? Not necessarily in the full automation, but sort of making, I guess, freeing up people to do really great work type of thing, or, or how has that changed the focus of CAI up until now?
Shawn Pfunder: I mean, I know automation has been around a lot longer than last year and chat GPT and the race, um, on those types of things, but how has that, how has that evolved to, to what you're doing now?
Christina Kucek: Yeah, good question. So I started 13 years ago, so I have a unique view. I'm kind of a lifer. They just let me play with all these different technology tools as they come and go.
Christina Kucek: So, you know, I stuck around. I'm like, yeah, great. But we, you know, we were an early adopter of RPA and we started rolling out things like machine learning models in intelligent document extraction. Today, we're implementing tools. that leverage generative AI and machine learning models just to make our clients and ourselves more efficient.
Christina Kucek: Things like automated testing, code generation. We use it for code generation, automated testing. We use it for reviewing contracts and looking at data, searching through documents, all of those types of things. I haven't written a proposal in a long time on my, by myself without, or like a PowerPoint without.
Christina Kucek: You know, running some of it by, oh, if I get, if I'm replying to a salty email, I ask our generative AI solution to tone it down for me and make it, you know, and then I'll send that version out. So it helps me in a myriad ways to be the, you know, professional I want to be.
Shawn Pfunder: So you. I guess with all these types of automation, you mentioned, uh, uh, an acronym that I'm not familiar with it.
Shawn Pfunder: RPA. Is that what you said earlier?
Christina Kucek: Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. What does RPA stand for?
Christina Kucek: So that's robotics process automation. That is like a software robot that will sit on somebody's machine or on a server and you can schedule it or you can, a human can trigger it and it will just go through your user interface and interact with multiple applications, read things from spreadsheets, enter them into websites.
Christina Kucek: Basically. Non intelligent, very scripted, do this step, then this step, then this step, people are always like, oh, the robots are going to, you know, they can't. They just follow their instructions. They don't. Until you get into like AI solutions, driving those automations, which is kind of our next step, you know, the actionable AI factor, you don't have to worry about the robots.
Christina Kucek: They don't know what they're doing. Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: I guess artificial intelligence and where we're headed with that. Is it almost like that same kind of program, but it learns and it figures out more efficient ways to do it, or it may change the way it's doing something based off of your behavior in order to make it easier?
Shawn Pfunder: Is that kind of where we're going in that regard?
Christina Kucek: I believe so. I mean, I think that, you know, with generative AI and large language models, being able to understand what I'm asking for, right? I need my password reset, for example. And it knowing what automation to trigger. to do that. I think that's kind of where we're going, that actionable AI.
Christina Kucek: And there might be multiple, like, we've realized that in a lot of our solutions, right? It's a very simplified solution. But, you know, sometimes there's multiple steps involved where you have to go out to maybe multiple systems and get data from Salesforce and then pull it into this system. And then you can create the output, being able to do all of those things.
Christina Kucek: Just from interacting with an AI rather than having to actually navigate to all of those systems. You know, that's pretty much where we're headed. I think.
Shawn Pfunder: You know, that's in a previous life, technical writer, long time ago, like mainframe days, that, that dates me all the way back, but it sounds like it kind of removes that because.
Shawn Pfunder: You know, back then, or even currently, I'd say, Hey, I need to update my password. Here's the set of instructions that we've written for you to update your password. And instead, Hey, I need to update your password. Great. What do you want it to be? And just take care of it on the backend automatically without having to go into anything.
Shawn Pfunder: And that sounds awesome. Like from my standpoint as what. A small example, but a great example of kind of where we're going with that. What are other ones? So when we think about, I guess, employee experience, what they're going to experience at a company, where are some other areas that we're going to see AI, or that we're using it now, you're using it now, to, as you mentioned before, I guess, take care of those repetitive tasks, the things that can be automated.
Christina Kucek: Well, just to clarify, robotics process automation, super dumb, just a script, but can navigate things, right? So one of the things that we've been doing a lot of is working with our chief human resource officer colleagues and asking them, you know, what are your goals? And one of the big things that we've seen lately with, The labor market and the available talent and that competition for the best talent and then retaining them and not letting them go once you have them is that employee experience piece, right?
Christina Kucek: Being able to integrate the chat. With benefits and payroll, right? With when's my next paycheck. I don't want to have to go out to the internet and search for things. I just want to, I'm working in teams today, like Microsoft teams or Slack. I just want to be able to ask the bots, like, when's my next pay period, right?
Christina Kucek: Well, where do I go to find a list of providers that are in network for my healthcare? Like, can I just get that? Can you just give that to me and make my life easier? I think we're all just looking for somebody to make our life easier. And can I just go. One place to do that, right? So, so those are the types of solutions.
Christina Kucek: Things like employee onboarding. We are really accelerating our clients that think based on the research that I hear from our HR professionals is huge. So, what they say is employee retention is a lot of times can be impacted by their first week or two of employment. So if we can get them their machine, their name tag for their door if they're in the office, get them access.
Christina Kucek: Right? So they get their machine, their access to all the systems that they need. They get their email. It's already set up. They show up on day one and they're ready to go. That impression that you make as a company on their new employee will help us retain our best talent, right? Or, and that reduces our cost overall for trying to recruit people and train people, and then, you know, that retention piece is really valuable.
Christina Kucek: It's not always as easy to crunch those ROI numbers. To get the value in those types of automations. But that's a very timely process too, which is what makes that AI component so compelling, right? Because The HR professional has to stop what they're doing throughout their day, right? They're like somebody, the hiring manager clicks hire, they need to stop what they're doing.
Christina Kucek: Now, most of these systems should be connected in the cloud. That's how they sell them. They're like, oh, yeah, we talked to all these other
Shawn Pfunder: We talked to those, API, this is going to do this. Yeah.
Christina Kucek: API is going to do everything. And then, but like the reality of our lives is like, but wait a second, there's data missing.
Christina Kucek: There's like data enrichment that has to happen in between these systems. Like these fields don't match, these values don't match, and this system to this system to that system. Or the API is only available at this ridiculous, absorbent price. Like we have it, but You don't have the license, right? So that's what we're doing with a lot of these automations and we have them triggered basically, right?
Christina Kucek: So that somebody clicks hire and they send for the background screening. They send to a different system for that drug screening if that's required. They can even, you know, send it out for a credit report and then once those things are returned, If the news is good and we can proceed to hire them, right?
Christina Kucek: You go ahead and you go out and you set up their payroll record in that system, you request their access in Active Directory, and these things just work. fall like dominoes. So it's not the HR person that's like, wait, stop what you were saying there. Let me log onto my computer because Jerry won't start work on Monday unless I click 17 buttons, right?
Christina Kucek: Which is a very, like, that's the life that everybody's living right now still in a lot of places.
Shawn Pfunder: Poor Jerry. Well, stay here for a second on the scene, because I'm trying to, I think I get it, but piecing this together as if, you know, it's in a movie, it's iRobot, it's at the beginning of the movie they come through.
Shawn Pfunder: So, said person, they likely apply for the role to get hired, and then it sounds like you would have, AI possibly take them all the way to the interview and sort of like pick them out as a possible candidate for the interview, still have a human take a look at it and do that. Is that, and then once they, they get the thumbs up to be hired, what does that do?
Shawn Pfunder: What's that potentially look like for the person? Do they know that they're, they know they're chatting with the, because you'd say like they, or you, the next step, next step, next step, next step. Does, do they know that they're not interacting with a person in that situation? Or is it generative AI, a personality, something that we've branded with the company that's interacting with them and moving them forward?
Christina Kucek: Well, we're a little bit more, I'm not necessarily advocating for too much interaction between AI and the human. Again, going back to the responsible, ethical AI.
Christina Kucek: So, we use AI strategically, right, in pieces of these processes. So, If it comes to employee needs to upload forms, right? Extracting all those forms using a machine learning skill, right?
Christina Kucek: Or, but even before that, using AI to try to identify the right candidate who's a great fit and give each person kind of a score. I have mixed feelings about that. Like the whole keyword game where people are just copying and pasting pieces of the job description and literally typing it into their resume and uploading it.
Christina Kucek: Like, you know, there's some lessons I think that we're still learning in that space. So yeah, we use it as an accelerator, but it's still a human brain. It's still those folks in recruiting and HR and talent that need to be that integral piece. That would be missing. I think it would, it just, it wouldn't meet our expectations without the human brain involved there, but to give them a score, right?
Christina Kucek: To say this person, based on all the things you said you really wanted to see on a resume, this person had most of these things listed. So you might want to look at them on this order, but I would strongly recommend that recruiters still, you know, examine the applicants more thoroughly because especially in technology, somebody could have a lot of.
Christina Kucek: Items that like on their resume that are adjacent to that role that would make them a great fit, but they didn't copy and paste from the job description word for word. So they're not going to get the 99%, but they might be this amazing candidate. And I just, I, you know, that's the one word of caution. I don't think that we're ready.
Christina Kucek: I don't think we should like necessarily replace that human with AI. I think always an accelerator at this point, always looking at an accelerator, but when it comes to like, just. The person's been hired, the manager interviewed them, they interviewed all the candidates, you know, they hired them and they click that hire button.
Christina Kucek: It's my, this automation plan, you know, implementing automation or even conversational AI with triggering these automated scripts, whether they're API calls or they're automated scripts that go through the GUI, like the user interface, I don't want to hold the HR representative hostage to have to sit at their desk.
Christina Kucek: And refresh, refresh, refresh, you know, click on all these buttons to move the candidate. Like, we've agreed. They're hired. As long as we get their, all of these steps completed, welcome to our family, right? Welcome to the organization. But I just don't think the HR representative needs to necessarily be held hostage to click all those buttons.
Christina Kucek: They should get more time to, you know, Talk to people, right? To build relationships. So make it a great company.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Yeah. They kick it off and then that interface, that interaction. Well, and for a new hire, they don't have to learn any systems out of the gate in that sort of situation. Like, I'm just going to walk you through and take care of everything on the back end before they come on board, before they get hired.
Shawn Pfunder: It's interesting. I like your answer on the ethics regarding that. I mean, I geek out a little bit. It's kind of like Star Trek. I'm going to have, you know, data. Walking me through everything, the, the, from beginning to end, I'm just going to show up in my, live long and prosper. I'm just going to show up to work and my hiring manager will be like, Oh yeah, I have no idea.
Shawn Pfunder: The robot picked you, took you all the way through, let's get to know each other. That's strange to get to that point, especially right now. But what you mentioned about, you know, HR, not having to be held hostage. Like make their lives a little bit easier or free them up to actually have the one on one human to human connection with others.
Shawn Pfunder: I heard a great phrase. It was actually from a simpler report that we were talking about a few days ago and they called it augmented intelligence instead of artificial intelligence, meaning it's like creating I mean, I want to say cyborg because that's cool, but creating this human AI superpower like for the, for HR, for other people.
Shawn Pfunder: What are your thoughts about that? Is that more ethical to just be sort of augmenting my intelligence or my capabilities using something like that?
Christina Kucek: I really think it is. And I feel like are companies sort of? I feel like I'm a cyborg to a certain extent because I'm using these AI tools every day. I mean, I already confessed, I haven't created a PowerPoint presentation like in months, like maybe even a year, if I'm being honest, without using one of these tools.
Christina Kucek: So it's making me faster. And better every single day right now. And that's only because, and I sound braggy, that sounds braggy, right?
Shawn Pfunder: You're a nerd. You're like, Hey, listen, I'm on top of this. The rest of you folks catch up.
Christina Kucek: Right. But no, the, our president CEO was like, I don't need a business case for this.
Christina Kucek: This is what we're doing. We're leading with technology. We're accelerating our people. And luckily his company is full of other technologists. You know, and, and, and we're a privately held company. So if he says, go, we just get to go do whatever he tells us to do, right? It's great. So, so we leaned in really hard and we didn't have to have some sort of business justification where like, Oh, we were saving so and so eight hours a day or, you know, 15 minute increments like throughout their week, you know, we didn't have to crunch the numbers.
Christina Kucek: He just kind of like, he said, do it ethically. Do it responsibly, and you're good to go. So, fly, birds, fly. And we went ahead and made that happen. And now, you know, we're, we've implemented generative AI across our organization in a safe, secure way. So, we're all kind of, CAI, the cyborg company. I don't know if that's like a, Marketing's gonna kill me when they hear this podcast, for real.
Christina Kucek: They'll be like, we did not authorize that.
Shawn Pfunder: That's pretty dope. Like, I'd be interested if I saw that for sure. You said you haven't generated a, a, a PowerPoint, at least it gets things started or cleans things up as well and putting it together, but you've been able to generate like actual slides or just the content for slides.
Shawn Pfunder: I'm totally fascinated by it. Like.
Christina Kucek: Yes. At this point I can, well, I can upload a deck and have it. Analyze my slides for me and tell me when I screwed up, but I still copy and paste it. I mean, I do the formatting, like the human's in control here. I'm not going to give the reins, not completely. I mean, but I, yeah, I've got a golf game appointment, you know.
Christina Kucek: No, I'm joking.
Christina Kucek: No, I'm still behind the driver's seat. I'm still behind the wheel.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Well, that's what I'm going to tell people, even when I'm not. When we get to that point, if we get to that point, I hope we don't, like, I like this conversation about the ethics behind it and related to that, a common question has been coming up related to workforce, I would say labor shortage, and in some cases, especially in tech right now, like there's an overall labor shortage across workforce's ethics.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, the world is coming, but certainly in the U. S., super low unemployment, but in tech, it's a little bit different. And the conversations around, uh, generative AI, augmented intelligence, superpowers, cyborgs, is that, Christina, if you're a cyborg and you got superpowers, one, We only need one of you, and two, can you pump out four times the amount of work?
Shawn Pfunder: You're doing double right now. There's a nervousness around that. Is that something that you foresee? Is there going to be more like, hey, Christine, you got a golf game to go to. You're super quick. We're measuring you on your productivity. Like have fun. It's like, which direction do we see it going?
Christina Kucek: That's an interesting question.
Christina Kucek: I have a couple of different thoughts on that. Number one, I have always had a work from anywhere policy with my team, which is like, I need you to get this many things done this week. This is what's in your queue. If you can pull things from next week into your queue this week, great. As long as you get this amount done, I'm a happy manager.
Christina Kucek: Right? So whether you are in the U. S. or India or on a beach in Bali, like, it doesn't really matter to me as long as that work gets done, right? So if AI is giving you a superpower and you're able to get more done in that time, and there's a golf appointment that you need to go to, You got your work done.
Christina Kucek: And that's just my personal perspective on it and I feel like that should be everyone's personal perspective. 'cause it's just way cooler to work for that person honestly than for somebody that's not like that. And it's better to work for that company and it instills like loyalty and all of those great things.
Christina Kucek: But after I've been in the automation space specifically, right, AI and hyper automation and I automation space for like the last four and a half years, and everybody's talking about, they talk about reducing headcount and they talk about, you know, ROI and it's really quantified in human hours. Like if we're just being honest, right.
Christina Kucek: But what I have seen is Most people, like, they have way more than 40 hours of work to do every week, right? So you have to really peel back that onion. You really have to peel it back layer after layer to even get them to be able to accomplish the things that are on their plate today. So we're asking a lot more for our people.
Christina Kucek: from them than I think we used to ask. Companies invest in all of these tools and they're like, well, I bought you this amazing software. Why can't you do the work of three people? Right? Like I spent a fortune on this software. You are now three people. So we're all already three people to, from the get, right?
Christina Kucek: So adding automation and AI on top of that, hopefully we'll just get there. I mean, we say that AI isn't a job killer, but it might be a job category killer, right? The way, like, scanner and fax machines were and, right? And we're digitizing all these documents now, like, you might not have to just key in data from a piece of paper into a system anymore.
Christina Kucek: That might be done, but it means that we're creating more work someplace else. Within the organization, you know, with these technology strides come new kinds of jobs, right? With the emergence of the internet, we have digital marketers, digital campaigns, right? Like we've got all these new, you know, thought leadership positions.
Christina Kucek: I think they were great.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, this is interesting because it could be certainly within contract work, but the idea that you're paid for project completion, delivery, whatever the metrics are for success in your job instead of for hours feels, I mean, it's been around for a while, but it feels new ish for a lot of people where they just sit for 40 hours or there's a bit of a whole like return to office stuff that's been going on that feels like, oh, you want to see.
Shawn Pfunder: That I'm sitting there or I'm available for 40 hours a week instead of, I'm really, really good at my job. I can do what others do in 40 hours, I can do in 10 and just deliver on whatever it is. I'm wondering if in, in your work, you talk to a lot of companies, you talk to a lot of, without of course revealing anything, but trend wise, do you, I mean, do you see us going more?
Shawn Pfunder: That kind of route. So instead of, instead of being paid just simply for hours, being paid for results or being paid for sort of delivery on a project moving forward. So then you could use the superpower and just take on as much as you want based off of what your talent or your experience is.
Christina Kucek: Yeah, I think it really depends on the industry because we work in both the public sector where they have to have people available to talk to constituents when they have to, right?
Christina Kucek: Service desk, customer experience, things like that, but augmenting those people with AI so we don't have to have people working really crazy hours to just pick up the easy things, right? But that, I think that's a lifestyle improvement for most of us and that we don't have to spend as much time being on call.
Christina Kucek: Mm hmm. that, you know, we could have an automated process to like reboot the server or to do an auto response to somebody. So we're serving the need, right, without having to extend people's time. I mean, it's, it's kind of all across the board, but I'll tell you, I was reading a book lately that was talking about a research study.
Christina Kucek: I can bring it up on my phone if you want to know the book later. But they were looking at different companies like technology companies when they like started up in the nineties. Right. And what they found was the companies that have the point of view where we want these people to start with us and end their career with that.
Christina Kucek: So we want them to be lifers. We want our employees to grow with us, right? They IPO hire. They have, you know, better revenue and they grow every year. Those are the ones that tended to be, you know, out of the dot com boom and all of these, you know, things that have happened, those are the companies that really succeed and it's thought of as being such an old archaic, old fashioned way of doing business.
Christina Kucek: Like who wants people to stay with their company? You know, it's all about being competitive and new blood. And what they found is that trust. When you have that philosophy, the trust that you build, if you want somebody to be with you for their entire career, like you can't quantify that. All of a sudden that fear is gone and the collaboration increases and their dedication to the success of your company increases and all of those natural, awesome byproducts.
Christina Kucek: So we're work from anywhere. CAI is now, after the pandemic, my man, our CTO, my manager, Matt Peters was work from anywhere. Since I, you know, was moved under his division. So like four and a half years ago, I've been working remotely and I love it. I connect well with my people. I, you know, meet all my objectives.
Christina Kucek: We're globally, you know, dislocate, you know, located all over the globe. So it works great for us to work under those parameters, but it doesn't fit every business model.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, well, three things. One, if you're not watching the video, sometimes I smile really big and laugh at something, and it's when you said, new blood, uh, because it sounded like Dracula for some reason.
Shawn Pfunder: New blood. But the other two things I love, that makes me, I absolutely want to see that study. Like that's, that just makes my, I sound super emotional in saying this. I'm not that necessarily that kind of guy, but it makes my heart really happy that you like, you hire people and you, it's not just lip service.
Shawn Pfunder: Say, I want you to grow. I want you to succeed. I want you to have opportunities, stretch, like try new things, whatever, because It sort of just baked in the turnover and the, and the new blood coming in to that space. And so I love that. And then the last one, thank you for pointing out. I have this weird blind spot just based off of my experience where I forget about Doctors, and nurses, and restaurant workers, Uber drivers, like, I just get into this tech brain mode where I'm like, So, are you just going to pay me for being talented and delivering on this project?
Shawn Pfunder: But you have a lot of people like, yeah, it's ours. Like, because they have to be, you know, we don't necessarily, I don't necessarily want to pay a nurse or a doctor for, hey, can you see five patients, but not my dad, because you knocked out your five patients and he's the next one down.
Christina Kucek: Yeah, for sure.
Shawn Pfunder: Pay based off hours.
Shawn Pfunder: So thanks for pointing out that my blind spot on industries and things like that. So where do you see AI taking us next? So not just a, not just a machine learning, not just automation. And I guess both professionally in the work that you're doing at CAI, but even Even personally, because it seems like that's even a, a mid ground.
Shawn Pfunder: If we've got augmented intelligence, like, why wouldn't it be in our personal lives as well? Like, you work with this a lot. The rest of us are like hobbyists. This is like hand radio for us, but you do this professionally. What are you seeing? Like, where, if you had to guess, like, where are we kind of headed next with this stuff?
Christina Kucek: Yeah, it's interesting. It's like my favorite topic. So, I could guess and be wrong, like, disclaimer, like, you're a thousand percent wrong, right? But it's already I'm wrong all the time, yeah. Oh, me too. So it's already in our lives, though, right? Like, so much. Like, my mother was this super effective, productive, like, you give her a phone and a Phone tree.
Christina Kucek: She could change the whole world, my mother. And, and then, oh, for real, remember the phone tree, uh, from the nineties? Those moms would just, okay. So, and dads, whatever. But like me, I don't want to talk to another human, like no offense. I'm like Gen X, like millennial kind of like in betweener. I don't want to talk to other humans unless I absolutely have to, you know?
Christina Kucek: And then my daughter was a, she's a swiper. Right. She grew up with like an iPad and her phone, but my son is four years old and he just talks to like, she who shall not be named right into thin air. And he's like, mommy, why don't you just ask her? She knows everything. So these models, these AI solutions are.
Christina Kucek: everywhere in our lives. And if I'm just being honest, like, I love them. Like, they make my life so much easier predicting things. Like, you and I spoke initially about R1, right? Rabbit, R1.
Shawn Pfunder: I know the rabbit R1.
Christina Kucek: I fell right down the rabbit hole when that came out. Like, pun fully intended. I mean, our brains were exploding because I feel like that is everything we've been talking about.
Christina Kucek: I mean, The idea of actionable AI changed the way we do development, fundamentally changed our design patterns for how we build automations, like two plus years ago. We started building them in these individual code snippets, right, that just did this one small thing. And then when you build them together, they can take an action.
Christina Kucek: So that way, when we have the AI capability to do one or more of these actions in a sequence, it could pull. The correct code snippets and APIs and all these pieces together to orchestrate, like, an action to do something nice for me. And that's what Rabbit is doing. I don't want to say a simplified level because it's super complicated, but in a business setting, you take it to like the nth degree, right?
Christina Kucek: It's just like exponentially more complex to, to pull all this data and feed it to all these different systems and all the conditional statements, right? So it's a much more monumental task to do it in a large organization than, you know, Get me a pizza to my location. It's still amazing that it's able to do it, right?
Shawn Pfunder: It is amazing.
Christina Kucek: Amazing. It can navigate my phone or an Android. I mean, it can do it. Like, it's, the fact that it came this early in 2024 is really exciting. And between work and dinner and, you know, taking the kids to all their things and the high school things and the preschool things and just life. Right?
Christina Kucek: I, I feel like anything that can make our very busy schedules that much easier and help me organize my time and get, you know, maximize my time that I get to spend with humans, right? So I spend less time researching something and I get to like look my kiddo in the eye or heaven forbid, talk to my husband or share a meal with him while we're talking.
Christina Kucek: I mean, give it to me. Anything that they, any technology that can get me that, that like dream reality. I'll take it. I'll try it out.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. I mean, there's something really different when you talk about dinner, there's something really different than, Hey, I want Indian food. What are my options? Or even right now we would open up, you know, Google maps or something and take a look, or you open up Uber Eats or DoorDash or whatever, you open up those things,
Shawn Pfunder: there's something different to doing that versus like, Hey, whoever, I don't know, Hey, Rufus, we need Indian food for five, order the same thing that we always order, need it here by six.
Shawn Pfunder: Okay. Well, and then that's it.
Christina Kucek: Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: You didn't go looking, you didn't have to find it. You didn't have to do anything else. Like. That's actionable. That comes through. Instead of telling you how to do it, it just does it.
Christina Kucek: 100%. But do you notice when you see the prototype, there's that extra step, which I'm so excited to see.
Christina Kucek: The ethical, responsible AI. It always says, like, I'm going to do this. This is the itinerary. Do you want me to book it? I'm going to order the pizza. Do you want me to do this? Here's what, you know, it's displaying or it's telling you out loud, you know, I'm going to do this. Are you cool with it? Because at the end of the day, if that pizza gets delivered to your old address.
Christina Kucek: Or, you know, you book, you said the wrong dates. Like I said, in March, I meant April. Like, don't, I wish you didn't book that non refundable ticket. Thanks. Thanks AI. You know? Yeah. I want that. Like, are you sure I'm about to do this for you? Is this the way you wanted it done? Are you sure? Do I need to fix anything here?
Christina Kucek: Did I mess? You didn't want this dish. It was too spicy last time. You actually want this other one. Yeah, that's not making my life easier, it's making my life harder is what that, and more expensive, right? Oh,
Shawn Pfunder: I know. You know, it's interesting that you bring that up from an ethical standpoint. That does make sense, because initially there's a part of me that's like, eh.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, I don't know, then it's my fault that I did it, or the AI is not smart enough to know that I said March, but I probably mean April because that's my mom's birthday, or
Christina Kucek: Right.
Shawn Pfunder: Or I'm wearing the device somehow in me that says, hey, Shawn, your body doesn't do well when you eat this super spicy Indian food, let me take care of that, uh, from that front.
Shawn Pfunder: But it does make sense, like, ethically, because it keeps the final decision, the review, like whatever that is, that keeps that with. Me, even if the AI is smart enough to know, which is that's what's freaking people out now. Like, Hey, I know you better than you know yourself. This is what we're going to get.
Shawn Pfunder: You want garlic naan today because X, Y, and Z happened over the past week instead of regular naan. Like, that's Yeah, that's new.
Shawn Pfunder: And keeping the human piece to that does feel really ethical.
Christina Kucek: Yeah, and responsible and all the good things. So it's like, you can have your cake and eat it too. Because at the end of the day, if you do the stupid thing and AI lets you do it, it's like, well, you could blame the AI.
Christina Kucek: But ultimately, especially in a business context, it's on you. Right? I know. So, making sure that the humans in the driver's seat is really important. Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, it's the same with code. I, uh, you know, when you program, you think like, oh, no, no, it's the code or it's the whatever when you first start, like, I'm doing this absolutely right.
Shawn Pfunder: I know I'm doing it right. And then, yeah, and then you miss a semicolon or a bracket or something goofy that's in there. And then you realize, oh, yeah, the machine's not going to lie. The machine's going to do what you tell the machine to do. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, so it sounds like then this augmented intelligence moving forward, just making lives a little bit easier so they have time to be, I mean, from what you're saying, so they have time to be human, to make those actual connections, to make decisions, to be creative, it just allows for more of that to happen than just doom scrolling your inbox or being taken away to something else.
Shawn Pfunder: Does that sound reasonable? Right? And kind of where you're falling on this stuff?
Christina Kucek: It does. I mean, it, no matter what it is, I feel like it removes the blank sheet of paper. It's always so much harder to start with a blank sheet of paper. It's like, I'm just going to stream of consciousness into this and you're going to help me create something and then I'm going to refine it and make it better.
Christina Kucek: Is it collaboration with an artificial intelligence to augment our human capability? And Accelerate Business, yeah, and Accelerator Alive, so how about that, Accelerate Parenthood.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, Accelerate Parenthood, come on, come on, come on, turn 18, turn 18. Right? Uh, no, I won't. Well, speaking of acceleration, what's next for you?
Shawn Pfunder: What are you going to be doing next, professionally or, or projects or playing with AI?
Christina Kucek: Yeah, I mean, we're doing a lot of acceleration in the IT service desk space. So just hyper automation all the way, accelerate where you can, leverage this intelligently, responsibly, but like give these folks the tools and the capabilities they need to be successful.
Christina Kucek: But yeah, AI implementations, automation implementations. I love it. I love just talking to stakeholders and saying, well, what are your goals? Not the little ones. Give me the big goals. You want to improve customer experience. You want to improve employee experience. You want to, you know, what are your goals?
Christina Kucek: And then how can we leverage AI and automation to make those happen? I mean, it, it gets me up in the morning. What can I say?
Shawn Pfunder: Well, if it makes it easier for me to, you know, reaching out to IT and say, Hey, can you create a ticket for that?
Shawn Pfunder: And I'm like, yeah, sure, and natural language, type it in, create the ticket, I never have to go into service now, I never have to go in anywhere else.
Christina Kucek: Oh, we haven't.
Shawn Pfunder: And I'm done. That's amazing.
Christina Kucek: We haven't. It's embedded right into Teams. I haven't been in service now since we rolled it out, not once.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, great. Yeah. There's a tinge of jealousy, envy, so to speak, when you tell me that, which I love. Well, where can we find out more about CAI, the stuff that you're working about?
Shawn Pfunder: Do you have white paper studies, webinars, things like that, that we can learn more?
Christina Kucek: We have all of those things on LinkedIn and our website is www. cai. io. We have the IEO exchange at the end, which is a little different for a technologist. And I'm Christina Kucek, K U C E K, on LinkedIn. Ping me! This is my favorite topic, so, you know, I'd love to keep the conversation going.
Shawn Pfunder: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for joining us. You gave me a lot of, like, you gave me a lot to think about to the point that I can't use words.
Christina Kucek: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's really been a pleasure talking with you today.