AI Leadership Insights: AI Personally and Professionally

Amanda Razani: Hello, and welcome to the Techstrong AI Leadership Insights. I’m Amanda Razani, and I’m excited to be here today with Alysia Silberg. She is the CEO of Street Global. She is a book author, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. She is a venture capitalist, and a UN women empowering women champion. How are you doing today?

Alysia Silberg: Great. And you? Thank you for hosting me. I’m excited to join today’s discussion.

Amanda Razani: Well, can you first of all share a little bit about yourself and your background, and what kind of led you to AI in the technology world?

Alysia Silberg: So my full-time journey in AI began around 2010 when I founded Excel Force, which was a pioneer in AI driven voice analytics. It was acquired by a leading pharmaceutical company. And it was incredible journey, learned a ton. And I then went on to establish Street Global venture capital, focusing on AI investing, learned so much working with the best founders in the world in terms of AI, and also helping them scale their companies. I authored the book Unemployable: How AI Transformed My Work And My Life, and as a result of that, many executives reached out and said, “Well, how did you do this? How do you incorporate AI into what you do in order to successfully scale companies?” And so it made complete sense from doing this for so long to found Unemployable AI to democratize advance AI solutions across diverse industries.

Amanda Razani: So can you elaborate on your book a little bit more? You said it’s about how you utilize AI in every aspect of your life. So can you share some of those examples?

Alysia Silberg: Sure. Let’s take, for example, coaching. So I have a human coach. I also have a AI coach. I basically get rated every day. I rate myself. My AI coach rates me too in terms of my performance as a CEO. And then we make the necessary adjustments. We have weekly strategy sessions. And then we say to my human coach, these are the areas Alysia’s slightly weakened could improve in. These are the areas we need your help. And it’s been this iterative process that works extraordinarily well that’s enabled me to scale the business rapidly, and also improve my personal wellbeing and my growth as a human.

Amanda Razani: That’s amazing. So for regular individuals all interested in AI and looking to harness this technology, how would they go about getting that same sort of help? What’s the first step in learning how to utilize the technology?

Alysia Silberg: I think starting from a place of curiosity is important. I think that’s an incredibly important thing, not fearing the AI. So for example, I have a weekly AI newsletter. We have a team of people putting it together. And it’s focused on executives, and we work very hard to enable them to go on that journey without having to do the heavy lifting of learning everything about the AI, where they’re seeing the benefits of being able to incorporate it into their businesses immediately and go on that go that very exciting journey that we are all undertaking. So I think the most important thing is being willing to learn and saying, okay, where’s my company at? Where do I want the company to be? What are the biggest challenges I’m experiencing now? Can I find the right partners to work with to achieve our goals? And being very realistic in terms of your expectations of the AI. As I say in the first innings, I’d say truly of this and everything that’s happening, so it’s going to get very exciting.
I think going back to the example I gave, if people wanted to use the AI coach that I’ve created, I have a custom GPT, they’re welcome to just message me on LinkedIn or via my newsletter and say, “I want to use your custom GPT.” And I have many custom GPTs I’ve created for all different aspects of the business. Be happy to share those too.

Amanda Razani: That’s amazing. And can anyone subscribe to your newsletter?

Alysia Silberg: Absolutely. Very easy to subscribe to. Just go onto the website, alysiasilberg.com, and I would love their feedback. It’s focused on executives. So there’s section in terms of startups, experts, tools that executives would find useful, the news, and then a fun section which is like AI generated images. And we try to create it around a theme. So we have themes around security and themes around compliance and branding. And so we try to be very focused on companies who are looking to scale and looking to use the AI to scale more rapidly, more efficiently, where humans are doing the most creative part, that top 20%, and then the machines are doing the 80%, which is the heavy lifting which the humans would prefer not to be doing.

Amanda Razani: So what I hear is that the human element is still important and the AI is a great augmentation tool to help with efficiency and speed up and make processes easier.

Alysia Silberg: Exactly. I’ve seen that it’s given me superpowers. And so for me, I see it as an augmentation tool where it enables each of us to do better. I’ve interviewed so many executives and so many people around the world, and many people want to do certain aspects of their job, and they happen to be extremely good at it. And there are parts that they just don’t want to do that don’t make any sense. I can give you an example. For myself. I was trained as an actuary. So for people who don’t know, working in an insurance company, literally doing calculations, and there’s a manual labor to it that’s actually very boring and numbing if you actually do that job.
And I saw this very early on and I wanted to create machines that could enable me to do the creative part, the creative part of financial modeling. And for me, that was a moment of epiphany where it’s like for every human, for you, Amanda, doing your job, the things you are extraordinarily good at and the things that you’d rather not do, and the idea that there are tools which enable you to be more efficient, to be more productive, to be more creative, why not take advantage of those tools so you are showing up at work every day delighted to do your job? And that’s what I’m focusing my energy on.

Amanda Razani: I would certainly love and appreciate that, and I know many others would as well. So you mentioned a lot of C-suite leaders, business leaders are looking to harness AI, and you have a lot of tips and knowledge to share. What are some roadblocks that you have seen them encounter when they’re trying to implement the technology or harness it within the enterprise?

Alysia Silberg: I think the top one is resistance from the team. So I think you touched on where there’s this fear where… It’s in the media. We are all aware of it, where employees are nervous that they’re going to lose their jobs. So I think that communication from the C-suites to basically say, “We are not trying to take away your jobs. We’re trying to ensure that we achieve our business goals. At the same time we enable you to be your most creative productive selves.” And so creating that environment of safety where people do feel that this is actually something incredible and brilliant opportunity. We are going to create abundance like we’ve never seen in the world before using the power of AI. We’re going to be more productive than we’ve ever been in history. And so the idea that those conversations are had early on.
I’m very lucky with our customers. We have early adopter customers, so they’re very interested in using the AI, and we’ve seen very positive response in terms of their teams where they’re excited because they see that their goals are going to be achieved more quickly, more productively without all that heavy lifting. And who wouldn’t be excited about that?

Amanda Razani: Definitely. Do you have any use case examples or stories of a specific company that you could share with us how AI improved their positioning or their processes?

Alysia Silberg: Absolutely. So we have a customer now based in the UK, so it’s a CFO, outsource CFO company. And they’re at a point where they’re scaling. And they were looking to build an AI CFO, so that’s the future where they have these exceptionally talented CFOs, but this would enable them to do so much more. They could onboard more customers, and they could get better results for their customers. The AI can analyze a lot of the financial work at such a deeper level. And so the idea that we created these modules for them. Going back a step, we did a deep dive with them, and we looked at the business from an AI perspective in terms of going super deep with the CEO, what are the biggest challenges in the business? So it was like 300 questions we asked them, the AI that we built, then analyzed the results and said, okay, these are the six areas that are fundamentally important to your business that you need to be focusing on in order for you to scale globally.
And so we built these modules which are focusing, as I say, on the key areas of the business investor relations. In this situation, it’s a VC funded company at an inflection point looking to grow, so they needed to reach out and get a lot more capital into the business. Onboarding customers, so if we think about it as it stands, it was a manual process. So it was very iterative in terms of the handholding that had to take place. And so incorporating AI into that, scaling it. So for example, scaling the team. They have a team of 20 people, they need more employees, but at the same time, they want to make those employees more productive so that they can do the parts they best at. They were very clear from the results where the employees were best versus where the AI could assist them just in terms of brand building, in terms of ensuring that they became a global brand and using the AI for that. And then the regulatory and compliance, that’s a big issue in terms of that data and ensuring that it’s well handled and all their customer data is protected.
So each one of these aspects had to be dealt with. And instead of doing it in a very laborious way, which is how we would’ve done it previously, incorporating AI into every single aspect for them to go quicker has resulted in a very excited, happy customer. And it’s just proof what you can actually do in terms of rapidly scaling a company with the right CEO, with the right team. So we were basically the outsourced AI executive team, which enabled them to just integrate us into the team. But it’s been a very interesting use case.

Amanda Razani: That’s amazing. So where do you see the future headed with AI as fast as this technology is advancing?

Alysia Silberg: I see it in a world where you can build a billion dollar company with five people, and that excites me beyond measure because I think of the people who are listening to this, executives or… And it’s just incredible that if each person in that organization has these powers, these organizations could be absolutely massive, and that excites me. I think about it every day. I think about what my small team with Unemployable AI is doing. Well, we couldn’t do that before. We just couldn’t go at the speed we’re going. And I just look at the things I do every day, and I couldn’t be more excited or grateful to be living in a time where eventually, you can just send the AI and it can basically do anything you want for you. And that’s just an incredibly exciting opportunity for each of us.

Amanda Razani: It really is. I can’t wait to see where the future goes.

Alysia Silberg: Me neither.

Amanda Razani: I know. So if there’s one key takeaway that you can share with our audience today, what would that be?

Alysia Silberg: If you’re a business leader looking to harness the power of AI right now, I’d say reach out, don’t be afraid, and embrace it. Because the people who are starting now, the world redefined in the next two years, that’s how fast the AI is moving. So I think start, get busy, get your team excited about it, and you’ll be reaping the rewards in the next decade.

Amanda Razani: Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights with us, Alysia. It was a very interesting conversation.

Alysia Silberg: Thank you so much, Amanda.