AI Is About to Expose How Your Company Really Works with David Dean

AI isn’t just a faster tool, and it isn’t only a threat to job security. The real shockwave is what AI can reveal about how work actually gets done, especially the unwritten rules, side conversations, and invisible decisions that never make it into process docs.

We talk with technologist, author, and speaker David Dean about the future of work in an AI-driven world through a practical lens he calls business AI realism. David explains why AI acts like a mirror inside organizations, creating organizational self-awareness by connecting to everyday systems like email, chat, meeting transcripts, and document collaboration. He calls the inbox a behavioral record, a place where the written contract of official policy collides with the unwritten contract that actually moves work forward. Once you can see that hidden layer, you can finally understand why approvals drag, where bottlenecks really live, and what behaviors are quietly shaping outcomes.

That kind of visibility can also create tension. We unpack why leaders may feel uncomfortable when patterns become measurable, how “insight vs surveillance” becomes a real governance question, and why AI strategy is as much about behavior and intent as it is about technology. We also get personal about what makes humans valuable, from lived experience to lived consequence, and how the best AI story is using these tools to give people breathing room to think, decide, and lead.

If you’re navigating AI at work as a leader or an individual contributor, this conversation will help you ask better questions and make smarter choices. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with your take: is AI making work more honest, or just more exposed?

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates, visit 5starbdm.com
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And don’t miss Grant McGaugh’s new book, First Light — a powerful guide to igniting your purpose and building a BRAVE brand that stands out in a changing world. - https://5starbdm.com/brave-masterclass/

See you next time on Follow The Brand!

Transcript

Five-Year Milestone And Big Theme

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome everybody to the Fellow Brand Podcast. This is Grant McGall. It's a special, special day for me in particular because this is my 50th anniversary. And this is June 1st. I'm not sure exactly when this episode will drop, but it will drop pretty soon. But I want to let everybody know that this is my fifth anniversary. We've got this our five year, we've got over 260 episodes, 70,000 some odd downloads. We've got a ranking out there now. My feet spot is the number one personal brand podcasting station that they uh gave me that designation. And also Thinkers360 gave me that number one ranking as well. And I really, really appreciate that. And that comes from the audience that listens to these podcasts and find value out of these things. And uh it's really the people, it's the guests. And I'm telling you, today we're gonna step in one of the most, I feel, the most important conversations in business, and that's the future of work in an AI-driven world. And you get a lot of people saying, Will AI replace my job? But today's guest, David Dean, challenges us to ask an even deeper and more powerful question, and that is what does AI reveal about how work actually gets done? See, see, so let's let's let's flip that a little bit because David is an author, he's a speaker, he's a technologist. He knows what he's talking about when it comes to these types of things, because these decisions rarely appear in what we call process documents, but determine whether these companies actually function, documenting the work that's being there. So that's gonna be his core message, what he's talking about. I don't want to waste any more time. I want you guys to tune in to what David is talking about. So, David, you like to introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Yeah, thank you for having me. Um, David Dean, I I've been working in the technology space for uh almost 20 years. Um, but more intimately is I've had the opportunity to uh live amongst the everyday leader and the everyday team. And and as a part of that experience over that 20 years, um I've had a lot of opportunity to have proximity to a lot of challenges and issues and goals, you know, for all these different types of um front-level dynamics with it. And um, and as I moved up in my career uh into solution design and

AI Realism And The Third Presence

SPEAKER_01 2:35

and development and uh and uh architecting and as well as strategy, uh, and then AI kind of enters this space, you know, there's a lot of questions, a lot of things coming out. And my background and hindsight allowed me to start kind of putting together some some things, some clarity in which uh as AI is entering this world, um, in a way that hasn't initially really been presented yet, you know, with it. And and that's really my goal around uh being out here and talking to people is really to create a new avenue, a new message that people can kind of guide and latch on to in this uh AI-driven world.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

I tell you, I I got a I got a question. Sure. And and because this kind of happened with myself, you know, I've been in technology 30 odd years. I remember when voicemail was a thing, you know, like it was something new, natural language processing in a voicemail, you know, one, two, three. Well, that was kind of a big deal. Video conferencing was only for the elite. I mean, you had to have a lot of bandwidth and a lot of money to do this. Now it's become it's common plus anybody for video conference, but video conferencing right now. AI is a special bird, it's a it's a platform that has a lot of a lot of uh uh moving parts, a lot of capabilities than previous iterations of even the internet, mobile computing, what we're doing now, cloud computing. How do you see? I mean, how did this take you by storm? Did you did you have an aha moment like, wow, this is this is really something big?

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing around it was um there's there's like amazing opportunities. There's all kinds of incredible things with that. And and you've seen um a lot of the what I call the what ifs out there, like what if we could do this? What if we could do this? And people are demonstrating tastes of all of these opportunities with it. And um and and looking at that, I was like, and being able to test and evaluate and kind of ideate from a solutioning standpoint. I'm like, there's a lot of opportunity here. The one thing that I have, but I'm a very realistic and practical individual. I actually classify myself uh coin the term business AI realist. That's that's how I kind of uh call myself out, is that looking at all of these different opportunities and then reeling it back to kind of the reality of how everyone does their job, everyone does their work, you know, change takes a while. And and then some things uh move really fast and some things move really slow with it. And the one thing in uh in all the like past technologies out there, it's still technology and it's still changed our culture with it, but it's still a tool and it's still technology with it. In this aspect, AI is here to mimic human behavior. That's what it's here for, essentially, with it. Um, and it's a tool, but it can be utilized in a lot of uh other different ways with it. But the one thing is that you have, I talk about AI being this third presence in this ecosystem, and there's a culture change that needs to happen and a mindset change on what AI means when it's entering everyday work with it. And um, and I don't think we're there yet. I mean, culturally, like despite all these amazing things that are happening, uh there needs to be an equilibrium that needs to happen. And uh, and we're still kind of like it's still like the Wild West, you know, out there right now. And it hasn't baselined yet, you know. And and the one thing that uh uh is is like how do I make this work for what I uh I use this term, the AI survivalist.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

And and the AI survivalist is what I call that everyday user who, you know, they come to work, they do their job, they do their things. AI is now another tool. Well, what does that mean for me? What does that mean for my job, all these different dynamics with it? And uh, and they're really still trying to get answering that question, what does that mean, you know, with it? And because of the volatility out there with it, that's still trying to be translated there. And and I'm trying to help get things grounded, kind of reel things back, um, have a little bit more clarity on making it real in the workplace and not from a what-if standpoint.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

I like that. That's uh I call it applied applied technology. I've always been a physics guy, loved physics. They only got a C in it, but I like how it worked because it wasn't about the answer you got, it's how you got there. They wanted to understand your process, your creative thinking, your design work, your analytical thought process. I I like, and I think we're starting to reveal some of that because the computational model can be done like that. I remember when we started using calculators in school, and everybody thought, oh my, everybody's cheating now. Now nobody cares that you use a calculator. Like they want you to get to the answer. It's nice that you do understand the processes, don't get me wrong, but you can get there quicker. And I think AI, a lot of times it's about speed, speed to the right answer, speed of work. How do you how can you get the speed to market for what you're doing? I also like the communication fabric that it brings and the different modalities that it has that it can do. I never had one tool that can simultaneously do mimicking human speech, text messaging, getting into natural language processing, getting into uh image creation, getting into video creation at scale. It's very, very big. So my question for you is about

AI As A Mirror For Work

SPEAKER_00 8:40

starting with the big, you know, your big idea about behind what you do, right? You said that AI acts like a mirror inside of organizations. What exactly does AI reveal that leaders have historically been able to ignore?

SPEAKER_01 8:58

So the one thing that I talk about with AI is um, and kind of my my overall message is what if the biggest thing that AI can do is not uh about tools and acceleration, but create organizational self-awareness with it. That is really the opportunity that AI can help organizations to truly understand themselves. And the and the biggest thing that I talk about, and this is where proximity comes into play, uh is that you know, I've been in the dynamics with executives and dynamics as a frontline level. So I kind of know like how all those organizational dynamics work, but there are two systems in in every company. There's two systems. This is a documented system and uh and then the undocumented, uh, I also refer to as the the written contract and unwritten contract. The written contract is um our our process documents, our our company values, our you know, uh policies and procedures, our uh presentations that we move up the chain saying this is how we're doing, this is what what's going on, that type of thing. That is the official documented avenue, you know, uh of an organization on how they do business and it's how it's in how it's presented out to people. Then there is the undocumented, which is really actually how you get the job done, you know, with it. And uh, and so when you think about the the uh written contract, all the steps that are relating to those, those are documented, they're controlled, they have certain things with it. But the reality is that each of those steps have you know infinite potential amount of undocumented steps in order to make that happen with it. And um, and so since all the official uh written contract is well documented, that's usually what's presented. So there's only there's a lens there. But the undocumented is really telling the the story of how the company actually operates and the the opportunities and challenges it faces every day. And the and the reality of that undocumented work has been highly fragmented across the organization. Certain people say something, certain people know things, um, and and uh and it's kind of spread across different things. You could get to that knowledge and that information, but it's a lot of work to like figure that out and stuff. So for the first time now, uh AI has given this opportunity for us to discover this. And this is what I call the inbox. Because everyone, email's been around forever. It's a centralized place for all of our communication, for all of our organizational dynamics that we have, the behavioral record of how an organization works. And that's what I say is that the inbox is that it's the behavioral record of all the communication and collaboration data on how the organization behaves. And now you have added AI that can connect to all of that dynamics, all of that information connecting to email, connecting to instant messages, connecting it to meeting transcripts and uh document comments, all of those dynamics, as well as published material. So you still have all your official stuff out there too. But now you have where everything has been fragmented and you have siloed people kind of telling the story, you can now put things together in order to be able to create uh awareness around it. So you can start figuring out challenges and stories and issues in that undocumented layer. And so what I uh how I guide people around this is that don't use AI right now, at least from a front door. You don't use AI to like build a tool and stuff. Use AI to discover yourself. Discover where your challenges are

The Unwritten Contract And The Inbox

SPEAKER_01 13:00

in your unwritten contract behaviors and and like and and then utilize that to address your challenges as a company, you know, with it. So for example, um, most common example, approval process. Every company has an approval process. And it and a lot of times it's usually uh a very common complaint, like things take forever to approve. Well, what it why? Why does it take forever to approve with it? What are the dynamics of why it takes um uh challenging for that? Uh and if you start connecting the dots, it tells a story. Your emails, your instant messages, all the behavior, all the conversations back and forth tell a story on potentially why that approval process is taking it a while to happen. And it's not just in the moment, it's historically over time. Let's look back like two years worth of emails and instant messages. What does that tell us there? And and what you may find out is based on people, someone may be they're afraid to make decisions, or someone is they're way overloaded. They don't have the capacity to to deal with that. They they're in like uh you know 30 meetings a week, nothing's ever going to get approved because of how how busy they are and that kind of stuff. So those are kind of those behavioral dynamic issues because it doesn't take AI tool to solve it, it takes AI to help you create that insight so then you can go have human conversations about addressing those issues and problems.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

I love that. That is I like how you put that. How do it's about the use case? What are you really finding out about your your business operations, uh your day-to-day workflow? I don't think a lot of people realize this, but only five percent of our known world universe is visible to human beings. A lot of people don't know that. So you you know, you see the stars in the sky, that kind of thing, but dark matter is like 90 somehow. What if we started to see more of that dark matter? So that what you're and I bring that up as an analogy of what you're talking about, because that dark matter actually supports the visible universe that we see, right? Right. So if you don't document those things, and I do a lot, especially in the in the investment banking room due diligence, that they have to have documentation of processes in order to for you to get to a point of where you showed me how you're getting these values, right? But if the math ain't math, then you'd be like, you know, something's not there. But sometimes in that human messiness, as we call it, you know, actually is the formula for success that's there, you know. And I I'm glad you kind of put this together in a in a book. If people don't know, you gotta go check out this book. It's called An Inbox Between Us. An Inbox Between Us that talks about exactly what you just said that it's more than just a communication tool. It's about the behavioral record of what really is happening every day that you couldn't get to before, but now you might have an opportunity with AI if you're getting the right kind of dictation and transcripting and you're starting to see the workflow more, so more is visible to you. I think that's very, very important as people are like, oh, is AI gonna replace me? I will tell you this it's going to change the work of the the workforce itself because it sits on a platform. That platform is now AI, so now it's context to where it's going to change. That doesn't mean you won't have a job, it's just what the job you do may be different from what you're doing before because they've discovered all these other things, right? And I know you made that that real good distinction about between a job title and then the actual behaviors that create the value. Here's the question about that is why do you believe that jobs are labels and what should professionals focus on instead of if they want to remain relevant? How about that?

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Yeah, so the one of the things when I was writing this book in the in the first

Approval Delays And Hidden Bottlenecks

SPEAKER_01 17:25

uh first several chapters is I I have to remind people on how they behave, like why they do the things that they do from a um a personal level and an organizational level around that, because people forget they and and it's the little things, those little dynamics around it. And the story that I'm building up to relating to all of these hidden dynamics is essentially why do we hire people in the first place? Okay, you know, with it. And um, because it it kind of brings into this conversation is what is the relationship with AI in this world? And I talk about in the book the AI is a third presence, it's a relationship. I have a relate and the work, it's different from the personal standpoint, but it's not terribly different, is that I have a relationship with the organization, me as the employee, and now I have AI as a part of it. It's a it's a triangle of a relationship. What does that dynamic mean? And and what is that relationship ongoing? And relationships take work, they take effort, you know, with it. We have to figure out we have to get comfortable with each other, just like with a company, same way with AI with it. That's the human aspect of us, you know, doing this thing. But the AI is still figuring us out as we are figuring AI. And and so uh what we want to try and do is kind of realize where do humans matter in this aspect. And the one thing that I kind of call out, and uh and I and I take a firm stance on this is whether AI today or AI 15, 20 years from now, whatever that looks like, even AGI, there is one thing that humans will always have that AI will not, and that is understanding of lived experience and lived consequence with that. And um, until that machine crawls out of that computer and lives amongst humans like humans, it's not going to truly understand that those lived consequences and lived challenges with it. I mean, you look at like Star Trek and Commander Data and all that kind of stuff. He's like, you know, still figuring it out and that type of thing. And and that, and those two things are kind of the real underlying aspect of why we hire people. You know, we hire people, they do a job, they do the official description, but you think about at the very bottom of almost every job description, other duties apply. So you're whatever we throw at you, you know, you're gonna do that. And we've hired you to basically figure all that stuff out, you know, with it. And uh and so the one thing we forget about is how amazing from a machine standpoint, how amazing machines we are with it. I mean, you think about we are processing millions upon millions of different inputs every second with how we feel, how we touch, how we sense. And we're thinking about upstream, downstream, all these different types of things with that. We're constantly thinking, constantly making choices with this around it. We are a completely different machine. And this is why we hire people. Because when when things uh don't go the way it needs to, when things uh don't um uh have issues and problems come up, when customers are having issues, uh problems come up, we want someone to step in and take care of it, essentially. That is one aspect of why we hire people is that we are capable of dealing with the unknown really

Jobs As Labels And Human Value

SPEAKER_01 20:50

well in comparison to AI. Now, I'm not saying that AI can't eventually get there, but it's still controlled, you know, amount of knowledge and controlled experiences with this. And I like to use this example. Um, the unfortunate situation that happened at LaGuardia several weeks ago, you know, with it. Um the pilot uh had a six-second choice to either swerve or hit that um fire truck dead on with it. In that six-second, and all the experience that he had as a pilot, all the years of experience, he knew the choice would be is if I hit this dead-on, I'm likely going to die. My um, you know, my colleague's going to die. Um, but likely I'm going to have very, very minimal casualties for all the hundreds of passengers that are sitting behind him with it. If I swerve, that changes dramatically, you know, with it around it. I could potentially survive, but a whole bunch of passenger passengers could die. He had six seconds to make a critical decision like that with it around human life, human experience. And he Understood the downstream consequences that the effects of his family and all of his friends and all that kind of stuff. That's why I talk about lived consequence and lived experience with it. And AI will never know that, you know, uh with that. And uh and it and I actually asked this uh at a legal conference, it's like, what is the price of human life, you know, in in that circumstance with it? Because AI has when we start doing the very sophisticated things where we're interfacing with human life, it's making decisions, but it there's a there's a cost and a risk and statistics around it. There's a difference in statistics and the uh difference between just that lived experience that we trust, naturally trust humans about, whether regardless of who, whether we know them or not, there's some instinct about that. That's why we hire people and that's why we value humans in the workplace to be a part of those dynamics. And so what I try to do when I talk about practically in this when it comes to executives uh and and making decisions around AI, you think about all that undocumented work. What if instead of trying to uh say we're going to replace people or anything like that, um, or we're going to try to eliminate positions? How about we recognize that we have not given you, everyday user, the opportunity to breathe in your workplace? We throw you with all kinds of stuff, expect you to survive in everything that we throw at you. What if the narrative is saying we recognize everything that you do for us? We appreciate that. We're going to embrace AI to give more time to you because of the things that we value you more. And we value you for your ability to think critically, think proactively, because you think about everyone, everyone has a backlog of things they would love to do in their job and their position with it. They never get the opportunity to do that. So why not change the tune? Say, we're going to use AI to give you that breathing room to help advance yourself and advance the company. And you do that at scale, and that's your story. But the only way to do that is to create organizational self-awareness.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

I love what you said there. Organizational self-awareness, the mirror effect. I go back to the very, very beginning, what you talked about. I believe we've never seen a mirror of this magnitude. We're starting to see humanity on a wholeness uh basis, the wholeness of our intelligence, the understanding of our world, our information, and uh a click that you can get this kind of information. You never had that kind of capability before. So now you're saying, well, what else is there? And you have to ask yourself that that hard question, right? Are you just a computer? Are you just an analytical being? And the answer to that, most people go, well, no, no, of course not. No, that's only one aspect of what you are. And the the creative aspect, the the judgment that you are, the appreciation of who and what you are as a being. Most people don't realize that uh the human brain and its computation of what it does and what it's doing all the time and all its neurons, it would take, I think someone said it would take like 27 data centers to emulate, you know, just one human brain. And this has been going on for just a few million years. So let's not discount the intelligence that has uh become the human species and what its capabilities are and what its destiny is. I like science fiction as I you alluded to earlier because it starts to show what it would be like with humans interacting with its uh uh creations, robots, and what their use case is. What would you use them for? What are they good for? You're gonna get new information quickly before you can make a lived experience. And sometimes I always I love the analogy of why Captain Kurt and why Spock. Sometimes Spock is ideal, but a lot of times Captain Kurt would do something that the computer, the logic doesn't compute. A machine will always try to follow the logic where a human being understands that unknown is willing to dive into the unknown. There's no data inputs, there's no past, there's no present, only a potential future. That is what gets your blood pumping, right? And that that creates crazy, and that's why we like sports and some other things that are out there that keeps us human and keeps us active. But that said, still, AI has a place. We need to understand its place. To your point, I don't think we fear we we don't really have that. We don't have the the confidence and the risk and the consequence. Where

Visibility Creates Tension And Accountability

SPEAKER_00 26:55

is all that gonna work out in human judgment? And there is gonna be this great shifting because there's certain things you can do. I would want to take somebody with a particular genius and put them in a role that they can really showcase that genius without being burdened with this other thing that are just sucking up their time for no real good uh value. So here's my question is that when AI creates more visibility and it creates how decisions are made, it can also create tension because now you've got new information that you didn't have before. Why does greater visibility make some organizations uncomfortable? And what responsibility comes with seen patterns that leaders used to be able to ignore, but they can't now.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Yeah, so um it comes down to intent and perspective relating to this. Um, and this is one of the biggest things that I was trying to push from the book because I don't think organizations are ready for what I reveal in the book about this behavioral record and what that ultimately means with it. Because what it does push is it pushes authenticity. And so you think about with AI, you want it to be authentic, you want to be real, you want to have the most accurate answer. The same way goes for that behavioral record with it. Now, does it have the whole picture? Absolutely not. It does not have the whole picture, but you forget about the other major system that's a part of the equation, the people. So when, and so the idea is that uh what does AI do? It sees patterns, it sees signals with it. So when you start looking at the behavioral record of your workplace, you start seeing things that you were not prepared for to see with it. The story, a lot of those kinds of the, I would say the negative aspect of this, the things that people are not ready to see and prepare for, are a lot of those kind of dynamics that are what I would call water cooler conversations. You know, a couple of people get together and they start chatting back and forth about the challenges around organizational dynamics with it. But I'll give you an example of a real use case of it. You uh in email communications. So you're you're a leader and you converse with your team back and forth with it. I, as an employee, can now discover that um you respond to other employee 90% of the time and you only respond to me 20% of the time. That is showing, in my mind, favoritism with it. I may be completely wrong. However, if you look at that pattern and look it over it for like over a year, that's that's harder to ignore, you know, in that regard with it. These statistics with it, now is it gonna be 100% accurate? Absolutely not, you know, with it. It doesn't, is it gonna understand all the circumstances? Absolutely not. However, then you have you and your mind and everything you've perceived and everything you've interacted, you have your own story and own knowledge related to it. You put two and two things together, that tells another story there with it. So, so the um, so a lot of these things are fragmented and have been for years with it, but now you can start building these stories together, you know, with it. And um, I was at at a legal conference, uh, as I said earlier, and I asked, I was in front of a bunch of uh um attorneys and compliance officers. I said, Does anyone know what this tool, like what I'm describing, is called? Because it does exist. There is a tool out there that does this with it. And they had to think for a second. I said,

E-Discovery For Everyone And Intent

SPEAKER_01 30:46

e-discovery tools. Okay. So when you are in a legal situation and you um and you are researching all of the dynamics and the behavior that happened in that situation for a legal uh issue or problem, you hire attorneys and they go and comb through all the emails and they look at everything that was said and all that kind of stuff with it. Well, essentially, by connecting email to, you know, kind of the self-service AI is how I refer to it. I now have an e-discovery tool of myself as the everyday user. I can start asking questions. I can start putting puzzle pieces together to tell a story around it. Now, and and I talk about this in the book. Um, and I also talk about this from a downstream in my newsletter around this, but it all comes down to intent. So it can be used in a very positive way, and it can be used in a very negative way, you know, with it. What is your goal around these different types of I call surveillance or insight? Surveillance or insight. And and so um, and I wrote a newsletter on what I call like the observant climb. And it's comparing two uh up-and-comers that want to gain the attention of executive leadership. So they start uh looking at the inbox and harvesting insights out of the email and correspondence and meetings and that kind of stuff and storing it and building stories to because one wanted to get ahead and to get into that leadership position with it. And he's gonna speak the language to kind of you know, swoon an executive to get that, you know, open up position in the higher level. Or you have, or you have the person who's looking for insight. I want to communicate and collaborate better as a leader. What kinds of insights, what kind of story do all these leaders tell me on how they communicate, how they collaborate? How can I practice and train myself to engage with them better so that I can eventually move into that role with it? So you can see kind of, you know, both angles with it. And this is the reality of this organizational dynamic out there is uh is connecting that. People are doing this in the workplace. They've they've quietly figured some of these things out. I figured it out over a year ago, and that's why I started writing about it because I'm like, you know, I'm not sure if people are quite ready for this kind of dynamic yet, you know, in the workplace and connecting it with it. So when I talk about governing AI from a strategy standpoint, I always say it's 40% technical, 60% behavioral, because AI, when it comes to security and controls and governance, you usually have a controlled set of inputs and controlled set of outputs. When it comes to AI, I have an infinite number of inputs and an infinite number of outputs. That's why I said behavior and behavioral understanding, behavioral education is critical, you know, up front in this kind of new dynamic world. And so you need to understand what that means and work that out. What is appropriate behavior, what is not appropriate behavior, you know, with it, because you can't stop it, you can't block it. And even if you were to put, even if there were guardrails that you could like try to ratchet that down, you're gonna smother the large language model. It won't be as effective as what you hope it to be with it. And so you so it kind of drives the organization to be more authentic in how they work. And and and that's what I'm trying to create understanding and awareness around.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

You you you're in my book, and then uh I showed you this earlier, first light, right? Brave Patriot, authentic leadership, brave is an acronym, right? And it talks about a lot of these things that you just brought up in this conversation and what we're getting to, especially when you think authenticity, authentic, that's the A in Brave. So you just did that. With first, you gotta identify who you are. How do you see yourself? How does the corporation really see itself? And it sees itself,

Governing AI With Behavior First

SPEAKER_00 34:55

remember what I said earlier, only five percent of the uh of the visible or of the world is visible to human beings. Five percent, it's not a lot, so it's 95 that's not out there. So, what is how do you identify yourself? And is there a disconnect about how you see yourself and how others see you? What does that really look like? And are you willing to go further and seek that out, right? And now we're getting to that R world, that resilience. We've got to be resilient now with this new platform. AI is there, as you said earlier. You can't really get around it. Most people, oh, I'll just shut up. Like, it's not so simple. We've got we're we've we've graduated, we actually live within a digital construct. Whether we really like how many people are gonna shut down, shut off your phone, shut off every electronic device, shut down on your bank account, shut off everything, and just live off the land, like we used to say way back. Because that's what you'd have to really do. So you're in this digital construct. How do you be resilient in that world? This authenticity, because now I was like, all right, what was I thought was invisible, it's actually visible. But do I choose to see it? And then I pretend that other people can't see this. Yeah, because that's when you get disconnect, right? You get a lot of disconnect there. And then you look at your values, and are your values really aligned with all those things? Because if you execute, which is the whole brave world together, if you execute on data or information or knowledge that's not truly aligned and it's not authentic, you're going to get a disconnect. It's never going to be exactly what it's going to be. And we call then the humor messy, right? That's why you get a lot of messiness because you got a lot of uh inaccurate communication that comes around, and as you whittle it down, sometimes it becomes more clear, like an old Polaroid. It takes time for it to get clearer and clearer. So, to your point, and I want people to really take this home AI is still learning us as we are learning it, and we're learning more about ourselves. Let's let that sink in.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and I I'm glad you brought up your book and a lot of the questions that you you call out because the a lot of these questions that um with all the lived experience that you have and that clarity around that meaning there, those questions can now be asked about yourself to a record that you you couldn't really see at scale. And because that AI is there to industrialize human behavior. So now theoretically, like, hey, I want to self-discover myself. I'm gonna read, I'm gonna look at things. But now it's like, but that takes a lot of time, that takes a lot of effort, that takes a lot of thinking in order to do that. And you're still gonna need to do that. But now I can theoretically make copies of myself

Practical Self-Discovery With Dictation

SPEAKER_01 37:45

to basically say, focus here, what does this say? You focus here, what does this say? You focus here, what does this say? Now put it all together because that's what AI, it's all story building, right? Small stories to a bigger story, essentially, with it. So, what is your story? What does your story tell you now? You have data now, you have data to tell you that. And um, and so this is uh, I get asked this a lot like, what is something practical? What is something realistic that a person can do um who's like who's struggling on like understanding what AI can do for them in the workplace, whether you're a leader or an individual contributor. And um, and I say, well, give yourself the opportunity to self-discover. So we have mobile devices. Those mobile devices have dictation capabilities with it. Go and write your story. Go and speak your mind, everything that's going wrong, all the issues, your problems, all of your dynamics, you know, your perspective, how you do your job, how do you do all these different things? Get it all out. One, it's helpful therapeutically, you know, to get that out with it. But then you're creating a um a bunch of opportunity that can be discovered. So now I have all of this information. AI, what does the story does this tell me? Yeah. And then, and then as you get into kind of the more of the behavioral science questions, those harder questions around around it, what else can you tell me? But you as a person, regardless of what it says, you are still accountable. You still have to use all your lived experience and consequence to decide what is accurate and what is not, you with it, because it doesn't have the full picture, but it does create those signals and those opportunities to discover. And in this kind of workplace dynamic, so like in personal emails, you know, you're only getting the dynamics of like, you know, your friends, your family, and that kind of stuff. But in the workplace, it shows you all kinds of dynamics. As you said, how do people perceive me? How um, based on how I said this or how I'm doing things, what conclusions they could potentially come from from this. That is something that's really helpful, you know, leader or as an individual contributor is to self-discover. And that is the opportunity. To me, that's the frontier is for us to kind of rediscover ourselves and um and create um more compassion, more harmony with each other. Um, because the reality is all of us have these dynamics. We're all the same, we're all human, you know, with it. So if we can figure out a way to be more um uh bring ourselves together as a scientist, like, hey, we all have problems. Yeah, let's figure this out together.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

Oh, get the awareness up. So we have a higher awareness. You know, understanding that is our our key differentiator when it comes to what we can machine, you know, what can we mirror is that higher awareness, especially if we as we grow in our own self-discovery, and then our in that growth from just self to family to work to community, and we become more conscious and aware of what we're doing, the intent, as you said. Uh behind, I think this has all been great, David. We're we're coming to the end now.

Book Details Audiobook And Closing

SPEAKER_00 41:10

And I want to make sure that people know that first of all, you got your book out, they got to know where to buy this book, and you've got something else coming out around the book that I think people I I know I took advantage of it. Talk, talk to us about that a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

Yeah, so um uh so the book's been out for you know uh three or four months uh now with it, but I have an audiobook version coming out here in July. Um, and because when I wrote this book, uh it was a series of journals, essentially, because I was trying to figure out how to explain AI to the everyday person. And and so then, but essentially I was trying to explain it to me, you know, with it around it. And so the only way I could figure it out was to digitally journal this, you know, with it. And it was a lot over a long period of time. And I'm like, people need this. Like I see comments everywhere on LinkedIn and social media and that kind of stuff. People are asking for what does AI mean and what is the reality? I don't need the what if right now. I don't need the how-to right now. I need something real, something that I can relate to and how I do the things every uh, how I do everything every day with it. And what does that mean? This presence, AI coming into it. What is that dynamic? That's what I'm trying to write to. And I and I'm I'm really trying to help people in order to understand what this means. Because my book is still will still be relevant even 10 years from now, you know, with it because human dynamics are human dynamics with it. So um, so um, because I see people suffering out there, and and I want to make it real, and I want to help educate like all the other kinds of AI dynamic uh personas out there. And so the biggest thing is I want to tell the people in regards to the story around AI, is that um you are valued, you will always be needed. And the biggest thing is that a lot of times you never get this opportunity in in all of your jobs. But I want to say thank you for I want to thank you for all the services, everything that you do for all of us every day. You may not get that thank you. I want to try to help represent and thank you all for everything that you do.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

I think that is a beautiful, beautiful way to to end us. Everybody's gonna lean in and what you're because we're all in this together. It's almost like when we went through the the COVID experience. The whole world, you know, had to be a part of the science experience. And it was yeah, nothing you could do about it. The whole world is in this AI experience, and we all are going through it. Whether you like it or not, kicking and screaming, doesn't matter, we're here. But how are we going to rationalize it? Where's where's my place in it? You you put that in such good context. Like, I went to write a book for other people, but actually it was helping yourself about you know, seeing yourself around certain behavioral patterns that you have, and hope you know, things as you've written the book and you've gotten through it, and you've seen a positive arc uh around all of that, and you're moving forward. So before we leave, last words first, you got to tell us again how to get the book, and then hopefully you get the audio book, the audio podcast as well, and then how we can turn into your audience.

SPEAKER_01 44:18

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So um, my book is available in all major you know book retailers, it's uh um available in all ebook platforms, essentially. I I went distribution-wide. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble, you know, um Kobo, um, all those different areas with it. The audiobook will be once it's ready, it I will have uh out all uh across other distributions. I I wanted to be available in the library and all that kind of stuff when it eventually comes out as well. So um working actively on it. And you can find more about me is David Christopher Dean.com. And uh the book, a lot more about the book is there as well.

SPEAKER_00 44:54

Awesome, awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much, David, for being on the Follow Brand Podcast. I want to encourage everybody, everybody, to remember today was my fifth anniversary today. We had David Dean talking about something that all of us are curious about. We need to get more wrap our minds around this and our workflows and what we're doing. How do we utilize this to our best benefit? Think the cell phone. Cell phone had been around since the 1980s, right? But it really took off, you know, when it started to be more than just being able to do telephone system, right? And it became this big construct. So social media, everything else. So mobile compute got big. AI is bigger than all of these things, and we need to understand what our place in it and how we can get our swim lanes, how we can be better at this. So I encourage all of you to tune in all the episodes of Follow Brand. And that is at the number five that is star S T A R B D M. That's B for brand, D for Development, Informasters.com. Thank you again for being on the show.

SPEAKER_01 45:55

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

It was a pleasure. Oh, the pleasure is all mine. You take care of yourself.