In this episode, AI strategist Colin Fitzpatrick joins Aarti Samani to discuss the transformative impact of AI across industries, particularly how businesses must adapt to AI-led growth. Colin shares insights from his 20-year career in big tech (Oracle, Dell, Salesforce), his experience as an entrepreneur in Web3 and AI startups, and the importance of businesses embracing AI to stay competitive.
From defining AI as “Software 2.0” to explaining why hiring a Chief AI Officer is critical, Colin offers a compelling argument for why executives cannot afford to ignore AI. This episode is a must-watch for executives, business leaders, and AI enthusiasts looking to future-proof their businesses.
Key Takeaways:
- Mindset Shift for AI Adoption: AI is not just a tool but a revolutionary mindset change. Treat AI as a “smart human” and see it as essential for business growth.
- The Role of a Chief AI Officer: Colin argues that businesses need a Chief AI Officer to navigate the complexities of AI implementation and to future-proof their operations.
- AI’s Impact on Every Business Function: AI will soon touch every aspect of business from marketing to finance to customer service, and companies that embrace it will thrive.
- Debunking AI Myths: AI isn’t going to take jobs away—it’s going to make businesses more efficient. But leaders who ignore it might get left behind.
- Scalability & Business Growth: AI tools enable businesses to scale faster, improve customer service, and make data-driven decisions with greater accuracy.
Highlights
- 00:00 – Introduction: Colin Fitzpatrick’s 20 years in tech, AI and Web3 startups.
- 01:34 – What is AI?: Colin defines AI and explains why it’s more than just a buzzword.
- 03:40 – AI-Led Growth: Why AI is essential for executive leaders and how it will change every business.
- 05:30 – The Importance of a Chief AI Officer: Why every mid-to-large-sized business should have a Chief AI Officer to stay competitive.
- 10:15 – AI Across the C-Suite: How AI impacts every role in the C-suite, from legal to HR.
- 13:20 – AI and Customer Experience: Why businesses need to embrace AI to improve customer service and retention.
- 16:15 – Future of AI Tools: What’s next for AI tools and how they will shape the future of work and business models.
Transcript
Aarti Samani: Hello Colin, welcome to the show. It’s such a delight to have you here today with us.
Colin Fitzpatrick: Thank you so much Aarti, it’s great to be here.
Aarti Samani: Tell us a little bit about yourself before we go into the deep dive of artificial intelligence.
Colin Fitzpatrick: Sure, absolutely. So, well, I’ve had 20 years in big tech companies, Oracle, Dell, Salesforce, HubSpot, mostly instead of business development marketing roles, always been very, very passionate about technology and I’ve always kind of been on the edge. Been a big fan of blockchain and web three for a long time and obviously since AI hit the scene in a very, very big amount in the last couple of years, I’ve been fully dedicated to that.
Um, I’ve been an entrepreneur. I founded and, uh, been a CEO of companies in both web three and also AI. And for the last year or so, I’ve basically been consulting, um, for artificial intelligence for smaller medium companies and trying to take a couple of startups to the front as well. So it’s just a, you know, very exciting place to be. It’s a, my huge passion. And I write quite consistently on LinkedIn as well. If you want to follow me, um, I cover.
AI, futurism, business innovation, and I just write about what I love.
Aarti Samani: Fantastic. It’s such a nice, you have such a strong background that our viewers, our listeners will benefit tremendously from all the insights that you have to share with us today. So tell us, what is AI? Just define AI for us, please.
Colin Fitzpatrick: I suppose the easiest way to think about AI is it’s the replication of the human mind by machines. And really, you just have to think of it very, very simply. You now need to treat AI like a human, and that’s it. You want to talk to it like a human. You want to engage and challenge it, but it’s like the smartest human you’ve ever come across. It’s not perfect. I’m sure everyone has seen by using ChatGPT, but really, to me, I always believe that
Right now, what’s needed from most people just scratching the surface with this is a mindset change. Because I like to call AI software 2.0. And we’ll talk about this a little bit later, but from now on, pretty much all software is really going to be built differently and built in a different way using the AI itself. And the way we interact with computers and pieces of software into the future will largely change. And it will become that much more human and also much more easily accessible.
So I like to make sure people kind of understand that mindset change because it’s important, but the most important thing is this is the greatest thing that’s gonna, that has happened in my opinion in a very long time and some amazing things are gonna come out of it across the board.
Aarti Samani: Yeah, I like that. It’s a mindset change. I call it AI led growth and often I get asked, what is AI led growth? Have you just stuck AI as a prefix just to make it sound good? And it’s not. My response is always AI led growth is a mindset. It comprises of a lot more than just a technology or just large language models.
So just for our executive listeners and audience, you know, there is no respite from AI, right? Any social media channel that I open, even advertisements for chocolate bars, talk about AI, it’s all around us, right? So I’m a busy executive leader. Why should I care about this? I think it’s just a fact that will pass over us. Do I really need to bother myself about this thing?
Colin Fitzpatrick: Yes, you absolutely do. And anyone who thinks this is a fad is not paying attention. I wrote an article a little while ago about a little sort of a controversial piece that was in Business Insider to say that, this is really, it’s gonna die off and the interest is gonna wane. And my answer was an expletive, but you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think that’s happening. Anyone close to this is seeing the actual acceleration of what’s going on a day-to-day basis, that’s quite incredible. Elon Musk, he’s pretty close to everything at the edge of technology. And he said he’s never seen anything like this. And it’s outstripping his anticipations from even a couple of years ago. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who’ve been predicting the singularity for 30, 40 years, are even impressed by this sort of cliff step jump that we’ve faced.
You know, it’s really going to change everything from a business perspective, from a personal perspective, from a usability perspective, everything will change. But the most important thing already is that, you know, you don’t have to be afraid of this. And a lot of people who are hearing it, ignoring it, not really bothering to look into it, they might have some fear here because, well, what’s the biggest question? Is AI going to take my job? And the answer is, you know, in the short term, no.
In the long term, maybe if you ignore it and you stick your head in the sand. But as the phrase goes, um, you know, you might not get replaced by AI, but you might get replaced by someone skilled using AI, and I think that’s probably the most important one in this, this generic phrase that everyone should be thinking about.
Aarti Samani: So as a leader, you want to protect your business, you want to protect your staff, you have to think about AI as a core component of your growth strategy, right?
Colin Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I mean, even I supposed to explain the background for our viewers Aarti, the way we became connected is I wrote a document which then became post, which is why the role of the chief AI officer is a crucial hire for any, uh, organization of, of substance going forward. And I pieced this together from reading a number of different articles and talking to a couple of people in the field. Um, it, you know, the, one of the first articles I saw was a massive survey by IBM where they surveyed 3000 CEOs and something like 75% of them said that the companies into the future who will have competitive advantage will be the ones who best utilize AI tools and strategy. Gartner have said that every sizeable company needs an AI strategy and ultimately if you really want to be serious about competitive advantage and winning into the future, you can’t overlook this. That’s really the best thing.
The thing about AI that we have never ever seen before is that it touches almost every different area of the business. And that is an amazing thing because we can have small, small gains that compound across the business. So there’s several different layers and we can go into this later, but you know, if you just want to do some basic training and enablement with all of your staff so that they understand how to utilize chat GPT or some of the tools, then that’s great.
If you want to go a couple of levels deeper and start creating knowledge bases so that you have your own custom large language model in the business, that’s extremely useful as well. If you then want to go down building custom applications, well, the sky’s the limit for the sort of productivity and time saving you can have. But there’s so many off the shelf tools coming out now and so AI being baked into everything from Google and Microsoft to all the other applications that we’re used to.
It really is highly advisable that you take this head on and run with it because you’re going to see significant advantages at the back end. Whereas if you ignore it and hope it’s going to go away, I don’t think you’re going to have a very good time.
Aarti Samani: Yeah, it makes sense. But if I just put a contrarian view out there, so World Economic Forum says global economy is expected to remain uncertain throughout this year. And their chief economist outlook report says that over 50% of them expect the economy to weaken or shrink. Now, in this kind of very tough environment, do businesses really need another c-suite person around their executive table, can they afford it?
Colin Fitzpatrick: Can they afford not to is probably the better question, Aarti. I mean, what I would say is this, from my knowledge of large companies, boards, et cetera, this is the first time that something has come in where it affects every different person in the C-suite with a new piece of technology. And like we were chatting about earlier, the thing about a lot of the C-suite is that a lot of them are not necessarily massively technically savvy, and that creates fear.
Um, so naturally they will be, uh, a little bit concerned and if they’re, you know, uh, in, in legal or compliance or something like that, you know, it might not be their, their forte. However, what I think a lot of people that I’ve seen is that they’re very, very pleasantly surprised about, Oh, wow, hang on, look at check, this digital brain out and this is going to help me be so much more efficient. I mean.
I introduced a bunch of HR leaders to some tools that they are just going, well, this is incredible now because it stops me getting tapped on the shoulder 15, 20 times a day to ask a stupid question. Now we’ve created a knowledge base and that just gets it. Gives me more time to do my real job. There’s just so many different ways in which you can really benefit. But as I said, like the one, it’s really about being prepared for the future because things are changing fast now. But, you know,
Enterprises are slow to respond and it will take a couple of years until this really sort of permeates across and where we will be in terms of large language models and tools in a couple of years. It’s really hard to say because they’re accelerating so fast. I keep a very, very close eye on this via a number of websites where everything goes on and practically every week, I am just bowled over by what’s coming out that I did not expect for a year or two or something like that. Um, so.
AI is not without problems. We still have hallucinations, which we all know, where it’ll give a very confident answer. That is just simply factually incorrect. It’s not that that’s gonna disappear, but it’s definitely getting better. And the models that are coming out now, even open source ones and from the likes of Google or Meta, et etcetera, are coming ahead in leaps and bounds. We’re gonna see GPT-5 and a couple of others. They obviously know that being able to permutate inside of a enterprise organization needs to be a certain level of competency. And that’s coming too. So all of these tools are gonna start seeping in across the board. You do need a C level person who is different to the existing ones. So yeah, we have a chief technical officer, we have a chief digital officer, we might have an innovation officer and things like that.
But in my article and in my thesis, the way I think it’s important to articulate this is that this is not a technical role. This is a strategic business role where the person’s first responsibility is to set the strategy, the AI strategy for the business going forward, aligning that with the long-term vision and the business goals and also, you know, the, the laws and ethics and things like that, which are very, very important to abide by, but then it is about stakeholder management because that Chief AI officer will essentially have to be very, very close to all the other C-level people, helping them understand, helping them set their own personal strategy for their own business and their own division. And then, you know, training staff across the board, figuring out where we might want to implement AI tools from a set of low complexity, but high impact status. And then planning out the vision of the future also looking at what the competitors are doing and make sure that we’re aligned. Because, you know, and some people go, oh, well, you know, can the CTO not do this? Well, no, the CTO is very busy keeping the lights on, keeping the show running, doing his own day jobs, same with the digital officer and many others. This, to me, is a wonderful opportunity to bring in someone fresh who is not, you know, polluted by the politics of the current company, who’s not, you know, set in their ways, but, you know, someone who can come in breathe a breath of fresh air into the organization to foster this, you know, digital innovation culture with our artificial intelligence to make sure that they are becoming a AI centric organization going forward. There was a wonderful video from one of the, you know, the big sort of tech billionaires the other day, his name escapes me, but he basically said that in the next few years.
There will be companies that are good at the AI and there will be everybody else and everybody else is gonna be left behind. And I don’t say that to scare people. It’s just that is probably the reality of where we’re going because these AI tools are going to give individuals and corporates such an advantage that it’s just gonna be really, really hard to catch up without it.
Aarti Samani: Yeah, that’s a great point. And it’s almost like as if every business will soon be an AI business, whether they know it or not. So even if they’re not, even if a business or an organization itself is not incorporating AI, their vendors, their customers, the supply chain, everyone else in the ecosystem has it, so they will be pushed towards it anyway. So it’s better that they make an effort and kick off these initiatives internally themselves. And you make a great point about this existing CXOs are already deep down in keeping the lights on, keeping the business afloat, if not growing, taking care of the staff, well-being, etc. And there is not really a lot of mindshare to focus on the forward-looking initiatives, where is the market headed in three years time and what bad happens.
What risks are we introducing within the organisation if we don’t take care of it. So that fresh perspective, someone whose sole mandate is to look out and do whatever it takes to bring people together to kick off these initiatives.
Colin Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Now, I mean, when we say every business needs this, we don’t need, I mean, a hundred percent of them. Obviously it varies very much by size. If you’re a small bakery, probably not so much, but if you’re a medium to medium to large sized organisation, you know, you will have a sales organisation. Sales organisations are utilising AI. You will have a marketing division and they are all over it at the moment because marketing is really transforming that in a good way and sometimes as a bad way. If you’re in finance, you’re going to see the finance tools utilise an awful lot of AI and things like logistics, product innovation, everything like that.
So whether you ignore it or not, it’s going to be touching these different people in areas and from what I’ve seen, you know, going to conferences and speaking and things like that, the transformation that’s happened over the last, even six months, I mean, I always ask people to raise their hand, right? How many people have used ChatGPT? And six months ago, it was like a third. Now it’s like 80, 90%. And then when I go, okay, how many of you use it every day? It’s still most of the hands. I think most people use this thing and go, oh my God, this is, you know, I don’t Google that much anymore. I mean, AI is just my primary thing.
It is becoming my digital brain and that is what it will become. And like we’ll talk about a little bit later, these devices are going to come out. We also, Amazon Alexa and your smartwatch and things like that, but these things are dumb, they’re really about to get very, very smart and, um, you know, there’s going to be a big race to essentially get as much data into it as possible because the more data you get in, the better you’ll be able to get out.
Aarti Samani: Yeah, great point. And also thinking beyond language models, beyond chat GPT. So what kind of business models will we need to see in the future? When I speak at business schools, the MBA students are really grappling and the and the educators in those institutions are really grappling with the challenges of what are the revenue models going to be in future? How do we think about cost versus profit versus revenue in these AI powered products? On the other hand, when you speak to legal teams, they are worried about what do the contracts of the future look like? How do we protect our clients with the IP clauses, et cetera? So it’s really, like you say, it touches every aspect of the organisation, all the functions within the business. And someone has to bring it all together, whether that is an AI leader, an AI executive or indeed a C-suite, a Chief AI officer around the table. How do you think very small businesses should go about it when they don’t have the resources? Is it a case of self-learning? Is it a case of providing L&D platforms to their staff, et cetera, when you don’t really have an individual dedicated to just focusing on bringing AI into the business?
Colin Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I mean, it’s a very good question. I suppose the baseline education is the most important. And this is something that I and my colleagues are seeing all the time. I maintain a small group of AI professionals and just had a chat with three of them there just yesterday. And the one thing that they resoundingly see is, I don’t know where to start. That’s it. They’re kind of going, I have no idea what to do. I kind of, I see that there’s people using ChatGPT. I see there’s people using these tools doing fine tuning, they’re building their own miles, I don’t know where to start. And that is what a lot of the industry is trying to put together. Now, the good news is there’s an awful lot of courses. There’s some amazing courses and I’ve done a bunch of them and flicked through and they’re largely all good. So it doesn’t matter, just get a base level of knowledge and understanding across the board. Then encourage everyone to be using ChatGPT responsibly.
And when I say responsibly, it’s about knowing when that you can trust it and when you can’t, and that you can’t just throw everything out, but you have to be reset. It’s probably fine for writing some copy for some digital marketing, and that’s fine, but you probably don’t want to be to be solely responsible for some building regulations or something like that, because there’s much wider ramifications for that going wrong. And it’s important to have a policy in bigger companies, but in smaller companies, it’s just about enabling all of your staff and getting them excited. Again, coming back to this, is it going to take my job? No, what it’s going to do is it’s going to enable you to do a huge amount more. And if you’re doing more than your competitors, then you really don’t have too much to worry about. You mentioned agents there. This is something I’ve been expecting for quite a while. And even just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen some really interesting things.
The first one is, was a software package called Devon, and it’s for a software developer. And it does very, very large amount of their work for them. You know, all this sort of setting up development environments and integrating different software packages, things that would just take hours and hours and days and days and you know, it just runs away and does for them. And that is coming to the rest of the business ecosystem as well. So it might mean that you can get more done with, you know, fewer people, which will be fantastic. Alleviating.
Colin Fitzpatrick: Everyone’s job to focus on what they want to do and what they enjoy doing and less of the things that they don’t enjoy that to me is really where the power of AI comes in. We haven’t even seen this come in yet it’s rehash and even scratch the service but it is coming and then there was another device just the other day called the zero one light which is a hand held looks like a power point clicker and you can talk into it so you can be in the park and your computer can be at home and you can go send an email to Steve, attach the forecast file on my desktop, and then message someone to tell that’s been done. It will literally control your computer. And the way they market it, which I think is brilliant, is it’s just like having a very smart assistant sitting at your computer and able to do things. And you can teach it how to do things. So all of these boring reports that we have to generate or things like that, I would like to see that an awful lot more of that is getting automated.
And allowing us to focus on, which is really the important thing that everyone needs to remember is the human aspect. AI cannot replace the human aspect. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who’s an accountant. He doesn’t know much about AI, but he goes, yeah, people are keep saying, oh yeah, accountants, they’re going to be gone. Cause they are going to come. He goes, if anyone thinks an accountant is going to be replaced by AI, they do not know what, what accountants do. He goes, me actually doing my sums and my numbers is probably 10 to 20% of my job.
The rest of it is dealing with the business leaders, understanding the business goals, aligning strategies, and then figuring out the numbers in the back end. So to me, it will empower us to do more of the things that we’re good at and we like doing, less of the boring, repetitive, and drudgery, style work.
Aarti Samani: Yeah, yeah, it makes total sense. And you make a great point there, going beyond providing L&D initiatives to your staff is something that leaders will have to start doing, right? It’s time to take your teams beyond trying to trick your co-pilots and the AI agents into deploying them to do productive work for you. And the way to do that is by providing official training,
carving out time from their busy schedules and allowing them to learn about these things. So how should, just kind of staying on that thread for a little longer, how should leaders go about the skills transformation program? What would be the impact on the workforce, do you think? And how should we be preparing for that?
Colin Fitzpatrick: Well, I mean, as I said, where you can have compounding impact on small different areas across the business that will bring you advantages that you probably can’t even imagine. And it should be done, yeah, from an L&D perspective, get everybody up to a certain level. One of the things I found very effective is just getting people into work groups to actually brainstorm themselves.
as to where they think AI could be utilized within their own group or division or anything like that. I’ve seen people that I’m extremely surprised have actually a very good understanding and some incredible ideas of how they can increase efficiencies and, you know, utilize AI tools. So I think just inspiring the ground troops as to how we can best support them and enable them.
And, you know, maybe it’ll, you got to focus them to what, what’s really important. Maybe utilizing these AI tools will speed up their efficiency and give them more time to go spend with their family or their newborn. That’s what people care about. You know what I mean? Um, and getting down to those sort of emotional barriers that if we can overcome them with positivity, then that’s exactly what we should do, not scaring people going, you know, there was a story there the other day that Klarna, which is a very massive, um, finance company in the U S.
replaced 700 staff with, from customer service with AI. When you look into it, that’s not a credible story. Yes, they did push an awful lot of their customer service into this AI, but it was very, very high level. And some of the customers didn’t like it. There’s too much scaremongering going on, but there’s some other very, very positive stories out there of people who are just beefing up.
the employees’ abilities using AI tools. They’re still hiring, they’re still doing more, they’re still competing, and it’s a positive and not a negative, and that’s what I think has to be remembered.
Aarti Samani: Yeah, great point. And a very large Scandinavian furniture store, I read somewhere that they automated a lot of their customer service, and all the staff that became available as a result of that were retrained to be kitchen designers or interior designers, tour designers, et cetera, the kind of skills that they actually wanted to learn and be deployed in. So as you say, there are positive
examples out there which are just not talked about enough and what should actually be focused on. So tell me Colin, before we end the show, what is the one question that executive leaders and board members should be asking?
Colin Fitzpatrick: I suppose I would kind of bring it back to that, you know, they need to be leaving no stone uncovered as to every different nook and cranny of my business. You know, where, where can we start utilising AI in a positive light? Because, you know, they are probably a lot of them just unsure as to where to start. And you’ve just got to dive in, you just got to make that move and you got to start by, you know, education across the board, followed by inspiring your teams to sort of take it upon themselves to how they can use this.
You’d be very, very surprised as to how many will really love this initiative. Um, and then just seeing where we can have a positive impact across the business to utilise some of these very incredible tools that are growing at a rate that is, you know, astronomical for even, you know, those of us close to the industry, um, and I think, you know, based on the fact that probably a lot of your competitors will not, you’ll be in a very, very good stance. Um, and, uh, you know, going to a deeper level to kind of now think about how can we get to level two, three, four in utilising some of these more custom tools and fine tuning and things like that. When it comes to customer service, like you just mentioned there, we all know where it’s going.
It really will. I mean, AI is going to basically become the de facto standard of how, when I want to pick up the phone or send an email or whatever it is, it will change. Cause I will get my answer straight away from an AI. And then if the AI can’t help me, at least the next person at the end of the phone will have a very good summary of what it is. So, um, I think a lot of the sort of pain points and annoyances will go away. And that will lead to better customer satisfaction.
and retention and things like that. So focusing on those sort of things, there’s a lot to be done and I would encourage people to do it as soon as possible.
Aarti Samani: Yeah, that’s a great way to end the conversation. So focus on what it can do for your business, put the right infrastructure, the right frameworks, the right skills, programs in place, and really embrace it and sort of move away from the fear. Also that internal communications piece you briefly touched on is very important. Bring your staff along with you on this journey, show them with transparency where you are taking your business.
in terms of AI initiatives. Colin, thank you very much. If our audience want to reach out to you, what is the best channel for them to contact you on?
Colin Fitzpatrick: Thank you Aarti
Colin Fitzpatrick: If they just want to follow me on LinkedIn or send me a message, Colin Fitz Patrick on LinkedIn, you’ll find me. I’m on Twitter and all the others and ones as well. So yeah, happy to take any questions or advise or engage. I’d love to hear from you.
Aarti Samani: Thank you. Colin Fitzpatrick, it has been a real pleasure to have this conversation with you and to share your insights with our audience. Thank you so much.
Colin Fitzpatrick (28:37.366): Thank you, Aarti. We’ll speak again soon.
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