AI, Leadership, and Innovation: Keynote Highlights from digitalNow 2024 (Day 2) | 65

Summary:

Dive into the riveting highlights of digitalNow 2024, where leading experts shared transformative insights on AI and its impact on associations. In this episode, keynote speakers Robert Plotkin, Dr. Gio Altamirano Rayo, Dr. Parham Dadia, Neil Hoyne, and John Spence unravel strategies for leveraging AI, enhancing leadership, and fostering innovation. From safeguarding intellectual property with AI to ethical AI applications at the U.S. Department of State, and even the science behind high-yield health, this episode delivers actionable takeaways for forward-thinking leaders.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction
3:36 - Robert Plotkin
18:44 - Dr. Gio Altamirano Rayo
31:26 - Dr. Param Dedhia
44:37 - Neil Hoyne
56:55 - John Spence
1:09:52 - Conclusion and Digital Now 2025 Preview

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Amith Nagarajan is the Chairman of Blue Cypress 🔗 https://BlueCypress.io, a family of purpose-driven companies and proud practitioners of Conscious Capitalism. The Blue Cypress companies focus on helping associations, non-profits, and other purpose-driven organizations achieve long-term success. Amith is also an active early-stage investor in B2B SaaS companies. He’s had the good fortune of nearly three decades of success as an entrepreneur and enjoys helping others in their journey.

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Mallory Mejias is the Manager at Sidecar, and she's passionate about creating opportunities for association professionals to learn, grow, and better serve their members using artificial intelligence. She enjoys blending creativity and innovation to produce fresh, meaningful content for the association space.

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Read the Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00
The usage of data is sub-5% in most organizations. That's what it is. You have 100 decisions, data is going to come in in less than 5 of them, and so we acknowledge, first of all, that data is hard.

Speaker 2: 0:13
Welcome to Sidecar Sync, your weekly dose of innovation. If you're looking for the latest news, insights and developments in the association world, especially those driven by artificial intelligence, you're in the right place. We cut through the noise to bring you the most relevant updates, with a keen focus on how AI and other emerging technologies are shaping the future. No fluff, just facts and informed discussions. I'm Amit Nagarajan, chairman of Blue Cypress, and I'm your host.

Speaker 3: 0:41
Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of the Sidecar Sync Podcast. My name is Mallory Mejiaz and I am one of your hosts, director of Content and Learning at Sidecar, and today I'm flying solo without my co-host, amit Nagarajan, because we are bringing you a special edition Digital Now episode. So, if you recall, a few weeks ago we shared a day one keynote highlight episode from our event, digital Now, and so today we are sharing with you the five keynote speakers from day two. Really excited to kick that off. But before we do, I'd like you to hear a quick word from our sponsor. If you're listening to this podcast right now, you're already thinking differently about AI than many of your peers, don't you wish there was a way to showcase your commitment to innovation and learning? The Association AI Professional, or AAIP certification is exactly that. The AAIP certification is awarded to those who have achieved outstanding theoretical and practical AI knowledge as it pertains to associations. Earning your AAIP certification proves that you're at the forefront of AI in your organization and in the greater association space, giving you a competitive edge in an increasingly AI-driven job market. Join the growing group of professionals who've earned their AAIP certification and secure your professional future by heading to learnsidecarai your professional future by heading to learnsidecarai.

Speaker 3: 2:06
To give you all a quick recap, digital Now is our event at Sidecar that we host every single year. It's for association leaders and we focus on emerging technologies and adjacent topics. So in the past previous years, we've talked about Web3, blockchain technology and, of course, artificial intelligence. We held our event in 2024 october 27th through the 30th in washington dc. It's actually our first time in washington dc ever and we brought in some fantastic keynote speakers from outside of the association space. So, if you didn't get the chance to attend, we wanted to share with you some highlight videos from those keynote speakers. As I mentioned, a few weeks ago, we dropped the day one keynote highlight, and so today we are focusing on the five keynote speakers from day two. If you hear some excerpts that you love, I want you to keep in mind that you can access the full keynotes in our AI learning hub, which you can access at learnsidecarai. And if, while you're listening to these keynote speakers, you were feeling inspired, you feel like you wanna take action, you feel like you would love to attend an in-person event like this and hear from some fantastic, similar keynote speakers, reminder that right now you can purchase registration for Digital Now 2025. You can do that at digitalnowsidecarai. The event is November 2nd through the 5th, and we are hosting it in Chicago at the Lowe's Hotel for the first time ever, so I hope, hope to see you all there.

Speaker 3: 3:36
To kick off today's episode, we are starting with our first keynote speaker on day two, and that was Robert Plotkin. Might sound a little bit familiar to you, because we've had Robert Plotkin on the podcast before. For over 25 years, ai patent attorney, robert Plotkin has secured patents for his clients' innovative software, but he does not stop there. He then guides his clients in deploying these patents to withstand the pressures of new competitors and big AI and win historic patent sales and licenses. A lifelong AI aficionado and MIT computer science graduate, robert possesses a unique technical background among lawyers. As a patent attorney and co-founder of the boutique patent law firm BlueShift IP, he secures and leverages IP to attract investment, to raise funds, generate revenue and secure successful exits on behalf of his high-tech clients.

Speaker 3: 4:30
This keynote will guide leaders in safeguarding and amplifying the unique essence or the soul, as he calls it that distinguishes their organizations. You'll learn how intellectual property, or IP, serves as a vital layer of armor, protecting this essence from threats while empowering growth. This presentation will reveal how AI can be harnessed to articulate, preserve and expand an association's soul, embedding it into products, services and interactions. So, by strategically combining AI and IP, associations can secure sustainable growth, defend against competitors and unlock new revenue opportunities. Enjoy this excerpt from Robert Plotkin's keynote.

Speaker 4: 5:11
I'm going to start by talking about AI, which is the topic of this conference, leading me to strategies for using a combination of AI and intellectual property to preserve combination of AI and intellectual property to preserve, protect and promote your association's unique wisdom, essence and identity in ways that are sustainable for many years to come. But to get there, we have to start with a recognition of the role that AI is playing today. As Mallory said, I wrote a book about AI about 15 years ago, when it didn't have the widespread impact on such a wide swath of the world as it is now. I did just a quick Google search for what is AI radically changing? And this is just a few of the results. You can do the same. Ai will radically change the approach to dating in apps. Ai is radically changing the practice of law. I better worry. Ai is already radically changing video games, and on and on and on.

Speaker 4: 6:17
Pick any topic, any field, any job, any industry, any type of association, and you'll find people concerned or excited or both about how AI is radically changing it. Yes, there's some hype involved in that. There's a lot of parties who have an interest in exaggerating the degree to which AI is radically changing things. But there is a real grain more than a grain of truth in this. It's quite real and when you hear that, if you imagine and think about how AI is already changing or has a potential to change what you do in your work, in your associations, I'm sure you've already been experiencing it, maybe you've already been leveraging it, maybe you're concerned about it, maybe you're exploring what does that bring up for you?

Speaker 4: 7:19
I'm going to talk about this as the AI fight flight freeze response. You all are familiar with the fight or flight response. Sometimes it's AI fight flight freeze response. You all are familiar with the fight or flight response. Sometimes it's called fight flight or freeze. I've even heard it go so far as to be called fight flight, freeze, faint or fake. Ask yourself what's your natural reaction to a threat? Right, these are natural physiological reactions that are built into us from evolution in response to what we perceive as a threat. I don't know, maybe some of you know that your natural instinct is to fight when you face a threat. That is, some people are natural fighters.

Speaker 4: 7:59
In the context of AI, what is an example of a fight response? It would be to say we are not going to change in the face of AI. That's a fight response. We are going to keep doing things the way we've always been doing them and AI is not going to affect that. We're not going to adopt AI. We're going to do things better without AI, the way we've been doing. It still works. That's an example of a fight response and many people and organizations have been having that response Ignore it, don't even pay attention to it, which might result in you doing something that looks on the surface equivalent to fighting, but internally is different.

Speaker 4: 8:50
You just ignore it and maybe hope that it'll go away, and sometimes that does happen with technological trends. Sometimes things come along that are hyped up. People say they're going to change everything and they don't, and maybe that's your hope in the case of AI. I tend to think it's not. I think AI is here to stay. I think it's only going to become both more powerful technologically and more influential on individual roles and organizational roles and models. But you could flee from it and then freeze. This might be the most common, I think, in my experience. Response to AI is to freeze, which might mean literally internally freezing, just not being able to think about it at all.

Speaker 4: 9:47
Today is presenting us with so many options, even within a single product like ChatGPT that everyone's familiar with. There are so many ways you can use it. There are so many things it can do, and then you look at the variety of AI products and services out there, you might have many different vendors knocking down your door offering to provide you with services that are going to save you, enable you to beat your competitors. Data, you could say, is an individual unit, like a fact. It might be my height, my age, my weight. It might be your organization's annual revenue. It's a fact, isolated from any context or meaning, which takes us to information. Information builds on data to add context or meaning which can help us to understand the data. Knowledge builds on both data and information to imbue it with a higher level of meaning that can start answering questions for us like how or why? Why am I this tall? Why am I this weight? Which might help us to answer questions like what can I do to make a change?

Speaker 4: 11:05
Scientific theories, you could say, are a form of the next level, which is knowledge, integrates all of this I'm sorry relationships, history, even ethics, to enable us to make decisions that are wider ranging, that take into account our unique personality, identity on an individual level. In the case of an association, that might be your association's unique identity, the thing that sets it apart from other associations. If we look at what are called wisdom traditions in the world, there are many of them that, whether they be religious, cultural, even in business, that were started inspired by a single individual and that person's unique philosophy, their way of approaching life or work, or a certain way of approaching problems of a particular constituency, particular constituency, and that person had such a unique essence and approach that it inspired an entire way of doing things and that's sometimes captured in a wisdom tradition. We're living in a world where I would put a pretty bright line just around two years ago, when ChatGPT was first launched. Of course, the technology existed before then, but that is what brought essentially the power of today's AI into the public realm, made it available to anyone with internet access, essentially for free, and what? Something like ChatGPT?

Speaker 4: 12:59
The reason I say it's starting to commoditize not just information but but knowledge is that when you ask it a question, it does much more than just spit back something that's stored in a database. You can ask it to brainstorm solutions to problems. Right, that's the kind of thing which normally, if you're asking a legal question before chat GPT, even if you had access to the internet, you would need to go to a legal professional to get that kind of knowledge. Knowledge meaning applying information to solve a problem, to develop a strategy, to take an action. Maybe many of you are in associations where your strategy for creating, providing value has lied primarily in your knowledge your ability to take even publicly available information and help people and other organizations answer questions, solve problems, develop strategies, implement strategies. That's where knowledge lies, beyond just information. I suspect many of you have fully adopted the premise that information is not the level where you can be a gatekeeper anymore and therefore you're going to rely on knowledge. And that is where today's AI is significantly challenging that premise that we can remain gatekeepers to knowledge. Today's AI is still at a fairly low level there. But if you deny that that's what it's doing, then I would argue you're back on that previous slide in the fight, flight or freeze mode.

Speaker 4: 15:02
Authorship is what copyright protects. That's one of the key forms of intellectual property. Protects works of authorship Like this slideshow, text, images, video, music in the context of companies and associations, websites, any content on there. Internally, documentation, process documentation Any kind of text, video, audio, source code and software all protectable by copyright. In the legal world, we call them works of authorship, invention. This is the world that I live in most of the time that's patent. Another core form of intellectual property protects machines, processes implemented in software, algorithms, chemicals, even DNA, new forms of biological material all protectable by patent, which protects inventions.

Speaker 4: 16:00
What I'm labeling here as branding is what's protected by trademark law that protects your association's unique brand identity. Extremely valuable, it's what enables you to stop others from promoting their products or services, or even information, under a logo or a name that's confusingly similar with yours and that attempts to free ride on your association's goodwill that you've put so much time and energy into developing. What I'm labeling here as confidentiality is what's protected by trade secret law. Trade secrets are really misunderstood form of intellectual property law, because you don't apply to the government for trade secret protection like you do for a trademark registration or a patent. Trade secret, though, is extremely valuable, I suspect, within many of your associations to customer lists. It's your know-how, it's your unique way of doing things. It's anything that's confidential, that's not generally known to the public or to your competitors, that gives you a competitive advantage.

Speaker 4: 17:11
For many organizations and even private companies, trade secret is the most valuable form of intellectual property that they have property that they have. The thing that ties both of those together AI and intellectual property is that AI is moving up that pyramid. It's enabling us to capture and synthesize information into knowledge at a higher level. As a patent attorney, I have always worked with clients when they develop a new piece of software to try to generalize, abstract from the specific method they've created protection for you that is at as high a level as possible. So this is the way in which I see AI and intellectual property as being really consistent with and mutually supporting of each other that you can now use AI to encapsulate your knowledge and then you can use intellectual property to protect that knowledge using the forms that I've talked about, and even to protect the wisdom of your organization, to preserve it and to promote it at a much wider scale than has ever been possible before.

Speaker 3: 18:52
Our next keynote speaker is Dr Gio Altamirano Rayo. Dr Rayo is the Chief Data Scientist and Responsible AI Official at the US Department of State's Office of Management Strategy and Solutions Center for Analytics. Since serving in this role since June 2023, dr Rayo has spearheaded numerous initiatives in artificial intelligence and data science, including the development of the Enterprise AI Strategy, a strategic vision to modernize the department's approach to AI policies and practices. In this keynote, she shares insights on the department's journey in implementing responsible AI across its diverse portfolio of global missions. Since the release of its enterprise AI strategy in November of 2023, the State Department has been a leader in the federal government on AI, rapidly building and deploying tools and policies to guide the next generation of diplomacy. In this keynote, she highlights ways the department is using AI to enhance operational efficiency and strengthen America's Decision Advantage. Enjoy this excerpt.

Speaker 5: 19:47
I'm here to talk about the Center for Analytics at the Department of State, and this is within an office called Management, strategy and Solutions, and I just want to give a huge shout out to one of my biggest fans, my boss, danny Stoyan. He's over there and one of the reasons why we have actually something to talk about today is because he's been a great champion of responsible AI. I'm the responsible AI official of the State Department, so I take ethics operationalization seriously, and I also wanted to say that we actually do read these very long EOs, these very long OMB memos, everything that has to do with what the standards are for ethics. We ingest it and we really take it seriously. So what is AI?

Speaker 5: 20:37
People have said that AI is like up in the sea now, because Chai GPT landed and democratized AI. Ai is everything from a linear regression model to a machine learning model, to a natural language processing model All of these fancy words. Well, we have an executive order, and that's executive order 14110, on safe, secure and trustworthy AI. That tells us what we have to consider at AI and from this definition, what the takeaway is is that AI is any machine-based system that can give a set of recommendations or labeling and the important part is that there has to be like a stochastic process involved so that it's not RPA. That's the key thing. If it's just a computer not doing anything different from what we as humans feed it to do, that's RPA, that's not AI. We focus on risk management of AI and, of course, we have to do things well to do good by our workforce, by our people. So in this slide I want to give you a little bit of an overview of what we've been up to in the past year and a half, and it's been a whirlwind year. It's been absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 5: 21:57
Back in June, my leader, the chief data and artificial intelligence officer, was appointed, and in October 23, the EO that I just mentioned landed, which basically says that we have to seize the power of AI. So don't be afraid of it, but do it wisely. So take measured risks and make sure that you know what you're getting yourself into and have a plan to mitigate those risks when they arise. Right at the heels of that EO, we had been working on this enterprise AI strategy so that we were able to meet the moment, and we did that. I remember that the EO landed like on October the 30th, and then our secretary, the secretary of state, signed the enterprise AI strategy, like the next week. So we're literally at the heels of EO 14110. That's a huge hallmark.

Speaker 5: 22:56
After the EO came OMBM 2410, which is basically what tells us how it is that we have to consider risks and manage those risks. I know that you know we're getting into these uncharted waters, but we have to have a plan if something arises and then we take that seriously. So at the end of, basically, june 2024, at the end of the summer, danny Stoyan, matthew Gravis, who's our chief data and artificial intelligence officer, kelly Fletchers, who's our CIO they all sat together with the secretary of state and the secretary of state himself said just give it a shot, just try it out and nerd out. So he was incentivizing our workforce to be able to leverage, like the EO said, leverage the power of AI while mitigating the risks. So again, this is a slide. The takeaway for this slide is basically that we take responsible AI seriously. We're reading all of these things, we're making sure that we understand what it is and what it isn't. I have tons of nerdy credentials so I can actually speak that and I can translate that. And we take the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies Framework, seriously, and within the enterprise AI strategy, we bathed in a section on responsible AI.

Speaker 5: 24:18
So that strategy that I was talking to you about. It has four goals and I have a little mantra for that. The first goal is get the tech right, because if we don't get the tech right, we can't actually serve as our workforce. The second thing is make sure that we're holding our workforce hand so that they can actually use the tech. So get the culture right. The third thing that's where I come in, that's where all the nerdiness comes in. The third thing is apply AI responsibly. So get the ethics right, make sure that you understand what you're doing and make sure that you have a risk management plan in place if something goes awry. And then the fourth thing is innovate or do smart things. Do things that people really want you to do, not do things that you want to do only yourself.

Speaker 5: 25:03
Now, by the way, we didn't do this, like at MSS, ourselves, together just, you know, all of us together in a room, dark room, with no windows. This enterprise strategy was a whole of the department effort and there are over 25 leaders across the department actually hashed it out and when it was cleared cleared means that everybody has to read it and accept what it says. It was cleared by over 55 bureaus, so absolutely everyone within the department got a chance to say what they wanted and also got a chance to mold the enterprise AI strategy so that it truly reflected the vision or the aspiration of the department or the aspiration of the department in the space of responsible AI. Again, this is you're always going to see me saying this is what we're doing and this is how we're managing risk. This is how we're doing it. We know that this is not like something that you could just go wild with.

Speaker 5: 25:59
This slide is meant to say that we're aware, we're cognizant, we understand we've already incorporated that AI can do some harm. It could do harm to people, organizations and ecosystems. However, we do have risk management in place. We're making sure that we provide policy to people so they have clarity about what they can and cannot do with AI, what they can and cannot do with public-facing tools like GPT or CLOD or any other public-facing tool, and what they can do once we provide those capabilities within the sort of system, infrastructure or the ecosystem within our organization. Again, we are not like coming up or inventing the standards that we are abiding by. Standards already exist. It's the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Speaker 5: 26:47
We saw the development of the generative AI companion resource. We understand what it means. We are absolutely in sync with its vision. Yes, we want to do things that are cool but at the same time, want to make sure that we have a risk management in place. So we ended up creating, for the department as a whole, a generative AI risk management plan, and I could talk for hours on about the risk management plan and all of the details and everything. So if you want to talk, if you want to nerd out, let me know I'm happy to do that. In addition to that, we also want to see what see, not just what our office is doing, what Director Stolian's office is doing, but, in addition to that, what everyone else is doing at the department.

Speaker 5: 27:31
This is a requirement. The AI inventory is a requirement that comes from the White House, but it's also smart to know what other people are doing within your department, so that you can learn from each other or encourage each other or see if you have similar interest and pool resources. You bring something beautiful, more complete, instead of what you were initially thinking. So I do this task and we're literally in the middle of it right now. The AI inventory fun, fun fact in December 17,. We will have our AI use case inventory live on stategov slash AI. So if you guys are interested about what else is going on, what else is still not telling us, don't worry about it, it's going to be there. It's at stategov slash AI. That's in December 17. And so that everybody is like knows what's happening and there's transparency over what we're doing, what the plans are, what risk management is, what to do in the event that you, you know, see something.

Speaker 5: 28:37
We have a resource that's for the workforce within the State Department. That's called AIstate, the workforce within the State Department. That's called AIState. So absolutely everyone in the State Department can go to AIState and learn about the policies, what we're doing, what the inventory is, how to learn right, how to do AI, how to use it. This is a one-stop shop for everything related to AI. So I was talking about all of the things that we do in risk management.

Speaker 5: 29:10
We're also doing pretty cool things in terms of innovation. We have something called the DCT data collection tool, which is basically a research assistant right now. We've calculated that it saves about 16,000 hours to be able to categorize primary sources for report writing, which is a huge task in the department. We also have another tool that's called North Star. This tool ingests like a million articles, like news articles a day and summarizes those things in an instant. These are public facing news articles and it actually helps the division of the State Department that does public diplomacy. And then, finally, our latest innovation and the thing that we're really psyched and excited about, something that we got TMF funding for. Tmf funding is a pocket of gold that comes from the GSA Technology Modernization Fund.

Speaker 5: 30:05
We got funding for this. We applied and we got funding for this. It's basically we call it StageHat. Stagehat is the first ever department-wide SBU means sensitive or declassified information chatbot available for the entire department, so this department can process information in a safe and secure manner. It has all of the guardrails already in place embedded in it within the tools of the bot itself, so we're mitigating the risk of data breaches or mitigating the risks of some of the harmful aspect of AI that I mentioned before. So it does a lot of things. It does summarization, translation, drafting and brainstorming.

Speaker 5: 30:58
That thing is what I use. I use State Chat for brainstorming. I always want to know feedback. I always want to receive feedback so that I'm improving. It's hard to know feedback. I always want to receive feedback so that I'm improving. It's hard to get feedback. Well, sometimes I'm asking Stay Chat, okay, how would you do? How would you read these words? Would you read it differently for me? And lo and behold, stay Chat is good for coming up with new ideas or actually seeing what your blind spots are, and it's actually a very good sort of interlocutor in some ways.

Speaker 3: 32:26
The next keynote speaker we have lined up for day two was Dr Parham Dadia, and you will realize shortly, as I introduce Dr Dadia, why he is a little bit different from all the other keynote speakers. He is an MD, a curious internal medicine doctor and a passionate integrative medicine practitioner. Parham's career was rooted in his 10 years at Johns Hopkins as a clinician, researcher and teacher. Thereafter he expanded his work over 12 years at Canyon Ranch as an integrative medicine doctor. He was the co-director of the executive health program, director of sleep Medicine and Architect of the Weight Loss Program. He has founded Moveo Health, which combines and extends all the work he has done in his career.

Speaker 3: 33:09
So what is Dr Dadia going to talk about at Digital Now 2024? Well, in his keynote he talks about separating health from hype and fact from fiction. It can feel as though there is a never-ending list of things that we must do to be healthy. Dr Jadia says that this is neither correct nor helpful. Instead, we must move into the concept of high-yield health, which focuses on a few things done well. The idea behind this keynote was really that in times of disruptive change, technological change, leaders need to take care of themselves first and foremost and also take care of their teams. So that is why we brought in Dr Dadia.

Speaker 6: 33:51
Enjoy this excerpt from his keynote the intention of this talk is really simple allowing you to live the life that you've always wanted to be a part of, and therefore, not to make it an idea, but put it into action. So when we call this talk high yield health, the true opportunity in these exponential times isn't about how many more things can you get done in a day, but what are those few things that have been shown time and time again. What are those things proverbially to put on your dashboard, to be curious about, to lean into? So is this brand new? No, this isn't a brand new talk at all. You guys have seen this before. Right, it's grandma's medicine. Let's think about it. What did grandma tell us to do? Grandma told us to do what? Basically, honor the fact that she wanted to eat your veggies. Yes, we're going to get into nutrition. We are going to talk about honoring, getting out and play. What is that of movement and movement science? And and get your sleep right. This isn't brand new, but nevertheless, this is a conversation that is now supported by modern science and a few things done.

Speaker 6: 34:55
Well, so, with all of this, as we could take a look at it, when I often get asked to talk about health, I'm really puzzled Because most of the time, what does it mean? When I go to a corporate event or to any group, it becomes a checklist, it becomes static, it becomes a noun, it becomes something incredibly forgettable and therefore not helpful whatsoever. What we want to do instead is really talk about what brought you to this meeting. What brings you to the life you want to be living, is this With everything being said, we want to talk about energy, and the whole conversation in these next set of minutes is how you can curate that being able to peak when you want to, how you can therefore perform and how you can have that clarity. What we want to do is build this into our daily lives.

Speaker 6: 35:41
So when I used to teach in Baltimore, I'd ask the students unknowingly, thoroughly, thoroughly frustrating them to define a simple word. What does it mean to be healthy? What is health? It was hysterical. These folks were not just type A, they were, like me, type AAA. They were really grumpy. They wanted to try to be able to find this definition. What I would eventually do is pull out the dictionary. I wish I saved the copy. I'd open up the dictionary. You know what it said Not sick. How ridiculous right we have defined in medicine. Okay, what do I do? What am I trained? I'm trained to do what? To make a diagnosis? What's your sign? What's your symptom? What's your diagnosis? Am I trained in health? My friends, it's not correct to do a default discussion. So what I would wish for you and I to know is that, thankfully, I'm not the first person to be thinking about it, nor anybody here.

Speaker 6: 36:36
In 1948, very austere the World Health Organization, over 70 years ago, brought people together Brilliant. Take a look at what they shared. They noted this to be the definition of health a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Let me say it another way One of my big roles back in the hospital was a hospitalist. That means I worked on the ward. What was I called for? The emergency department, literally 10 times an hour, would call me about somebody who had chest pain. If you go to a hospital with chest pain, what happens? You ain't going home immediately. Over the next 12 to 24 hours, they're going to figure out did you, did you not have the big one, the heart attack? What do we know? 97% of the time? What do we tell people? Yet again, good news you didn't have a heart attack. You're fine Sign here you can go. But again, we want to define this proactively on the physical, the mental. Anytime I get an opportunity I also want to talk about that of emotional and spiritual. We want to bring all these together for the life we want to be living.

Speaker 6: 37:48
So my first fellowship after doing internal medicine, meaning adult medicine, was this work in something called gerontology, the study of aging. So I steal this from the group that's been going on for 70 years doing research and a cohort in downtown Baltimore, the Baltimore Longitudinous Study on Aging, the BLSA. So take a look at it. They define it on the physical level right, because it's a lot easier to do that than the mental, emotional, spiritual. So what they do is they take a look at our organs and they look about what happens over time, in other words, how well is your heart and how does it look like at over time. So in general conversations this is like good old George telling jokes to a hundred. All right, yeah, you know famously that he smoked cigars, but the guy was a fitness fanatic and, by the way, he had come to Canyon Ranch and I know a bunch of people knew George. Here's something really cool. He traveled with a massage therapist. He had a massage every single day, just throwing it out there, right.

Speaker 6: 38:41
A few fun things to be able to understand how we want to bring things into our lives. What we want to do is be like George, telling great jokes, being proactive for this green line, very little change from that optimal, that upper dashed line. What we do not want to sign up for is going down to this red curve, and it's not that you slope down suddenly excuse me, slowly, but tends to be more quickly. So what we do know is that this can be those disease illnesses, but also what many of you experience and more or less are seeing about that of burnout. What we want to do as much as you can fall onto the red line, you can also drift back up. In other words, we know, classically, the way we eat, the way we move, the way we sleep and the way we honor stress can take us down to the red or move us back up to the green. Thus the part of what we want to get into in the next bit of time.

Speaker 6: 39:31
So what I want you to know is, every single night when you sleep, here it is. You had a good workout, feeling a few muscles you haven't felt in a while. You want to get the full benefit, get your sleep. That makes growth hormone, testosterone, proteins that repair the body. The Olympics does it beautifully. They'll tell you the secret to some of these top performers getting their sleep. Lebron James, age 40, I think his 22nd year in the NBA he has a sleep coach. He sleeps on the order of eight to 10 hours during the season. I want you and I to appreciate it feels like a leftover time. In a few moments you're going to be like uh-uh. This is incredibly productive to help sleep the body, the mind, everything.

Speaker 6: 40:11
But, ladies and gentlemen, if we're not here to talk about joy, why are we here? Really bored, you just need something to fill in the time before lunch. Without joy, all the things we talk about are just things they're not connecting to that of the opportunities we want to be a part of. Let me say it another way Without joy, what do you call food If you don't like your food? What do you call that A diet? How long do diets last? They don't. On a diet, 1% continues out to six months. Awful return on the investment If you don't enjoy your workout. What do we call that? A boot camp? No, soldier is permanently put in boot camp.

Speaker 6: 40:50
If you don't have joy, can you get your head on the pillow, get to sleep, stay asleep and wake up feeling refreshed? So we will bring all of this. Now here's something else I want you and I to think about. Many people coming to a sleep talk are going to get worse sleep, so let me be really careful not to mess you up. What do I mean by that is that every single night I want you to know it's natural every 90 to 120 minutes to have a brief wake up. So tonight, when you roll over, you're like, oh gosh, I'm never going to be healthy. This is terrible. What can I do? I want you to take a deep breath and to center yourself and really understand that happens to everyone. Put your head back down on the pillow. What I want to do as I finish this up is to understand that the first half of the night you're reviewing facts. The second half of the night, you're making creative thoughts. Think about what you're doing every single night when you're sleeping Physical repair, emotional clearing that opportunity to bring in facts and to more or less clear that opportunity of negative and be creative. Who here wants to donate their sleep any longer? Now, I know I'm out of time. Can I get 90 seconds? Two minutes? All right, 90. Okay, so she's great. What I want you to know this is all great, it's easy to put up on a slide. You'll have my contact information.

Speaker 6: 42:12
Iq is not the challenge here. What I want us to do is to understand where is our IQ most effective. If you're like most humans, we have to understand the brain. We have neuroplasticity. We get into patterns. What's the biggest pattern? We get into the negative.

Speaker 6: 42:29
What I want you to know is this is from my dear, dear buddy, my mindfulness teacher. He's only taken one gift from me and this is it. You may or may not be able to see back there. This is a snow globe and I'm shaking it up, but I want you to see. This is our daily lives Emails, phone calls, should-haves, could-haves, what-if, what-if. Am I going to understand all the policy related to AI, all of that stuff. But what I want you to do not immediate, but if you can somehow get a good look at this what's starting to happen, give it a moment and over these moments when you are able to get to that stillness, what do you find? It starts to clear. And now what happens? Now I can see more clearly. This is the analogy of what they call mindfulness. Every tradition of prayer, worship, of stress reduction taps into getting to that clarity. What I want you to know is this this conversation of putting the snow globe down is something we must practice.

Speaker 6: 43:40
What you want to know is we have a negative bias. If I'm petting a bunny rabbit and someone says saber-toothed tiger, I'm going to look. Someone goes, oh, just be positive, check out the bunny, be happy. Really, you want to make sure of what's wrong. What you'd want to know is the stress curve, low stress, red hot, angry, foaming at the mouth. How effective? When I'm red, hot, foaming at the mouth, my insight is down and I'm reactive. I'm going to say and do things I regret and I'm not going to be very effective. When I'm down here, I can bring in the information, I can process it by insights higher and I can respond. So what I want you all to appreciate is some of you just did it with me, you took a breath. Some of you will wiggle your toes and just really be present. Some of you will say a poem, prayer, hymn, throughout the day, five times a day. I want you to spend a minute breathing.

Speaker 3: 44:38
Our next keynote speaker from day two was Neil Hoyne, another name that you might recognize because he's been on this podcast before. Neil Hoyne is Google's chief strategist and he's had the privilege to lead more than 2,500 engagements with the world's biggest advertisers. His efforts have helped these companies acquire millions of customers, improve conversion rates by more than 400% and generate billions in incremental revenue. In this keynote, the CEO of Rasaio, which is part of our family of companies, eric McDonald, interviews Neil and through their dialogue you'll discover fresh perspectives on the key drivers of exponential growth transforming member relationships into sustainable competitive advantages, leveraging technological disruption and building the organizational culture needed for breakthrough success. Enjoy this conversation with Neil Hoyne.

Speaker 7: 45:30
Hello everyone.

Speaker 1: 45:33
I like that introduction. I should have done a more modest introduction. That's why we found this guy outside and he knows something about data and AI. It's all downhill from here.

Speaker 7: 45:43
Go ahead. I think it's about to be uphill. I wouldn't worry about that, Neil. So thank you everyone for joining us. I was thinking about Amit's keynote yesterday and we were looking at his graph showing how much computing power changes, and when you're at the brink of big change, it kind of can feel slow at the beginning, and then exponential growth really takes off, and what I would like to do today is talk about ways where we can unlock value for associations so we can try to start to drive that exponential growth, and one of the tools that we have to do that is AI. So that's where I want to start and I'm going to leave it very open for you. So what's going on with AI?

Speaker 1: 46:29
So if you go through any airport, you'll see everything is AI. I flew out of San Francisco where it seems that every advertisement has been every traditional company but they now say they're doing something AI related. This is the world we're in right Technical change. I'll give you my best sense as to what I see and these are just my personal opinions on it. The first stage of any technology, unfortunately, is you get into this cycle of massive hype of what's going to happen. And just for comparison, if you were to look at Citi's report, you can look at Citi, you can look at McKinsey Citi forecasts that by 2030, so about five years from now we're looking at AI, generative AI at least being a $1 trillion opportunity which we all think like that is huge and you think about that and how disruptive and how much money. That is opportunity of our lifetimes, unless you go back to Citi's projections two years ago where they actually had a $9 trillion opportunity called the metaverse, and now nobody even talks about it. We don't do keynote sessions on the metaverse and so we go through these cycles very quickly. We're like, yes, this will take over and this will do everything where that metaverse I'm not sure if anybody here bought. Nfts are familiar with it, but effectively people would buy for people and buy things like not physical goods, but pictures will not actually even pictures. You just get a little thing that says you own this picture.

Speaker 1: 48:08
Jack Dorsey's first tweet, I think, sold for 2.9 million dollars 2.9 million dollars. And then the gentleman that purchased it tried to sell it. He put it up for 48 million dollars, I think the bidding capped off around 250, 260 dollars and so quickly everyone's like, well, we're not doing the metaverse thing, that's not going to work. And then all of a sudden people are like, ah, ai, and we follow those same things where people get excited about growth and opportunities, and what that leads to is confusion in the market to say what do I do and how do I adjust? Because nobody wants to be left behind through innovative technology and disruption. And none of this is a mandate against AI, as much as it is a reflection that a lot of companies are saying they're doing things with AI that I question if it's really real.

Speaker 1: 49:03
So, in a moment of pure honesty, data is really hard and even I don't like it at times. We love data. We hold data in very high esteem. I don't like it at times. We love data. We hold data in very high esteem. This allows us to make better decisions. The usage of data is sub 5% in most organizations. That's what it is. You have 100 decisions. Data is going to come in in less than five of them, and so we acknowledge, first of all, that data is hard. Part of the problem that you uncover with data is how it's used, and I'll kind of give you an example of this.

Speaker 1: 49:34
Is a large well, it's a Fortune 100 company who you would all know, but I'm not going to name them because I don't like shaming these parties, but they spent, over three years, $60 million organizing, collecting all their data. And it was a beautiful plan very expensive consultancy, a lot of new tech. And I asked their CMO, I said, great, once the system's in place, what are you going to do with it? And she was like well, we're going to hire a whole bunch of data scientists. I said, okay, good, what are the data scientists going to do? And she's like well, they're going to do data science to the data. I was like, all right, so you're hiring new people. Day one, here's a whole bunch of data. Go do data science and find value in this.

Speaker 1: 50:15
This is not uncommon in a lot of organizations. It just doesn't happen in candid conversations. It happens over months and years, and here's what happens. You have a whole bunch of really talented data scientists and they get all this data and they sit there and they come to some conclusions and then they hand them over to people in like marketing and sales that have to use it. But it's divorced from the reality. So the salespeople look at it and they say what do I do with all this data you gave me? And nothing happens. And then the data people go back to their corner of the office and are like all those salespeople they don't use data at all. And all the salespeople are like the data people are really smart, but we don't know what they're saying, so I can't use any of it. And then everyone gets frustrated that they're not a data-driven organization.

Speaker 1: 50:54
Instead of data being the first step in the process, I like to think the first step on any company's transformation is what the hypothesis is, what the idea is. If we do this for our members, we expect them to do that. Members are asking us for this functionality, this service, this offering. What's great is that these hypotheses are everywhere in your organizations, they're from your members, they're from your partners, they're from technology vendors telling you these are different things you could do. Now, on this first step, where things tend to go astray is that we jump not to the data to prove or disprove. We jump to how we feel. And so we often see this at conferences, where someone comes up and they're like I think you should do this, you get this guy, I think you should do lifetime value, and some of you may be like, yes, we'll do that, and others will say no, we won't.

Speaker 1: 51:48
The goal of this first stage is you don't judge at all, you simply say it's an idea, this is an idea that somebody gave me. Why do we want to lose it? It's not. We have to jump through organizations, we have to narrow it down. These are our three or five ideas. I encourage you capture every idea, every hypothesis you can from this conference, from the conversations you have with each other. Put it in. I love spreadsheets. Put it in a spreadsheet and column, get hundreds of ideas.

Speaker 1: 52:14
Now the next question you ask and this is where it goes to it is what data do we have? But now here's what we did. We didn't say here's a whole bunch of data makes sense out of it. We said here's a whole bunch of hypotheses that are worthwhile. Do we have any data to support it or to disprove it? Nobody comes into the office and be like hey, neil, what are you doing today? I'm going to go fail at something? No, we don't. And if you go to any leader and be like so what's the likelihood that this is going to work? 50-50. That's not getting through. Let me tell you what I want to avoid.

Speaker 1: 52:48
There was an organization I met one time that gets on stage at these keynotes and it's like and we are a test and data-driven culture, like, wow. And the CEO's like and I come up with an idea and it gets implemented right away. Wow, that's incredible. And so naturally, you want to go meet these people. You want to learn what they're doing, what's their special sauce? So beers.

Speaker 1: 53:08
Afterwards I meet a few of their analysts and I said your CEO is on stage running tests. I was like amazing. I was like how did you get that to work? And they're like oh well, they're like first of all, it's not three to four days to run a test, so how long does it take? They're like eight to 12 months to run a test.

Speaker 1: 53:29
I said eight to 12 months. And I was like, walk me through it. And they're like well, first I have an idea, good. And they're like now I need to convince my manager, and then their manager, and then their manager, and then I need to find budget, and then I need to convince engineering that it needs to be part of their sprint legal, to sign off on a creative, to build an asset. And then, after that time, maybe I get my test running. And I said, okay, but you're a test-driven culture, right? And they're like well, here's the secret. They said, if any of our tests fail, we're in a bad spot, because now, all of a sudden, the CEO, cmo, are looking and saying you took $50,000 out of our budget, which we know how we were going to spend it otherwise, and you took it on something that didn't work.

Speaker 7: 54:14
We're never giving you budget again. We were talking earlier about investing in the customer, investing in the member, and you were talking to me about how you might invest differently for someone who is new, a new member, versus someone who's been around for a while. I just was wondering if you could talk about that, my actions.

Speaker 1: 54:32
What do we do with in a few minutes? What do you do with customers? I group customer activities into three simplified perhaps overly simplified buckets. You can acquire and meet new people, you can develop the relationships that you have, or you can keep people around because they're going to leave. 90% of my time and my money is spent on acquiring people, but acquiring the right people. You acquire great members early on.

Speaker 1: 54:55
This is where that behavioral segmentation people that are aligned with your organization, its values, its mission will buy lots of stuff. They're going to be great and the time and attention you need to give them should be less than those other people you try to fix. Now, on the development side, this is actually where some organizations can go astray, and I use a simple metaphor just because it works and I like personal relationships. It's the equivalent of one of your friends not any of you, but one of your friends coming up to you and saying I met the perfect person. If only I can change them first. Now you know what's going to happen. You'll be like no, no, no, no. That's going to lead to heartbreak, and it often does. The same thing happens when we try to develop customers. Oftentimes companies will go out and say we just want to acquire them and once they see how great we are and how well we treat them, then they'll be with us forever. Yes, but it's really expensive and it's really time consuming and it leads to a lot of heartbreak. I prefer to meet great people first, develop them where I can.

Speaker 1: 55:55
How do you develop If you launch new services, new offerings that they're not aware of? If you have a moment or you have their time and attention to bring them in closer to the organization, yes, the classic McDonald's upsell. Would you like fries with that? It fits into the same model. Oh well, I already want a sandwich. This works. That's a development stage. But compared to acquisition, if 90% of my time is spent on acquisition, only about 1% of my time is spent on development, just from an ROI perspective, acquisition is infinitely better.

Speaker 1: 56:25
The last 9% of your counting is on retention. Is somebody not doing what I thought they would do? Now, how does this actually look like in the math when you do this lifetime value? Well, I said cashflow is right. Here's how much we expect a Neil to give us this year. Neil's behind what happened. How do we change it? And that's our retention bucket, where you simply want to have some measurement put it on your dashboard, where you know that somebody's not behaving in the way that you expect, and then it's a question for your organization. How do we want to respond?

Speaker 3: 56:57
Our last keynote speaker from day two was John Spence, and he was a fantastic person to wrap up day two, because he is just a bundle of energy on stage. You will see very shortly. John Spence is recognized as one of the top business thought leaders and leadership development experts in the world and was named by the American Management Association as one of America's top 50 leaders to watch, along with Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. He has been a guest lecturer at more than 90 colleges and universities, including MIT, stanford, cornell and the Wharton School of Business. In his keynote session, he'll introduce his formula for business excellence, focusing on four pillars talent, culture, extreme customer focus and disciplined execution. He will help you figure out how to attract and retain top talent, build a motivating culture and create stronger customer relationships. Figure out how to attract and retain top talent, build a motivating culture and create stronger customer relationships.

Speaker 8: 57:58
Enjoy this excerpt from John Spence. I'm going to look at four major areas and I'll tell you how this comes about, but first I want to challenge each of you to think of who your top three competitors are in your organization, your association. Give them a second. Who are the top three people that you compete against most fiercely? Everybody got a few. Okay, here's what I would suggest. This is who you compete against.

Speaker 8: 58:26
You compete against Amazon for anticipating your needs and speed. You know you're ordering something. Okay, they recommended this, I got to get this. I mean, it's right here on Amazon and you push the button, it goes ding dong. How'd they do that? They're already at the door with the damn thing. By the way, they are already starting to deliver packages with drones. This is total stress. You can be in the backyard cooking hamburgers, like you guys, for lunch, and run out of ketchup Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Drone comes in, drops off ketchup or barbecue sauce in your backyard and flies back out. So some of this, everything I cover today, is happening right now.

Speaker 8: 59:03
I'm going to talk a little bit about strategy and it's going to mix in really well with what Amit said and some of the other folks yesterday To be a really good strategic thinker. There are five levels and I'd like to get up here and be next to my slide. At the bottom is solid business acumen. If you want to be a good strategic thinker, you have to understand how business works, how to finance it. It doesn't mean you have to be a CPA, but you have to get the fundamentals. How many books business or self-help books, personal development books do you think the average business person reads per year? What? Two Five Zero, it's 0.5. It's 0.5. And Amit challenged you to read 15 minutes a day, five days a week. If you did that, you'd read well. Let me give you the statistics. If you were to read six books a year business books or self-development books you'd read well. Let me give you the statistics. If you were to read six books a year business books or self-development books, six a year you're in the top 5% on the face of the earth for professional development. Personal If you read a dozen a year, you're in the top one to 3% on the face of the earth for personal and professional development. If you read 15 minutes a day or the equivalent thereof podcasts, blogs, articles, magazines, whatever it might be but if you were to do the equivalent of 15 minutes of research a day. You would read about 11 books a year between 8 and 11, depending on the length of the book. That would put you in the top 1 to 3% in the world for professional development. So if you take nothing away from this talk except for this, I hope you take some more, truly do, but take Amit's challenge, invest in yourself.

Speaker 8: 1:00:38
They. You know how many of you have ever read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers? Anybody remember the numbers? 10 years or 10,000 hours. Yeah, they say, if you practice anything and look at it 10 years, 10,000 hours you can become among the best in the world at that. That's how low the bar is If you look at people who are world-class at what they do.

Speaker 8: 1:01:00
The reason is is they see patterns before other people do. This is how a great musician looks at a sheet of music and hear the music in their head. This is how a great athlete can you know I'm not a big football fan, but drop into the pocket and see all of the you know the receivers on the field at the same time and be able to look at the defense and find the pattern of where they aren't. This is how chess grandmasters learn Actually, they learn a fascinating way. They start at the end of the game and learn backwards to the beginning. What does a winning game look like Then? How do I back up? What's every possible move that could get me to that winning game? That's why sometimes you'll see them start a game and then, after 20 or 30 minutes, just turn a piece over, go there's. Neither one of us can win because they know all the patterns that would get them there. So when you look at people who are the best at what they do from a strategic standpoint, from an organizational standpoint, from an expertise standpoint, they have the ability to identify patterns faster than their competition, which is what creates competitive advantage.

Speaker 8: 1:02:01
Am I going at a good speed? I can go faster. I always tell this story. I used to coach a gentleman in Vienna and he asked me to come over and visit with his senior management team. And I'm there and he got a room probably 60 people there. I won't walk to the lectern. He walks up to the lectern and goes. I've spoken to John. I've asked him to speak slower. He could not. You will all have to listen faster. So I'll keep it moving at a good pace Then. So I'll keep it moving at a good pace. Then you go and get at.

Speaker 8: 1:02:31
The highest level is strategic insight. Yeah, the highest level of thinking is strategic insight. I've been studying, I've been reading, I've been learning. I have a solid base of business acumen. I then look at my own personal experience and combine those two, looking for patterns. Once I recognize a pattern, I get an insight that says here's where my association can go in, here's where we can get ahead, here's some new thing in AI, an agent or a chatbot or something that we can deploy faster than our competition to gain advantage in the marketplace. But all of this is useless without disciplined execution. Ideas are great, but you have to be able to take those ideas and put them into action. So I mentioned just earlier that I've been spending about 30 years traveling worldwide. I've had the chance to look at thousands of companies, and what I do every time I'm there is look for the what Pattern, what are the best companies tend to do over and over, that makes them so incredibly good, and what are the companies that fail do consistently? That causes them to go out of business?

Speaker 8: 1:03:32
I wrote a book. Not plugging the book here it is. Well, I'll take it off, boom. The reason I put my book up for two seconds is it's about 67,000 words. That's an average 200 page book is about 67,000 words and after I wrote it I used an algorithm to create a word cloud of the main ideas in the book. I used an algorithm to create a word cloud of the main ideas in the book. So I put it in there, you know, and pops out this word cloud. I'm like awesome, this is fantastic. My entire book on one piece of paper. I'm highly visual. I'm like this is. Then I realized I'm not that smart so I said I better get some more information here. So I reached out to a whole bunch of my friends that are authors Jim Collins, good to great Tim Sanders, written some crazy great books. I've got Drucker and a whole bunch of stuff.

Speaker 8: 1:04:19
I did a research project several years ago asked 10,000 high potential employees and top companies around the world why do you work where you work? These are what I call voluntary employees. I'm sure some of you have these. These are people that are so good that if I quit today, they could have a job at the competition tomorrow. They're highly talented and they don't have to come back to work there because they have to. They come back because they want to. So I asked him why do you work where you work? Here's what they told me.

Speaker 8: 1:04:43
Number one was fair pay, which was 10% above or below what I would make to do the same job at any place else. As long as you basically get parity on pay, pay comes off the table as a major motivator. If pay is the major motivator, as soon as you give someone money, what do they want? More money, and it's going to be a cycle like that. However, if we get fair pay and put that over here, here are the things that really drive loyalty. Number one is challenging, meaningful work, purpose-driven work, what all of you focus on.

Speaker 8: 1:05:16
You heard Mallory mention that early in my career, I was the CEO of one of the Rockefeller Foundations, and the other organizations I work are my organization. Well, let's put it this way we were driven by an incredible passion to do scientific research on fish species, to help save fish species in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. However, I went to my team and I said we're going to run this like the best business in the world. We're going to steal ideas from all of the top companies so we can make as much money as we possibly can, then we'll put it all back into scientific research to help more people. So I think there are some fundamentals of leadership stuff that will never change ever. Honesty never going to go out of style. There'll never be a time that honesty is a leader.

Speaker 8: 1:06:01
Courage and this is also from another research study I did where I asked what are the characteristics of a leader that you would willingly follow. I made them all C's, so I'll just give you the Cs. First one was character Tell the truth all the time period. Next one was courage the courage to make tough decisions, to do big, bold things, but also the courage to be vulnerable. I would call that authentic. The next one was communication skills Gotta be able to stand up and talk, talk about the vision, explain things. But what they really said in the research projects is I want a leader that is asked great questions, who's curious and is an intense listener. The next one was competence. I just told you about that. Spend your 15 minutes a day, five days a week, a couple of years. You're constantly getting better at what you do and you're setting an example for everybody else. Next one was collaboration Got to be a great team player. The next one was compassion. Especially today, you've got to be someone who genuinely cares about the people that work for you. And then the last one was contribution.

Speaker 8: 1:07:02
When you get to a certain level in your life, in your leadership journey, it's time for you to give back Member retention sentiment analysis. I'm following them to see. Are they disengaged? Are they not using our products? Are they complaining? That way, I can head it off early and spot this dissatisfaction before they quit, before they leave. I can target my using all this AI. It's very hyper-personalized to different stages in their career Early stage, mid-stage, late stage. They need different things, they want different messages, they attend different things. So I'm not going to send an invite to someone brand new in the industry. That would really be more appropriate for a senior leader that's been in 5, 10, 15 years. They'd be in over their head. It wouldn't be a fun event for them, or the reverse.

Speaker 8: 1:07:51
I don't want old people like me showing up at some for the young people and then event-based check-ins, which is after you've renewed, I get a highly personalized email thanking you. After your anniversary, I get a highly personalized email based on all this other information we have that says thank you for being part of our association for 15 years. How often do you guys do this flawlessly that every single time somebody has an anniversary, you send them a really nice, highly personalized note. Ai will do that for you every single time you guys are like this one sponsorship matching for immediate revenue generation I can look out and say, okay, I've got this event I'm doing. Here's the audience it's going to attract. Here are the corporations or organizations I work that would love to be able to like we have out here sponsors be in front of this particular group. So there's a higher likelihood I'll get the sponsorship. Same thing with fundraising.

Speaker 8: 1:08:44
If I'm trying to create a scholarship fund, I can use AI to scan all of my databases and go to the handful of people who have the highest likelihood of donating that money and wanting to get a scholarship fund in their name. I can do e-commerce optimization so I can upsell. You buy A. You're probably going to want B, based on your background and everything I've seen. You just purchased this. You're probably going to want this other product. So I'm using AI to upsell everybody.

Speaker 8: 1:09:12
Oh, and I said abandoned cart. Somebody doesn't buy what you want them to. You send them a highly personalized hyperlink saying hey, I noticed you put this in your cart and you didn't buy it. Can I help you? You know what? What made you drop it? What can we do to get you to come back and purchase it? How can we get back on your team? Last one, I believe, is content creation. I have a custom GPT that writes exactly like I do. I program it. I put in all my writing. I create about a three-paragraph prompt of the kind of writing I want it to create. My social media team uses it to do drafts of things on my behalf and I just read them, check them, change them a little bit. But I wrote one through there and I gave it to my staff and they said we didn't know it was you.

Speaker 3: 1:09:54
Everyone, thank you for tuning in to today's episode. Hopefully, you got to see a little sneak peek of what we offer at Digital Now. We are gearing up for an incredible Digital Now 2025. Again, I hope to see you all there. If you are interested in attending, head to digitalnowsidecarai. I'll see you all next week.

Speaker 2: 1:10:16
Thanks for tuning into Sidecar Sync this week. Looking to dive deeper? Download your free copy of our new book Ascend Unlocking the Power of AI for Associations at ascendbookorg. It's packed with insights to power your association's journey with AI. And remember, sidecar is here with more resources, from webinars to boot camps, to help you stay ahead in the association world. We'll catch you in the next episode. Until then, keep learning, keep growing and keep disrupting.