Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:33:20 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:33:20] S2: I'm having a bit of a moment where I'm like, every every real CEO building right now should be listening to this, thinking about how do you get ahead of where the world is going. And I wanna recap a few things that I find really interesting. One, I I like this pushback, Brian, that it is not clear that we will have fewer people. What is clear is that they will be significantly more efficient and probably solving more complicated problems, which actually, you know, let's go back to the the chain guard analogy of you get rid of the factory worker because they become the factory manager. And actually, in that analogy, that factory manager now is managing a lot more complexity and actually doing a lot more real thinking work because a lot of the rote stuff you can actually get offloaded. And so you actually need better management support in that future Mhmm. Because you're like, are we thinking about inputs properly? Do we have the right dashboards for how to think about maybe the complexity of this new problem and ideas? He had this sentence that he was like, ideas are the bottleneck. And so people will be ideating and strategizing a lot more, and that I saw sort of the future gets rid of linear thinkers, and it thinks about nonlinear thinkers, which I think all three of us on this are are nonlinear thinkers. We're very strategic. And in which case, you actually need more support. So... And and then I also really like what you're saying, which is like, I don't know. Organizations may have more people. They're just doing more.
00:34:57 · Brian Distelburger
[00:34:57] S0: I'll give you a very specific example from a very old company. IKEA. We've all had the experience of putting IKEA furniture together. They have a massive call center. They started using AI agents to field a bunch of their calls and turns out that they were... I think it was 47% of the calls they found were able to be fielded by AI agents. Great. Cool. They had a choice. Right? They could lay off all those people. Cool. We cut cost a little bit or whatever. What they did instead is they realized that there was another service that all those people wanted who were engaging with the brand, which was help with interior design. And I know nothing about interior design, but I I would know I need help. And so they repurposed all those people into consultants to help with interior design. They ended up... They just announced they did an extra billion dollars of revenue from those people that they kept. And so when companies... When you have people that fit your company, that fit your culture, that you've trained, that you've developed, that know how you operate, that know how you make decisions, it is... To your point, it's an ideas problem with how to leverage them.
00:36:13 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:36:13] S2: Okay. Now we're gonna get on a point that really matches. I know all three of our value system that we've talked about privately, but we should talk about publicly. So when we met you guys, I had confessed that some... Maybe like now three years ago, I'd sought out seeing AI coming. I'd sought out some big think tanks around the White House around like the future of labor. And as someone who cares deeply about America's wallets, I was like, we can't just lay off 50,000,000 people tomorrow. That would be horrible. None of us want a world. None of us want our kids to be raised in a world like that. And this incredible person I'd spoken to sort of leading the charge of the thought of that was like skills assessment is everything. Knowing the skills that people are good at very clearly is really important because then you can take those people who maybe get displaced and you can redeploy them towards something better. And what you just gave, Brian, in that analogy is a really profound one, which is IKEA made the choice. Why on earth would we just cut these people? Let's go redeploy them because they... Skills towards more revenue. And, again, none of those incumbent products that exist are doing any of that, and Windmill will. How do you think... How do you guys think about skills assessment?
00:37:35 · Max Shaw
[00:37:35] S3: Yeah. I I take it back to the to the context graph. It is all... Like, there isn't a place right now. So I I think a skills assessment is kind of like one of the use cases for for what we're building. There isn't a place right now where you can go into some system and say, I wanna know what Brian's good at. Right? That does not exist in any system, let alone... Or being able to, like, ask questions about, hey. I'm thinking about putting Brian in this role. Do you think this would be a good fit? What will go well? What will not go well? None of that exists because that context layer does not exist. And so I I think the skills framework makes a ton of sense and being able to understand... I I think one one thing I don't love about the skills framework is it's usually too cookie cutter. It's usually too, like Yep. We we have, like... Instead of job titles, I have, like, 27 skills, and it's like, are you yes or no or some scale or something like that. And I think people are a lot more dynamic than that. And before LLMs, there was really no other choice but to kinda bucket stuff up and try to put numbers on it so then you can see, like, a match quality and stuff. With LLMs, it's exciting because if you give it the right context, you can talk to it like a person would. Right? Someone who knows Brian extremely well, who's worked with them for their entire career, knows every single project he's ever worked on, what's going well, and how he's changed, and how he's evolved, and what he's interested in, and what his skills are, which is part of it. And you could essentially just have that conversation of like, hey. What... And and and you said back to the IKEA example, taking those call center agents and understanding who they are and what they're really good at and why they're actually talented and you... And and and aligned to the IKEA values and and kind of role play some of this stuff, I think, an interesting way to think about this. Another common term here is, like, running simulations on being like, hey. On the IKEA example, what if you took all the agents and have them do interior design? I think there's actually the opportunity to potentially predict some of these outcomes and to actually run a simulation before doing it.
00:39:23 · Alexa von Tobel, Max Shaw
[00:39:23] S2: Wow. [00:39:23] S3: Which is pretty, pretty interesting concepts. It's only it's only ever gonna work if you feed it the right context, though. [00:39:30] S2: Actually, Max, you know, your largest cost of almost every company is your human talent. It's, like, quite literally for... I mean, I'm... I I don't wanna overstate it, but maybe 98% of companies, that's their largest cost. Yep. What you're basically saying is let's have a software that not only optimizes that that system, and then let's also start to think about workforce redeployment in really powerful and sophisticated ways that doesn't exist.
00:39:59 · Max Shaw
[00:39:59] S3: Yeah. There's there's no... We have so many ideas about how you can leverage it once you get the right pieces together. But getting the pieces together is not easy. And a lot of the most important information right now doesn't live in any system. It lives in managers and employees' heads. And so it's not just like we need to connect Slack and DHRIS and linear. Right? Yes. We can do that. But the harder part, and actually, the reason people love Windmill is we have a system that can collect a lot of the information that lives in managers' heads and employees' heads and systematically collect and organize it and permission it so that the right people can see it and the right people can understand it. But without that piece, you're just not gonna have the right information, and it's gonna lead to... It could... There's a, like, a pretty big risk here where you can start asking AI questions about your people. I can ask chat... GPT a question. And if it doesn't have a context graph, it usually doesn't say, I don't know. Usually, it'll just say something. And so without the right system in place, there's actually, on the flip side, a really high level of risk for individuals and organizations where you're gonna get a lot of really bad advice, especially in areas like this where the context isn't there.