Mid-Market Growth With Scalable Data & AI Strategy

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I’m joined by John Powers. He has recently joined Mod Op as an Executive of Residence. He spent the last 30 years as an executive at Deloitte of all places leading digital transformation and serving as the CIO.

[00:00:20] Tessa Burg: We’re so excited to have you on the show today, John, and welcome to Mod Op.

[00:00:26] John Powers: Tessa, it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here as well.

[00:00:30] Tessa Burg: So I was telling you before we got on that I was checking out your LinkedIn profile. Super impressive. And I am very curious what brought you to Mod Op?

[00:00:41] Tessa Burg: Like how, how did you come here? And before we get into all the things about digital transformation, the next wave and all that tech, tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you here to Mod Op.

[00:00:51] John Powers: So let’s start with the, what brought me to Mod Op? Um, I happened to be doing work with Mod Op and, uh, I, the work was when, as my, as CIO at Deloitte, there were a series of programs that I needed to educate, uh, the organization about and try to drive change.

[00:01:10] John Powers: That was my, I was also the Chief Transformation Officer, so it was combo and I happened to be, uh. Friends with, uh, Len Gilbert, who is a senior leader now at op, uh, and was then as well, and he were discuss. He and I just happened to be discussing the problem that I had and he happened to mention this is something that he and Mod Op did as a scope of work.

[00:01:33] John Powers: And, uh, that was really intriguing to me because while I could have used internal Deloitte resources for the job, frankly this was a big change to get the organization to understand. I needed an outside perspective that would quote, unquote shake it up and was not gonna be bound by, hindered by, if I wanna think of it.

[00:01:52] John Powers: Uh, constrained by prior thinking, prior investments and um, it turned out like a third-party was great. Len’s team was great, perfect for the job. Um, and the senior leaders that they brought to the engagement, again, was one of the differences I find with Mod Op and a lot of what Deloitte. Was doing is I would get, if I were to hire Deloitte, I would’ve gotten a lot of junior resources.

[00:02:17] John Powers: Mod Op brought senior experts, which is what we needed because the problem we had was around data strategy and data governance, and the fact that we didn’t have either a position that we had had to be in charge of data strategy, let alone a data strategy. We had no one in charge of data governance, let alone rules, policies, et cetera.

[00:02:37] John Powers: And I could see this huge clash coming with the, the advent of AI. And we have an enormous amount of data in an a wide variety of platforms. And so we were pretty well disabled from actually taking advantage of what our, our own teams wanted to do. So, so we were in charge of enabling the teams and we were effectively disabling them ’cause we didn’t have a data, uh, essentially a data leader.

[00:03:04] John Powers: Um, and we didn’t have strategy or governance, and that was, uh, essentially a big issue. So I brought in the, uh, Mod Op, they did the data strategy and governance work, which led to actually us putting, uh, a position in place, which is essentially the data strategy and governance leader. And that then turned into additional work with Mod Op as we have expanded what.

[00:03:26] John Powers: The role of Mod Op was doing with me and my role as CTO and it’s, it’s extended past me leaving Deloitte. Mod Op is still doing work, and it has to do with the same model that Mod Op brings, which is senior leaders, very nimble. Very flexible, but highly, uh, expert, especially in this emerging area that I find to be really fascinating and exciting is data strategy, governance, and enablement.

[00:03:49] John Powers: If you want to put it in a big bundle and that’s, you know, to, to flip it around, that’s why I decided to join Mod Op. So as I, as I retired from Deloitte, uh, the opportunity came up, uh, uh, with Len and the team. They, uh, essentially reached out to say, would you like to do more of this kind of work? The answer was yes.

[00:04:08] John Powers: And so the opportunity was there to now work on this with the same team that I had been working with on the same kind of issues that I wanted work on. And that’s really attracted because I, I wanted to focus my time and energy as, as you said, I’ve spent 30 years at Deloitte. I spent years doing all variety of jobs, and that was great.

[00:04:26] John Powers: But I really wanted to focus on what I think is this really emerging opportunity be. That’s, uh, of course everyone understands how AI is an emerging opportunity, but what a lot of people don’t understand is the potential for small to medium sized businesses to really take advantage of this AI moment and punch above their weight.

[00:04:42] John Powers: And a lot of people are worried about job losses. And while there will be some dislocation, there always is when there’s a new technology revolution that comes through. I think small to medium businesses, it’s kind of the opposite. They’re actually gonna be able to use these tools, AI, and uh, the like to expand, to grow and actually, uh, compete in places and in ways they couldn’t before because it was just too much of a, a barrier to entry, so to speak.

[00:05:09] John Powers: So the scale advantages of large corporations in many respects are gonna start to come down. Small to medium sized businesses are gonna be able to move up. I think that’s a moment in time. I’m a big fan of that ’cause I think that a lot of the jobs, you’re think of it that way. A lot of the opportunity for right now, this is mostly a North America phenomenon for us in Mod Op.

[00:05:29] John Powers: But this is a really mo a moment in time for the world where you’re gonna see this kind of opportunity for organizations to compete in ways that have otherwise not been able. I think it’s exciting and to be blunt and wanna be part of it, and Mod Op is a great place to be part of it. So that was a kind of fortuitous intersection.

[00:05:47] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. I love working in that mid-market space because you can make an impact faster, but there are still some resistors who don’t seem to be recognizing what these huge shifts. Actually mean from your experience at Deloitte, and not only did you get to see Deloitte, but you got to see other businesses, you know, mid-market and enterprise size, uh, start to lean in as AI, data and automation converge.

[00:06:23] Tessa Burg: What were those fundamental shifts that you’re seeing redefine how enterprises start to organize or even have to organize in order to facilitate growth today?

[00:06:36] John Powers: So first thing that’s really interesting to me is this notion of mid-market. So when you think about mid-market, uh, you’re talking about billions of dollars in revenue.

[00:06:47] John Powers: So that’s not small and, but people often hear mid-market. The, what people don’t quite understand is, of course, the largest consultancies, like a Deloitte or an Accenture, et cetera, are targeting. The Fortune 500 because it’s just efficient, just very efficient, bigger sales, bigger targets, bigger breadth, and those are in the tens to hundreds of billions kind of a situation.

[00:07:12] John Powers: Um, and that’s great. And that’s a, and that’s a great use case that’s wonderfully efficient for both of those organizations. But when you’re talking about, you know, and anywhere from a billion to $10 billion of revenue, these are really complicated, interesting companies, um, that have great opportunity.

[00:07:27] John Powers: And what the way to think about this is. Also really quite simple and the data continues to back it up. We did some research when I was CIO to try to understand what’s the potential for AI very broadly, but what’s the potential for AI to affect what kinds of jobs? And by the way, Wharton just came out with a study that is almost completely consistent.

[00:07:46] John Powers: What we found, and this is very specific to what we’re doing at Deloitte, and what we found is what I think everyone is sort of figuring out is about every job we have, it has about 25% of their tasks is administrator. Um, and that administrivia can be enabled slash made more effective. If you were to really like lean into AI becoming fundamental to how do you deliver that.

[00:08:13] John Powers: Let’s put that aside for a second. ’cause that the lean in is the thing that hasn’t even happened yet. There’s these other jobs that are very deep, so it’s not, it’s it that where you can take almost all the job and automate it and we found that it’s quite. Obvious when you look at what we had offshore.

[00:08:33] John Powers: So we offshore a bunch of work to be more efficient as everybody did. Those tasks were to be straightforward, very simple, and commodity based, so to speak. Well, it turns out AI’s exceptionally good at that kind of repetitive commodity work, so it’s an opportunity to reshore. Now you can reshore whole departments, which is really an interesting dynamic.

[00:08:54] John Powers: In both of these cases though, the. This is where I think the challenge hasn’t really been met is you have to rethink how you work. And that’s really hard for most companies. The rethinking of how you work. Like it’s really easy to say, we’re gonna do a video call. That call, we’re gonna capture it, uh, via use of embedded AI and then it’s gonna produce a transcript.

[00:09:17] John Powers: And guess what? We can now search all the transcripts and we can pick out trends. That’s great. That’s wonderful. That’s not changing how you work really. It’s taking out some of the time, but that’s not the big upside that that’s helpful, but that’s not the big upside where people haven’t gotten to is when you engineer the things, the way you communicate, like your emails, your internal documents, even the, even the, the use of email so that it’s engineered, so to speak, to be useful for AI to pick up the key tasks.

[00:09:47] John Powers: It’s the same in. Marketing messaging. It’s the same in in the persona you want to have in social media as you start. We’re gonna have to engineer how we communicate as humans to fit the way AI interprets that information. Like when I say we don’t have, you don’t have to do it, but if you do it, the AI tools become much more effective.

[00:10:09] John Powers: But that would change things like email as the specific communications tool where all documents are being exchanged for a corporation. And that’s a lot. There’s a lot of people, or email is their information exchange. And yes, AI can comb through there and pick out documents and make more sense of it.

[00:10:26] John Powers: That’s great. But if you rethink that, hey, let’s not, let’s not exchange information that way. Let’s even construct the information we exchange very specifically. You can really start to. AI enable everything you do as a corporation. Now, again, I don’t think it’s gonna be job losses. I, I think it’s going to be, guess what?

[00:10:43] John Powers: That’s more capacity to focus on higher value, skilled skills like revenue generation, target marketing, enhancement of your services to the client, better customer service for the clients. There’s a bunch of things you could do to upscale that, again, become accessible. I start to rethink the work.

[00:11:00] Tessa Burg: Yeah, and I think that’s also where external partners.

[00:11:04] Tessa Burg: Help and bring that perspective. It’s interesting because Mod Op, as an agency, we are a partner that helps our clients rethink, and a lot of them face the same challenges that you did at Deloitte, like your professional services company. And so your company is providing very necessary professional services to other businesses and sometimes, maybe not even sometimes, a lot of times when you’re inside the company doing all of the rethinking internally only.

[00:11:35] Tessa Burg: You don’t have the external lens or the external perspective from partners who have worked across many companies to really unlock that creative problem solving. And that’s where those partnerships can be so valuable. ’cause as you were talking, I was thinking in my head, like internally, we’re running AI transformation programs and we do use a lot of learnings from our client.

[00:12:04] Tessa Burg: Clients and the work we do for clients as examples of almost partner with them to pull out the what’s possible. And partnerships are becoming so much more important to move faster. ’cause it’s so easy to get bogged down in the internal politics of it all when you try and lead that change, uh, internally.

[00:12:24] Tessa Burg: But what I want, this is, I’m rambling. That was a great, I mean, one, you hit on something that is. It’s just one of the biggest blockers getting people to recognize and actually move to working fundamentally differently. Because yes, when we talk about adoption, a lot of people are like, yes, I’m using ChatGPT, check.

[00:12:45] Tessa Burg: I’ve adopted AI. Yeah, I recorded that and it was awesome because I got a summary and emailed it to the client really quickly. But for me. As a CTO who is leading innovation and leading change at our company, what advice would you give change leaders who are sort of hitting this wall on unlocking that creative problem solving to get people to move from, I’m doing what I do slightly more efficiently to, I’m working fundamentally differently to unlock new possibilities of communicating, engaging and selling.

[00:13:22] John Powers: So I think, um. This was, this was my advice, you know, when I was at Deloitte is, there’s two facets to this. Part of it is you’ve gotta understand, you know, the old horses for courses. Like what’s the right tool for the job? Because as you pointed out, there’s lots of available tools, um, that we all like bump into and use on a daily basis.

[00:13:43] John Powers: I probably use, I personally probably use on a daily basis, three different tools. I’m probably using ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini. On a daily basis. ’cause they each have a slightly different use case for me from an efficiency that I wanna achieve. Right. Okay. As you point out, check, I use, I use, uh, AI, each individual coming up with a way to adjust how they work is better, but it’s not, uh, transformative is the best way to say it.

[00:14:14] John Powers: And so you’ve gotta think of what are the tools that. Are gonna be good for what use cases. And I think there’s another, and I, again, I just saw this word in research that shows essentially the, of all the tools people are using in fifth place is custom AI for a specific purpose. So custom built AI solution using the tools you can use to build, but a custom solution for a company, that’s where the money is.

[00:14:40] John Powers: Just to be blunt, like we’re what you for this adoption to really work is that you’re gonna build, you’re gonna use those other tools, and we’ll get back to that in a second, but you’re gonna build custom solutions that are really bespoke for what your particular unique value, uh, advantage is your, your secret sauce as they, as we say, whatever your secret sauce is, if it’s secret and it’s sauce, it’s got a recipe that it could be enabled in a unique way, should be enabled in a unique way.

[00:15:06] John Powers: Almost every company has that. And so. Commodity tools are good for certain things, but they won’t get to true. Uh, the real value and what you see in this, again, this award study is sales and marketing are lagging behind in adoption of these tools. And I think that’s because the generic standard model is not gonna enable or enhance or amplify the secret sauce a lot of companies bring.

[00:15:29] John Powers: But get back to the other side of the equation is you really have to think about how people work. This is one of the biggest barriers. So yes, we can all change a little bit of what we do on a daily basis. Like I’m gonna have meeting notes. Okay, that’s great. Um, but I, I’ll give you a couple examples.

[00:15:46] John Powers: I saw that I could not, I couldn’t get changed. Um, when I was with Deloitte, I was trying, and these tools were emerging, but, and this goes in the talent domain, there’s a lot of opportunity to rethink. Everything you do with talent. Now, HR tends to be a little bit further ahead now in adoption as a department, but a couple of easy examples.

[00:16:07] John Powers: Onboarding, this is something I was trying to figure out. How do you figure out what’s effective for onboarding for your new team? Uh, because you’re gonna see in their, in their productivity slash ratings reviews, if you will, a variation, a bell curve. That’s how it should work. Great. Well, what is it about?

[00:16:25] John Powers: The people that aren’t coming up to speed quickly. And what is it about the people that are coming up to speed quickly? Some of it’s personal talent, no doubt, but some of it is likely a pattern of how they interact with the organization. A basic pattern which you get from how they network. Like my theory was there are people that are networking better and it could be ’cause they’re better networkers or ’cause they gotten a place where there’s a better network.

[00:16:45] John Powers: You pick the the idea. But you can use a graph tool and they’re available to try to understand these connections between people in the organization and you could quickly understand. Are my new hires networking in at the same rate pace and in the, in the right way because networking is a huge exchange of, of very I important information about how a company works, how your department works, how your clients work.

[00:17:07] John Powers: Like that’s where you get the real learning. So you can do a bunch of training programs, but watching the network real. Okay. Well, if you change the way you monitor new hires, you might have a. Very quick process to understand are they networking in properly? Almost a quick remedial review. You could use AI to do that, but you’d have to completely change the theory of onboarding as opposed to like, how many hours of training did they take?

[00:17:30] John Powers: How many classes did they take? Uh, that stuff is useful obviously, but it’s not like it’s not new. And the flip of that is on ratings is another way to move. You could totally change the way most people are rated. Get humans out of almost all of the evaluation and then also make it more real time and less annual.

[00:17:48] John Powers: Yes, everyone’s driving towards that, but you get some really interesting patterns once you start to get the, the numbers above a hundred people of how do people rate, do we have people that are rating differently? Are there people that are struggling? Can you find them earlier and help them? Um, and what, and what are the people?

[00:18:06] John Powers: Who are the people that are succeeding? Great. You just found people to succeed. What are they doing differently? You start to get actionable. Information that can change the way you grow and develop your teams. Okay. But you’d have to change your cycles to not be an annual cycle, which is a, I’m gonna give you a rating to get compensation kind of a model.

[00:18:23] John Powers: You wanna get to a real time in and out kind of theory, and then quickly adjust when you find new practices and that that whole thing dynamic quickly and adjusting. That’s really difficult in a lot of companies, by the way. I think that’s where small to medium businesses. Are particularly well positioned.

[00:18:41] John Powers: They’re not as invested usually in these historic processes. They’re not as invested usually in archaic old school software. They’re willing to take more chances and they can adjust faster. So that’s why I think when you start to build in that kind of di dynamism, is that the right word, um, into the organization.

[00:19:00] John Powers: Then you could certainly use off the shelf tools, but you would tell everybody, you’re gonna use this tool for the following purpose and we’re gonna change. ’cause here’s how we’re gonna adapt or integrate it into our daily working, so to speak. And like I’ll give you a really basic example and then I’ll shut up, I promise, which is, PowerPoint drives me nuts.

[00:19:21] John Powers: People use PowerPoint as a communications tool. That’s not what it’s designed for. If you wanna write a message. One, it should be short if it’s supposed to be like, like a quick turnaround. If it’s, I need to educate you. The only reason you’d use PowerPoint is there’s, there’s a need to integrate graphics in a flow and you need to present it.

[00:19:45] John Powers: Word or Google Docs. You pick the text driven engine is gonna be a better answer. Um, so. Sometimes you just need to send a chart, which is a, like you don’t like. Your chart should tell you, like, people should read a graph and know what the answer is. They shouldn’t have to interpret it. Like if you’re gonna communicate information, your analysis should leap off the page.

[00:20:08] John Powers: They shouldn’t have to be, you shouldn’t have to tell them what to look for. Like that’s clear. So it drives me nuts. But that, you know how ingrained PowerPoint is a communications tool. It’s literally insane. So there’s hours of time with people converting things into this format to send it to other people when it’s not actually intended to ever be presented.

[00:20:26] John Powers: So you could outlaw that like. I’ve done that. I’ve told people, do not bring many more PowerPoint. ’cause that’s not what you need for this job. Just write it out. And if you can’t write it out, we got a different issue. And if the chart doesn’t tell me what you’re supposed to tell me, we got a different issue.

[00:20:41] John Powers: So there’s ways you could change how an organization works, but you gotta be, you gotta commit to some uncomfortable decisions. Like, oh my God, we, we invested a lot of money in the Microsoft Suite. What do we do now? Well. Maybe adjust your thinking. Do you need that suite? I don’t know. This gets back to like, depending on the company, start thinking about what’s relevant for what you wanna do.

[00:21:01] John Powers: But I, I do think it’s, you gotta have both sides of that equation and I’ll come back to you and you have to be willing to listen to both sides of the equation and start adjusting on both sides for this to really transform how a business works.

[00:21:16] Tessa Burg: So I love all of that and what you’re saying and the need for transformational change and to think differently.

[00:21:24] Tessa Burg: I could hear clients, even internal leaders or really anyone I’ve worked with pushing back and saying, that’s gonna just take too much time. Like we are doing work right now today and delivering, and who has the time to one, rethink how this should be done. Two to transform and even put in a process to change.

[00:21:50] Tessa Burg: How do you make that argument and tie what’s necessary to actually work differently to the goals and the vision and really the financial stability and growth of the company.

[00:22:05] John Powers: And this gets back to your point on partners and, and I think this is where the A partner’s really helpful because one of the most helpful things is to one.

[00:22:15] John Powers: Give people examples of what kind of changes, risks, projects you can, you can take that are really high probability, uh, improvements in an, in any organization based on the third party, you know, the, the partner’s experience. Mod Op’s a good example of that. Mod Op’s got a ton of experience of where we’re seeing this working or we’ve seen this not work like this.

[00:22:34] John Powers: That’s a, that’s the good news with an organization like Mod Op that is. Penetrated or is, or is in a variety of, uh, similar style, small to medium businesses around the US You’ve got great experience, you’ve got great, um, use cases. Now, the, the, the theory though, have the third party could look at Penn and I think is willing to look at the strategy of the organization, uh, very objectively.

[00:23:01] John Powers: Can then turn that into, if, if this is the strategy, then therefore here are the ways you can enable the strategy. That’s the key connection of see your strategy. Here’s where we want to go. Here’s how we’ve seen it work, here’s what we recommend it work. And then the technology is the, is the last component you bring in.

[00:23:17] John Powers: So if, if, if this is what the actions we want to take, here’s the right technology, not just AI.Here’s the right technology for that situation. And then it gets back to. I think there’s a going to be this growing understanding of I need a custom solution, not custom. As much as I need my own company solution for this specific application, I, I want to a control where my data sits.

[00:23:41] John Powers: That’s a really, really, really misunderstood or not well respected aspect of using these public tools. Do you have no control over the data? So you really want to control the data, which you should really want to control the data. You need it to be in a situation where you’re controlling exactly how and when and where, and what is going in.

[00:24:01] John Powers: That’s why you need a, a strategy and that’s why you need governance. And the, the third party is, I mean, has seen all the problems and, you know, I, I’ve seen them as well, so people aren’t doing that. Um, there’s also gonna be bumps along the road of typical obstacles or challenges. And once again.

[00:24:18] John Powers: You don’t wanna discover and, and solve every one of these on your own. Like take advantage of the, of the, of the experience of a third party who has seen and then overcome variety of solutions with a variety of, a variety of challenges, with a variety of solutions. It’s gonna be clear and I think to get the organization off the dime, so to speak.

[00:24:36] John Powers: I don’t love, I wouldn’t recommend it. I haven’t seen a lot of upside in and like deploying a tool and saying, see what you can do. Yeah. Um. Uh, there’s a lot of vendors that’ll sell you, you know, this ChatGPT enterprise, let’s deploy it in. Let’s see what happens, you know? Yeah. Um, Google Copilot. Let’s, uh, let’s deploy that.

[00:24:55] John Powers: Let’s see what happens. There’s two really important points here that costs money and like actual money out the door before you understand even how to measure ROI or what ROI is. So it’s not remotely free and it’s really debatable what the ROI is gonna be unless you’ve got a deliberate intentional strategy.

[00:25:17] John Powers: ’cause it, how are you gonna measure it if you don’t? And then the second thing is, people’s time is also not free. So if you’re gonna ask people to start experimenting just for the heck of it, think of how many people are gonna run the same experiment and end up in the same outcome of it. Did, wasn’t really helpful in this organization to do the following thing.

[00:25:34] John Powers: Right. So I, I, it’s fine for people to play around with these tools, but I just to deploy them and ask people to go figure out what would be useful. Both slow down adoption. If you look at what’s happening in the big enterprises, they’re not having a lot of, a lot of great ROI. Because a lot of them have deployed these tools broadly without theories as to what the ROI is gonna be.

[00:25:53] John Powers: And they’re discovering, gee, we’re seeing a lot of use, we’re generating a lot of costs, but we’re not getting what we thought was gonna be from a productivity perspective. I think you really have to have a use case dependent or use case specific situation of strategy. With this idea of how am I gonna govern, what data am I gonna use and where?

[00:26:12] John Powers: And then actual monitoring in by specific use case, like we’re going to do the following thing and it’s either a department or it’s all of us, whatever the, whatever the, the test is gonna be. And you have very specific measurement and you can come back and adjust. You’re not gonna get it right the first time.

[00:26:27] John Powers: You have to come back and this is useful, this isn’t useful. And I think that’s where the big, the big change is. You also, that whole process brings people along the journey. So you’re gonna have a lot of people that think AI’s here to take my job. Like that’s a, a natural resistance, or I don’t wanna learn another tool.

[00:26:45] John Powers: Again, natural resistance. What you wanna do is get people clear, like this is how this is gonna enhance, amplify, and make you more successful. And to do that, you’ve gotta have really internal specific. Use cases and change agents that say, this really worked. And so they’re walking on the hallways or, or on the Zoom calls, telling people, this really worked.

[00:27:06] John Powers: Like who do your fellow employees believe? They, they blow the their peers. So you want to have wins as you go before you leap into something that is like an all singing, all dancing, expensive pilot.

[00:27:21] Tessa Burg: Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, you made a lot of really good points in there that we’ve seen one. We are still seeing too many leaders want to grab a hold of the silver bullet.

[00:27:34] Tessa Burg: Like, I’m just gonna use this one piece of tech. Let’s just roll that out really quick. We gotta get that check mark. We gotta report back to the board that we have X percent adoption on AI by this date. Let’s, you know, just go, it’s there, it’s available. And they, they want that silver bullet and. We are now seeing the folks who did that have learned from it really quickly and have come to the realization that you highlighted.

[00:28:04] Tessa Burg: If you are using the same technology that everyone in the market is using, you are not going to be differentiated in the market. You have to make the leap to. Rethink the way you deliver value to your clients. And one of the, uh, to restate something that you said like it has to be strategy, it has to be grounded in the challenges aligned, um, to more than just a single person’s way of working is bubbling it all the way up to what have you always wanted to do for your customer?

[00:28:44] Tessa Burg: When you think about who you’re serving, the customers you have, what have you always wanted to do for them? And that is now possible and just assume it’s possible, but there’s not going to be one single application or one tool that’s already available on the market that’s going to get you there. But when you start imagining.

[00:29:02] Tessa Burg: What, what is, what have you always wanted to do? To your point? You can bring more people into that conversation and then when you create the experience first of what that could look like, then you’re gonna find that it’s actually a combination of some off the shelf tools, some things that we’re gonna need to connect.

[00:29:21] Tessa Burg: You are going to see that data’s a problem. You know, like that is always revealed. We don’t have the right data, we have too much data. The data’s all in these different sources, but it unlocks that journey while empowering people to be there. But absolutely, it’s sometimes takes the external voice because we’re busy.

[00:29:41] Tessa Burg: We’re already all busy trying to serve our own customers and clients as, you know, large B2B companies. Uh, so I, I, I love. Answer. I love that perspective of you have to start in a place that brings people together, but the people coming together also have to understand that they are going to be doing their job differently.

[00:30:03] Tessa Burg: And I, and that’s sometimes everyone gets really excited until it’s time for themselves to change. And then it’s, uh, oh, wait a minute. But it, but I’ve always done it this way and I’ve been wildly successful my whole career. And it’s like, and you have and high five. And we’re entering a new era.

[00:30:22] John Powers: Well, and, and, and the, the magic here is when you amplify that person’s expertise, not replace it like everyone’s afraid.

[00:30:31] John Powers: They’re gonna go away. Well, there’s a lot of expertise that people don’t even document. They can’t document. It’s it they, they’ve got it in their head, they’ve got the supercomputer in their head that, that is connecting data points. That is pattern recognition. That’s the one thing about humans, we’re excellent at pattern recognition.

[00:30:45] John Powers: So some of the people that best at their job are doing it in naturally, and we’re not trying to replace that. What you’re trying to do is. Speed it up so they can, they can do it faster, they can, they can be more responsive or expand it. So the scope, they can see it across a broader array of situations, again, for their clients, um, and then, or, or themselves.

[00:31:08] John Powers: And almost no organization has enough capacity. To be building all the expertise again, that some of the third parties can bring, like a Mod Op, because how would you like, that’s a, that’s a humongous investment that needs a very clear return, even if you’ve got a data analytics team that’s in-house. Once again, I think if you’ve gotta show that data analytics team, I got, I got a hundred more use cases for you.

[00:31:30] John Powers: Like, so they’re used to very specific ordered analysis that is coming off of data that is in a database that they have, et cetera. Like it’s a, like that kind of model. It is gonna change and you’ve gotta convince them that, well, you’re gonna join new information that they don’t usually join. Usually you don’t need all of their data.

[00:31:50] John Powers: So like oftentimes all of it is too much, right? You gotta make sure it’s tagged properly. It often isn’t tagged properly. You gotta know what’s rights to it. That’s often a problem. So there’s, when you’re just kind of bumping around in a big database and cranking out queries. There’s a certain level of accuracy.

[00:32:08] John Powers: Like I, I think if you get people to understand, like we can create much clearer, much more precise analyses, but it’s assembled in a different way. Um, then your job is, is, is more, you are more effective at your job. It’s really what happens. Then you see the patterns more clean, you see the more pat, more quickly, I was just talking to a, a consumer packaged goods company.

[00:32:30] John Powers: Uh, one of the brand managers happened to be a friend and we’re talking about some of the issues that they have. And they’re, they’ve been fighting with for years. Like they get the data on the effectiveness of their media annually. How could that possibly work? Right.

[00:32:49] Tessa Burg: Right.

[00:32:50] John Powers: And, and that, so they’re, they’re literally flying blind.

[00:32:54] John Powers: For a year now. They have great instincts. They get to see how the product’s moving. They, they certainly are looking at volume data, so they’re, it’s only they’re, I, I don’t wanna say that they’re, they’re not, they’re doing quite a good job with what, with the tools they’re handed. It’s a matter of there’s gotta be a faster way.

[00:33:10] John Powers: Like I, I didn’t have an answer for them ’cause it was just a friend and we having a conversation. But there’s gotta be a faster way to do this. Like, this doesn’t make any sense that it, that you, that the delay would have that kind of a lag to it. And so. With the new tools. It could be a smaller sample. It could be a specific sample.

[00:33:24] John Powers: It could be you go create the data. This is what a lot of people don’t actually are, aren’t thinking. It’s like I don’t have the data. It’s not able, go create it. Like it could be worth you to go create the data surveying, interviewing, focus groups. You pick the method of assembly, like now you might wanna go assemble the data you want to, to connect to a smaller dataset, but it’s a much more informative dataset.

[00:33:46] John Powers: I just think, you know, the, the opportunities there are gonna be phenomenal for most small to media companies because of they, they can get access to and then be much more responsive to, with these tools what the customers are looking for or need.

[00:33:57] Tessa Burg: Yeah, no, I agree. You should tell your friend that you’ve now joined an award-winning, multi award-winning media company.

[00:34:07] Tessa Burg: Uh, one of the ways that we have that expertise and that we’re able to take and pair our data intelligence team with media, with our tech team is we’ve grown through acquisition. And we are leaning into, acquire the intelligence, acquire that expertise that you’re talking about elevating. And that made us one of the fastest growing independent agencies in the country.

[00:34:30] Tessa Burg: AI is changing the way enterprises approach mergers, integrations, and structures today. From your experience, ’cause you also led global m and a consulting at Deloitte, how, how is that change happening?

[00:34:46] John Powers: So there’s two. Um, again, there’s, I’m coming up with two on every side here. There’s two ways to think about this.

[00:34:50] John Powers: Um, one is the enablement of m and a in general. So just like you’d expect with every department, companies should be able to look at many more targets, uh, much, much more in depth, um, in a much more in depth manner than they would’ve at the time or the energy capacity, et cetera, to do before. So. If you are acquisitive, if you’re the kind of company that’s looking to grow through inorganic acquisition, the opportunities now are enormous around quickly assessing the fit with a target, A, A, finding the targets, and B, assessing fit with the target.

[00:35:29] John Powers: Uh, just your ability to, to find that needle in the haystack, so to speak. With this unique value of combining two organizations has gone up dramatically. So the speed and hit rate. Are both gonna go, gonna accelerate. So, you know, as a former m and a integration person, uh, it strikes me as we should see a lot more value being created outta m and a because previously.

[00:35:52] John Powers: You could only look at a few targets and a lot of people got committed. They would, they would essentially sign a definitive agreement way before they had the right kind of information, because that’s the way it used to work and theory, they were gonna go work it out. But once you’ve signed a definitive agreement, almost no one backs out.

[00:36:06] John Powers: And so you’d end up with, I call it less than optimal results. Whereas today, you should be able to get to a much better fit conversation, value creation conversation ’cause of the data. Now the. Other side of, uh, this m and a. It enables the, the, the transaction. But from a, how companies are going to grow essentially from, uh, mergers and acquisitions.

[00:36:32] John Powers: If you wanna position your company to be a great target, and if you want to be a great integrator, this gets back to the prior point of. Restructuring yourself, so to speak, restructuring your work so that it’s AI enabled already. So just think about that. The next, the next thing is gonna be how en, how enabled is this organization with AI and the way I use AI?

[00:36:57] John Powers: So it used to be you’d compare your ERP packages. Hey, do we have the same package? Can we consolidate it? ’cause that would be a big cost. Typically, in any merger, one of the biggest costs is gonna be IT integration. I mean, it almost always was close to the, to the biggest cost, if not the biggest cost. Okay, well we’ve got a new kind of IT integration now.

[00:37:15] John Powers: It’s AI integration and it’s what tools are you using? How much control do you have with the data? How well documented is it? Can I really bring your you and your information in quickly to enhance and do what I do well or do I have a huge cleanup problem? Yeah, and two ways. Think about that. You can set yourself up to be both a great integrator.

[00:37:35] John Powers: We would advise this to companies anyway, which is structure your domain, so to speak, so that you can integrate companies much more quickly. Essentially set up your GLS back in the RP days so that you’ve got an easier onboarding method for companies, assuming you’re gonna onboard them to your systems.

[00:37:51] John Powers: If you’re the, if you’re a big acquirer, companies should think about that. What’s your strategy for structuring yourself? To be able to bring people on. And what are you looking for? This gets back to your due diligence process. What are you looking for in these targets that would tell you good, bad, or different with respect to AI usage?

[00:38:06] John Powers: Now, here’s the good news. We’re in early days, so you’re not gonna find a lot of people that are well beyond the, I use ChatGPT, Gemini, or uh, Copilot. But how could, how structured is their data? Where is it housed and how controlled is it? What are the rights and access that people have? Um, a lot of those things become important because you can have huge messes on your hands like that.

[00:38:32] John Powers: You know, I hate, I, unfortunately, this is one of those where consultants always say, oh, be careful ’cause it’s a big problem. But there, there are time bombs out there of people that have dumped client data into the public domain ’cause they’re using public tools and don’t, or their, their staff didn’t understand it when they used this tool, what was happening?

[00:38:48] John Powers: So. This is another risk and liability you gotta look out for. There are time bombs waiting to go off of people using AI inappropriately and essentially losing control of their data or their client’s data, confidential data. And so now you have another category of risk to look out for, but I’ll look out on the opportunity side.

[00:39:10] John Powers: So in the next couple of years, people should be thinking about how am I gonna structure myself technically so that I can integrate quickly? The best data from these acquisitions and or the best processes and or the best tools. Like what is my method of, let’s assume we’re all gonna be an AI enabled enterprise.

[00:39:28] John Powers: So I think that’s an interesting and evolving area that is going to start to become important. Like if you think about the advancement of technology, you know, back in the day, way before I was born. Mainframes were this huge leap from manual. Then people figured out how to fractionalize mainframes. That was a huge leap that created whole consulting firms, just fractionalizing time sharing on a mainframe.

[00:39:50] John Powers: Then you got the distributed computing, uh, client server kind of, which was further democratizing what people could do. You had all set of different problems and then came ERP, and then it was this whole mishmash of who’s gonna have which ERP program. Each of these created a. Problem of how do you bring someone onto a new technology?

[00:40:09] John Powers: AI is the latest new technology that’s going to become integral to corporations, but there’s no ways to stop it. So you’re gonna have an AI architecture, everyone should have that in their minds today. It sits side by side, or you know, in or layered on your current full stack. You have to have this architecture that is laid out and clear to say, this is our theory as to what we’re gonna do when the data comes in, how we’re gonna house it, we’re gonna store it, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:40:35] John Powers: Um, and I think getting ahead of that’s a good, if you wanna be acquisitive, having a real clear perspective on that is gonna both help on the integration front, but also helping the targeting front better at understanding how much it’s gonna cost, better understanding how quickly you can get the value.

[00:40:49] John Powers: Um, also, it’s a great story if you wanna bring a company on and you’ve gotta, here’s how we’re gonna amplify what you do. If you’ve got your, your act together, they’re gonna be pretty happy that you, they, you see the value in them and they’ll be much more likely to be call it, uh, interested in being acquired or partnering, uh, merging.

[00:41:08] Tessa Burg: Yeah, no, I totally agree. It’s definitely been a big selling point for the agencies that we bring on, and you absolutely nailed the reason why, which is we are. Democratizing the ability to do things that you haven’t been able to do before. And like you said, it introduces new challenges, which means underneath all of the planning, all of the strategy aligning to show your team what’s possible, being able to deliver on it.

[00:41:38] Tessa Burg: You have re-skilling, upskilling, and training programs because new challenges are emerging. New roles are emerging. And we see a lot of companies doing layoffs and saying it’s quote unquote because of AI. Okay. It’s really things that we’re less thinking and highly repeatable are going away. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t new opportunities emerging.

[00:42:03] Tessa Burg: And if you know, that requires. Changing the way you fundamentally work. So John, honestly, we can talk about this all day, but we’ve, we’ve gone over time, this has been so rich with clear insights on how people can start thinking about really transform, transforming their business underneath that equation for growth and new opportunities to deliver value.

[00:42:30] Tessa Burg: And yes, it takes work and maybe it requires a partner, but the benefits are going to be. Huge new opportunities, new roles, new ways to serve your clients and drive revenue. Um, so thank you so much for sharing all this experience. It’s been a great conversation. If folks wanna get in touch with you, where can they find you?

[00:42:51] John Powers: [email protected].

[00:42:53] Tessa Burg: Yes, absolutely. And John is also on LinkedIn and we’ll have to do a continuation of this soon. If you wanna hear more episodes of Leader Generation. We’re always interviewing, uh, clients and other Mod Op thought leaders inside the business on helping people realize growth and revenue from digital transformation.

[00:43:14] Tessa Burg: Those episodes are at modop.com. Until next time, John, have a great rest of the week.

[00:43:20] John Powers: Thanks Tessa.