383. Standing Out in the Age of Artificial Intelligence with Pascal Bornet

 

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 Pascal Bornet:

You shouldn't wait. You shouldn't wait to build the three skills of the three competencies of the future. This is what the most important for us, for our kids, for our team members, for our organizations. That's the most important thing we can do.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself.

 

Each episode, you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping.

 

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And our guest today is brilliant. And I am so excited to share him with you today. His name is Pascal Bornet, and he is an award-winning expert author and keynote speaking on artificial intelligence and automation.

 

He developed his expertise more than 20 years ago as a senior executive at McKinsey in EY Where he created and led their intelligent automation practices and implemented AI initiatives for hundreds of organizations around the world. He has received multiple awards and is regularly ranked as one of the top 10 global AI and automation experts.

 

He's the author of Intelligent Automation and Irreplaceable, which is now available everywhere. Just came out. We're going to talk about it. And his insights have been featured in such publications, Forbes, Bloomberg, McKinsey Quarterly and The Times. He's a lecturer at several universities, a member of the Forbes Technology Council and a senior advisor for several startups and charities. Pascal, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today.

 

Pascal Bornet:

Thank you, Dr. Richard. I'm very happy to be with you. And Dr. Richard, I have one thing to tell you now.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

All right. What is that?

 

Pascal Bornet:

I'm an expert in AI, but we won't talk about technology. We will talk about humans.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

This is great because everybody who's a human is being terrified by the media as to how the machines are coming for them. So this is a timely conversation. But before we get into that, I kind of want to, I love to find out people's superhero origin stories. So we were joking about Terminator a little bit before we hit the red button and started recording. So let's hop in that time machine. I want to go back, and I want you to tell us kind of your story, what puts you on this path you're on today, helping so many people?

 

Pascal Bornet:

Yeah. So some background on myself. I've been a consultant for more than 20 years for McKinsey and for EY implementing AI for companies around the world, really around the world, because I'm French originally. Then I moved to Shanghai, China for five years and to Singapore for six years, then San Francisco for three years. And I'm currently in Miami.

 

So I really had companies around the world to implement those technologies. What I mean by implementing those technologies across really diverse industries and diverse functions, what really struck me is that those initiatives, those AI initiatives that were successful, all had one thing in common. They used to put the humans in the center. And from this, I realized that AI without humans is a nonsense. We've created, as humans, we've created AI. And if AI doesn't service, doesn't serve humans, it's just a waste, it’s just a nonsense. So the most important thing in AI are humans. That's what I come to as a conclusion. And that's what really motivates me and makes me wake up every morning is how can we build a better world, a more human world using those technologies?

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I think what most people don't realize is this technology, it has been around for a while, machine learning has been around for a while. AI has been around for a while. But it's really only become kind of front and center because now there's ChatGPT and other companies like it. But that's the one that seems to have the most media attention around it. And now anybody can pull out their iPhone and start playing around with it and are mesmerized by it.

 

So when you talk about the successful AI technology was human centered. I want to really talk about the fear, right? Because so many people are afraid and it really kind of doesn't matter what industry they're in. They're afraid that at some degree AI is going to be harmful, maybe even replace their job, right? So what do you want to tell us about that?

 

Pascal Bornet:

That's exactly the reason why I wrote the book Irreplaceable because we all want to be irreplaceable in a world where we've seen over the last decades and even centuries, but more and more in the last decade, and especially in the last two years, as you mentioned with ChatGPT, that these technologies are taking more and more of the capabilities and skills that we thought were uniquely human.

 

I mean, we thought calculation was only human 30 years ago. Then calculators came. Then we thought writing and analyzing was only human. And then those systems came a decade ago. We thought creativity and writing poems and stories was uniquely human. And we've seen ChatGPT and all those large language models that came. Can you imagine that they came just a year and a half ago, almost two years ago now, but it seems like a decade.

 

So all those systems are taking to us, replacing us in a way on those skills and doing those things 24/7, never need to sleep, never need to eat, never need to take vacation, even if, and they can do it simultaneously. And so they are scalable to infinity.

 

So the key question is what's left for us? We thought we were humans because we had those skills, but now that those skills have been taken by technology, who are we? Okay. Do we still have a play? I mean, do we still have a reason to exist? And to be more pragmatic and logistic, we have a job. We've been able to make our money, thanks to our skills. And now those skills are taken away by technology. So I don't have a way to earn my money anymore.

 

So that's central to the book. And to answer your point, yes, we should be scared because AI will take our jobs. Definitely, it's going to take our jobs, but we need to be ready for that. We need to understand what it means. The only one thing it's not going to take is our skills and our ability to evolve those skills, our capacity to adapt our skills in the future. This is something that AI will never take. And I'm going to explain to you why and how.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I want you to explain because what I've been reading is from an adaptability standpoint, that AI, these large language models are getting smarter and smarter. And we've actually crossed a threshold earlier this year where the AI, they gave an IQ test to an AI, and it actually was smarter than the average person. And the prediction is by 2027 or ‘28, they'll be smarter than everybody on earth. So talk me off the ledge here, because this is getting crazy.

 

Pascal Bornet:

You're right. So our parents told us you need to be a medical doctor. You need to be a lawyer. You need to be a coder or a programmer. But all those jobs, all those skills are mastered better by technology than by humans. And soon, it's going to be forbidden to drive because we are, as humans, too foible and we create accidents because we are distracted, and we don't have the 100 percent control as technology can have.

 

So in this world, what's remaining for us, should we be scared? Yes, we should be scared. And yes, we should take, we should get prepared and get something to be ready. On top of these capabilities that are being taken by technology, those capabilities, those advancements of technology are going faster and faster. So in the coming 10 years, we will see as many disruptions, technological disruptions, and innovations as we've seen in the last century.

 

So just to show you how it's going fast, faster and the curve is exponential. So it's times two every year. So while we as humans are linear in the way we can progress, it's one day after another, one plus one. Okay. So this gap between our environment in the sense that our world that is boosted by AI and technology is going this way and we are going this way. So the gap, this gap is growing, growing, growing, growing.

 

As a result, I mean, we see a growing level of stress, growing level of depressions. I mean, and we need to be ready for this because it's just the beginning. So that's why I wrote this book. And to become irreplaceable, meaning being able to live in this new world. And to be irreplaceable, we need to build the three competencies of the future.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

So let's go through them because this is great stuff. So what's the first competency again?

 

Pascal Bornet:

So the first competency is being change ready.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

So change ready is number one. What's number two change?

 

Pascal Bornet:

Change ready. AI already is the second one. And human ready is the third one.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I'm really interested in learning about number three, but let's --

 

Pascal Bornet:

Yes, that's why I keep it for the end.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

So let's jump in.

 

Pascal Bornet:

That's the most important one.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

So change ready. So walk us through it.

 

Pascal Bornet:

So change ready is about in a world that is, as I explained just now, progressing at exponential pace while we are linear, the gap between our capabilities and what is required by the world is growing. And this is creating a lot of issues for ourselves, and for our kids, and for our companies. So we need to build a new resilience, a new level of adaptability. We need to bring these to the highest level.

 

So basically, those are resilience and adaptability are the reason why we as a species, as homo sapiens are still alive today. Okay. That's the reason why we are still here. And our ancestors in a way were better than us today at mastering the skills. So it's kind of a, we need to find again, the wisdom coming from our ancestors on managing and boosting those levels of adaptability and resilience to the next level.

 

So we need to work on ourselves to achieve this. I share in the book, many things to do that. First of all, back to the presentation I did of myself in the beginning, where I told you about the different places I worked in,

I lived in the world. The reason why I did that is to train my adaptability. When you change completely life, moving your whole family, you have two kids from one place to another. And trust me, moving from France to China is a really big gap. You have to put in place all the adaptability that you can imagine, to understand what is happening to you and to adjust to a new world and succeed in this new world and survive and then succeed in this new world.

 

So it's -- so what am I saying here? It's about marrying with change. It's about triggering change in our lives so that we marry with it. And the change that will come from our world and that will increase in the future, as I explained, will be nothing else than part of ourselves.

 

I talk in the book about 20 years ago, I used to backpack a lot. I went in the Sahara Desert, and I was lucky to meet with the Tuareg. The Tuaregs are nomads from the deserts. And I think those are one of the most resilient and adaptable people in the world because they live in some of the harshest environment you can imagine with the heats and draft at the highest level in the world. And they gave me a lot of learning points. The fact that I'm implementing on a daily basis that come through breathing exercises to mindfulness and others.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

They use – does nomads in the desert use mindfulness and breathing exercises?

 

Pascal Bornet:

I put these words on those practices, but they don't, of course, don't use, don't put these words.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Well, I know they don't call it, but I mean, it's -- but it's interesting --

 

Pascal Bornet:

To use their words, they call it Ingal. Ingal, it means finding tranquility and they will -- and so I explain all this in the book, but I just wanted to make it brief.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Yeah. So I don't know if you talk about this in the book or not, but the data is starting to show that the younger generations, Gen Z, to a lesser extent, the younger end of Millennials in many ways are less adaptive than previous generations. They have strength certainly, but adaptiveness and resiliency don't seem to be as poignant as other generations.

 

So that concerns me because we have the majority of young people coming into a world where if they don't learn to be resilient and adaptive, they're going to get left behind. So if it's not in the book, what would you say to a young person listening to this about things they need to do to become more flexible and be more resilient in a world that is going to be changing so rapidly?

 

Pascal Bornet:

That's a very good question. And I agree with you, because we live in a world that is more and more comfortable, then we tend to forget to be resilient and adaptable. And it's all about training ourselves. So changing things on a daily basis, instead of having a routine where, for example, you always drive the same way to go to work or you always do the same thing when you are in a break, in your school, change things, change, talk to new people, talk, do different things, challenge yourself and be proud of it. Share about that. Those are just examples that come to my mind that could be applicable to students. Learn a new language. Like learn new things, go into different groups of people with different interests, be curious, try things with them. Yeah, I mean --

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Yeah, there's countless examples, but again, I think it's worth pointing out because we -- and social media has a lot to do with this, why we are less cognitively flexible than we used to be, but these are all really good examples. Okay, so change ready, number one. Let's talk about AI ready.

 

Pascal Bornet:

Yes, AI ready is a very important competency. So I call it AI ready, but it's on a broader sense, it's tech ready. It's being ready for technology. AI being the most dominant one currently. So it's about leveraging to the maximum, to the largest extent AI in our lives and work. It's about taking the maximum benefits from it, automating all the tasks and activities that are repetitive, mundane, tedious that we don't like to do.

 

So basically, taking us away from those robotic activities, giving them to AI. So I'm thinking here about scheduling meetings, about writing the minutes of those meetings. I mean, we have tools to do all this nowadays, so that's really amazing. Anything that, I mean, whenever you have something to do in your day or in your work that you don't like to do, and that it's taking you time and energy, wonder is there an AI to help me doing this? If yes, I mean, it's easy to Google, you Google it. If yes, try it. Nothing -- you don't -- I mean, what can you lose other than a few minutes of your time? And very often, you won't lose anything. You will learn something and best case, you will get all the benefits from those automations.

 

The second thing that you can gain from using AI is elevating your skills.

So while the automation saves you time so that you can educate yourself, meet with people, spend time with your family, the elevation helps you to amplify your existing strengths, your existing capabilities. For example, our creativity, our capacity to connect with others, our capacity to critical think, to analyze.

 

And it's kind of, I mean, it's about using AI to help us become superhumans. We are capable of analyzing millions of data in just a few seconds. I'm able to be more, or at least creative faster. And for example, from one article that I built, create posts that I can share on social media, creates a podcast that I can share on YouTube, create -- you can repurpose things very quickly, very easily. And it's about augmenting your own creativity. It's based on what you've done. So it's about making it shine and making it scalable. And again, transforming you into a superhuman.

 

So here -- so the advice that I give is to identify which activities should be automated, take all those activities that take you the longest time that are the most tedious, find ways to automate them so that we get rid of them. Okay. You gave them to AI and you have more time for you and to do whatever you want.

 

And for those tasks that you want to elevate, think about the task that you do that create the highest value in your day, the highest and all that you have the highest satisfaction in doing. And think of how and look again on Google, the different tools that you can find that can help you to move to the next level.

 

As we talk about being AI ready, it's about, as I just mentioned, sizing those tools and being able to grab the benefits from them, saving time, making us superhumans. But it's also about keeping ourselves updated on those new tools. I don't know if you have, Dr. Richard, the same experience as I have. Every day, I see coming in my mailbox, new tools, new AI doing this, this, this, this. I mean, we are flooded. We are flooded and we keep on asking ourselves, I mean, am I missing something? Should I try? I mean, but my day is only 24 hours. How can I -- okay, how can I identify what is trivial from what is essential?

 

And this is a skill that we need to train. I call it AI literacy. AI literacy is not about knowing how to program or to code. It's about keeping ourselves updated on what is coming out, understanding what are the benefits and opportunities we can get from those tools, but also understanding the limits and the dangers of those tools. And we can't try all of them, all those tools that are coming out.

 

So let's focus first on what are our needs. Okay. And I, as I said before, we can either automate. Think about those tedious tasks that are taking a long time. Think -- and we have those elevation tasks. So think about those tasks that are delivering the highest value in your life and work and boost them to the next level. So AI literacy, how to implement it.

 

My rule of thumb is, spend 15 percent of your working day keeping yourself updated, and trying out some of those tools. Okay. So 15 percent. So this means as well, if you have a team, spend this time, I mean, ask your team to do that. Okay. And accept that they won't be working on something else during this time. So this is being AI ready.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Okay. Now the big one, let's put it all together, human ready. Take us through it.

 

Pascal Bornet:

So being human ready is the most, I think, the most essential and critical of the three competencies of the future. As we said at the beginning, in a world where technology and AI are taking over all the skills that we thought were uniquely human, how should we position ourselves? What should we learn now basically? How should I prepare myself for a future where I, if I learn a skill now, these skills might be taken by AI in a few months?

 

The World Economic Forum, based on the research identified that the lifespan of skills has decreased by three times in the last 30 years. And today, there are some skills that before becoming obsolete, the only -- the time that is span is only two years. So can you imagine, you spent maybe two years learning a skill that in two years will be obsolete. So what are those skills that first of all will last forever? So we should invest in and we will never lose them to technology. And what does it mean and why should we focus our full attention and energy on building those?

 

So first of all, what are those? So it took me a lot of research. And so yeah, a lot of research with experts, to identify those three uniquely human abilities that I call the humics. Those are basically the uniquely human abilities that AI or any technology will never be able to master as well as we do as humans.

 

The first one is genuine creativity. The second is critical thinking. And the third one is social authenticity. So you might tell me, Dr. Richard, creativity, why do you think creativity is uniquely human? We see ChatGPT creating poems. We see a runway or whatever doing videos and images more creative than we can even ever think. Yes, they are creative, but it's a completely different creativity from the creativity that we humans come with.

 

So what do systems do is they just use the data that they've been trained with. So basically, what they do is they combine different components on a different way. They come at existing data, existing components, and they will create new things. Okay. But what we do as humans is called novelty, meaning we build something from scratch. We built something that never exists. We can combine as well, but we can create completely new things.

 

And those new things come from our life stories. I mean, we've all been kids. We've all grown up. We've all had a story. We all have different personalities. We live in different places. We have different lives. We have emotions, authentic emotions, human emotions that no technology will ever authentically have. And this is based on this, that we create things, that we create novelty. And technology again will never be able to achieve the same thing as we do. So that's the first of the humics.

 

The second is critical thinking. Critical thinking is two key things here. First thing is when we use AI and technology, we shouldn't take things for granted. Okay. I mean, I ask ChatGPT to look for the best things in the world or to research for me on something. And as you, as most of us know now, those systems hallucinate. We need to review before even taking the outcome that is coming from those systems. We need to review, to criticize, to question the outcome before and add the human touch, our human touch to that before even calling it an outcome that we can deliver to someone or to an organization.

 

So that's the first thing. It's about criticizing the outcome and reviewing and improving the outcome that is coming from AI. That's the first thing in critical thinking. The second thing is there is one thing that we will never want technology to do. And here it's never want. Okay. We will never want technology to tell us that this is a good thing, or this is a bad thing. You should do this, or you shouldn't do that. This is right or this is wrong.

 

So basically, what we call ethics. Designing ethics, designing the rules of our world, we will never want any technology to tell us you humans shouldn't be doing this because, okay, that's what we think as humans. And even across different countries and cultures and religions, we don't even agree on that, on everything that we call ethics. But we want to keep, we want to stay the guardians of that. We are humans. In a human world, we are creating the rules for humans. So this is critical thinking.

 

And finally, social authenticity. So you might tell me, come on, ChatGPT is talking to me like a friend, like a human. So why are you telling me that social authenticity, which includes communication, empathy is only human because also technology understands us better than us. It understands better how long I slept. What is my big term in it? Using my watch, it understands me, but it even understands better my emotions just by looking at my face. So why do we say empathy is uniquely human? Because technology masters, it's even sometimes better than us.

 

So social authenticity is a uniquely human skill because we are the only one as humans to better understand another human on a genuine point of view, on an authentic point of view. Because we are humans, we are capable of understanding another human, what technology does, what AI does, it only takes cues from data and translate those cues into what probably can be emotions behind challenging talking to us like humans is only using probabilities to identify which word should come after another word. It doesn't understand what it says. It's just mathematics, probabilities, statistics, and that's it. That's empty, there is no authenticity behind, there is no humanity behind that.

 

Okay. So those are the three humics, genuine creativity, critical thinking, social authenticity. They have in common a few things that are very essential to know. The first one is they are innate. All of us, we were born with this. I mean, have a look in a playground where you see kids playing, they will build castles in sand. They will tell stories and so on. Okay.

 

Secondly, they will, whenever a newcomer is coming and new kids coming in, in the playground, come on, come on, play with us. Come on, play with us. That’s social authenticity. And finally, they will create rules for their games, and they will debate those rules. No, you should be these, I should be that. We are all born with those three humics. That's the first characteristic.

 

The second one is, we can develop them to the highest level. We can develop and grow them, expand them by working, by training ourselves, being more creative, expanding our capacity to connect with others, to empathize with others, expanding our capacity to criticize, question, evaluate, philosophically review anything around us.

 

And in the book, I explained how to do that. I mean, I give practical exercises of how you can build all these so that we become super humans, basically. Again, we become humans to the highest level. And why is it so important to do that, to build those humics? Because the more we build those humics, the more we are different from technology, the more we are different from AI. And the more we are different, the more, the less we are redundant. And the more we are different, the more we create value because we create a synergy where one plus one equals three. It grows the pie. Okay.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

No, I'm loving this. And I can't help but think as you're talking that these strategies that you're talking about, this is what we should be teaching people in schools and universities, not states and capitals and who won the battle of whatever, right? Because knowledge is now a commodity, just like air. Our society has always been constructed hierarchically about how much knowledge you have. If you have a lot of knowledge, you're a doctor, you're a lawyer, you're something, right? But now, that data is available everywhere, but the soft skills, these things that make us human, the humics that you talk about, this is what we need to teach people. So I am so grateful that this book is out there. I can't wait to read it.

 

And man, our time together has just flown by. I can't believe how quickly this time has passed, but I've loved every second of our conversation, Pascal. As you know, I wrap up every episode by asking my guest just a single question, that is, what is your biggest helping, that one most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today?

 

Pascal Bornet:

Dr. Richard, it's very simple. You shouldn't wait. You shouldn't wait to build the three skills of the three competencies of the future. This is what the most important for us, for our kids, for our team members, for our organizations. That's the most important thing we can do. That's it.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Mike drop. Well said. Pascal, tell us where people can learn more about you online and get their hands on Irreplaceable.

 

Pascal Bornet:

Yes, definitely. So Irreplaceable, the book, has just been released a few days ago. You can find it everywhere. Amazon, bookstores, everywhere. On www.irreplaceable.ai, you can also access to a new community, academy and community that we've built around this. So it's basically my commitment is really to, I mean I don't want anyone to be left behind in this future that is going at an increasing pace. I know what's coming out. It's coming up in the future because I'm an expert in these technologies. I've grown those technologies over the decades. I don't want anyone to be left behind.

 

And on top of writing the book, which gives you all the fundamental knowledge that you know, that you need, I've created an academy where you can practice on a day-to-day basis those skills. So anything we've discussed, you can grow it. You can meet with other people who are growing those skills as well and who are maybe facing difficulties, and you might be facing issues as well and you help each other and we bring in experts like you, Dr. Richard, to talk about specific aspects of resilience, adaptability, AI, how to better use those technologies, how to build our creativity, how to become more connective, how to connect better with others and so on. So that was very important for me. So again, www.irreplaceable.ai.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Perfect. And for those of you in the car and you're actually driving yourself, it's not AI driving your car, we got you covered everything Pascal Bornet. And Irreplaceable will be linked to the show notes at dr.richardshuster.com. Well, Pascal, I have loved our time together. I learned so much. This book is so important. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for coming on and sharing your wisdom with everybody.

 

Pascal Bornet:

Thank you, Dr. Richard.

 

Dr. Richard Shuster: Richard.

And for each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to this, don't be scared, be excited for the future. If you like what you heard, if you're inspired, if you're going to go grab Irreplaceable today, go give us a follow and a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, because this is what helps other people find the show.

 

But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post it in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping, because the happiest people are those that help others.