00:00  The Imperative of Our Time

Parker Mitchell: So I feel very, very fortunate in the position where I am. I get to talk to a range of folks, thought leaders like Gillian, like Ethan, like Reid, people who are—Geoff Hinton, who's coming up at the end—who are talking about how is, at the thirty-thousand, fifty-thousand-foot level, how is technology, how is this wave of technology beginning to impact work, beginning to impact us as people, beginning to impact societies. But it's equally as exciting, it's probably even more exciting that I get to chat with many of the folks, I recognize some names of folks who are joining us today, people who are our partners, partners in trying to put AI into the hands of their workers. And you'll hear in a moment that I think this is one of the imperatives of our time, being able to give people, workers at every level, every seniority, every type of job, AI fluency, AI literacy to work with the most powerful tool, I think, the most powerful tool that any of us have experienced. I think that's the imperative of our time, and it's just such a privilege to have a chance to partner with people who believe equally, themselves, in their own companies about the importance of this and are able to help navigate the sometimes difficult mazes. And so I've had a chance to distill some of these ideas and conversations that I've had into a few key sort of themes and thoughts that I'm delighted to share with you today 

01:37   The Future is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed

Parker: So one idea that again I'm privileged from this position of being able to see so many different things happening is that we see a future that is actually in many cases already here it's just not evenly distributed. It's a classic quote from William Gibson and one of the things that we're seeing with early AI adopters, and these are individuals in companies who are saying, "Hey, I want to make AI part of everything that I do." You know, we get to see this from Nadia. We get to hear from them often because they feel like Nadia provides them with so many resources, but we see just such an incredible range of use cases, creative ideas of how can I set Nadia up to be able to coach each and every member know each and every member of my team, so that as I'm talking about them, Nadia is able to remember them and able to give me specific advice to the relationship I have with them. 

So we heard that from one of the users, I think it was over in Ireland, maybe two or three months ago, hear so many ideas of people being able to sort of push the frontier there. And I think the lesson that I take from this is just the importance for companies being able to hear those voices being able to make a safe space for people to be able to share their innovations, draw them out and then be able to amplify them. And so as we look around, we sort of say, hey, where is AI, you know, where's the impact of it? Hasn't shown up yet in the productivity statistics, and our belief is that it's going to take some time to show up in the productivity statistics. That's about widespread adoption, and we're going to talk a lot about that today but the spike, the first 1%, 2%, 3% of a company that is already there. And so we have to go out and find it now as we look into the future. 

It's really hard to make predictions in a chaotic world in general, but it's especially hard to do so in a world where the future is exponential. I've had a few conversations now with Geoffrey Hinton about this, just about the trajectory of the change of technology that he's experienced particularly in the past 15 years, and it's hard to remember that 15 years ago, this work on back-propagating neural nets was considered sort of the backwater of AI. It was still considered a little bit of, you know, not where the innovation was going to happen, but even he was unable to fully see the potential and how quickly these new innovations would arrive, the new models would arrive. And so, as we look forward, it's also important to realize we can't just extrapolate from the past. Things are going to continue to accelerate, and it behooves us all as leaders to really try to, even though we can't predict the future, to try to get glimpses of what it might look like and to set our organizations, our leaders, our employees, our workers up for that. 

04:35   A Brief History of Big Technological Leaps

Parker: Now a very quick digression into the history of some of the technology leaps because I think it's really interesting to see what were society's reactions to some of the big ideas, the ideas that clearly were going to change. And the history of the car is an interesting one. If you look at the newspaper reports from about 125 years ago, as the first cars were being introduced, they weren't glowingly positive. Cars were having so many negative externalities. They were noisy, they were dangerous, they were dangerous to pedestrians, they got into accidents with each other, and that is obviously true, but there were a lot of innovations that then were able to come with it. So there were seat belts, there were street lights, there were better rules of the road. 

And I think we can sometimes get—when new technology comes in, we can get caught up in the rough edges. There are certainly going to be challenges to how AI models produce information, but those challenges are going to be overcome-able. The work that we've done, and many other companies deploying AI in enterprise, to just put really strong guard rails on the models and make sure that they don't hallucinate, they don't talk about topics that aren't allowed to be talked about. That was a relatively quick solution for us and others to put in place, and it takes care of problems like hallucination. And so I just think it's important, even if there is a momentary issue that causes someone to want to hesitate, to know that there will be solutions to that. 

06:03   Generative AI & The Era of Personalization

Parker: So the big idea that we believe is incredibly empowering is that generative AI will usher in an era of personalization. And when we talk about, with our product team, what we really want to help, we really want to help have our AI coach, Nadia, understand the mental model of each user, understand how each person sees the world and how they are trying to navigate it, and then be able to support them as much as possible. And this is a long-term vision. This is something that's going to build over time, but I think this idea of personalization, of having a coach alongside you the same way I think every child is going to have a tutor alongside them, an AI tutor that knows how to help them on their learning journey, this AI coach is going to help them at every stage on their professional careers and learn how to collaborate. And I think that is going to be one of the most profound changes to how work is done, and it's incredibly exciting to be part of, to be at the vanguard of this. 

07:05   Our Origins and Motivating Principles

Parker: Now, we didn't start there. I’ll briefly do a quick digression. We were founded with this idea of a coach but knowing that we didn't have the technology to get there. And so you see a very primitive prototype of our team tools. I know some folks on this call are Valence team tools users. This is a version of a line done by paper, just seeing, hey, how will people react to that. But I share that because at the center of our mission has always been, how do we help people work better together? How do we help them understand themselves? How do we help them understand others, and through that, how do we help them have a better collaboration, which is really how work is done? 

And so we've taken that ethos, and we've woven that through every product that we've built up to and including Nadia, our team coach, and so these are our motivating principles. We started with this idea of democratization that everyone in the world deserves this idea of a personal coach. We talk about a world where potential is more valued than credential, so if you have a growth mindset, if you have a desire to learn, if you have an openness to feedback, if you have a personal coach like Nadia that will compound over time, and we think that those traits of potential are the ones that should be rewarded socially. 

08:32   Reimagining the HR Talent Platform

Parker: Now, as we've come to build Nadia, we've also seen that there's a huge opportunity for something else, which is to help modernize talent programs. And I don't mean talent programs as the design; I mean the technology that's behind delivering the talent programs. And I think many of us, many of you on the call, will probably if you think about the tech stack that you use for your talent programs think, yeah, that might not actually be the way that I would design it from scratch if I was redesigning it today, especially if I had the power of generative AI behind it. And so I think it's been, again, it's been a great privilege to partner with heads of talent, heads of leadership with people who are thinking about, how can we redesign these programs to make them more personal, to take down some of the burden to make them more fair, and it's an exciting journey to help modernize some of the technology behind the talent programs. 

09:29   Our Mission: Augmentative AI for All

And then the final motivating principle that we have, and this is what I alluded to at the beginning, is that we think the change that is going to sweep through the workforce, the change that is going to be driven by generative AI, which is a new way of comprehending our world, which is mainly in the written and spoken word and reasoning over that world, it is going to cause enormous change, and I think we are still just only catching glimpses of it and probably underestimating the change that it will drive. And the solution we think to this change that's going to be caused by AI is to give each and every employee generative AI that is augmentative, not AI that's going to automate and take away things that they do. 

That's very important as well, but AI that they will interact with and learn how to use and co-create with. We and others call this augmentative AI, and we think that the imperative of our time is to put this augmentative AI into the hands of our employees, imperfectly at first, but then it will get better and better and smoother and smoother. And so that's why we, at Valence, do what we do, it's why we're building Nadia, it's the principles behind Nadia that we build, and it's just been an enormous pleasure to, again, partner with such great folks to help discover what is going to work in this new future world that we're all moving toward.

‍