How to Build Effective Teams in an AI Workforce, with Shannon Curley

How to Build Effective Teams in an AI Workforce, with Shannon Curley Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to another episode of The New Frontier. I am here back with Jo. Haven't seen you in ages, Jo. We've both been traveling, but in that time you've become a massive influencer. Speaker 2: Oh man, I really wish you didn't put it that way. No, I had one post that went a little bit prominent, I would say. I ain't an influencer. I do not acknowledge this. I do not I see myself saying that, so please do not. Speaker 1: Okay. I roughly feel like you are on about 15,000 followers. You've doubled your following on LinkedIn, roughly. Not that I'm checking your page every day, but is that roughly correct? Speaker 2: That is roughly correct, yes. No, it was, it was really crazy. At one point I actually felt like total uncertainty going on LinkedIn because I literally had the entire time, like a nonstop stream of DMs. Like at every given minute I will click on the connections box and it'll have a 99 plus connections and then I will close it and then it will go again on 99 plus in two minutes. I was like. So at the moment I have like literally 9,000 connection invites and my LinkedIn actually crashes whenever I try to talk to it. Speaker 1: I can't read to these events anymore. I don't know, I don't know if I, because you're now so famous that only 10,000 follower people, I literally can't add you to or I can't tag you. It's really weird. I don't know if you've upped in terms of your. Speaker 2: I have no idea, but actually what's hilarious is that LinkedIn forced me to change my name to Joanna from Jo. They said I cannot be a Jo, I have to be a Joanna. So I was really worried about that. Unknown Speaker: That's very strange. Speaker 2: Anyway, I hear you have seen your LinkedIn and you are jazzing around on loads of events and speaking. So what is coming on your events? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been that season and I'm keen to hear about Billion Dollar Seller Summit. But yeah, I will be in Wall Store on the 24th and 25th on the Global Sellers Conference. And then I will be Sophia for Amazing Days on the 28th. And we're doing a lot of these events and yeah, the links will be, I'll put them below. So please come if you're in and around those areas, come and say hello. We'll be very, very excited to see you there. But how was Billion Dollar Seller Summit? Speaker 2: Oh my God, it was amazing. Like, honestly, it's not a surprise. This is my third Billion Dollar Seller Summit and I just have to say it was really like kudos to Kevin King and the entire crew that organized the event. It was in Iceland over five days. I think it was also the longest conference I've been on, but it was so worth it. And what was cool is that I submitted a strategy, which I presented, and my strategy was selected from 22 others, and the stage presented 10 other amazing presenters, and I won. I'm so proud and so chuffed and almost hysterical about it. It's such an honor. So I'm just going to bathe in my glee for at least another three days, but it's okay. Speaker 1: Congratulations. What was the hack? Speaker 2: It was a strategy around creating AI product images, videos and AI influencers showing a, like coding a product, so like the entire flow of AI-generated content for a product and a brand. Speaker 1: We will be going into a lot of detail on that next week, Sim, but this week we are very excited to be joined by a strategic marketing leader specializing in brand storytelling, content strategy, and audience engagement. Over a decade in B2B e-commerce, she has helped brands to find their voice, craft compelling messaging, and execute high-impact campaigns. Most recently, she was the Director of Marketing at Carbon 6, which was acquired by SPS Commerce in 2005. That was a few months ago. For 210 million, welcome, Shannon. Speaker 2: Woof, woof. Speaker 3: Woof, woof. Sounds so impressive when you say it like that. Thank you. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 3: I need more people to follow me around and read out my resume. Speaker 1: I'm not going to lie. When you sent me the topic for this podcast, I was even more excited than I normally am because I think it's fascinating. And you said the topic of building effective teams in an AI workforce. We're just such a topical thing and like such a deep discussion. I'm really excited to get into. I think I'll start by, I don't know if you saw the post by Toby Luke, the CEO of Shopify, but he put out something very similar. So what you said to discuss actually before you even posted about it. So tell me about it. Give me the summary. He wrote an internal memo, which was then leaked and the internal memo started. We are entering a time where more merchants and entrepreneurs could be created than any other in history. We often talk about bringing down the complexity curve to allow more people to choose it. As for it, each step along the entrepreneurial path is rife with decisions requiring skilled judgment and knowledge. Having AI alongside the journey, increasingly not just doing the consultation, but also doing the work for our merchants is a mind-blowing step-function change. Unknown Speaker: He then goes on. Speaker 1: He said what I read, which is right at the end of the internal memo, which is the action plan, was before asking more for headcount resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if an autonomous AI agent were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions in the project. So, you're basically not enabling teams to hire anyone, unless they've already evaluated. So I want to turn it to you. How, what are your thoughts on that? Speaker 3: I hate that. I think that there's a lot of fear around using AI. I think that's something like, especially from a marketing background, a content background, a creative background. And so there's a lot of threat in that space, I think. And so the reason I say I hate that is because I hate leading with prove why a robot can't do it. I think it should be proved why a human can do it better. So it's just a matter of perspective in that way. Generally speaking, I think it is true that you have to integrate AI, right? You can't just be sitting back and not using it. But I think that perspective of tell me why a robot can't do it cheapens the whole human experience. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there is a lot of narrative now, which is get rid of the humans, just do it with AI. But the reality is that, at least at the current moment, thankfully, we're not at this stage. But when it comes to AI, it can be an amazing tool. It can be amazing help. It can speed processes. It can make them better. But when it comes to integrating that into an organization and a team, how do you think about that type of process? What is the place and the role that AI has to play and how can companies integrate that effectively? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think AI should be integrated into teams like any new hire on a team should be. It has its strengths, but it also has its limitations. I've in the past taken to referring to it as your intern, especially working with people who are a little bit afraid of it, because then you have that Power Dynamic Playworld. It's just your intern. Let AI do the work that you don't want it to do. Let it take your coffee order. It's fine. But I think AI isn't going to be able to do everything. To get the best results, organizations should define the role clearly. Where does AI add value? Going back to that article and the quote you read, where do we need to have human intervention in order to be successful? AI isn't going to hold itself responsible for upholding your company vision and values, for example. It's really important to your core brand to have mission and vision and values and something that you're striving for and principles that you're upholding. AI isn't necessarily going to be held accountable for that. So I think when you're talking about integrating it, you still need to require that human oversight and require that final review in the same way that you would need to do that if you hired someone new for your team who isn't read in on the company guidelines yet, who doesn't necessarily understand the brand DNA that you're working with. It just requires a little bit more. So treating it like another member of the team versus a replacement for any human on the team, I think is an important first step. Speaker 1: I want to come back to that piece. That's a really interesting debate. But I want to firstly, for the sake of the podcast, put the argument in favor of what Toby said, which honestly, I agree with. And the reason I agree with is I've seen organizations, as you guys know, I worked in Amazon for six years, and there is a Push in organizations that happened. I worked in maybe four or five different departments or units under separate directors and separate VPs. I was out in Singapore. I worked in B2B. I worked in search. I worked in grocery. So I worked in a completely different part. But one consistent thing I saw was that The behavior of people in these departments was always to question more humans in their team because they knew that you get more humans is a way to get yourself a promotion. And basically what people do is every year, and I was guilty of this, but everyone across the business would be guilty of this, you would say, oh, I need someone to do this, I need someone to do that. And I basically, I'm trying to grow my organization structure because at some point, at least in Amazon, when you've got six direct reports and each of those reports have got direct reports, you're qualifying yourself at the next level of promotions. I think it's a very good force and function to help people think about solving the problem that the customer pain, that the customer faces, rather than politically manoeuvring in the company thing to just throw a headcount because actually everyone's motivated by a promotion and lots of people are and therefore it removes that as a reflex people have. Speaker 3: I think that's a useful framework to think through too, though, that AI can be that stepping stone for you. If the idea is, okay, if we hire more people, then that gives me more opportunity to move up, then AI should allow you to accomplish that same thing. I think my initial reaction to the quote is don't immediately take the human element out of it by challenging someone to beat a robot. That's what I don't like about it because I think it is a sensitive topic. And again, it's coming from my background with And we're going to be talking about a highly personal, intimate career path of people who are creatives, who are putting their heart and soul and vulnerability into everything that they do. So there is much more of an easing them into an element, which is why my reaction is that way, because I know how often and really what I've experienced in trying to get teams, creative teams in particular, to be more receptive to using AI is they're already looking for all the reasons why it won't work. And I'm not interested in the reasons why it won't work. I'm interested in them telling you why it will work. And so I think to that conversation, like, if you want to move up, if you want to advance in your career path, then tell me all the ways that you're going to make AI work for you and then what you're going to do differently on top of that. Speaker 2: Nice. That makes total sense. I'm really interested to hear how, like, how did you approach it from your own, like, personal career path? You were managing a team at Carbon6. I have seen you in action. Like I, I basically met Shannon at several new events and I always, this was the first thing that I really spotted is how on point all of the branding was for Carbon6. There was always like something to start a conversation in terms of whether it's the outfits or the little How did you guys roll it on? Everything was so well thought through and I'm curious to understand how did you integrate AI within your team and within your processes? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I use AI constantly. And I think that actually is a really important element of leadership with AI too, is using it yourself. It's not helpful. And I'm sure we've all had our various experiences of this, of leadership and executives saying, use it, but then they don't use it themselves. So for me, part of being a leader on my team was not just saying, hey, you guys got to do this, but actually showing how I'm using it. A lot of early stage AI that I was using was really, I would record myself with my stream of consciousness. And then ask AI to turn my stream of consciousness into actual notes and actual takeaways. Voice memos to AI were really my bread and butter for a long time. But I think as someone who is creative at my core and creative at my heart, it's using AI to refine, to come up with, hey, here are all my crazy ideas that are all over the place. Now digest that for me, narrow it down. But it's also the back and forth. It's okay, use it and narrow it down, but let me put more input back into it now and back and forth. That's sometimes where the thread is lost is you can't just take the initial product and call it done. I actually was in the process a few months ago of interviewing for a role at my last company and Someone that I interviewed, I could tell that they had done their assessment using AI. And it wasn't hard to tell because it was not refined at all. And the funny thing is like, you want them to use AI, right? Like part of the conversation around hiring teams in AI workforce is hire teams that are receptive to using it. So I wasn't upset that they used it. I was upset that I knew that they used it. And in the interview, I said, how do you feel about AI? And they coyly were like, I actually used it to do my assessment. I know. And so it's, I think for me, like the way that I've tried to integrate it into my workflow is absolutely it's a necessity, but it is by no means the final product ever. And reminding people that review over and over again is what makes all of the processes still human is that we can't just have it be final on the first. Speaker 1: One of the ways that I use, of course I use it in many ways, but one of the most recent ways I found very helpful was I was writing my investor update a few days ago, put it into Claude and just going back and forward as a kind of thought partner on restructuring and clarifying and maybe moving bits. It's so helpful just to get 16 drafts of something and then you can read as you say and you can pick the best one. I guess, how did you encourage your team to do it? And bringing it back to what you said a bit about the mission, vision and values, were you making flawed projects that sounded like Carbon 6 language or like customizing a bit to make it closer to the finished article, even though obviously it's not going to get 100% of the way there, but 80-90% of the way there? Speaker 3: Yeah, like creating custom GPTs, for example, with our brand guides. And one thing that was great, actually, is we finally hired a product marketing manager. So far, we actually had product documentation and that helped as well. But yeah, creating those libraries and creating that system to reflect back. But at the same time, using that and seeing what the first product was, the first output was, and then showing the team, like, hey, this is great. Again, it was for me, a lot of it is rebuilding the confidence in your team that they can't be replaced. So my experience with that was like, see guys, look, like it's not perfect. It's going to get you draft one, which is great because nobody has time to write draft one, but I still need you to edit. And I think being reminded, like, I still need you to edit. I also am not a graphic designer at all, but would use whatever AI is to create initial versions of designs when I needed to do something. And that made my designers feel real good. And when you talk about like design thinking and collaboration and radical collaboration, it requires A lot of different viewpoints and the idiosyncratic technical expertise, but also the human expertise for what makes for best problem solving. So that's why I always try to frame whatever AI you're using as just another contributor on the team. Speaker 2: And maybe this is a bit of an extension to this question, but like, how did you make your team being more receptive and more practically used? It's like, of course, one super powerful tool is to show them that you're using them, but was there like any processes you created or any sort of, I don't know, team competitions or anything like that, that was more of a structured way to get everyone to get their toes in? Speaker 3: Yeah, if you tell people it's okay for them to block off their calendar to do something other than work, they'll be a lot more receptive to it. And then we would do, I added like a weekly in our all hands meeting, an option to do an AI spotlight. So that if there was something that you were excited about that you wanted to share and there was no pressure, it was optional. But if there was something that you would come across, there was no structure to it. It was just, hey, we got five minutes in team meeting. Did anyone use AI for something interesting to them? Speaker 1: I'll open this question up to Jo afterwards because I know she does this for a living. How do you think about retraining and upskilling people? This technology is absolutely coming. And my dad, who is a consultant, told me that when he was starting in his consultancy job years and years ago, he basically was like getting people to use Excel for P&Ls. And he was going around to all these businesses. It was like, oh, this Excel tool is going to help you track your P&L way better and manage your books as a company. At one stage, no one was using this. And it's so obvious. Now imagine trying to build a forecast and not using Excel. What does it even look like? It's unimaginable. So how do you think about that process of training and re-skilling people for something which, in my opinion and maybe your opinion, is so obviously going to become such a fundamental part of the work they do? Speaker 3: I'm going to take a slight step back from that question because I think in the conversation of hiring teams too, you need to hire people that are open to it. And there is a need to be open and receptive to using AI first. So in that hiring process, there's a lot of, historically, we've looked at a lot of role-based recruitment of, they need to have this degree, they need to have this title in their past, they need to have gone to this type of university, whatever. I think now that shift needs to go more for skill-based recruitment of have they shown that they're avid problem solvers? Have they shown that they are active? Is it on their resume that they're using AI currently? Things like that. So I think the first step if you want anyone to learn something new is that they need to be open to learning that thing. And then I think like with teaching anything, you need to understand that people learn differently. So some people are going to learn just fine if you tell them to go off on their own for an hour and go test out a new automation. Some people are going to learn better if you give them 20 minutes to learn from someone in that all-hands lesson. So I think you have to go back to the basics of how do people learn in order to make sure that they're learning effectively because sometimes it's not their fault that they're not learning it either. Different people learn different ways. Speaker 1: Anything to add Jo in your experience? Speaker 2: I know I completely agree. I think it's also about showing people that especially if you invest in like upskilling them with AI, that's the whole point. You're not trying to get rid of them. By implementing AI, I think a lot of resistance is because either people have tried AI and it didn't work because they don't know how to use it or that they fear that they're going to be replaced if they just say yes to it, which in either case is not, in most cases, is not the case. So I think it's a lot about When you are planning to implement a training program like that, it's about actually having very transparent conversations with your team and like almost having like a very Like psychologically targeted messaging around the whole thing, like reassuring them so that they can be open and rather than just taking the stance of this doesn't work, this is rubbish, this is going to replace me as this is a huge opportunity. I'm going to be so much more efficient in my job and I am going to make my job so much easier by knowing how to use AI. But I think there's a mismatch between the organization saying, we need to use AI for everything and people being like, I'm scared of this. And so there needs to be more open conversations and more support, I would say. Speaker 1: I think, from my perspective, I don't think organizations are leveraging this nearly. I'd love to hear, Shannon, your view, obviously, from recent experience, but from what I see now as an outsider in a startup, Organizations are not at all leveraging AI to any state and they're frilling around the edges in my opinion and they're very few going all in and it's these kind of big proclamations from like Shopify CEO where he's forcing people to do stuff because I agree people don't really don't know what to do. What's your view? Is it like how, what percentage of your tasks do you feel were being automated versus hadn't really changed for the last five years before this generative AI wave? Speaker 3: I think I've seen a lot more of individual team leaders deciding to roll it out rather than it being an organization-wide objective. And so without that, you don't have necessarily the right resourcing behind it. For me, because I was a scrappy marketing leader leading a way too small team, it was out of necessity. It was, we're not hiring. We don't know when we're going to be hiring. So let's figure out ways that we can integrate this into our process. And even as we became a better resource team, that didn't go away because it was still important. One of the things that I used AI for constantly was writing blogs. It would help me create the outline, sometimes write the full blog and then go back and do all the editing. And then there were things that I would add to those blogs that were manually added by me, whether it was video links or backlinks or whatever. And then what we started doing was adding an audio feature to those so that they would read out. And that was all done through using AI rather than having one of us have to record our voices every single time. And that was actually one of the things that I think started changing people's views on it because we use AI to do a voice clone, someone on our team, so that it sounded like it was someone on our team. And that was a perfect use case because they're like, I don't want to have to do this every single time we write an article. And so that was a really good example of see how it's like taking something off your plate that you weren't even thinking about doing in the first place, but it's made our content better with almost no effort and very little need to do much more other than put the transcript through the platform once a week. Speaker 2: Really interesting. And actually, I want to flip the question, which is, what did you not use AI for? What were the sort of areas where you were like, actually, this needs to be just human kind of expertise versus AI? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the trick, the secret is that you can use AI for anything. What you're not going to use it for is the various stages of refinement. So you can use AI as a starting point for any project, and we did. But the degree to which you then have intervention, and you have more stakeholder review, and you have more and more levels of editing, it just depends on the significance of the project. What I wouldn't use it for was like Carbon 6, we have Comic 6. Which is just our kind of campy, fun comic series that we came up with because I wanted to, because I'm a nerd. And I wouldn't use Chachabitty for that because I think it's funny. Like, I like doing it because also it requires... Whether people who view them find them funny or not, I do. I think they're funny, but it requires an understanding of our industry to get the joke. And I don't think AI necessarily is going to give the punchline. I think the punchline is up to us. And so anything that's like very personal like that, like press release too, it's like, you don't want your executive quote being written by AI. So things like that, that are inherently personal, which is obviously the obvious answer, but anything that's inherently personal or inherently requires a more human point of view. Have a human do it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Maybe shifting on from talking about like AI tool, did you guys have any AI agent solutions at Carbon Sex? So actually having an AI within the workforce, so not just like one of your team members using Mid Journey or whatever, but actually within your team, you have some folks, some human folks and some like agents. Did you get to that stage? Speaker 3: No, I think the closest we were getting to that was with editorial because we were using it so constantly for blog creation, but nothing was ever running on its own to the full extent that an agent was. Speaker 2: Actually, I'm interested to understand how do you see agents are going to impact, for example, our industry, brand marketing, all of that? Speaker 3: It's a great question and I have different feelings on it depending on which hat I decide to wear at any given moment. As a marketing director and marketing leader, I see it as being really positive. I think to go back again to the original quote that you shared, Max, it is an opportunity to resource a team without having to hire and so I think that's huge and I think it's going to allow for a lot of opportunity to scale faster but also experiment faster and fail faster which is a cliche but it's like you want to fail quickly and you want to fail often and I think hiring agents to do that helps a lot. Hiring heavier quote. On the other side of things though again when I look at my experience with creative and with content I think it has the possibility to be really morally damaging to existing teams to feel like their work can be replaced by something. Even myself I I have always done freelance for my whole career because I am a workaholic, cool brag, but I was working on something a couple of weeks ago and I could tell they had sent me the brief for it and there was a whole reference document and in the reference document there were pages upon pages of things that I could tell were AI. And I was like, damn, they didn't give me this project. Like this is a project that in the past they would have given me to do and I can tell that they didn't. And they went with AI instead. And that's a legitimate, that is a lived experience and a real concern is job security around AI. And of course, there's like that argument of if AI can do it, then shouldn't you just be better at your job? AI shouldn't be able to do what you can do. But that sometimes isn't your call. Like in that instance, that wasn't my call. I would have rather been the one working on that project. I would have rather been the one creating the responses and giving them what they wanted, but they decided for whatever reason that wasn't, they just wanted to use AI for that one. And it wasn't bad. And that's the thing. And it wasn't bad work, but it wasn't good work either. Someone who has done brand and content for as long as I have can look at it and say, it's not exactly the brand voice. It's a little bit off. I wouldn't have used that word. That word doesn't fit with that brand. I think it can help with resourcing, but I also think you really have to be, whenever you hire a new person for a team, you have to think about how they're going to fit within that team. There's really no exception when it comes to adding an AI agent. Speaker 1: I'm interested how you think about that kind of motivation and morale, because for example, our team on the agenda question, All our software engineers are using Cursor. It's a fantastic tool. It means that a lot of this code, A, like you can AI generate code, B, you can then test stuff. And what I think coders hate doing in the past was sitting there and actually stress testing the stuff they've just written. They don't want to do that. They want to go and build the next thing. No one likes rereading your essay for spelling mistakes like you used to have to do at school or whatever. But that's the worst bit. So now you can have an AI. That's what they say you have to do at school. You sit there and reread it for five minutes. It's really dull. But with someone like us, so you have an agent, it's going to stress test it, it's going to stress test it better than any human can do because A, they don't really want to do that. And B, have all of the data in his training to hit it with 16,000 different angles. So at the end of the day, it makes the human better and their job means they can go a lot faster and they can remove the brawling bit. And I would say to my team, again, we've always been using AI stuff. We're very AI forward. As an AI first company, that's what we are. But how do you deal with that demoralized? You're using it in a way that means passing on a lot of work. Surely that's got demoralized for people, right? If they're generating 10,000 blogs and you're sitting there just coming up with the idea of basically how we do the bloggy content. I will think of an interesting idea and forward and write the blog and that's a really great way of doing it and I have really, in my humble opinion, interesting blogs about Alexa and ranking on Alexa Plus and how many people are using Rufus and all these interesting questions that just come to me when I'm working out or whatever and then I have a beautiful blog there with a lot of projects up and my writing style and so I didn't like, how are you thinking about that motivation and changing perceptions? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, again, it comes back to that idea of it being a collaborator. I think, like, they're dynamic, I think, with the conversation around AI, where sometimes people feel like AI is, like, getting treated better. And that's not really the case. AI is just another tool in your tool belt. So it's useful, I think, or at least I found it useful to say, we We're trying to solve a math problem. If you had a mathematician in the room, you could maybe get to that answer on your own, but wouldn't it be faster if you worked with someone who already had that expertise? And so I think treating it like a collaborative product and saying, yes, you could do these things on your own. You could probably fix change, do an oil change on your own, but wouldn't it be faster if you had a mechanic and aren't you just trying to drive the car? So does it really matter if you do it or they do it? So I think my experience has just been that. Treat it like a collaborator. Treat it like another member of the team. Treat it like it's almost like in a university course where you're forced to do a particular project. But it is helpful if you have someone that's a business major and someone that's a marketing major and someone that's an English major and someone that's doing something else. That's useful to have everyone there because then inevitably you're going to ask the English major to write the final report and you're going to ask the business major to do all the numbers. And if you can do that, then you're going to have a better outcome. And you're also going to not have to do the stuff that you didn't really want to do in the first place, which is like putting a dog pill in a piece of paper. Look, it's getting you to the thing that you're getting a good thing out of it, okay? You're trying to pull the wool over their eyes a little bit in the beginning. That's how I felt about it. But if you can sugarcoat it a little bit, I think it is just that dynamic of this is collaborative. It's not... Which is what you don't want to do off your plate. Speaker 2: And actually, I'm really interested to understand like your point of view, because I think it reflects on something recently, which is my over-reliance on AI. So like, I realize that sometimes now, whenever I'm posed with kind of a more tricky question, I'm like, I'm just going to ask AI. And I realize that it's a really bad habit that I've started developing. And my question to you, there's a new thing, there is such thing as over reliance on AI and like, what would you say are some examples if it is? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that example even that I gave of hiring for a role and then having an assessment and being like, cool, you used AI for the assessment and I can tell, is an example because that's, theoretically, that was an important conversation to have with us, right? Like, we were hiring you, that should have been an important moment for you. This is the job that you want, and you used automation to do it. I want to see you using automation. I want you to be open to that. But what I don't want you to do is 100% rely on it. And so I think that's the potential pitfall. You're using as a replacement and not as just a support system. And then in the creative and content side of things, excessive AI can result in homogenized work. It lacks originality because AI is generating variations of existing ideas over and over again, but isn't necessarily coming up with new ideas itself. So I think it can dull creativity in that way. And also dull critical thought. If it's doing all of the problem solving for you, then how often are you really engaging in critical thinking? Speaker 2: I feel like our critical thinking abilities are really going to deteriorate over the next few years because anything challenging we're just going to offload and try to get an easy answer. It's like a diet pill. You're trying to solve a problem but really you should be doing the work. Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a shortcut in a lot of ways. Yeah. Speaker 1: My input, not that you asked for it, Jo, but I think the overaligns question is if you can tell it's AI, like in your example, Shannon, that's a problem. Because we can always, AI is, it's too down the middle road. Here's far-fewer, here's the counterpoint and we don't, that's not the main thing for us humans to read. We just want to know the unfiltered raw truth that someone is thinking. I guess the last question of mine and one that I, maybe you can tell I'm very bullish in AI and very much an optimist, but the one, The thing that I do worry about is what impact it's going to have on junior roles. So I think of my little brother who's 17 and going into a workforce soon where many roles are going to be automated. Like that kind of base level junior role that people were doing when I was his age, that's going to be AI. I think in a few years, by the time, in three years time when he's done with university, I think we're definitely going to see that. You're not going to watch You're going to have an AI doing the basic sales calls and the basic email outreach and the blogs and the product listings, like basically all of the kind of mundane stuff is going to be AI. I think there'll be human who I think will be highly motivated and enhanced and augmented in their creativity on top of the actual kind of people coming into the workforce. I think that's where the problem is. I don't know. What are your thoughts, Shannon? Speaker 3: I think a lot of their responsibilities should come back to the hiring leaders, to be honest. I think that the recruitment process should change and needs to change because there's a lot of things that are going to be able to easily be carried out by AI. So I think that kind of goes back to that conversation of skill-based versus role-based recruitment, which is, of course, challenging if you're just entering the workforce. But I think of it's almost like when you're applying for universities and you wanted to have a more robust application, say, oh, I did this after school thing and I played soccer and I volunteered and all this stuff. I think that looking at that as a hiring team is going to become more important. I think you need to be diligent about what you're including in your job description and your job requirements so that you're not accidentally filtering out really interesting and useful and applicable experience. One of the people I used to work with at my last company was So phenomenal at her job, and it was the first time she had that role. She had a role in a completely unrelated field before, but when you broke down the role, she was a teacher before. And when you broke down the things that were required of her to be a teacher, it was hyper-organization and really good at managing different personalities and really wonderful at addressing different needs of different stakeholders at different times for different reasons. And that translated beautifully into her job as an event manager. She was incredible at it. But if we had gone through what is now a recruitment process that has a ton of automation involved in it, probably would have gotten filtered out before a person ever even saw it. And so I think as a hiring manager, as a hiring leader, we need to be more mindful of the fact that what was looked for as a necessity of a role before is probably not the same thing that's necessary out of a role now. And I think it requires more human intervention to look at experience and see what aspects of that experience are going to be relevant to the role, rather than just looking for the standard title or the standard degree or whatever it is, because it's just different now. Think that what you can do is different than the title of what you did. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're like, we're closing out, but I like, we talked a lot about AI, but I really want to understand a little bit about your journey. How did you end up in Cardwell States? How did you become so awesome at your job? And just tell us a little bit about, yeah, what brought you to this like place you are right now? Speaker 3: I've always been involved in ecommerce because I started my career at Hasbro Toys. And so I was doing all of the listing copy for all of the toys under boys licensed, which is what we called them. But it was basically Marvel, Star Wars, Power Rangers, Jurassic Park, all the nerdy boy stuff. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. So I did all of the Amazon listings for that when I was there. And then I briefly worked for a content marketing agency and that's where I got really into The content side of things and content strategy. And when I was at that organization, I moved, I created a role for creative strategy on the pre-sales team because I realized that we were, the sales team was often, I know this never happens, but sales team was over-promising things that were being under-delivered on the creative side. And then we were losing clients. And so it created this creative strategy role, which is where I got really into the idea of like, how can I create a creative ecosystem and be really efficient with the content rather than just We're creating a high volume of content that maybe isn't going to resonate. And then this was all during COVID. So careers, job paths were all up and down. I managed a hotel for a year in the middle of COVID because I had nothing else going on. On my LinkedIn, you'll see that it says former tortoise manager. That was because I was responsible for 38 red-footed tortoises for a year. And then I ended up at Thrasio. So I was at Thrasio for about a year and a half and went through the ups of it being a unicorn and the downs of it not making it on the arc. So that was an experience and then ended up at Carbon 6 after that because I felt like there were a lot of things about the aggregator model that were exciting to me about being responsible for building a brand and optimizing a brand. But I felt like Carbon 6's model was more sustainable in that it was in software. But what I loved about Carbon 6 early on especially was that we had so many different tools. So it was like working at an agency too, because it was our inventory tool, our reimbursement tool, our ads tool, and it was trying to find a way to make all those things cohese. So my whole career path has been around this idea of creative strategy, content strategy, efficient strategy. And then through lines of all of that, I've been managing teams. And so that's where this conversation in part comes from is that I have always enjoyed managing teams, building teams is something I really get excited about. And I think it's really important, especially in creative and content, to be thinking about the ways that AI and automation are changing the dynamics of creative and content teams in particular, and how we can attend to that to make sure that those teams still feel valued. Unknown Speaker: And then now I'm on my own. Speaker 3: Now I'm looking for my next thing, just looking for something to get excited about. Again, on my LinkedIn, I posted about looking for a new star to hitch my wagon to. So that's where I'm at this moment, just looking for the next thing. Speaker 1: Nice. One final question from me. We've been talking a lot about AI, but in terms of human culture, when we went for breakfast, Shannon, in London, this was what I was fascinated about with Carbon 6, because it, from the outside, when you would meet The Carbon 6 employees, they all were super motivated. They were always friendly, smiley, really happy. It looked like they just have a fantastic culture. And I'm not going to name names of some of the other places mentioned, but certainly I've met people from some of the other companies and haven't felt that. What do you think in terms of the culture that Carbon 6 got really right for its human employees? And then maybe also, if you're open to answering it, some of those other places, what do you think went wrong in the culture? Speaker 3: I think so Carbon 6, like many companies, has core leadership values. But I think one of the things that really set Carbon 6 apart is that they adhere to the one that What resonated I think the most with our team and probably resonated a lot company-wide was we all own Carbon 6, which sounds like a little corny and a little surface level, but it was really true is that everyone felt like they owned Carbon 6 and there was a sense of ownership around it. And when you own something and you feel responsible for it, I think you're more passionate about it. Some of the other principles were we care more about getting it right than being right. So there was a lot of in our DNA was like, let's just do the thing that we need to do and not get so obsessed about who's right and who's wrong and keep ego out of it. I'm comfortable with discomfort. I'm like, I should remember all of them because I wrote them, but I don't remember all of them. But the short answer is like the leadership principles that we had actually were true to the DNA of the company. And I think the other thing is a lot of organizations say that they're horizontal structures, that everyone's voice matters and it doesn't matter if you're brand new or you've been there for three years. A lot of companies say that. I've been at a lot of companies that say that. Carbon 6 is the only company I've been at where that really felt true all the time, where it felt like if you had an idea, it didn't matter if you were coming from engineering, it didn't matter if you were coming from product, it didn't matter where you were coming from. If it was a good idea, we were going to listen to it. And I think that really built a lot of confidence in people. That made them feel confident about themselves, made them feel confident about their role in the organization, and ultimately made them feel confident about what Carbon 6 was trying to do. That was truly unique and it's something that I would feel lucky to see replicated in another company that I joined. Speaker 1: Do you want people to reach out to you? Yeah, connect me on my LinkedIn. Speaker 3: Yeah, connect on my LinkedIn. Feel free to send me a DM. I have a mildly outdated portfolio link if you want to check out some of the work I used to do for Hasbro, but definitely be in touch. I'm a huge nerd about content and creative strategy and team building, so I'm always happy to have a conversation. Speaker 2: Awesome. Speaker 1: Thanks so much, Shannon. It's been great to talk to you. Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you.