Futurist and technology trends advisor Athena Peppes discusses the challenges and opportunities of AI adoption in business. She addresses the varying pace of AI integration across industries, emphasising that while some sectors like consumer goods move quickly, others such as pharmaceuticals proceed more cautiously due to regulatory concerns. Athena highlights the importance of understanding AI's potential applications, from enhancing pricing strategies to improving data analysis, while also considering the ethical implications and regulatory landscape that shape its implementation.

Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with

me, Matt Best, and Jonny Adams.

Hello!

Today we're absolutely thrilled to be joined

by Athena Peppes, and you're going to talk to us a lot around

navigating AI adoption, through overcoming fear and embracing

foresight. We're going to address some of those ethical

challenges that come up as part of that today. So we're really

looking forward to getting into that conversation. So Athena,

welcome and thank you for coming along.

Well, pleasure to be here today. Thank you for

inviting me.

Brilliant, and just a bit about your background. So

you're a futurist speaker, and you advise on trends in

technology and looking into the future and obviously, and also a

founder of Athena Peppes Consulting and Beacon Thought

Leadership. But I wonder, for the benefit of our audience, if

you could just share a little bit about your background, your

journey so far?

Yes, absolutely. So I started off my career as an

economist, working in insurance and then in shipping and mining,

and my role at the time involved forecasting quite a lot, which

is very different to foresight and researching those sectors

and understanding a lot about the policy issues, what the

demand, supply is and those in those sectors. Then I moved to

Accenture, which is a major consulting and technology

company, and I worked in thought leadership there for 15 years,

focused on topics related to the future of business. More

recently, as you said, I've founded my own consultancies,

helping my clients with two aspects of what I'm really

passionate about. One is around long term thinking and really

understanding how technology trends are going to shape

business, they're going to change it, and how to help them

be prepared and actually turn that change into an opportunity

and growth for their organization and the others

around the other consultancies is a partnership focused on

helping them with their with their thought leadership

initiatives.

Wow, fantastic. So I was going to try and come up

with some sort of pun there, but I think this is all going to be

very futuristic. I'm very much, very much looking forward to

diving into this with you.

Glad that you finished it, because I was like,

is he? Is he going to do it on absolutely super, super

interested about this topic today, Athena. And really, I

think, in the last number of conferences, or what's going on

in the news feed on LinkedIn at the moment, it's all about the

future. And you know, what does technology mean to us? And

there's a lot more sort of that personal impact. I'm really

super excited to spend some time for you today. So thank you for

joining us.

Perfect. And before we jump into the future, though,

what's customary on the growth workshop podcast is for us to

ask a little bit about what's been going on in your week. What

have you learned? What's been interesting? Maybe something

that you've experienced in your personal life, but you'd be

happy to share with with us in the audience today.

Excellent question. I I'll draw on my

recent trip. I just came back from Dubai, actually, yesterday,

I spent five days there, visiting different sites, there

in Abu Dhabi as well. And I was very impressed. It was my first

time there. Was very impressed with the focus they have on long

term thinking and future generations. And have they, they

plan the city, and they plan their economy with that in mind

and kind of working backwards.

I've also heard good weather, good food and good

shopping. Is that fair to say? Things may have come into this?

What was your favorite out of those three?

The weather not so much because I'm Greek, so I

should be used to the heat, but it's actually very humid there.

And yeah, so quite different. Shopping was excellent. I will

say I've never seen a shopping mall like to buy more.

Did you? Did you go out on the plane with a half

empty suitcase and come back, we'll see cases on the way

around. Good on you.

Good on you. Brilliant. Well, I mean, thank

you for sharing that, Athena. And actually, when we dive into

the conversation today, I imagine some of that reflection

from your trip to Dubai, that sort of, that forward thinking

mindset will come out of it. So Jonny, how about you?

This week's been amazing. So, I mean, it's great

to have Athena here. She's worked and is a thought leader

herself, and one of my favorite authors, Steve Martin, some of

you may have read some of his books in the past. I went to his

latest book launch. He's just collaborated with the economist

and Matt, you and I have been lucky, but also maybe you know,

showed how our business works is that we've we've worked with his

organization for the last five years. They are behavioral

scientists. They are an organization called influence at

work, and as a SBR, from a business development

perspective, have sort of merged together to bring science and

art together. And for the last five years, we've worked with

him, and I think some of the tips and techniques. That he

writes about in influence and persuasion have really helped me

as an individual, become become better at my job and as a

person. So he talks a lot about the six principles of influence

and persuasion, and he's got some great insights around that

topic. So yeah, went to the book launch. Really good. Had a beer.

It was fantastic. What about you?

Nice. So I went to a slightly different event,

actually, and it was an engaged sales event recently in London,

which talked about Mark was focused on marketing and sales.

And a lot of what we talk about on the growth workshop podcast

is, of course, around kind of client centricity and that focus

on bringing that, that all together in organizations. And

there's a lot of discussion at that, at that event, actually,

which is really insightful, so similar came out with some Yeah,

I feel like I've learned a lot this week, which is always a

good place to be.

What was the one thing that you took away that

was like, Yeah, that was good?

You know what? There's one of the speakers was

talking about the importance of when it comes to sales and

marketing enablement, the importance of creating a

community around it, acknowledging that normally

those teams are quite small, so the ability to scale is

challenged, right? So, yes, it's scaling through enabling

leaders, but also creating a community of people to support

getting that out into the market. So selecting individuals

from different teams to be sort of champions and change

carriers, which I think is really, really important to to

maximize the impact of that. SoAthena, as we look, as we look

to the future. Again, I'm going to try not to say that too many

signs, but one of the we were reading in one of your blogs

recently, which is actually titled, could humanoid robots

close the gender equality gap in that book, you or in that blog,

rather, you talk about, you know, the process of adopting

technology, and how it involves overcoming some of those

natural, understandable and justified concerns, right? But

our challenge as humans is not to avoid this progress, but to

make productive, informed and moral use of it. So certainly,

whenever I think about the sort of evolution of AI and look

around at some of the people sat in those C suite jobs, right?

You can, you can sense some fear in that. What do you do? And how

do you help those leaders in getting comfortable with that

and maybe being able to make informed decisions around how to

effectively and appropriately leverage these technologies?

Yeah, it's a very good question. There's a lot to

unpack there. You You mentioned the word fear, for example. I

think perhaps there is a little bit of fear, but actually the

the main concern is around those leaders being fully prepared,

especially in an environment where this technology is just

changing so fast. I think we're currently in a in a technology

or innovation super cycle. So one development you see in

artificial intelligence is quickly bringing in another, and

that's how I ended up writing the article around humanoid

robotics, because there's a lot of emphasis in the AI research

community at the moment in terms of how large language models and

generative AI can be embedded into the previous generation of

robotics, and that can bring about another wave of growth.

You know, that's all happened quite fast, and it's only been a

couple of years since chat GPT was released. But actually, the

field of AI, the research that's been done around that, has been

going on for much longer, since the release of chat GPT, there's

been a lot of hype, a lot of media attention on it, a lot of

company investment. So all of that can make leaders feel like

things are changing really fast. What am I doing? Everyone's

doing this. What do I do? The reality is that if you kind of

look at I was thinking about this the other day, because in

the last six months, I think I've had more than 200

conversations with different organizations. The topic that

always comes up is artificial intelligence, in terms of what's

top of mind for those for those companies, but the pace of

adoption is very, very different, right? And that makes

sense, because if you are in consumer goods, you will just

naturally move a lot faster and adopt and respond to trends a

lot faster. But some industries, like pharmaceuticals, are a lot

more heavily regulated, so you'd understand that there might be a

bit more hesitant or slower reluctant, and want to be a bit

more prepared before adopting any new technology. There's also

the dimension of size. I personally have seen that a lot

of the narrative that we get around technology trends,

including AI shaped by very large technology companies,

right? But as I just mentioned, the industry makes a difference.

The size makes a difference of an organization in the UK, if

you if you look at the data, 99% of companies are actually SMEs.

If you look at that by revenues, it's about 50% employees, 60% so

they're the backbone of the economy, right? And so it can

feel like. Everyone's ahead of you in AI, there is a lot of

fear, you know, lack of confidence. How do I go about

this? Surely everyone knows what they're doing. And actually,

that's not the reality, because if you go a bit deeper, you'll

see there's a lot of variation in terms of adoption.

There's a piece that I think was really

interesting. I know you're going to continue on this trend of

asking the question is that you reference, you've had many

conversations, and we also do, like we did some market

analysis, where there isn't really a growth consultancy in

the space that's taking and capitalizing on this AI

conversation. But what I mean by that, Athena, is that, could you

give like, a summary, and without putting you on the spot

too much, what are those common questions that you're getting

asked about, or common concerns? Maybe. So why I ask that

question is, I think the listeners that are typically the

individuals that you're talking to might go, Yeah, I also have

got those problems or questions. Do you have like, a trend of

what they're asking you at the moment?

It's a little bit varied, I would say. And that's

why I mentioned kind of the industry and size of company. I

won't mention names, I'll just give you a couple of examples as

illustrations. So for example, I was talking to a marketing

agency that works a lot with life sciences and pharmaceutical

companies, and they were the ones that were saying, Look, we

see the potential to use AI and what we do, but it's very

important to take our clients along with us in that journey,

and they're a little bit hesitant, because they worry

about that regulation. And when you say AI, that could mean a

lot of different things. It could be something very simple,

right? It can be something super sophisticated.

Should be AI for dummies. You remember the book

that were your like, you know, I think my mom and dad got...

How do you use a computer for dummies?

There must be one.

I'm sure there is. But it's a little bit like

that. And I think the issue is sometimes, if you're very senior

executive or, you know, then it can feel a little bit like, oh,

I can't say that. I don't know exactly what's happening in that

space. And actually the best way to kind of get around any fears

just better understanding, better knowledge, more

conversation around the talk. Expert, yeah. Another example is

how to use it for pricing. How to use AI for pricing.

Describe that a little bit more when I'm

curious, I've talked to a professional service firm. So

future will look like there's been a lot of consolidation in

financial services over the last number of years. There's going

to be a heavy pivot towards professional services being

consolidating in the UK market, with a lot of classic sort of

money needed to be invested by investors, as we all know, it

was going on at the moment, and that was sort of a bit of

insight shared to me this week, but, but pricing was the key

point that investors are looking for at the moment. So how do you

think AI and pricing? I'm curious about that because

that's very topical.

Yeah, that came from another kind of lead, and

they're just interested in understanding basically how they

can get better data faster, into their into their sales teams

using it, and how AI can help them do that, so that they can

have more competitive pricing, so they can think a little bit

differently about what their pricing strategy. So my dynamic

sizing board, yes, or modeling different scenarios, right? And

being able to understand, okay, if I do this, what if this

happens? What would the impact be? And some of that might be

already there. But obviously it's becoming a lot more

sophisticated. The data sets on which these models are trained

are a lot bigger. So in theory, they should be better quality,

but then you also get issues around that, like, is it really

that robust? We know there's an issue with hallucinations,

right? So if you create a tool to help your teams with with

pricing, how can you make sure that the data gives them is also

very robust? You're also dealing with very sensitive data, right?

How do you ensure that it's, it's secure when it when it

comes to pricing? So those are some of the questions that are

coming up around this.

Something that's sort of interesting, and I'd love

your perspective on on some of those industry type trends you

mentioned, sort of Life Sciences and pharmaceutical fair to

assume that they're a kind of fairly highly regulated

industry. I think, you know, some of the more consider it

kind of more straightforward, sort of AI technologies are

still struggling to get into into some of these industries,

just as a result of the regulatory environment. Do you

see this as much the job of regulators and policy and policy

makers as it is the businesses themselves?

Yeah, I think there is an element of that, in

the sense that sometimes organizations might wait to see

what the regulation is before they adopt something right? I

think then culture comes into. Play and kind of how fast you

can be. Some organizations might say, well, but in the meantime,

we're still missing out on all this potential, this growth. I

think the other thing with being an early adopter is potentially,

of course, it's high risk, but also you might be able to

illustrate the benefits to the policy makers as well as they

shape that policy. The key thing, I think, around

regulation policy making, is that, for sure, organizations

have to deal with just a patchwork of regulation, because

each country or each region, say, in the case of the EU,

takes a very different approach. That's another part of the

dynamic. You have to think about that in the US, they tend to be

a bit more relaxed. I would argue, if you look at the trend

over time, that they are actually becoming a lot more

focused on on regulation, for sure, but look at the UI act

that's already come into into force, that is quite intense.

I'm not an expert in the space. I can't comment specifically,

but on a webinar recently about like, how many assessments now

companies have to do? Because even if you have the same tool

every time you use it, if you use it for sales, you have to do

a different assessment than if you use the same tool for

marketing or internal employee training or different kind of

things. There is a lot of that. But I think the back then, it

comes back to the balance we talked about a little bit

before, right of, how do you make sure you take advantage of

the opportunity and not miss out?

And if we think about, kind of practically

diving into some of the practicalities of the work that

you do, when you sit down with a C suite executive who's feels

maybe a little bit under qualified, is getting pressure

from the business to adopt new technology. He's worried about

the risk. And you know, whether that be, you know the because,

because risk is always on the other side of that, the other

side of that equation, how, what's your approach, typically,

to doing that you mentioned, sort of education and building

and understanding is so important. So is that at the

heart of what you do, in terms of you of helping these

executives in understanding what this looks like and how it could

shape the future of their business?

Yes, in terms of how to help them, it really

depends on where they are on that on that adoption journey,

because some come and say, we know this is a trend. We know we

need to do something. We kind of don't know what to do. Others

are experimenting. They've already rolled out some proofs

of concept. And just want to thinking about scaling, you

know, across different business functions. The way I help them

is to think a little bit about the future of their

organization, and where is it that they want to be, and to

also make sure that when they're thinking about those

technologies, they're not just thinking about today, but what

will AI look like in five years time, so that you can be

whatever you introduce now, can be more resilient, I would

always start with the problem. So what's the problem that

they're facing, right? It's the classic consulting of trying to

understand, in some cases, it's not them, it's their teams. How

do we take our teams along with us? In other cases, is like, Oh,

we feel resistance, because people think this is going to

take over their jobs. How can we make them sure there's actually

potential to help? It kind of varies a lot.

If you're looking and again, I kind of digging into

this, and I'm really curious, is your perspective? We talk a lot

when we when we're working with leaders, around, kind of toward

an away motivation of your employees, right? So away

motivation being, I'm afraid of something, so I'm going to do

something because of the consequences of something else.

And toward motivation is I'm going to do something because I

really want to strive for it. So it's sort of proactive versus

cat versus stick, if you like. Are you seeing that, if you had

to sort of balance the the equation on which side is that

falling? Is that? Is it more about with the executives that

you work within the businesses you work with? Is it? Is it fear

of being left behind more than what opportunity could we

unlock? Or is it the other way around?

I think it's kind of, it's almost actually a

little bit above that, in the sense of, maybe, I'll give you a

stat, and that might help. So some of the research that I've

done in the past has been focused on change, quantifying

change, a pace of change, and understanding how the C suite

sees that and how that compares to actual data on change on the

ground. Now, 88% of C suite executives surveyed said that

they expect the pace of change to accelerate, but 52% said they

not fully prepared for what that change will mean for their

organization.

So there it is, right?

So yeah, because, as I said that, and then you can

go deeper into that, but the implications are huge, right?

Because they have to make decisions about how to allocate

their budgets, their time, for people. So if you're not fully

prepared, then how are you going to make. Those decisions. And

the idea is, most of the time they spend dealing with the day

to day, operational delivery for the next quarter, financial

results, that kind of thing. So how can you, or in this case,

me, help them kind of take some time out of the day to day and

think about their organization in the future and where they

want to go. And there's different ways to do that,

right? You can help them with recognizing the trends that are

out there. I always use rise in my mind as a way to kind of

structure that so eyes for recognizing trends and just

understanding what signals are out there, what's happening, the

eyes around imagining the possibilities. Okay, so, yes,

I've read about this interesting trend. What does that mean? And

so the example of a humanoid robotics I was just thinking,

Who knows whether, in the future, we might have companies

instead of giving you certain types of benefits like health

insurance, what if they gave you a home robot to do all your

housework for you, so you wouldn't have to spend your time

doing that, and you could be more productive.

Oh, please, that sounds amazing.

I know, but I'm not. The point is not to predict

or to argue for it. It is just to say what if or what you know,

and to pose those kind of questions that really straight.

And is that the "I", because it's unpacking that

sort of quite boxed view, and actually we're opening up our

blind spots to think, well, what could...

Yes, so imagine, like different possibilities,

right? Then the S is for shape scenarios, because you can

imagine those kind of possibilities, but people

respond differently to seeing a story of what the organization

will actually look like. So you can take, say, two dimensions.

If we take the example of AI, you can take a dimension around

advancement of the technology, and another one around regulate,

like fast to slow, and another one around regulation, lenient

to kind of tight, and then almost create stories of so you

can imagine like a little quadrant of that, and think

about stories of what, what would that world look like, and

how, how do you operate? How do you what does your organization

look like in that future? And then that's where the E comes in

around enabling action. Because once you have those different

stories, what you can do is say, But hold on a second. If that

came to bear, that would mean we're obsolete. Or if that came

to bear, that would mean we'll make a lot more money. How you

influence that? You know? So that's the that's the idea

behind using foresight frameworks to help you think

about the future, but see growth today.

I think anyone like you talk about that, that with

execs, you can imagine the calmness that comes over the

boardroom when they all go, Oh, okay. So we can put this into

those mode, into those moments. And I can think about this in

the big, big picture, without feeling all of that pressure.

And I can be, you know, I can be conscious of of those, of those

other stages. So I love that. I think that's really and I think

actually, for anyone listening to this, whether, regardless of

where you sit in, in your own or in your own organization, is a

really, a really important way of, kind of having that

perspective. Because you mentioned the robot in your

house doing the cleaning, and like, some people will be

going...

Athena doesn't have a robot in the house just yet.

But some people will be going to the kind of I Robot

view, right? Will Smith. They go, Oh my gosh, it's gonna,

like, destroy us, Black Mirror. No, God, let's not go there.

Which is very forward looking and excellent at

prediction.

Somewhat worrying.

But then the reality is that we take ourselves back,

kind of came back, kind of 2030, years and said autonomous cars,

everyone would be going having exactly the same response that

people are probably having now to the idea of having a robot

doing the cleaning. So I think it's just sort of, I guess,

being able to sort of see that and put that in perspective,

it's really important.

Well, and also to let you know that that already

actually exists. The I'll send you a video, which I'm sure

you'd love to watch. There's a company called 1x they released

a robot, humanoid robot called Neo. The video is of this. I

don't know. Would I say he, she? I don't, I don't know. It's Neo,

yeah, yeah, helping this person get ready for work, right? I

mean, it's kind of fascinating, and there's a lot of VC funding

and investment, and even the big tech players like Nvidia are

really backing a lot of companies in this space. So it

feels futuristic, and part of the job is to help organizations

see that perhaps it's not as out there as you might think. Some

of that is already there. Yes, you could argue about the pace

of it, whether people will want to adopt it or not. At the end

of the day, technology is not neutral. It's up to us to decide

if we would want a robot around children, for example. On the

other hand, if I was to put my economist hat on, I would argue

might be a good thing, because we have aging demographic, aging

population in many developed countries. How do we care for

them when there's a lack of carers? Should policy. Makers be

investing in this should companies be working with them

to help address this problem? There's just so much to unpack there.

Athena, thank you for joining us, and to everyone

listening. Join us for part two as we continue this

conversation.