TL;DR
AI is not the strategy—it’s a tool. The roundtable explored how tech leaders can thoughtfully integrate AI into their organizations by first grounding themselves in clear strategy, purpose, and people-centered leadership.
- Strategy First, AI Second: AI should be seen as an enabler, not the goal. Without a clear strategy—one that defines what you’re doing and why—AI adoption becomes chaotic and ineffective (“Brownian motion”).
- Leadership & Communication Matter: Honest, deep conversations and leadership alignment are super important. Miscommunication and lack of strategic clarity are major blockers to effective AI use.
- Human-Centered Design: AI’s impact on people—especially across generations and roles—is profound. Organizations must consider how AI shifts job functions, required skills, and team dynamics.
- Living Strategy Documents: Strategy should be a dynamic, revisited framework that guides decisions and adapts as AI and the market evolve. It must be communicated clearly across all levels of the organization.
- Practical Integration: AI should be applied to optimize existing value-creation processes (e.g., funnels, recommender systems), not as a standalone initiative. Leaders should experiment and learn iteratively.
- Cultural Intention in AI Adoption: The conversation reinforced the need for cultural clarity and intentionality when introducing AI—aligning tech with values, vision, and human impact.
Guest Links
Muness Castle: email, LinkedIn, X, book-a-call
Autotranscript
Please note that this transcript was autocreated by AI and hasn’t been proofread by a human. How’s that for a bit of irony? 🙂 So, expect errors.
Michael Hunter
Welcome to the uncommon leadership roundtable, where we bring smart people together to discuss hard topics in a fun way. I am your host, Michael Hunter, with uncommon teams, and joining me today is Muness Castle, who is a data and engineering leader with over 20 years of experience. He specializes in data engineering, strategy, management, organizational design and architecture, and you do lots of things, is it still a specialty? Muness
Muness Castle
has led together,
Michael Hunter
yeah, okay, that makes sense. It’s one thing that covers all of that got Vanessa has led or consulted with teams at Shopify, Zapier, JPMC, living, social staples, and many more. And we have Mark fulker or Fulcher. I forgot to ask you, which it is Mark, I apologize
Mark Fulcher
culture, but that’s fine. It’s been pronounced many ways across, originally in Europe, so it’s it’s fine,
Michael Hunter
great. And Mark is a consultant from Melbourne, Australia. I probably mispronounced that too. Who is determined to uplift the upper echelons of an organization, senior leaders, executive leaders and the board? He has taken his experience from leadership roles in Big Four consulting and multinationals to help growing medium sized organizations get set up for future success. Mark believes that business success is so closely tied to leadership effectiveness, and so should stay front and center for all organizations. And I partner with top tech leadership teams to create extraordinary cultures and help them sustain the changes they mean to wake mean to make in a way that is safe for them and everyone else. You might say, I’ve done this in three distinct phases. I started out debugging code, then I switched to debugging people, and now I help people debug themselves. So I was going to have us each do fun facts. However, I know I mean, ness does not like fun facts, so let me ask instead, and we’ll start with you. Mark. What is unique about you?
Mark Fulcher
What a good question. What is your name about me? I believe the ability to create the space and moments for people to be truly vulnerable and get to levels of honesty and do the most powerful work they can
Michael Hunter
nice. And what is it that you do that lets you do that, that everyone else wishes they could do?
Mark Fulcher
It’s the ability of, I think, the power of conversation, but the power of creating space and enabling people to dig deeper and and understand the meaning of the everyday that What’s really, truly going on in their life to go to lower levels of deeper levels of conversation, really, I think there’s a lot of work to be done in having the right conversations, having the right conversations, but really using the power of language to really progress individuals and organizations.
Michael Hunter
Yes, that communication and miscommunication gets in the way so often and we don’t even realize that we’re miscommunicating, maybe AI can fix all this for us and make us magical communicators all the time.
Mark Fulcher
Or does? It highlights the importance of of being human and what we need to maintain to ensure that we can, you know, optimize in whatever the future world will be. Yeah,
Michael Hunter
my dog agrees?
Mark Fulcher
No, that’s important. I like your dog.
Michael Hunter
Fine. Yes. What is unique about you?
Muness Castle
I don’t know that there’s anything particularly unique about. Me, yeah, I mean, I unique, as in, like nobody else, no, but I do have a Fantasia. I don’t remember if I’ve told you that a Fantasia is a condition when you can’t picture things or have experienced sense, unless it’s actually out there in the external world, right? So, like, imagine an apple, that is a an impossible thing for me to do, likewise with sounds and and tastes as well. So I, you know, not unique. I think about 1% of the population, maybe 1% of 1% suffers that at the extreme that I do, which is across all the senses completely. Yeah, it’s something I think makes me different and approach the world in a different way than a lot of people seem to expect to
Michael Hunter
how do you find
Mark Fulcher
no, I’m sorry, no. I said, Thank you for sharing. That’s all.
Michael Hunter
How do you find that affects the way that you communicate when so much of communication is having a guess at what is going on in the other person’s head and translating what we heard into what we think or hope they meant to say,
Muness Castle
yeah, one way it it affects me significantly is that I have a hard time when people want visuals for things that seems seem really straightforward to me through abstractions, right? So that’s something I definitely have struggled with even more so in the past, before I realized that difference that I had, right? And like, why is it that people want visuals? And of course, now I understand most people can hold on to visuals and play them back, and it becomes a really handy reference for them in a way that I can’t experience, but the majority of people do, and so that’s one example of like, a communication difference that I have, and I you can imagine the opposite right, the symmetrical aspect of it, where I need abstractions, I need mental models, so I can carry an idea in my head, because, literally, it is a set of like sentences and how they relate to each other and mental models. And that’s something sometimes I have to explain to people and sort of work at to get to.
Michael Hunter
Thank you, and this is why I brought you two together today to talk about deciding how to decide the right approach for using AI in our team and company strategies, because you both each had very different backgrounds, very different experiences, and yet know how to and know the importance even more of a knotting the people problems that are always behind every technical problem. So if you had two minutes with a client Mark and your their big question was, we know we got to do something with AI. We don’t know how to even start thinking about it, let alone what to do. What would you advise them? That’s a
Mark Fulcher
really, really interesting question, because I think that is the question that’s being asked. And I don’t know about your experience there. I mean, I’m sure it’s very similar, but it’s, there’s a lot of I describe as there’s a lot of noise around. So I’m, I’m nowhere near as technical as either of you, but I have spent part of my career in IT for about seven years, so I can relate to it. And I think there was a lot of noise. There’s a lot of information being thrown around. There’s a lot of people saying that they can do things, but what, where is the who’s who’s able to answer some of these questions? Truly, I think that’s the who’s who’s rising above all the noise. So I do think that organizations are saying, what do we do and how do we how do we solve this? I What would I advise? I mean, I think it is a time to it. Is it is there’s a time to to act now, I think it’s, there’s two sides to it. Is the one is the almost like the technology and the process side of it, of, what are we how are we going to change? How’s the world going to change? From that perspective, that’s one thing. So that’s one thing to think about. And I think a lot of people are thinking about that. So it’s like, okay, well, what can. Do different. What can we do better? The other side is thinking about from a people perspective, what are the what do we need to what are the skills and the capability that we’re going to need to do different? I think about it from a leader’s perspective, but in our teams, what do we need to start to build and enhance in our teams, in with our individuals, that are going to enable them better as the world is changing and it is going to change and it’s changing, but it’s like things, for example, I had a meeting yesterday, so this is more than two minutes, critical thinking, problem solving, like really establishing some of those really foundational skills in a very deep way so that they’re able to work with these tools, you know, you know, a far more critical way to, you know, to understand that we can get the best out of them. And so that’s a real life example. Actually, I’m talking about with a leader I was speaking to you yesterday, and they’re thinking about their five year plan with their sales people, what their sales people needed to look like differently, because part of their job is going to change significantly, but the skills that they’re going to need to be able to work with, the tools, the changing tools and and AI, whatever, In the interpretation it has, is important. So one thing is research around what’s going to change from a tool and a process perspective, but then really thinking strategically around, you know, what is that people capability, both from a leader, an individual and a team perspective? What does that, you know, plan, what that needs to look like, and start building that. There you go. That was way too long for two minutes. Sorry,
Michael Hunter
that’s fine with we’re not exactly time bound with the three of us today. Minas, what does all of that bring up for you as someone more in that technical role, who might have pinned the person on the other side of that conversation that Mark had yesterday.
Muness Castle
Yeah. I mean, for me, I think you saw me nodding vigorously, right? I think a lot of what I see is that people talk about AI as if it is disconnected from what we’re doing. The end of the day, you still need to understand, what am I doing it? Why am I doing it? The how is what’s changing, but without a strong anchoring into the what and why. We’re putting the cart before the horse. And I heard, you know, I heard that in what Mark was saying is like you need to understand, what are you trying to do? Why are you doing it? And then how can we bring this new general purpose technology that is, in fact, revolutionary and amazing, and, you know, has huge potential in service of that, because if you if it’s disconnected from the what we’re doing at the why we’re doing it. It’s just activity for its own sake. It’s Brownian motion, is what I like to say. And I’ve, I’ve observed Brownian motion in corporations for my whole career, but it’s become so much more acute. It’s so much more of a tanned now that we really have to do a better job of explaining the why and the what that we are doing after the
Mark Fulcher
strategy, yeah, sorry, just, I think they did. You’ve articulated that well better than I did. So what was the what did you say? Brownie in motion?
Muness Castle
Yes, brownie in motion, right? A gas moving. You know, the more energy you put into it, the more it moves, the more of the molecules move, but they don’t go anywhere, right? That’s right, yeah, it’s what you see in corporations a lot, if there is absent, a sense of vision, a purpose, a camaraderie, a bring it together, and a laddering up of strategy back and forth.
Mark Fulcher
Can I just add something to that? Sorry, this is a good conversation, so, and it actually relates back to my business, but I you won’t know some of the Australian organizations, so the biggest supermarket retailer in Australia, right? So significant for Australia, minuscule for North America, or probably similar to Canada, right? Anyway, so one of the guy and I’ve worked with for 15 years. Over the years, he headed up their AI function. It was, he might have been a chief AI officer or general manager or something, but and they are, they, they’re introducing technology like they are in supermarkets all around the world. So he was, he him and his team were having a real impact, and he really loved it. He got poached by another large organization who work in real estate data. So property data, we’re property obsessed in Australia, but you know, like, it’s not as big a organization, but big, significant size, billions and billions and billions of dollars. He gets brought in as their Chief AI officer. He leaves after five months without a job, because he’s like, You are 18 months. Away from being able to do anything like you, like as munis, as you’re saying, you don’t have a vision, you know. So we’re not, not clear about what the role we’re going to play. I’m going to be sitting on my hands doing nothing at a very critical time in the world while you work out what this means. But they started with, let’s bring in someone, we’ll bring in the capability, we’ll bring in a skill, and then we’ll work out what we do. And he way off. So interestingly, he’s now, you’re now in the market. I’m sure he’ll be fine, but, yeah, he’s in the market for something because not having that strategy, not having all that vision for what actually just really it is the strategy that you’re going to need, and what is going to be enabled through with AI, right? And, funnily enough, the work that I do with leadership just lately, it’s sort of like, I, you know, I talk a lot about leaders and leadership and teams and and that’s, you know, for Michael and I similar like that. But the work lately I’ve been getting is a lot about Rick coming back to strategy, which I love, because it’s like, Well, you got to get that right, because if you don’t have that right, all the other stuff doesn’t flow. So they’re sort of, they start a conversation with me, or my business around, okay, well, what you know, got to do some work around building leadership, leadership capability. But then you ask the right questions, and it’s like, well, there’s, there’s a gap. You might say you’ve got a strategy, but really that is not guiding the organization. You need to start there, get alignment, and then we can start thinking about, how do you, you know, ensuring that you’ve got the right leadership capability to deliver that? But, yeah, it’s interesting, but it’s just, I saw it all came to my head, because it sort of keeps coming back to strategy, right? And it sort of, or strategy, or, yeah, what’s the guiding light that’s going to get you there? And so I’m going to have to take that term. Was it the brown brownie?
Muness Castle
Brownian motion.
Mark Fulcher
Brownian motion. Thank you. I’m writing that down.
Michael Hunter
So for companies who or teams leaders who think they have a strategy and they don’t really how can they realize that what they think is a strategy is actually something else, maybe just a few hopes and wishes, and then how can they move from that to building a strategy that lets them get started at deciding what to do with AI and everything else.
Mark Fulcher
Let’s go first.
Muness Castle
I like this pivot, and I hope you know we’re doing the right thing here with talking about strategy in order to talk about AI effectively, I mean a strategy that doesn’t tell you what to do. Like you alluded to Michael and Mark. Like is not a strategy, right? A strategy should bring teams together. It is not something that happens in one part of the org and not in another, right? A strategy is cohesive. It excludes certain things. It’s it has to be viable. It has to be specific, and it ought to be substantial, right? Like, don’t bother doing easy things. I mean, like, who wants to anyway? Those are some of the attributes, the connectedness that I alluded to. Those are some of the things that, if you’re not observing them, right? If you’re observing the opposite, oh, I put out a strategy and like, people don’t know what to do, or it only affects, you know, these two teams or these organizations. That is not a strategy, you know, that might be useful. It might be part of a playbook that you want to execute. But the strategy is, this is what we are going after this is how we’re going after it. This is, this is how we’re not going after it. It allows you to have peers and organizations directors and different parts of the org sit down together and say, Oh, we should be working together like that is what I think of as a strategy, is it’s that, like it brings folks together with a tangible deliverables that they’re going to work on.
Mark Fulcher
Yeah, and I, where I have a challenge is that one thing is, so you may or may not have a strategy, like we determine a strategy or an artifact that is guiding the organization. So you may or may not have something in place. Let’s say you do another challenge is that it is not well communicated, shared. It is not the document that is guiding the rest of the organization. It might be something that might be, you know, guiding the SLT or C suite, etc, but it’s something that is not, it’s not been cascaded. And it is not something because it really should be something, because I do a lot of a lot of work, to do some work with leaders and teams around enhancing performance and their goals and what is guiding them that. What is guiding their day to day? What is their connecting their work to the strategy of the organization or the vision of, say, what is connecting that? And so if they don’t have that connection, there’s, there’s a really missed opportunity around driving performance, driving people’s engagements, productivity, etc, etc. So I So, I think it can be, is, is the strategy a living document that is part of the business, the day to day business? Are you revisiting that directly, like it’s regularly, like every quarter to ensure, like it’s can change. It’s okay, like it’s okay, change, but, but work, work with it. Make it a living document and be comfortable with that change and cascade that change, that’s one thing. So it’s you might actually have done the work. You’re just not using it properly. And then the other one is you’ve created something that actually is not to your appointment, as you know, it’s not, it is not guiding the organization. It is not providing that sort of beacon on the hill that is, you know, that is going to take the organization forward, or it’s, you know, you’ve created something that is. It’s certainly something that just sits on the shelf and it is not being used right, so it’s wrong, so you might need to come back and actually redo that. So that’s why some of, when I say, some of the work we’re working on at the moment, that is, some of the workers, like, well, they have a document, but it’s, you know, and it is a document. As soon as you say that it’s a document, it’s like, Well, okay, well, it’s not fulfilling its purpose.
Michael Hunter
So for however much of a strategy we might have, if we don’t know what AI can really do, which is most of us these days, because AI is potentially capable of so much and none of us have the time and resources to explore anywhere near all of that. How can we sensibly integrate AI into however sophisticated the strategy we have,
Mark Fulcher
I’ll go first this time only because I am delivering something at the moment right around this. Let me share the story, the case studies. So it’s a membership organization across Australia and New Zealand for the insurance companies, right? So again, let’s say the organizations are more like Canadian size than North American size. Michael, you’re in we’re about to you again, sorry,
Michael Hunter
I’m in Missouri, in the middle,
Mark Fulcher
cool, yeah, so Australian size organizations. It’s a membership organization. They realize if they don’t evolve, they will die. So they are they deliver training, they do events and blah, blah, blah. So they’re like, they know that they’ve got to so they’re thinking about where do they need to be in five or 10 years time with this, this nebulous thing called AI, like, what’s the role that it’s going to play? They know it’s going to be some sort of enabler. So that’s what we’re getting them to like, it’s like, well, it’s going to, it will enable them in some way. So they know that, they acknowledge that it will, but the answer to that will is will be determined over time, right? So, how it will? And we’re coming together in a month, actually, with the board, to be able to define this strategy, really, around this we’re talking a lot about AI, but then saying, Okay, well, What? What? What what is the answer? And I we’re not going to walk out of that day with the answer without saying, AI will do this. It’s sort of like AI is a working it’s a work in progress, and it is evolving so quickly. So but, you know, we need to have attention and focus on that. But again, as going back to Vanessa’s point, you know, what is the what? Why are we here? What is the purpose? What is our vision? And neither of those are going to say we are here to, you know, optimize AI. No, not, no, sort of, it’s around, you know, in this situation, is around delivering the best value to our members in the insurance industry, fine, and one of the ways that we will do this is we will be optimizing this growing capability of AI, which is, and I think it’s just, it’s the awareness and perhaps putting the focus on it, knowing that you know, it’s it’s you know, you need to elevate it to be able to ensure that it continues back. And I suppose the other thing as well, Michael and ministers. And I was mentioning before about strategies of living document in the same way that you should be coming back to revisit your strategy regularly. And I think it’s, you know, it’s, it’s not annual, it’s more of a, quite a process you’ll be coming back to revisit. I said, Okay, what’s happening in the world, what’s changing? What do we need to do? How do we, what do we when we define this? Enabler of AI, what is changing about that, and therefore, how do we optimize that, given we’re still trying to deliver this strategy? So I said a lot of words there, hopefully some of them made sense.
Muness Castle
Yeah, that really resonated with me, right? Ai, is it’s not about optimizing for AI. It’s about using AI to optimize something else, right? I think there’s an aspect of that that you know, we we generally want to keep in mind, right? Like this, we just opened up a new general purpose technology. How does it allow us to do what we wanted to do significantly better, faster, cheaper, whatever you have, right? But it’s not about the thing itself, because if you if you go that way anyway, what is your comparative advantage? Anybody can do that too. And so it’s understand your purpose, understand what you want to do, understand the value you’re creating in the world, and then look at, how can I use AI to leverage it, right? And so I’m an engineer. I’m very practical, I think, right? And so a lot of what I look at Michael is like, okay, so much of the world is about funnels. You know, we start with a lot of people. We qualify some. We steer them in a different direction, and we get them somewhere. You know, the world’s built engineers have built recommender systems to help you go to the right path. Helped you convert slightly better, right? That kind of thing. Help you identify the path you should take faster. Okay, you know that is the kind of thing, if you understand that. Well, that’s about a value generation process, a funnel process. I understand it better. I can deploy AI better. That’s how I think of it. And then over time, as AI gets better, you know, you can leverage it even more so into that process. But understanding what you’re doing, you know, from a product world, let’s just go to that the job to be done, and the people who are trying to do it, okay, if you know that, and you feed that additional data and gather it more systemically than you used to in the past. All of a sudden you open up more AI opportunities. So that’s how I think of it, like how you optimize and apply AI to strategy, is you have a good sense of what you’re doing, and then you think, what can I gather in terms of data and context and expertise that will make this better over time? And then can I possibly get there faster using this GPT that we have, rather than the old statistical machine learning models that we used to use in the past, or expert systems and rule based systems,
Michael Hunter
or human based systems. So what I’m taking away from this part of the conversation is the AI isn’t strategy, and it doesn’t even maybe shouldn’t be part of the strategy. It’s an implementation detail the strategy is about. These are the outcomes that we’re creating for these customers, and this is the way that we’re approaching creating that value, and part of how we implement creating that value may be starting to explore how AI may allow us to do things we weren’t able to do before, make certain things faster, streamline, take free up human capacity from doing some of the stuff that we used to have to do, so that now we can focus on higher level, more interesting, more important, work. And then we’ll learn. And over time, we’ll discover where for us, the AI that we have right now works really well, where it doesn’t work so well. And we’ll start understanding how AI is evolving, so that we can understand how to adjust the way that we’re using AI and all of our other helpers, human and otherwise, to create that value.
Muness Castle
Yeah, I think without those pieces of understanding, direction, purpose, right, it’s a tool. You can’t just deploy the tool by itself, and it doesn’t tell you where to go. I think that stuff is is increasingly important now, because you can move faster, and so move faster in the right way, right or not, in the in a way you know, where you end up trapping yourself somewhere where you didn’t want to be
Michael Hunter
that bright way part is super important and so easy to lose track of.
Mark Fulcher
Yeah. Yeah, and just as you’re talking about, I just think there’s agreeing with everything, both of you saying, and the other thing that’s coming up, and I’m sure it’s everywhere, but I see it more in feeds and like it is the, it’s the human impact of what is going on, yeah, societal shifts. And you know, and how do we, you know, for me, it’s often, it’s often about people and leaders and human call it human capital, call it talent, whatever. But you know, is it, you know, we’ve got parts of our society, you know, people towards the end of the career, are they being impacted with how things are involved evolving at the moment and all of a sudden? You know, there’s questions, like, in the last two weeks, or I can just talking about the power of experience, is that being usurped by some of these technological shifts? That’s one thing. Younger generations who are, you know, like, I’ve got twin girls who are 22 would soon join the workforce. One was doing law. Laws changing a lot. I come from a consulting background. Consulting is changing a lot. So a lot of these industries, they’re shifting. And so it’s like, well, what does this also mean? As we’re, you know, we’re trying to setting the direction, and likes to say, like, AI or otherwise, but sorry, not AI, but we’re setting a vision. We’re setting a strategy. We think of all the things to line up. But what does it mean for how we’re, you know, almost like, almost like, bringing along society to deliver that. Because it’s sort of the our people capital, the changing, and what we need from them is changing. And yeah, I don’t know. There’s just some quite there’s some big questions there. And yeah, I think it’s, um, yeah. I just think from from a people perspective, it’s interesting, because it’s, it’s creating all these people questions. It’s not about the technology, it’s about what actually happens and that’s the thing I love. So
Michael Hunter
Jerry Weinberg taught me that every technical problem is really a people problem, yeah, and I have found that to be 100% true.
Mark Fulcher
Yeah, yeah.
Michael Hunter
So what is most important for companies to think about and consider as they ponder what to do with this technical problem of AI that is really a process, a people problem, of all the changes that the capabilities AI brings may wreak on our business, our company, the way we work, who we work with, and kind of everything potentially i
Muness Castle
i think we covered it in a lot of ways, is, don’t forget the basics, right? You can’t start with this tool first, like you don’t go and pick up a screwdriver and then decide what to build or or a hammer, right? Like you go and you do a little bit of work and you sketch it out. And yes, you might sometimes start there just to play with the thing, but you know, if you go to play, was going to go to music, but you might improv. I think there’s still that aspect of where do we want to go, what do we want to do with it, with it that you can’t let go of. I think at the other angle that we haven’t really touched on is that the expectations of AI are all over the place, rightfully so, right? We don’t know what this technology can do, and so approaching it from that angle of this is what we want to do. There is a technology with indeterminate value for our problem set. Be curious like go and try it. There’s nothing that’s going to be applying it in the real world to discover what it can do for you in this world. Again, if it’s connected to a real problem in a real direction, that’s going to work much better than if it’s sort of blind exploration, the Brownian motion that Mark liked, right? So that would be my advice, is keep that in mind, the basics are important, and you’re not going to be able to guess what it can and it can’t do go and try,
Mark Fulcher
yeah, without building on that, what is really sort of cemented for me, as we’ve talked today, and I thank you for this is the the. Realizing AI is an enabler, and we’re continuing to learn about it. So have come up with a massive, massive growth mindset that learn as much as we can, but we’re going to learn about this continually, right? And it’s going to be learn about this in the context of, as you said, the problem you’re trying to solve, the business strategy, you’re trying to deliver, etc, but you know, things are going to move so with that, you know the importance of really, you know, working, having your stress strategy, and revisiting your strategy, really, you know, highlighting the importance of that is at the moment, more than ever, this is a living document, living artifacts that you need to review and stay on top of, because as the world is changing and as you learn more about this enabler, AI, what does that mean for your strategy and How you are going to deliver that, etcetera. Because the other thing about a strategy is understanding, you know, the market and the competitive landscape, etcetera. So not only you’re trying to work out your world, but other, other important players in your world are changing too. So I think it’s been able to, you know, it’s being it’s becomes very much a, I don’t know, it’s bit more of a real time process almost, you know, which I
Michael Hunter
don’t think is bad.
Muness Castle
Yeah, a little tip for like, observation. I’ve seen with some people who use it right, write it down, because then you can put it into an AI and say, here is what I’m doing. Is there’s anything about my strategy that tells me what to do or what not to do, or that is falling apart. And you can literally do that, and it’ll help you right in a way that we just couldn’t do before right strategy itself is becoming, if you’re intentional about it, far more useful. It doesn’t have to sit in a in a drawer desk. You can actually pull it out, put it in the context window of your conversations. You can develop derivative like data architecture documents out of it, that kind of thing. And as it changes, you update those other ones much faster than you could have done in the past. Yeah.
Michael Hunter
So is there anything mark more that you’d like to leave our audience with today?
Mark Fulcher
No, just, I mean, really, of all the things we’ve talked about, I mean, I’m going to come back to the people side of it, but, you know, really thinking in the same way you’re thinking about how to, you know, sort of like a real time focus on, on your strategy and how that’s going to get you to your future stays really thinking strategically about your your people, and building people capability for the future, both leaders and teams to be able to help you get there. But it’s all interconnected there, because big Venn diagram of all these things that we need to constantly, monitor and probably help AI to do that. So there,
Michael Hunter
all we need to do is dump the entire universe by contact window of our AI
Mark Fulcher
chat. There you go.
Muness Castle
That’ll work really well.
Michael Hunter
And same question for you, me nuts, what would you like to is there? What else would you like to leave our audience with today?
Muness Castle
Just a different way of saying the same thing, right? AI is a tool. Yes, it’s a really cool tool, but it’s a tool, and it comes down to what you do with it, right? And we have agency. We have direction. We do great things, tools help us do that. Right is just not to forget that. Yep.
Michael Hunter
And one last question for you, Manas, what surprised you about our conversation today?
Muness Castle
I We talked more about strategy than we did about AI. I didn’t expect that. I think it’s really cool, but I did not expect
Michael Hunter
that. And same question for you. Mark, what surprised you? Yeah, similar,
Mark Fulcher
actually, sort of it has crystallized for me. You know, maybe the importance of that and the glue that might help bring some of these components together and where to start, where to start the work.
Michael Hunter
What didn’t surprise me is that we had a wonderful conversation. I was confident. And that would come to pass. What did surprise me? One thing that surprised me is the same, as you each said, have, everyone is so focused on AI, and how do we use the new thing that we have to use, and we’ll go out of business or become irrelevant, or whatever our personal fear of AI’s effects will be that we forget, as we’ve said over and over today, it’s just a tool, and what’s important is not the tools that we’re using to affect the outcomes we’re creating. What’s important is, are we creating the outcomes that we mean to create in the way that we mean to create them? Thank you so much for a great conversation today. I mean us and Mark,
Mark Fulcher
thank you. Thank you. Bye.