– Welcome everybody to today’s “Building My Legacy” podcast. I have with me today, Neil Sahota. I put a little bit of a Japanese twist on that. Neil is fascinating in terms of his background. There’s so many people right now that are looking at, they want to be innovative, they want to create innovative products. I hear a lot of people talking about artificial intelligence and the various components of that, but today we have an expert in our presence who has done all of that. Neil is an IBM Master Inventor, a United Nations Artificial Intelligence Advisor, Chief Innovation Officer and globally recognized speaker and author. He is a founding member of the United Nations Artificial Intelligence for Good initiative, and he’s here to talk to us about disrupt the box. Neil, you’re also have an AKA called Game Changer, I think that’s what you’ve been all about, but tell us, how did you get started in this game?

– Honestly, Lois, it was a complete accident. Never planned any of this. I’ve just been the guy that sought the challenge and the opportunity to learn and that kind of opened up my mind, if you will, to possibilities.

– Wow, so if we just have an inquisitive nature and we’re willing to explore it, you say that we can do a lot. I’m fascinated, so go on, tell us your story.

– Well, you know, I started off my career as a management consultant and you know, everyone’s looking for that innovative or disruptive idea, and it’s hard to do. We get used to things and we don’t realize you can’t see the forest from the trees anymore. And at least being a consultant, you have the kind of fresh eyes, but I was always the kinda guys that think either outside the box or say like, you know, why even have a box? You have the wrong box.

– Oh, got it.

– And so that helped me do things like, help Starbucks actually re-enter the Chinese market successfully but kind of rebrand the experience from Italian barista to an American like coffee shop experience to, you know, helping Disney identify the, you know, the Marvel acquisition, what they could do with that. And it led me into AI because 16 years ago I had people like Michael Eisner and Warren Buffett’s saying, Neil, it’s amazing what computers are telling us. I’m thinking like, they’re actually not telling us anything, we just have some tools to collect data, store it, to slice and dice, and make nice looking reports, but started thinking to myself, but could the machine think and draw insight from information? And that’s how I wound up actually going into AI.

– Got it, and so you’ve done, I mean when you were with IBM, you worked with IBM’s Watson which has been heralded as an incredible tool within healthcare. So why artificial intelligence for you?

– I think it was really about tapping into the data and making data-driven decisions. And we had suddenly this flood of data coming in and it’s like, you know, as human beings, we can be good about putting together a 10,000 jigsaw puzzle piece here, right, and do it kind of quickly, but we’re now dealing with like a billion pieces, right? We can’t even fathom that and it’s like, this is actually a grand opportunity to define those things that accelerate change, accelerate help if we can augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence. And so, seeing kind of that natural symbiosis is what helped kinda drive me into AI, not just in terms of the technology but understanding like how can we as people can take advantage of this as a tool?

– So you talk about the framework that you’ve put together called TUCBO, what is that framework?

– TUCBO stands for Think Different, Understand Different, Create Different, Be Different, Own Different, and it’s something I developed from my work that actually helped me identify these kinds of disruptive opportunities. And it’s more than just ideation, to think different is really to only start formulating the ideas. We understand is okay, where’s really the value and the market need, and am I aligned with that? And then the create different is, how do I actually implement this? Be different is, how do I actually launch this into market? And then own different is how do I build the infrastructure and the buy-in to be successful? You know, maybe a simple example, most people would get is Tesla because they weren’t the first electric vehicle, but they’ve been wildly successful, and why is that? Well you know, nice design, they’re kind of fast, and it’s like, but that wasn’t the reason, the biggest problem that people had was they were worried about running out of electric charge. The one thing Tesla did that no one else had done before was build the infrastructure. Like for people to buy our cars, we’ll put in EV charging stations everywhere, right? Take away the reason to say no. And so that’s a thing a lot of people don’t get, they just think, I need this aha moment, come up this disruptive idea, and you know, backup the Brinks truck. It’s like no. Well, the idea is never an aha moment, it’s kind of a collection of small things that lead up, but you gotta do it soup to nuts, and you gotta be fully committed to the disruption to actually be successful.

– So define disruption, ’cause we talked about that word loosely, and I think a lot of people think just a different idea is a disruption. So tell me, what do you think for you, how do you define that?

– That’s a great question, Lois, for me, a disruption is finding a whole new way of actually performing the work or doing something, right? So you think about, you know, Airbnb or Uber and Lyft, right? And you talk about, they’re considered very disruptive technologies, disruptive business models. And that’s because, think about it harder, thing with Airbnb is one of the like the, you know, the largest “hoteling companies”, yet they own no real estate, right? How could you sell people or rent people rooms when you don’t own any of them? That’s a whole new way of doing this. That’s what I call disruption.

– Got it. So going back, disruption along with your TUCBO framework, how do you get people to think disruptively out of the box, and out of the box is still in the box. So talk about that please.

– The universe is full of boxes, so we can’t see. I have some techniques that I actually have people apply. We all know kinds of bits and pieces of how we kind of put them together. But like with the think different aspect ideate, I always say that there’s three things you can always do to flush something out. The first is, could you repurpose or multipurpose something? So I know I’m dating myself here, but you remember the Exxon Valdez oil spill back in the ’80s, right? It was massive, we’re trying to clean up as fast as possible, they were getting fined, but the prevailing methods weren’t fast enough and they actually started a prize campaign. So they said that some of them would come up with a better idea, we’ll give you a million dollars. And this guy from DuPont, you know, he recommend this kind of like bubble kind of technique. And it worked, it was very fast, and it was very effective and they’re like, wow, you know, how’d you ever think of this? And he’s just like, well, we’ve been doing this at DuPont for 30 years. They were like, what? I just started thinking about it. Like this is how we clean up chemical spills at DuPont and oil is like a chemical, so it would probably work. Repurposed, right? So that’s one technique. The second one is to really cultivate a different perspective. And sometimes you have to look at things from a different angle. And I always like to give the example of the film camera, because most people have watched a movie, but the film camera was invented in the 1870s because of a bet. So Leland Stanford, the guy who started Stanford University, he made a bet saying that when a horse gallops one or all four hoofs could be off the ground at the same time. And the other guys said, no, one hoof always has to be on the ground. But it was on Leland to prove he was right. And he had no idea how to do that, right? And so he went to a scientist named Eadweard, thought about it, and set up this experiment. And so they went to this field, set up a hundred cameras. You have to have a person that each camera, you know, it’s the 1870s. And they had a horse gallop by and the cameras went off one second after the other, and you have a stack of a hundred photos. And so they’re looking through it and Leland finds a one photo that says, ah, here it is, all four hoofs off the ground, I win my bet, runs off to collect the money. Eadweard, even though he’s got the trying to help Leland win the bet, same data points. He’s looking at this and he’s like, I have all these static pictures, but when I flip through them, it’s like, I’m watching the horse run, you know? It’s like motion from stillness, invents the film camera, because he was able to do that ’cause he had a different perspective. He wasn’t going to win any money, so he wasn’t focused on the singular data point. You could actually look at them as an aggregate and draw insight from that. That was super powerful, and it’s hard for us to be able to step back sometimes and take that different perspective. So that’s another actually key technique we can actually apply to think differently. And then the third technique is to really challenge assumptions. Assumptions aren’t like truths, right? It’s things that we don’t know for sure or not, but we’ll say we’ll believe it’s true. We tend to forget that. So like, you know, well the oldest assumptions was we have to own cars, right? Wanna use a car, you have to own it. Well, the guy from Zipcar challenged that assumption because he one day was thinking like, yeah, the car is the most expensive thing I own and I barely use it, and he researched it, and he realized, hey, wait a second. The average American spends an hour a day in their car, it’s idle for 23 hours a day. Why do I have to own that? And he wound up coming up with, you know, cars on demand, Zipcar, right? Very successful, disrupted the rental car industry. You know, I believe Avis bought them, but then of course, you get other people like Uber and Lyft, they’re like, well, why do you even need a car? People are driving around all over the place, what if you could carpool on demand? Well boom, you have ride share. So challenge assumptions. So if you want to think differently, repurpose, multipurpose, cultivate a different perspective, or challenge assumptions.

– So I think from what I have observed, people seem to have an easier time challenging assumptions. I think where they have more difficulty is in the first two steps, your experience, is that right or wrong?

– You’re absolutely right, Lois, it’s easier to challenge an assumption, right, or because we’re familiar with it. We may not know how to kind of retool something we’re doing today or retool something some other industries using, ’cause I hate to say it, once you start doing something, it’s almost like, you know, your commute home, most people will always usually take the same path, right? It works. And they don’t really think about another path, and as a result, we miss those other opportunities. We don’t say like, well, is there a different path home, can I cultivated a different perspective, maybe there’s a shortcut, maybe I’ll save more gas, you know? Or you know, maybe that, maybe I don’t have to drive home, maybe I can actually use the bus or something. Once something works, we never really question it anymore.

– So to get people to look at how else something could be used or to look outside, DuPont already had that innovation, but until they were asked, they didn’t think about offering it, right? But they could have, they could have done that years before. So as you work with companies, Neil, is there a way you can speed up that process so that kind of knowledge gets shared more quickly and easily?

– Yeah, this is the challenge that companies have is they want to do this, but this relies on kind of the soft skills, this is more about communication, collaboration, and creativity. And you just can’t like, unfortunately, pick up a book or say here’s a framework of how to be creative.

– Right.

– And so it’s harder for companies, they want it, it’s hard for them to figure out, how do I give them a box to do this? That’s again, that’s the problem is disrupt the box. You don’t wanna give them a box, you want to help them understand techniques and give them opportunities to practice. Because if it becomes second nature, it will become intuitive in anything they do.

– So where do you get the most joy? I think that what you do must be a lot of fun, but where do you get the most joy in what you do?

– I’m really big about social good, and that’s why I always advocate for social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, but one of the most amazing things and things I’m probably the most proud of is actually my work with the United Nations, and you know.

– Talk a little bit about that, what you do there?

– So I’m their AI advisor to help them actually create, and launch, run the AI for Good initiative, which is essentially using AI and other emerging technology for the sustainable development goals, those are 17 goals for a better planet and per better, you know, help people, like zero hunger and poverty, access to health, all these things, those are part of the 17, but there’s a huge gap, I’m trying to make them a reality. You know, as much as everybody wants them, unfortunately, the member nations haven’t been able to commit as much resources as is really needed, so it’s really falling on like volunteers like myself to see how we can do that. And I will tell you, you know, the UN is a very slow, bureaucratic organization, I don’t think even they would dispute that. But the fact that they were talking about this and the process of setting up, they move like entrepreneurs, right? Actually kind of going through the, you know, the taco workshop I have, that kind of stuff, they really saw the value, they saw the value beneath the need. But they went from this slow moving organization to moving at the speed of a startup. I mean, we got the whole thing launched in like four months, which was unbelievable, and like a lot of people, other people in the different parts of the UN, like, whoa, how in the world did you guys do this? You know, it took us two years to get this small project off the ground, get this big worldwide initiative, build an ecosystem in just a matter of a few months. Well, I say it’s very impactful, but I also tell people like, if the UN can do that, then you can do anything.

– Got it. And what the SDGs have done tremendously is to look at public/private sector collaboration. And so that takes it back to what you talked about a little while ago, and that is collaboration, that really a key component of this is collaboration. Speak a little bit more about that, ’cause that’s also a tool set that most organizations don’t naturally have?

– Yeah, you’re right, Lois, unfortunately they don’t. And you know, we always say there’s power in diversity of thought, that’s one of the things about collaboration. And we can talk about looking at things from a different perspective, that’s what people bring together when they work together. Like when I was in business school, your first year they put you in these groups, and the school sets the group, but they set the groups, there’s one person from marketing, one person from finance, one person from operations, and so forth. And when you’re working like on the same case study together, everyone sees it so differently. But you realize everyone has a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, right? And now you can start snapping together if you start talking and working together. And that’s the kind of the big thing, I think for most companies they think, we have smart people, they know what to do. Problem is everyone’s gotten so specialized, they know one piece, right? You want the real value, you got to put the pieces together, and that’s why you have to create a collaborative environment.

– So how have you done that? I mean you’re doing that with the UN, how have you done it with the businesses that you also consult with?

– That’s a good question, it’s a lot of organizational change management. So this is more than saying, we’re going to throw everybody into a giant conference room or we’ll do an offsite retreat for a day. This is actually about building a culture and creating a culture that comes top down where the executives are coming and saying like, we’re going to give you the opportunities to work together, we’re going to reward you if you guys do work together, we’re going to have shared goals, but we’re also going to create an environment where no one will be punished for failure and no one will be punished for speaking their mind, right? As long as they’re professional, that’s the key thing. And it’s those last few things where I think most companies actually stumble, right? Because they’re like, I want the good stuff, but I don’t want people to make mistakes. And it’s like, it’s going to go hand in hand, it’s a learning process, right? If your people are used to having so much work and their heads down in their tasks, they don’t know how to collaborate. Right, that’s not a knock on them, that’s just not a style we’re used to, so build the culture.

– So you take care of those two issues of people speaking their mind, being able to speak what they think safely, and then also take risks. So taking away that fear of failure. That is a big culture shift in organizations because we’re measuring numbers all the time, right? So how do you begin that process? That’s a huge shift that CEOs have to make, if they’ve got boards of directors, that’s a huge risk they take with the board. So how do you navigate that?

– You start with the leadership and you make the case on the value, right? Risk is not a bad thing, risk means uncertainty, it can be positive or negative. You can look at is as a threat, or you can look at as an opportunity. And so you take like the UN for example, it’s a collection of 47 agencies, historically they never even worked together, and here I have this guys talking about this giant initiative and having them collaborate, not just with each other, but collaborate with outside organizations, right? And you can just, the eyes are going like this. And it’s just starts as like, if this is the goal you really want to achieve, you don’t have the resources internally to deal with it, right, you go partner, you get the WHO on board, they’ll bring in some of the medical expertise and some of those things. You go work with UNICEF they’re going to bring the expertise on how we can help children. And so you try and create these things and say, look, someone’s going to have to be the first one to kind of show their cards, right? It’s got to start somewhere. Yeah, some people may not quite play share, you’re got to learn how to manage that. But you know, the UN’s always been about optics, and playing it safe, you know, not making any mistakes, but it’s like, then again, like how much have you accomplished? Like, not nearly as much as we need to. So it’s like, is it worth it? Look at it as a threat or look at this as an opportunity. And I managed to convince leadership, this is an opportunity.

– How do you get people to play fair?

– I think most people are actually good, there’s a small percentage that they’re always going to kind of double deal or gain the system. But I think most people are, they want to be good and want to play fair. And if you treat them well, and I think if you’re rather relatively open and you help them understand what they get out of it, the WIFM, what’s in it for me? They’ll usually come along, and support you, and do their best to help make it successful. And if they don’t agree, I find most of them will tell you that now. They’ll say, okay, you know, I don’t believe this, there’s not enough value. So at least, you know, right, you don’t need to waste people’s time. But these are hard conversations, that’s the challenge. And too many people right now are shying away from having them.

– Because why?

– I think they’re afraid to look weak or they’re afraid to look ignorant, right? They look at this, this is like, I can’t show that everyone thinks I’m, you know, let’s call it this 100%, when in reality, I think of the 70%, I don’t want people to see that gap. And I think we’re starting to kind of move away from that where people are realizing, like, I need people to understand the 70%, I need people understand where I need help, otherwise I’ll never actually get the help I need.

– Got it. You know, asking for help, no matter who you are, where you’re struggling, or what your business is, that’s one of the biggest things, it’s one of the biggest problems people have with getting a coach, or getting a business strategist, or, you know, whatever, so that the business can really thrive. It’s that fear, will I be judged? Will I be shamed? Will I, and the list goes on, doesn’t it? Neil, who’s your ideal client? Who comes to seek you out?

– It’s people that are really trying to solve a big problem or unlock an opportunity. So, I mean, it’s been obviously the United nations, it’s been global Fortune 500 companies, it’s been small entrepreneurs, it’s been non-profits, but my ideal clients, they’re looking to unlock something or solve a problem, and they’re committed to actually doing that, right, this is not like, well, that’s too risky, or you know, they’re like, I genuinely want to help protect kids from child abuse, right? The nonprofit called Zero Abuse Project, they were like, we’ve done a lot of things to help survivors, but we haven’t figured out how to help prevent in the first place. And during the conversation we’re willing to say, like, look, we will put in the resources, the money, whatever if we can reduce how many children are abused in the first place. You know, one, I love the fact they’re doing something so good, and second, the fact that they and their donor base said, look, we need to do this. That’s kind of the ideal client. They’re like, were we’re open to the possibilities, help us find them.

– So there’s a certain amount of idealism that your clients have, right? They also have access to capital because they can afford to be idealistic and work on solving a problem?

– It’s true, it doesn’t mean you need a lot of capital. It depends on the size of your problem, right? There’s actually a small startup company I help out where they’re actually using AI to try and help depressed and suicidal teens, you know, and what they’re trying to figure out is they’ve got something that works, the two guys that started the company, one’s a therapist and one’s actually a neuro linguist, their biggest problem is that as they approach, you know, clinics and stuff, and even people they know, not a lot of people believe AI can do this, you know, be a tool for psychologists and therapists. And so where I really helping them is try and figure out how to, one, establish their credibility, but to break through this barrier. That’s not something that requires a lot of capital, but it requires a lot of investment in their time and willingness to build this infrastructure that they actually need to establish their credibility.

– Right. And infrastructure is huge, isn’t it? And it’s looking at how do you create those adjacent markets to really build what you’re trying to do, because you need that support in order to make that happen. Neil, our time is almost up, what have we left out that it’s important for people to know this? It’s been wonderful to have this conversation.

– I appreciate it, I think it’s been a great one. And the one thing I just want to leave people with is that it doesn’t matter how big or small you are, everyone actually has the power to disrupt the box. Don’t think you need to be a genius like Elon Musk, or you have to have a lot of money like a GE, or any of the things, we actually all have the capability, we just have to learn how to tap into it. And hopefully, you know, a little bit we shared about TUCBO and those stories can help you kind of draw upon that well and be a disruptive.

– You also have a book, “A.I. Revolution”, correct?

– That’s right, it’s called, “Own the A.I. Revolution”, it’s a business book for non-technical business leaders that one, helps kind of shows how you disrupt the box a bit, but do that through the capabilities of AI.

– Got it. We will have information about the book in the show notes for those of you who are listening. So I encourage you to go to Amazon. I’m sure it’s on Amazon, right?

– It is, Amazon and all the bookstores.

– And all the bookstores and learn about it. Because I think that we’re going to all be challenged to think more and more about AI as we move forward into the future. Neil, thank you so much for being with us today.

– My pleasure Lois, this was a blast.

– You are so welcome. And those of you who are listening to “Building My Legacy” podcast today, thank you for being with us and remember to also visit our website at www.build2morrow, with the number 2, .com. Thanks so much.