{"id":2562,"date":"2026-02-11T19:52:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T20:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/?p=2562"},"modified":"2026-02-18T17:44:44","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T17:44:44","slug":"rethinking-workflows-in-the-age-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/11\/rethinking-workflows-in-the-age-of-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Workflows in the Age of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\/rethinking-workflows-in-the-age-of-ai\/\">Rethinking Workflows in the Age of AI<\/a> written by <a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\/author\/johnjantsch\/\">John Jantsch<\/a> read more at <a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\">Duct Tape Marketing<\/a><\/p>\n<header>\n<nav aria-label=\"Jump links\"><\/nav>\n<\/header>\n<h2>Catch the Full Episode<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<h2><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\" wp-image-85116 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Steve-Wunker-1.png\" alt=\"Steve Wunker \" width=\"323\" height=\"323\" \/>Episode Overview<\/h2>\n<section id=\"overview\">\n<div class=\"card\">\n<p>AI is moving fast, but most organizations weren\u2019t built for that kind of speed. In this episode, John Jantsch talks with Stephen Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and author of <em>AI and the Octopus Organization: Building the Super Intelligent Firm<\/em>.<br \/>\nThey unpack why \u201cadding AI\u201d to existing processes is not the win, and why the winners will redesign how decisions, learning, and accountability work.<\/p>\n<p>Using the octopus as a metaphor, distributed brains connected by a coordinating nerve ring\u2014Wunker explains how AI can enable distributed intelligence across teams while maintaining contextual alignment through data, governance, and culture. The conversation dives into \u201cgolden workflows,\u201d the danger of unmanaged pilots, and how organizations can move from incremental improvements to<br \/>\ntrue workflow transformation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"guest-bio\">\n<h2>About Stephen Wunker<\/h2>\n<div class=\"card\">\n<p>Stephen Wunker is the Managing Director of New Markets Advisors, where he has advised hundreds of organizations on growth, innovation, and new market strategy. He is the author of <em>AI and the Octopus Organization: Building the Super Intelligent Firm<\/em>, focused on helping companies redesign operations and decision systems to capture the full value of AI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"key-takeaways\">\n<h2>Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n<h3>1) AI is not just better software<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Incremental upgrades (e.g., swapping interfaces for chatbots) help, but the real gain comes from redesigning workflows end-to-end.<\/li>\n<li>Think: turning a 21-step process into 3 steps\u2014possibly different steps\u2014not just automating a single task.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>2) The Octopus Organization enables distributed intelligence<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Like an octopus\u2019 arms sensing and acting independently, AI can push decisions closer to where work happens.<\/li>\n<li>Alignment comes from shared context: connected data, governance, and coordination mechanisms.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>3) Stop running \u201c900 pilots\u201d<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Uncoordinated AI experimentation is distracting and risky.<\/li>\n<li>Build a repeatable way to assess, measure, and either scale or kill pilots.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>4) Use the ABC approach<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>A:<\/strong> AI-fy the present (within guidelines).<\/li>\n<li><strong>B:<\/strong> Become great at experimentation (hypotheses, pre\/post measures, learning loops).<\/li>\n<li><strong>C:<\/strong> Create the future (rethink a few high-impact workflows to become \u201clighthouses\u201d).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>5) Focus on \u201cgolden workflows\u201d<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Pick the few workflows that drive the most time, cost, or strategic value\u2014and redesign those first.<\/li>\n<li>Examples discussed: campaign planning, internal announcements, service-line marketing messaging.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>6) The three hearts: analytical, agile, aligned<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Analytical:<\/strong> data-driven decision-making.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Agile:<\/strong> ability to adapt quickly (often hardest for larger firms).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Aligned:<\/strong> shared purpose and emotional coherence during disruption.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>7) AI supercharges collaboration<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The \u201csuper intelligent firm\u201d is less about super-human AI and more about AI improving human collaboration and coordination.<\/li>\n<li>Right information to the right people at the right time elevates firm-wide intelligence.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"great-moments\" class=\"timestamps\">\n<h2>Great Moments (Timestamps)<\/h2>\n<div class=\"card\">\n<ul>\n<li><code>00:01<\/code> Why most organizations aren\u2019t built for AI speed<\/li>\n<li><code>01:17<\/code> The octopus metaphor: nine brains and distributed intelligence<\/li>\n<li><code>02:44<\/code> The real unlock: redesign workflows, not just interfaces<\/li>\n<li><code>03:53<\/code> Risks and requirements: data quality, human-in-the-loop, and decision boundaries<\/li>\n<li><code>05:25<\/code> The danger of scattered usage: \u201cno brain, no guardrails, no retention\u201d<\/li>\n<li><code>06:41<\/code> ABC framework: AI-fy the present, experiment well, create the future<\/li>\n<li><code>09:33<\/code> Campaign planning: cutting cycles with real-time prototyping and shared context<\/li>\n<li><code>10:24<\/code> Golden workflows: prioritize what matters most<\/li>\n<li><code>12:16<\/code> The three hearts: analytical, agile, aligned<\/li>\n<li><code>15:29<\/code> What \u201csuper intelligent firm\u201d really means: collaboration amplified<\/li>\n<li><code>16:29<\/code> Iteration at scale: personalization and massive variant testing<\/li>\n<li><code>17:16<\/code> Octopus principles for a 20-person firm vs. a 200-person firm<\/li>\n<li><code>17:45<\/code> Electricity analogy: the assembly-line moment requires rethinking work<\/li>\n<li><code>19:17<\/code> A practical starting point: align AI with strategic priorities<\/li>\n<li><code>20:14<\/code> Where to find the book and connect<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Catch the Full Episode on Youtube<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"quotes\">\n<h2>Memorable Quotes<\/h2>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cThe real unlock comes from rethinking the system of work and the workflows.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cThe era of having 900 pilots\u2026 is unsustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cWhere firms get their intelligence is through collaboration of people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cAI has the potential to supercharge that collaboration by making sure the right information goes to the right people at the right time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"resources\">\n<h2>Resources Mentioned<\/h2>\n<div class=\"card\">\n<ul>\n<li><em>AI and the Octopus Organization: Building the Super Intelligent Firm<\/em> \u2014 Stephen Wunker (available on Amazon)<\/li>\n<li>Book site: <a href=\"https:\/\/aiandtheoctopus.com\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">AIandtheOctopus.com<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Connect: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/stephenwunker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stephen Wunker on LinkedIn<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"cta\"><\/section>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<div id=\"fbxt-wrap\">\n<div id=\"fbxt-wrap--inner\" class=\"fbxt-extra-class\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-header\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-header--logo\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-header-text\">Duct Tape Transcript<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-header--nav\">\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-email\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Email<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-download\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Download<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-new_tab\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">New Tab<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-content\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-content--inner\">\n<p>John Jantsch (00:01.749)<\/p>\n<p>AI is moving fast. No question about that. But I think the biggest challenge for a lot of organizations is they just weren&#8217;t built for this kind of speed. My guest today says the winners won&#8217;t just adopt AI, they&#8217;ll redesign how decisions, learning and accountability work. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Stephen Wunker. He&#8217;s the managing director of New Market Markets Advisors, where he&#8217;s advised<\/p>\n<p>hundreds of organizations on growth, innovation, and new market strategy. He&#8217;s also the author of a book we&#8217;re going to talk about today, AI and the Octopus Organization, Building the Super Intelligent Firm. So Steve, welcome to the show.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (00:48.078)<\/p>\n<p>Thanks for having me on.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (00:50.051)<\/p>\n<p>All right. So it seems like I start here, long time listeners know I always start with titles, words and titles. So I think when you suggested this show, I think the thing that got my attention probably is for a lot of people, it&#8217;s just the word octopus. It&#8217;s a metaphor that&#8217;s used a lot in business. So what&#8217;s the simplest way for you to explain an octopus organization?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (01:17.582)<\/p>\n<p>So an octopus has a biology that is weird for us humans. It&#8217;s very unusual in the animal kingdom in general. It has nine brains, one in its central head and one for each of its arms.<\/p>\n<p>which means each arm can sense and think and act independently. And yet all those brains are interconnected with the nerve ring. So they don&#8217;t need to route everything through the central brain, but they can sort of coordinate semi-autonomously with complete contextual awareness. And it&#8217;s a great metaphor for how an AI infused organization is to operate with distributed intelligence, a lot of local sensing and acting, and yet<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (01:31.488)<\/p>\n<p>Thank<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (02:01.473)<\/p>\n<p>with complete contextual awareness. So we developed that model in detail as a guideline for how organizations should adapt to really make the most out of AI.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (02:14.499)<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m seeing a lot of organizations, especially we work with a lot of small to mid-sized businesses that really are not compartmentalized necessarily like larger organizations might be. And I get the feeling that they look at AI as like software. It&#8217;s like, this is just a better version of Word, you know, or something like that. So what do you, I&#8217;m curious if you&#8217;re encountering that as well, or if you see that as a clear sign that they&#8217;re not thinking about this distributed intelligence.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (02:44.749)<\/p>\n<p>John, I&#8217;m seeing it all over the place. Small organizations, certainly large enterprises. I was with 100 product managers earlier this week in Denver talking to a group there. And they were reporting it even in their software companies. They were getting a lot of requests for these very incremental improvements. And all that is nice, but the real unlock comes from rethinking the system of work and the workflows, not through swapping some<\/p>\n<p>regular interface with an open text box for a natural language chatbot. No, it comes through taking your 21-step process and making it three steps, albeit maybe three different steps.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (03:29.411)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, or automating the handoff between those steps, right? Yeah. So the idea, at least as I sense it from you, the idea of the eight arms is that we&#8217;re pushing decisions out in a lot of cases, decentralizing. Where&#8217;s the risk in that? Where does that break down? What role does data play in making that happen?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (03:32.076)<\/p>\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (03:53.355)<\/p>\n<p>look, you need to have decent data in order to make decent decisions. So that&#8217;s certainly one.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (03:55.799)<\/p>\n<p>Right? Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (03:58.955)<\/p>\n<p>People need to know how far they can go. You also probably don&#8217;t want to take a human entirely out of the process. But let me give you an example of how to do this in a marketing situation. We worked recently with the marketing department of a major health system and they wanted to infuse AI in what they did. So one issue they would have is that they would work with the different service lines in a hospital trying to create a marketing message for them.<\/p>\n<p>but often the service lines didn&#8217;t even know themselves what their marketing messages should be. So for the lower priority stuff, it&#8217;s like the Urology department wants to do some brochure about their services. They were able to put into very simple AI system queries and a sort of interactive process to help Urology come to that messaging itself, to draft messaging for it, help them create the output. And then the human can get involved.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (04:31.659)<\/p>\n<p>Sure. Right.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (04:58.849)<\/p>\n<p>and say, well, how about we do this or we&#8217;re not quite aligned with the brand value, so we need to go in this direction. But it took out so much of the work that marketing was spending on this relatively low priority task. And actually it was better for the people in urology as well, that they didn&#8217;t have to go back and forth and back and forth over period of weeks. They could do it all with the self-service engine.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (05:13.613)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah. Right.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (05:25.091)<\/p>\n<p>So one of the things that we&#8217;ve also encountered is a lot of, you know, as organizations, especially if there&#8217;s not like a leadership mandate for AI, a lot of organizations have various people that have said, well, I can figure out chat GPT, you know, and so they&#8217;re using it to kind of do their work better, but there&#8217;s no real central guardrails. There&#8217;s no brain, there&#8217;s no retention even of, you know, what they&#8217;ve built. I mean, how do you build a system that is, that starts, of course, from leadership? And I know part&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>part of the answer is going to be buy in from leadership. But how do you build something that has the guardrails that we&#8217;re going to speak like the brand, we&#8217;re not going to use the wrong language. So that if you have all these people in various departments or various locations even using the tools, how do you set the guardrails up?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (06:11.787)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, the era of having 900 pilots, I hope, is drawing to a close. They are distracting. They are dangerous. Yeah, maybe they got people comfortable with AI, but it is unsustainable. So look, you need to have a common data foundation with some data quality. So definitely invest in having decent quality data, ideally some sort of data lake or other system to provide that free flow of information throughout the organization. There needs to be some governance guidelines and governance process.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (06:14.947)<\/p>\n<p>Right.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (06:23.873)<\/p>\n<p>Right.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (06:41.711)<\/p>\n<p>on how AI should and should not be used. But then there also needs to be a mechanism to assess these pilots that are still going to occur. look, we have a three-step system, ABC. A, AIFI the present. You want to go AIFI what you&#8217;re doing now?<\/p>\n<p>Great, let&#8217;s make sure it&#8217;s within guidelines, but go do it. B, become great at experimentation. So what&#8217;s actually your hypothesis? What are you measuring pre and post? What did you learn? How do you kill pilots that aren&#8217;t working? And then C, which too few organizations are doing, is create the future. So for a handful of things, you can&#8217;t do it for everything all at once.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (07:18.027)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (07:21.803)<\/p>\n<p>but in a handful of golden workflows, as we call them, what can you do to really rethink what you&#8217;re doing and make those sort of a lighthouse for the rest of the organization. Do that in a half dozen situations and then move on to the next half dozen and the next half dozen.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (07:40.367)<\/p>\n<p>So I want to come back to golden workflows, because I want you to explain that. I will say another thing that we encounter a lot is that people are just applying AI to maybe a process that&#8217;s non-existent or broken, as opposed to, you know, I always tell people start with workflows first and then use AI, you know, to automate them. Don&#8217;t tell AI, create me a workflow for this. How do you work with organizations where they really need to<\/p>\n<p>I think I said at the beginning, they really need to rethink how they even do workflows, how they even serve their clients.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (08:16.397)<\/p>\n<p>So you need to understand what your starting point is and where all the disconnects. But then don&#8217;t just think about what might we automate. You want to think about what humans shouldn&#8217;t be doing because AI could do it better. What won&#8217;t they do because it&#8217;s just too time consuming but it would be valuable. And what can&#8217;t they do because it&#8217;s just overwhelming in the amount of detail.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (08:19.095)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (08:39.629)<\/p>\n<p>Wait, you forgot what they hate to do. That&#8217;s one of my favorites.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (08:42.861)<\/p>\n<p>Yes, maybe that should be an it shouldn&#8217;t do as well. yeah, look, so anyway, we have the can&#8217;t show quote. And when you do that, then you can really rethink, okay, with AI, what makes what does this make possible? So we did this recently, another marketing department in campaign planning, and they would spend about half a year planning campaigns for people in the business, because there&#8217;d be infinite going back and forth, back and forth, and then they have to go to the agency.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (09:07.971)<\/p>\n<p>Hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (09:12.709)<\/p>\n<p>and all these disconnects and nobody quite knows what they want and you go through iteration after iteration, we were able to use those principles and come up with a system that was about half the time. Could actually be a lot less, but there&#8217;s still going to be some human indecision that you have to account for. But by just&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (09:30.433)<\/p>\n<p>Mm. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (09:33.717)<\/p>\n<p>reducing the number of cycling because you can real-time prototype stuff, get real decisions made right away, make sure everybody has context of what happened in the prior meeting so you eliminate a lot of those disconnects. You could do it in half the time. Now you can&#8217;t re-engineer every process all at once, but you can do it in some of those golden workflows like that one.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (09:55.908)<\/p>\n<p>So again, you&#8217;re going back to the golden workflow. You&#8217;re saying that&#8217;s basically, know, a lot of times when, people bought into this whole idea of systems, they would try to systemize everything and just get overwhelmed because there were 740 systems and 723 of them didn&#8217;t matter. So as a golden workflow in your vernacular, kind of like what&#8217;s, what&#8217;s a real impact one that we absolutely have to get right.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (10:24.609)<\/p>\n<p>Right, looked, mean, campaign planning was a great example because there was real money being spent and a lot of time. There would be others, same marketing department, with press releases or even internal announcements about what was going on. People would go back and forth and back and forth. And I mean, it was a huge sink of time and you had about 40 people just doing internal communications. So.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (10:27.639)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (10:37.1)<\/p>\n<p>Hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (10:49.891)<\/p>\n<p>And 28 of them were attorneys though, right?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (10:54.437)<\/p>\n<p>Well, I mean, so you do need levels of scrutiny, right? You cannot just think we&#8217;re going to replace humans with AI. It doesn&#8217;t work that way. But you do want those people focused on the highest use of their skills and not helping people make decisions that AI would probably help them make even better than a human consultation. So, I mean, we&#8217;re not seeing a tremendous amount of displacement of humans with AI. There&#8217;s some, in particular in things like call centers or whatever.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:01.291)<\/p>\n<p>Right. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:13.857)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:23.265)<\/p>\n<p>Right, right.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (11:23.501)<\/p>\n<p>But more, it&#8217;s just ensuring that people can focus on the best use of their skills. That&#8217;s where the real productivity gains are.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:31.555)<\/p>\n<p>I suspect I wouldn&#8217;t study to be a paralegal right now though either probably.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (11:36.725)<\/p>\n<p>No, that will, yeah, that one is already played out, right? So, and it&#8217;s an example, right? Auditors, there are some others that are really threatened, but that&#8217;s a minority of what most white collar jobs are.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:45.793)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what we&#8217;re finding, and especially in knowledge work, that what it&#8217;s doing is not displacing people, but it is asking them to do their job differently. You know, to maybe manage AI as opposed to do the stuff that AI is now capable of doing. You started talking about the eight brains. I think I recall, don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Doesn&#8217;t an octopus have three hearts also? So, so how does that metaphor, how does that metaphor come into play for you?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (12:16.141)<\/p>\n<p>It does indeed. And that is another chapter of the book.<\/p>\n<p>So an octopus has different hearts for different purposes. And similarly, a company needs to have different operating modes as it enters this very dynamic period of AI-led disruption, also many other disruptions too. So we talk about the analytical heart.<\/p>\n<p>which most companies are already pretty good at. The agile heart, which the bigger the company is, the worse it typically is at agility normally. And then the aligned heart of how do you make sure that people understand the common purpose and where people are going, particularly when there&#8217;s gonna be just a lot of turmoil in the workplace. And there is with the entry of AI. Being attuned to those emotional cadences in an organization is gonna be really, really important.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (12:47.639)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (13:02.071)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (13:09.347)<\/p>\n<p>I mean, would that, could you break that down almost department wise? mean, or not even department, but function wise? Like that what I just heard you describing sounded like culture.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (13:21.709)<\/p>\n<p>It is, yes, and culture is incredibly important. We also have another chapter on emotion and the cultural side of change. Look, we think about culture sort of like a brick wall. The culture is the mortar in a brick wall. It is almost invisible.<\/p>\n<p>but it gives the whole thing shape and coherence. But you start a brick wall with the bricks, which are the hard levers of management control, the way you select people and incent them and measure them, the way you allocate resources around an organization. If you don&#8217;t have that right, you could put up all the posters you want on the walls. It&#8217;s not going to change a thing. So get the bricks right, and then definitely think about the culture, but don&#8217;t just think about it as some isolated thing. It&#8217;s not.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (13:39.896)<\/p>\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (13:55.799)<\/p>\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (14:00.085)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (14:09.847)<\/p>\n<p>I like that because unfortunately you do see some examples of performative culture that then doesn&#8217;t really deliver when you shine a light on what the company is actually doing. I think also in the subtitle you have the term super intelligent firm. What&#8217;s a super intelligent firm mean in terms of human terms maybe?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (14:34.413)<\/p>\n<p>So there&#8217;s a fallacy out there that AI is going to approach general intelligence, so being just like a human, or super intelligent, just like a human, but even more so. And that is based on providing a very human model to a machine. We evolved to who we are because we needed to escape the saber-toothed tiger. So we had to be good at a lot of stuff. But machines don&#8217;t. They need to be good at just a handful of things.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (14:52.419)<\/p>\n<p>Thanks<\/p>\n<p>Right. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (15:01.429)<\/p>\n<p>So the super intelligent firm isn&#8217;t necessarily super intelligent AI. Where firms get their intelligence, where organizations get their intelligence, is through collaboration of people. It&#8217;s not just through brute force processing capability. If we want to say who has the most neurons, well, an antio wins that contest. So humans can do something which octopuses can&#8217;t, which is collaborate. And that&#8217;s how we build civilizations and cities.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (15:12.428)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (15:21.852)<\/p>\n<p>Hehehehe<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (15:27.299)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. All right.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (15:29.779)<\/p>\n<p>AI has the potential to supercharge that collaboration by making sure the right information goes to the right people at the right time. And it&#8217;s that use of AI that actually enhances our humanness that is the most high potential use of AI because that makes us then superintelligence as firms, as organizations.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (15:51.107)<\/p>\n<p>So one of the things I tell people, because I think a lot of, especially in marketing, a lot of people&#8217;s first reaction was, look how much faster I can do stuff. And while there is a bit of truth to that, I think it&#8217;s not very interesting to just produce more content. What I think is really interesting is I can iterate 200 versions of something in about the same time it took me to do one. And I think that&#8217;s where the learning, because we all know that we&#8217;re just guessing sometimes in marketing.<\/p>\n<p>by being able to test faster and experiment faster. That&#8217;s where we&#8217;re going to not just produce more, we&#8217;re gonna produce better and we&#8217;re gonna produce more personalized.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (16:29.325)<\/p>\n<p>I wrote a Forbes profile about a year ago on a company called Movable Inc. that provides email software to companies like LL Bean and Victoria&#8217;s Secret. LL Bean can run a million different variants of an email. Literally a million different variants.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (16:33.859)<\/p>\n<p>Mmm.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (16:39.203)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (16:43.778)<\/p>\n<p>Yep.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (16:46.241)<\/p>\n<p>And of course it&#8217;s A-B testing and it&#8217;s determining what&#8217;s best, but it&#8217;s also using that to be just super personalized in ways that we could never do as human beings. But you know, this is all possible now. So yes, we have to embrace that.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (17:00.418)<\/p>\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n<p>So what would you, how does an octopus move look like for like a 20 person firm as opposed to say a 200 person?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (17:16.161)<\/p>\n<p>You know, the principles are actually often the same. The maladies may be different. Right? The 200 person, 2000 person, there&#8217;s a lot of discoordination and siloing. Hopefully in 20 person it&#8217;s not. But you still need to think about for your prioritized workflows, the things you really want to focus on, how do those principles of moving action closer to the suction cups on the tentacle, right? To the coal face.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (17:28.856)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (17:43.201)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (17:45.645)<\/p>\n<p>does that look for you? What does AI enable in terms of what humans shouldn&#8217;t be doing or can&#8217;t be doing or just won&#8217;t be doing because it&#8217;s a poor use of their time? How would you really fundamentally rethink things? We talk a little bit about when electricity came. Initially, operators of factories swapped out their steam-powered machines for electric machines. And this is sort of equivalent to what we&#8217;re doing now. And that was nice.<\/p>\n<p>But it actually took 35 years for the big unlock to come, which was the assembly line. And the assembly line could not happen without electrification. But it was that that unleashed the productivity, because it was a fundamental rethinking of how work was done. So we don&#8217;t have 35 years this time, but we need that equivalent of thinking about what&#8217;s the equivalent of an assembly line for our companies.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (18:15.043)<\/p>\n<p>Thanks<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (18:29.321)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (18:35.619)<\/p>\n<p>So if a CEO company founders listening and they want to like start adopting this, obviously they need to get a copy of the book first. Do you also work with, do you come in and work with organizations to install this? Yeah. So, yeah, okay. So if somebody was listening then and they said, okay, what&#8217;s my 30 day plan? I mean, do you typically, I&#8217;m sure it starts with an assessment, but do you also typically, are there things that you often test?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (18:49.597)<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s my day job, yes.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (19:03.925)<\/p>\n<p>almost right off the bat? Are there things that you tell them to stop doing right off the bat? And again, every instance is different, but are there some common things that you find?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (19:17.037)<\/p>\n<p>So it has to relate to your strategic priorities.<\/p>\n<p>So AI can be better, faster, and cheaper all at once, but to some degree there is a trade-off. So what are you actually hoping to achieve? And how does that fit in with your objectives? What is impeding that today? And then let&#8217;s overlay that on where AI can be particularly useful. So we&#8217;re not just coming in with a hammer looking for nails, but we&#8217;re trying to understand what are the different priorities in the organization.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (19:31.779)<\/p>\n<p>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (19:50.147)<\/p>\n<p>You<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (19:50.831)<\/p>\n<p>And then based upon a handful of things that we can really focus on, let&#8217;s figure out how to redo that. Sometimes it starts all the way with the value proposition, but it can also just be very internal process oriented as well.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:04.387)<\/p>\n<p>Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you would invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work, and obviously find out more about AI and the octopus organization?<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (20:14.925)<\/p>\n<p>Sure, you can find the book on Amazon. The website for the book is AIandtheoctopus.com and that is actually a subdomain of our company New Market Advisors. Also, connect with me on LinkedIn. Feel free to write me. I do answer my emails. So, send me a DM and I&#8217;ll get back to you.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:34.719)<\/p>\n<p>Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stop by and hopefully we&#8217;ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Steve.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Wunker (20:40.481)<\/p>\n<p>My pleasure John.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-content--footer\">\n\t\t\t\t<a href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Scroll back to top<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-modal fbxt-email-signup\">\n<h4>\n\t\t\t\t\tSign up to receive email updates<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/h4>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\tEnter your name and email address below and I&#8217;ll send you periodic updates about the podcast.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<div class=\"fbxt-email-response-text\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-name-fields\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-signup-fields\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-credits\">\n\t\t<span>powered by<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/fusebox.fm\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rethinking Workflows in the Age of AI written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Catch the Full Episode Episode Overview AI is moving fast, but most organizations weren\u2019t built for that kind of speed. In this episode, John Jantsch talks with Stephen Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and author of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2562"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2562"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2565,"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2562\/revisions\/2565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gogetmuscle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}