Amy Wilkinson - What skills are needed for the future? STANFORD GSB Entrepreneurship Lecturer, CEO INGENUITY, and International Bestseller of THE CREATOR'S CODE
Amy Wilkinson
If you look at some of the data computer science, which has been a great major to get employed and to do everything else it's maybe going to be less in demand because Gen AI is going to write code. It does write code.
Anne McGinty
Welcome to how I Built my Small Business. Welcome to how I Built my Small Business. I'm Anne McGinty, your host, and today I have Amy Wilkinson talking with us about the skills needed for the future. Amy is the founder and CEO of Ingenuity, a lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the author of the international bestseller the Creator's Code. She has written articles for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist Inc Magazine and dozens more. Amy has been featured on NPR, is a top-ranked keynote speaker, and her TEDx talk on the secret of how to think like an entrepreneur has been described as a must-listen full of amazing content. You can find a link through to her business in the episode's description.
01:16
Before we get started, there is one thing that you can do to help me grow my show, and that is to please hit the follow button on your favorite streaming platform. All right, let's get started. Thank you to our listeners for joining us today. Amy, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here with you. You wear many hats as a CEO, a lecturer at Stanford, an author. What do you find most rewarding in what you do?
Amy Wilkinson
You know, I find rewarding different elements of teaching. So that's what I do at Stanford Business School and running a company which is amazing and fun and love working with our clients. And then I do some writing, which you know. Each piece of what I do feels very rewarding, but in different ways.
Anne McGinty
For the research that you did for the creator's code, which was your international bestseller. As you know which insights have had the biggest impact on your personal and business life.
Amy Wilkinson
Yeah, you know the research there came back with six essential skills, and so I would say that you know I actually practice the six skills in everything that I do. I do it with my team, you know, doing research and then trying to live the results of your research. It's difficult sometimes to get it right, but I actually find that the research helps inform even my own effectiveness, and so I'm really trying to do the six skills in teaching and in running a company.
Anne McGinty
When did you decide to start your company Ingenuity?
Amy Wilkinson
You know, the company started about a year and a half after the publication of the book, and it was a surprise in many ways in that for the book, I interviewed the 200 top founders in the United States that had scaled businesses from zero to $100 million revenue, and so I'm arguably an expert on high-scale entrepreneurship. The company Ingenuity is a response, however and this is the surprise to very large fortune 500 companies that want the same mindset, skillset in their workforce, and so a lot of very large legacy businesses and the leadership there were coming to me and saying will you please help sort of enable, empower our internal workforces to grow more aggressively and be more entrepreneurial.
Anne McGinty
And as an expert on entrepreneurship, innovation and AI, what are you curious about and exploring in your work now?
Amy Wilkinson
Everything that I do and I'm sure you feel like this most people do is really being impacted by AI. I mean generative AI, especially in the last 18 to 24 months. Artificial intelligence, big data this has been around for a very long time, but the generative AI piece, which has sort of unleashed a whole new way of working and studying and synthesizing information, is really what captures a lot of my attention. Now I can say that in the course that I teach at Stanford on being an entrepreneur in an existing organization, we shifted 80% of that content last fall because of generative AI, like it literally has changed that much of what I'm teaching. So it's pretty exciting frontier to be on right now and that's getting a lot of my attention.
Anne McGinty
When you say generative AI, you're talking about the ability for the AI to self-learn. So you're talking about, like chat, gpt and anthropic and things like that. That's right?
Amy Wilkinson
Yeah, so you know. The difference is that it actually generates new and unique versions of answers, very different from search on Google, where you would just get a series of links, and the links are pretty much the same. Chatgpt 4.0, every time you ask a question, you get a different answer. It's synthesizing and generating a response based on scouring all of the information of the web, but pushing the regenerate button, for example on GPT-4, is fascinating because you'll never get the same answer twice, right? So that's what makes it so different.
Anne McGinty
And in your classroom? What resources and tips are you giving to your students to give them the best foot forward when they graduate?
Amy Wilkinson
Well, education is going to be profoundly impacted by generative AI. We're in the very earliest moments of it, so we're all experimenting. Faculty is experimenting, the university, the standards, the administration, the university, the standards, the administration. Students are, in many cases, ahead because they are collaborating and experimenting extremely quickly. And to your question, what makes someone successful going forward, I think it's the ability to learn and continue to learn. So education is in the formation of a great change right now.
06:25
But I think for people, whether you're graduating this year, next year, five years from now, or you graduated five years ago or 10 years ago, or you know however many years you've got to keep up to date on what's happening. So it's just the lifelong learning message. So, for students that are graduating this year and going out into a world that's rapidly changing, my advice to them is you have to keep experimenting, you have to test these tools. No one is an expert at generative AI. It's only been around for 18 to 24 months, really, and so no one's too far behind either. You just have to continue to experiment and learn and test and update your skills, and if you don't do that, you will be left behind.
Anne McGinty
So then, what are your thoughts on how AI is going to impact human capital? What is going to happen to jobs?
Amy Wilkinson
Yeah, I think we're going to see a profound shift here in a couple different ways.
07:23
It's going to increase productivity tremendously and there's already data and results out from Mercer Consulting Firm, from Goldman Sachs, from McKinsey there's lots of different information sources that you can see about how the workforce is going to be a lot more productive.
07:40
Companies or employees using Gen AI are 40 to 60% more productive, and so you want to be using these tools to power your professional work. In terms of a workforce shift, I think we will see dislocation of certain groups of people, and you can look at this in law firms, all of the paralegal work that may be outsourcing towards AI assistance. You'll see this in accounting firms. You'll see it in banks. You'll see it in consulting firms. We will see a different shift in the highly professionalized workforce, and I don't think it's something we need to be afraid of, but I do think it's something where, at every level, you want to be using these tools to stay ahead and the mantra I'm sure you've heard it but you won't be replaced by AI, but you'll be replaced by a person using AI. So that's again the need to upskill and reskill each one of us all the time.
Anne McGinty
And knowing that AI is being trained by such a diverse group of individuals, whether they're in this country or maybe in another country, what does that say about trust in AI within society? Like what can we expect there?
Amy Wilkinson
Well, one of the criticisms is that it's not being trained with a diverse enough workforce or background or input.
09:11
And so if you look at who's really building the generative AI models, a lot of them are coming out of Silicon Valley.
09:19
They're backed by the hyperscalers, by Meta, by Google, by Microsoft, obviously backing open AI, and you see, in many cases, real homogeneous group of people that tend to be white males, silicon Valley trained technologists that are building this, and one of the clients that we work with Ingenuity is Hearst Magazines and Cosmopolitan Magazine specifically. Cosmo has 30 million women readers digitally and OpenAI is really actively trying to work with that 30 million women that are age 18 to 35, because that group of people that is a different gender, living in places all over the world, is a rich group of people to get their point of view into building these very models, for example, right. And so there's a lot of debate around do we have the right historical representation in building these models? I'm sure you've followed some of this, but do we have minority points of view? Do we have indigenous points of view? Do we have all different socioeconomic data and classes and points of view? And so really the building out of this tool and technology diversity is pretty important, and right now is there's a debate going on.
Anne McGinty
Well, I was just wondering if, say, another country that maybe had a different culture or priorities than we do and you know, americans may think that they're right, but another country may differ how will the AI decide who is right?
Amy Wilkinson
Well, the United States is ahead in the development of AI. China is coming up as a close second. The capital required to build these models is very significant. So to your question do we have the same value systems as others that are building the fundamental AI models? There's a big difference between US values and Chinese values, and those of us that live in Western civilization, we would like AI to have built into it a profound regard for human rights, for example. We want to protect the rule of law, for example.
11:46
You know, there are various things that Western civilizations believe is very important, and so that's the race to build AI, and there's a conversation in the US sometimes about should we be regulating? The technology companies are out in front of government, certainly worldwide, and my view on that is that we want US tech companies to build as fast as they can, because we don't want another culture that would be quite different from ours to get in front of us. Yeah, so I think it's pretty important to have a Western, a US perspective on it to build the future that we want to see.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. We can't really stop. We kind of need to move as quickly as we can. So what to you do you see as the most exciting potential for AI and our futures?
Amy Wilkinson
Well, I think that there's an enormous amount of potential in the healthcare space. You know, you see breakthrough analysis that leads to disease prevention. There's a lot of research. We're just on the cusp of seeing an amazing amount of breakthrough in the healthcare space. I think it's also pretty exciting in the education space in that, if you've followed Khan Academy, for example, khan Academy has got a big partnership now with Microsoft, openai, and the idea there is that every student, every person who wants to learn, can have an AI teaching assistant. Basically, you can have an AI tutor and that tutor. If you're trying to learn math skills, if you're trying to learn history, whatever it is, they can give you multiple examples. They can help you follow the steps to learn. They don't get tired, you don't have to pay them more. It's an amazing technology to help people who want to engage, really learn and accelerate, and it can be accessible worldwide, right, and so the ability to transform knowledge is pretty substantial when you use it as a teaching tool. When you use it as a teaching tool. So I think there's a lot of exciting future there as well, and then I just think overall for enterprise, we're just going to be a lot more productive If you look at it as the next industrial revolution, our organizations are going to be able to do multiples of what we can right now in a fraction of the time. So if you use this tool really effectively, you boost your own productivity for whatever you're trying to do. So you know, I'll give an example. We run an innovation firm. You can test ideas. You can iterate back and forth with chat GPT, for you can build marketing materials. You can build all kinds of writing materials. The next wave will be video. It is amazing what one person or one small team can be doing. If you use these tools Now, will that displace like, look at the marketing and advertising space? Will that to some degree displace huge marketing firms and advertising firms? Yeah, maybe, because you're putting the tools in the hands of every person to be able to do some of their own marketing, brandingplace them? Yeah, to some degree it will, right. And will it democratize those tools in the hands of any professional who wants to do some of their own marketing? You are empowered with these tools. That will make you a lot more productive.
15:28
If you want to think about it, it's a little bit like Excel coming into the financial world. You know there were bankers where people were doing calculations to value companies when it was pretty hard and arduous to do, and then Excel came in as a tool and that really made it easier. I was an investment banker with JP Morgan early in my career and that made it easier. Now there were still workforces of analysts and associates building massive Excel models and going forward. Arguably, generative AI is going to build those models and you won't have to have all of those analysts and associates. You're still going to need some and you're still going to need to test the assumptions. You're still going to need to understand how to build a financial model, but it's just the evolution of maybe having a calculator to having an Excel spreadsheet, to having a financial model, but it's just the evolution of maybe having a calculator to having an Excel spreadsheet, to having a gen AI model. That makes that process less labor intensive and faster.
Anne McGinty
How can people stay up to date on understanding how to best utilize AI so that they don't get left behind? Where can they learn?
Amy Wilkinson
Well, there are amazing amounts of resources available. One place I like to direct people is to MIT. Mit puts all of its courses out for free, so you can go and find a lot of the MIT courses on AI, for example, right, you can take them online. Coursera is another place. There are amazing courses there. Now you have to purchase them. Microsoft has put out a number of resources for free on how to utilize AI to make yourself more productive. If you want to find the resources to a large degree, they're there. It takes time for every single person to experiment with it.
17:22
I gave a talk two months ago now in Portland, oregon. I'm from Portland and my mother is part of a women's club there called the Town Club, and so I gave a talk to all the ladies at the Town Club, and they tend to be in their 60s, probably as the youngest 70s, 80s and they were asking me how do we make ourselves up to date on AI? What do we need to know about our own lives and AI? And so we did a talk, and now a bunch of these grandmother types are using ChatGPT4 to plan travel, to figure out where they want to go with their grandkids, with their kids, to figure out financial research. Where do they want to invest in the marketplace?
18:10
We tried to make it as practical as possible, and one thing I said to that audience, which I often say, is a lot of people don't want to pay $20 a month for GPT-4 and now they've made a lot of that free. But you wouldn't go back to DSL dial up. All of us pay for fast access to the web. Now, right, I mean for the most part, everyone at home is saying it's worth paying a subscription fee in order to have fast internet connectivity, and I believe that it makes you even more productive to have fast, generative AI capability, and so if you have to pay a little fee every month for that to be more productive, even if you're 80 years old and you want to stay up with the trends, it's very worthwhile.
Anne McGinty
That's something to think about, because I only use chat GPT-4. I mean, I get to use the Omni version in a select number of times per day, but maybe I should also just do it.
Amy Wilkinson
Upgrade, yeah, because other things in your life, if they make you more productive, if they make you healthier, if they make you more able to communicate, you're very willing to pay for them. Right? Yeah, if you use it as an effective tool, I think is one of the force multipliers.
Anne McGinty
So, with the birth of AI being so brand new I mean, it is still technically a baby, and we saw how rapidly the technology development curve went from the late 90s to now Do you think that there will be an AI bubble, the way that there was a 99.com bubble? Do I think?
Amy Wilkinson
some of the funding of AI startups is overhyped right now. Yes, but do I think that there is a quote bubble that means it will get washed out and go away? No, I don't think so. I think that, arguably, this wave of technology is bigger than the internet, and I was at Stanford as a student, both as an undergrad and a grad, and then in business school. I came out of undergrad school in the mid nineties when the internet was just getting launched and a lot of the conversation then was hey, do you need a webpage? Like does anyone think that the internet is really gonna affect our professional lives or will it affect business? Like is this important?
20:29
We're kind of having that conversation now with Gen AI, and if you look back at that, it is fundamentally everything about the way we do business. It's how you find information, it's how you find information, it's how you find partners, it's how supply chains are tracked. The internet is thoroughly integrated. If you have a business that doesn't have some kind of use of the internet, you're kind of living in the dark ages, right. And then the mobile revolution came along. I came out of business school in 2002. So by 2005 or six, seven, like everything was mobile, and if you don't have a mobile phone now and you don't have access to information in your car as you walk around, if you're waiting to get to a computer terminal, you're also sort of left behind. Now, right, the mobile revolution was the next wave, and I believe this Gen AI wave will be bigger than either of those, and so we'll look forward five years, 10 years, and everything we do is going to be powered by computational analytics to help power what we're doing by computational analytics to help power what we're doing.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, I think you're right that this is going to be much bigger than the internet and mobile phones. What skills, beyond understanding how to use AI? What skills do you think students need the next generation needs when they enter adulthood?
Amy Wilkinson
Sure, I think that there's a real need for critical thinking, because there's going to be so much information coming at you, and the people that will really succeed will be able to decipher information, be able to synthesize information, be able to ask the right questions. So I think curiosity is an absolute must, and the ability to probe and ask questions and then synthesize what information is coming back. You see this right now with prompt engineering, right. So what prompt do you put in to chat, gpt, and then what information do you get back? And the better the prompt, the better the question, the better information you get back, and so I think it's going to be an important skill to think about.
22:48
How do you probe, how do you question, how do you follow up, how do you synthesize, how do you think critically? You're not going to have to do all of the finding of information and sifting and sorting and processing of it, but you are very much going to need to understand what are the assumptions built in and do you agree with them? Do you want to tweak them? Do you want to ask a different question to get to the underlying assumptions of an argument, for example, that's being presented to you? So I think critical thinking and curiosity are two of the biggest going forward.
Anne McGinty
And do you think that AI is going to be capable of learning critical thinking skills and learning curiosity as well?
Amy Wilkinson
Yeah, I do. I was just a couple of weeks ago at the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles and Elon Musk was asked this question about AI and he's arguably, you know, one of the people who has been thinking about this for quite a while and has now stood up XAI as a challenger to open AI, and they've just raised $6 billion in funding. I mean, that just happened this weekend. They've just raised $6 billion in funding. I mean, that just happened this weekend. So he was asked and what he was saying is, yes, he believes that AI needs to be curious and that it's one of the most important factors in building a future of safety, in fact, that you need AI to be curious and that if AI is curious, that it will continue to experiment and continue to learn.
24:28
And in many ways, it was a little bit of a dark comment that he made, but he was saying in a dystopian future, if AI is more powerful really than human cognition, you want the AI to be curious enough to wonder and keep humans around. Like you know, humans are very unpredictable and in many ways, we're causing a lot of the problems on the planet we're polluting, we're doing things that are really irrational, and so you want AI to look at humans and be curious enough to wonder what's going to happen next and be supportive. It's kind of dystopian future, but I mean, it was a fascinating answer on this very question that I saw.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, I've just finished reading the first half of Mo Gowdat's Scary Smart, where he paints that dystopian future, mentions some of the things that Elon Musk is talking about as well, and it does sound like there's a bit of an unknown. When the AI does become so much smarter than us that it is Einstein and we are a fly on the wall, what will it do with us? Do you have any of those worries?
Amy Wilkinson
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of conversation right now. There's this dystopian sort of fear of AI, and I think the best answer, best response that I've heard in multiple conversations of sort of the top Silicon Valley thinkers on AI, is that we need AI to protect us from AI. So this is another reason why we don't want to slow down US technology companies from building these models that have, again, human rights built into them, rule of law built into them, sort of a moral and ethical compass that we believe as a society is the right way to treat people right, and so if you do have AI, that might become threatening. What you need is AI to be a checkmate on that. So that's the sort of future that we probably need to be building in terms of protection as well.
Anne McGinty
I think so too. So what do you see for your everyday life as AI progresses as a utopian future?
Amy Wilkinson
Well, I can already tell you some of the things that I do differently, and it's awesome. I mean, like coming out of meetings. For example, you can feed notes If you have a transcript of notes into Gen AI and have an immediate summary of your meeting, right, and instead of having a note taker and having to go back and figure out which decision was made and who was responsible for the next steps, whatever, it's immediately there for you, it's just done Right, and so that saves my teams quite a lot of time. Or here's another example If I'm leaving a client site and I have a 20 minute drive home, conversational AI is so powerful in that it can understand my voice and I can just sort of verbally talk to my phone while I'm driving and say here's the proposal that I want to write for this client, here's what I think we need to outline.
27:47
Here's 0.1234. I think we should price this at X price. I think our deliverable timeframe should be over the next three months, this, that the other, and when I get home, there is a proposal that's already drafted oh my gosh and edit it right, like I have to do. But in the 20 minutes that I drive home, I have done my homework out of a meeting that you know just a few months ago would take me painstaking time for the next couple of days, Right, and a proposal for a client can be generated as I'm driving home. So there are things like that that are happening right now that are really freeing up a lot of my time and making our teams more productive.
Anne McGinty
Can you rattle off some of these softwares that you're using? So it sounds like you're using more than just ChatGPT 4.0.
Amy Wilkinson
Well, we're using that, we're using Claude, and there's different reasons for different ones. We use Otter AI for transcripts and I'll also say, when I wrote the creator's code, the book, and it was published nine years ago now, I did 200 interviews and I had to hire people to write those transcripts and it took days. I was recording them on a handheld device but it was thousands and thousands of dollars paying people to transcribe interviews. There were 10,000 pages of interviews behind the research for that book and now Otterai just records meetings, interviews, whatever. Real time Like it is amazingly more productive. So I'm going in to start writing a next book and it will make that efficiency so much greater and it will make it more joyful, like you know, for everybody who is hammering out transcripts and then me having to go back and, sort of pattern recognize across transcripts that were printed instead of digital. It's an amazing difference of what can happen even in a research project like that.
Anne McGinty
So what do you think, then, about the intersection of innovation, entrepreneurship and AI?
Amy Wilkinson
I think it's one of the most exciting intersections that we're going to see, because innovators are going to use this technology.
30:06
First adopters often are experimenting with the technologies ahead of everyone else, and so I think we'll see innovators and entrepreneurs be years ahead if they are adopting these technologies.
30:21
And one thing that's different about this wave of technology versus the internet or 1999 when we looked at that, or even mobile, is that the compute power and the cost behind this is so great that the hyperscalers are largely driving this revolution, which means that incumbent very large incumbent companies again it's Microsoft and Amazon and Meta and Google. You know they are driving this wave of technology build, this wave of technology build, and so I think in some ways it's going to be different from all the small startups, and there will still be many small startups that are doing applications on top of AI, right. So I mean, it's not just the hyperscalers, but it's a little bit different dynamic that we're seeing on this frontier, and so I think we'll see these very large traditional organizations, the incumbents, leading the charge on this wave of technology, and so I think that will put some more pressure on other large incumbent companies. It will really be an industrial revolution for large organizations as well as individuals.
Anne McGinty
Do you think that there will still be space for smaller startup AIs to do well?
Amy Wilkinson
Yeah, I do. But if you look at what the venture capital industry is backing, a lot of the VCs are trying to back things that are not enterprise technology, because the enterprise technologies, for the most part, are going to be dominated by the hyperscalers. So if you watch where investment dollars are going, they are going a lot into healthcare, right, because arguably you're not going to see meta, probably, or Google or Microsoft become healthcare.
Anne McGinty
I see, yeah, how long do you think that this AI wave building is going to take place?
Amy Wilkinson
I think we're going to see a huge change in the next two years. So I think the race is on right now and the race is on to build data centers, to build compute power. This is the critical window in which we build out what that future looks like. And then I think, sure, from years three to five and five to 10, it's just going to continue to advance. But I think we're in the moment in time right now where the next 24 months, the next two years, sees winners and losers on the frontier of who's going to really drive this technology.
Anne McGinty
And where may be some unique gaps in this AI journey that could provide opportunities.
Amy Wilkinson
I think healthcare, I think education, I think any kind of application of the technology. I don't think that entrepreneurs and small companies are going to be building the compute power. It's just too expensive, it requires too much capital. But the creativity is on the next layer. So that's on the applications and uses.
Anne McGinty
And if somebody wanted to understand the applications and uses, what kind of a degree are they getting? Is this considered computer science or what is this?
Amy Wilkinson
I think it can come from anywhere. I mean, there's the kind of exciting part and, by the way, if you look at some of the data computer science, which has been a great major to get employed and to do everything else computer science, which has been a great major to get employed and to do everything else it's maybe going to be less in demand because Gen AI is going to write code. It does write code and so for everybody who's been training on how to write code, maybe you're not going to need that skill set, right, because maybe you're just going to need to be able to ask the right questions and have Gen AI build code. So this argues in some ways for a more liberal arts education. We're kind of the pendulum may be swinging back again towards critical thinking.
34:12
Wow, right, that is fascinating. So I think you can be a entrepreneur from any angle. It's how you're going to use the power of the tools, how you're going to apply it. I think the hyperscalers are going to build, they're going to build the computational power and then the rest of us are going to try to figure out what the layers are on top of it and what the applications. What does that really mean?
Anne McGinty
Well, Amy, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and share your knowledge and insights with all of us. Well, thank you, Anne.
Amy Wilkinson
I have absolutely enjoyed the interview and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Anne McGinty
As always, thanks for being here. Today's key takeaways Generative AI is unleashing a whole new way of learning and synthesizing information. At Stanford's Graduate School of Business, 80% of their content has shifted because of Gen AI. Education is going to be profoundly impacted by this technology. Learn and continue to learn and keep up to date on what is happening with Gen AI. Experiment and test the tools that are available and that continue to be brought to market. Update your skills or you'll be left behind.
35:29
Gen AI has only been around for a couple years, so it's not too late. If you pay attention to and learn about the capabilities of Gen AI, you will begin to understand the shift that we will see in the future with jobs. There is a well-known mantra you won't be replaced by AI, but you will be replaced by a person using AI. The hyperscalers, such as Google, meta, microsoft, for example, will be the ones to create artificial intelligence because of the significant capital required to build these models with data centers and compute power. So the hyperscalers will be leading the charge. There is enormous potential in the healthcare and education spaces and for applications, uses and creativity of the technology that can be layered on top of AI. Mit puts their courses out for free, so you can find access to incredible education through their AI courses online. Coursera is another resource with low-cost classes, and Microsoft has put out courses for free as well.
36:39
The artificial intelligence wave is arguably much, much bigger than the emergence of the internet or mobile phones. There's a real need for critical thinking skills and curiosity, plus the ability to ask the right questions. You need to practice and understand prompt engineering. This means knowing how to probe, question and follow up. If you haven't already, check out and get to know ChatGPT 4.0, cloud AI, otter AI, conversational AI and start experimenting. There are ways that you could likely be using Gen AI right now to free up your time while simultaneously increasing your productivity, so look into it. That's all for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.
