Scaling AI: Why Your Path to Growth Requires Agentic AI

Hey guys, happy New Year.

Welcome to 2025.

This is our first episode.

And to kick things off, we’re trying something a little new this year.

We’re airing sets of themed episodes, and our first theme is on Scaling with AI.

So first up, this episode is about Scaling with AI using agentic AI.

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 Nordlight CEO, Pete Buer.

But first, let’s kick things off with Pete Buer’s interview with Charlene Li.

Charlene is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Disruption Mindset and Winning with Generative AI, the 90-day blueprint for success.

She and Pete dove into a topic you’re sure to hear a lot about this coming year, agentic AI.

Charlene, welcome.

Thank you so much for joining us.

We’ve been looking forward to the chance to speak.

Happy to be here.

Thank you very much for having me.

I have been stalking you in the background, and one of the many notices in the press, and there are quite a few, your focus is referred to as helping leaders thrive with disruption.

I was hoping with that as a frame, you could tell us a little bit about your role and where AI fits in.

Sure.

I have been a long-time industry analyst and author.

I have written six books, one of them a New York Times bestseller and working on my seventh, which is about winning with Journal of AI, the 90-day blueprint for success.

And it’s really about helping organizations understand the latest, greatest changes that are happening, especially with technology, making sense of it, putting together a strategy, changing their culture and showing up as great leaders.

Well, that title is sort of exactly what the world needs right now.

How soon will that be published?

It will be probably in March.

In March.

Okay.

Well, we’ll be looking forward to that.

We had a particular angle on GenAI to address today, and that’s the notion of agentic AI.

And the headlines are all telling us 2025 is going to be the year of agentic AI.

Why now?

What’s bringing it to the center of focus?

Agentic AI, which is using these AI agents that can function without any human intervention, is elevating AI from being a very passive tool, one that you have to be at the keyboard to use to being an active participant in your operations and in your life.

And so the key thing it does is that it removes the bottlenecks involved with you as a person, as a human, in this decision-making processes.

And when you take the human out, you can scale things in real time.

And so this is revolutionary.

It’s akin to the industrial revolution, but it’s for cognitive work.

And we are here because we have this conversion of technologies, joint of AI, data processing and machine learning that create this perfect storm for innovation.

So I think organizations that embrace agentic AI are going to have a significant competitive advantage and then also be able to thrive with all this uncertainty.

As an analyst, you’ve got your eye on the market constantly.

Can you help make this idea of agentic AI real for business leaders who are listening?

So what are a couple of the best examples of its use that you’ve seen so far?

Not a couple.

And again, agentic AI isn’t just about automation.

It’s about helping you respond to very complex situations in a very dynamic way.

So the traditional way of using AI was machine learning.

If it didn’t fit the exact parameters that you had programmed it for, it didn’t work.

And agentic AI can literally act as your co-pilot, your buddy, your colleague to help you get your work done.

So let’s take customer service, for example.

An AI agent can support real human agents, solve some of the very complex issues that come up.

So in real time, something can come up on the screen with suggestions from the AI agent that’s listening to the conversations.

And again, really anticipate what those customer needs are.

And sometimes, you can even identify times when a human is no longer even needed.

An AI agent can take care of everything.

In supply chain management, it can monitor inventory, predict demand, and place orders in real time, again, without any human intervention.

In healthcare, you could have it support doctors with patient follow-ups, identify patients based on their numbers, who may be at risk, and maybe even recommend interventions to healthcare providers.

So these are just a couple of examples, and we see agents already in our world, in our life, and now they’re just becoming much more powerful and flexible.

Thank you for the examples, and it’s wonderful that they cross industry and with different application types.

Thematically, is there anything to look for in a workflow or in a business challenge that suggests this is the place to use Vagentic AI?

Well, if you break down processes, you tend to have a couple of characteristics.

Some of them are highly repetitive, and others are very creative.

Some are very simple, some are very complex.

Some have structured data and unstructured data, and then there’s human judgment that’s involved.

In each of those situations, it’s clearly you would automatically think, well, agents would be great for the ones that are simple, use structured data, are simple, and again, are highly repetitive.

But even for the more complex situations, they can be extremely helpful.

Let’s take the job of a CEO, for example.

You think that a CEO could never be replaced, right?

Well, probably not, but a lot of the work that a CEO does can be automated, can be supported with an AI agent, looking at the reports, understanding the scheme of things, understanding all those conversations that are happening inside and outside the organization and having it filtered for that person to understand.

So agents can do a lot of that heavy lifting to make that CEO much more effective.

And in fact, I think the place where AI agents have the greatest potential are the very complex jobs, the places where human judgment is oftentimes distracted from the places where it’s most needed and having to do these repetitive things.

So if we can take on some of that heavy lifting or even act as a partner in brainstorming ideas or being as a sounding board can be incredibly valuable.

That is awesome.

I’m going to I’m going to try to drill to one level more even of specificity to accommodate our listening audience.

We serve a lot of middle market services businesses.

So imagine, you know, boutique consulting.

If you were doing a consulting gig to a consulting firm in the space, where are the first few places that you would guide a services company, for instance, a consulting firm to consider in applying the technology that we’re talking about?

Well, I think the first one is around knowledge management.

Again, having been in a consulting firm, run a consulting and analyst firm, the information that is in people’s heads, I wish I could tap into because I don’t know what it is that they’re working on.

So being able to curate and organize the research.

And again, it could be just understanding the prompts that they use, the results that they have, the conversations they have.

So being able to tap into all of that knowledge, that unstructured data could be a huge goldmine.

You can think about client engagement and following up with clients, scheduling meetings, drafting proposals.

I just drafted a proposal using Jointive AI, using a template, and then taking the call transcripts, giving it to it, and just populated that template for me.

So super easy.

Operations, it could be tracking your invoices, doing project tracking, allocation of resources, as you know, managing people.

Scarce’s most valuable resource, how are they using their time?

So my recommendation is to start with some of these one area, pilot it, measure the results, and then keep building on that success.

That’s awesome, because all of the examples that you just gave, curating the research and extending expertise to everyone in the organization, allows you not to have to hire just experts and all the client and operational augmentation automation approaches.

They help to do the job of scaling a services business, which of course has been the difficulty of services for all of time.

It’s a new world.

Pete, when I first started with Join the AI, I went into Chashu PT and said, you’re Charlene Li.

And I gave it questions that a podcaster had given me.

I gave it the questions that they had asked me.

And I had my actual responses from the podcast, and I compared it to the responses.

And I gave it to people to say, what do you think is which ones are better?

I was the real me was always better, but the AI me was pretty darn good.

It was decent, it passed muster.

And so I’m like, I’m chopped liver now.

So again, AI operates in the domain of knowledge, but humans operate in the domain of wisdom.

I don’t think AI is necessarily capable of wisdom yet.

And yet, that is what we bring in our key differentiation.

So we can leverage all of AI to increase our access to the right knowledge and apply it to that situation.

But it requires wisdom to figure out and have that judgment to make the good decisions that are required.

Nice.

Wonderful distinction.

And in fact, I was headed there next.

Your chopped liver, we also said earlier in the conversation, you know, remove the human bottle necks.

All along, we’ve been talking about generative AI as a way to enhance the work of the humans and the importance of keeping humans in the loop.

Does the AI agent change that expectation, that hope?

Well, the thing is we’ve been trained so much not to trust AI and to have human in a loop to make sure things are correct.

This is the most important thing and the biggest challenge is that we build trust.

We build trust in AI’s decision-making capabilities without any human oversight.

Again, that takes time and experience and working with it side by side.

At some point, you go, maybe I take my hand off this, give it some training roles and see what happens.

Bit of a philosophy or maybe policy question.

Whose job is it to change the skill sets and the role of the human in the mix?

Is it we as employees?

Is it the business?

Should government have a hand?

We see the change that’s coming, but how do we make it a successful one?

I don’t think government is the one.

They can provide some funding potentially for retraining and reskilling.

I’ll give you an example.

The CHIPS Act has in it, job retraining to train people how to work in the chip manufacturing places.

So government can have a role in that, but I think it’s a limited role.

I think it really comes down to the individuals and to the companies, and it’s a synergy between the two.

The companies have to provide the training because it’s their jobs that are being changed.

So anticipating, having a workforce strategy and a planning that anticipates these changes, is re-skilling people, up-skilling people, hiring people, and having a plan over the next 18, 24 months for what that looks like because it’s going to take time to re-skill people.

But it requires people be willing to be re-skilled too as well.

And so right now we have this fear that’s driving all of it and none of it’s happening.

Yeah, exactly.

I was going to ask, do you feel like companies get it?

Are companies taking the long view and thinking about what the path for talent is?

No, again, most of them are looking at AI as a technology, not as a transformative force.

And they’re just using, they’re throwing use cases against the wall and seeing if it’s sick.

And that’s not a strategy.

And if you want a strategy that is going to truly impact the business, then you have to look at the implications for your workforce.

And turning your head away from the obvious, this is jobs are going to change.

And how are we going to change with this?

And if you can make the commitment to your people and be honest and fair, and that’s all they ask of you, to be honest and fair.

You’re honest with them, jobs are going to change.

And fair, we’re going to give you a chance to compete for the new jobs.

That’s all they ask.

We may be on the answer, but let me ask the question anyway.

What are the greatest obstacles or challenges to a future that’s powered by agentic AI?

I talked a little bit about it, that trust is a big one.

I think also just the readiness of leaders to take this on.

Again, they kind of keep throwing the buck back and forth to each other saying, IT, you take care of it.

And IT goes, we don’t know what business challenges you’re trying to fix.

And the leaders are going, I don’t know anything about this.

So it just goes around in circles.

And part of the reason I’m writing this book, and my co-author Katja Welsh has been a Chief AI Officer for the past 15 years.

So she knows something about how to actually implement this inside of companies.

And the thing that we’re finding is that it requires top executive and board support.

And it is scary, it is highly disruptive, but there are things you can do to make it less so.

And so organizations that are good at change are able to adopt AI and put it to their benefit and create that competitive differentiation and advantage better and faster than anyone else.

And so my pitch isn’t, this is the greatest thing since live spread.

You have to understand the capabilities, also understand the limitations, and then apply it to the biggest strategic challenges that you have as an organization.

Because it is so difficult, the only reason you’re going to get through it is because it’s worth it at the end of the day.

Because it addresses a key strategic need that you have.

If it’s something on the side, off on the area, so it can’t cause any farm, you also want to invest in it.

So my history in looking at transformative technologies and transformative strategies, it has to be core to what the company is all about.

I imagine in the future, if not today already, companies who are good at change probably have a different, at least, leadership competency model or maybe even a different work structure or different roles in the business that allow greater than average focus on the hard work of transformation, which to your point is about the people and not about the technology.

Do you see changes in the way businesses are structuring and showing up?

It has less to do with structure.

I’ve seen highly structured hierarchical organizations move very quickly.

The reason is because their hierarchies support them moving fast.

I’ve seen very non-hierarchical companies just dissolve into total chaos.

Because it has nothing to do with your structure.

It has everything to do with your mindset.

My last book was called The Disruption Mindset, and because I found that certain companies just could innovate and disrupt themselves over and over again.

I wanted to know what was in the water.

The thing that they did consistently is they were constantly looking to the future, and in particular to the future customers that they wanted to serve.

They were here where they are today.

This is the future they wanted to be at, where they wanted to serve these new needs, emerging needs.

Their strategy was all about getting there.

Then they made sure that everybody throughout the entire organization knew what the strategy was.

They created a movement around that strategy and created a culture, with certain beliefs around openness, agency, and a bias for action that would get them there faster than anyone else.

So those are elements that exist in any and every industry, is what I found.

They exist in big and small businesses.

They exist in every possible country.

And it is not determined by anything other than the leadership saying this is where we’re going to operate.

What a wonderful place to end.

And vision, strategy, culture, and the leadership team that can get them in place and in working to bring the company forward.

It’s been such a delight to speak with you, Charlene.

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.

We’ll look forward to the publication of the book.

And I think there are other books that we need to catch up on as well.

Again, thank you for having me.

Are you ready to make 2025 the year that AI goes to work for you and your business?

Us too.

In fact, we’ve even made it our New Year’s Resolution to help you keep more of your clients than ever before.

So how are we doing that?

Well, go to knownwell.com to find out and to sign up for our beta wait list.

I was excited to get in the studio with David and Mohan to hear what they thought about agentic AI and the role it will play in 2025.

David, Mohan, how are you?

Good?

Everybody good?

I think I’m doing well, but the way you asked the question implies maybe I shouldn’t be.

Is there something going on?

No, well, you should be on your toes because we’re going to do something a little different this time around.

I want to get your reactions to a few things Charlene Li said just to see how they strike you as a leaping off point for our conversation today.

So before we get started, I want to play the first clip.

Agenda AI, which is using these AI agents that can function without any human intervention, is elevating AI from being a very passive tool, one that you have to be at the keyboard to use to be an active participant in your operations and in your life.

And so the key thing it does is that it removes the bottlenecks involved with you as a person, as a human, in these decision making processes.

And when you take the human out, you can scale things in real time.

And so this is revolutionary.

It’s akin to the Industrial Revolution, but it’s for cognitive work.

And we are here because we have this conversion of technologies, joint of AI, data processing and machine learning that create this perfect storm for innovation.

So I think organizations that embrace Agenda AI are going to have a significant competitive advantage and then also be able to thrive with all this uncertainty.

I love the way that she frames Agenda AI as the Industrial Revolution for cognitive work.

Mohan, David, what would you add on to that thought and where should we be thinking of, if that’s true, if it is like the Industrial Revolution, how should we be thinking about this as executives?

You know, I largely agree with Charlene’s statement that this is akin to a big revolution that’s going on, but obviously to compare it to an Industrial Revolution is something that is truly monumental.

It’s one of the three big phases of changes that have happened in the world.

The question for me is at what pace, right?

What is going to happen in 25, what’s going to happen in 26?

You’re not going to get to the end result of whatever we are all imagining in the next year or two.

So it’s going to happen in stages.

Courtney, where my mind goes with this is looking at that word, Industrial Revolution.

I could not agree more that we are in the midst of a revolution that is akin to the Industrial Revolution.

But my mind just goes to seek and break down, what were the drivers of the Industrial Revolution?

What can we learn from it?

I think about things like the factory system and manufacturing lines, machinery, workers in one place producing more than we’ve ever been able to produce before.

I think about the steam engine and how all of a sudden power was available and drove productivity increases.

I think about capitalism and how the economic system of the time was coming about and was a driving force behind the motivation and the inspiration of it.

I think about coal and the abundance of coal that drove it, probably tied with the steam engine there.

So, there were these different factors playing into it.

And there’s no doubt, when I think about agentic AI, that’s a piece of it for sure.

But at the same time, I think there are other factors as well.

Agentic AI is actually a piece of the overarching artificial intelligence ecosystem that I think is powering our ability to do much more complex work than ever before.

So, some people may be thinking, oh, agentic AI, that’s automation.

We’ve had automation forever.

What we’re doing though is automating and proactively, we’ve had proactive software before, you could schedule things.

But now, that work can be so much more complex.

It can plan and execute other types of work versus just a pre-determined process.

And that is what’s new.

And I think it’s not just agentic AI, but there will be all sorts of different factors that go into it.

We hear in the news a lot about the power and the energy consumption.

We’re going to need breakthroughs there.

We’ve already had the breakthrough of what we’ve often called the ambient user experience.

Technology has moved closer and closer into our everyday lives.

I think there’s going to be another breakthrough there.

We’ve gone from supercomputers to desktops, to laptops, to mobile phones, to watches.

I think it’s getting smaller and smaller, and it’s going to be inserted into how we already live.

I think all of these things have to come together.

I think the technology is there, the raw materials are sitting there, and the industrial revolution or the AI revolution now is about bringing those together to create economic impact, growth, and I think we’re going to see the next wave of prosperity, right?

And hopefully, that kind of enables the same type of progress that we had at the time of the industrial revolution, where we saw this incredible, because of all these factors coming together, we saw this incredible shrinking of those that are impoverished and in poverty.

I think this can have that same type of global impact, but it’s not just going to be because of agentic AI.

It’s one driver, kind of like the steam engine was, but there are other factors that have to play into it.

You know, the other thing that she said that’s super interesting to me is, she also said, be able to thrive with this uncertainty, right?

So that was like, that just caught my attention, right?

So David and Courtney, what do you think she might mean by that?

Well, I think it goes back to Mohan, this idea of being deterministic versus probabilistic, right?

That’s at the foundation of AI, right?

Everything in artificial intelligence is about taking billions and billions of weights and measures, right?

And probabilistically making decisions, right?

No longer are we doing 2 plus 2 equals 4.

We know the answer to that every single time.

This is rationalizing, right?

This is leveraging all this data that we’ve used to say probabilistically the next word is most likely going to be X because the previous word was Y, right?

And in that world, when we do that billions and billions and billions of times, there’s just not certainty.

And so we see this with the platform we are building at Knownwell all the time, right?

Where because we’re leveraging the large language models, this artificial intelligence to create our product, it’s very different nature from the deterministic products of yesterday.

And we have to figure out new user experiences and build a level of trust for folks where you can’t necessarily go in and prove that this is exactly how we came up with that, right?

We can say, here’s all the factors that went into it.

And rationally, the human mind can make the jump and say, oh, I get it.

But we’ve got to do certain things to promote that trust and that confidence.

And I think that’s what she’s talking about.

It’s very true.

If you’re going to live in this world, you’ve got to be able to embrace that lack of kind of pure mathematical certainty that I think we’ve been living with for quite some time.

It’s really interesting because in a lot of ways, as you’re describing that, I was thinking it’s a lot like a person.

We take the inputs and we make the best decision based on the inputs and the information we have.

And obviously, we don’t expect other humans to be exactly right all the time.

We never know what we’re going to get when we show up on this podcast.

Courtney comes up with something new.

We like her.

Lots of great skills, but you never know.

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Which actually brings me to the next topic, because David, we’re going to put you on the hot seat for a minute here.

Curious to get your thoughts on this one.

And I think it does relate a bit to being able to drive with AI.

But even for the more complex situations, they can be extremely helpful.

Let’s take the job of a CEO, for example.

You think that a CEO could never be replaced, right?

Well, probably not.

But a lot of the work that a CEO does can be automated, can be supported with an AI agent.

Looking at the reports, understanding the scheme of things, understanding all those conversations that are happening inside and outside the organization, and having it filtered for that person to understand.

So agents can do a lot of that heavy lifting to make that CEO much more effective.

And in fact, I think the place where AI agents have the greatest potential are the very complex jobs.

The places where human judgment is oftentimes distracted from the places where it’s most needed, and having to do these repetitive things.

Courtney, I actually couldn’t agree with that more.

I believe that it is not only, as she said, even in these more complex situations, I think it’s even more so in these complex situations where we see the benefit of artificial intelligence.

I mean, the reality is, as humans, we’re notoriously bad at making objective decisions, right?

Go to any sales training, right?

You’ll learn about how we make decisions emotionally, right?

For example, right now, I don’t want to diminish the human aspect of that, right?

There is a consciousness, there is an ethical component, there is a creative component, right?

None of this AI is, it feels creative, but it’s actually just regurgitating what’s been done before and probabilistically doing that to recreate something else.

There’s pure creativity, there’s all sorts of things, right?

The ability to relate, we’ve talked about that a lot on this podcast, right?

To know and be known is something that is uniquely human, and by truly knowing somebody, you can actually make better decisions that can inform your decisions, you can live to your conscience.

There are all sorts of things that are uniquely human.

But if you look at those things that are uniquely human that a CEO does, it’s probably outweighed by those things that candidly AI can do better than any of us can do, right?

It can process infinitely more data than we’ll ever be able to do.

It can only process it, can churn through it and make rational decisions in a much more objective way than any of us could ever do.

I actually think that this reality is one of the ways that we get to the trust we were just talking about, the confidence we were talking about.

If CEOs can actually lead by example and show that, yes, this technology isn’t just about replacing my job, it’s actually about taking off of me what it can do better to empower me to do what only I can do.

I think you’re going to see significantly better CEOs, much better decisions being made, and those CEOs can focus on what’s truly important, and that’s the people.

Can focus on their constituent relations, they can focus on their employees, their customers, and really begin to lead and inspire and do those things that only a human being can do.

And so I think that not only are we going to at this onset, you’re going to see that happen more and more.

I also think you’re going to see because of it, a new type of leader emerge on the other side of this, quote, industrial revolution, that leader that’s much more emotionally intelligent, much more focused on not just the science, but the art, right?

Focused on the ethical considerations, focused on the people and all those things.

And you’re going to see better results from those folks because they’re doing the scientific work through the AI.

Yeah, that’s really fascinating to think about the leader, the CEOs of the future in this new AI era.

Mohan, I want to get you in here because she starts to kind of also lean into an area that I know is a favorite of yours, that being knowledge management.

Is agentic AI really the, like, holy grail of knowledge management?

I am truly excited about the knowledge management space and AI because if you think about how knowledge management happens, it’s so archaic, right?

So literally, you can describe it as a bunch of PowerPoint decks and PDFs in a shared folder, right?

That’s what knowledge management today is.

I mean, literally the three of us had a whole dinner over pizza one time, just talking about there has to be a better way than this.

Mind-numbing.

Absolutely.

I give that analogy because that’s how knowledge management, in quotes, is done today.

But the real knowledge is in people’s heads.

It’s constantly getting updated.

It is happening across multiple people in the organization.

It’s mostly unstructured data, whether it’s email or video transcripts or whatever it is.

To be able to take all of this into a system, it’s not necessarily agentic AI, but this is more broader AI, and then be able to automatically tag and curate and clean, and keep the knowledge as clean as possible.

I think the, I’m so excited about what’s possible with knowledge management and professional services with the use of AI.

David, Mohan, before we part here, and obviously today we’re talking a lot about agentic AI, anything else you want to add or cautionary things that you foresee that you want to make people aware of?

Now, for a long time, the agentic AI needs to be people’s agents, humans’ agents, right?

It cannot become like the principal AI, right?

So you’ve got to kind of make sure that these STAIS agents that do a specific scope of work, that you know what the outcomes that you intended are, and we have to kind of keep that for a long period of time till we gain more confidence.

Well said.

Thanks for that, Mohan.

David, Mohan, thank you as always.

Thank you.

Thanks as always for listening and watching.

Don’t forget to give us a review on your podcast player of choice, and we’d really appreciate it if you would leave a review and share this episode with your network.

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

Hey, ChatGPT, what’s happening?

This episode, we talked about why the path to growth lies with agentic AI.

So what do you think?

Agentic AI takes the grunt work off human shoulders and relentlessly drives projects forward, making your business more nimble and efficient.

Pair that with its ability to learn from each new challenge and you’ve got a recipe for steady and scalable growth.

Now, you’re in the know.

Thanks as always for listening.

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