Scaling AI: How AI Can Help Break Down Silos in Your Organization

How can AI break down those dreaded silos in your organization, that slowdown, well, everything?

And CMO in Brand Police Alert, I’m on the case here, I’m very interested to find out more about this concept of AI brains for brands and synthetic audiences.

What do you think those audiences are even made up?

Is it like filament, bits and bytes?

What is it, guys?

Hi, I’m Courtney Baker and this is AI Knowhow from Knownwell, helping you reimagine your business in the AI era.

As always, I’m joined by Knownwell CEO, David DeWolf, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Mohan Rao and NordLite CEO, Pete Buer.

We’re kicking this episode off with Pete Buer’s interview with Josh Okun.

Josh is the Chief Innovation Officer at Gravity Global, and he sat down with Pete to talk about using AI to break down silos.

Josh, thank you so much for joining us today.

My pleasure.

Thanks Pete for having me.

Excited to be here.

If you wouldn’t mind, could you get us started with just a little bit of background?

Intro to Gravity Global and your role and where AI fits into the whole thing.

Sure.

Gravity Global is a brand to demand B2C agency based out of London with offices in 13 cities around the world, North America, Vietnam, and coverage in Asia Pacific and really covering all of EMEA.

We help a lot of really large brands like Embraer, Airbus, Honda, 3M solve really complex challenges in marketing.

And we are using AI more and more to support the planning, execution, automation, optimization of our work, as well as implementing AI into our business operations.

My role as Chief Innovation and Digital Experience Officer has been to basically facilitate the adoption and integration of AI into our business, both through service delivery and utilization.

And then I oversee the strategy, go to market and digital experience function within the organization.

So as we did a little stocking of you and the business, we learned that there’s a specialty referred to around improving collaboration, breaking down silos, and unifying business processes.

Of course, all of this reads a bit like Holy Grail.

These are problems, business problems we’d all love to solve.

Can you tell us a little bit about your approach in solving them?

One of the most important things that I have learned is relationships matter most.

It is important for leadership in any organization to know and trust each other and to work to create a shared understanding of what success looks like for the business and where each team fits into that.

And maintain a constant communication amongst that leadership team about how our groups are helping each other.

And that level of shared experience and commitment and relationship building at a senior level trickles down into the teams because we’re all working towards mutual success.

When it comes to an operation standpoint, particularly in Gravity where we’re operating on a 24-hour time zone and we have multiple clients that are in different locations and we have teams that are working from across the globe, you have to get comfortable with synchronous and asynchronous work.

We are a podcast about the use of AI in business.

Where in Creative are you seeing AI playing the biggest role these days?

Sure.

We’re seeing the standard things.

Creative is using Mid Journey and Chat GPT and other generative AI tools to quickly come up with visualizations of concepts.

We’re seeing the use of GenAI to help write scripts or come up with headlines or do naming projects so really as a first blush or first swag at bringing a strategy to life.

Where we are delving deeper is in taking that first draft and working more into execution.

Leveraging AI to build out a finished product and creating multiple different sizes of a deliverable.

And then even going further into production, where you’re using AI to generate backgrounds on an LED volume wall, and using that output mixed with reality, real actors to generate a final product is really one of the more interesting places where we’re going.

And then how about beyond the focus on creative, where else are you getting powered by AI in the biz?

Yeah, so we’re using AI in all areas of the company, from strategy to development to SEO, keyword planning, execution, media planning and optimization.

One of the things that I am finding really interesting is the ability to create like AI brains for brands and for synthetic audiences.

A number of our clients have brand guides, they have product value props, they have a whole host of documents that sit on a bookshelf somewhere that a few people who drafted them are really familiar with and nobody else does.

Right.

We’ve sort of figured out, and we’re not, this is not unique to us, but let’s get that off the shelf.

Let’s put that into a rag and create a custom GPT around that and then allow our teams to interact with that.

So we can pressure test a creative concept and see if it’s relevant to the brand.

We could do a number of different campaign execution or ideas based off of that brand guidelines that are there.

We have some clients where we’ve put in a whole host of copywriting rules and regulations into a rag and we’re able to proofread or Q&A documents that we’ve written against that library of information.

We’re using it now as a way to have a much more interactive relationship with brand and customer data.

I don’t want to say it’s not PII, it’s not confidential data, it’s persona information, it’s journey map information.

How do you take a static document and make that a living thing and a dynamic thing that can impact advertising is really where we’re starting to find a lot of value with it.

And that lives very much in the upfront and planning stages of work just as much as it does in optimization and where can a campaign go next as well.

We’ve been doing the podcast for a year, believe it or not, maybe a little bit over a year.

And so many of the questions early days when generative AI at least was still a little bit new, were around the threat versus opportunity and are companies ready and what’s the level of aggressiveness with which leaders of functions and businesses are adopting?

What does the environment feel like to you now as you’re mixing it up with customers?

Different industries are governed by different rules.

Healthcare financial verticals are way more conservative because there’s a lot more at stake.

And versus a CPG brand or a company that is not using personally identifiable information, but more so just looking at how do I put out a campaign or something that’s a bit more, I don’t want to say disposable, but things that are social based, things that are flash in the pan, shorter term campaigns have less risk associated in them, typically with the use of AI.

When it comes to using AI to support coding and quality assurance testing, risk is low because you’re not hinging any sort of money or potentially damaging company information to it.

Reputation.

Reputation is a big part of it.

Then I think the level of which you’re using AI also matters.

Having an understanding of what are our goals for marketing, where can AI help in a low risk, medium risk, and high risk situation, and you balance the reward against that.

So creating some sort of matrix helps with the decision making.

So many of the applications that you’ve described at least power the human, and at most take away some of the work of the human, and hopefully it’s thankfully so in most places.

But are you seeing impact on roles?

Are there fewer?

Are they changing?

How is the technology affecting the human and customer organizations?

I think for the people who are willing to try stuff out and experiment, what they’re seeing is once they get over the initial hurdle or worry or concern about the uncertainty of AI, what they find is that the possibilities of their imagination becoming a reality open up.

And a strategist who is really good at a very specific planning function can now go beyond and say, well, what if this turned into a campaign or what if we tried to talk to the audience this way, how would they respond?

And so imagination is taking hold a lot more across all areas of the business and allowing people to go further faster in terms of exploring their thinking.

And that is incredibly invaluable to our business.

You’re able to bring opportunities to internal teams, to clients much faster, have more meaningful conversations around the potential for whatever idea to take hold and grow.

And so I don’t see teams getting smaller or getting pressure put on them because of AI.

I’m seeing teams be opened up and really the ability to just extend their capabilities as a result of it.

Nice.

And does the role of the leader in the business or on the team sort of determine the degree to which there’s embrace?

Water rules downhill.

Yeah, yeah.

So if you have a leader who’s an advocate for something and is enabling and empowering their team to try new things, you see a lot more of that.

And if you have a leader who’s more conservative or fears change or is, you know, more cautious, you have a much more cautious conservative team.

And so adoption is slower.

But how we combat that in the agency is I’ve created an AI club.

We meet once a month and people from every different department will come in and they’ll bring something they’ve been working on or something they’ve seen online.

And it’s show and tell.

And we talk about it.

And, you know, people are like, hey, that’s an interesting idea.

What if we did that over here with this client?

And it just has created a conversation in the agency where people are now discussing ways in which we can try AI to help do different things.

And it’s been really helpful in elevating adoption.

We’ve now got 90% of the agency population across the globe using AI.

Oh, that’s awesome.

What a great best practice.

It seems like change management around AI is all about engaging especially the front line as early and as aggressively as you possibly can.

Hackathons, gamification, and now we’ll add to the list AI clubs.

You have to encourage experimentation, right?

And I think that’s also the value that agencies bring to the world is largely we’re on the cutting edge of trying new technologies, exploring ideas.

We’re operating in a lot of different business contexts and supporting communications and more so than any single client will ever be.

Because they’re only ever focused on their product, their audiences, and the tools and rules that they’re bound by.

And agencies have the ability to explore and experiment a bit more.

And so if we can lean into that and use this new technology in a responsible way, you get really interesting and exciting outcomes.

Nice.

It’s sharpening even further the agency value prop.

That’s excellent.

What’s coming around the bend?

What do you look forward to in the future?

What’s the most exciting thing that you’re waiting to see happen next?

I think coming around the bend, we’re going to start to see much more end-to-end thinking and planning and use of AI.

There’s a lot of AI agents that are coming out now, and some of those are even AI agent based staff that you can hire.

So there’s a staff augmentation component that’s coming in the next year or so.

I think that’s interesting because that can take away some of the rote and mundane tasks of our team.

Like I said before, it’s the experimentation piece.

It’s the building of tools and new processes and programs to get to really interesting outputs.

So we’re starting to see new configurations of teams in the agency.

We’re starting to see much faster prototyping.

I think what we need to see more of is storytelling, is just really engaging experiences.

Because the fundamentals haven’t gone away.

Our job as an agency is to be an expert in the audiences that our clients are trying to reach and understand what is compelling for them and an engaging way to interact and communicate with them and then find ways to do that.

I think gone are the days of one way brand communication through paid advertising.

And we are now in a world of choose your own adventure experiences.

And they need to feel authentic and real and engaging and exciting.

And I think AI can help us do that.

I have this idea or concept that everything an agency has done up until now, you’re creating an artifact of a brand that someone is interacting with.

There have been zero instances of a brand that is defining itself in real time based off of a person’s interaction with it.

But AI promises, I think, to create brands that are living interactive things that are governed by a base set of rules, but that are unique to an individual who’s interacting with them based off of that individual’s preferences and inputs.

So someone is going to figure out how to make a living brand.

Up until today, all brands and products have been static.

And so, to me, that’s what’s coming around the bend.

That’s really cool.

Josh, it’s been a pleasure.

It’s been so much fun.

Thanks, Pete.

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After listening to Josh and Pete’s discussion, there were a few things I couldn’t wait to talk to David and Mohan about.

I loved this conversation with Josh Okun.

We started on how to break down silos in your organization, which I think every organization at one point or another, has this conversation and ended up on AI brains for brands and even AI clubs.

Needless to say, great conversation.

Let’s get started here.

One of the things Josh talks about as being so vital to breaking down silos is focusing on personal relationships, especially in a global context where there are seamless handoffs between teams.

It sounds like Josh is almost describing what could be a new operating model for a company.

Do you two hear it that way?

You know, AI is uniquely good at what Josh is describing, right?

So which is the ability to break down silos.

The reason it works is because the state of the art so far has been, hey, I’m going to miss this meeting, can you record it for me?

I don’t have the time to sit through a 90-minute meeting that somebody else recorded that I’m never going to watch, right?

So if AI can just summarize the key points for me, I will listen all day to the key meetings that I may have missed because you can be at all places at all times.

So AI especially is uniquely good at this, and your best employees are always, I shouldn’t say best employees, your most impactful employees are usually working cross-functionally.

And if you can get the transcription of those conversations in the global environment that Josh was discussing, get that into a system and summarize it for everybody, it just makes the whole organization more effective.

Courtney, I’m kind of speechless, because I thought that meeting I recorded for Mohan last week, he actually listened to the recording.

I was just going to clarify the meeting.

I’ve asked both of you to record a meeting for me recently, and I did watch both of them.

See?

Okay.

Actually, now that I say that, I think I just watched one of them.

I haven’t watched them yet.

Mohan, let’s not ask which one.

Yeah, I think you appreciated the background.

That’s what I remember.

Oh, yeah.

So that means she watched yours, not mine.

I’ll tell you, I actually keyed on something else in what Josh said, Courtney.

He talked about trust.

He talked about relationship.

He talked about the dynamic of a leadership team.

I couldn’t agree more with that, and all the data and research shows that, right?

High-performing teams have a level of cohesion that comes from building this vulnerability-based trust and seeing themselves as the primary team, where what he describes as those departments, these different groups are rowing in the same direction, right?

100% true.

Here’s the thing.

So much of that, he said the word relate to one another, right?

Sharing experiences.

That is human.

How many times on this podcast have we said, what AI allows us to do is what we can only do as human beings, right?

To be in relationship with one another, to know and be known.

We talk about vulnerability based trust.

What is that?

That’s actually about getting to know each other.

That’s about actually knowing how each other ticks.

We can make better decisions.

We can have better debates, all of those things, right?

And so AI is giving us the time to do that.

And this operating model that you talked about, it’s spot on, right?

Because coming out of COVID, all of a sudden what we had was this hybrid work environment.

Are you going to be in the office or are you going to be out?

That was the debate.

It’s a new world order.

The new world order is it’s a different paradigm.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is the human experience.

What matters is can we create that type of cohesion?

Can we pull people together to pull in the same direction?

Can we build businesses that leverage the latest technology in order to do things that we can do, but we don’t need to be doing as human beings so that we can be more human?

And I think that concept, that idea is spot on, and how more people need to be looking at all this transformation that is going on in our economy right now.

David, Mohan, I love an AI club.

I actually posted about that.

Maybe Josh Selma posted on LinkedIn.

Do you think this idea works if you don’t have, your higher levels of leadership involved?

You know, this is a massive change that’s going on, right?

And as with anything that’s critical, that for any mass adoption, it has to start at the top.

There has to be sponsorship at the highest level, at the CEO level.

And that’s when you really can make this change happen.

What Josh and his team are doing is phenomenal.

They’re sharing information.

They’re kind of being very progressive with their use of technologies.

They’re embracing it.

I love it.

But it can’t happen without sponsorship right from top.

And I feel like you need to argue just to argue.

I’m not 100% sold.

I agree you got to set the tone.

But I actually think I’ve seen organizations where it’s all top down and there’s no bottom up.

And the innovation is actually stifled.

So to me, there’s actually a bit of balance.

There’s no doubt that the entire team has to be empowered.

There’s no doubt that the entire team needs to have the safety to be able to experiment.

There’s no doubt that a leader can accelerate by having recognition, by supporting storytelling, by buying pizza for the AI club, right?

Those types of things.

But I want to be careful about putting the AI transformation on one or two or three people at the top and making it seem like it’s a top down thing because I actually think the role of the leader is to…

What did George Patton say?

Lead, follow or get out of the way, right?

Like it’s almost that.

Like it is, yeah, lead it if there needs to be a leader out front.

If you’ve got a great leader, follow them and show other people what it is to follow great innovation, right?

Get out of the way, right?

Get out of the way if you have a ground swell that’s going.

How can you support it?

And I think it’s really important for leaders to be sensitive to that and not just make it a dictate, we’re going to do this and this is how it’s going to work, but really to encourage the type of experimentation, the type of playing around that it takes.

And if that’s what we mean by tone at the top, absolutely 100 percent.

But I think it could be misinterpreted if we’re not careful as the CEO or the executive team needs to be the one driving it and intimately familiar with and coming up with all of the new ideas, etc.

We should just be careful of that.

Totally, absolutely agree.

I think the key here though is exactly what you said, if there’s not total empowerment, if there’s even a hint that, hey, by doing this AI club, I could get in trouble for the types of technology I’m using.

There is a sense of unknown.

If those aren’t very clearly defined and empowered within people, it just won’t happen and then it’s a lose-lose.

I think if you are going to go that route where you’re trying to empower other people to create this groundswell, that you have to be so crystal clear on those other items.

Totally.

But when do you let a groundswell develop and mature versus when do you say, hey, this is a sponsored program, this is great, we’re making budget for this?

How do you know when is when?

I’d love to back that up and let’s look at that abstractly and ask the question, is this a decision AI would be better at than a human, than us?

And I actually, because I can’t step back and say, how would I analytically make that decision without other stuff?

There’s so much gut in there.

There’s so much humanity of knowing and understanding the motives of your organization, knowing and understanding the personalities and different stuff.

Like, I don’t know that AI would be better at making that decision than I would, but I can’t tell you how I make that decision, right?

That is something that as a leader, you are actively engaged in watching and noticing and making a judgment call.

And this is where that relationship and that knowing of other people and the human part of leadership really, really matters.

So when do you fan the flame?

When do you just let it burn?

When do you put it out?

Right?

Those types of judgment calls are really, really hard.

And I don’t think we’re at a point where AI could replace the CEO yet because I don’t think it can figure that out.

And I don’t know if I can stand here and tell you, you know what, here’s how I make that decision, Mohan.

What I know is the human spirit.

I know and have this ability to read other people, to understand their motives, to sense when something may continue on, when it may need a little boost.

And those are calls I have to make in the moment as they occur.

Do you think you could get to mass adoption without sponsorship from the top?

Depends what you mean by sponsorship.

I don’t think you can get to mass adoption in an organization if leadership is suspect or creating an environment where it can’t thrive.

I do think you can get to mass adoption if you have a leadership team that isn’t actively sponsoring but provides an environment of empowerment.

And yes, I don’t think leadership is bound to position or hierarchy.

And I think you can have leaders at the ground level of an organization that know how to drive adoption, that know how to drive change.

And the organizations that are the most successful, the most scalable are the ones that are skilled at finding those types of individuals and creating an environment where they can thrive, so everything isn’t based on just one person.

Now, the risk in those organizations is you can have 57 people going in 57 different directions.

So, you’ve got to make sure there’s an alignment component that has to be played as well.

But those individual initiatives, absolutely, I think you can get to mass adoption without, you know, direct immediate sponsorship of a specific program.

Yeah, and it’s empowerment, isn’t it?

It’s not delegation.

That’s right.

What do you think, Mohan?

You know, I think, you know, it’s a cultural thing in a company to say how innovation is embraced.

And, you know, you got to kind of set the context.

It is not about things being mandated or being delegated.

It is really truly a cultural thing.

It’s a mindset thing that everybody in the company just sort of says, hey, this is good.

Let’s lean in to this.

And most of the best decisions are made when you lean in to the problem set.

David, Mohan, thank you as always.

All right.

Take care.

See ya.

Pete Buer joins us as always to break down the business impact of some of the latest and greatest AI news.

Hey, Pete, how are you?

I’m good, Courtney.

How are you doing?

I’m doing good.

Everyone’s expecting big things out of AI in 2025, me included.

Also from Wired, which published a story headlined, to interact with the real world, AI will gain physical intelligence.

Pete, what do you take away from this one?

Well, for me, I come to discover by way of this article, that there are two latches to Pandora’s box.

This notion of physical intelligence that’s raised in the article and that’s heralded as the big change for 2025, has two component parts.

The first is the idea of using AI to power physical outcomes.

So not just driving software and digital decision-making, but actually performing activities in the physical space, flipping switches, moving robotic arms, moving machinery, whatever the case might be.

Secondly, it’s AI that is adaptive.

And we’ve referenced this in other conversations, but taking what the model has learned in its original training and applying it to new contexts.

And in the case of doing physical operations, the dependency is on being trained on the relevant physics.

So that for many of us is a class that we failed in high school, but that’s what this setup requires.

The end result is self-powered cars that don’t run over babies, and powering and making decisions in the utter absence of humans to run the electricity grid across the country.

And the list goes on and on and on, and it’s quite convincing and compelling stuff.

The conclusion I take from my understanding now of the advancements on this notion of physical intelligence is that Cyberdyne systems should have everything it needs to power Skynet to bring along the first generation of Terminator models.

That is good to know.

I think all executives definitely need to know that one as they go into 2025.

This podcast isn’t made to scare everyone, but we are, you know, we just call it like we see it.

Pete, thanks as always.

Thank you, Courtney.

Thanks as always for listening and watching.

Don’t forget to give us a five-star review on your podcast Player of Choice.

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At the end of every episode, we like to ask one of our AI friends to weigh in on the topic at hand.

So, hey Gemini, by the way, thank you for all those search summaries, really appreciating it.

This episode, we’re talking about using AI to break down organizational silos.

So, what do you think?

You’re welcome.

Using AI to break down silos is a smart move.

It can really help teams collaborate and share information more effectively.

Imagine AI connecting different departments and making sure everyone’s on the same page.

That’s the power we’re talking about.

And now, you’re in the know.

Thanks as always for listening.

We’ll see you next week with more AI applications, discussions and experts.