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Welcome to a special edition of Project Synapse, our AI show that we
run every weekend on Hashtag Trending.
This week, we're sharing the show with our Cybersecurity Today listeners, and
we have a special guest, Krish Banerjee.
He's the managing partner for AI in Canada at Accenture.
Welcome Krish.
. Good morning and thank you, Jim.
And of course, John Pinard, whose day job is a VP at CSO for a
financial institution here in Canada.
Every weekend.
He's a co-host of our AI show, project Synapse.
Welcome John.
Yep.
Morning.
Marcel can't be with us today, but, but the three of us are gonna carry on.
just to start out with some of the news stories from this week, and, Krish,
you've done this, been on the show before, but we just bounce these ideas
and add what they've, what we know about them or what we think about them.
One of the ones, and this is a familiar for us, John, is Google.
every time we do a show and we dis Google for not doing something,
they come out and go do it.
So I think we're gonna consider ourselves the Google whisperers.
'cause two weeks ago we were wondering why Google hadn't integrated
Gemini, which is a fantastic ai, and why they hadn't integrated it with the tools,
why you had to do stupid things like, oh, I want to fix this email, so I'm gonna
cut and paste it into another window, and then all of a sudden Google makes a
big announcement and they've integrated it with everything Workspace, Gmail.
I don't know if, I don't know if either of you guys use Gmail or workspace.
I do, and it's fantastic so far.
I'm just, I'm happy to rave about them again because . The email things that
they do, and the intelligence of Gemini, I don't know if you've seen it before,
but when Google first started out and many of these AI products, you get this
clunky window that tries to take over your email and then gets in your way.
And all you want to do is send a quick email and you can't do anything about it.
But Google now.
Elegantly lets you write the email.
It underlines the mistakes By the way, Grammarly is outta business,
at least in for terms of Workspace.
But it underlines everything.
And of course, you can pop the window up and get advice on the email.
It's just elegant and it does the things that I want it to do.
Gimme a quick grammar and spell checks.
Before you press enter you're like me, when you do email, you
press enter and you see something is spelled wrong, you go, oh, no.
So anyway, I was just happy.
heck about that.
Have you guys tried this at all?
I'm not a Gemini user, oh.
Or sorry, I am a Gemini user.
I'm not a Google Workspace user, so yeah.
I do a little bit with, Google Docs, but that's about it.
And, so I haven't done a lot with it.
I have used Gemini, both for like work as well as, for kind of more of
the research type of stuff as well.
I agree, like it's pretty good.
at work we do have, Co-pilot and Microsoft, that's the
integrated, platform that we have.
and it's pretty good as well, like the difference between this, platforms
are, disappearing quite fast.
And if you see one announcement of Microsoft copilot, cowork led to
announce another announcement, and then all of that kind of cascades.
Yeah.
And that's one of the things that, that I've said in previous shows too,
Jim, is that Krish, I keep saying that it's a bit of a leapfrog effect,
that one company will come out with something and then the next week
another company will come out with that plus something else and go through.
I do Gemini.
I've, I have two paid subscriptions.
I have a Gemini paid subscription and a ChatGPT, paid subscription at home.
and I, I find I'm, I still use Chachi pt, but I'm, I find I'm
using Gemini more and more.
And then like Krish, and by the way, Krish, it's really nice to hear
somebody else that uses Copilot at work.
these guys keep giving me a hard time because that's what we use as well,
is that, we have Copilot integrated into, into our Microsoft Suite.
Yeah, that's what, an Accenture from, at least in.
Microsoft 365 perspective.
That's yes.
Integrated with our, because we are on, Outlook and, and that's easy
form an integration, but we do have, Tim and I, we have Claude name it.
We have that as well.
Yeah, you need that in your line of work, but the, but it is, and I'm a
big, I am, like I said, I'm a big fan of the tools that I use, but I've always,
I've been in both the position of John and, and you as well Krish in terms of
consulting and I, the tool that works the best is the one that you use, Yes.
I've had people complain to me, this tool doesn't do everything.
How much do you use?
not a lot.
And you go, we'll use more, Yeah.
You'll get more from it.
couple other things that happened this week that.
Just, and two of them are related.
we had the big agent explosion over the past couple weeks with Open Claw and
Moltbook and then Open Claw went to OpenAI and basically, I don't know how you buy
an open source software, but you take the founder I guess what happens then
Meta came in and bought MT book and I don't know if you guys remember MoltBook.
I'm sure you do, but MoltBook was for our audience was that, it was supposed
to be a, social media network for agents.
I think that was nonsense, but I think the real, a lot more people there than there
were a automated agents red for agents.
Yeah.
Reddit for agents.
Yeah.
that's a better, yeah, that's a better way of putting it.
And I looked at, it didn't look anywhere near as nasty as some of the Reddit forums
I've been in, but, but it was getting there, like I, I've been following it
and if you have followed from when it started till the time, it got taken
over, the discussions has changed.
and that's the whole point here is that there is a self, learning aspect of it.
there were comments around, how they would develop and language that they
don't want humans to understand.
Which is surreal, just mind blowing to think about like that is an
agent to agent communication and an agent talking about we need to build
in some kind of in communication protocol that humans don't understand.
Yeah.
Isn't that comforting?
But I, my feeling is that I felt that some of those discussions were manipulated,
not the fact that they wouldn't occur.
'cause that's happened before.
Somebody has put two AIs talking to each other and they
did evolve their own language.
but I would just, I felt like it was more manipulated and sensational.
That's just a feeling.
You can't prove it.
But, the usual AI's gonna take over the world and destroy all humans
things, And, I don't blame 'em.
I feel that way some days, but the, it's, but being a grouchy
AI sort of thing, I don't know.
but Meta taking that over is a really interesting mix and seeing how they're
gonna move into this because, everybody's struggling with the business model
of AI and the obvious ones we take a look at are, OpenAI are
they gonna be able to make money?
Or is, how does Claude make its money?
and all that meta.
is has a whole AI that nobody thinks about and they have a
perfect way, to make money from it.
they're great at making money from social networks and from the use of AI
. And I think it's gonna be interesting to see the way they take this, but it's an,
a new way of looking at, And how people are gonna evolve and Nvidia joined the
group Looking at the next generation of how they're going to make money or how
they're going to continue themselves.
And they pulled, for listeners who don't know, they pulled back,
Nvidia was supposed to invest a hundred billion dollars in OpenAI.
They got to about 30 billion and they stopped.
And Jensen, Juan came out and said, basically, I don't know if we're gonna
do any more of this, but Nvidia, is now, they've built a network now, and I think
Meta will do this Reddit type network.
That's a great thing for Meta, that's a consumer type of social network.
But Nvidia, and maybe you've thought about this Kish, but the, they've got
an enterprise software, agent network.
But for corporations, and I've been thinking about this a
lot because the next level.
Of ERP of enterprise software is going to be AG agentic.
And if they pull this off and manage to, to make that this, the coalition that
develops those real enterprise agents and runs them, they're gonna be in a great
place for hundred billions, multi hundreds of billions in spending every year.
Is that something, have you been watching that, Krish?
If you think of Nvidia, they're evolving from being a chip maker to
really an infrastructure backbone.
that's the strategy that you see from them over the last year or so.
and now they're getting into more of the agent based enterprise systems,
comparing with the coworker model that we are seeing in the last
few weeks to months coming out.
Like they capturing that space.
If you think about the compute demand, like it's nearly doubling every three
to four months, like overall in an AI compute perspective globally.
and that's the opportunity for them.
Like the chip opportunity will become commoditized at some point.
But how do you capture the AI infrastructure, AI compute opportunity?
And remember, we used to think Moore's law was fast.
you're saying every three to four months we're doubling our demand.
We, I used to think, Moore's Law we're, every 18 months.
That's spectacular.
No, it's every three.
The last, report I saw, it's every three to four months.
The globally AI compute demand is, is almost doubling.
Wow.
And then NVIDIA's getting into autonomous vehicles.
The same thing.
Wow.
Yeah.
and where I guess, people have, and they're I think
they're so smart as a company.
they've let Tesla and Waymo do the hard work, develop all these things.
Now they come in and say, okay, we'll develop a facility that
can be used for autonomous vehicles and everybody can use it.
and once again, that everybody is going to be using Nvidia chips, and I think
they're, it's a brilliant strategy.
It's gets back to that idea of, the, that we used to teach in business
school about the people who made money during the Gold Rush were
not the people who looked for gold.
Few of them got rich, but most of them didn't make any money at all.
Who made money?
People who sold them the pick axes.
The wagons.
And for Levi Strauss, the jeans, Yeah.
Great stuff.
Last thing, and I'm, I've been really, since we knew you
were coming outta the show.
I wanted to talk to you about this and then I wanna get into this,
the whole question of AI anxiety, but I wa my favorite YouTuber, Nate
Jones came out with a great model.
'cause this has been the great discussion is why and MIT came, I think MIT came
out with a report, said we can plot.
How much of an occupation could be done with ai?
And then we'll plot how much is actually being done with ai.
And it's a big difference.
we have the promise.
Yeah.
We have the ability.
We're not having the uptake.
And that constantly comes back.
You see everybody's report , only 5% of executives say they're getting
benefits . And yet we know e especially if you know business, you know how
much of the job can be replaced.
I, we play with it every day and we're not seeing that, that degree of uptake.
And Nate Jones , came up with this idea that maybe it's
just the way we're doing it.
And that we're not, we're trying to automate jobs end to end like we
used to do with chatbots where we'd come in, we'd type something in, we'd
expect the whole report to come out.
Instead of saying, what, how can I break down the job?
How can I supervise the AI properly?
And have somebody say, oh, that's right.
That's not right.
And you start to think about it.
We need to think about ai, not as I think somebody used to say as, junior
employees, but I think we have to think about these AI capabilities in
a new way of architecting our business or we're never gonna get anywhere
'cause they'll never be perfect.
But then we accept imperfection from humans, but we can't manage it with ai.
Krish you've, you, this is what you do all the time.
are you seeing the same reluctance and are you finding that people are starting
to think about ways to overcome it?
I think it's getting better.
if I were to go back to the time when we started talking maybe a year back or
six or nine months back, there was a lot more of, skepticism and a lot more of,
fear in terms of getting hands on ai.
But I see more and more people, not just people who are in consulting or
who are dealing with AI every day, but just in general, like people
who has no clue of what AI is.
But it is becoming more of an, I think it's becoming more of
an ambient layer in, in my.
Way of explaining, right?
everything you do, it's part of ai.
Like you wear the Meta sunglasses from RayBan, it's part of AI.
You don't have to figure out, but then it becomes part of the jewelry
or kind of the thing that you wear.
And then you ask the question like, pointing and looking at something
and say, tell me what this building is, and it tells you about it.
What's happening behind is the meta AI is the LAMA models that are
probably working behind the scenes.
So that ambient layer is causing us not to make those conscious decisions every
day that I'm going to use AI no one thinks about using digital applications anymore.
When it was a thing, like in the first time when you could order
pizza on a digital app, it was a big thing versus having to call.
I think it, it will just become like that at some point.
But Krish, how do you find, I agree that there's more and more people that
are using AI for a whole variety of different things, like you said, even
down to the Meta glasses and so on.
But how do you find the difference in uptake of, I'll call it traditional ai?
So the chat bot, the, what I call the personal assistant versus agentic ai.
I think agentic AI is still, still in the labs in many ways.
there's a lot of organizations, at least the tier one Canadian organizations are
all using some form or shape of Agen ai.
Where the opportunity lies is have we actually used Agen AI
in your business processes?
it's a great thing to have a Chatbot
It's a great thing to have.
One process in your overall kind of, ecosystem being automated, but have
you actually looked at how to automate your procurement business processes?
Have you looked at reinventing your HR and marketing?
And I think that's the opportunities and I'm seeing people are starting
to think about it, but haven't really thought about the full reinvention
of all of those business processes.
I, I was gonna say, it almost sounds like, years ago people used
to talk about process redesign and re-engineering of the business.
And that really sounds a lot like what's required now is process
redesign to now incorporate.
Agentic into your processes and not just trying to slap them in various places.
Percent.
Because if you automate or if you put AI into something that is broken,
you're basically scaling the kind of the making it break faster.
Yeah, exactly.
You are, you're promoting digital bureaucracy.
Yes.
And the, so what do you, the other part of, while we're talking about AgTech,
is how do you find, in your experience, are there a lot of companies or is, do
you find that there's an, a real need to be able to go back and look at making
sure you know that your data is secure?
Pre I'll call it pre agentic, before you start utilizing any kind of
agents, making sure that your data is safe and secure and that it's
properly classified and that, because.
I guess my concern, one of my concerns from a corporate standpoint is it's fine
if, if Sally accidentally has access to some data right now that she shouldn't,
that's wrong, but it's probably not gonna kill us because Sally's one person
and can only look at things so quickly.
But now, if Sally's running an agent that can run 24 7, 365 and do things
dramatically faster than what Sally did, now you run into the problem
of the, an agent having access to the data that they shouldn't have.
Yeah, no, I completely agree that the guardrails need to be there.
And depends on the industry, depends on the type of data.
At the same time, if you look at, the sniff test, which we were
talking about, it talks about reasonableness verification.
Like you, you need to verify reasonableness.
and sometimes you could be 80% right when it comes to AI
and the 20% could be manual.
Human in the loop, human in the lead.
and that's good enough.
And I think sometimes we have, we're running for perfection and that is causing
some of the concerns to be perfect.
And to your point, like if there's one person getting access, sure,
can we put the right guardrails to make sure that doesn't happen?
And if it happens, what are the kind of the mitigations for it?
but you may be not doing anything with AI for the next nine months
just trying to solve that problem.
Is it worth, yeah.
Yeah, and I've seen this before in it, it, I wrote a paper
on it for the cutter journal.
At one point I was doing a big telco system and they, we were
gonna build this massively great system to avoid a couple of errors.
And the couple of errors were that, the way Bell expressed where they
put things was not by postal code.
So you couldn't do an edit.
So we were gonna spend all of this great time and money trying to
figure out how to solve this problem.
I went and asked one question.
I said, who do you have that's really successful, really dealing with this?
and I had this one lady, and she was really up on this.
I went to her, you know what she had under terminal, whole pile of yellow sticky
notes for the 15 items that were there.
And literally we were going to spend a million and a half
dollars building a system to fix several error areas like that.
That training would've.
Gotten rid of or that just making sure people had experience with.
And that opened my eyes and I did almost 10 years of lean work and just pulling bad
things outta processes and understanding that many times we were trying to automate
things we should have just abolished or we should have just taken a new
look at and said, why automate this?
we can fix this with training.
We can fix this with experience.
And and I think that's, I think that would be the maturity of AI is
to stop trying to think of it like it's, we're gonna have an end to end.
It's gonna, we'll install it, it'll fix this problem.
Instead looking at and saying, what components could I do well with ai?
What components can I do well with people?
Where do I need exactness of an algorithm versus the experience
that says that number's just wrong.
I've had a lot of bosses who don't redo my work.
when I was, especially when I was a young employee, I was working in finance and
stuff like that, and somebody look at it and go, Jim, there's something wrong here.
And basically that's what they got paid for.
You.
You are spot on, Jim.
Like we, when we go and, look at business processes or existing process
at a number of our clients, I often find that there's probably good 20, 30%
that's pure RPA type of work and that's good enough that does not require ai.
And I think that's the realization that we need to absorb that.
You are looking for an outcome that is going to be X 30, 40% more efficient, more
productive, improves your NPS score, helps you with customer acquisition or saves
you money from an bottom line perspective.
How you get there doesn't need to be, and I'm saying this being
kind of the AI lead for Accenture, it doesn't always need to be AI.
And I think that's an important acceptance because sometimes we run
after and bit of an AI wash, let me wash everything with AI and we don't have to.
Yeah.
Interesting.
John, you're that same, and by the way, Krishtian John's questions,
he's also in charge of security, so he is, that's a, I saw the CSO mug.
yes.
. I just, I was just gonna say that, I'm a big fan.
part of the reason I'm on this show with Jim is I'm a big fan of AI, but, one of
the things, and it more so with ag agentic than traditional ai, but, it scares the
hell outta me because there's, it feels a little bit like the, a black box that you
put the data in and it spits answers out, and you go, okay, how did it get that?
so it's not like traditional programming where you can follow
the code through and verify it.
but it's, so I'm, I don't wanna say I'm skeptical, but I'm a little bit leery.
And again, because of the cybersecurity hat, it, it makes me a little bit nervous.
So it's, I'm approaching it with caution.
And you were in the industry, you're in a regulated industry as well.
Yes.
so that's the other.
Aspect.
'cause the industry and the type of data and the type of obligations you
have for your customers and shareholders is also going to decide the kind
of, protection you need to consider.
Yeah, sure.
And one of the things I love about having John on the show is he's got that because
of where he, the way he's thinking about these things and trying to wrap his mind
around this, it's different than me who's, I don't, I don't work for anybody anymore.
I can put as much AI as I can.
I created a little publishing company that is 80% ai.
Like we, we automate everything, including my expenses, which I toss into it
and say, send those to my accountant.
Now, what used to take me 45 minutes of going, what is this one, what is this one?
What is this one done?
So we've, and that's how I attacked it, was I just, when I was stuck saying I
wanted to have a publishing company, but I couldn't afford to have a massive
amount of employees, anything that's not.
The value of publishing, doing this sort of work where a human should do it.
I said, we're gonna get rid of it.
And I think we've done that in a small business.
I know you can do that in a big regulated business.
I think the constraints are bigger and the challenges are bigger.
it's great to be a cheerleader, but then if you have to do it in real time,
what's that old, was that an Accenture ad that they used to have about changing
the engines on a plane in mid-flight?
I think it was, they were trying to explain, they're trying to
explain consulting and said, here's what we're doing for you.
Crazy things for our clients as well.
So I'm sure it could be ours.
no doubt about it.
No.
But it was the idea of, it was the idea of a big corporation making a change was
like flying an airplane to try to change.
we need into a massive change ourselves as well.
if you look at from the time of the AI kind of the.
Growth in the last few years.
AI has always been there, as we all know, but since the time, it has
become more often, commoditized, opportunity for all of us.
we are a small country, like 800,000 people globally in Accenture.
And think about the change that we have to go through to move.
Accenture people to use ai, and that's what we have done, like our
leadership and our CEO, Julie Sweet.
she has been very vocal about that.
We need to be our best credential for us to be going and talking
about AI to, to anyone.
So we have completely changed our marketing function.
We have changed our, the way we look at HR and legal and
all of our corporate functions.
So we went through a massive transformation and then for our people
as well, like every single person within Accenture, irrespective of your
level, has to go through a certain amount of agent and AI training.
That includes, that's certification from Stanford.
That's a phenomenal way to do it because that's the only way to do it properly is
train your people ahead of time on how to use the tools before you just throw
them out and, and say, here, go use it.
Sorry, I was just, when you said 800,000 employees, I'm sitting there
going, God, I can only imagine what their copilot licensing costs are.
I'm sure they've got somebody driving a deal.
Don't worry.
Yes, no doubt.
Yeah.
but this is the thing I loved about working in a consulting
company and something that I think people could a adopt.
And that was, we and I ran a worldwide practice , with , the former DMR
group, and we did a lot of training.
We invested heavily in training, both for knowledge and culture.
and those are two important things.
And I think, yeah.
Accenture does that exceptionally well as, as well, investing the
money and training your people so that they're not only knowledgeable,
but they have an understanding of the culture of the company and how
you move forward and how you work.
And it's why I think you can have 800,000 employees.
And I, my experience has been, you might, you might, people might argue
with this, but if you talk to somebody in Accenture who works in another
country, they're gonna have a lot in common with somebody who works in Canada.
'cause there's a, their thread that of, and I, they're big companies and all that,
but there's a thread and understanding of the purpose of the company and how
it works and all those sorts of things.
I think companies could learn from that.
No, I think we have, I feel proud of, what we have done.
and I think it's a good segue.
If you may, Jim, into the topic of AI anxiety, because I think when
this does not happen, yes, it leads to confusion, it leads to distrust,
it leads to causing the, all the parameters that leads to anxiety.
Because that's one of the things we were hearing.
Like people were anxious, people were nervous about what's going to happen.
Like in consulting, people don't always jump and talk about job loss,
but they think about relevancy.
They think about am I going to be relevant in conversations, in discussions in my
peer group, in front of my, clients.
And that is an anxiety.
And I think we address that with the training, with the knowledge, giving
people the tools, letting them use it.
and I think that's a good way of Addressing that and acknowledging it,
that it's okay to have that conversation.
and I think some of the anxiety anyways comes from the fear of the unknown, right?
That if, as you said, that you've, that Accenture has done a really good job of
educating people and sharing information with them that helps to, tame that anxiety
versus a company that says, oh yeah, we're rolling out AI across the board.
And everybody going, oh my God, I keep hearing about people losing
jobs over AI and this and that.
am I, does that mean I'm gonna lose my job?
And, what's, how are things gonna change?
yeah, the communication part I think is huge.
And the education.
Yeah.
And I think companies, I think it, this is now catching up with us.
I think the first, from the first looking at chat GPT in, what was it, 2022?
Yeah.
November, 2022.
November was 22.
Yeah.
With you, every, everybody knows where they were when John Lennon
died and everybody knows where they were when ChatGPT came in.
the, but it's the idea of we've, we were so amazed by this thing that could
write a poem, that could talk to us, that behaved in a way that no software
had, except maybe in science fiction.
So we're enthralled with that.
We've had, that has exploded.
I think there is a huge.
anxiety in companies.
I think there's a huge anxiety in society and I'm starting to see it,
and I don't think that people who are rolling this out, even the big AI
companies that have been quite critical of them really understand the feelings
that people are going through with this when they hear, and it's relevant
when you're talking about a company.
it's one thing to talk about, the job loss that's gonna be out there
in the future and it will come.
I'm absolutely convinced of that.
Geoffrey Hinton was in front of A Parliament committee and you could
see the impatience in the man saying, you're not preparing for this.
You're not preparing for what's going to be a massive
transformation of the workforce and our taxation and all of that.
But that's in the future.
We're not good at the future, but when we see ourselves.
Being affected.
And it's that old joke about, not joke, but saying that, when the guy next
door loses his job, it's a recession.
When you lose your job, it's a depression.
and so when we see it affecting us, and I think that's what's happening, I
think people are seeing it affect them in their own lives and starting to worry
about that no matter where they are.
Yeah.
And I find like most, organizations are trying to tackle the job, which
is okay, but I would rather start with the task because there's a
difference between the job and the task.
And if you think about the work's going to change doesn't mean that the
human being is not required anymore.
It's.
The work is going to change.
I may not be doing the exact same thing I'm doing today.
I may be doing more audit, more decision making, more of validation, versus
actually doing the stuff and the steps that I were doing so it changes the
work, which then in turn changes the workforce and thinking about what kind
of a workforce do I need for future?
How do I prepare for that?
What trainings, what tools, what kind of empowerment do I need to give them?
The pyramids going to shift upwards, so how do I make the junior entry
levels behave like they have more tools and capability to behave a couple
of levels even higher, even from the get go that changes the workforce.
Then we need to think about what do I need from the workers?
I think we are jumping into the workers first in many cases and
saying, oh, I, I have a contact center.
I need to displace X amount of people because I need to save cost.
Instead, if I think about what are the processes that I'm running in my contact
center, what work needs to change, what are the tasks that needs to change?
And then decide and design the workforce of the future, then
you can have a better worker.
And I think that builds trust.
Yeah.
I think one of the things though that we also don't do is we don't
think of work in terms of outcomes.
and this is one of the things that I think freezes organizations.
When you think about who you are in the organization, I think it's important
your processes become important.
you've gotta defend your data, your processes and where, what you do
in the organization, instead of asking yourself, what's our outcome?
And what's the best way to utilize both people and technology to get that outcome?
And that gets broken very quickly.
we're good at thinking about inputs to a process and we're good
at protecting those and managing those, but we forget the outcome.
And I think that's part of, I think what you're saying, Kris, is
if you're looking at the outcomes people can have, you can start to
ask questions like, wait a minute, A junior employee, why are they junior?
Because they don't have enough knowledge to make these decisions.
but how else could we employ them?
How else could we use them?
I think that, or give them the tools they can make different kinds of decisions
that they were not making today.
Yeah, 'cause and we talk about, the errors that AI would make.
I have taken on a lot of new employees and I wish I could
give them a tool that says, look.
Just work your stuff out and then ask, check it using this and see
if you get a different answer.
and that's, I think would be, I think we can find different ways to
use the diff the different tools we have, but the anxiety piece of it
goes, I think, goes deeper as well.
and I don't want to, I don't want to go get past that, but I also don't wanna
lose that point that I was going to think about, and I was talking about
consulting companies and investing in the training and getting people to understand
what this can do before we start asking them how we're gonna employ it.
'cause I think if people have an understanding of ai, they will do
things that will make their jobs easier.
I believe you know, that people are, people will act in the interest
of their own personal efficiency, if nothing else, if it's offered.
And you can use AI to your advantage as well.
I'll give you my personal example.
Like early on, like I was really, I would say borderline anxious in terms
of what do I need to learn because I, it just because of my title, I have a
responsibility to be ahead of others.
You need to know a little bit about AI is what you're saying.
Yeah.
My mentor, John Thorpe once said to me, said, you don't have to be
the smartest person in the room.
I said, I'm the head of the practice worldwide.
I love your, I love what you just said, but I have to try to be
the smartest person in the room.
Yeah.
so that was a phase when Okay, I need to read MIT, I need to read this,
I need to, that read that article.
And it was overwhelming.
And it's overwhelming for a lot of people.
And if it's overwhelming for people who have access to a lot of tools,
I can only imagine people who do not have access to tools, but they're
hearing about all of these things.
So I used AI to my advantage.
Now, I wrote a couple of agents who summarizes information,
sends me an email every Friday.
This is what happened in the world of ai.
I take a quick glance, at least I know enough to be relevant or can have
a few sound bites of conversations like this, but that's like use
AI to your advantage as well.
Like even in the field of mental health and neurodiversity, there's a lot of
AI based diagnosis that is happening.
So I think it's bit of an circle like AI is causing some of that.
And then you can also use AI to.
Preempt or remediate some of that as well from an anxiety
or mental health perspective.
That's interesting.
'cause we do focus on the reverse.
and I was thinking about this the other day.
Some of the smartest people I know are dyslexic, in business.
And it really, you don't actually know that unless you actually talk to them
or neurodiverse in one way or another.
And they've used that.
What, what might be thought of as a limitation by some people as a
way to drive themselves forward?
my friend Mark, I won't give his last name, just, but he's, I didn't
know he was dyslexic for years.
I'd known him and he finally told me he looked, he was one of the
most well-read people in the world.
And I went, how do you.
Keep up that fat, how do you do that?
He said, work hard.
And now I'm thinking, in some cases, you can now have books
available to you, read to you.
you can have different ways of tacking information.
it's sad to say my eyesight isn't what it used to be and able after three
hours of staring at a screen, I dunno if I can read that stuff anymore.
I'm much more likely to say, look, I'm gonna just have something.
Read this to me, Or as, and I think executives must suffer from
this a lot, is you get a stack of things you're supposed to read.
could I summarize some of them?
Is that cheating?
Maybe.
But it helps you cope with the volume of information you've got.
It's an interesting thing.
Yeah.
Wow.
'cause she started me thinking about that, Krish.
it's.
Not difficult to write.
A couple of agents.
I've seen people who have never done coding, have never been
close to calling themselves.
Technical has actually started doing that.
And this is something that again, in Accenture, we have started doing, like
an democratized way of how you can actually use Agentic to your own work.
Like we, we have in-office workshops where people will come in, sit down
with their laptops, that includes managing directors, partners at all
levels and analysts and build agents.
And the agents could be about helping me plan my next trip to
Italy to summarize this AI knowledge.
For me to give me a summary of my emails, like the use cases are different.
You find your own.
Bottlenecks in your day, do your own kind of day in a life journey map and
say, where can I be more efficient?
And I think there's many opportunities.
Yeah.
I think, by the way, when we talk about anxiety, I think we
ignore senior management and executives to our peril actually.
Because, the myth is, oh, they don't understand this technology.
they're not interested.
many of them are interested, but we forget that they have jobs too.
And some of them are incredibly busy and taking a risk in front of a large group.
It may not be everybody's style.
when I was at Ernst and Young, one of the reasons I think I got ahead there was I
would help partners with their computers.
And I didn't look like a jerk when I was doing it.
I respected that they knew a lot more about a lot of things than I did.
And if I could share my knowledge of how to use a PC and get some of the experience
they had, and understanding, wow, I was getting a big benefit out of that.
instead of just treating them like, you don't understand how to do this,
and I've seen tech people do this.
They walk into an executive's office and they have that attitude from the
start, and they don't realize that, that these aren't people who are stupid.
They are, they just, they're smart at a lot of other things.
But I think if we want executives to be able to run companies understanding ai,
they have to somehow get that experience.
I think, and I think the good thing about AI is that it is become a great leveler
to a large extent from an capability perspective, you can build an agent.
With just English language prompts or
execution level kind of commands.
You don't need to be knowing Python or Java or any
programming language to do that.
And that's a great kind of way of leveling the playing field.
And I'm seeing that is already happening.
Like people who, who would've otherwise dependent on a group of
ingenious to do something for them, can build reports, can build tools.
And we are already seeing that happening.
Like in our Canadian leadership team, our Canadian CEO, he asked
everyone directly reporting to him to have a session on building agents.
How do we build agents, how do we learn to do that?
And now there is a whole.
flu of things happening.
Everyone's trying to be more efficient, trying to come up with new ideas, and
it's just like it, it's almost it's spreading, and when you do that at the
top and you start showing that, and when you start sending that information to
a broader group of people, it spreads.
It is very infectious.
Yeah.
I think one of the things like we've talked about anxiety and fear and
things, and I think part of it is that, I guess I call it fear of the unknown.
That, and Jim, you talked about the executives as well, that they don't wanna
look stupid in front of others in the company because they're an executive.
They should know all of this stuff.
but I think that's the big thing is that, how do you get started learning it?
How do you.
how do I know what to do with AgTech AI when I don't even know what it is?
and so I think, Krish, to your point, the, the idea of providing, training
often, and making it available to everybody in the company is a huge
start or a huge stepping stone to getting you to where you need to be.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
we absolutely have seen that benefit.
Yeah.
And for the overachievers out there, and I said, and one of the things I,
and I've talked openly about my career and what it, what I did wrong and what
I did right over the years, one of the things that drove me was if somebody
was working for me or consultant or contractor or anybody who came up to
me and said, you don't understand this.
I'd take the books home.
I, the next time they saw me, I'd know a lot about the topic, but it's exhausting.
Yeah.
Operating at that level is exhausting and overwhelming at times.
and as I got older that, that got harder.
Now I'm just, I, and John and I have talked about this, we were,
we're talking about one of the, when Gemini came out, I learned a
programming language in an afternoon and am I gonna be perfect at that?
No.
But I got past all the syntax problems, all of the things that you had to learn.
I could be, came up and wrote a program and the AI walked me through it.
So I had a really good understanding of how to program and rust in an afternoon.
And everyone will tell you there's a reason why they put me in management.
And it wasn't because of my programming skills.
It was to get you outta programing.
Yeah.
I think they put me in, they wanted me in project management to keep
me outta coding, but that's, but at the same time, we have this ability
to learn new skills and experiment with those, and I think that's being
missed, of the things you can do.
Everybody thinks about it like a chatbot.
And I was listening to the senate committee, everybody's
talking about chatbots.
That's good.
But what about the other things that you can do to expand your
knowledge, to learn to try things.
I think, I guess maybe that's one of the cures for anxiety.
Krish, I wanna ask you about another thing and John, I'm gonna ask you the same
question because it's, I think, when we.
We are all humans, and we hear about the things that are
anxiety generating from ai.
the things that we hear about children, the things that we hear about,
about people being dependent on it.
How do you cope with that level of anxiety, which I think hits us all
if we're parents and we're members of society, how are you dealing with that?
When I have two daughters, one, just finishing university and the other
one in, grade nine, and I see, the.
The real field level experience of working with them on that.
And I see the one who is in the high school, they're natively in ai, right?
my, my older daughter, she's, in adversity and final year, she has adopting to ai.
she has, she's obviously seen the journey, but she's adopting to AI and she's
learning AI as, as we are all learning.
But the younger one, going back three, four years, when she was middle
school, by the time they started using computers and all, they're all in ai.
So it's the native way of using it.
So I call them kind of the AI natives in some way.
And for them, they don't know.
and honestly, they're not even using search anymore.
And sometimes to our peril, because if you use.
LLMs for every single question you are probably not using the
resources effectively, right?
Because there's a cost of using LLMs and tokens and all that.
So I think that to me is an, is a positive thing, but I obviously have
the same concerns of what does it mean for their future, what kind of work
and task will be relevant for them?
And I don't have an answer because today one, one a of
work might feel secure, right?
whether it's, whether you have certain skillset, whether it's
in, medical or law or something.
But even law is disrupted, right?
the question would be like, do we need as many lawyers that we need today to
make the type of decisions and synthesis that we are doing tomorrow, right?
and everybody tries not to smile and make a lawyer joke.
I'm proud of your professionalism, gentlemen.
Yes.
Yeah.
So I honestly, Jim, I don't know the answer of sometimes people
ask me, so what is in future proof profession at this point?
I don't know.
Like I can, there is know the skills.
I know the traits, like it's probably more decision making, it's more
analytics, it's more being, how can you ask the right questions because
the answers are all out there.
It's about asking the questions, where the skill lies now, but what type of job will
evolve in future to my kind of the work changing and then the workforce changing
and that means the worker will change.
I just don't know at this point.
It's hard to predict.
Yeah.
And I think just tied in with what Krish was saying is that it's.
it's the skills, not the knowledge.
I go back and look at when computers first came out, people went from
handwriting everything or typing to now they use the computer for taking, doing
all of their note taking and so on.
And this is, it's another transition.
I think one of the fears that I have is, and quite frankly, Jim, this kind
of ties to the discussion that you and I were having earlier on, is, as
you get older you want to do things to keep your, exercise your brain.
and to me it's the same thing with the younger generation as they're going
through school, that if they can just go and ask an AI for an answer versus them
having to go and do some research on it.
That makes me a little bit nervous.
I think one of the things though, is it, so that's the negative side of it.
The positive side though, is the more detailed you can be in, the
questions you ask your ai, the better the answer is going to be.
So it will train people to ask better questions, but I don't know.
I think, back to what Krish was saying, that I think it's going to become
more about, knowing how to use things, understanding how to be able to, grasp
concepts versus this is really just a new tool that we have to learn how to use.
and I think there are going to be some.
So I have 23-year-old twins.
One is in the trades.
One graduated with her BComm in marketing.
my, my son with the trades had no problems finding a job.
Got a job right away, and he's busy 95% of the time.
my daughter in marketing had troubles finding a marketing job because now
everybody's using AI for marketing.
So she's now gone into a different, a different line of business.
But, it's not that she can't find a job, It's that the job that she has found
is in a different line of business.
And so I think people are going to have to learn to adapt.
And, where is this gonna end up?
Who knows?
I'm a firm believer that I think that, as humans, we always go
overboard and then tone it back a bit.
I think that we're going to be in the same boat with AI I think everybody's trying to
do everything with AI and go well, yeah.
as Krish said earlier, some things just make more sense
to do for a human to do it.
so I think we'll figure out what that balance is.
and we're going to have to, as a human race, we're going to have to figure out
how to adapt to that, that new balancing.
Yeah.
Two things that, that, and one thing that jumped out from what you both said, that.
The one thing that troubles me is, and it goes back to this idea
of the sniff test of being able to assess and not trust openly,
everything that, that an AI tells you.
Yes.
Or that in the way we wouldn't trust any other piece of information because
in the society of the future, AI is the easiest thing to manipulate.
If we think controlling the media is something that's happening.
And it is, that's just a natural thing.
media has its own way of thinking about things and presenting information.
And that's, whether it's social media that's making us angry or whether whatever
we think about media is there, but AI.
Really easy to make to put together information.
And I've tested it, what does it say?
What does this AI say about one politician or another?
You'll find actual differences.
Yeah.
And, so who's trying to please who, but that, but the fact that potential
is there means not only does AI have a capacity to make mistakes or to
misinterpret , and it's always going to have that, that's a feature, not a bug.
And, but, so people have to be able to have that critical thinking.
I don't see that in our educational system, and it troubles me, but.
More about it, I think is this idea that I think, I think our kids may
have, and maybe a lot of us have, and I heard Geoffrey Hinton express
it beautifully, and it was, it's a paraphrasing of that old line of
if you think you understand quantum physics, you're not a quantum physicist.
but he said, if you think you understand the future of AI
10 years out, you're wrong.
that's all I can tell you.
that you, it's like looking through gauze.
He said, you can see a little, you can see some stuff.
Clearly the rest of it's pretty, pretty messy.
And when one of the godfathers of AI tells you that he can't think 10 years
ahead and be right, we shouldn't feel bad.
I think that's something we all have to grapple with.
yeah.
No, I think Jim, you are right.
I would say, you can also use AI to the advantage or the benefit of that Yes,
it's easy to, to have fraud with ai, but it's, I expect that in future we
will use AI to also detect that as well.
And there's already capabilities like that.
Yep.
You have scanners who can detect whether it's an deep facke or
whether, the text that you just got probably came from an AI bot.
And I expect that will become more and more part of our lives.
So it's the usual thing, like any new technology that has come in the world
has been used for both good and bad.
The balance of that is where the progress of the society lies.
Yeah.
Yep.
I would agree.
And the, my kids are grown, but I was actually asked about the same
thing about what I hoped for them.
And my, my, my kids are in their thirties now, but the and.
I came up with a piece of advice that I think actually works and my, because
they're my kids, they won't listen to me.
But, so for other people who've got kids out there, I was asked about,
'cause I get asked about the same question as what do I do about my work?
And I said two things to concentrate on.
What are you passionate about and where can you add value?
And value Doesn't have to be money.
it can be something you trade for money, but it can also be making
a difference in your society, making a difference in your world.
And I think as I look back on it, the only thing I've done well,
I'm crappy at career planning.
I just stumbled into everything I've done.
But I try to follow stuff that I was passionate about and where I
thought I could make a difference.
And I think if we could, if we could get behind that attitude.
and we'd ask ourselves a different question about AI and that's, how
do I use it to help me get there?
Yeah.
Well said, well said.
Krish, ' you advise a lot of businesses and you have some foresight into this.
What is your biggest piece of advice for companies right
now, who are looking at this?
And they may be partway through the journey they might be starting.
what would you say to them?
Yeah, this is what I'm saying.
Pretty much every conversation with the, the CEOs and chief AI officers
and chief data officers, we need to.
Beyond the experimentation and I already see that's happening.
But let's jump into proving something and use AI where it mat matters
most and gets the most value.
So focus on the value part is important.
I think we have all proven in the last two years or so, AI works.
There's no reason or no need for anymore proving the point that AI works.
Now it's about how does it work in your environment?
How does it unlock value?
How do you get value?
How can you do that ethically and how can you do that keeping in
mind talent people and change, and that's how you can be successful.
I think that's usually where I see most of the organizations are stuck.
Everyone has done some experimentation.
Now, how do we scale from there and realize value, which is the ask
from the board, ask from the CEO.
show me the value now and let's focus on the value and do it in a way that's future
proof ethically, and for the people and for the, the community and everything
that the organization lives under.
So that's my advice, Jim.
Fabulous.
Thank you, sir. I'm gonna wrap there.
I don't think we can do any better than that, our guest today has been Kris
Banerjee, who's the managing director and partner for Canada, for Accenture
in AI thank you so much for joining us.
Kris has been really great.
Thank you, Jim.
Yes.
Thank you Kris.
I hope, joy, John, great to meet you and great convers you again.
I put a small challenge to you that I would like to see you hosting an,
podcast with agents talking to you.
Ooh.
Oh, come on.
Let's do that.
We will, we'll do that.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'll, I'm gonna, we'll be, we'll talk to you.
we, yes.
We're yes is the answer.
Oh, that's cool.
So think as a guest.
Yep.
That we're gonna do that, John, get on it.
Yes.
Yeah.
I, I was, yes.
I was thinking maybe Marcel.
Yeah.
Go.
Thanks again, Krish.
Thanks to you out there listening to this program.
It's been great to have Krish with us.
Hopefully we've given you something to think about some insights.
Don't hesitate to contact us and send us your ideas.
and even if you're an AI agent, \ You could reach me@technewsday.com or.ca.
Take your pick, just go to the contact us form and drop a note.
And like I said, even if you're an AI agent, tell us what you think.
Have a great weekend, and we'll be back on Monday with the tech news.
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